What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  Now is the time, now!

  And if the word still falls within the cursed purview of these corn-fed gods, at least give me something that passes undetected beneath them, some little bubble of mystery they miss. Something that escapes the prying scope of their cyclopsian eye. Let me give my uncle a golden line that is officially between us but somehow seems bigger than every breath of air we could ever take. He must face eternity, or the lack of it, every day. Is it still possible? We need to be convinced that our lives matter, not finally matter but firstly matter. The old assumptions inherent to the old equations no longer fly.Convince him, convince me, convince us that this earthly blink of the eye matters.

  “Uncle.”

  “Step aside and step back, nephew. And shut up. This thing was way done before it ever started.”

  “Uncle, I have to believe that this life is of the purest, realest, finest—”

  “I know, I know, nephew. I heard that song. I wrote it. But I can’t sing it anymore. You stay right where you’re at and live it. And remember: there’s more than enough hurt in the world without you throwing in your pennies of pain. The suppression of suffering can be achieved.”

  “Are you firing me, Uncle?”

  “Let’s just say it’s time to quit.”

  “Are you taking this car back too?”

  “Let’s just say I am.”

  “You’re my only ride back home.”

  He explodes into waves of laughter. Hilarity. Nearly lunacy. I don’t look around and I don’t smile because I’m embarrassed and it’s not funny. He’s coughing out this high-pitched whine akin to the heckling banter of hyenas at the kill. This attack of laughter is an attack against me, an easy target—when it comes down to it—of ridicule. He’s hunched over, two hands on his stomach, forehead pressed into the ancient steering wheel.

  There is no home, he’s cackling. And do you think I’d let you back into this ’82 two-door Honda Civic once you’ve set foot on the soiled grounds of this place? You’re defiled forever.

  Finally he stops. “You’ll have no problem getting a ride, nephew.”

  “Uncle.”

  “A final word of advice: Try staying on the ride as long as you can.”

  He speeds off, and the passenger door slams shut in the acceleration. He’s not fifty yards before he’s sliding into a bank in the lightless end of the muddy lot. I’m thinking, You’re stuck, you’re stuck, even as he spins out of the pit with grinding tires, sputters up the house-infested hill, and is gone.

  Maybe I’ll hail a cab. I have enough money now to do it. Instead I take to habit and start the long walk back to New Almaden. I like when the fresh night air swirls into the hollows of my nose and my mouth and I’m forced to use the moonlight as guide. I never know where I’m going but I always hope it’s somewhere good. Everything ends up being at least tolerable, though all that means, really, is I’m still alive. When it gets intolerable, I guess, it will no longer matter.

  A small crowd of geezer swingers near and pass me in a cloud of combined fragrances, Brut and Sunflowers. One of the ladies smiles. She has a spiked bob with highlights, a turtleneck sweater over a leopard-print dress, and those knee-high Eskimo boots you see on leggy Scandinavian runway models. Her earlobe is lined with studs of jewelry. I cough into my hand, head down, when a man with chains up to his chin, a purple polyester shirt fanned open to the sternum, and a stark black cowboy hat materializes from the darkness and slaps me on the arm. “Hey, hey, hey, youngster.”

  It’s Chinaski. Who the hell else would it be? I try to keep walking as if I haven’t recognized his desperate voice and fat face, but he spins me around and shouts, “We gotta pay our respects to the elders, youngster!”

  I look back at the Blue Pheasant. In a crowd of twelve, I see a lady in white limping up the steps with a cane, the outline of her panties halfway down the leg of her skintight polyester pants. The three men give her more space than she needs. I say, “You mean pay respects to the dead?”

  “Now, now, youngster,” says Chinaski.

  Chinaski thinks that our mutual aversion to greetings means mutual embarrassment. That it might affect our fate at Santa Clara Real Estate West to be caught in such a lowly establishment. It’s like screwing your own cousin: neither party can say a word because both parties will be equally crucified by family, friends, society. Against the universal urge to share bed stories, you both keep your sin to yourselves. But Chinaski has no clue that I could care less about the incestuous hoodlums of the West. You can screw whoever you want to in these free, unrestrained, morally relative days.

