by Ken O'Steen
To outsiders, the place bore the universally ingratiating, euphemistically elegant name, “Cocktails.” To the rest of us it was just home. I was standing in front of the adjacent SRO, the place I slept, and under the circumstances, the nearest thing I had to a home away from home. I’d just come down from my room. I was making my first attempt to activate vision in that bright afternoon sunshine that viciously affronts the eyes. Slowed by the light, but extremely focused and highly motivated, I took a baby step toward the bar. My path was blocked of a sudden by a tall angular man in a Hawaiian shirt and yellow pants. Politely, and in a British accent he asked, “Could you direct me to the office?” Transparent as the question seemed, the answer was a complicity wrapped in a subterfuge wrapped in the commission of a felony. I couldn’t answer it correctly, and I told him as much. The rarely heard from Samaritan in me made an appearance and told the man, “I’ll find out for you. Do you have a minute?”
“Oh yes, by all means. You’re very kind.” As two birds ripe for killing with one stone descended from the heavens, I led the man into the bar.
Inside was dim, cool, perversely insulated, and the sound of a purring television replaced the insidious noise of industriousness out in the street. Straight ahead was a long bar with a cuneiform top; above it the television tuned to CNN. Three males and a female were seated on the stools around it. The seats of the empty ones exposed their torn, red naugahyde. A scattering of rickety tables was hanging by a thread in the center of the room, and around the walls were booths: ripped, brown naugahyde brethren of the barstools.
As I approached the bar with the Brit in tow, a deep voice from somewhere in front of me bellowed, “NOOOOOORRRRRRM.”
“Man that’s tired,” I answered for the millionth time. After I’d smacked down my pack of Benson and Hedges Ultra Lights, I began to slowly and methodically slap the surface of the bar with the open palm of my hand, all the while staring into the back of the man behind the bar. The bartender said over his shoulder without turning around, “I hear ya Donovan.” I grinned at the British man. He was in the process of making the Sherlockian observation that everybody else in the place already had an accelerated diurnal buzz humming along. I turned to the others who had accumulated there and asked, “What room is the office this week?” Andrew, the heavyset man right next to me said, “No idea.” Stan, the next man down had only the wherewithal to shrug, before the last male left in this noble lineage answered, “Raul knows.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“It was that time of the month. He had to go down to the unemployment office and do the check-in thing so his money won’t stop.”
Added Andrew beside me, “Once a month he’s got to swear to them how passionately he’s looking for another job cleaning office garbage cans from midnight to seven in the morning for the minimum wage.”
To the British man I said, “Clever group, aren’t we?” Giving me a quintessentially British look that said, “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, but I’d rather have my head dipped in shit than to behave impolitely,” answered, “Quite.”
Since the moment seemed felicitous, I asked him, “So, are you having one matey?”
“A drink? No. I don’t suppose. Not at the moment.”
“You could front me one.”
“Oh, I really should, shouldn’t I?”
“Yes.”
The bartender was putting my Stoli rocks down right at that moment.
“So I already have it. Just pay the professor there,” indicating to him the man behind the bar.
“Who?”
“The bartender.”
“Was he a professor, actually?”
“Actually, he came very close to passing the GED equivalency on the third try, but no, he was never a full professor.” The professor hooted appreciatively. I swallowed down half my drink, which is what it took for me to get my sea legs on this, the first day of the rest of my life. Then I joined the others, and gave my silent attention to the television news. The owner of a cable company servicing a broad chunk of Los Angeles was being trundled out of a building in bracelets, then plunked down in the back of one of those official black law enforcement cars, accused of bungholing stockholders and creditors for a billion or two. The Enron boys were up next. After them came those wacky cut-ups who had waylaid WorldCom, now effectively neutered. One certainly couldn’t argue credibly that these citizens weren’t industrious. Apparently the only animals busier than beavers were dirty CEO’s. The commercial interruption caused Andrew next to me, who had control of the remote to flip the channel to Bill O’ Reilly. Stan hollered, “Get it off that putz.”
