Western Palaces, page 15
For a while I lie there on the sidewalk, shirtless, my pants around my ankles, shivering and turning blue. I watch the lights on the signs twinkle and flash, stretching off into the distance toward the floating lights of the Bay Bridge, which I thought had been destroyed a long time ago. As people and zombies stroll past or over me, most ignore me while some spit at me and tell me to get a job. I lie there for a while, full of self-pity as black wasps alight on me and gnaw away, attempting to feast on all the fly larvae crawling through my bowels and growing in my womb. I think: Well, there’s another birthday down the shitter. But, at least I have another one tomorrow where I can try again. Or maybe that’s next week. Doesn’t matter. I’ve got another soon enough.
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.
FUNEREAL
I’d heard someone in Cameron’s building mention Pearl a few days after they’d hauled away her bloated and decaying corpse. They stood before the useless elevator on the second floor asking each other if they’d known the woman that collapsed from heart failure and was left all alone to rot in her apartment over the Christmas break. Laughing, they admitted to each other they hadn’t even heard Pearl’s name before, nor had they seen her around, so, no, neither of them knew her and neither of them were moved by her sudden absence.
“Someone said they thought someone in the building went on their holiday vacation and left raw pork and old cabbage or something rotting in their garbage can up here,” one said.
“I know,” the other said. “I think it was that weirdo at the end of the hall. He even called building management—like they give a fuck. And who does that, anyway?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, this is the Tenderloin. Anyway, they told him it was a rat that died in the wall and to just wait it out.”
“Jesus, that was a big fucking rat,” the other said.
“They’re burying that rat tomorrow, thank God.”
“Yeah. I think I heard that’s when her funeral is. Or something like a funeral. I’m sure the paparazzi will be all over that one.”
I watched them through the peephole: These two weren’t human at all, just a pair of large bipedal crickets. Twitching and vibrating in the hallway under flickering fluorescent lights, I watched them chitter. When a breeze weaved through the corridor it shook the black shards on their legs, causing those crickets to sing in a pitch so high I had to back away from the door and cover my ears. Actually, I fell to my knees there in Cameron’s apartment and dry-heaved for minutes on end, nothing coming up because there was nothing inside me.
After the sound of my gagging and hacking ceased, I heard the sound of trucks. No. It wasn’t trucks. It was Toby, down the short hall, in his bedroom, playing trucks. Someone else was giggling. It was Cameron. I couldn’t believe it. They were back. They were finally back!
Walking down the hall, I heard Cameron say, “Now, where are the trucks going, huh? Why are they hauling that dolly away? Where are they taking her?” And Toby answered, “Da mass gwave,” and she laughed and he vroomed and chuga-chuga-ed and I thought, Christ, the kid doesn’t even know the difference between train and truck noises.
This was all coming through his closed bedroom door. Maybe they’ve been here this whole time. Just in his room. Maybe they’ve been in there all along. Doing what? Hiding? From me? But, why?
“Knock-knock,” I said, knocking on the door.
“Who’s dere?” Toby asked back.
“Banana,” I said, playing along.
“Bananana who?” Toby replied, and cackled.
“Knock-knock,” I said again to the door, not knocking this time.
“Who’s dere?” Toby asked, stifling a laugh.
“Banana,” I said again.
“Bananana who?” Toby asked.
“Knock-knock,” I said, and Cameron mumbled something about this getting old.
“Who is dere, pawleez?” Toby said, anxiousness creeping into his voice.
“Orange,” I told him.
“Orange who?” Toby asked.
“Orange you glad I’ve let you both live as long as I have?” I asked.
Silence.
“I said, orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?”
Silence.
I flung the door open, prepared to chastise them both for fucking up my punch line, but the room was empty. A toy dump-truck moved across the floor all on its own and bumped into the closet. Dirty grey morning light sifted through the small bedroom window that looked out into a lightwell smattered with pigeon shit. Feathers floated out the window like snow in stasis. Toby’s bed was made and unslept in. It had a Dora the Explorer bedspread and that reminded me to make yet another mental note to have a little sit-down chat with Cameron about how she’s raising our boy. I also made a mental note to my mental note to remind them never to fuck up one of my punch lines, just as a sort of preemptive measure.
