Catty-corner from me sat a dear little black child maybe sixteen, all messed up on skag. She couldn’t keep her head up. She couldn’t stay out of her dreams. She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog’s tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.
“I never tasted black honey,” I said to her.
She itched her nose and closed her eyes, her face dipping down into Paradise.
I said, “Hey.”
“Black. I ain’t black,” she said. “I’m yellow. Don’t call me black.”
“I wish I had some of what you have,” I said.
“Gone, boy. Gone, gone, gone.” She laughed like God. I didn’t blame her for laughing.
“Any chance of getting some more?”
“How much you want? You got ten?”
“Maybe. Sure.”
“I’ll take you down here,” she said. “I’ll take you down over to the Savoy.” And after two more stops she led me off the train and down into the streets. A few people stood around trashcans with flames leaping up out of them and that sort of thing, mumbling and singing. The streetlamps and traffic lights had wire mesh screens over them.
I know there are people who believe that wherever you look, all you see is yourself. Episodes like this make me wonder if they aren’t right.
The Savoy Hotel was a bad place. The reality of it gave out as it rose higher above First Avenue, so that the upper floors dribbled away into space. Monsters were dragging themselves up the stairs. In the basement was a bar going three sides of a rectangle, as big as an Olympic pool, and a dancing stage with a thick gold curtain hanging down over it that never moved. Everyone knew what to do. People were paying with bills they’d made by tearing a corner off a twenty and pasting it onto a one. There was a man with a tall black hat, a helmet of thick blond hair, and a sharp blond beard. He seemed to want to be here. How did he know what to do? Beautiful women in the corners of my sight disappeared when I looked directly at them. Winter outside. Night by afternoon. Darkly, darkly the Happy Hour. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what to do.
The last time I’d been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn’t been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies.
Everything down there but the curtain was red. It was like a movie of something that was actually happening. Black pimps in fur coats. The women were blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them. “I’ll just take your money and go upstairs,” somebody said to me.
Michelle left me permanently for a man called John Smith, or shall I say that during one of the times we were parted she took up with a man and shortly after that had some bad luck and died? Anyway, she never came back to me.
I knew him, this John Smith. Once at a party he tried to sell me a gun, and later at the same party he made everyone quiet down for a few minutes because I was singing along with the radio, and he liked my voice. Michelle went to Kansas City with him and one night when he was out she took a lot of pills, leaving a note beside her on his pillow where he’d be sure to find it and rescue her. But he was so drunk when he got home that night that he just laid his cheek down on the paper she’d written on, and went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning my beautiful Michelle was cold and dead.
She was a woman, a traitor, and a killer. Males and females wanted her. But I was the only one who ever could have loved her.
For many weeks after she died, John Smith confided to people that Michelle was calling to him from the other side of life. She wooed him. She made herself seem more real than any of the visible people around him, the people who were still breathing, who were supposed to be alive. When I heard, shortly after that, that John Smith was dead, I wasn’t surprised.
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn’t my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
I know they argue about whether or not it’s right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t what the lawyers did. It wasn’t what the doctors did, it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.
The Other Man
But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one, whom I met more or less in the middle of Puget Sound, travelling from Bremerton, Washington, to Seattle.
This man was just basically one of those people on a boat, leaning on the rail like the others, his hands dangling over like bait. The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I’m sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green—in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus—islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck’s seams.
This guy wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a shy smile, by which I think is generally meant a smile that occurs while the eyes look away.
It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.
“Do you like some beers?”
“Okay,” I said.
He bought me a beer and explained that he was from Poland, over here on business. I stayed and talked with him about the obvious things. “It’s a beautiful day”—by which we meant that the weather was good. But we never say, “The weather’s good,” “The weather’s pleasant.” We say, “It’s a beautiful day,” “What a beautiful day.”
He was a sad case. His jacket was lightweight and yellow. He might have been wearing it for the first time. It was the kind of jacket a foreigner would buy in a store while saying to himself, “I am buying an American jacket.” “Are you having,” he asked of me, “a family? Any father, mother, brother, sister?”
“I have a brother, one brother, and my parents are both living.”
He was driving around in a rented car, with an expense account: a youthful international person doing all right. A certain yearning attached itself between us. I wanted to participate in what was happening to him. It was just a careless, instinctive thing. There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.