The Professor countered, “He’s the voice of the working class.”
"My ass” Stan said. “That shit bucket went to Harvard. His family was loaded. It's a shtick."
The customer to the right of him said, "This guy's Morton Downey Jr., without the cigarettes and those thingamajigs on his face. Fuck, we’re the working class.“
The rest of us stared. “Well,” he amended, “not literally.”
“Ah,” Andrew said, “Technicality.”
At this point I liberated any of the others staring at my glass pondering whether it was half-full or half-empty of the burden of contemplation, and downed the remainder. The Professor was there and leapt into the breach immediately, bringing me another.
“I’m just quite anxious to get myself to the office,” the Brit reminded me. “It’s most urgent, really.”
“I understand. I don’t think we’ll have to wait much longer to get the info. Listen, I’m going to relieve myself. Hold the fort.” I took a big swig from the glass, reducing the volume inside it by half again, and left.
Returning to my station, the Professor was holding forth to Andrew and Stan on our bar mate, and my neighbor Chris. Attentive, I slid a smoke out of the pack, made the other fifty percent in my glass evaporate, and set the cigarette burning.
“So I tell him,” confides the Professor, ”'you see Chris, I know it's tempting, having a name that could either be a man's or a woman's, but you mean to tell me you’re going to dress up like a woman, falsify your gender on a government form, make up a kid to qualify for Aid to Families with Dependent Children...what's that, for about 400 bucks a month?'" We all chortled at Chris’s expense.
"To think,” I said, “that Chris, with such a brilliantly diabolical criminal mind, still has to live next door in the roach hotel with me and the other inferior breeds."
Andrew asked, “What else did you tell the poor defective?”
“I told him,” answered the Professor, “he should just settle for milking them for a disability check the same as you." Then we laughed at Andrew’s expense. Just in the nick of time, the always-vigilant Andrew noticed a promo for Larry King underway and hushed us, saying, “I want to see who’s on King tonight.” The voice of a thousand promos announced, “Tonight on Larry King Live, a full hour with the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson.” The groans spilled over the bar like a crashing wave. The mercifully reflexive change of channels borne of acute revulsion, brought us to the oasis of Access Hollywood, where tales of toil on the movie set were juxtaposed with clips of these various show business incumbents of Parnassus describing their leisure pursuits in answer to Letterman’s famed, “So how was your summer?” This moved Stan to sentimentalize uninhibitedly that, “Now I have something in common with Harrison Ford. We both sat on our ass all summer.” I bolted half the extant drink, and as the weak light penetrating into the bar was adumbrated by the shadow of the prodigal Raul returning, bolted the other half.
“How’d it go,” the Professor queried. Stan and Andrew chimed in similarly.
“Okay,” said the understandably frazzled Raul, “No problems.”
“What took you so long?” the Professor asked.
“I stopped by my ex-old lady’s apartment to get my bicycle. It’s on her terrace. It wasn’t like I
was gonna steal it. But I wasn’t in no mood for people looking at me like they thought I was. That bike is mine. I figured, at least during the day there wont be too many people around. I forgot this is LA… nobody does nothing during the day…they’re all home. That place was crawling, man…the pool, the garage, the hallways. I said, ‘to hell with this.” Aware of the impatience of my charge from the former imperialist empire, I immediately asked Raul, “Which room’s the office in right now?”
“311,” he answered efficiently.
Turning to my British friend, I said, “There you go.”
“Wonderful.”
“Are you ready? If you want, I’ll walk you up there.”
“Oh yes, yes. Aren’t you kind?”
