He didn’t know what Deb’s angle was, suddenly trying to give Marie some recognizable human quality, make them partners in a way they never were. In the early days, when Marie would call, Deb would say, That witch is on the phone. But he said, “Okay,” and they hung up over a quick Love ya, Love ya too, and Greg leaped out of the RV because it seemed less like something a tired old man would do. He zinged his ankles on the landing, had to stomp the sparks out the whole way up to the front door. He tried pushing in but the door wouldn’t give, and he stood dazed in the entryway listening to the muffled music, trying to make out the words, thinking about how he hadn’t felt nervous about seeing Marie until just now. And then the door opened toward him, revealing the tall man in the ball cap holding two to-go cups of coffee; for a moment Greg wondered if one of them was for him. The man nodded and edged by Greg, the door closing in a cold whoosh of air that smelled of sweat and vanilla. Why was he driving toward that woman? He felt foolish about the door, about the whole trip. He always forgot that sometimes it was a pull, not a push.
Greg showed the man just inside the door his ID, waiting silently as the man studied it under a flashlight and feeling ashamed by the way his hands flapped up to shield his eyes when the man aimed the flashlight at him. A heavy red curtain that was soiled at the bottom hung behind the man, who was as large as Greg and teetering on a stool with uneven metal legs. “Okay,” the man finally said, holding Greg’s ID out with one hand and using the flashlight to push back the curtain with the other. A wedge of darkness and noise beckoned. “Thank you much,” Greg said, in the cheerful twang he used at home, in town getting his hair cut or picking up some firewood. Like this was a normal transaction, like it was a necessary errand on his way to rescuing GJ.
Behind the curtain, down a short hallway, there were two swinging doors: one with bright light behind its porthole window and one with a strobing darkness. Greg looked into the light, saw what appeared to be a family diner. He pushed in for a closer look, thinking maybe he’d just choose this door, maybe he’d get a slice of pie and call it a night, maybe the other door just wasn’t for him and that’d be okay. He squinted in the harsh white light, the room smelling of burned coffee and grease, a not entirely unwelcome smell in Greg’s opinion. The floor was black and white squares of linoleum; there were round black tables and cracked red booths and a bar with a line of broken stools trying to stand up straight, like men after a bar brawl. A waitress in a powder-blue uniform was shepherding a coffeepot between the only two tables that had customers, two lone men, each hunched over his plate like it needed protecting. The waitress had a high, rigid chest and a pretty but worn face, like it had gone through the wash too many times, and Greg wondered if she had graduated from the dark room to the light. A man behind the counter tossed a dish of fries on the counter and bellowed, “Order up!”
“You seat yourself,” the waitress called to him in a scratched monotone that told him she’d been working in loud places for too long. The woman who cut his hair in town had it, always having to yell over the hair dryers when she asked him all the same questions: how was Deb, how was the house, what would he be doing that day? Sometimes circling right back to the beginning, And now how is Deb?
“Oh, I’m not hungry,” Greg said. “I got that sack of burgers in the car.” He had his thumb over his shoulder, pointing back to where he’d come in, like she knew what he was talking about, knew what he drove, knew about the Krystal and GJ and all the rest of it. One of the men turned his head, put his chin on his shoulder to look at Greg without going to much effort. Maybe it was the light, or the quiet, or the smell, but he knew he wouldn’t be sitting down to collect himself as he’d originally thought. And maybe it was also that he’d stopped here in the first place, he’d stopped here, so early in his trip, which meant he wasn’t barreling toward his son, which meant he was quite possibly incapable of facing anything—GJ’s disappearance, Marie, fatherhood—and if that was the case then he felt wild with the urge to make this stop count. To see a naked woman, to feel her hair brush his face as carelessly as a bird shitting on his shoulder. As a younger man he’d often taken clients to strip clubs. A boulder of cash in his pocket, ones nesting fives nesting twenties and in the center a few hundreds that only the most dedicated girls would ever catch sight of. Thinking of that, those nights with their own sweat-and-vanilla-scented darkness, Greg felt lighter, like he wasn’t presenting the broad expanse of his belly, like he wasn’t carrying around a limestone slab of torso.
