by Jim Grimsley
“You did?”
“You were pretty drunk. You were about to fall off that stool in the pub. Do you remember?”
Newell shook his head.
“You were pretty drunk,” the man repeated, then stopped, and looked at Newell again. “How you feeling?”
“Not so good,” Newell said, and leaned against the door jamb. “I need to go back to bed.”
The man shrugged. “Sure. I was only wondering how you were. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
Newell shrugged. “Thanks. I’m okay.”
The man ducked his head for a moment each time he spoke. “I’m Henry,” he said, and to Newell it seemed that the man spoke his name as though it were the key to everything. He offered his hand to Newell as if to shake hands but instead gripped in his thick fingers was a small brown bag. Newell found a bottle of aspirin inside it. But by then it was already too late to thank the man, to thank Henry, who hurriedly climbed down to the courtyard with his socks showing at the back, threadbare where shoes had rubbed away the weave, and so Newell closed the door and swallowed three aspirin and went back to bed.
He slept through the rest of Monday, got up for a while, too depressed to do much more than eat chicken noodle soup.
In the morning, he woke up and bathed, his head still tender but no longer throbbing. He went to breakfast because he was starving from the day before and ate a big omelette and a lot of potatoes and toast, and he felt better after that, though the meal cost five dollars with the tip. He bought a Times-Picayune and read the want ads in his room. He sat on the front gallery with all his money in an envelope in his hand, and he listened to the sounds of the city in the hot morning, felt its strangeness and indifference, and this scrap of money in his hand was the only force that could protect him.
He slept for a while, real sleep, with the effects of all that alcohol finally gone, and when he woke he went for an afternoon walk and ended up, he never knew quite how, at Mac’s.
This time of day the cool, high-ceilinged room was mostly empty, but Louis was nowhere to be seen. Mac himself slouched behind the cash register, a cigarillo in his fingertips, brown and thin, trailing a signature of smoke toward the drop lights. He had something on his mind and merely nodded at Newell when he passed, which made Newell shy, so he strayed along the shelves of magazines and scanned them. Standing in front of the magazines that had women and men on them, the women shoving their breasts toward the camera, bending over to show the creases and pinknesses of their inner parts, sometimes sprawled on a bed with a man hovering over them, a man with a pale, flat, white ass and a limber cock in his hand, and the woman staring up at him and pretending to have some expression on her face that somebody told her to try to have, and all the while the invisible camera hovered there, and their relationship was with the camera, and with Newell, and with anyone who wanted to watch. Newell thought this effect must come from the fact that the regular magazines were not made as well as the magazines that had only men in them, because the magazines with only men seemed very real and exciting to him. While these big-breasted women and sag-assed men were flat and lifeless.
“You like that stuff too?” Mac surprised him, walking over from the cash register, scarcely lifting the cigarillo from his lips.
Newell blinked and watched him.
“You like this stuff too?”
Newell shook his head. “Not much.”
“I didn’t think so.”
They blinked at each other in mild surprise. They were suddenly watching as if they might know each other, in a friendly way, nothing too personal, and Newell became less nervous. He moved away from the racks of magazines with their rows of breasts, and Mac gestured to him. “Come look at these.”
Mac lifted a stack of magazines to the counter. These had not yet been wrapped in their plastic covers and Newell lifted each one and smelled it and opened it. Every kind of magazine offered itself, magazines with thin pale boys, smooth asses, a little fat at the lower back; with tall lanky men in cowboy hats, sometimes with cowboy clothes on, maybe a vest or chaps or just boots; with men who were dressed like sailors in a cheap motel room, or what looked like a cheap motel room, though it might have been someone’s cheap apartment, or even a room in a mobile home in Pastel, Alabama, and the sailor men taking off their clothes, and one was thickly muscled and one was thin and hairy, and they both had moles on their butt cheeks. But occasionally one of the magazines contained someone beautiful, and Newell felt his tongue go thick, and these he laid aside in a pile, as if by instinct, since Mac had only asked that he come and look. He spent some time sorting the stack into the magazines that he liked and the ones that he didn’t care much about. Now and then Mac would chuckle and say, “You like that one,” or, “There ain’t much to that one, right?” Pointing with the little cigar.
A couple of other customers came in, but Newell and Mac went on talking, even when Mac was taking the money, making change, answering the phone. Newell helped put the magazines into the plastic covers, tape them shut, and write up the price tags. He had heard Mac mention this sort of task to Louis, and knew he was up to something but wasn’t altogether sure what it was until he had a thought, and asked, “Where’s the guy that works here?”
“Louis? That fucked-up motherfucker? He don’t work here no more.”
“No?”
“His ass is gone back to Mississippi where he the fuck belongs.”
“That’s too bad,” Newell said.
Mac fixed a look on him and chewed on the end of a match. “You want his job?”
“You bet I do.”
“You want to start right now?”
A weight lifted off Newell, and he took a deep breath and took a look around the store. The fluorescent lights were humming in the sweetest way. “Yes sir.”
“You ever cashier before?”
