In the mornings, before the sun burns away the fog that rolls in from the ocean down the hill, the maintenance hands and labor-pool men arrive in their pickups and utility vans. They load up on three-buck breakfasts of whiskey-spiked black coffee and eggs with Tabasco sauce, before rattling off to whatever kidney-shaped pool or strip of expensive lawn or patch of Mediterranean roof they’re working that day in Newport. All afternoon the bar drowses in the cool, smoky dimness; a few old rummies push around pieces on a checkerboard; unshaven men work up doomed schemes on napkins and coasters. At sunset the laborers come straggling back with the day’s stinks and resentments, trading punches and complaints about the rich. And at night the vampires slink out of their 55-dollar-a-night motels and one-room efficiencies, folding hands the color of the Dead Sea Scrolls across the counter, with their purple lips and eyes that don’t line up and armpits that sweat gin through the night. Side by side, their slouching bodies look like some kind of slumscape, a row of rat-gnawed tenements. The sight tended to cheer me up.
I never knew how the bar got its name. It probably had to do with the cost-efficiency of tacking a couple of letters to the front of a prior, prettier one, judging from the Frankenstein neon hanging now above the grimed, mustard-colored façade: GREasy Tuesday.
One night after my shift at the restaurant (Mexican, sink) I found myself dreading the prospect of home, of another evening confined with my wife and the gibber of the TV. In no time my bicycle had taken me across town and parked me in front of the bar, and then I was moving down the long, smoky hallway at the entrance toward the blur of bodies and dim crimson illumination in the main room, suddenly depressed that I had no place else to go, that I felt at home only here. It couldn’t reflect well on me. Already the familiar smell assailed me – the bar’s fetid compost of alcoholic sweat, sawdust, Kmart cologne, Brylcreem, cigarette ash, piss, intestinal bile, domestic beer – and already I was becoming part of the smell, augmenting it with all the bad sweat and misery coming out of me. I drifted down the hall like a man carried by a powerful invisible current, propelled toward the sweetly alluring sin-lights of the bar, not even conscious of working my legs toward them.
I had slipped down this tunnel so many times, lived in this smell so many years, the passage was automatic; I believed my ghost would be doing it long after my body departed, just like Tony the Money and the other trapped shades. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I was going to die here, I was going to die just another bad smell, among the mole men, no better than any of them. I knew every inch of this bar’s scabrous skin, and it knew every inch of mine. We owned each other and understood each other. We were like one of those bitter old couples you see, she and I, hating each other even as we wrapped our bored bones around each other one more time – a hideous nightly dry-hump, lacking passion or even pleasure. Nevertheless I was hers and she was mine and there was some comfort in that.
The tunnel opened into the main room, and I stepped through the vertical sheets of smoke toward the counter, moving past the 10 or 12 cheap stools arrayed around the horseshoe. The stools that weren’t sticky with beer were spilling stuffing from gouges in their surfaces or patched with masking tape. I found my favorite stool at the far end of the bar and hunkered down to wait for my drink. Familiar faces around the bar: trajectories doomward as my own.
Telly Grimes was back tonight, after six months in lockup. He wore his favorite uniform of snakeskin boots, Levis, Western longsleeve shirt with pearly snap-buttons, and Texas bronco-buckle. It was good to see him. He was sitting beside his best friend, Sal Chamusco.
‘I tell them, “Officers, fer crissakes, it ain’t my shit,”’ Telly said. ‘What kinda dumb-ass keeps fifty hot volleyballs in his back seat? I say, “When you gonna leave a man alone in this country?” I say, “You put ’em there, you fascist fucks. I know how far you’ll go . . .”’
Telly was recounting his latest arrest, drinking Coors, chain-smoking 405s and saying fucking-pigs this, fucking-pigs that. He was an ex-radioman with a voice all bass and gravel, textured with 35 years of fumy carcinogens. Gaunt and bent, with gapped fanglike choppers and gray, moistureless skin, he was easier to imagine hanging upside-down in a cave than sleeping in any human habitation.
