Polizzi and Campos sneered and then Polizzi said, in a high faggy voice, “I love her. But I love her,” and then Campos joined in saying “I love her. Oh, I love her,” and they were saying it in unison, and Shapiro cried more and louder and it was getting pretty ugly, Polizzi and Campos dancing in circles on their tiptoes like queens saying, “But I love her. I love her so much. Oh, oh, I love her.”
It worked, like it always did, and finally Shapiro stopped his blubbering and we all bought him drinks and he drank them all and everything was back to normal and we were all having a good time again.
That’s when Pop finally showed up.
Everyone cheered.
“The wedding boy!”
“Nuts in a vice!”
“Lover boy!”
“Listening to the little head instead of the big one,” the old waitress said. She tipped her drink at Pop and slugged it.
Pop beamed. “A round for all my friends,” he said, and Louie poured one for everybody and took a shot for himself.
But instead of taking a stool, Pop tipped his head and motioned me to a booth. He sat down. He looked serious.
“Son,” he said. “I’m getting married, and I always wanted your brother Kent to be my best man at my wedding. But he’s dead. And so is Clyde. You’re the only son I have left, even if you’re not really my son. I still think of you like a son.”
“You’re Pop,” I said.
“I’ve been rough on you,” Pop said. “I had to be extra rough on you, since you were going to be more on your own than your brothers. You understand that.”
I nodded that I understood. And I did.
“I can’t have you for my best man,” Pop said.
He looked at me like I was supposed to say something.
He said, “If I had you standing up there next to me, I’d just be thinking of your brothers. It wouldn’t be right. For either of us.”
Old Gull walked in, and he sat down next to Shapiro and Shapiro started up again. You could hear him going, “But I love her. I miss my kids. I love her so much,” and Gull stood up and gummed something at Shapiro and Shapiro gave Gull a funny look. Gull said whatever he’d said again, and Shapiro laughed, and Gull nodded and let a toothless grin. His gums were black.
“I understand, Pop,” I said.
Pop got out his wallet and pulled a ten-spot and he handed it to me. “You stay and have a good time,” he said. He smiled. “I have a date.”
After my rounds I parked my rig at the dumps. I’d cleaned up and was hosing the suds off when I heard Jones behind me laughing.
“Mate,” he said. “Mate, you look damn funny there with that hose over your head.”
“I don’t have a trailer like you,” I said. “I ain’t no uptown dude from England who gets to be a boss.”
“I’m not a boss, mate, and I’m from Australia, if you remember. I have bosses. I just don’t pay attention to them. They don’t know the first thing about garbage. All they know is blueprints. Put a hill here, a valley there, an easy rise over yonder. They don’t know the first thing about how to distribute the bounty.”
“Your job’s better than mine. My rig doesn’t have a shower,” I said. I started toweling off. A breeze pulled across the bay. My nuts were raisins. “Or a stove. Bed.”
“I’m a lot older than you,” Jones said. “There was a time. That doesn’t mean it’s not funny to see someone else during their time.”
“Well,” I said. “I’d be sleeping in my car, but the niggers laid claim to it. Caught them screwing in my car last night. A pile of them on the queen and fucking away. Boomboomboom.”
“As well they should be,” Jones said. “If you’re not using it, why shouldn’t they?”
“It’s not theirs,” I said.
“It’s not yours,” Jones said.
“It’s sure the hell mine,” I said. “I paid for it. I built it. I’ve lived in it. I can tell you where damn near every part on that car came from.”
“Do you think this garbage,” Jones said, sweeping his arm outstretched across the rubbled and rotting terrain, “is mine?”
I finished toweling off and pulled on my shorts and pants. I lit a cigarette.
“Because it’s not,” Jones said. “Everything is temporary. Permanence,” he said. He laughed. “Permanence is the realm of only the very powerful and the very stupid. We, my friend, in all likelihood, are neither.”