“Are you in the right place?” the waitress asked, setting the coffeepot down on an empty booth table. “You must want the other door.” She wiped her hands on her apron and Greg couldn’t help but detect a hint of regret in the gesture, something she tried to hide but couldn’t deny, like a sliver of onion in a cookie.
“You got me,” he said. “Thank you much.” The man who had turned to watch him turned back to his plate, hefting his spoon in his fist like a child. GJ held his utensils the same way. Was it a mark of some kind? This man will have a hard life. Deb had tried to break him of the habit, but it never took.
Greg pushed back through the door, into the dark hallway. He heard the man on the stool speaking to someone, another customer perhaps, and pushed through the other door before that person could see him. It was part of the allure of a place like this: no one ever got a good look at anyone or anything. Just glimpses and flashes and the sudden pliant weight of a thigh or a breast or a hip. No touching, no touching, the bouncer at one of his old spots used to intone. But there was always touching. Hidden, accidental, on purpose, the bills sliding out of his hands and pockets like he was a flu-struck ATM.
A woman on stage was upside down, her legs in a split, slowly spinning, as bland as a ceiling fan but for the stunned lidless bulging eyes of her breasts, staring out at the men, like, This? This is what you came here for? A ratty disco ball swayed weakly; a man with wet hair stood in front of the stage, and even from behind Greg could see that the man was openly rubbing the front of his pants. He wore the same kind of gym shorts Greg favored. So this was the kind of place where men showed up in gym shorts, not business suits. Where the bouncer didn’t even bother to warn Greg not to touch. A blonde in a neon-green bikini was holding a tray as small as a dinner plate, a tray meant mainly for singles. She came toward Greg, beautiful at first, a specter, and slowly morphing, the closer she got, into a woman who might have some grandchildren, even a great-grandchild or two. Her breasts were hard and looked painfully large. Her skin was tanned the way a hide got tanned and turned into a purse. The blond hair was a wig; she adjusted it like it was a hat, tugging a lock on one side of her face and then tugging a lock on the other side, shifting it into comfort. Why did he notice things like this? Was he the only man in this room who would have noticed? She had worked the wig like she didn’t mind him knowing it was a wig. Was that because she truly didn’t mind, or because she had gotten used to people not noticing her? He was too sober, maybe that was it. So in that sense this woman was an angel.
“We got two-dollar beers and three-dollar whiskeys. Or you can get a twofer for four dollars.” The music was loud and Greg found himself watching her mouth as she spoke. Her teeth glowed white in the darkness. She stared at him, waiting for his order. Her eyebrows looked drawn on, arched like she was shocked and surprised, Happy Birthday to me, where am I?
“I’ll take the twofer,” he shouted.
She put her hand up to where her ear was under the wig. “What?”
He put his face close, so they were cheek to cheek. The wig smelled brand-new, like plastic, and it seemed to be conducting heat from her scalp. Here was the hair brushing his face, for better or for worse. “The twofer,” he said, and dug in his pockets for his change from the stop at the Krystal. He handed her a sweaty five-dollar bill and she plucked it from his hand with the tips of her long nails, like some kind of predatory bird snatching up a rat in its claws. “Keep the change,” he shouted, and grinned at her, feeling pleased t
hat he could tip this poor old half-deaf relic twenty percent. If he was tipsy he’d have said something like You still got it, girl, glad to flatter and bolster someone older than he was. He knew how good it felt to be flirted with, seen; it was why he stopped for coffee once a week at the place where the college-aged girl called him G and swatted at his arm when he joked with her.
The woman walked behind the bar and assembled his drinks, banged the register and flung the five into the drawer. It was hard to tell but he was pretty sure he could see his whiskey sloshing out of the cup onto the tray as she walked over. She held the tray out; it took Greg a few beats to realize she wasn’t going to hand him his drinks, that he’d have to reach out and retrieve them himself. The beer bottle was warm in his hand and the whiskey was in a dented plastic cup. Again he wondered what he was doing, and again he decided he was doing the only thing.
