by Jim Grimsley
“I just got off work,” Newell said.
“Are you still being a bus boy?”
“Oh, no ma’am. I quit that job. Now I’m a cashier at a bookstore.”
“Which one?”
He had never asked, and had never seen a sign, so he shrugged. “I don’t even know the name of it. It’s on St. Ann near North Rampart.”
She blinked. “Why, I know where that is. That’s an adult bookstore.”
“Yes ma’am, it is. And there is stuff in that store you would not believe.”
“I suppose there would be.” She sipped her whiskey and lifted a kerchief to her lips. “Well, I suppose it’s better than the restaurant.”
“Oh, yes ma’am. It’s clean. And the people are all nice. I work the cash register and make change.” He found himself watching her with tremendous enthusiasm. He liked her odd face with its sharp lines, and he sipped the beer, which had warmed some. “It’s almost like an office job. My grandma wanted me to get an office job.”
“Well, this is nearly like that,” she agreed, though she was staring distractedly at something on the tip of her shoe.
“So now I can call her and tell her I have an office job, and she won’t worry so much.”
“Where does your grandmother live?”
“Pastel, Alabama. Near Pocatawny. I gave you the address, remember?”
“My husband had people up that way,” she nodded. “Pretty country.”
“You can’t beat it for looks,” Newell agreed.
“You grew up with your grandmother?”
“Yes ma’am,” he answered, but he decided not to offer anything else. She watched him. Finally he asked, “You had a husband?” This surprised him, after seeing her with the girl.
“Oh yes. But he died.”
They sat there sipping their drinks and refrained from any more questions. Miss Kimbro chewed the inside of her lip, the loose, softly wrinkled skin sliding up and down her throat. “Well,” she remarked, “since you are so well employed, I hope you’ll be staying in your apartment.”
“Oh, yes ma’am. I like it up there very much.”
“You can get you a window fan for when it’s hot. I won’t charge for the electricity.”
“Yes ma’am, that’s a good idea.”
“You might even get you a television,” she added.
But he could tell by the way she was watching him that she was thinking about something else. She had gone suddenly very far away. When she returned, she faced him and smiled. “You should be careful, working at that bookstore.”
“I think it’s safe,” Newell said, “I think it’s all right.”
After a moment she added, deciding each word, “You have to be careful how you live, here.”
When she began to clear away the glasses, he helped her a bit and said good-bye, decided to forget buying a newspaper, went upstairs and wondered what Louise had meant.
For the next few days, with the sweltering summer settling onto the city, he went to work early and left late. He learned about the bookstore and especially relished Mac’s ominous hints about the mysterious barge that brought the magazines downriver from St. Louis and Chicago, its secret connections to crime, to a network of criminals spread throughout New Orleans. “There’s people in this city would take one look at you and kill you and not think twice about it. You think I’m playing?” An image of a life full of nebulous danger. Now and then Newell thought about Louise Kimbro and the alcohol she had shared with him, and he wondered if this was what she had meant, he had to be careful how he lived; but he soon forgot when Mac presented the possibility of something else.
Mornings, while the traffic in the store was slow, Newell drank coffee with Mac and stood in the cloud of his cigarette smoke. Afternoons, Mac went upstairs to the girls, to do some business in his office upstairs, he said, and Newell tended the store by himself. The phone rang sometimes, and he answered it, mostly wrong numbers or people who breathed heavily or mumbled, asking about some magazine or other; occasionally a message for Mac. He dusted the shelves of dildoes and plastic vaginas with fake hair and the bottles of Rush, and he wondered what was the good of such a small bottle when it cost so much money, almost four dollars.