A one-man clearance center for all kinds of random black-market trade, Telly spent a lot of time slouching against the fence at soccer games and loitering near labor pools, hawking cheapjack green cards and drivers’ licenses. Mexicans called him ‘El Chupacabra,’ after the legendary beast that swept down from the hills to spirit away cows and drink from their jugulars. Telly believed it was an endearing term of some kind, maybe Spanish for ‘dude’ or ‘pal.’ Once, with the aim of peddling a ‘miracle’ to the faithful, he went through a half-dozen lighters failing to burn the recognizable likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe on a flour tortilla.
Telly was on his second pair of lungs and needed a third. Three years ago, an ice-slick sent a Mormon teenager through a windshield and saved Telly from emphysema. He was certain he didn’t deserve the new lungs; it seemed an awful injustice the kid should be snuffed out so that Telly, who knew he was one of God’s sorrier sons, could kick around larcenously for another decade or so. He vowed to beat his vices and do his best to obey the law. He bought walking shoes. He went to AA. He tried to develop a Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ. He quit smoking and lectured on its evils, twitchily spitting bag after bag of sunflower seeds into the sawdust. His friends found him insufferable.
Raging with tears, and with a Michelob bottle trembling threateningly in his grip, Sal Chamusco finally told Telly that he missed his best friend, that he’d rather see him dead than replaced by this seed-spitting psalm-sucker who’d taken him over like a pod creature.
They embraced then, hot tears filling the cystic pits on Telly’s cheeks. Sal lit a cigarette and thrust it at the thin, purple gash of his friend’s mouth; the men looked at each other silently for a long time until, slowly parting, the lips received. Apart from jail stints, Telly had not been without a cigarette since.
Right now they were sitting beside each other and fixedly avoiding each other’s eyes. Sal was a squat, nervous man who wore a baggy Members Only jacket and a mustache that refused to meet in the middle.
‘Why’d the pork stop you in the first place?’ Sal asked. He carried a Bic lighter snug in his sweaty palm, like a sick man with his hand on the call nurse’s button. When he was depressed, especially around the holidays, he torched Dumpsters to make himself feel better. I was never a lover of fire myself, but in certain black moods I could admire the purity of the fuck-you it represented.
‘Tag,’ Telly said wearily. ‘Tag’s expired. Who can jump through those DMV hoops anyway? Miserable fucking luck! And I tell them, “I didn’t loot the fucking Sports Authority! I got these offa some wetbacks! You can’t connect me to that shit!”’
‘You accuse the cops of planting those balls,’ Sal said.
‘Bet your ass I did,’ Telly said.
‘Then you say some Mexicans sold ’em to you.’
‘Right.’
‘Maybe you deserve to get jacked-up, story like that.’
Their posture resembled two men having a conversation in a car, watching something distasteful through the windshield, rather than each other.
‘Six months of my life’s nothing to laugh about,’ Telly said. ‘This is a joke to you? You know what they feed you in the Orange County jail?’
‘Goats’d puke their guts,’ I said. ‘I’ve been three times.’
‘Thank you, Benny,’ Telly said. ‘Benny’s been three times.’
‘Hear you ate a lot of salad in there,’ Sal told Telly. ‘Hear they got an all-you-can-eat salad bar.’
Drunks sputtered and wheezed in amusement. Telly looked wounded. He cut his eyes to his Coors.
Little Junior walked over and said in his cheery Kiwi lilt, ‘They torture you with greens, huh? What’s so bad about – – ’
‘He means ass-eatin
g,’ I said. ‘Don’t ask me who thought it up. Reminded some inmate of a nice bed of Romaine, and there you are.’
Junior hurried away to find some glasses to towel off.
Telly to Sal: ‘I siddown tonight, six months in the dungeon, what do I get? Everyone else is, “Hey, Telly,” and “Good to have you back, Telly,” and you’re like, “Hey.” That’s it. “Hey.” Not a hug, not a handshake, just the fuckin’ stink-eye all night.’
‘You been stink-eyin’ me!’
‘Well, maybe I hate you, you greasy guinea fuck!’
‘Maybe I hate you too, you fuckin’ salad eater!’
In this fashion they made up. Soon they were sitting with their arms around each other’s shoulders – long, bony Telly and fireplug Sal, cursing each other and shaking with laughter.
