‘I can’t argue with rent-free digs. Actually, it was his idea.’
Gus rubbed his hands together thoughtfully, with an expression stone-sober, tranquilized, and bloodless. ‘Bring a little order in the establishment,’ Gus said, mumbling so softly it was tough to hear him.
‘A man starts toppling at the bar and before anyone can yell “timber,” he’s safe in bed,’ I said. ‘Nice arrangement.’
‘I just hope I don’t wake up thinking I’m back in lockup. Some shit might get broken. Some people too. My head’s a bad neighborhood you don’t wanna drive through at night, brother.’
‘How long were you in lockup?’
‘Few here, few there.’
‘What for?’
‘Killing some motherfuckers, this and that,’ he said casually.
He pulled off the light and we walked back to the bar counter, where Junior was cleaning the well. Jesse James was curled on the sawdust under the legs of the pool table. The dog lifted his head from his forepaws and seemed to regard me with some intensity, his good ear and his bad ear both pointing straight up on his head, and his black nostrils quivering, undoubtedly picking up the distinctive emanations of my rectum. This made me very nervous, irrationally nervous; in the back of my throat I tasted a compound of dread and guilt that, from here on, would never fail to manifest itself in the presence of Jesse James.
A man will spend years crossing the street to avoid a particular building on no grounds other than it brings a bad feeling to his gut. I always assumed these are the sites of slayings or suicides that happened or will happen. The ragged old dog gave me something like that feeling. Maybe Gus’s boasts about the dog’s mutant olfactory-telepathic powers touched some guilty nerve in me; maybe I suspected that even now Jesse James was alerting his master to my professional-Judas nature, warning him that, despite my surface amiability, I was the one dude in the bar he shouldn’t trust. I genuinely did not want to betray Gus Miller; I wanted to be his friend. But the dog, perhaps sensing my poor record with friendship, seemed to have developed a quick animosity toward me. His eyes were cold and vicious; he belonged on the leash of an SS man.
Whatever suspicions he may have harbored, however, Jesse James lowered his head and began licking himself under the scrotum.
Late-afternoon sunlight diffused through the bar from the front and back doors, which were propped open with rubber wedges so that the crossbreeze could carry away some of last night’s residual corruption. It was the first time I’d seen the bar’s interior exposed to raw daylight, and I experienced the strange, protective urge to bolt the doors against the intrusion, like Nosferatu’s keeper. A bar in natural light is an unspeakably forlorn and depressing place, and you should never have to see it. Everything looks wrong. Every blemish shows. It becomes a hole in the ordered universe, an un-place or anti-place.
Something else was strange. The nicked wooden horseshoe of the bar top was clean. The vinyl stools were shiny. The ubiquitous pissreek and remnants of bile and spilled beer and all the other mingled stenches, never more than perfunctorily scrubbed away by Junior, had been replaced by a pungent ammonia odor. There was even a little green fragrance-tree hanging from the mirror.
‘This place is all wrong,’ I said, sniffing the air with a frown. ‘It’s unsettling. I come here for the squalor. Is rose blossom pot-pourri next?’
‘I landed tidy-up detail,’ Gus said. ‘Throw around some Comet and some Lysol and march Mr. Clean into action and we’re in business.’
‘Gus is our new all-around handyman,’ Junior said proudly.
‘You know I appreciate it,’ Gus replied.
‘For a war hero and a friend of my pops, it’s the least I can do.’
‘I wish more people in this country felt that way.’
Junior shook his head. ‘It’s men like you that it’s all built on,’ he said. ‘After what you went through, to come home and have those hippies spitting on you, and Hanoi Jane and all the others . . . it just burns me . . .’
‘Sometimes you have to be from somewhere else to know what America’s about,’ Gus told the Kiwi.
Junior nodded, creasing his lips emotionally and hooking a thumb at his chest. ‘It’s what’s in there,’ he said.
‘It’s American as shit of you to give me this chance.’
‘A man who’s flown million-dollar gunships, I know I can entrust with this kind of responsibility,’ Junior said. ‘This place – this place – – ’ He waved his hand, taking in the gouged, shiny stools, the splotched walls and the array of decapitated pool sticks. ‘All my old man had to pass on, you know. They say he couldn’t stand to see it disrespected, and neither can I.’
‘I won’t let you down, Junior. And I know your pops would be proud you’re helping his old pal.’
Junior’s eyes shone, slightly wet. He clasped Gus’s hand and looked soulfully into the wide, red, grizzled, dissipated face. I could tell Junior had been practicing this – the look, the handshake, and what he said next: ‘Welcome home, soldier.’