Taking a pass on the truthful answer to this, I signaled the Professor I would be soon to return, took a bon voyage gulp of the drink, then moved toward the fading light on the street. Outdoors, the sun had dropped behind a string of buildings, and the streets were now safe for those with sheltered eyes. We passed through the double glass doors into the hotel’s foyer, walked past the clerk ensconced in his cage at right, and onward through the elevator doors. The chamber strained hard to make its ascendance, growling, moaning and shaking so hard it felt more like a space capsule atop a rocket pulling manfully against the gravitational pull of earth, than a simple three story elevator ride. The second the door began to move we sprang. Once escaped, we marched, the Brit right behind me, straight down the pockmarked and paint-emancipated hall to 311. I banged on the door hard. There were steps across the floor, and then a voice just the other side of the door answered gruffly, “Yeah?”
“It’s Donovan.”
The door was unlocked, and a prematurely graying middle-aged man, who otherwise had the appearance of a businessman, except for wearing shorts, socks, sneakers and a shirt with the shirttail out, welcomed me in.
“My friend here came to see you,” I said, presenting the Brit. He instructed the Brit to follow him. I closed the door behind us and leaned against it.
“I’ll just wait for him I suppose.”
The man took a seat in a stiff-backed chair between the window and the dresser. A large attaché-type case rested atop it. He closed the lid on the laptop computer propped up on the bed.
“Yes, well,” said the British man, “ what I need is the Lady of course...let me see, four of the packets...yes, that, that should do it."
The other man reached into the case, moved a thing or two around, pulled something out, and handed it to the British man. "Alright bud, four packs a whack."
As he took the packs and paid the money, the Brit asked the man, "I say, do you live in the building?"
“Jesus, pal...you kidding me? I live in the Valley. I own a house in Studio City. I'm five minutes from Art's Deli and Moby Disc. Why would I work insane hours and risk the righteous indignation of the law to live in a fuckhole like this?"
"You certainly wouldn't."
"I certainly wouldn't."
The British man balled his fist around the packs of heroin in his palm, and said, “Thank you kindly,” to the other man. As he was walking toward me, the other man aimlessly addressed the Brit’s back. “British, eh?”
Over his shoulder, the Brit answered him, as I opened the door for the both of us, “Once.”
I escorted this satisfied customer from a far away land out to the street and wished him well. Again, he thanked me with that well-meaning, but unnecessary British obsequiousness, the result of a couple millennia of class strictures hardwired into the British brain I supposed. It seemed a nation of people either uppity or groveling, with little in between.
When I shuffled back into my de facto living room, the Professor was standing there staring at me expectantly, along the lines of your favorite cat when you walk in the door. I was as eager to be served as he was to be of service. I sucked the little liquid left around the ice cubes in the glass remaining on the bar, then transferred my ardor to the one arriving. The Professor rewarded himself for a job well done by tossing another in a leisurely series of Jagermeisters down his throat.
The same five were there: Andrew, Stan, a comfortably fitting male irregular, whose name so far had been superfluous, Raul, and our single female patron Donata, pecan brown doyenne of the boulevard, customarily reticent on account of her transfixion by the television screen. They all seemed, after their continuous fueling through the afternoon, to have achieved a delicate equilibrium poised to crack.
The news was on. Andrew generously apprised me of all I’d missed: “The players and owners came to an agreement in the baseball thing,” he told me, “so there’s not going to be a strike. But the docks are shutting down. The ballplayers decided a one hundred and forty million dollar salary cap might not exploit their labor. The owners decided they may be able to afford to pay a few gazillion more in salary without having to eat Hormel Chili for dinner like us. I’m going to need,” he said without a dram of ironical hijinks in his voice, “to catch the news a little earlier in the day to figure out the beefs the dockworkers and terminal owners have with each other.” At the commercial he cavalierly flipped the channel to C-Span Two. Stan issued a general appeal for a loaner cigarette, and I slid him one down the bar. As I pulled one out for me and lit it, the low sun, signal of another day dwindled down with the light, was slanting through the tiny square of glass in the door and through the cracks in the haggard façade of the building, catching me in the eye, putting spots in front of me for several seconds. I could hear the booming voice coming out of the face on the television screen before I could see it. Trent Lott, Majority Leader of the senate and pitiable owner of that face was assuring: “...it is legislation that will guarantee, when the time comes, the rights of hard working Americans may not be abridged…” Talking over him, Andrew complained, “Why is everything only for hard working Americans? Isn't anybody else entitled to anything?”
