The friendly barkeep returns with my drink and I see that the Giants are losing twelve to nothing now. I take my drink, drop six bucks on the bar and point to the TV, “Fucking typical, right?” The bartender, saying nothing, turns, looks at the TV, turns back to me and takes the money. He switches the TV off with three innings left in the game as he walks back to the cash register.
“Real fucking gentleman,” I say to Christy and as her mouth starts to form a response I turn my back on her again and say, “So, what the fuck, Kevin?”
“What, Luke?” Kevin asks, tired. Suddenly everyone in the bar sags with fatigue and the bugs take the opportunity to crawl into their ears. No one has the energy to swat them away. Everyone in the bar starts buzzing in a monotonous opera for ten seconds. Then they stop.
“Do you believe this shit?” I say, again looking at Christy who gives me a puzzled look as we all slip out of our momentary but musical malaise.
“Listen,” I say to Christy. “What’s going on here?” The TV behind me flashes violently between violet, blue, and red before going black again.
“Um, I, uh, don’t know what you’re talking about, Luke,” Christy says, her cheeks more flushed than normal.
I look back at Kevin who only looks bored.
“What the fuck are you doing here with Kevin?” I say as I recall a time during a lull in the workday at Café Communisto when Christy and I had snuck down to the basement for a quick fuck and I tore her shirt right off her, tore it to so many shreds she had to wear my undershirt the rest of the day, nearly disappearing in it.
Then I try to remember if that actually happened even though I can easily recall the menthol warmth of her Burt’s Bees lip balm on my own lips—can recall with crystal clarity that her thighs were small, tight, smooth, and smelled like peppermint when I grabbed them and spread them and put my face against them.
“Luke?” Christy says, snapping fingers in front of my face. I notice my drink is gone and the TV is back on and Braveheart is playing, but in ultra-slow motion. Mel Gibson’s enormous head and jaw slide from left to right and his eyes don’t blink and overhead The Smiths are saying, “William, it was really nothing,” and I picture this bar in the middle of a Shakespeare play where the bartender gets drawn and quartered, Kevin gets poisoned, and I exit on a two-headed horse with Cleopatra and Christy in chains behind me, tied to the horse, only to find out all that really happened was that I accidentally slept with Oedipus.
“What?” I say. “Wait, what? What was I talking about?”
I order another drink and Christy says, “You said you were thinking of going to visit your mom, which I think is really sweet. You haven’t seen her in a while, have you?”
“What?”
“You haven’t seen her recently, right? Anyway, I think it’s a great idea. If you can forgive your mom, and I think you should, really, then that’s great. Go see her this weekend and patch things up.”
As I look at Christy her blue eyes turn into neon pools of moonlit perfection and it makes my heart actually ache to look at her before I say, “Mind your own fucking business. Jesus, who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” and Kevin already has his hands on my shoulders pulling me away and I push him back against the bar and when his back hits the bar the TV flashes back to the Giants game just long enough to see that they came back to win the game thirteen to twelve, which gives me two seconds of rare hope, then it goes back to Mel Gibson and both Christy and Kevin are giving me a look I don’t understand and my head hurts so I ask them if they have any Advil and they both tell me to fuck off which I don’t get and my eyes go watery and it’s all I can do to keep from crying and I start thinking about the time Christy and I went to the Legion of Honor and dumbly stared at Rembrandts and portraits of Jesus in orgies with eleven other men and one prostitute before heading out to the nearby golf course to sit on a bench and share my flask of whiskey and make out madly before all the bright green grass as the Pacific lay blue and cold beneath a hill behind us.
Suddenly something clicks in me and I reach between Kevin and Christy for my drink and walk back toward the front of the bar where Cleopatra sits with her two friends.
“Sanchez isn’t gonna show up,” I say, interrupting some heated discussion about acrylic nails versus the real thing and where to get a really good facial.
Cleo looks up and without skipping a beat says, “Yeah, Luke, I’m well aware of that. I saw him hightail it out the back way. I don’t get him. I really don’t.”
“How do you know me, again? I mean, how do you know my name?”
