by Jim Nisbet
TWELVE
THE HAWAIIAN BAR, WHERE DISPORT ONCOLOGISTS AND THEIR groupies, is under new management, and the new management ask you to leave on account of the stink. No hygiene, no service. So you drag your bones on down Geary until it turns to Point Lobos Avenue, whence you turn south into Sutro Heights Park. There, on a cliff-top bench overlooking southwest over The Great Highway and the Esplanade, you withdraw the photograph from the now sweat-stained envelope. It’s a woman. If you don’t count the incident of a few months ago, wherein a woman got in between you and your job, and you don’t, this is a first. Of course, you imagine, a woman can get into a bad way with the wrong people just as easily as a man can, but, still, this is a first. Ask me if I care, you say to the photograph. I’d like to remind you, the smart money reminds you, that the verb imagine and all its declensions, in particular the nominative forms, as well as any noun forms and any derivatives thereof, such as, in your dreams, or, I imagine it to be so, or even one imagines it to be so, are, will be, and have been, for a very long time, the sole discretion of the smart money, hereinafter known as The Proprietor. Your extrapyramidals contort until your face is a parody of itself. You thought we already had this discussion. Think of the smart money as a Kantian object, the smart money maintains, a soulless monad whose existence is intuited only by the intellect and not perceived by the senses. Your extrapyramidals are not released. Especially other people’s senses, you manage, spittle flying. Also called Thing-In-Itself, not precisely the soul, that cannot be known through perception, although its existence can be demonstrated. No? A last twist of all the neural pathways throughout the musculature between the bones of the face and their fleshy excrescencies. Why didn’t I think of that! Come to think of it, why didn’t I remember it? I’ve know it all along! But yes! you exclaim. Of course! The pathways are released. The smart money formally apologizes. Sorry, it says, as if merely smoothing the front of its shirt, the pleats of which are actually the runnelettes of your brain, I just had to walk that dog on the surface of your brain. Where else would you walk it? you ask sensibly. You have a point, the smart money somewhat begrudgingly admits. Perhaps three hundred feet below the lip of the cliff, which is just ten yards from your bench, a motorcycle accelerates down the grade from the Cliff House and onto the flat expanse of the Great Highway. A seagull is lifted up the face of the cliff by a thermocline until it is at eye level with you. A swift, comprehensive glance determines that you are not yet food, despite smelling like it, and the bird, too, glides south. Oh destiny, you recognize, why do you wait to claim me? Yes, the smart money unexpectedly agrees, and there’s nothing for it. You consider the photograph. She’s perhaps thirty? Perhaps. An intelligent look about her. Yes. Not all that comfortable with being photographed. Apparently. Yet, accepting it. You think she knew she was being photographed? That’s an interesting distinction. I couldn’t say. You? I think not. If one thought so, then she perhaps knows the person who knows you. Nobody knows me. Stick to the point. That would complicate things. I think so. May I ask what has spurred this intemperate spate of introspection? Um, The Great Martini Famine? Quite possibly. Nevertheless, in retrieving the envelope you’ve accepted the job, you’ve got a week to perform, within three days you get paid, and that’s the beginning and the end of it. You don’t give a damn who this person is, or why he/she/it has come to this particular crossroad. The envelope itself is addressed to the attention of Mr. Mifune Sibaabwe, Chamber of Commerce, 14, Al-Fayyum St., Abuja, Nigeria. There’s a cover letter. They’re always the same. Dear Mr. Sibaabwe. This is to be thanking you very much for your contribution. As you can see by the accompanying photo, the plastic surgery has been successful beyond our wildest dreams. I cannot properly express in words the profoundest gratitude of our entire family, including nieces, uncles, and all in-laws. Suffice to say, you will reside in all of our prayers forever. Please wire via Western Union the final payment in the amount of Two Thousand One Hundred and Fifty Euros (€2150), to the account you already know, for it is perhaps not safe to include its number here. I need not remind you that, lacking the final payment, all my wife will be sold at auction before next month. With gratitude extending far downward and inward from a surface, sincerely and expectantly yours, Doctor Sade Reduviid, PhD, LLB, Esq. etc. It’s important to verify this letter every time, the smart money sententiously reminds you, inspecting it for the least variation in diction and syntax. That’s true, you say, studying the return address on the envelope. Apt. D, 1410 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 94133, you muse. This is in North Beach, for chrissakes. The smart money narrows it down to Telegraph Hill, maybe even Coit Tower, north of Union Street. Corns calluses and bunions, you declare, it’ll take us a week just to get over there. You reconsider the photograph. A handsome