The Regular, page 3
A BALL OF LIGHT POPS. An instantaneous crash rattles front windowpanes. A mean sky boils over. Another flash and crash, rolling planes of thunder, one after another after another, like opening salvos or the fighter-wave of an air raid (pre M.A.D. era, that is). No rain as of yet, just furious anticipation. And yet, what one might call malefic intent, or malevolent design, or (insert your own flourish here, dear reader, because why should we have all the fun gilding the lily?) _______ _______ , our man shrugs off as nature in action. Hot humid updrafts force-feed the cumulus stack, an explosive brew blowing its top. It is all just doing its thing, doing what it must.
Goodspeed, several doubles in, stands on the sidewalk out front of Asa's. He revels in the foment of the moment. The storm dyes daylight a jaundiced tone, cigarette smoke swept up into the prevailing gusts. A splintered bolt rips the sky. BOOM! He can barely stand it, is feeling the need to rededicate himself, is in need of inspiration for his next chapter. A flash, an instant violent crash. "Whoa! Man, oh' man!" Just doing its thing. Just doing his thing.
A fat bead of rain pops roadside sand. Drops smack the hot asphalt. A sheet of rain drag races a microbus up Austin. The T2 VW sputters to a halt (as if knowing to do so), driver-side door opening, closing, the driver sprinting across the avenue through a rain sheet falling sideways from the west. The driver lunges for Asa's eave reprieve.
"Great," mumbles Goodspeed.
"What's up?" the (so labeled) yellow journalist greeting the Regular, slicking back soaked hair.
"Doin' your own legwork, or here to weasel it out of me? I tend to lean on violence a bit more the second go-round, just sayin."
"Actually, just stopped by for a beer. Still a public drinking establishment, right?"
"Right as rain. Headin' out for a stroll, anyway."
"In this?"
"A little rain and thunder? Nature's wonder, chump."
"Enjoy."
It is twenty minutes later. Goodspeed is thoroughly soaked, oblivious to the deluge then slowing to a downpour. He bends his way around Waverly Park, sweeping his view up a turreted tower. Angled rooflines spill over a modillioned cornice down to bay windows. Ah, the glory of Springvale's Go Go '90s (the 1890s, that is). Gilded Age castles command attention at every turn: a Greek revival, an Italian renaissance, a Tudor. A few are well-kept. Many are not (yet), one-time symbols of status having suffered the natural leveling of time. Decorative lightning rods descend on a rare pair of eyebrow dormers. Heavy and sullen, tired eyes peering, Goodspeed stepping through with purpose. He is heading for inspiration. He is heading for the Gordon Patrick Woodruff House.
It is ten minutes later. The storm has blown itself out. Goodspeed stands before the house. A Queen Anne dating to 1894 and lacking much of the inherent detail, it is his inspirational Mecca. Whenever our man feels tired or worn or lacking in duty / devotion, he sets out on a hajj to the house. Staring at the shrine's worn skin, Goodspeed recites Gordon Patrick Woodruff beneath tapering rain:
Let us attend to a creed composed of very simple demands: liberty, equity, justice for the common man. Let us not forget ah'own battle cry, my fellow men: through collective action we will achieve individual freedom ~
"Riding latter-day Populism and its hysteria to its grave, his only mistake. Might could have done without the bigotry too," our man thinking on his man: Gordon Patrick Woodruff…. His man would come to regret not splitting with the Populists as they lost their way in the run-up to the Silver Sell Out and doomed 1896 fusion with Bryan Democrats, the movement devolving from a sophisticated (if on a shoestring) socioeconomic crusade against the rapacious inequity of industrialist wealth concentration into a dark comic gaggle driven off the cliff by anti-semitic conspiratorial cranks…. Goodspeed has applied this bitter lesson. He will not long endure the crazed mouth-foaming of others claiming to speak for his cause. He is all the time leery of words, promises. What with his own well-spring of virulence set to a rolling boil, he wades into the "modern slave-ocracy" on his own. He will go the revolution alone, a dedication that could easily be confused with ambition; but for our man's strategic reliance on careless inaction, his finger-in-the-eye of the "Big Mules" manipulating the responsible, "running them to ruin for their own obese fortunes." He'll not long endure the rambling half-cocked conspiracies of others. For he has time but to foment his own playlist of contradictions, his own gilded conspiracies. This is his revolution—and his alone—to bury.