“Never mind,” I told the empty room, shuffling my feet. “It’s more the kind of joke Pearl would appreciate, anyway.”
I turned and exited the room and the apartment and, in the corridor, found that Pearl’s door was wide open.
“Pearl,” I said, striding into her little junior one-bedroom. “Pearl? You really shouldn’t leave your door wide open like that. Any kind of monster can walk right in.”
“Luke?” Pearl asked from her little window that looked out onto the tarpapered roof of the low building next door. She swung that giant head toward me and smiled so big her face began to bubble and fester until it turned to a brownish liquid and melted off, her eyeballs popping and tongue flopping to the floor. She dissolved entirely into the floorboards before I could say goodbye.
The floor was all torn up where her body rested last, her rot having seeped into the grain of the wood floor and demanding replacement. The radiator she had lain next to, which had expedited her decay, was also missing. The whole apartment was emptied out, in fact. The ripped-out floorboards the only thing proving she was ever here. Our landlord who was usually unresponsive to our calls to have him fix anything in this shitty building was apparently determined to erase the memory of Pearl from this place as quickly as possible. I supposed it would be hard to rent an apartment with a wood floor soaked through with dead old-lady juices.
***
Now, here I am at St. Ignacio’s in the Mission District, seated in a metal folding chair. There’s maybe a little more than a dozen chairs arranged in a circle, and only a handful are filled. Across from me a group of four women sit, dabbing at their eyes with mascara-stained handkerchiefs. They’re old, loose-skinned, heavily made-up. Smiles crack their wet faces as they attempt to console each other.
There’s no casket. There’s no memorial photo board. There’s no sign of Pearl at all. She was cremated by the State to ensure she never rose again. No zombie-hope for Pearl. No chance I’ll be sipping glasses of Jim Beam alongside her skinless corpse at Bourbon Bandits, Aberdeen Tower, or No Casa ever again.
Speaking of. One zombie sits alone off to my side a few chairs away shouting “Yeah!” in between twitch-fits and snacking on flakes of her own skin. The only other person here is clearly homeless and lingering for the free coffee. He’s sipping from his steaming paper cup and attempting, unsuccessfully, to hide the immense pleasure and comfort he’s finding in his warm beverage and surroundings, despite the occasion.
I feel terrible because we’re in the church’s basement and not the actual main room where God lives and plugs his ears and hums loudly anytime anyone tries to talk to him. I feel terrible knowing I might not even get something as good as the basement when Cameron finally comes back and slits my throat in my sleep and plays around in my blood and laughs and laughs and laughs.
This feeling, empathy—I almost don’t recognize it. Fortunately the unfamiliarity creates enough anxiety to mask the empathy, returning me to my usual state of alarm and unrest. My knuckles go white as I grip the seat beneath me and the breath in my lungs becomes shallow and searing. I’m ready to pounce on any motherfucker that looks at me sideways.
For a second, I calm, becoming distracted. Distracted because I’m realizing I’ve been here before—this church basement. A long time ago. I’ve been here with Kevin for an AA meeting. Not for me, of course. AA’s for pussies. I’d never seek self-improvement by surrounding myself with other losers. That’s just stupid. But, Kevin had been hitting the bottle pretty hard and was spiraling quickly into a cycle of self-hate, self-pity, and ill-health. At that time I told him, “Kevin, seriously, self-hate, self-pity, and poor health—that’s life, man. If you didn’t have those things, what would be left? Nothing. You’d be a fucking cipher. Think about it.” That just seemed to depress him more. He started skipping out on his shifts at Café Communisto, leaving Christy or Cleo or me or one of the other baristas covering for him, pulling doubles and cancelling our own plans. But Kevin was definitely sick. He was always skinny, but he grew skeletal back then, except for that ridiculous bowling-ball belly he sported from his love for the High Life.