“I’m pretty stupid,” I said. “I live in a dump truck. My friends went to college, and I became a bum. My enemies deal drugs and have lots of loot and I live honest and can’t afford work boots. My brain is a swamp. My car is a fleabag hotel.”
Jones shook his head. He spat. “You see that?” he said. He pointed to his junk tower. He’d welded a pair of refrigerators, doors open, to what was now the top. “You see that?”
I nodded.
“That will not last.”
“Nope.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Yep.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Do something else,” I said. “Something that will last.”
Jones laughed.
I changed my clothes, but I couldn’t get the stink out of my skin. The sun set behind me, but you could hardly tell through the fog. The gray sky turned a darker tarp of gray. I looked up for some reason. It’d been a long time since I’d looked up. In Oakland, you worry about what’s in front of you, to your sides, behind. There weren’t any stars. It seemed like there never were. I wanted my fucking car back, is what I wanted.
I unlocked the door with my key and I pulled the handle and the door started to come open but wouldn’t open more than a few inches because it was chained shut with a bicycle lock. Pigeons roosted on telephone wires picking fleas and shitting on the sidewalks. A catfight screeched and a train sounded its whistle. Bells went off at a crossing. Somewhere someone shut off some lights and it got darker, and then some lights came on somewhere else and it got lighter again. My back hurt, a low pain in the small I’d had for a few years that wouldn’t go away except when I was at work.
I went around to the passenger side of my stationwagon and tried the door, and it was chained too. And the rear door.
I shined my flashlight through the rear window and took a look. Unoccupied, but full. An old Hoover upright vacuum cleaner with the headlight broken. Six-pack of toilet paper, opened and one roll missing. Empty tampon boxes. Dirty clothes in one corner of the bed, a neat stack of clean clothes—male and female—in the other corner. A photo album, opened, but I couldn’t make out any pictures. Spider webs hung from the headliner. Beneath a few tools—a screwdriver, a staplegun, three ball-peen hammers—lay a high school yearbook from the fancy side of town. A wrinkled condom was stuck to one of the rear side windows. In an open box and packed neatly in crisp white tissue a wedding veil, beautiful lace and pearls trimming the headband. Dirty socks stunk.
A piece of paper was taped to the windshield, and I walked to the front of the car to take a look. In the front seat was a styrofoam head with red hair and one eye gouged. The piece of paper was a note. For me.
—Joker’s Lounge tonight. Sorry about the locks, but this is a bad neighborhood.
I shone my light into the car again and scanned the rubble. On the driver’s side floorboard was a box I hadn’t before noticed, and in it neatly folded was what looked like a wedding dress, white and lacy, that thin packing paper used for fancy stuff neatly folded over the edges. Next to the box was a withered corsage. The shift siren sounded at the slaughterhouse, and you could hear the building sigh.
A squad car drove slowly down the street, and when he saw me with my flashlight poking around in a car, he U-ied around and pulled up alongside me.
“You’re under arrest,” he said. “Up against the wall, mothe
rfucker.”
I grabbed my crotch. “Eat this,” I said.
“How you been,” he said. “I heard you were doing construction work, some nasty shit.”
“Fired,” I said. “Clubbed the foreman’s kid with a shovel after he pulled a knife on me. Now I drive a dump truck for Vieira. You still with Roxanne?”
“Naw,” Joey said. “Bitch left me for Campos, skinny little shit. But that’s OK—you’d be surprised how much pussy the badge gets you. Chicks just love the badge. The baton, the cuffs, the pistola.”
“Driving a dump truck ain’t no nookie bait,” I said.
Joey nodded. “What’s a matter with your car?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just checking on it. Lent it to some friends while I don’t need it.”
Joey pulled his flashlight from its holster and clicked it on and swept the light around through the window.
“Some friends you got there,” he said. “Looks like niggers to me.”
“Black folks on hard times,” I said.
“They give you any shit,” Joey said. He patted his iron. “You just call dispatch and tell them T-Bird needs a hand. I’ll clear them out quicker than they can peel a banana.”