She stood, waiting, and Greg realized she was waiting for a tip. Another tip. He fished out another dollar and placed it on her tray. Out came the claw again, gathering up the bill. She held the tray between her knees as she lifted the wig away from her scalp and pushed the dollar under it. “I’m Pam if you need a refill,” she yelled, readjusting her wig again, and then walked over to serve other men. Greg watched the silly waggle of her rear, its flesh all give. Deb wore underwear to conceal, to protect, to hide. She knew her strengths and she knew her weaknesses. The only time he glimpsed her ass these days was in the shower, behind the new glass doors they’d had put in. Clenched and puckered like a dog with its tail between its legs. Still, it thrilled him to see it, the naked ass of the woman he loved. He did not thrill at the sight of Pam’s.
He sat in a chair to the left of the stage. There was a new woman up there now, flat on her back kicking her legs in the air, displaying the swollen folds of her vagina, the raisin eye of her asshole. Not a hair to be seen. All those layers of flesh, like a complicated pastry. The man with the wet hair was still up there, but now Greg could see he had his hand in his shorts. He almost had the answer, right then, the answer to why he’d come, and he pictured taking a running start, sliding to home, landing inside this woman, safe! Everyone in this room doing away with any pretense, letting it all hang out there, wig and scars and tortured hard-ons. Calling a spade a spade. He could be who he was and no one would give a shit. He took the whiskey all in one gulp, opening his throat to let it slide down. The beer was like swallowing his own warm spit, but it felt necessary to continue drinking. Sometimes drinking was necessary. GJ had learned that, too. Sometimes it wasn’t. GJ had ignored that part. The woman rolled to her side and spun like a compass going haywire. It had to be difficult, thinking of new moves, moves that would set you apart from the other girls, ways to showcase your body, ways to distract yourself. Greg threw his last single onto the stage. He had a twenty left and that was it. As if she could sense it, could feel that twenty burning his pocket all up, like his dick had risen up and pointed right at it, another woman in a bikini appeared. No tray, no wig as far as he could tell. He could smell sex on her, that smell like saliva and salt and the wetness Greg could never help but mention in the heat of the moment.
“Do you want to come with me?” she asked. She put both hands on his neck, cradling him. One of her breasts was larger than the other and the smaller one looked like it had been pummeled with a meat mallet. “It’s fifty.”
Greg had never gone with one of the women before, at the other clubs; he’d seen clients be led into curtained rooms and come out with exhausted faces and wet lips; he’d gone out the back exit once and seen his colleague being pinned to a wall with one red-nailed hand while the other pumped at his crotch like a piston. His partner had nodded the way they did passing each other in the hall at work, then closed his eyes.
The music was loud, so loud that he felt like it might all be in his head, just a crush of noise out of which he tried to find the words. In truth he had always regretted not being the one to go behind the curtain, to unzip before a stranger and lean back. And back then the woman wouldn’t have had to reach under the hull of his belly to find his prick. Now all he had to offer was a hard-on of bodily girth, the swollen fatness of him. He and Deb had sex on special occasions only. She never took him in hand, never led him in. It was up to him to pump the dime-sized portion of lube, to push in, to get it over with. In a way that felt even more filthy than having sex with a wife was supposed to feel, both of them just doing it as a favor to the other. Deb patting his back when it was all said and done, polite and firm as always; she’d be patting the back of the angel of death when her time came.
But what did he expect? They were old and getting older.
“I only have twenty,” he shouted to the woman before him, hating himself, but relieved to have an excuse all the same.
She shrugged, let go of his neck, and stepped back. “Twenty’ll buy you a lap dance,” she said, and held out her hand. She said it halfheartedly, as if Greg was her last hope. One of the narrow triangles of her bikini top had shifted, and from where Greg sat it appeared she was missing a nipple, and was that a scar? He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
“You like that?” She looked down at the smoothness that should have been nipple. “That’s road burn, Daddy. Motorcycle accident. You can touch for five.” She took the beer from his hand, raised it up, and licked its mouth slowly with her tongue before handing it back. He suddenly thought of the waitress behind the door of light; had she ever lifted a coffee cup and licked it like that?
