Western Palaces, page 6
Poor guy.
“Hey, Daniel, why do you advertise this place as a sports bar? You have three TVs,” I tell him, motioning to the two small TVs behind the bar, and the one hung up in the corner near the pool table. No Casa is no frills. It’s this linoleum-topped bar, some square plasterboard tables with plastic chairs, a concrete floor, that pool table, three TVs, and bathrooms with doors that sometimes come unhinged. They don’t even have any beer taps. Just brown, clear, and amber stuff in bottles that doubles as mausoleums for drowned termites and mosquitoes.
“Because…” Daniel says, thinking about it.
“Because what?”
“Because we play sports on the TVs, man,” is all he says.
I look around at those TVs again. One is showing my mother at the clinic trying to abort me. The doctor’s got that sucking apparatus right up in there and he’s really going to town and my ma, she’s all drugged up and out of it, and eventually the doctor gives up and says it’s not taking. My mom asks what he means. The doctor just shrugs and drops the vacuum thingy, pulls the surgical mask down, and walks out of the room so that the show can go to a commercial for a psychic hotline. I’m pretty sure that’s Serena in the commercial, all dolled up in purple and gold makeup and crystal jewelry. She’s looking directly at the camera, but her face is flat, emotionless. She’s speaking, but her mouth doesn’t appear to be forming any kind of words I’d recognize. I’m sure that’s Serena even though the name on the screen says Angel Mist. The other TV behind the bar is some sort of televangelist program. There’s a preacher in a white suit on a white stage and he’s bashing the legs of a little boy in a wheelchair with a sledgehammer and telling him to walk. With each swing he’s yelling, “Jeee-zus! Wants! You! To! Walk!” The TV’s on mute, but I can read lips. Also, I’m pretty sure that little boy was me, so, maybe I’m just remembering the words. The last TV, by the pool table, is playing a dog show, which is a sport, I guess. In the end, I guess it’s all sport, so I have to concede to Daniel’s point.
“Listen,” I tell this padiddle, “a couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I murdered a girl and I fucked her cold body after.”
“You did what?” he says, a little alarmed.
“The dead girl. I fucked the dead girl. I wouldn’t call my girlfriend cold, man. I’m already in the doghouse enough as it is. Jesus, who do you think I am? Give us a little credit. But, you’re right, now that you mention it. Cameron has become a bit cold since that whole thing.”
“She has?” he asks, sucking that GPC to the filter and lighting up another while simultaneously popping the caps on two fresh Coronas—one for me, one for him. He’s a talented bartender for someone with no depth perception.
“Yeah. Like, she’s just hardly ever around anymore, you know?”
“Cameron?”
“Yeah.”
“You still think Cameron’s your girlfriend, man?” he asks, eye squinting, lips curling behind the smoke.
“Well, I’m living with her, ain’t I?” I say, defensive, snatching the beer from him without a thank you. I tilt back my head and drink it all down in one go, then burp and slam the bottle down and complain that the cyclops didn’t put a lime in it first.
“You would’ve just choked on it anyway,” Daniel says, and I see that the man has yet another point.
“But, wait… what the fuck, Daniel. Cameron’s my lady and you know it. We do everything together. Like I said, you know, that whole homicide thing. We’re bonded for life. There’s no way we could ever go our separate ways now. Not really.”
“I see. It’s metaphorical, man. I get it. You have a shared experience, but that shared experience isn’t poetic enough to really make your point, so you wrap it in fiction, in metaphor. Dark metaphor, but metaphor all the same. It speaks volumes, man. It says you have a genuine, no-shit pact with Cameron now, right?” he says, still smirking, mocking me.
He walks down the bar and fiddles with the boombox on the counter next to a sink filled with greasy water. There’s only a few other people in the bar, which is mostly lit up by the dull midday light filtering through the small, rectangular windows that are near the ceiling, making this place feel like a basement. The Mexican guys at the table stop talking for a moment, clearly perturbed that Daniel changed the radio station from Mexican folk music to NPR. Daniel likes his talk radio. He says it’s so hard to find intelligent conversation in the Tenderloin that he has to rely on it to stimulate his mind, and his soul. I once told him he has no soul and he got real depressed about that for a time. One time I even brought Nietzsche to the bar and Nietzsche told Daniel there is no God, just science and the actions of man. And, Nietzsche said to Daniel, you can’t prove the existence of the soul, thus, you have no soul. Truth only in the tangible, he told Daniel. But then Nietzsche got shitfaced on peppermint schnapps and started sobbing and snotting into his mustache and he grabbed the cyclops and pulled him near and told him he was sorry, he was so sorry, while patting Daniel on the chest, telling him his soul is right there. Oh, it’s been there all along, Nietzsche wailed.