All night Gus Miller crammed Percocets and other pills in his craw and washed them down with Bud. By midnight he was asleep snorelessly on his forearms at the bar, bearlike, and the drinking went on around him. I was drunk and feeling piss-mean, brooding over the day’s indignities. Across the horseshoe I saw Telly and Sal and Old Larry. Ah, my friends. But tonight I didn’t love them at all. In my spleen I experienced a moment of clarity: I realized why I was compelled to hurt my friends by snitching on them. I didn’t do it, after all, for their own good; I didn’t really do it for the money. But when you’re always being kicked in the guts by life, the only people you hate more than the ones above you are the ones below you, those even more wretched and debased. A poor illegal sonofabitch in a Gremlin despises a man on an old Schwinn much more than he despises one in a Benz.
Music videos were playing on the TV set over the bar, superquick montage flashes of bucking slippery jittering perfect oversexed bodies, entities of the distant Realm of Perpetual Coitus. ‘Do you ever feel like just fucking somebody up?’ I asked Junior. ‘Climbing a tower with a rifle and a scope?’
‘You’re not a violent drunk, Benny. I’ve never even seen you swing on anyone.’
‘I walk around wanting to hit people, and I can’t, and I think it’s giving me cancer.’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘I’ll give you a hundred bucks to seduce my wife.’
He’d heard the proposition before – at least once a week for a year – and as always he smiled. He was a professional barkeep, and knew when to play along. ‘Why would you want to do a thing like that?’
‘So I can split.’
‘Why not just split and save the hundred bucks?’
‘What would she do without me?’
‘I’ll consider it for five hundred,’ he said and went down the bar to serve someone’s drink, leaving me alone with a sudden sense of shame. The night was young, and I’d already betrayed Donna, and for a stale laugh at that.
‘Mass murder’s no way to relieve stress, Benny,’ Junior said when he returned. ‘Try a Playboy.’
‘I’m more a Hustler man,’ I said. No need to mention The Fantastic Four and She-Hulk.
‘Hef’s girls are much classier. They hold a little back, make you use your imagination. And the interviews are in-depth.’
‘Sure, you learn her favorite color, you learn her sign,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna abuse myself, I’m gonna use Hustler. Playboy’s too dangerous. You’re flipping between chicks with one hand, your johnson’s in your other, all of a sudden there’s a Q&A with Colin Powell or Tom Clancy. What then? You have to read it.’
‘No, you come back to it when you’re done.’
‘Works for you, fine,’ I said. ‘Me, I have to read it. Your wife walks in, she thinks you’re jerking off to Colin Powell. That’s a dangerous situation, Jack. Pour me a couple more fingers, and I’ll tell you the kind of day Charles Whitman must have had.’
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nbsp; Junior complied. I gave him the run-down on the day’s torments, the dangerous misunderstanding at the Coast Highway gas station, the full sorry story.
Junior feigned interest expertly, nodding and saying ‘Hmm, hmmm’ or ‘Sonofabitch!’ at intervals – he was a professional barkeep – but he was really only half listening. He was busy monitoring the bar, eyes sweeping the room continually, scanning for brewing violence and empty glasses and bowls of Goldfish and Chex Mix to refill.
‘One thing I can’t get out of my mind is that terrier,’ I said. ‘It must have had laryngitis.’
‘What was the sound it made?’
‘Sort of like a cough or a whisper.’
‘Surgical devocalization,’ Junior said. ‘They hack right into the vocal cords and snip ’em. Keeps it friendly and quiet in the million-dollar blocks. Otherwise neighbors wanna sue each other’s asses. You hadn’t heard?’
The glass paused at my chin. ‘That’s horrible. Really?’
‘Remember a few years ago down in South County, the lady who got whacked with a crossbow in the home invasion? She’d taken out her dog’s pipes. Yapped too much. Funny thing, because it might have warned her of the guy with the crossbow.’
I grunted and pounded my drink, thinking gloomily of mute dogs: the poor bastards, inarticulate even at their best, deprived now even of the pure expression of their howl.
CHAPTER 8
Late for work the next day, my head brick-piled under a hangover, I got the expected tongue-lashing when I arrived at Zapata! Zapata!, and took it without flinching. My boss, Aristotle Scabronis, a demonic little Greek in cufflinks and gleaming finger-jewelry, was a shouter and a frequently terrifying man. He owned high-end Mexican food joints around Los Angeles and Orange Counties and he was worth at least a few million dollars. He tried selling Greek food, but Californians wanted Mexican. In his sixties he still worked 80-hour weeks – mostly here, at his ritzy flagship restaurant – charming important diners, browbeating his staff, watching for thieves in our ranks. He had one manner for his customers (gracious, avuncular, expansive) and another for his employees (paternalistic, suspicious, exasperated). He had hair on all his fingers and on his neck, and served as the brunt of many gleeful goatfucking jokes among his kitchen staff.