Goodspeed is buoyant, having been recharged for the skirmishes and challenges ahead. He moves along, waterlogged sneakers squeaking an optimistic resolution with each step.
And a neighborhood away, our journalist / interloper jots a few final notes in a small spiral-bound hand-held. He drops a final gulp of pint-based domestic (his second, if we are keeping score) and gets up to leave the, strangely, empty room.
He drops a fiver (it being $2 draft day) and gets up to head out, his warmest regards as he does: "Thanks for the hospitality. It was Howard?"
"That is right. Get what you came for?" H not one to miss a thing.
"Um, we'll see," acknowledging the barkeep's keen observation. "Might just drop in again, if that's cool?"
"Clayburn was it?"
"Clee-burne, long e."
"Alright Cleburne with a long e. You're welcome back any time, and bring some friends. Just watch yourself, hear?"
"Appreciate that, I think."
DARK GULPS THE DUSK. Here comes the nightly reprieve, the post-storm air a hazy soup unbound to gravity's bowl. Lights light up in windows and on porches all along the avenue. The dark—empower-er of the fiendish—also beckons friends (who may also be fiends) to come together, to gather amongst like kind, to vent that day's transgressions. Come fellow regulars, be as one! A little Victory is within grasp! A final arc of non-dark slips beyond the city's skyline to the west, night now known.
Having filled his inspirational void and fulfilled his philanthropic contribution (his rain-soaked trek shower enough), he stands again out under Asa's eave. Having shed soaked clothes and sneakers for a dry set, sobriety has now become a looming unwelcome presence. It will soon enough be a fleeting thought, as he sights Dorothy—D—materializing from the freshly-minted murk. She strides up the sidewalk, cycling through concentric streetlamp haloes: an obscure outline, fully illuminated, repeat. He welcomes her arrival….
Dorothy wears 40 (+/-) years well, exuding a rugged independence that is all hers despite the countless attempts of petty male egos to deny it. (She was a corporate defense lawyer.) But like Goodspeed, she'd had a falling out with the suits, defending "rapacious assholes" she'd come to loath having grown most tiresome. Even worse, its relentless schedule invaded her time in the saddle. A short stint for the other side (as an anti-trust prosecutor) proved equally unrewarding, given the incestuous backscratching and constant interference of "well-oiled" politicians. She'd left all that behind, taking on this Goodspeed cat instead. Client / lover, he is full-time enough….
"Damn, lookin' good tonight, babe!" Goodspeed gaining a smile as he sights his flame.
Dorothy, hands outstretched, shoots an as if look. "It's what I do," the few strands of grey running through a tightly-wound cinnamon ponytail falling somewhere between distinguished and hot stuff. "Wish I could say the same; you get some recovery time in today?"
"Enough, s'pose. How goes the thing?"
"Not bad, making headway. Should be wrapping it up soon."
"Don't know how you put up with that crap," Goodspeed, simply allergic to the average administrative chores of life and work, grateful beyond words to his Cinnamon Girl.
"You just need to be glad that I do, moneybags. Just keep doing your thing and rest up, let me worry about keeping 'em all in line."
Having successfully won an appeal on behalf of Howard and Martha that overturned a controversial and very unpopular city zoning-board ruling (what a few trowels full confirmed as the first step in an annexation aimed at razing blocks of private properties, including those at Austin / Elizabeth, in favor of upscale gentrification infill), her smarts are something of legend around here. But a sharp mind is buttressed by street-smarts equally sharp (a concealed handgun permit, for instance). And the fact that she took the case pro bono means she has won not just minds, but hearts around these parts….
Dorothy Harmin had shed the pantsuit for leather chaps about the same time Goodspeed had shed his "shackles of economic exploitation." She has been a regular at the Dakota Sturgis Rally and here at Asa's since. She knows loud pipes and the finer points of a deal. It seems a good piece of synchrony, the two having met the week the ruling came down, that having been the very same week that Goodspeed finished The Book…. To get a good deal, one could use a good contract. And for that, one could use a good lawyer. Dorothy is willing to put up with "that crap" (dedication, devotion, finds her skipping the rally this year), and more importantly: his crap. Marvin Goodspeed has drawn quite a hand….