“Cameron and I do have a real pact,” I tell Daniel. “And, fuck you, man. I don’t need this sarcasm. Give me another Corona, and don’t forget the goddamned lime this time, muchacho.” I slide my empty beer bottle toward him, return my attention to my whiskey, and try not to drool.
“Luke, man,” Daniel says while cutting a lime. “I do not think the world is how you see it.”
“Anyway, she’s mad at me. Either because I killed her best friend, or—”
“Metaphors. Allusions,” Daniel says, placing a lime wedge between his yellow teeth and sucking, a single tear leaking from that single eye.
“because I refused to go to the beach with her and that little brat of hers, Toby. Or maybe it’s because I fucked her best friend. Or stole her tip money. It could have something to do with Serena, but I’m sure Serena put a protection spell on me—or, um, what’s the opposite of protection? Maybe she knows I’ve been faking my orgasms lately.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the beach with them, man? Everyone likes the beach,” he tells me, forcing a lime into the Corona’s orifice and sliding the bottle at me.
“Well, they sure do. They love the shit out of it. That kid’s only like three or four or something—”
“Toby’s ten-years-old, Luke. Come on, man, you gotta know that much,” Daniel says, and I start to catch a whiff of distrust from him. Like, he’s starting to think I’m not so smart. I mean, why’d he turn on talk radio while I’m here, anyway?
“…and he’s supposedly a great swimmer already and especially loves swimming in the ocean. I told Cameron—I said, Cameron, look, peach-tush, I don’t do the beach and if you let that little potato-head of yours swim in the Pacific some shark’s likely to mistake him for a plump baby seal or lump of chum and I don’t want to hear about it when that little shit is Jaws’ midday snack, oh dear, oh love o’ mine.”
Pushing back from the bar, squinting his one eye, the uni-peeper says, “You’re a… you are one hell of a romantic, ain’t ya? Just a real carpe-diem Don Juan type, man. I know that Cameron. Una mujer bonita, that one. We bartenders have a kind of pact—a real pact. You need to treat that petite chica with a little more je ne sais quoi.”
“Uh-huh. Pour me another goddamned whiskey, oh maestro of many philosophies, many languages,” I say, pulling out a Winston and lighting it. Daniel does a little geisha bow and shuffles his feet in tiny steps backward down the bar, finds the Jim Beam and sloshes it into a half-clean glass of half-clean ice.
“Anyway, the beach is fucking freezing,” I continue. “Have you been to the goddamned beach? It’s a windy nightmare full of dead jellyfish and rats hiding in the crabgrass. And it’s filthy. There’s all this… sand. That’s all improved by the random nude communist or collection of college kids huddled around bonfires huffing glue.”
“You huff glue, Luke.”
“Hey!” I say, stabbing my finger at him. “What I do in the privacy of my own goddamned home is my own goddamned business.”
“Anyway, you should embrace nature, man. It’s pacifying. Nurturing. The ocean is one of the few places where man can truly contemplate his smallness, and his significance, on this living planet, man,” the one-eye says, all earnest.
“Oh, Christ, kill me now. I’m in the presence of fucking Buddha here. Now that I’ve been in your presence, what reason have I got to live? I’ve reached total goddamned enlightenment.”
“Man, your glow is so dim you’ve hardly reached nightlight… enment,” he says and crinkles his eye, pleased with himself.
“Shit, Daniel. I’ll just bring my typewriter down here next time I want to write a goddamned philosophical bestseller. Something really spiritual, like a sequel to The Da Vinci Code or something. I’ll just type out every word that comes out of that beautiful Mexican mouth of yours.”
“Hey, Luke, man. I see a lot for a dude with one eye, you know,” he says, slicing more limes and stopping to tap the knife just below his good eye. “And there’s already a sequel to The Da Vinci Code.”
