The Regular, page 21
"Okay, alright, you're right, they were sticking their necks out for us. Just that I wouldn't have gotten there without you and did not do it on my own. I'm just tryin' to give you some fucking credit."
"I don't want it. I backed out as soon as we made the connection. I'm no Woodward or Bernstein, friend. I just want to write about the music and art and all the crazy art fuckers. Fuck that whole nauseating universe of corrupt fuckheads fucking over everyone and then walking away with fortunes subsidized by taxpayers."
"No—fucking—shit! And thanks for proving my point: I know you wanted them rung up too! I know you wanted that story to hit and hit big. I know you wanted to nail those fuckers! You were in on it, can't deny it!"
"You wanted it. You cracked it. You needed to write it—alone!"
"Ya, okay, okay, I'm going to guess that this quarreling is about as entertaining to us all right now as a zoning-board hearing, of which I have had the privilege of attending many, and yes, they are mostly mind-numbing, spiked with hot little moments of selfish ranting. So, how about less arguing the hues of perception and more eat, drink, be merry, ¿si?" Kelly, tiring of the argument (to which she's had a front-row seat for weeks now).
A taxi-driver skippers his hack down the cobbled canal outside open casements. Plunging past, he soaks a crew of pre-soaked revelers gliding up the sidewalk. The most inebriated of the crew runs after the perpetrator of the soaking, yelling, fists-in-air. The comic scene arbitrates a lightening of tensions, king rhythm lightening the gloom of gloaming. It is Delta-dashed Creole, less the stern stance that now stirs spirit and soul. It is as it should be. And it is honored as it should be: crawfish rattling down the gullet, calls for another round. Encore!
"Right. Okay, moving on. Here's what we do," Grey presenting the revelers with a plan: "there's a hole-in-the-wall up on Toulouse, we start there, work our way down, end up in the streets for the countdown?"
Affirmatives are confirmed in the glow of expressions. Glasses ring as they all toast the plan. They are all now laughing with each other, at each other, and with and at those passing by. The spirit is tangible. It pervades the torrent. It is the magic of New Orleans that they hold dear: the physical and the spiritual dirt. It calls on the senses, strokes them to climactic heights….Oh, fuck! Oh, I'm coming! I'm coming! Don't stop! Do not stop!
It is the verve of these days, these nights.
Grey bands layer up the sky, a furrowed forehead skeptical of the sunset optimism then coursing through fine skeletal tears in the cloud field. It is a finale not to be denied, shoving through the clouds: to go out with a bang!
The year speeds towards a conclusion, the view before him one of the more familiar. Yet it rains down scenes surreal, a real subsidized by creative interpretation. (Or is it the joint that he smokes?) He traipses the perimeter of Waverly Park: the gingerbread hung under pitched roof dormers, the gaslit globes as sentinels. The coursing rays frame a squat late-Romanesque era mansion. Eyebrow dormers casting a leery eye. It is all not as it seems. A car motors past. (Or was it horse-drawn carriage?) A dog is barking. (A coyote howling?) The Tudor at the corner could very well be the walled fortress of Old Yorke, a widow's peak on the same block embattlements lined of trebuchet, archers, vats of hot oil at the ready. Besieged by a modernity it does not yet understand—or trust—Springvale holds fast. The uniformity of suburbanization, the bigotry behind the blight, gentrification. Modern day barbarians? It's all in the perspective. This old quarter, this grande old belle….They're pressing our flanks! They're everywhere! Stand your ground, over. For honor, for country!….And Goodspeed plods through.
Imagination / perspective supersedes a strict interpretation of reality out here, the rhythms of history influencing (fucking with?) the present. It is a thin membrane, but a thin layer of red dirt dusting the shallow burial of artifacts we'd so rather forget and / or deny. But then, those historical frequencies, erupting like sonic booms: cycling, whirling, building-up-speed….BOOM!
"He just couldn't hide forever. Finally caught 'im, poor bastard."
His thoughts are heavy. There is weight to the air itself. The past weighs heavy on this little quadrant of the world. It is never far: slow-blooming like mold in the gaps of flagstone curb, an occasional boiling over as ants in the cracks of hexagonal stone. Unremitting, relentless….
"Comes a time when you tire of running; was just no more run in 'im."