"How 'bout a humble beau buys a beauty a drink?"
"Still make enough sense to trick an old girl."
"Old nothing, babe. Beauty, it transssscends!" punctuating his affection with a pentecostal-like hand-thrown witnessing.
Curved neon rods in Asa's front window advertise, entice: Cold Beer! Hot Stew! Y'all Come! They shove, elbowing their way through the radioactive pink of Austin Avenue streetlamps. It all glows. They glow.
"Look at 'em in there, that scene. It's a Rembrandt," Goodspeed beaming.
"You mean Dogs Playing Poker, right?"
The view through the front window is one of the Asa Inman's most familiar. Hues are lifted as from velvet paintings, a gallery of gaud for sale along the chain-link of a closed gas station: The stoop-shouldered frames of regulars = rusting pumps; hands / arms = nozzles, decaying hose. Drinks sprout atop the bar like weeds in asphalt cracks. It is fine art.
The two enter to greetings. It echoes down the line…. Welcome back, all, to the place where evenings are whittled away in an ancient way: to drink wine, to be with like kind…. But instead of the ease of camaraderie and protocol, we are assaulted by another unwelcome presence, an aggressive cancer devouring the simple aim of timeless Victory!
"But see Dylan wasn't so great, he only done what Woody already done!" slurs George, a not-so-welcome newcomer.
"Woody, Bob Dylan, cain't ya just listen to the music and shut the hell up? Always trying to make a point 'n sound smart. Would you just shut the hell up for once?!" snaps Henry, a squeamish veteran regular who George has made his reluctant cohort.
A moron with half a brain originally from somewhere else, George was released from the city's Federal pen earlier that year. He drifted in and set up camp at Asa's in the Spring, it being the kind of place that attracts all makes / models from society's fringe. Most try to tolerate him. Goodspeed thinks he's an undeserving asshole, which he is (subjective indiscretion noted).
"But if I'd get ya to listen every s'often, I wouldn't have to always give ya facts plain as the nose on yer face. Woody was okay, see, but was nothing before Dylan. Dylan, now he was the real talent. Woody Guthrie? Please, woulda just been forgot kind likes that guy, what the fuck-hell was his name? Ya know who I's talking 'bout?"
"No, I don't. Now shut the hell up. Anything for a little peace 'n quiet," Henry placing an order: "H, how 'bout another'n down here?"
"Henry, how 'bout lopping off some of this here tab you been piling up of late. What say, friend?" Howard, stern, paternal, arms locked at the elbows as he leans on the bar. There is no question who's sheriff in here.
"I knows it, I knows it, H. Old lady took the check, again. Jeez, why don't I stand up to that evil witch. What kinda man am I? I need to stand up for myself. I ain't seen no part of that check, H," Henry's hand gesturing erratic, inebriated.
"Same excuse as last time, Henry," Howard sliding a fresh domestic-in-a-bottle before the veteran, knowing, sadly, that it is all truth. Henry: one of their own, a burdened soul. He persists….
"It's the sad truth, I swear it, H. That woman'll be my end some day."
"The plain truth is that ya ain't knowin' what I's tryin' to splain here. Guthrie 'n Dylan was like this," stammers George, swaying drunk and stupid, attempting to cross his fingers and enamored by the complexity of his pointless point.
"Just shut it up, George. Hoo! My head hurts. Just shut up yer damned hole, would ya please?!"
A-fucking-men, thinks Goodspeed, he and D walking past, making their way to the end of the bar. But the pointlessness continues, the slurred rambling words microscopic pinpricks slowly, methodically, bleeding time. Goodspeed slow-simmers:
"Some day."