  Now he’s popping spearmint Tic-Tacs, playing cocky. What would he say if he knew how close I was to being his boss? He’d start calling me Massah, Boss-Pa, Mr. Trump. He doesn’t know it, but he was one minute removed from hard labor. If the Civic had stalled in the Blue Pheasant parking lot, Chinaski would have had to rip off his shirt again and push my uncle up the hill.

  I say, “You’re a regular at this place, aren’t you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I’ve never been here.”

  “Me neither,” he says, too quickly. He’s about to hide his face again. Says instead, “Guess who I just saw?”

  I’m afraid to ask.

  “Your Aunt Lanell. On the arm of some muscle-bound hotshot.”

  It’s irritating that, between us, he’s seen her last. I shake my head and try to remember good things about my aunt. From Vermont. An old WASP. Dark green eyes that turned brown in the evening. Habit of tapping her nails against her coffee cup. Loved old Jimmy Stewart movies. Laughed a lot.

  Yes, a nice lady overall whom I never really knew.

  “Don’t frown now, baby. We all need love.”

  “We all need rocking chairs. I’ll see you later.”

  He grabs me again, almost bear-hugging me from behind. “Where you going?”

  “Away.”

  He spins me and I can’t help but turn my face to the street. His body deflated, he’s slumping like a stand-up comedian whose jokes have all died at the mic. “Please come in with me. You’re handsome enough to get a crowd of ladies. I just want a little take-home plate for the night.”

  “A doggie bag of dentures?”

  “I’ll buy you a drink, youngster.”

  “I ain’t going in there. And stop calling me youngster.”

  “Please, young—Sorry, sorry. You don’t understand: I’m begging you. You’re as close to a sure thing as I’ll ever have here. Gimme the leftovers, that’s all. Just for half an hour, no longer.”

  No wonder he gets fed upon at SCREW. His flesh is dripping weakness. But I’m going to go in there with him—why the fuck not?—and I’m going to get drunk enough to forget the past, up to a minute ago, and not think about the future, about a minute from now. And if both happen at the same time, even better.

  “All right, look. Just stop calling me youngster.”

  “You got it!” he shouts, hugging me, I hope for the last time.

  I think about the Punjabi “youngster” he’d stolen from at the screw property site. “All right, all right, take it easy.”

  “I’m putting in a good word for your two–week eval tomorrow.”

  “Whatever,” I say.

  He detaches and asks, “Did you drive here?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you couldn’t drive here.” He snickers. He’s clowning my car, this coward is actually clowning my car. “I’m just joking.”

  “That’s right you’re joking.” I’ll make him pay for that cocky gesture, make him pay for the whole night out.

  “Let’s go! The ladies are waiting!”

  As we’re walking toward the establishment in question, my miscreant superior is handing me bathroom mints and generic winter-green gum and half a pocketful of banana-flavored willies with bumps for her pleasure and offering tidbits of sophomoric advice about the shady nuances of the soon-to-be vanquished elderly ladies of the club. I look over and say, “On
ly a half hour, Chuckie.”

  He fires a canister of Old Spice in my face that makes me gag briefly at the base of the steps and says, “Come on, man, it’s not mace,” moves up the steps.

  I look up through the mist and see the old lobster bouncer smiling down on me in the soft light. I’m close enough to see his arms, shaven like a triathlete, and his teeth, so white they make you squint. It’s like he never put anything edible in his mouth. He’s glowing with extraterrestrial pizzazz, radioactive.

  I nod respectfully at my elder, this sixty-two year old doorman in the muscle shirt about to OD on Viagra. Be sure to contact your physician if your hard-on lasts for longer than sixty-two years.

  He says, “No hats, man.”

  It’s an inconceivable directive: I’m not wearing one. My beanie’s in my pocket. He’s a little nervous with all the horse steroids flowing through his system so I look down at my slippers to give him reprieve. Despite all the investment with the local Vietnamese beautician, his features—close up—still look older than mine. He’s wrinkly at the neck and there’s a sag in his chest that may get worse during my temporal stay at his establishment. He only has so many more years to stop juniors like me at the door for infractions of fashion.