woman. Pretty, even, and what do you know about it, the smart money starts in. If there’d been any design changes in the last twenty years—. Can it. You make as if to frisbee the photograph over the lip of the cliff. Hold on, now, the smart money says. Don’t let’s do anything rash. Then don’t let’s be so liberal with the insults. Point taken. Grumpy today, chortling tomorrow, it’s bipolar geography. It was a long way to go, just to be turned away. You’d think we would know a bar in every district of San Francisco, that wouldn’t mind serving the like of us a drink. Time was in this town, the smart money declares, you couldn’t get away from them. Don’t spit your bridge. Sententious, too, you add, today. Sententious and grumpy, abounding in pompous and ill-tempered apostrophizing. Market Street was one long bar, in any one of which a half-pint draft beer and a shot of rye would cost you all of fifty cents. A half-pint of piss, just the right color, and a brimming jigger of Flindered Gallinule, is more like it, you correct, three-two beer and enough esters to guarantee the shakes and atrial fibrillation fit to cavitate the feathers in your down vest. Them days, the smart money reminiscences, sleeping bags was the flannel type, green canvas on the outside, blue flannel on the inside, with little ponies imprinted. My upper-case G God, you say to the afternoon expanse of the Pacific Ocean, never this blue. True, agrees the smart money, but that about the bars is correct. These days, one is hard put to broach the threshold of an establishment willing to countenance the idea that a man down on his luck might still want a drink, let alone, serve one to him. I believe that the entire substance of your solipsism, you and the smart money say in unison, can be boiled down to precise ratios of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. If you’re trying to say ethanol and finding your tongue tied, that would be correct, C2H5OH, the very thought fires the will and we’re on the move again, it would seem. Tireless apostasy, the smart money agrees. All else is pretension. If the odoriferous plume of molecules left by our passage were only visible, our tireless apostasy would be self-evident. Cannot we manage a drink, before the reconnoiter? Is it not a precept of your method, the smart money reiterates testily, that all work be conducted in all sobriety, maximizing thereby the chance of fruition, while minimizing that of doing oneself injury? If we’re being followed, they must be exhausted, you suggest. They seem to like to talk in bars. That’s true, but everybody does. So what if we made a fake? How’s that. We, you know, duck into a bar, order a Shirley Temple, and see what happens. Doesn’t a Shirley Temple cost just as much as a martini? If I ran a bar, they would indeed. So what’s the point? Non-obfuscation, is the point. Clean, sober, ready to perform. Let’s duck down 47th Avenue, diagonalate Golden Gate Park via John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., and duck over to Irving on 41st, where there just about has to be a bar that will accommodate us. Good idea. But—how much money do we have? As you walk down the hill you pull out a fistful of filthy ones from the ones stash and fives from the fives stash and single ten from the tens stash. Plus there’s some change. Use it for parking. Ah ha. Ah ha? Ahhhh ha ha ha… No metric can compass this illness called Life. Thirty-two dollars. It’ll have to do. But to think about wasting it on a Shirley Temple… Well, maybe just one. You think? I just hate to think of you as unable to have a drink when you wan
t one. It’s just that moderation seems to be a term unknown to you, beyond your understanding. Like imagination? No, imagination is locked out. Try not to think about it. Pretend you lost your password. Besides, why imagine horror when you’re surrounded by it? Surely, there are other things to imagine? How about a life of sobriety? My lower-case g god, how can you even suggest such a thing? Well, don’t imagine, just think about it. First of all, your intestines wouldn’t be making those noises all the time. And your liver wouldn’t precede you everywhere you go. You could remember what happened to you last night, with whom you exchange words, and about what. Many if not most of your matutinal contusions might perhaps be eliminated. It’s conceivable, anyway. You might be able to keep some proper meat on your bones, the rubicundity of your upper torso might subside somewhat, edema, that swollen aspect of your extremities, notably in your hands and feet, wrists and ankles, might subside, along with the voices in your head and the tinnitus in your ears, along with your blood pressure, along with your lipids, and almost immediately you would find yourself in funds sufficient to eat hot meals any time of the day, and to sleep in a bed with a roof over it and your own key to the door. Sounds like fucking heaven, you say, stuffing the ones back into the ones pocket, the fives into the fives pocket, and keeping the change to rattle ruminatively in the palm of one or another of your shaking hands as you walk. Set change to autojingle. Your walk is a rolling sine wave, not dissimilar to a multiply inflected limp peculiar to that of an amphiuma whose semi-vestigial tootsies have long since