“Luke,” she says. “Luke. Are you fucking kidding me? Luke. Are you fucking kidding me?”
Next I know, she’s up from the table and standing next to me, looking up at me with dark eyes moving all over my face with a hint of pity. I figure the green bugs are probably still following me. I then see one of those bugs in a Giants cap that I named Jim some time ago because he reminds me of a fake uncle I once had. Jim gives Cleo the finger then nosedives into a glass of Jim Beam at the bar.
“You obviously need another drink,” she says, noticing my empty glass. She then drags me to her table and seats me next to her, her two friends on the other side of the table awaiting any clue that it’s OK for them to inquire or join in the conversation. Before they can, Cleo hails a waitress with a queen’s persistence and sets me up with a Grey Goose and soda water.
“So, Luke, what’s his problem? I mean, seriously?”
“Wait… how do you know me?”
“Shut the fuck up, Luke. Enough of the jokes. What’s with Sanchez? He’s so suave it’s disgusting but he runs away almost every time we’re supposed to meet up. It’s not cool.”
“Wait, you two know each other, too?”
“Boy, you really are a dolt, aren’t you?” she asks, knocking on my head and making hollow sounds out of her beautifully formed mouth.
Her friends are glassy-eyed and looking back and forth between me and Cleo with a kind of irrepressible anticipation and I’m pretty sure one is drooling.
“You need another drink,” Cleo says and I don’t think I’ve had a chance to say a word let alone take a drink but when I look down I see my empty glass and she’s ordering me another and she has her arm around me. For some reason she’s making me feel like the center of attention, even though it’s clear that she is. As far as I can tell, she’s completely forgotten about her friends staring at us bug-eyed with awe and envy.
The fresh drink arrives and then Mel Gibson dies and everyone in the bar cries violent, eye-exploding tears, and Cleo is grabbing my thigh while Kevin is consoling Christy from the tragic, dramatic, and upsetting loss of Mel Gibson in face paint.
“You need another drink,” Cleopatra says yet again and the jukebox is on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” for the twelfth time tonight. Again, I don’t remember finishing my last vodka she ordered, but, again, the glass is as dry as southern California and my vision is blurry and I’m pretty sure Kevin now has his hand up Christy’s shirt and she has hers down his pants and I can’t understand why she’s doing this to me, after the moments we had together, those moments that could have added up to mean something larger than the both of us, and now she’s making a fool of me to my face pretending none of that ever happened or meant a goddamned thing.
Then I remember the Giants came back tonight from a complete and bloody annihilation (that twelve to nothing deficit) and before I know it the next drink Cleo buys for me is here then gone and the next is just the same and her friends are shooed away and my hands are on her thighs and breasts and my lips are pressed hard against hers and she’s making the small wounded sounds of pleasure.
Standing outside on Geary Street, we kiss more in the haze of street lights, up against Aberdeen Tower’s front windows, her ass pressed magnificently up against that glass before deciding she’ll come to my place tonight, which is just a block or two around the corner and up the city hill.
As we’re about to leave, I see
Sanchez in the window of the second story apartment right across from Aberdeen Tower where he rooms with Kevin. Sanchez is staring at me while Christy and Kevin grope each other off to his side. I see him on his phone and get a text that interrupts Cleo’s wandering hands and the text says, “So now you’re interested in her? You fucking prick.”
I look up at Sanchez and laugh and lead Cleopatra by the hand back to my place. When in my brightly lit jail cell of a studio apartment I quickly undress her after putting on a CD by The Church. The song “Reptile” beats against my close walls as I bury my face in her pussy and fall asleep for two minutes or so and wake up to Cleo saying, “Here, take a bump,” to my protests of, “I don’t do coke. I’ve never done coke. No. I don’t think so. I don’t do coke. It’ll give me a fucking heart attack or something. I’ve never done it,” and she reassures me, “You’ll be fine, but you may not be able to get it up. Just stay the fuck awake and finish what you started,” and she pulls out a tiny Ziploc bag from her humungous purse, grabs her keys, dips in and shoves it up her nose before doing it again and offering it to me.