  I pat his shoulder. “Can I go in now?”

  “You have a good time, bro,” he says to me, a meaningful nod at Chuckie of the cowboy hat, a patron he obviously recognizes.

  The place is one big heartbeat. Chuckie’s shouting in my ear, his head bobbing to a growing pulsation, something about the electricity in the air and that he likes the jam. We get to the bar, which is packed with people, and for just that prompt registry of the miraculous, I’m shocked. That’s saying a lot these days. I never thought I’d see a dance floor of quinqua- and septuagenarians freaking to the mating calls of a 50 Cent slam. But there they are, as tangible as time, pushing their hips to the physiological bounds of agility, hands in the air or on each other’s (age-appropriate term here) derrieres, faces plastered with desire. A separate clique in the corner of the dance floor nearest the bar is shouting in synchronicity to the ghetto beat of 50, “Heyyy! Hoooo! Heyyy! Hooo!”

  I close my eyes to try and find peace behind the void of my eyelids: follow my uncle’s advice. Perhaps it will work. But I know better: it won’t. Can’t. The thumping of the rap song and the deep streety mumble of 50 betray me.

  At the club—boom-doom-boom-doom-boom—at the club.

  I am truly tired of myself. The clock has yet to strike midnight. I shake my head out, rattle its contents, open my eyes, reregister with reality, say, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Told you! Told you!” shouts Chuckie, tugging on the sleeve of my shirt with naked vigor. He throws his hands in the air. “Heyyyy! Hooo! Heyyyy! Hooo!”

  I almost shove him. The gold around his neck is heavy and doesn’t move. For some inexplicable reason, I put my index finger in his chest. “I’ll have a Guinness!”

  “Okay! okay!” he shouts, his hands still thrown up overhead.

  I’m a little lost. “And a shot of Stoli!” He nods. “Black currant!” Nods again, waiting for further instruction. I withdraw my index finger, walk into the crowd and, all eyes on me, spot a booth.

  I slide in, sit down and scan the floor for my Aunt Lanell. The mystery woman. Unless she’s had some major reconstructive surgery—and that is, I suppose, a very real possibility—she’s not here. So she got lucky early, like Chinaski said, and is already heading out to her hook-up’s house/apartment/dorm room. The image makes me a little queasy, so I break down the dynamics of the place by gender.

  When it comes to the ladies, there are two kinds in this place. The first is white, older, powdery and flat-assed and led by sloped, Catwoman eyebrows, held together in the middle—you can see it faintly—by a tube of girdle, hungry for sex. This would be my Aunt Lanell’s category. The second is Southeast Asian or Melanesian, middle-aged women, prim and serious, internationally uppity, tight-figured in svelte black dresses and bodysuits, just slightly gaudy with the jewelry, foreign translations of money-speaking lips. The two enemies are here for the trade: the first pack gives up their wealthy limp-cocked husbands in exchange for the second pack’s broke boner-ready boys. Each can deal with the loss. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  And the men, symbiotic to the equation, are either old loner sugar daddies or young horny foreigners—mostly Afghans and Persians—in twos and threes.

  You look at something like this and almost feel responsible for the mayhem: so this is just how far the tentacles reach? It goes across the country, over the pond, right through Europe, and into some Ottoman village; or it stretches back across the Pacific and drops into an impoverished Filipino borough. And then it goes backwards, too, suction-cups some lonely baby boomer into the now. These geezers are really victims—that’s what they are—the sacrificial lambs of sensationalism, white noise, speed, and immediacy. Bling-bling, Rock the Vote, and Microsoft. They’ve set themselves up like pins to be bowled over by my generation.

  Chuckie puts the shot and the beer on the table, and I waste no time. Before I take another breath of air, they’re both down into the system, liquid fuel for illusion. I look around at the quick blur, listen to 50 wind down. The DJ is a young Southeast Asian in a black fade, sunflower shades over his flat head. He’s elated, life spilling out his ears. America, America. He mouths his mic, bellows, “Are you weady for the mother of gawd?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Are you sho’?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Get on that dance flo’, potty people, ’cause it’s a holiday up in this place!”

  “Yeah!”