been gnawed to gists by itinerant athletic coaches, but to memory dim of purpose, like the email address of the second President Bush, which now attracts nothing but spam. But it is an ambulation of surprising vigor, fueled as it is by hatred, pain, and spite, as well the fervor of the turncoat. For in fact, there is no thirst but the thirst, and no will but the will, and no purpose but the purpose, and these shall maintain, uninterrupted, until they are extinguished. In due course, having assiduously ignored the various salients of one of the finest parks in the world, there, when you come to a certain, as if predestined door, you stop in front of it and say to yourself, I never noticed this place before. A grill over the door is open to the sidewalk, the door itself stands in partial shadow, opening onto an inviting gloom. A certain effluvium, equal to your own but enticingly fresh, cool but also rank, breathes from the doorway, a fetor seduced thence by the warmth of the sun, the calories of the former as if drained into the entropy of the greater exterior. To the right of the door is the frame of a window, waste high to slightly overhead, into which has been inserted a piece of plywood, and onto which is painted, in script, Maxilla Salute. This must be the place, the smart money announces. Who would have thought. Indeed it’s a bar, and there’s a woman behind it. She’s older than you are—a good sign. Better, when you take a seat as far back in the gloom as you can get, still face the door while seated at the bar, she folds up her Chronicle, lays a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of you, and waits. Best, when you order a Shirley Temple, she bursts out laughing and makes not one move toward glasses and bottles. Rather, she continues to wait. What’s a maxilla? you ask. The drink or the anatomy, she replies without hesitation. Let’s start with the drink. First things first, she concludes. That might be the case, you reply. Depends on how stupid it is. She smiles. Two ounces tequila, one ounce of pale ale, the juice of a fresh lime, two ounces of sweet and sour, salt to taste. Jesus upper-case H Christ, you expostulate, I pass. The moment you walked in the door, she says, I took you for a sensible person. Let’s have a vodka martini, you say, ice cold, vodka from the well, two of the small olives, if you have them, and just the slightest hint of dry vermouth. That’ll be my pleasure, she says. She retrieves a bowl full of mixed nuts, little cheese-flavored crackers, pumpkin seeds, and two different colors of raisins, and places it on the bar. The protestations of the smart money are as if suffocated by a cushion borrowed from dead center in the eighth row of the oldest burlesque house in Buffalo. And the anatomy? you ask. Mammal or insect, she replies, as she breaks out the bottom half of a cocktail shaker and drags it through a sinkful of ice. You answer question with question, the smart money points out, abruptly alert to the moment. Unnecessarily, you point out. My dead husband was a DUI lawyer, she explains. Plus, he named the bar. Oh. If it’s a human, she continues, as she build the martini, it’s one or another of the two bones that form the upper jaw. My ex’s idea was, if you’re amused enough, the maxilla lifts, along with your head, like this, Ahhhh ha ha ha—see? You see a perfect upper plate of artificial teeth. You throw your head back in absolutely sincere laughter. Oh, you say, somewhat dully. Can I ask you a question? Sure. What’s so goddamn funny? Everything, the bartender says, or nothing. Now we’re talking, the smart money says. No in-between you say. That’s the case, open and shut, my ex always said. Himself, he preferred to look at the bright side. In fact, he got paid to look at the bright side. He had guys, and gals too, with three, five, even six DUIs. They were always in here laughing it up. I thought you went to jail after three, your say. Depends on your lawyer, she replies. Obviously. Like everything else. But it was the old days, too. The whole courtroom would be full of drunks. Your honor, the DA would say, soand-so here before the court blew point oh eight on the Breathalizer. Ah, big deal, the crowd would mutter, barely qualifies. Time was, legally drunk was point one two. One and a half times as much. That’s true, you nostalgicate. Order in my court, the judge would say. And it was always the same judge in those days, she added. Driving Under the Influence was his bailiwick, you might say. She lands a martini on the napkin in front of you. It’s so cold and so full you can’t pick it up. The conical glass is a large one, two. It holds, as you happen to know, four fluid ounces. That’ll be eight dollars, she says. Eight dollars, you begin to remonstrate. But anywhere else, that’s two martinis, the smart money points out. I know, you smile, I was just taking the piss. You want I should start a tab? the bartender asks sweetly. Oh, man, you growl, after sucking the top three molecular layers off the surface tension. The vodka is so cold, and your haste is so perfect, you don’t even feel the toothpick prick your upper lip. Where have you been my whole life? Right fucking here, I daresay is the answer. She pencils a hash mark on a note pad next to the cash register. So after they fine the