“Shit! Why write anything? Everything worth saying’s been said already!” I tell him, reaching across the bar and grabbing a lime slice and sucking on it until I also have just one leaky eye.
We do a few shots of whiskey followed by a couple shots of tequila followed by more Coronas. Daniel keeps telling me that Cameron and I are not a thing—that we don’t exist. I keep shaking my head and drooling, saying, “You… are…. You don’t… you don’t even know… man…” and I’m scratching something into the bar with Daniel’s lime knife and when I stop and focus I think it says Your love is a fiction, Luke. But I wasn’t even looking at what I was doing with that knife. That shit just wrote itself. I quickly scratch those words out in the linoleum bar-top which are right above the already scratched-out words, Your life is a fiction, Luke, which are above Logan is a fucking sadist sociopathic asshole, also scratched out, and though Daniel sees my vandalization, he says nothing and just looks a little sad.
I wonder what he’s sad about.
“What’s with the long, one-eyed face?” I ask.
“Hey, man, you know I’m in this boat, too,” he says, leaning back, running his thumb along the lip of his beer bottle.
“Yeah,” I say, conceding.
The radio’s talking about refugees and how the GOP is petitioning the Vatican to anoint sainthood upon George W. Bush given how slow his decomposition has been since his death. I mean, it’s so slow he’s still walking around and talking and playing golf and drowning poor black people every chance he gets. It’s a miracle! I wonder how they can consider him a saint, though, when Nietzsche already proved he didn’t have a soul to begin with. Anyway, the lack of upbeat music in the bar has apparently made the guys at the table leave, so it’s just me and Daniel for a time, shooting the shit, drinking and smoking.
When the daylight through the slim windows darkens, Daniel turns on the bar’s dim lights, which give a swampy glow to all the smoke lingering around us. He turns the radio dial to this pirated station run by Christian Slater somewhere outside of Emeryville in the East Bay where he also has a meth lab/actor’s studio. Right now Christian’s playing “Bodies” by Danzig but he’s left his mic on so you can hear him grunting and air-guitaring in the background, wailing and yelling, “I used to be somebody, ma! I used to be a contender! Talk hard! Talk hard!”
On cue, the zombies shuffle in, dragging their feet, heads slung to the side. They order two-dollar bottles of Miller or cans of Tecate with shots of tequila. Every time they lick the salt off their hands before shooting the drink a strip of skin peels away, which they swallow down before repeating. Soon all the zombies have skeleton hands and somehow this feels familiar. As soon as the cyclops can break away from the melee he turns up the radio now playing Skinny Puppy’s “God’s Gift (Maggot)”.
A bunch of giant crickets strut in and rub their legs together to the tune, complementing the song with high-pitched arpeggios. I worry they’re about to rumble with the zombies and destroy the comfort I was just beginning to feel, but everyone seems mellow and the crickets find their seats and shove their faces into fat glasses of wine Daniel pulled from boxes behind the bar.
My artist pal, Eyre, strolls in next, done with his day-shift down the street at Aberdeen Tower. He takes a seat next to me, points to the scratched out words in the linoleum-topped bar and smirks then signals to Daniel to set us up with another round.
“Cameron says hi,” Eyre says. He chuckles at the commercial on the TV that shows a frowning man on a tiny mechanical horse. Eyre somehow finds amusement in most things. I’m pretty sure it’s a Bank of America commercial because of the swastikas not so subtly hidden in the background.
My skin turns inside-out and my heart somersaults, and I say, “She did? What… uh, what else did she say? Where did you see her? I haven’t seen her around in weeks.”
Eyre just looks at me and shakes his head then grabs a cardboard coaster and starts drawing on it as Daniel places Coronas and whiskeys before us. Eyre and Daniel shake hands and exchange pleasantries and Daniel takes immediate interest in Eyre’s doodles so I get up and go to the pisser where I find more graffiti telling me life is a fiction and that I have no soul. Right over the cracked and leaking urinal that I’m pissing into, someone wrote YOU ARE A FIGMENT OF A DISEASED IMAGINATION in Sharpie. Another scribble claims that the universe is a computer simulation created by aliens. Another says that you can’t live if you were never born. Another is a whole pamphlet about what to do if you have worms. I choose to ignore the possibilities while exiting the restroom, kicking drops of urine from the toes of my all-black Chuck Taylor All-Stars.
