Western Palaces, page 12
“I mean, for meeting me,” I tell Sanchez, sipping my coffee although my skin’s already tingling from all the coke I did before meeting up, so I probably don’t need the caffeine. I put my quaking cup down and place my hands on my knees beneath the table to hide the shakes.
“Well, you know. I had nothing better to do, so, no problem, I guess,” he says, looking around, bored. He’s in his usual three-piece grey suit. Alternates between fixing his tie, vest, and jacket with patting his gelled hair back into place or smoothing out his pencil-thin mustache.
“It’s been a while since we hung out, man. It’s… it’s been a while,” I say, my voice quavering. Unable to make eye-contact for fear of breaking into a crying jag or fit of laughter thanks to my PBA (PseudoBulbar Affect: unexpected and uncontrollable outbursts of crying or laughing), I keep my eyes on the waiter and contemplate hacking off his feet, tying his hands behind his back, and sticking those feet in his mouth—and all on the street corner as performance art where San Francisco’s brightest will pelt me with nickels and dimes and phlegm. I don’t feel bad about the vision because I already decided I’d split the fortune we’d make forty/sixty. I make a mental note to go home and get my hatchet before I approach the waiter with my idea.
“I guess you can call whatever hanging out…” Sanchez says, removing the toothpick from his mouth and peeling it apart into soggy splinters.
“We were friends, Sanchez. Good friends. Come on, man,” I say, picturing the waiter’s dismembered feet in my mouth.
“Look, we’ve already gone over this. We’re not friends. We were never friends, Luke. At best, we were acquaintances. But then you had to go and get all fucking weird.” He looks away from me, scans the room, sighs, then has a hard time taking a breath in.
“Are you OK?” I ask, alarmed, leaning forward as he pats himself all over, looking for something, then shuffles through the metal briefcase next to him, wheezing. People at other tables are watching, worried, and I’m halfway out of my seat, ready to save my friend’s life when he finds his inhaler and takes four rapid-fire intakes on that and finally calms.
“I’m… fine…” he says.
“You shouldn’t say those kinds of things to me, Sanchez. Maybe next time you won’t find that inhaler,” I mumble.
“Huh?” he says, color coming back into his cheeks. He smooths out his pencil ‘stache with thumb and forefinger, not waiting for a response, then shuffles through his briefcase again, pulls out his pack of toothpicks, and starts chewing a new one to bits. Noticing me giving him a look, he says, “What? Oral fixation. It’s a nervous habit. At least I don’t smoke anymore.”
“You don’t smoke anymore?”
“Nope. Quit about six months ago.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say, feeling left out.
“No. You didn’t. Why the fuck would you?”
“I… I thought…”
“Look, Luke, I haven’t got all goddamned day. You said you had something important to tell me? Something to give me? Something of mine? That—what—you stole or something?”
“I didn’t steal anything from you, asshole.”
“Well, then, what is it? Come on. Out with it.”
Plates clank and the knife carving meat behind the counter at the front of the restaurant is the soundtrack to my dreams. Fogged skylights overhead and large windows at the front filter the space in a dirty yellow light while bipedal boars in the back room roar at football on large TVs in between bouts of friendly ass-sniffing. A Muzak version of Green Day’s “American Idiot” softly lulls from the sound system.
“A friend of mine died a few weeks ago,” I tell him, placing my hands back under the table because they’re quivering again.
Sanchez pa-shaws me, says, “Luke, every time I run into you someone you know has died. It’s a tired shtick, man. That sympathy card’s been played too much. And it’s fucking weird—you lying about that kind of shit. I mean, I’m all about weird. I love weird. But you… you’re just too Daffy Fucking Duck.”
“Is it because I fucked Cleopatra?” I ask him, accusing. “Are you still angry about that? You didn’t even like her! Shit, Sanchez, that was years ago.”
“Try a couple thousand years ago, nutbag,” he says, leaning back again and flicking his wet toothpick at me.
“You know goddamned well what I’m talking about.”
“Can’t say I do, Luke.”
“Is it… is it because I burned your building down?”