Suddenly I was as invisible as the drifting smoke. Seeing them in that brotherly, almost amorous huddle – these two gnarled hoodlums, these low-rent lepers who didn’t know half the things that I did – I felt a familiar kid-alone-in-the-cafeteria ache. It seemed unfair they should enjoy such a bond.
It’s like trying to be friendly with an ugly, kicked-around dog you believe would appreciate your attention. You say, ‘Come here, boy,’ but all the mutt does is show you its ass. You watch his balls bounce away, and suddenly you’re a lower thing than he is.
‘We’re a proud people,’ Sal said. ‘We made up the Sistine Chapel and vendettas.’
‘Wops got the God racket, I’ll give you that,’ Telly said. ‘But you stole it from the Heebs.’
Soon Sal was quietly apprising Telly of recent commerce. Eddie the Chink was trying to move some hot Björk tickets, a shipment of luffas, a set of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan collectible plates, six reclining plastic nativity lambs, and three cases of ben-wah walls; Balboa Bill was on the hunt for some animated Japanese splatterporn; a dude in Newport wanted to unload some Swedish furniture, Brazilian exercise videos, and South American fighting fish . . .
I sat listening, looking as harmless and inconspicuous as an empty bar stool. My only real talent: listening, filing away what I hear using memory tricks I picked up in magazines (since a man didn’t want to be seen taking notes amid loose talk of larceny). There’s a gigantic old Southern plantation house in my head with 10,000 rooms where I deposited what I picked up, street names of underworld players, accomplices, cribs, cross streets, car types, girlfriends, pimps. Benny Bunt’s Fabulous Memory Palace, I call it, and there are things kicking around in those rooms – recipes for failed drinks and bad limericks and obscure words from 15 years of vocabulary calendars, and data on long-dead batting champions and the Turn Ons and Turn Offs of Eighties Playmates – that I sometimes wish would clear out and make room for better tenants. Maybe it’s low on the scale of important gifts a man should possess in the world, this memory stuff, but it made me ferocious at Trivial Pursuit, particularly because I’d flawlessly memorized all the cards ahead of time. And it helped pay the bills.
I’m a snitch.
Not one of these low-lifes at all. You must’ve mistaken me, sir! No: a spy, a man on a mission, an agent of higher authorities merely posing as a lower life form. A soldier behind enemy lines.
I could remember the smell of those fine, white, regulation-size volleyballs when Telly brought them in last year, three in each arm, factory-fresh in their packages. He passed them around, but found no takers, the bar’s regulars not being known for their athleticism. (By mysterious channels he’d also acquired eight pairs of Chuck Norris crotch-flex jeans that we snapped up immediately. Snug inside them, you were supposed to be able to throw head-level axe-kicks ‘without hindrance from the superflexible fabric,’ as Telly put it. ‘A confidence builder in any dangerous situation.’ So clad, we spent the next half-hour out back kicking up packing crates with savage martial grunts and howls. Sal Chamusco hurt himself the worst, ambitiously trying to get his leg above his waist; the rest of us settled for knee-level and below.)
That day I excused myself from the bar, found a payphone down the block, and called Detective Al Munoz. El Guapo. I gave him the license plate of Telly’s 1978 DeVille – retrieved from one of the rooms in my brain labeled ‘Potential Useful Stuff’ – and told him about the hot volleyballs he could find in it. The wonderful Norris jeans I didn’t mention. ‘Keep the tips coming, Cowboy,’ Munoz told me. ‘I’ll pass it on to Property Crimes and make sure you get a few bills. And lemme know when you hit some gold.’ He meant something better than a stash of hot sporting goods, something a homicide man like himself could use. Munoz was always calling me Cowboy. We had a special understanding.
Graffiti carved into the bar’s counter top:I smell bacon, I smell grease
I smell the Costa Mesa police
‘Those jackboot pigfuckers, I’d like to, I dunno what,’ Telly was saying bitterly, scanning the bar for the comfort of shared bitterness. ‘But I’d like to do something to ’em.’