first guy and turn him lose with a mild admonition, they lead in the next guy from the drunk tank. Now, your honor, the DA says, so-and-so here blew point one two blood/alcohol ratio on the Breathalyzer. And the crowd waiting along the back wall makes appreciative noises. Order in my court, the judge says, and raps his gavel. You gainfully employed? he asks the offender, and if the guy says yes, he fines him a hundred dollars and let’s him go with a stiff admonition. If the guy says no, he doesn’t fine him and he doesn’t admonish him either, he just says that’ll be ten days on the farm, where you can get thirty square meals and a hard week’s work in the hot sun. Next case. Now, your honor, says the DA, reading from his stack of papers, soand-so here blew point one nine blood-alcohol ratio on the Breathalyzer, and the state thinks that’s really too much, it’s over twice the legal limit. And the back of the gallery breaks into applause and huzzahs for the guy. He’s their hero. Not only that, your honor, the DA adds, squinting at a piece of paper, this is the third time Mr. So-and-so has appeared before this court. More applause and huzzahs from the railbirds. Your honor, my husband would jump in, because, frankly, if you’re on your third DUI and you don’t hire my husband, you’re going to jail and without a drink for a lot longer than most people can stand, my client here is under a lot of pressure. I’ll have another, you say, abruptly pushing the empty martini glass a couple of inches across the bar. She doesn’t miss her stride at all. The shaker is in her hand and the hand is dragging it through the ice, and standing it on the rubber mat in the gutter admixes the sacrament before she has advanced another paragraph into her story. Plus his wife left him so he lost his house, and his job went south, too. You honor, and then my husband would turn to the gallery, who wouldn’t
want a drink? And the place would go nuts. Well, the judge might say. Mr. So-and-so, what resources do you have to fall back on? Now she‘s shaking the cocktail. In other words how is it that, despite these unfortunate circumstances as detailed by council here, how is it that you can afford to drink at all? Now that’s a good question, your honor, my husband would invariably interrupt. She’s pouring. But my client so-and-so here, he’s got the Social Security, and he’s got the unemployment. Is that a fact, the judge would reply. And he’s got no place to live? She lands an icy, brimful martini on a fresh napkin in front of you, and rattles chards of ice out the little holes in the cap of the shaker. Which my husband lower-case g god rest his soul, used to call the Death Rattle Float. He’s almost indigent? Yessir. And a wave of pity would ripple through the gallery. He’s sleeping in his truck. And so, council, the judge would say thoughtfully, are you and the missus still renting out rooms? We are, your honor, my husband would reply. Are you willing to help Mr. So-and-so, here? And is he willing to be helped? And my husband and this poor sonofabitch so-and-so would exchange glances and they’d both shrug and my husband would turn to the judge. It would appear to be the case, your honor. And your head is now propped on the palm of one hand and the second martini is already half gone. Say, listen, the smart money begins. But you’re listening to the bartender. Long story short, she’s saying, there would be the hundred dollar fine, the license would be suspended for anything but a legitimate job, to which you can drive from home and back, but for thirty days only, AA meetings once a week for three months, and So-and-so would be remanded into the custody of my husband. The martini is two-thirds gone. How much money did we have? Thirty-two dollars, the smart money reminds you. I’ll have another, you say, downing the last third of the second martini. And my husband would bring Soand-so home, the bartender says, tossing the diluted contents of the cocktail shaker into the dish sink and dragging it afresh through the ice. And we’d put the guy into one of the rooms upstairs and keep him down here all day for a month. Any checks that came in, he’d sign them over to the bar. In exchange he’d get his drinks, a place to sleep, and a hot meal every morning, if he wasn’t in such bad shape he couldn’t eat. She shakes the new martini with surprising vigor. Thirty days go by, he’s either able to walk out of here and start his life over again, or he’s not. If not, she decants the third martini, sooner or later, he’d drink himself to death right upstairs, there. She replaces the four-inch square napkin with a fresh one and carefully sets the third martini onto it, and applies the Death Rattle Float. And every year, that judge would get a nice ham for Christmas. You want those olives? she asks. You’ve been stockpiling them on a second napkin. You shake your head, no, as you apply your lips to the upper three or fourteen molecular layers of fluid atop the martini. It’s cold. The upper eighth of an inch of your tongue meat is now permafrost. It’s good. Somewhere distant and far down in what passes for your soul the smart money is nagging. Don’t sign anything, the smart money is saying. Pay up and get out of here. If it’s an insect we’re talking about, you say, how does the maxilla fit in?