Often he was drawn to the racks of magazines, especially the ones that had only men on the covers, and he arranged them and rearranged them until the blend of faces and thighs and elbows seemed to him more harmonious, as if in grouping these hairy and pale, flabby and firm asses side by side, he were writing sentences in some picture language. He grouped the Stallion Studios magazines near the Eagle Studios magazines, at first through instinct, afterward noticing that the beefy men on the Stallion covers complemented the more adventurous covers of the Eagle magazines, on which the boys were piled on top of each other in poses that could not be mistaken for sports practice. The rest of the magazines were a blur of titles to him at first, More Than Enough, Two Hands Full, Take Ten, Truck Stop, Marine Daddy, Three in a Barn, The House Painter, Navy Buddies, Beefcake, Muscle Love, Stag, and their covers appealed to him when the color was good, the skin looking like skin, the pimples none too prominent. His discrimination, at first, amounted to nothing more than a feeling about each image that he saw, each magazine on the rack, each postcard of some oily-haired blond from the fifties posing naked with his thigh thrust forward to hide his penis, a feeling that these images were overpowering him in some way, were speaking to him.
He had started work on a Tuesday night and finished out that week on the day shift. Mac paid him at the end of his shift on Saturday, the end of his first week, Mac counting cash into Newell’s hand, one hundred sixty dollars. Newell found himself surprised by the amount and by the fact that he was paid in cash. He could pay his rent and still have some left over to live on. Next week he would be paid one hundred sixty dollars again, and he wouldn’t have to pay rent then, he would have all the money for himself. He gaped at the stack of bills and stood there tingling, then folded the money and slipped it into his pocket as if he always carried that kind of money. He grinned at Mac, who said, “You’re doing a good job. The cash register hadn’t been short once all week.”
“I like working here,” Newell said, and he truly did, from the bottom of his heart, but speaking the sentiment aloud disturbed him so he got busy dusting the dildoes, the big inflatable woman with the holes in all the right places that had taken Newell a good morning and a bicycle pump to blow up, and all the other toys that were displayed in the locked case beside the door.
Mac said, “You get Sunday and Monday off. People don’t like it if you sell smut on a Sunday, so we close. And Monday you get off.”
“Really?” Newell asked, as though this had never occurred to him, and Mac nodded.
Mac watched him for a while longer, without speaking, and Newell continued to work with that same cheerful air, as Mac marveled, though he himself would not have used the word; he marveled at the nonchalance with which Newell worked among the plastic cocks and leather harnesses and studded masks, as though this were some five-and-ten-cent store. Mac had been struck by this thought for most of the week while Newell trained on the cash register or answered the phone or stuck price labels onto the plastic covers of the magazines. Finally Mac said, “I told you to go home, now,” and Newell grinned, stored away his dust cloths, and left the store just as the phone rang, Marlene from upstairs to tell Mac she was bringing down his dinner.
That night, Newell bought cologne at a drugstore on Canal Street, a fragrance called English Leather, which the cashier allowed him to sample at the counter; he also bought a new comb, and a conditioner for his hair, even though he did not know what a conditioner was supposed to do, and he bought a separate kind of soap for washing his face, and he priced a gold chain at a counter that also had watches and a few rings, but he would have to wait to spend that much money, nearly fifty dollars. But he could see himself with the gold chain around his neck, and he realized as he pictured himself that this gold chain would make
him more similar to the other people he had seen in the bars. The cashier bagged his cologne and comb and toiletries, a word that he savored, having read it over the section of the drugstore where he found the soap, and Newell took the bag and his change and felt the bulge of money in his pocket and hurried home.
He got the rest of his money from upstairs and paid the next month’s rent that very moment, wanting to secure his room before he spent more money on anything else. He found Louise in the courtyard with a cat in her arms, stroking it down the spine and along the tail, the cat blinking in satisfaction. Someone at the back of the courtyard was singing, a young girl’s voice; and Louise smiled serenely as if no sound on earth could please her more. She stood there as though she had been waiting for Newell, and she accepted the rent money when he counted it into her hand, and slid it into the pocket of her skirt. “Thank you,” she said, as if she had been expecting him to come in at that moment and pay the rent, even though she could hardly have known he would do so; and he dipped his head to her, and smiled, and the voice from the back of the courtyard called, “Louise?” and she turned and walked away, stooping just a bit, letting the cat glide out of her arms to the pavement.