Goodspeed and D file into their regular slots at the far end of the bar. A king and queen, benevolent keepers of the kingdom. Not that they would accept such nobility. For the point—if not the rule—is to blend, in here…. Annoying pinpricks fall to the background (as much as the loudmouth allows that to be possible). Goodspeed, still off from the previous night's excesses, zeroes in on the television. The set broadcasts the game, the local boys of Summer plying their trade. Baseball proves a perfect companion on this night: Goodspeed's attention span non-committal, blurry. Dorothy allows him his visual mistress without jealousy; really, she could care less about his moods (another reason they work). Sensing the shift in temper, she strikes up a conversation with Martha, known to all as "Muth." They gab, ruminate and declare, while Goodspeed wiles away. Conversations, annoyances, minutes fall to the background. It is his safehouse, Asa's panacea underwritten by elixirs served tall and cool. Innings are dropped and recaptured with nonchalance. Strike three called, nicking the outside corner, side retired. Six-and-a-half in the books. Goodspeed stands and stretches with the crowd.
Again, we cast an eye about the place, a lodestar central to our study. It is a world unto itself, a self-absorbed universe where rules / laws are redrawn as what the regular wills. What is is what they wish, everything "out there" strangled—if only for a moment—by the physics of "in here." The place is a landmark, an out-of-the-way wonder along the lines of the Largest Ball of Twine. (Come one, come all to Dinosaurland!) Old tourist kitsch, the irrelevance of time itself, Asa's has it all. College pennants hang over trinkets from South of the Border, Graceland, and The Keys. Two calendars faded and fixed behind Asa's cash register say it all. Classic Muscle Cars: a '66 GTO. Winston Cup Showcase: David Pearson limping to victory at Daytona in '76…. It is the middle of August 1997, the stretch run of the millennium; though one might not even notice, in here. Time is swallowed in a lack of immediacy, a languor that rounds out the dank often punctuated by Dylan or Guthrie, Curtis Mayfield, K. D. Lang or The Allmans….
"Anyone with half-a-brain knows what the fuck-hell I's talking 'bout, Henry."
"Anyone with half-a-brain's got a full half more than you do, George."
"Problem's that ya just don't want to listen."
"You got that right!"
Brewery signs linger from promotions long past: coasters from Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee. Pabst lamp cones, Hamms and Jax serving trays, a bottle of Schlitz thermometer. Promotional gadgets, hats, posters, all manner of cheap crapola lay strewn about haphazard and shellacked by an oozing ochre floated of decades of rib grease, dust, must, and humidity. Howard didn't even install window-unit AC until the Summer after Saigon fell. The effects are still apparent: stalactites of grime cling to the tin-ceiling, dust-covered cobwebs strung like an unkempt regeneration of Pollock.
But one should not be fooled. A lack of care is not the result of a lack of love. The mild madness that abides in here feeds no ire. It finds only absolution. It is a modest place. It's a place for drinking, long-guaranteed protection via its friendliness towards police gambling. Hush-hush and backroom the pots can roll big, back there—all the cops known by name, in here. The Asa Inman: where time sinks into the stares of its regulars, where it lay capsized in its cure….
"And another thing, ain't never met no one who's got a first name for their last name that I ever did like, like uh, like uh, a name like uh, Bob Frank. In the pen, this guy's name, it was Bob Frank or Daniel, some'n 'er other; ya couldn't turn your back on him; never can. Cain't trust 'em is the problem with 'em," George yammering on relentlessly.
"George, what's your last name?" Goodspeed, eyes still glued to the game, inquiring loud enough for the loudmouth to hear.
"What? What's that, Goodspeed?"
"Your last name, George. What's your last name?"
"My last name? Thomas, dammit! Ya knew that, Goodspeed. Fuck-hell, ya did. Ah whatever, never know what you talking 'bout anyway, always talking stuff I cain't make heads-nor-heels; pro'ly just tryin' to impress yer girlfriend over there, spoutin' off about this-and-that-and—blah—blah—blah….Goodspeed having become so skilled at tuning out sonic bullshit he often feels he should patent the process and make his millions. Of course, his entrepreneurial spirit has gone a bit soft ever since he made it.
"Can't deal with that horse's ass anymore," D draining a last swallow of domestic light, getting up to leave.
"Sorry, was someone talking, babe? Was all caught up watching our five-million-dollar boys here squander another lead in the eighth."
"Got to get up and get to it early tomorrow, anyhow. Hope they pull it out. Be sure to get some rest tonight. See ya, love."