“What I want to know,” asked the Professor, “Is if somebody is watching and judging on an individual basis who's working hard and who is fucking off a little?”
“It's always,” Andrew said, "Hard working Americans deserve this, hard working Americans deserve that; every speech, every politician, every part of the political spectrum. Lazy people don't have rights?”
“What about,” I asked, “Somebody like the Professor? He works. If you catch a look a look at him at certain times you might even describe him as hard working, even though most of the time he's a shiftless pile of dung...like now.”
“It's hard work listening to what comes out of your mouth,” the Professor said.
“And why is it,” Andrew asked, “Always HARD working? Since when isn't just working enough?”
Raul on the end said, “I guess if I'm doing just enough to get by they can deport me.”
“What's the cutoff point,” the Professor asked, “Between hard working and just working? I'm working hard enough to meet the criteria for hard working, but I don't want to work any harder than that; just the minimum amount of hard work. I don't want to work harder than I have to to keep my classification.”
“If you did,” I said, “It wouldn't really be very American. I think trying to be more than hard working might actually be un-American.”
“Or plain stupid,” Andrew said. This provoked Donata to break her silence. “I'm a hard working American,” she announced. “I ain't got no dental plan, I ain't got no pension...shit...they don't even WANT me to work hard, otherwise they wouldn't fuck with me every time I get out there and get to work.”
The professor told her, “You might as well give it away.”
“Hell, I might as well, if they ain't gonna let me be a hard workin' American.”
“Donata, you're a saint,” Andrew told her.
“An angel of mercy,” I chimed.
Donata said, “Fucking right I am. But the price ain't going down.”
Andrew, launching forth
with Inaugural grandeur declared, “I'm supposed to be guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say in the Declaration of Independence you have to pursue happiness at a frenetic pace. I'm pursuing happiness. I just prefer to pursue it sitting down. Do they want to take my benefits and my right to vote away just because I'm not considered to be a HARD WORKING AMERICAN? I'm still an American, motherfucker.”
“They should add that,” I said, “To the Pledge of Allegiance. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And hard working or not, I'm still an American, MOTHERFUCKER.”
“The truth is,” the adopted stranger and foster boozechild between Stan and Donata said, “the country wouldn’t be able handle it if all of a sudden all the non-hard working people got a heavy ass dose of big ambition. Wouldn't be enough jobs for everybody with all that extra competition. There wouldn't be enough rewards of hard work to go around.”
“Exactly,” I said. “People who don't work hard are the forgotten Americans, the forgotten heroes. They're the real patriots, sacrificing the rewards that benefit hard working Americans, so that hard working Americans can keep those benefits to themselves.”
“My ancestors” Andrew said, “came to this country believing that stuff they'd heard about the pursuit of happiness. Their idea of happiness was not having to do a hell of a lot.”
“Same with mine,” I said. “In fact, they came from a part of Ireland where the people who didn't feel like doing a hell of a lot were in the minority, and were constantly discriminated against and persecuted by hard working people. That's the reason they came to this country...in order to have the freedom not to do a hell of a lot. And now every politician who makes a speech comes along, and by exclusion, subjects them to the same old prejudice.”
“My vote,” Andrew said, “if I make the effort to get up off this stool and vote goes to the man or woman who spells out in his or her speeches that they are concerned for the well being of every hard working, sometimes working, barely working, hardly working, scared of working, downright worthless, lazy, uninspired, apathetic, freeloading, deadbeat, cocksucking American...regardless of race, creed, color, or level of exertion.”
Just as he finished, Tom Daschle was enunciating on the floor of the senate how, “…we will protect hard-working Americans from the effects of this legislation…” Before he made it any further, we all hollered, clapped and cheered. If balloons had fallen from the ceiling, another milestone in the course of democracy would have ended perfectly.