Upstairs, Newell heated a can of soup on the hot plate and ate it with a slice of bread. He had the money to eat out if he wanted, but he decided to spend it in the bars instead. Before leaving he spread a film of cologne behind his ears and along his wrists, the way he had seen his grandmother do before going to the Moose Lodge dances, and he smelled his fingers and checked his hair in the mirror. He wished he had new clothes and planned, briefly, to buy clothes next week, when he got paid again, at least a new shirt or new jeans.
But he went out anyway, wandered up and down the sidewalks looking all the men in the eye. He had lost part of his fear of them, now that he had a job, now that he knew he could stay. He went to Lafitte’s, where the men congregated, some of them strong and masculine in their jeans, some emaciated, and others with large, round rear ends and thighs that tapered toward the knee. But he looked at them all and slid past the ones who lounged near the doorway watching the new arrivals and headed for a stool near the corner of the bar, beside the jukebox. Music came from the jukebox, though it was piped through the sound system, and so the music was changing all the time; but somebody played “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” by Thelma Houston, which was his favorite song, and then “I Love the Night Life,” by Alicia Bridges, which was his second favorite song. So he felt as if this must be a lucky day for him, and he drank another beer for eighty-five cents.
Men were watching him from all sides, but this was nothing special, because they were watching each other too, and watching the door that led upstairs and the door that led to the street, and watching the bathroom door, and watching the bartenders and watching their own drinks, their own hands. If there had been a mirror they would have been watching their own reflections, he thought. With the music so loud hardly anyone was talking, though occasionally someone would lean to the ear of someone else and say a few words. A lot of men were alone, like Newell, so he hardly felt out of place, and the second beer went down faster than the first, helping any anxiety he might develop. He sat wondering what time this place would fill up, what it would be like then, because the other night when he had walked past the bar had been stuffed with men, hanging off the upstairs gallery and overflowing into the street.
He had ordered another beer from the bartender and turned to scan the titles on the jukebox when a voice spoke to him, from behind, close to his ear and soft, “Hello there.”
When he turned there was Henry, wearing a red flannel shirt and a red handkerchief in his pocket. Newell remembered him at once and wished he would go away. He had been standing very close to Newell but took a step back, with an anxious look on his face that made Newell feel anxious too, and Henry’s eyes seemed far too large and round, and what was he staring at? Irritated, Newell started to turn away from him, but instead noticed that other people in the bar were watching Henry talk to him, and this seemed to Newell more desirable than to sit there alone with the beer like so many of the rest, so he nodded to Henry to sit on the stool next to him, and Henry hopped onto it at once. He had a drink with a lime wedge floating in it, and he set that on the counter. The bartender came along and slid a napkin under it, and Henry and Newell sat there listening to the jukebox, which was so loud there was no way to talk except to lean one head close to another. So Newell leaned a little toward Henry and asked, “This isn’t the bar where you met me, right?”
“No, that was the Bourbon Pub. Do you want to go there?”
Newell shook his head and sipped his beer. The music pounded the walls, the ceiling, the countertops, making everything vibrate, raining men, it’s raining men, he heard the words and watched Henry out of the corner of his eye, knowing that Henry was staring at him, feeling odd because of that, feeling as if he ought to walk away. But he went on sitting there because it was pleasant to have someone watching him with eyes so avid, and he wondered whether Henry could smell the new cologne the way Newell could smell the sweet stuff Henry used. But Newell was careful to keep his eyes moving, ranging through the bar over the hard, round shoulders of the men, many of whom had torn the sleeves off their shirts, every color of skin, every texture. He wondered if his arms looked like that or if they could look like that. He surreptitiously squeezed a shoulder, a forearm.
“I like this bar this time of day,” Henry whispered. The sound located him close behind Newell, invisible, speaking into Newell’s ear. “Everybody comes here early. To get ready for the rest of the night.”
“Then where do they go?” Holding himself perfectly still, with Henry’s breath on his ear lobe.
“A couple of streets over to Travis’s. Or over to the baths on Frenchmen. Or dancing. Or down to the waterfront, late. Then toward daybreak people eat beignets at the Café du Monde. Or cheeseburgers at the Clover Grill. Or else they drive to Susie’s for breakfast.” He spoke plainly, but his words drew a map in Newell’s brain, and he looked around the bar again, at all the men, and he remembered the men on the street outside, and he wondered. Henry’s description framed the whole event. Newell could feel a sense of preparation in the air, everybody sizing up everybody else, the evening about to unroll like some magic carpet. “I like this time of night,” Henry added.