So much past we find irreconcilable with what's next. It will run scared, until overtaken: inevitable, a final dying ember. It will stand its ground: a pyrrhic stand before an irresistible tide, and fighting to the last. It will decay slowly without a word: back to the earth that gave it life…. Goodspeed stops before The Woodruff House just long enough to pay homage and light a smoke. He notices the growing blooms of mold fouling cornices, rotting siding. He looks to stand his ground. He promises without a word, moves on.
Christmas lights ring the Heights. Side streets are constellations. Passing through a maze of festive light on deliberate heavy steps, he turns on Dixie. Grey strands of sky are shot through to the west by one final rose-orange pulse: a sliver of finale, an eye relinquishing its final strobe of life to the grey nothingness. The horizon retracts the day, the year. It will soon belong to the ages. It is dusk.
He walks up the front path to D's front porch, opens screen-door, knocks on front door. He peers in over the dentil detail, opens the door and steps in….
"Babe, ya ready?"
"Ya, in here. Just looking for my wallet, lying 'round here somewhere," Dorothy responding from another room.
"I got tonight, babe; let's get on."
"Don't feel like it, stomach's all tight," D buttoning a sharp blue denim shirt.
"It's the raht thing to do."
"He was no angel, but that whole mess. Some uncalled for bullshit."
"It was bound to end this way. The inevitable always wins out, the bastard."
"Guess it's all we can do," D sighing, pulling back her long thick cinnamon braid, the few distinguished grey strands, donning fringed-leather jacket.
"We'll remember the man as we want to remember 'im."
"That's it, s'pose, what gets me about these things; knowing the parts that are a put-on just to ease the grief, the bullshit. Having to fake it some, y'know? And yet, knowing that's what needs to be done."
"A dose of nostalgia helps get you outta bed in the morning."
"Is that it, hon'? All this time was thinkin' it was my all-world cocksucking that got you up 'n at 'em each day," D's fiery glance, light-scratching his cheek with fingernail.
"Why yes: nostalgia, blowjob, coffee—healthy, wealthy, wise."
"It's the hard soul that can just take the bullshit life dumps at your door, as is; s'pose we can be allowed a little revision after the fact. In fact, think we're due," D straightening out and zipping jacket, looking tired but ready.
"One thing Henry knew all about was the bullshit; one too many times, s'all."
The two step onto the front porch. A drizzle has begun to fall, prefacing a return to cold rain. D leans to look up through the screen at the misty murk, pulls out an umbrella. She thinks back a few years to her Uncle John's funeral, how fact and fiction had floated up from the speakers until a thick revisionist cloud hung within the rafters of the church….
"Just thinking, driving pop home from Uncle John John's funeral a few years back, he leans in to tell me: think Uncle Johnny'd be right touched by all 'a that; but sure's hell he's up there shaking his head, snickerin' some over all that rosy stuff."
"It's what we do. A little harmless editing, just helps make for a better story."
"An easier pill to swallow, s'pose. Think we're due that, at least that."
"Nothing like nostalgia to help smooth out the rough spots past. Sometimes ya just want to remember it like ya want to remember it. Fuck all the real."
"Take out all the rough spots, is there anything even left of Henry's life?"
Goodspeed breathes deep and exhales: a silent concurrence. "Well, we'll cobble together something we can all raise glasses to and then can get on to the business at hand."
"It's the raht thing to do."
And they are off to pay homage and be overcome by emotion. They will rattle off Auld Lang Syne and toast to the memory of a fallen comrade: a poor sap who hid and then ran and ran and then hid until there was nowhere left to run, nowhere else to hide…. They will all move on, regulars continuing to hide, run, fight to the last. They are world wise. They will be looking over their shoulders with every step: leery, nostalgic. They will look out at the unspooling future ahead: leery, uncompromising. Tonight, the regulars will drown this year's bullshit in hard drink. They will proclaim Victory! in the face of the inevitable defeats. Battle tested, these two—arm-in-arm—are ready.
A trumpeter blows ragged jass, wailing in silhouette of hole-in-wall windows lit sweating and hot. The party swarms las calles: a head-dress trails to ass-less chaps; street dancing, group groping. It is 10p CST, 12/31/97 (11p EST for our Beacon friends). The scene is pleased with itself (pleasuring itself?), rhythmic strokes swelling collectively towards climactic heights. The group spins up Calle d Borbon: a whirling tapestry of metal railings, open shutters giving up the half-naked, thumping bass beats penetrating each step. Hari stumbles into Erin, who catches him in a tight embrace. They laugh. They start making out. It hardly attracts a notice from the former cohorts who stumble and laugh. Paint peels from stone foundations, a scene of epic writhing improvisation. Wash the girl of your choice, it says, the sin of lust a tangible scent….Go for it. You know you want to…. It taunts them all. They drop it like a hurricane.