“Huh? What?”
“Is it because Wilson burned up in his building? I didn’t even mean—”
“Wilson? Wilson—”
“Look, you and Russ and Kevin and Wilson—you can all pretend you don’t know me—that we were never friends. Fine. I don’t even know what I did to…. But… but you can also pretend that we can all start over right?”
“Huh?”
“If you all don’t know me… what’s—what’s stopping you from getting to know me?”
“Here we go with the freaky weirdness again…”
“Listen, you all say you don’t know me. You think I’ve gone crazy. But it’s you all that have gone crazy. You all are fucking bonkers. You all are fucking wrong. But I’m willing to… let that slide.”
“You are, huh?”
“Yeah. We can let bygones be bygones and be friends again—I mean, now.”
“This just gets better by the minute, Freako the Clown.”
“Look, my friend, Pearl—this nice old lady in my building—I mean, Cameron’s building. She just kicked the bucket. I think she was the last person to… I just… Cameron’s gone and—”
“The bartender at Bourbon Bandits?”
“Yeah, Cameron. You fucking know her, Sanchez.”
“Oh, I know her, alright.”
“What’s that fucking mean?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, seriously. What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I know your dirty little secret, Luke.”
My heart jumps into my throat. I think about Abigail’s ribcage blossoming crimson. I think about her and Naomi, entwined, forever, in a closet in a room above a dingy bar in the Tenderloin. I think about Cameron. I think about the boy. I think about them on the run, without me, the western sun trailing them, chasing them, no matter how fast they go, the backs of their heels forever charred black. I think about bodies in suitcases and my own organs shoved inside one that’s put on a train to Chicago where men in stained overalls shove the suitcase into a vat of pig guts in the Meatpacking District where Al Capone once gave an affectionate handjob to Big Bill Thompson.
“What… what secret? What secret do you know?” I ask, my adam’s apple a brick going up and down.
“Don’t worry about it. Mum’s the word, you whacko.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with me. I just don’t want to get involved.”
“You don’t, do you? No one… no one wants to get involved. No one wants to be… bothered.”
“Well, why would I?” he asks, tossing a fresh toothpick between his teeth.
As I’m about to answer I notice the words YOU WERE ONLY BORN 5 YEARS AGO scratched into the table and it makes my stomach turn. Underneath that, the initials LRS. “Fuck… you,” I tell the table. “I’m thirty-six-years old! I’m not five-years-old! I’m not five-years-old! I am not a baby!”
I slam my fists on the table, try to scratch out the words scratched into it.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sanchez says, both hands out, toothpick in his right hand. He’s laughing a little, then smirking and looking around at all the attention we’re getting. He straightens his tie and winks at the table of ladies across the dusty wood dining floor. Those women giggle in return.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, about to hyperventilate.
“You are, Luke. I give you shit, but you are kind of entertaining.”
“Thanks,” I say, slinking back in the booth, defeated.
“So, seriously. What is it? What do you have for me?”
Perking up, I sit straighter and say, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know… I know you’ve had a hard time completing stuff before. I know you tend to lose interest or switch gears or whatever, and just kind of drop things.”
“Huh?”
I pull a stack of papers from my shoulder-bag beside me and drop it onto the table with a toothy grin. The papers are dog-eared, full of red marks, coffee stains, and my own blood. That’s how hard I worked on this manuscript.
“Well, you know, ever since Pearl crashed the Pearly Gates—and since Cameron’s been away for so long—I’ve just had a hard time… sleeping. Anyway, I came across this the other night. This manuscript of yours. I remember—I remember fucking loving this, man! This is definitely one of your best books of poetry. One of your best books of anything.”
It’s his turn to perk up. He says, hesitant, hiding his excitement, “This… this is one of my books?”
“Yeah. You handed it off to me about a year ago, I think. I just found it again the other night—like I was saying. And, basically, I’ve been reading it over and over and over and over… and over again. And I thought I’d help you edit it. You know, shape it a bit. I tried not to change too much, but there’s some things in need of changing and a whole lot of fucking typos and terrible line breaks, but it’s brilliant. It’s really goddamned brilliant. And I wanted, you know, to do this for you. I thought I’d help you finish something… you know, for a change.”