I regain my seat next to Eyre at the bar and snatch away the coaster he’s drawing on. It’s a photo-realistic depiction of a zombie, and below it, in handwriting not dissimilar from the graffiti in the toilet, it says LUKE (LOOK). He’s talented. I rip up the drawing and toss it over my shoulder and Eyre shrugs, says, “More where that came from,” and starts drawing on another coaster.
Daniel’s one-eying me so I grab a coaster and draw a stick figure shooting himself in the dick, and underneath that I scrawl, LOSING MY HEAD OVER YOU! and hand that over to Daniel. He studies it sincerely, turns and tacks it to the wall next to a framed autographed portrait of the Crazy Crab standing beside Allen Ginsberg. The single autograph on it belongs to the Crazy Crab.
Suddenly feeling existential and dizzy and nauseated, I turn back to Eyre and say, “Quick! Draw me exactly as I am. As you see me right now at this very minute. As you really see me.”
Daniel leans forward and studies me with interest and Eyre chuckles and says, “Sure, that’s easy,” grabbing another cardboard coaster. He moves his pen over it for only a few seconds, never looking downward, keeping his eyes on me, then he lifts it before his squinting eyes and chuckles again. He hands the thing over to Daniel who looks back and forth between the coaster and me. I’m feeling anxious, needing confirmation as there are no mirrors on the other side of this bar and no mirror in the men’s tiny, cracked, and piss-stained restroom.
“What do ya think?” Eyre asks Daniel.
“Yeah. Yeah, man. I think that’s about right,” Daniel answers, still looking back and forth between me and the drawing.
“Well… shit! Let me see it,” I say, leaning across the bar and swiping the coaster out of Daniel’s hand. I flip the thing over and over. One side has an ad for Lagunitas beer, which they don’t even serve here, and the other is just a bunch of ones and zeroes. I flip it over and over again thinking it’s some kind of trick.
“It’s a good likeness,” Daniel says, lighting up a GPC and sucking back a Corona.
“Yeah, feel free to keep that one,” Eyre says, lighting up a Camel with a match. I make eye-contact with him for a few moments. He shakes the fire from the match, takes a draw on his smoke and just laughs, turning his attention to the Giants game now on the TV. They’re playing the Diamondbacks and most of the Giants are curled up in the dirt, frothing at the mouth, seizing from the poison. Eyre chuckles and starts drawing something else.
“But…” I say, feeling sick. Feeling lost. Feeling no sense of affirmation.
“What?” Daniel says.
“This fucking coaster… it’s just a bunch of ones and zeroes, Eyre.”
“Yeah?” Eyre says, Camel drooping from his lips, his brow furrowed in concentration on his new drawing.
“You’re not even here,” Daniel whispers, and I freak, jump from the stool, push away from the bar, and fall back onto a table, spilling drinks where two zombies sit.
“Sorry. Sorry,” I say to them, righting their beer bottles and wiping up what I can with the few napkins on the table. The zombies just grunt and snarl and snap their unhinged jaws at my wrists playfully, thinking themselves funny.
“Wait… wait…” I say, going back to the bar and grabbing my pack of Winstons and lighting up. I take a few drags to calm my nerves then hand Eyre another cardboard coaster. “Um… um… draw… draw Daniel now.”
“Huh? What?” Eyre says, confused but amused, of course.
“Just fucking do it!” I yell, cigarette vibrating in my hand.
At this moment Christian Slater has chosen to play Nine Inch Nails’ “The Day the World Went Away” followed by Babyland’s “You Will Never Have It” and he’s asking us to explain to him how Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves didn’t catapult his career into mega-stardom. You can hear his mom in the background telling him to stop pestering people.
“OK. OK,” Eyre says, repeating the no-look approach he did with my portrait, just staring at Daniel while moving his pen over the coaster. Daniel stands there behind the bar, arms crossed, stoic. Proud. Appreciative of this opportunity.
Eyre’s taking ten times as long as he did with mine and I’m growing impatient, asking him every five seconds if he’s done, and, finally, Eyre says he is and I snatch the drawing away and flip it over and over again and, once again, there’s just the Lagunitas ad on one side, zeroes and ones on the other, but maybe two or three times the number of digits as my portrait.