It was disappointing when he told me he was going sober, of course. For the longest time he’d been my most reliable friend. Anytime I wanted a drink—be it nine at night or seven in the morning—I could always count on Kevin. Kevin was the one that taught me the trick of the “street latte”. That is, beer in a paper coffee cup with the plastic lid, which allowed us to stroll the streets of San Francisco without the risk of losing our buzz. Brilliant, of course. We worked together for a while before I got canned for fucking the boss’s wife, Jennifer, who also worked there as a barista while getting her law degree at USF. That was a long time ago, too. She was older than me and opinionated and sarcastic and cynical and I’d grown fond of her. She often told me I was a loser and waste of space and chastised me for having no direction in life. She said I was particularly shitty to women and that I’d probably never get laid again the second I got out of my twenties and had to mingle with more experienced women, such as herself, that knew my type and knew to keep their distance.
Honesty. Another reason I appreciated her.
It had only happened the once—that one time Jennifer and I closed out the café and decided to drink the place dry of wine before slipping down to the basement where she drunkenly bent over the desk down there beneath the burning bare bulb, pulled her short black-and-white striped skirt up, and said, “OK. Just this once. Stick it in me.” Unfortunately we both forgot that her husband, Tony, would be by to pick her up. I don’t know how long he had been standing there watching me pull his wife’s black hair, slap her pink ass, and pound her, but he was there to punch me in the back of the head just as I was about to blow an enormous load of wine-diluted sperm into Jennifer. I fell atop of her mumbling something, groaning and drooling, instantly half-retarded, and she slid away from me and put the desk between herself and her enraged, rather large husband. He was about fifteen years older than her and balding and Jennifer had often made comments about her growing sexual frustration since marrying him. She thought it was probably the steroids.
Behind the desk, Jennifer wiped the wet from her mouth and cackled nervously while I rolled around on the ground, suddenly suffering blue balls and a sore skull, fighting to hold onto consciousness.
“I love you, baby,” Tony said, kicking me in the ribs. “And, I know, despite all this, you love me.” He punted me in the hip just then. I think he was crying. “And I forgive you,” he told Jennifer, kicking me in the ass. She laughed some more, apologized, and pulled her skirt back into place and fixed her hair. They skipped up the stairs like smitten teenagers, leaving me all alone on the basement floor—but not before Tony told me I was fired, of course.
Jennifer was wrong about me never getting laid again once I got out of my twenties. People never learn. Age has nothing to do with it. And people love abuse. People love to be wrong. People love to make mistakes. People love regret. It would be a lonely fucked up world if it were any different.
Anyway, when I was here before in this church basement, sitting next to Kevin, offering my support like any good friend, I listened to Kevin moan and groan about his feelings of inadequacy and how maybe that had something to do with his drinking. How, having grown up in the Midwest, he was made to feel as though he should have the quintessential adult life by his mid to late twenties—the house, picket fence, two cars, one wife, three kids, and a well-paying, secure job. He didn’t have that, he told the little grey-haired lady who nodded, clutching her Bible and AA manual. She told him God sends everyone on different paths and some paths are slower than others. I snickered at that, causing everyone in the circle to quiet and stare me down. That old bat also told Kevin that he needed to love himself before anyone else could. She said that was very, very important. I said, “What about his mom and dad?” And the old lady said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I mean, don’t his folks have to love him no matter what? Does he really have to love himself before his folks love him? And what if he came out of the womb full of self-loathing? What if he was just born that way? Would his parents have to wait until he somehow learned to love himself before his parents could love him?” And that old blue-hair responded, “It would be his parents’ duty to teach him how to love himself, Luke.” And I told that crazy grave-dodger, “But if they didn’t love him already, why bother? Why not just chuck him in a dumpster, like my folks did? I mean… well… does Kevin really have to learn to love himself before God Jesus Lord Almighty Fire-Breather can love him?” And she answered, “God’s love is automatic.” And I retorted with, “Ah-ha!” while jumping out of my chair and jabbing one forefinger heavenward. “But, if God loves him,” I went on, “then why should he give a flying rat’s cooter whether he loves himself? Or his parents? Or you, you dirty old hag? He’s going to Heaven no matter what. So long as he asks for forgiveness before squeezing out his last fart, right? I mean, he could even kill some random, drop-dead gorgeous redhead and her idiot drug-dealing boyfriend and God would have to forgive him so long as he asks for it. Right? Right. Because that’s the goddamned law!” And the old crow answered, “Well…” but I cut her off with another “Ah-ha!” before sitting back in my chair, pulling out my flask and taking a celebratory pull on that and passing it to the other degenerates in the circle who greedily slurped away and thanked me and told me they loved me whether or not I loved myself. Kevin just slunk down in his chair.