Joey got back in his car and pulled out his timesheet and wrote something.
“How do I get to Joker’s Lounge from here?” I said.
“Joker’s Lounge?” Joey said. “Why you want to go there? That’s Africa.”
“Jazz happening tonight,” I said. “Thought I might sit in.”
“You and that trumpet,” Joey said. “If you’d have spent as much time working during high school as you did playing that trumpet, you’d own a house by now,” he said. “Like me.”
“You the man,” I said.
“Walk down the tracks is the fastest way,” Joey said. “Down to the old cannery. Cut between the cannery and the scrapyard and head toward the bay. Down by the docks. Joker’s Lounge—you’ll smell it before you see it.
“How come I never seen it before?”
“No sign. Just a yellow bulb outside the door. You watch your ass there. You’ll be the only gringo.”
“Like that’s new to me, José.”
Joey laughed. “Adios cabron,” he said. “Vaya con dio.”
I sat on an empty 55 gallon oil drum and lit a cigarette. Fog snaked through alleys and between the rusted water heaters and refrigerators and twisted car doors and washing machines of the scrapyard behind the cyclone fence. Tugboats groaned and trains hammered the rails, the sounds muffled in the mist. A candy factory pumped scorched sugar into the air, and somewhere a dead dog or cat or maybe something bigger skunked. Cigarettes help with the stink of the world.
When I opened the door I couldn’t see anything but barlights. One flickered in convulsions. Pot smoke and cheesy Booker T. and the MG’s organed and when the people came into focus none moved, not even the bartender, and no one even looked at me. A row of red leather booths along one wall, the bar made of rivet-stitched tin, stools a miscellany—an old steam radiator, two shipping pallets nailed together with two-by-fours, a few oil drums, a real bar stool, a foot locker turned on its end.
My tenants sat at the end of the bar—the old dude with the gray hair sipped a gin or vodka, the three young ones drank beers, and the woman had a cocktail in each hand, one clear and one brown.
I pulled a twenty from my wallet and flagged the barkeep. “Drinks for them,” I said. “Scotch for me.”
“Scotch,” the barkeep said. His face shone with grease. He wore a white shirt and tie. He was bald.
I looked at the bottles lining the wall. No fruity mixers. No Bailey’s. No tequila. No kahlúa, no Scotch, no call drinks except Jack Daniel’s and Beefeater’s. Hennessey. Courvasier.
“Beer,” I said. “Bud. And whiskey. For the house.”
He didn’t even nod at me, and he didn’t take my money. I shoved the bill to the edge of the bar and lit a cigarette. He popped the beers and poured the drinks and handed them to the gang and me. They tipped their drinks at me and I tipped back and I knocked mine down. The barkeep brought me another round.
The oldster tipped his head, motioning for me to come on over.
“Glad you could make it,” he said.
I drank.
“Name’s Harrison,” he said. “After the president.”
“T-Bird,” I said. “After the car.”
He nodded. “I got a friend named Brisket,” he said. “Know a woman named Mydol.”
The jukebox ran out of money. No one put in quarters. You could hear bodies exhaling. You noticed the sour and the wheeze of the world.
“We all got jobs,” he said. “We ain’t no bums.”
“That’s something I understand,” I said.
We drank, and we drank a long time and we told some stories. At first the stories were about other people, things we’d seen and places we’d been, shit jobs we’d quit and other shit jobs we’d been fired from. It’s spooky how much we white people have in common with the niggers, when you get right down to it.
“Those two,” he said, and he pointed. “They got jobs at the slaughterhouse. No commute for them. The other one,” and he looked aside with his eyes. One eye was rimmed with blood. “That other one, he’s touched. He has hard times keeping jobs. He’s all right though. Works at the school right now as a helper. One of my sons.”
Harrison’s son was the one I’d seen walking away from my car the night before. He was huge. His legs were like pylons. His head was shaped like a cinder block. He never smiled.