  The wolves circle. Madonna’s techno-squeak filters through the joint—dunt, dunt, dunt, dunna dunna nunna nunna, dunt, dunt, dunt, “Holiday!“—as Chuckie, smiling, swaying, shouts, “Want some more juice?”

  The loudness of the place puts you right on the brink of ecstasy. I fight the need to shout above the noise—dunt, dunt, dunt, dunna dunna nunna nunna, dunt, dunt, dunt—which seems wrong, almost perverse. I grab Chuckie’s shoulder hard, dig into the muscle.

  “Juice?” he shouts.

  I nod.

  “The same?”

  I nod again.

  Chuckie crosses the room in that high school hallway swagger, and heads turn from both packs. I realize something I missed before. I didn’t give Chuckie enough credit, but he’s a wanted man in the Pheasant, and it isn’t just the hat. Marginally young and marginally rich, he transcends the mutually exclusive terms, at least for a night.

  We walk through the leering eyes of the ladies. They can spot subservience with or without the afflicted vision, can connect the dots—Chuckie’s his bitch— and they’re right. If I claim it, I can have any woman I want tonight. The ultimate flattery or the ultimate insult.

  I finally disregard personal safety and make eye contact with a lady a couple booths down. Not true: she makes eye contact with me. I can feel her stare for the eternity of seconds. She’s twirling an olive on her tongue, nibbling it, enshrining it on the straw of her martini. It’s the lady from the lot who smiled at me. Sitting down, she doesn’t look all that bad, but who knows what kind of gravitational forces will take over once she stands up.

  An eighties song starts into the refrain—When the walls ... come tumbling down—good old John Cougar.

  She looks like she’s in her late fifties, early sixties, but you can’t get a clean read on it with all these perfectly positioned, cavernous pockets of shadows. It’s like they hired a Hollywood lighting techie as interior decorator, an airbrush for the flesh in the flesh.

  Beneath this post-pubescent mating ritual, I see something that disturbs me. I flash back to childhood, Scott Lane Elementary School, Xavier Lumabacoda: he was the nerd on the playground looking for a friend. That look each day scared me into complicity. She has it now: despite her boldness to peek over at me, deep down she’s expecting rejection. She knows I can do without her. She’s taking the risk that I
’ve been kind to nerds for decades. And she’s right: I have been. I’d give Xavier Lumabacoda an ear, at least, if not the heart. I’d indifferently hear him out. But tonight I feel the urge to set something straight in this henhouse.

  I lift an eyebrow, kind of half chuckle, look away at the dance floor, chuckle again, look back. As if I were sitting on a throne of gold, a twenty-eight year old emperor of the sun. The transmission hits home. Her facade implodes. She’s fragile as a fossil, this woman. What’s worse: she stands—tumbling down—and walks off to the bathroom.

  My liquor sponsor for the evening has moved to the dance floor. Mid-eighties George Michael kicks in. Or is it Wham!? The sights interfere with my ability to track the pop chronology. A woman in vertically striped spandex is humping Chuckie’s leg. He’s got his stubby arms over his head, my drinks in his hands. He’s on rhythm, keeping up with the crazy beat, his brain sloshing around in the cranial pocket, the big electric sponge for titillation. It’s like the cowboy hat’s just holding everything in, midwest head dressing for the wound of unfettered hedonism.

  She rips off her shirt and—a tribute, no doubt, to modern history—there’s the black sports bra, S.I. cover shot of Brandi Chastain on her knees at the World Cup, two straps each digging into a shoulder. She wraps the T into a ball and throws it toward the booths, indisputable American victory.

  Someone shouts, “Yeah, baby! You go!”

  Temptress, invitation: she takes Chuckie’s hat and pulls it down low over her brow. Her stomach and back are spilling over fabric and his big, slightly sloped, long-lashed eyes are glazed with desire. He throws me a thumbs-up. I point in the direction of the restrooms. They’re right before the exit, and Chuckie panics. This is his place, his cash, and yet he can’t freak an old fogie without me. He twirls his partner, steals back his hat, and heaves her off deeper into the crowd like a folk dance. Before I can get past him, he’s at my side.