They tack, heading for the square. They pass the trumpeter, lofting loose change into open trumpet case. He sustains a note as they pass. Time, meanwhile, is losing its grip, seconds and minutes falling away. Reality and dream fall into each other, trading lovers' spit, hot and heavy, on this: the final night. Laughing, groping, passionate heat rings Cyrus and Kelly as a radiant glow. Hari and—well, wait now—Erin and Grey providing some tag-team action, Hari now making out with our man Grey; this here, a spicy indigenous dish. The rain has passed, dark wet cobbles warbling neon reflections. Every street corner is a new party. It is hopping. It is bound to get freaky, the lust all-pervasive—groping the aura of Cable, Faulkner, Bechet.
They all pass into the square: necking, groping, singing. The carnival swirls, the general regal and brave….The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved…. He wants her and she him. They veer for the spare bedroom at Grey's apartment.
"Hey, ah, meet you beauties back here for the countdown?" Grey locked arm-in-arm with his beaming necking compatriots.
"See ya," Cyrus explaining without explanation.
"Happy New Year!" Kelly confirming, a double arm-wave.
And they are off to do it in tune with the year's end: to come in-unison @ 12:00:00 a.m., 1/1/98, the goal. It will be too much to ask, logistically; a wild orgasmic passion not respectful of on-the-clock efficiency. In the throes they will forget all of the timing. They will let it come when it may. They will fall asleep wrapped in each other—in the afterglow—will miss the countdown altogether: going out with a bang!
And we are back on Austin, in Asa's front room. Plastic flutes of champagne are being hoisted: an extolling—what should be done, what is right—a final send-off to one of their own having reasoned his way out with a revolver…. It was the day after Christmas when news came down that Henry had shot himself. His apartment up Washita had been ransacked on Christmas Day, gleaned of everything pawnable—including the title to his car, about the only thing he owned—by his old lady and some half-her-age ex-con she had since run off with. But having been cleaned out of his few material possessions paled to the vindictive shard-pile of the only other thing he owned and truly cared about: the smashed remnants of Henry's complete Johnny Cash collection. This, on discovery, prompting the broken regular to shove a .38 into his mouth and author a conclusion to the only thing he still held control over: a life he was done with.
"Poor bastard. He always said it: she'll be my end; just a matter of which she it was gonna be," Goodspeed absolving suicide through the vexed vernacular of a life as trying as Henry's had been: having labored for minimal pay down at South Atlantic Rail off and on for the twenty years that he hadn't been in prison, always hooking up with troubled women who grew increasingly more troubled as the years progressed.
A few cobbled together words from the grand ol' Boo leads to flutes tipped and emptied of their elixir in-memoriam. The resolution of grief proves a resolute thing on this night, in this modest place—bowed paneling showcasing the mold of mis-care, not a lack of love. Sentiment for the brethren is a tangible thing, in here. And so is the cryptic unsolved mystery of hard living. And when they collide, when the fault-lines rupture and consume, it is all they can do to raise a toast and move on…. Que sera.
And like that this gala of the gangrel gets underway, drifters all, but for the security of Asa's warm hearth. Home Sweet Home. A festive gusto (that one might could readily mistake for gumption) powers up. Flutes are emptied and refilled to be emptied again. This is a night like few others. The regulars will give all they have got; for those past, for those present. Mantras are amplified through the sheer act of taking it to excess, heavy thoughts and heavy hearts leaning hard upon the panacea of heavy drink….