So Mac began to teach him how to work the cash register, and pretty soon Newell stood on the other side of the counter, and he relaxed, for the first time since Curtis fired him, maybe even for the first time since he stepped off the bus that morning on Tulane Avenue. He learned the operation of the cash register without trouble, and soon he was making change or ringing up sales himself with Mac supervising, arms folded. Newell’s first sale was a magazine called Suck City with women and men on the cover, and for the rest of the afternoon Mac sipped Barq’s root beer and sat on the stool while Newell operated the cash register, made change, and checked in magazines from below the counter, ticking them off on a handwritten invoice sheet that he could barely read, then bagging them and pricing them and, with Mac’s advice, moving them to the shelves.
That night, in bed, satisfied, having eaten two whole cans of chicken noodle soup, he stared at the shadowed stains on the ceiling and was aware of the ridiculous smile on his face, here on a day that had begun so badly and that was ending so well. Visions of naked breasts and stiff nipples rose before his eyes, and something in that parade of body parts pleased him, as if he had found something for which he was destined. He would have money now. He would be able to call Flora and tell her he had a job at a bookstore, and she would think that was nice, and she would not worry about him so much, and he would leave out the part about the exact type of bookstore, and everything would be fine. She would stop being afraid he was about to go bad. Like his mother, though Flora would never say that.
In the morning Mac greeted him near the movie booths and handed him a cup of coffee with cream and many spoons of sugar. Newell accepted the paper cup without a word and wrapped a napkin around it, as Mac had done with his own cup, to keep from burning his fingers. He drank the coffee without a word. The store opened later than most of the other shops, at eleven, and this would be one of Newell’s duties, to open up every day, count out correct change into the cash register, check to make sure the alarm buzzer for upstairs was working, and make the coffee in the drip coffee maker in the back room. He had to check the movie machines in the back to make sure they were working like t
hey ought to, and this meant taking a few quarters and running them through each machine, watching snippets of the movies that were featured, women bobbing their heads over penises made blurry by the poor resolution of the viewboxes, men bending over other men and pumping them from behind like dogs astraddle each other in a farmyard. Mac led him through the whole routine of changing the movies, checking the machines, removing the coin boxes, and Newell kept his mind on his work but still felt a thrill at the glimpses of sex, the covers of the magazines, even the smell of the place.
The store took up most of the bottom floor of an old Creole town house, Mac explained, and Newell remembered he had read that word “Creole” in the book he had bought; aside from the main floor and the two sections of movie booths, there was a storeroom downstairs and more space in the entresol; there was Mac’s office, a couple of bathrooms, a laundry with a washer and dryer, and a gallery at the back leading to a loggia and the big house upstairs. The girls had the upstairs, and Mac was in charge of that part of the building too, though he had some people to help him, like Dixie, Ferdinand, and Kelly. Mac showed the button for the silent alarm and explained that Newell had to press it to alert the girls upstairs whenever a policeman entered the store. Didn’t matter if it was a city police or a county deputy or a fucking Secret Service agent. Visitors to the house traveled in and out the passage from Rampart Street, but Dixie liked to know whenever a cop walked in the front door, he said. Newell nodded as if this made perfect sense to him, as if he understood who the visitors and the girls were, and why it was sensible that they should be warned. After, Mac took him to the back room to show him where to find extra cash register tape and brown paper bags.
“Most of our customers want their bags taped shut,” Mac said, and showed him how. Later, when the store was open and the first few customers had come and gone, Mac said, “People are ashamed to be in here.”
Newell remembered how he himself had felt, how he had gripped the brown bag with the copy of Brute Hombre inside, how he had been certain people could see through the paper. Mac was watching him, waiting for something, so Newell said, “I guess it’s only natural.”
“Horseshit, it’s natural,” Mac snorted, and pulled his belt midway up his stomach. “I’m going upstairs to see the girls for a little while. You think you ready to handle this by yourself?”
“I think so.”
“All you got to do is keep an eye on these fuckers and take the money and don’t let nobody start slipping these magazines inside their drawers. You got it?”
“I got it.”
Mac grinned at him and adjusted the hang of his balls inside his trousers. Newell found himself grinning too, warm inside at the beauty of it all, of Mac disappearing upstairs and leaving Newell alone in the shop with these shelves of magazines. He took a deep breath and stood there. The quiet that surrounded him contrasted with the noise and commotion of the Circle K.
Customers, nearly always men, stuck their heads in the door, crept in furtively, stood blinking as their eyes adjusted to the light, standing back from the shelves to study the covers. Sometimes it apparently took them a moment to realize these were pictures of the naked parts of people, the parts that were usually covered, and these people were doing things to one another that were usually hidden, all this out in the open. They would pause and look up from the shelves and the merchandise, and what Newell saw on their faces was not shame but hunger.
Some men stayed only a few moments, rushing into the sunshine loosening their collars as if hurrying for oxygen. Many more stayed longer, drifting along the magazine shelves, lifting a magazine in its plastic cover and turning it over to see the back, studying the magazine from all angles, carefully. When there were several men in the store at the same time, they all pretended to be alone and stepped past one another, pretending not to see. The ones who bought magazines or the other items that the store offered, like the little bottles that said “Rush” on the label, or the plastic penises, or packages of French ticklers, refused to meet his eye as he counted out their money and bagged and taped their purchases. Maybe one or two murmured thank you. But most of them looked through him to the calendar from Stony’s Fishing and Tackle on the wall behind his head, a thick-waisted fisherman in hip boots and a flannel shirt lifting a helpless, gasping trout high over a river. Customers studied the fish and pretended Newell was not there, or so he imagined. They hurried into the street again, shading their eyes, looking one way and another, stepping into the stream of tourists and becoming, within a few steps, anonymous.