‘We’d all like to do something to ’em,’ I said. With a flourish I peeled back the sleeve of my shirt to show the six-inch scar across my forearm, where I cut myself colliding with a fence (schnapps, Schwinn). ‘Last time they picked me up, I got this souvenir. Some men are blessed by luck, but I don’t see any such man at this bar.’
From the end of the bar, Old Larry Swet muttered in outrage at the cops’ treatment of his pals Benny and Telly, making a noise that sounded like, ‘Uhhhfuggin fuggin caz! Gugdammit peegahs! Nug blaggah!’ He was in his seventies, wasted to the shanks and barely capable of human speech anymore, but his watery eyes followed people’s mouths when they spoke. Outrage shuddered through his brittle old body, and, shaking his head slowly, he looked between me and Telly sympathetically. It was good to have his love.
‘Larry knows,’ Telly said.
‘A man who’s logged some mileage on the unluck highway,’ Sal said.
‘Look, Telly,’ I said. ‘Those Nazis stole six months of your life you won’t get back, and they gave me this gash, but there’s no sense dwelling on it too much. God knows we’ve got the right. God knows. But you’re back in the land of the drinking now, and I’d like to put one in your paws to celebrate.’
Telly was touched. ‘Shit, that’s pretty decent of you, Benny.’
‘Least I could do. And one for Sal and Larry too.’
Junior brought the drinks. Telly and Sal and Larry raised their glasses to me and cursed the Man. I raised mine in solidarity, shouting, ‘Fuck the fucking Man!’ We drank, and it was a beautiful moment, the sense of brotherhood in the room almost enough to bring tears to a man’s eyes.
It was a fine thing, to be here in the cool, smoky dark with the other ugly men, none of us even ugly in the shadows, our bad yellow teeth unseen and our cracked veins nearly invisible. The love we shared was a true love, the strange family love of moles for fellow denizens of the tunnels.
With such emotions in my chest I told myself that I snitched on them for their own good. Freedom was bad for them. They didn’t know what to do with it. Lockup kept them from drinking and smoking themselves to death. I was doing them a kindness. Without some time away in lockup, besides, tender reunions like these would be impossible.
‘How’s your woman?’ Telly asked me. ‘She letting you in these days?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Twice a year I go to the mines. Bring your pick and shovel and get down to work.’
A man shouldn’t malign his woman this way. I’m against it on principle, and have no respect for men who do it. But Telly laughed, and Sal laughed, and Old Larry made a half-gurgling, half-choking noise that was probably laughter, and they were all raising their drinks again to witty Benny, smiling in boozy brotherhood at me over the scum of their glasses.
Every day I said to myself, ‘I will not talk shit about my woman today.’ But it’s easy to betray your principles for a little love. Still, you could’ve asked these guys: I was still about the biggest-hearted human being you ever met. ‘Benny Bunt might not be so easy on the eyes,’ they’d say,
‘but he is one big-hearted motherfucker.’ They all remembered me staking them drinks when they were hard up. Among the chronically hard-up, that coin went a long way.
CHAPTER 4
I couldn’t say when Gus Miller walked in, because I didn’t see him. In fact he just seemed to materialize in the smoke around midnight, like some kind of demon-bear in the misty woods. I looked up from my fourth or fifth or sixth beer, and there he was across the bar, this enormous stranger with shaggy gray hair pulled together in a ponytail that hung down his back through the opening of a Yankees cap, and his bare arms so thick with tattoos that for a moment I thought he was wearing sleeves. Sal and Telly and Old Larry cackled at some story he was telling.
‘Who’s that big Willie Nelson motherfucker over there?’ I asked Junior. ‘Look at all that scribbling on him. He looks like a toilet stall.’
‘I dunno.’
‘I suppose he’s being funny. He’s the new funny guy around here.’
‘Take it easy, Benny. A bar has room for more than one. Have another.’
He brought me another drink and I carried it over to where the gray-haired stranger was holding court. At his feet lay the world’s sorriest-looking mutt. A rangy, smoky-gray dog that looked to me like a German shepherd, although the stranger was saying it had strains of wild Canadian steppe-wolf in it.
‘Why’d you call him Jesse James?’ Telly asked Gus Miller.
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