I’m actually not sure if I said that bit about the redhead or if I’m misremembering. That might have been Before Abigail (BA). Time isn’t what it used to be. I remember everything at once, and nothing at all at the same time. The hourglass is more of a parlor trick and reality is a piece of wet, uncooked clay.
Anyway, I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs, watching the cadre of flabby old chicks continue to sob and pet each other when the lady priest walks in. I’m pretty sure she’s the priest, but she’s not wearing the usual fancy getup they wear for funerals. She’s just in the black digs with the white collar.
There’s some scuffling of the chairs as she steps into the circle and stands in its middle. A stocky, well-groomed Mexican guy enters after her and takes a seat across from me, a few chairs from the weeping retirees. He eyeballs me and I keep eyeballing him because he looks familiar. When the lady priest clears her throat, a few others shuffle in, and I’m gladdened to see the room almost half full now. One of the late-comers is Daniel and he spots me and I nod to him but he averts his one-eyed gaze and decides to just stand back in the corner of the room. Surprisingly, Eyre strolls in. I didn’t know he knew Pearl—but I didn’t think Daniel did, either.
Eyre shakes hands with that cyclops and they nod to each other in some kind of agreement before Eyre walks up and takes a seat next to me. He pats my knee and crosses his legs and says, “Life’s too short,” as if he’s making concessions. Then he adjusts his tie and straightens his tweed coat. His knuckles and fingers are crusty with old paint. “Cameron says hi,” he says with a smirk.
I give him a double-take followed by a sour face, but decide not to say anything.
“Anyway, I’m here for ya,” Eyre adds.
“Um… thanks?” I say, confused.
“Life isn’t real,” the lady priest says after everyone’s seated, getting right into her homily. Her first words rev my heart and I hyperventilate and fall out of my chair.
“Oh my! Is he… is he alright?” the priest asks as Eyre leans over, pats me on the back, and tells her I’m just fine—that this happens all the time—and to please continue.
“As I was saying…. Life isn’t real. Or sometimes it seems that way. Because life isn’t really all there is. Not really. There’s Heaven, after all. And life is just a book on God’s shelf, read before it’s even opened, but loved for every moment it offered. Even the bad ones. And I know all of us here, myself included, have had our bad moments. We’ve stumbled, we’ve faltered, and we’ve overcome only to stumble again. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s all in the book, and God has already read it. He already knows. There are no secrets between you and him.”
Eyre gets me to my seat as she’s saying this and I nearly fall out of my chair again. Thankfully I remembered to bring my trusty paper bag, which I breathe into heartily. After a few huffs I realize there’s still some glue in there. The lady priest looks upon me again with concern and I motion for her to continue, feeling just fine, the paper bag crackling as it inflates, deflates.
“And this world is just a library—God’s library where story-time might feel endless, but indeed it is not, for life is short. But there’s beauty in brevity. And that’s what God sees. We are all stories to be told, while we’re here. And while not all stories are happy, and not all stories go the way God would have hoped, life writes its own way through us, and God loves every plot, every twist, every turn, and every challenge our stories reveal. Our struggles, in turn, are his struggles. Just as we study the Bible, we are the books God studies, and reads. And Pearl’s tale was another of God’s favorite novels—warts and all.”