We went downstairs and got in his new-smelling rented car. We waited for the boat to dock and then we drove down the ramp and just a very short ways to a restaurant and tavern on the waterfront, a loud place dappled with sunshine and full of the deep tones of thick beer ware.
I didn’t ask him if he had a wife or was father to a family. And he didn’t ask me about those things. “Do you ride the motorcycle? I do,” he said. “I ride the small, the one, we say, ah, yes, motorscooter, you call it. The big Hell’s Angels have the motorcycles, no, I ride the small motorscooter, excuse me. In Warsaw, my city, we drive in the park after twelve in the night, but the rules are saying no, you must not go to the park after this time, 12 p.m. middle-night, yes, ah, midnight, exact, precisely, it’s against the rule, the law. It is a law, the park is clawsded. Closed, yes, thank you, it is a law for one months in jail if you try it. Oh, we have a lot fun! I put it on my helmet, and if the polices are catching, they will—bung! bung!—with their sticks! But it doesn’t hurt. But we always get away, because they walk, the polices, they have no transportation for that park. We always win! After the middle-night, it is always dark there.”
He excused himself and went to find a bathroom and order one more pitcher of beer.
We hadn’t yet mentioned our names. We probably wouldn’t. In barrooms I lived this over and over.
He came back with the pitcher and poured my glass full and sat down. “Ah hell,”
he said. “I’m not Polish. I’m from Cleveland.”
I was shocked, surprised. Really. Not for one second had I thought of something like this. “Well, tell me some stories about Cleveland, then,” I said.
“The Cuyahoga River caught on fire one time,” he said. “It was burning in the middle of the night. The fire was just floating along down it. That was interesting to see, because you’d almost expect the fire to stay in the same place, while the water travelled along beneath it. The pollutants caught on fire. Flammable chemicals and waste products from the factories.”
“Was any of that stuff you said, was any of it real?”
“The park is real,” he said.
“The beer is real,” I said.
“And the cops, and the helmet. I really do have a motorscooter,” he said, and assuring me of this seemed to make him feel better.
When I’ve told others about this man, they’ve asked me, “Did he make a pass at you?” Yes, he did. But why is that outcome to this encounter obvious to everyone, when it wasn’t at all obvious to me, the person who actually met and spoke with him?
Later, when he dropped me off in front of the apartment building where my friends lived, he paused a minute, watching me cross the street, and then left, accelerating swiftly.
I cupped my hands around my mouth like a megaphone. “Maury!” I called, “Carol!” Whenever I came to Seattle, I had to stand out here on the sidewalk and shout up toward their fourth-floor window, because the front entrance was always locked.
“Go away. Get out of here,” a lady’s voice called from a window on the ground floor, the window of the manager’s apartment.
“But my friends live here,” I said.
“You can’t yell in the streets like that,” she said.
She came closer to the window. She had chiselled features, wet eyes, and tendons standing out in her neck. Fanatically religious utterances seemed to quiver on her lips.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “is that a German accent you have there?”
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “Oh, the lies. You’re all so friendly.”
“It isn’t Polish, I hope.”
I stepped back into the street. “Maury!” I screamed. I whistled loudly.
“This is it. That’s the finish.”
“But they live right up there!”
“I’m going to call the cops. Do you want me to call the cops?”
“Jesus Christ. You bitch,” I said.
“I didn’t think so. The friendly burglar runs away,” she cried after me.
I imagined jamming her into a roaring fireplace. The screams … . Her face caught fire and burned.
The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.
The street I stood on rolled down a long hill toward First and Second Avenue, the lowest part of town. My feet carried me away down the hill. I danced on my despair. I trembled outside a tavern called Kelly’s, nothing but a joint, its insides swimming in a cheesy light. Peeking inside I thought, If I have to go in there and drink with those old men.
Right across the street was a hospital. In a radius of only a few blocks, there were four or five. Two men in pajamas stood looking out a window of this one, on the third floor. One of the men was talking. I could almost trace their steps back to the rooms from which they’d wandered tonight with everything they stood for disrupted by their maladies.
Two people, two hospital patients up out of their beds after supper, find each other wandering the halls, and they stand for a while in a little lounge that smells of cigarette butts, looking out over the parking lot. These two, this man and this man, they don’t have their health. Their solitudes are fearful. And then they find one another.
But do you think one is ever going to visit the other one’s grave?
I pushed through the door into Kelly’s. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You’d think they’d found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.
There was one woman in the place. She was drunker than I was. We danced, and she told me she was in the army.