They sat through more songs on the jukebox, and Henry asked if Newell would like to go to the Corral, and Newell said yes and thought they were leaving the bar, but, as it turned out, the Corral was the bar upstairs; he felt comfortable there, in the noise and smoke. Henry and Newell found places for themselves along the wall, and Henry bought drinks and they stood there, sipping, Newell watching the other men linger, exiting, coming in the door, passing by on the way to the jukebox or the bathroom. Newell felt, as he had since he got the job at the bookstore, that his eyes had opened fully and he was really seeing what was around him for the first time. Where once he had seen only a mass of faces, now he could distinguish groups of men in the bar, and different types of men in each group. Some of them were lean and sullen and had a polished look to their skin, especially to the skin of their faces, like women’s faces, Newell thought, though these were clearly masculine men. Some of the men were pale and soft, some slim and soft, and these soft men spoke with a lilt and stood with a slight curve to every part of the body, and spoke with soft curved arm gestures and tracings of the hand through the air. Some of the men sat at the bar and stared hungrily at the others, clearly here alone, stooping over their drinks with a furtive air. One of these men was wearing a business suit and had a wedding ring on his hand, a banker or insurance salesman, and Newell wondered if he had come here by accident, if he had failed to notice that there were no women here. There was one man wearing a woman’s wig and polka dot blouse tied to leave his midriff bare, his hairy navel sunk in a few pale folds of fat. He had a lot of friends around him and laughed and slapped his hands on the bar and whooped and threw his hand up in th
e air and lit a cigarette on a long, thin cigarette holder with rhinestones at the tip. He stopped talking only to freshen his red lipstick and his friends surrounded him, chattering and laughing, and all of them looking around the bar to make sure other people were noticing their fun, their friend with the wig, the lipstick, and meanwhile the music from the jukebox pounded as three men in leather clothes stood over it slipping in quarter after quarter and choosing song after song. The bartenders whirled and slid along the counter slipping their hands across each others’ backsides as they passed one another, with the noise so loud they had to lean close to the customers to hear what they were saying; two of them wore flannel shirts and the other a halter-type T-shirt that outlined the smooth curves of his body. Everyone moved to the beat of the music in some way, the bartenders neatly dancing in the little space they had, and the men at the bar tapping their fingers, keeping time with head movements or undulating at the hip, some of them singing along with the record, or appearing to sing along—hard to tell, since nothing could be heard except the music.
He and Henry stayed at the Corral a long time, where men were playing pool, with more men lined along the walls to watch them, and lined up along the walls in the other room to watch the bartenders, and lined outside the bathroom to watch each other there as well. This upstairs bar had a balcony, and Newell and Henry walked onto it, stepping out of the noise into the humid air that fell on them like a weight. They looked at each other and smiled, and Newell now felt curiously warm and grateful that Henry was with him, but still uncomfortable about it, especially when Henry stared at him too long. “I like to come out here for the quiet.”
“It’s cooling off,” Newell said.
Henry gestured, and Newell looked at a group of shadows standing farther along the balcony, formless except that a point of orange light, a cigarette ember, hung in their midst, and Henry said, “People smoke joints out here. Nobody cares.” At the same time Newell smelled the smoke, which he recognized from the one joint he had ever tried to smoke in Pastel, with his cousin Joel, one night in back of the cemetery in the bend of the river, the same smell of grass and earth, and it had thrilled him then as now because it was illegal, and yet here were these men on this balcony in the middle of a bar right out in the open, far more daring than Newell’s taste of the smoke beside a moonlit grave. Next thing he knew, Henry was lighting one too and handing it to him and he took it, as if he had always taken such things, and he put the hand-rolled tip to his mouth and pulled in, and coughed and felt the rasping of the smoke along his throat, and wanted to cough again but refused. They passed the joint back and forth.