“This is mine?” he asks again, unsure, flipping through the pages.
I swallow coffee, burn my tonsils. “Uh-huh.”
“Uh… Luke,” he says, perhaps about to choke up.
“Sanchez, don’t worry about it. I’m glad to do it. I mean… it’s such a weird book. It’s just—I mean, all those talking bugs and that big scary rabbit and the mysterious motorcycle lady? Just—the characters really spoke to me. I’m serious. For a few days they were in the room with me. I lived with them. Literally. And, boy, were they chatty. I had to kill them when they started up a conversation with Abigail, but…. I wanted to make sure they could live on. In print. As a book. As something complete no matter how unreal. You should take a look at my suggestions and edits there and, you know, publish it.”
Shoulders slumping, and sighing, Sanchez says, “Luke, what the fuck?”
“What?” I ask, excited to hear how much he appreciates the work I put into his book. Proud of this selfless act of mine.
“This is not my fucking manuscript, Luke.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, a lead weight kerplunking in my gut.
“You fucking schmuck. This is your book. This is very obviously your book, you fucking hot-air balloon,” he sneers, stabbing the stack of papers back at me.
Thumbing through the pages now, myself, I don’t recognize a word of it. I don’t remember writing it at all.
“This is my book?” I ask, gulping, almost scared of the answer.
“Yeah, douchebag. It’s yours. I don’t have a crystal-clear memory of it, but I know you read some of that shit at that café below your apartment—about a year ago. What’s that place called?”
“Café Red Ass,” I say, absentmindedly, still trying to recall writing a goddamn word of this thing.
Sanchez laughs, “You really don’t live in the real world, do you?”
“No?” I ask, hoping for an answer I can trust. I hold back the vomit climbing the ladder from my gut.
As I’m looking over this manuscript, at all the red marks and scribbles—thousands of them—and all the work put into it, I’m wondering. I read a line of poetry here, a stanza there, and I’m feeling that maybe Sanchez is right. It probably is mine.
And it’s fucking crap.
When I look up from it, eyes plate-glass windows smeared with tears, I see Sanchez bust through Righty’s front door out onto Geary Street, the sunlight turning the doorway into a blinding portal.
People are looking at me. The boars have even quieted in order to listen to my pathetic whine, which slips from my lips like fog. I fake a smile, look around, try to wink at the girls like Sanchez did but feel my eyeball pop out of its socket so I quickly turn away to hide myself and push it back in. I pretend to put the manuscript back in my bag but drop it to the floor beneath the table, instead, wanting to be rid of it, and then sigh and look out the front windows of Righty’s at traffic coming and going. I watch two people hugging on the corner across the street, beneath the traffic lights, until one drops to the sidewalk and doesn’t get up and the other calmly strolls away, whistling, maybe.
SAN FRANCISCO BEACHED
The waves of the Pacific slap the sand between my toes and off in the distance the setting sun coaxes a million diamond-fish to pierce the ocean’s surface, stand on their tails, and shimmy. From where I stand, at the world’s end, the sun still has a good four or five feet before it plops into the horizon and appears on the other side of the world to alight everyone in shame there just as it has here.
I look at my phone, hoping for a text from Cameron, then look back at my bottle of Jim Beam dug into the sand next to the Dora the Explorer beach towel I nabbed from Toby’s room. I don’t need to make a mental note to talk to both Cameron and the kid about purchases such as that towel because it’s already written in indelible marker on my goddamned brain.
Monstrous screeches erupt down the beach and I flinch out of my daze. It’s just a couple of seagulls fighting over the carcass of a shark-attack victim that washed ashore.
Besides the gulls’ shameless fighting over rotted flesh, there’s a couple dog-walkers, and a smattering of teenagers hanging out and getting high off bags of glue. There’s a pair of zombies not far away. One’s burying the other up to its shoulders in sand. They take turns gnawing each other’s ears off—the unburied one offering its in return without question, lovingly.