“Oh, I’ll be able to get it up, don’t worry about that,” I say and take the bump and feel the familiar return to near-normalcy where the room warms from its invisible center to glow in a blur around its edges. Then the walls close in and my heart nearly explodes before I realize Cleo is already tied up to the bed posts with my black tie, her wrists bound together, her bronzed ass reddened, her long jet black hair matted against her perfect back glistened with sweat while a loud, obnoxious Terra Patrick porn plays on my little TV and The Church keeps going on about milky ways and blood money.
As I’m fucking Cleopatra I’m thinking about Christy and that time we went to that Yo La Tengo concert at the Fillmore and how we left halfway through, catching a cab back to my apartment to drink wine and dance and screw for hours with the windows open to let the warm air and city sounds blow in. The next day we woke up groggy and tired-eyed but happy and went to work at the café together where we pretended nothing happened, which only made the work day more exciting.
I really can’t understand what went wrong there.
Cleo shoves more coke up my nose, eternally grateful to be untied, speaking to me in hot-breathed words with a tight body ready to turn to jelly at my slightest touch.
I push her advances away as something in my stomach goes bad. I get off the bed, turn the porn off and switch The Church to The Rapture and look around my computer desk for my phone.
“Luke, what the fuck?” Cleo says, sighing, falling back into bed, glittering like Mediterranean sands.
“Shut up,” I say, finding my phone.
“Excuse me?”
“Shut the fuck up! I’m trying to concentrate.”
Desperately I search through the contact list in my phone, trying to find Christy’s number as I suddenly have a million things to say to her, to tell her. Things like, I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate her, that I wish the moments we had could have been more and that I still think about the times we had all the time and that I’m thinking about them right now and if we could just talk maybe we could work things out and that Kevin is not the guy for her and how could she be fucking one of my friends, anyway, it’s completely uncalled for, and that if I thought about it maybe I’m in love with her and everything is my fault.
While scrolling through my phone, confused, unable to find Christy’s fucking number, I look back at Cleopatra who is getting fucked by a rather large cricket and seemingly enjoying it more than she should. Then a rat scurries over my foot and I give up and go back to Cleo, shove the shiny, dark thing from her, gather up the sand she’s made of, push it back into a form I can recognize, and fuck her until the sun rises.
In the light of that sunrise, I stand before my lone window and watch a falcon perched on the fire escape grasp a pigeon in its talons and beat it to death with its beak in a kick-drum-like rhythm while Cleo snores softly, just a few feet behind me on the futon.
I make coffee on the hot plate, my head in a cloud, my body in a complete state of arrest, full of anxiety and tension. Cleo wakes up, all smiles.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“I’m making coffee.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Pour me a cup, please,” she says, sitting up, stretching into illumination until she’s only a few beams of scattered light.
“If you’d like a cup of coffee, there’s a café up on the corner of Stockton,” I say, my back to her.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I don’t even fucking know you. Just, you know, show yourself out,” I say, making a comical gesture, embellishing the size of my shithole studio apartment.
“So, after all that, this is what it comes to? You tossing me out of your place?” she asks, getting out of bed, pulling on her panties, searching for her bra, eyeing me the whole time.
“Yes,” I say, sipping too-hot and bitter coffee, watching pigeon feathers flood the air outside the window like a tickertape parade for the soon-to-be dead.
“One night. That’s all you get, sweetheart.”
“One fucking night? Jesus, you are a bigger prick than I thought. One fucking night? Really? Really? One fucking night? What about that time at the museum? Have you forgotten about that? The way we connected back then? How we kissed so hard on that park bench that you said you could still taste my lip balm the next day? Seriously? Don’t you ever think about the times we’ve had together? It wasn’t that long ago, Luke. How can you just forget all about me? I thought you were kidding when you asked me how I knew you, but now you’re scaring me. What about that time I visited you at your café and there was no one there so we snuck down to the basement and fucked? You can’t recall that, either, huh? What about that concert where you couldn’t get enough of me and we left early so we could drink wine and fuck and dance and be alone together? Any of this ringing a bell, asshole? How about that fucking time I went with you to visit your goddamned sick mother that you hadn’t spoken to in, what, five fucking years? Luke, seriously. Are you fucking kidding me? One fucking night is all I get? I only went after Sanchez to try to get your attention, you fucking asshole! Did you not get that? Christ, what a fucking dick you are!” she says before throwing something like an ax at me that splits my head in two, splattering dark red blood against all four walls of my studio.