“No,” he said, louder than he wanted to. The music was in between songs and the dancer onstage looked over at him as she bent to collect her dollars. “I mean, no thank you,” he said to the woman in the bikini. He reached out and patted her arm.
“Now you owe me five,” she said. She shifted the top back into place, crossed her arms over her ribs. The man with the wet hair was watching now; the dancer lingering onstage, boldly staring at Greg.
Greg held out the twenty. “I’ll need change,” he said. Again the feeling of shame, of foolishness. Like he was being burned from the toes up, burned alive by a creeping flame that was only ever warm. Asking for change from a stripper. Standing in a strip club in his open sandals and slightly nicer pair of gym shorts and his penis nestled like something exhausted, something only ever warm. With a jolt, he remembered taking GJ to a strip club on his eighteenth birthday. Had wanted to do something unexpected, shocking. Had wanted to seem as young as GJ, maybe. On his own eighteenth birthday his mother had given him a suitcase. He had wanted to show the boy his view of the world. In truth he was the kind of father who expected GJ to make mistakes, but only all the same mistakes he himself had made. And he had never told the boy that being happy wasn’t the point. Who was happy? When had he been happy? That day on the library steps. It came to him before he could stop it. That day on the library steps, he’d been happy. Was it worth what came after? GJ had wanted to leave after seeing the first dancer, but Greg pulled him into the bathroom, let him sip from his drink until he felt better about staying. Greg was older now; his son had been an adult for years. He could see how he’d been trying to show the boy he’d been as a teenager what life could be. He could see how he’d only ever seen GJ as a mirror, not a window. These moments came to him more and more, especially after he retired. These lists of failures. He had time to reflect. What was the point? He could dole apologies out upon GJ one by one, like Band-Aids, like dollar bills. But the damage had been done. Too much road burn. They were both smooth and swollen and beyond themselves. Where was GJ? He had been worried about the boy for almost thirty years. When would it end? Where the fuck was he?
The woman in the bikini had gone and come back. “Here’s your change,” she yelled, holding a fan of ones out to him. A simple business transaction for her, nothing more. She was cutting her eyes over to a new customer; Greg was surprised to see that it was a woman, a large woman in a Hawaiian shirt leaning back in her chair looking like she came here all the time. He took his money and the woma
n in the bikini walked quickly away, toward this new customer, to cradle the woman’s neck in her hands as she’d cradled his. As he left he saw the woman in the bikini leading the other woman by the hand, toward the back where it was too dark to see if there were curtains or doors or just an open dark space where they could conduct their business. So sometimes it was better for everyone if he just left. Ha. He’d have to remember to tell that one to … who? Maybe he’d stop by the bar on the way out. Just a shot or two.
And then he was in the small hallway again, between the two doors. His shin throbbed; had he tripped and hit it on something? He was sweating. The hallway was too narrow; he was too big. His belly burned from something he ate or drank. Or both. He looked into the light but he couldn’t see the waitress, and one of the customers had left, so now it was just the one. If he died and these were the two doors he had to choose from, the one in the light definitely seemed more like hell, that stillness and quiet, than the one in the dark.
“Good night,” he said to the bouncer, who did not return the sentiment.
He walked quickly across the parking lot to the RV. His sandals slapped the asphalt; his heart thudded heavily. He heaved himself into the RV. He was starting to feel afraid he’d pull it onto its side, that he was heavier than the vehicle. He had to crouch around inside like a teddy bear in a dollhouse, but he managed to climb up into the loft bed above the front seats. Didn’t even take his shoes off—he’d have to bow his body, reach his toes, and that was out of the question. He’d forgotten a pillow and a blanket but he could stop for those the following day. He was shocked, disappointed even, that it was only just past eleven o’clock. Well, if there was anything he was good at, it was stalling.
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