“I’m locked out of my friends’,” I told her.
“Don’t worry about a thing like that,” she said, and kissed my cheek.
I held her close. She was short, just the right size for me. I drew her closer.
Among the men around us, somebody cleared his throat. The bass’s rhythm travelled the floorboards, but I doubt it reached them.
“Let me kiss you,” I pleaded. Her lips tasted cheap. “Let me go home with you,” I said. She kissed me sweetly.
She’d outlined her eyes in black. I loved her eyes. “My husband’s at home,” she said. “We can’t go there.”
“Maybe we could get a motel room.”
“It depends on how much money you have.”
“Not enough. Not enough,” I admitted.
“I’ll have to take you home.”
She kissed me.
“What about your husband?”
She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks. I don’t remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called “Misty Blue”; probably “Misty Blue” was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in my hands.
“I can’t let you get away,” I told her.
“I could take you home. You could sleep on the couch. Then later on I could come out.”
“While your husband’s in the next room?”
“He’ll be asleep. I could say you’re my cousin.”
We pressed ourselves together gently and furiously. “I want to love you, baby,” she said.
“Oh, God. But I don’t know, with your husband there.”
“Love me,” she begged. She wept onto my chest.
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Since Friday.”
“Friday?”
“They gave me four days’ leave.”
“You mean the day before yesterday was your wedding day?”
“I could tell him you’re my brother,” she suggested.
First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.
It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.
Happy Hour
I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn’t her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way.
I was in love with her, too. But she was still in love with a man who’d recently gone to prison.
I looked in all the worst locations, the Vietnam Bar and so on.
The bartender said, “Do you want a drink?”
“He doesn’t have money to drink.”
I did, but not enough to drink for the whole two hours.
I tried inside the Jimjam Club. Indians from Klamath or Kootenai or up higher—British Columbia, Saskatchewan—sat in a row along the bar like little icons, or fat little dolls, things mistreated at the hands of a child. She wasn’t there.
A guy, a slit-eyed, black-eyed Nez Perce, nearly elbowed me off the stool as he leaned over ordering a glass of the least expensive port wine. I said, “Hey, wasn’t I shooting pool in here with you yesterday?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And you said if I’d rack you’d get change in a minute and pay me back?”
“I wasn’t here yesterday. I wasn’t in town.”
“And then you never paid me the quarter? You owe me a quarter, man.”
“I gave you that quarter. I put the quarter right by your hand. Two
dimes and a nickel.”
“Somebody’s gonna get fucked up over this.”
“Not me. I paid you that quarter. Probably it fell on the floor.”
“Do you know when that’s it? Do you know when it’s the end?”
“Eddie, Eddie,” the Indian said to the bartender, “did you find any dimes and nickels down here on the floor yesterday? Did you sweep up? Did you sweep anything like that, maybe two dimes and a nickel?”
“Probably. I usually do. Who cares?”
“See?” the guy said to me.
“You make me so tired,” I said, “I can hardly move my fingers. All of you.”
“Hey, I wouldn’t fuck you around over a quarter.”
“All of you, every last one.”
“Do you want a quarter? It’s bullshit. Here.”
“Fuck it. Just die,” I said, pushing off.
“Take the quarter,” he said, very loudly, now that he could see I wouldn’t touch it.
Just the night before, she’d let me sleep in the same bed, not exactly with her, but beside her. She was staying with three college girls of whom two had Taiwanese boyfriends.
Her fake brother slept on the floor. When we woke up in the morning he didn’t say anything. He never did—it was the secret of his success, such as it was. I gave four dollars, almost all my money, to one of the college girls and her boyfriend, who didn’t speak English. They were going to get us all some Taiwanese pot. I stood at the window looking at the apartment building’s parking lot while the brother brushed his teeth, and watched them leave with my money in a green sedan. They ran into a phone pole before they were even out of the parking lot. They got out of the sedan and staggered away, leaving the car doors open, clinging to each other, their hair flying around their faces in the wind.
I was sitting on the city bus—this was in Seattle—later that morning. I was down front, in the long seat that faces sideways. A woman across from me held a large English-literature textbook in her lap. Next to her sat a light-skinned black man. “Yeah,” she said to him. “Today’s payday. And it feels good, even if it’s not gonna last.” He looked at her. His big forehead made him seem thoughtful. “Well,” he said, “I got twenty-four hours left in this town.”