Then she walks out.
After she leaves, I clean up my walls with wet rags, using slow, meticulous circular motions, going clockwise, then counterclockwise. Then I suture my skull together with a sewing kit I stole from Walgreens, wincing with each piercing but refusing to let my eyes tear up. I used it only once before to repair a six-inch crevice that opened spontaneously in the left side of my torso a year earlier. When I’ve finished cleaning the walls and tying my skull together it’s ten a.m., so, I go to Jack in the Box with an empty head and wait in line with the zombies to get something to eat.
FATHERHOOD
Gurgling. Orange curtains billowing. A metallic scent. More gurgling. A sticky wood floor. Green walls. I lift my left all-black Chuck Taylor All-Star and it makes a suction-smacking sound. Gurgling. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what day it is. Orangish morning light waves in with the orange billowing curtains. My stomach feels green, like sick and bloated and hurt. Like, I ate something that wants to eat me. I lift my right all-black Chuck Taylor All-Star and it makes a suction-smacking sound. The Winston I forgot in my right hand burns to the filter and singes my end-knuckles. Instinctively, I flick it away. It goes out with a slick fizzle.
Gurgling. There’s an unmade bed next to the window with billowing orange curtains. A boxy TV in the corner of the room plays a beer commercial showing bikini-clad ladies in snow-clad mountains. They keep yelling, screaming, pleading in a foreign language while shivering and rubbing their arms. Only, it’s muted. Their mouths move, nothing comes out. A close-up of goosebumps on what is either boob or ass cleavage or a pa
ir of elbows. It changes views before we can tell. Cartoon speak-bubbles eschew from their lips and read, “Enjoy me!”. The speak-bubbles flash and flicker in and out and in a wide spectrum of colors. Then the commercial ends and turns to static. Then it flickers back to the commercial and everyone’s head is snapping back and forth off their shoulders like the heads of Pez dispensers. A bloody lozenge falls out each time. A bearded man in filthy, street-oil-stained clothing crawls through the snow around the bikini-clad girls and retrieves the bloody lozenges and slides them into his anus like suppositories. The camera closes in on his big, bearded, grinning face. I get it. It’s a constipation commercial. It has nothing to do with beer. I feel stupid for a second. The commercial bleeds into another for handlebar mustache wax that doubles as lube.
Gurgling. Horns and morning traffic and grumpy zombies grunt and fart and moan outside, their noise coming inside with the orange curtains and orange light.
Gurgling. My hands are sticky. When I press them together, or open and close a fist, they make the same suction-smacking sound my all-black Chuck Taylor All-Stars do. There’s something familiar about this. Like, I dreamed it. My head hurts, though, the way it hurts when I haven’t slept well, or at all. Pulsing and bulging and aching, like my brain has a dry erection.
Gurgling. The orange morning breeze off of Geary Street soothes me some, though the scent of bloody feces and burnt coffee that it carries only hurts my green stomach more. I stare down at the butt of my Winston on the floor. It’s all black and sticky. Like my All-Stars. I squish my fingers into my palms—suction-smacking sounds. Like my All-Stars. I do it again. And again. And again. I click my teeth and flitter my eyelashes, but nothing comes into complete focus.
Gurgling. Someone calling for their momma. A metallic scent. A tingle in my dick. Like, static electricity. It tickles. I laugh but don’t touch or scratch my junk. Instead, I pat my dress-shirt pocket for my pack of Winstons. My black skinny tie dangles loosely. My sleeves are rolled up. I tighten the tie and unroll my sleeves and nearly choke on the smell in the room. I mask the smell of quick-rot by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke into the space around me. It turns the green walls brown and my green stomach blue. I feel sad. And I know why.
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