The iron grip falls away before the iron will of the new year. It is coming on Asa's like a freight train; but will be treated like all others: with indifference, lackadaisical contempt at best. Champagne, domestic lager, and lit cigarettes summon the reveling regulars to hands-on-shoulders, a few tears shed—which summarily break into laughter fits, wrestling matches, liquor shots. Boo and Chuck lead Auld Lang Syne, Paul's slurred chorus more akin to row, row your boat. The cool Ez and Jude, arm-in-arm, cracking grins, killing off George Dickel. Omar and Marjorie have found a motel room less than spontaneous, doing the deed in a back-room booth. Victor doesn't even notice, wheeling and dealing the pinball machine's bells and bumpers and whistles. A hard ker'chunking showcases his devotion, his desire for high score—doing all he can do. A stool falls over. Gid dumps a beer on Paul's head, its attempt to drown out his singing unsuccessful. Dorothy is biting Goodspeed's ear: tangible tough love. The seconds count down, Howard and Martha and Olivia wheeling out elixirs as magicians producing coins in empty palms. Catcalls and caterwauls, the joy of reckless excess. And the line at the bar stands and sways as one: eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow we—ah, to hell with tomorrow! Huzzahs! Rebel yells! The reflections of regulars melting into the line of bottlefronts along bar back wall, a canonical aura ladled over the room like a preservative. This moment, one for the ages….
And the front door opens. And in steps George. And he calls out Goodspeed's name. And heads turn. Goodspeed turns his head, sights the invader: down here! in here! Blood rushes his eyeballs. George draws a stolen Glock and fires at Goodspeed through the crowd. Three shots. Paul goes down. Goodspeed is knocked clean off the stool, crashing against the back wall. Seconds are an eternity…. And George is swallowed in a swarm of fists.
Dorothy's maniacal curse slices the freeze-frame moment. Howard vaults the bar, palms at his forehead. Regulars are beating George into an unrecognizable pulp, the gun having been quickly torn from his grasp and in Pete's hand, his own revolver drawn. Omar, pants half-off, stumbles in from the backroom, hands out, triage-ing Goodspeed….
"Son of a—fuck! Alright! Okay! Outta my way, let me see this. Collarbone is broke, but it's a clean-through. Alright, okay, just got to control the bleedin'—uh—Sax c'mere, right here and immobilize his shoulders, collarbone's all fucked up. Marge, help, uh, okay, just help me lay him out," Omar, having been a medic (with the 173rd Airborne @ fucking Dak To, y'all), kicking in muscle memory. "Marv! Can ya hear me? Just look at me. Focus on my face. Do—not—black out. Marge, talk to him for me; get him to talking, if ya can."
Marge, skirt half-off, is imploring Goodspeed to focus on her hand, which she holds up before his face. Omar is now at Paul's side, inspects the bullet having grazed the right side of his head; an actual bloody groove, the same bullet having ripped through Goodspeed's upper-torso. Amazingly, the other two shots hit no one: one puncturing Martha's favorite stew pot resting on a shelf in the kitchen, the other having defiled Daisy Duke's denim-clad left tit: a neat clean hole in the moldering Dukes of Hazzard calendar hanging at bar's end—there, where it has hung since 1981, as if it still were….
Dorothy is primal screaming as she kicks George's limp body. No one in the swarm has backed off the vicious beating. His face is unrecognizable. It is bloody meat. His name will not be mentioned within these walls again. It will be law. Howard will declare it so.
Pete is finally able to muscle through and drag the unconscious defiler off through the front-door by his feet, regulars getting in final kicks—Ez and Jude both required to hold back the wrathful D. On the sidewalk, Pete rolls the perp onto his front (doing so with highlander game log-rolling zeal), handcuffs the defiler with shoulder-separating disregard. Bid and Laverne are 30 seconds out, the paramedics only a few minutes behind. And it is a good thing: Goodspeed is coming-to through the diffusion of shock, the first pangs like a red-hot poker. A long low demonic scream….
And like that, the night has turned. But oddly, this unexpected twist doesn't seem entirely out of place. Sure, the unforeseen is rarely a welcome guest, in here. But then, in a place where the maintenance of things as they are is so very prized, why would it be?….And yet, here it is, not to be denied, its shoving-through-crowds demeanor indicating that the unforeseen is here whether they like it or not. It has fought to be noticed, recognized, as out of a sense a duty, of self-determination, clawing at the right to its own unique permanence and place. In that light, it could even be seen as a natural fit. Fighting for the sake of honor and duty? Fighting like demons though the odds be long against you? How does this not sound like it belongs? How is this incendiary scene anything but another of the roaring patrons stunned into hot blank stares, hands-on-heads-shaking, their wild vile vitriolic strings of fearful loathing hate being heaped atop the now (per Howard's law) nameless motherfucker who dared desecrate the order?