The woman finished her drinks. She was all gussied up, wearing a purple hat with tassels and her dress was shiny green and tight even though she was really fat. And even though she was really fat she still looked sexy in a fat kind of way.
“I work at the library. I put the books back where they belong. I know lots of shit, man. I read lots of books. Everybody trying to figure out if they different than cockroaches, trying to make up some reason to go to work in the morning, to have babies, get married. You know what, though?”
I nodded.
“What is this, what,” he said. “I’m a philosopher of the stomach.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Might of read that somewhere,” Harrison said. “But when I read it, it was something I said myself. I want to digest.”
“I want to drink,” I said. I tossed one back and the barkeep brought me another. He was starting to sweat pools but he didn’t look like he minded.
“The lady,” he said. He smiled. He had a gold tooth with a design scrimshawed into it, some kind of spiral thing. It shone green and red with the neon and it flickered. “The lady, she’s our wife.”
I nodded.
“We married her.”
“All of you?”
“Except my son,” he said. “That wouldn’t be right, a man and his son married to the same woman. She’s a fine lady, she is. She’s what we work for. Yolanda. That’s her name. Yolanda.”
Yolanda heard him talking about her and she leaned over and talked in my ear. “Don’t let him give you no too-much about me. They my husbands, but they my babies, too. I just make sure everything’s good with them and they remember to go to work in the morning.”
“You’re a good woman,” I said.
She laughed. It was a high-pitched laugh. Not a cackle or anything bimbo, but a nice laugh like a lady.
I put down another twenty and the barkeep brought more drinks and everyone drank and the woman looked even prettier.
Yolanda whispered in my ear. “I’m bringing my mens a present tonight,” she said.
“What kind of present?”
“You so nice,” she said. “You come on by our place and maybe I’ll share my present with you too.”
&nb
sp; I tossed back another drink. I was feeling pretty right.
I had to piss bad, and I stood to go to the can. I was pretty wobbly. Some dude slapped me in the back when I was waiting outside the door. On the door was a big black and white poster of Willie Mays. Willie was smiling and holding his glove in front of his chest in a basket-catch pose. I got slapped again.
“What?” I said.
“That’s a blacks only toilet,” he said.
“Where’s the whites toilet?”
He was skinny and his chest was sunken and his lips were cracked and leaked motor oil.
“Ain’t no whites toilet here. White toilet on the other side of town.”
Harrison’s son walked up. He picked up the skinny dude gently and set him aside against the wall. “T-Bird is our friend,” he said.
The skinny dude nodded real quick, like he was shaking but he wasn’t, just nodding too quick.
“We like T-Bird,” Harrison’s son said.
“I like T-Bird too,” the skinny dude said.
Harrison’s son almost-smiled and he said, “We like T-Bird.”
After the skinny dude walked back to his booth, I looked at Harrison’s son. “Thanks,” I said.
He looked at me with question. He tipped his cinderblock head sideways.
“Thanks for helping me out there,” I said.
“We like T-Bird,” he said. He shrugged. He went back to the bar.
When I left, I shook hands with the guys. Yolanda hugged me, and I felt a little funny. Harrison bought me some beers to go.
I walked toward the docks. A bitch-dog pulled itself alongside me, teats drooping and its haunches bony and brittle, legs thin as tire-irons. I stopped and she stopped too, her legs curled beneath her rump, and she whined and licked between her legs. I patted her head and my hand started itching.
“Go home,” I said. “Go home, gal.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were clouded with scum.
“Go home,” I said. “Go goddammit home. Go the hell home. Take care of your goddamn puppies.”
I lifted my arm as if to whack her, and she slunk into herself and I felt the water in my eyes and I said, “Go the goddammit hell home,” and I started walking and when she walked along behind I walked faster and faster and still she followed me and I picked up my pace and by the time I lost her I was panting and I needed a cigarette and I cracked one of the beers Harrison bought me and smoked a few.
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