He rearranged the shelves to make room for more magazines, and right away showed a talent for it, according to Mac, who liked the way Newell grouped certain kinds of covers and titles together. Mac only had to change a couple of magazines that were displayed in the wrong sections, including one in the women’s section that was actually drag queens, men dressed as women, according to Mac, and though Newell had heard of this before, the fact that these pictures had fooled him sent hairs standing up on the back of his head.
Beginning in the early afternoon, the movies drew a lot of traffic, men disappearing into the mazes of booths on both sides. Most of these men seemed comfortable and eager, less sheepish than the men who had been through the store in the morning. The whirring of the movie players and the jingle-click of coins sliding into the slot provided background for the radio Mac kept tuned to a country music station. The section that had movies with women in them remained pretty quiet, only an occasional grunt or groan, but from the section where the all-male movies played came a lot more commotion, footsteps between the booths, muttered words, the sound of strange movements against the cheap plywood walls of the booths, the muffled grunts and groans, and Mac occasionally walking through the booth calling out, “I want to hear them quarters hitting them slots, boys, else you got to come out of there.”
Near evening one of the girls, Starla, came down to mind the store. Mac still had to hire somebody for the night shift. Newell offered to stay, but Mac said Newell should go home and come back the next day at the same time, to continue his training. Newell left the store oddly disappointed that he could not stay all night, till closing time. But he picked his way home through the bright, noisy blocks of the upper Quarter, tourists emerging from their hotels for the night, and he had a sudden certainty that everything was going to be all right.
At home, when he was walking into the loggia from the passageway he heard voices and paused, concealed by one of the arches, seeing Miss Kimbro in the courtyard with somebody, embracing a girl who turned out, when he could see her, to be the girl who worked in the junk store. Standing in the shadows of the balcony of the slave quarters, slatted shadows across their faces, the young girl with a mocking look on her face, a low-pitched laugh as she pulled away. Miss Kimbro let the girl go as far as arms could reach, then called, “Millie,” quietly, hurtled forward toward this Millie again, collided with her, and pulled her close, and the girl laughed—a ripple of pleasure, that sound, and she leaned toward her with tantalizing slowness, kissed the woman on the lips, a kiss that melted across both their faces, and Miss Kimbro drew the girl back into the shadows, never aware that anyone had seen her, though Newell stood breathless till they were gone.
He followed along the loggia, crossed the courtyard in the shadows and stood where he could see into the room where they were standing. He felt no compunction in spying, he simply watched as she stood the girl against the wall, slowly stroked her hair with long, curved fingers, kissed her face on all sides, but slowly, with careful precision, as though she were reading invisible signs to learn where she should place her lips, and the girl gone rapt and sightless at the pleasure. Standing in the light of a torchère beyond a casement door, half open. Miss Kimbro kept them there for a long time; she was clearly the one in control, whispering in the girl’s ear, touching the underside of her throat with the tips of her nails. Newell watched till Louise closed the door.
Upstairs in his room he opened the windows and le
t fresh air enter, trying to get calm, but the memory of Louise and the girl stirred him up, no matter that he tried to think of something else. No matter that it disturbed him that two women together like that could excite him. The force that drew them together, the compulsion toward each other that draped over them like a mantle, taking them over. Louise and the girl who worked for her. Now he knew a secret. For everything about the scene had the sheen of something to be concealed.
But when he was leaving to make a trip to the Verti Mart for a Times-Picayune, he found Miss Kimbro waiting for him, or so it seemed to him, standing in the loggia near the stairs. When she saw Newell she beckoned to him, and when he was close said, “Well, why don’t you come inside and we can have a drink,” as if that were something special. But he followed her inside the same rooms where she had been fooling around with the girl earlier, a nice sitting room with handsome old furniture, including a low wooden table with curvy legs, where she had set up a silver tray and a bottle of bourbon with a black label.
“What do you drink?”
“Well, to tell the truth, I drink mostly beer. But I like vodka, too.” He wanted to sound adult.
He settled on a beer, and she brought it and poured herself a bourbon in a plain small glass. She had a nervous way of handling things, of looking around the room, and he wondered why she had brought him here, whether maybe the room had become too quiet now that the girl was gone. Miss Kimbro had hardly been more than cordial to Newell before, so it was hard for him to figure why she would invite him inside for a beer. But he sipped it anyway and ate the potato chips with the sour-cream-and-onion fur on them, and by now he was accustomed to the flavor of beer and quickly finished his first one.
She brought him another one and sat down. She was wearing a long robe that tied at the waist, a silky fabric, emerald green, a delicate brocade running through it. When she sat, she sipped the whiskey with such intensity Newell was sure she hardly knew he was there at all.