We’re all scattered along Ocean Beach, which is off the Great Highway.
Lots of convertibles are speeding along that two-lane highway only thirty yards behind me, enjoying the last few moments of sunlight while I sit here toeing dead jellyfish and texting Cameron. Most of those convertibles are silver, and foreign, and Cameron’s not responding because of what, I don’t know. It could be that I slept with her best friend, Naomi, or it could be that she found out Serena was in town recently and she’d probably assume I couldn’t help but sleep with her, either. There was also that note she left before the holidays asking me to move out, which I didn’t do because doing what people ask of you never got anybody anywhere in life. I should call Serena’s psychic hotline, which is a direct line to the afterlife since Serena is worm food, and ask if she knows what’s going on. Because I think Cameron may have even accused me of something last night, but, I don’t know, I wasn’t really listening. I was pretty drunk and trying to watch an infomercial on the TV in her bedroom/living room about how to better hide one’s bulimia.
The shame of it all.
I pick a sand dollar from the whitewash and chomp into it like a cookie, hoping to taste it: Shame.
It tastes like sand and a crab’s asshole.
Which may be what shame tastes like, so, I don’t know.
Shame just crumbles and falls from my lips. I spit as much of it out as I can.
In the wet, frothy sand, I toe the words “Fuck you, Logan” and I don’t know why I’ve done it. My stomach turns, clenches. I ignore it.
I look down the beach one way, then the other, and wonder why there’s no lighthouses stationed out here. But it makes sense. That’s how all this garbage—these zombies and monsters—went adrift and came ashore here to this postcard town that knows best how to frame the shot to keep the picture free of the everyday horror for all the tourists and suckers.
All the better angels of our nature knew to steer their ships clear of these sands.
I’m hoping for a text or call from Cameron because she knows I hate the beach and I want to prove to her and Toby that I’m flexible and willing to go outside my comfort zones for them, even though I’ve told Cameron countless times how stupid and pointless the beach is and that I’d probably end up just drowning the boy, anyway.
“It’s only good for getting sand in your crack and no matter how high the mighty sun is shining, you’re still going to freeze your ass off there. Going to the beach here is the act of a goddamned masochist… and a faker,” I told her and the boy. “It’s beautiful. People come from all over the world to see the beaches of California,” Cameron told me, standing in the doorway of her apartment, Toby’s hand in hers and a couple of rolled up beach towels under her arm. She had her sunglass set atop the crown of her head and a nose painted white with sunblock. The kid also had his nose sunblocked and a pair of knock-off fluorescent green Wayfarers on. “Is fun. Come wit us, Lou, pawleez,” that little shit said, still getting my name wrong after all this time. “We can buil’ san’ cassels an’ fly kites,” it said. “Don’t be a dum-dum,” I told him. “You can’t fly kites, it’s physically impossible. And castles just crumble to nothingness at the first sign of the rising tide,” I said. “Nothing lasts,” I kept on. “Your ma will be dead by the time you’re nineteen,” I added. “You’ll be all alone. More alone than me, even,” I told him. “Anyway, don’t let the crabs snip your pecker off,” I advised him. “Have fun there without me, suckers,” I said to them both. He just looked up at me behind those big plastic sunglasses and Cameron breathed heavy, her eyes crinkling above that alabaster schnoz.
It was just so goddamned precious I had to vomit right there in the hallway. It was love-vomit, but Cameron didn’t understand that and made a beeline out the door, sighing and cursing and leaving me on my own in her apartment. I spent the next four hours making a patchwork fort out of her panties, trying to remain hidden from Abigail in the closet. I’d heard a rustle and grumble from there that was not the normal sounds of decomposition.
It frightened me.
But, now, look at me. I’m here, at the beach. A regular Californian. Freewheelin’, free lovin’, and free-loadin’. I’m even smiling. Like every other fucker in this state. Well, I’m not actually smiling. I painted it on with Cameron’s eyeliner pencils before leaving. I had a seat all to myself on the 38, the 28, and the N Judah on my way here.