Scabronis was always going on about the American Dream, and how his kids were in the Ivy League, and how everything was possible here if you worked hard, and how his Mexicans, having no honor, were always stealing from him. What I wanted to tell Scabronis was, ‘Here you are, a Greek dude, running Mexican joints with wetback cooks and dishwashers, pillaging another culture’s culinary genius, stealing their terrific tacos, their wonderful flautas, their voluptuous huevos rancheros, and feeling so superior. Who’s the thief here?’ I longed to tell him his version of the American Dream sucked, even apart from this thievery, because who wanted to sweat off his balls for 30 years only so that he could work 80-hour weeks in his sixties?
Right now Scabronis was scowling at me and jabbing a finger at his watch. I was a half-hour late. The lunch rush started 15 minutes ago. Tables needed to be bused. Dishes were piling up. As I slipped into my apron, he followed me through the grill-hissing, pan-clanging kitchen with its thousand mingling smells of cheese and meat and tortillas: ‘Twice this week! You have no pride, no honor! Shit-ass thief! You stole thirty minutes from me! From my family! My children! How will you ever succeed? How do you expect anyone to respect you?’
Having no answer to these questions, I put my head down and headed silently for my place at the sink, cheeks hot with shame, aware the rest of the kitchen staff were witnessing my humiliation with sweet pleasure. The boss usually picked one person per day as the target of his fury; this meant the others were off the hook. As I hunkered down to work, I lit imaginary fires throughout the restaurant. I torched the tony tablecloths and fine silverware and the walls with their beautiful fake bullet-holes and the framed Mexican revolutionary pictures above every table (Zapata with bandoliers; phrases like Better to die on your feet than live on your knees! to inspire the diners). I poured jet fuel on the Prada handbags and Salvatore Ferragamo suits of the patrons. I watched all the Ermenegildo Zegna silk ties curl and blacken up their owners’ throats. I ignited Scabronis’s bushy black mustache and, one by one, the curly black wires all over his fingers. I couldn’t even afford to eat in his restaurant; I’d never even get past the hostess; and yet here I slaved.
Rick and Alfonse, the other dishwashers, were working busily to keep up with the growing stack of dirty pans and pots. They were not happy with me, either. They muttered something to each other in Spanglish. Often they spent an entire shift trading what sounded like gibberish. I rarely knew what they were saying, but I was pretty sure most of it was obscene. A lot of the time I suspected they were talking smack about me, but I had no proof.
‘Lo siento,’ I said in a weak voice, pulling on my latex gloves and squirting great gobs of liquid detergent into the superpans crusted with oil and grease and food. Grunting furiously, I tried to scour away my humiliation in the soap-foamy muck of sloshing pinto beans, mole, clumped rice, Mexican meatballs, salsa verde, and menudo. It splattered my arms and apron and face.
‘Look at whiteboy go,’ Rick said.
‘Go, whiteboy, go,’ Alfonse said. ‘Get that coño.’
That broke both of them up. Said Rick: ‘Gotta get that coño, holmes.’
‘El dinero,’ Alfonse said, ‘y el coño.’
They riffed that way for a few minutes, nodding at me with smiling hostility. I had no idea what they were talking about. They were insulting me, somehow. I was sure of this. Then I remembered a coño is a pussy. But they didn’t seem to be calling me a pussy. They seemed to be suggesting something else, maybe that a sexual encounter was responsible for my tardiness and/or my unusual vigor at the sink. Maybe they meant to say that I was desperate to keep my job because it permitted me to afford prostitutes. Or maybe they were making the broad philosophical point that whatever was wrong with me must be attributable, one way or another, to coño. Coño was the pox of many a man. Coño hobbled you. Coño corrupted. There was really no arguing with this. At any rate, Rick and Alfonse were not necessarily insulting me. They might even have been expressing some kind of solidarity with me, extending an invitation to friendship. Being as lonely as I was, I took it, though coño was not what happened to be bothering me at the moment.
‘Shit, amigos,’ I said. ‘It’s all about el coño.’
Rick slapped me on the back with one hot sauce-slathered glove, and Alfonse nodded with surprising sobriety, as if a point of deep importance had been confirmed. For once I felt close to them. I knew these men only vaguely. They were tough bastards who never missed a shift, not even when they were dog-sick, and who didn’t even flinch when they picked up stove burns. They both wore peeling sneakers embedded with grass clumps from marathon weekend games of futbol. Now and then I went to Pomona Park – the very place I met Detective Munoz – to catch these games, mostly for the fistfights that erupted with almost ritual regularity and played out according to certain interesting rules. The players formed a wide circle around the fighters and watched with a quiet, neutral connoisseurship as the men exchanged fists, heels, elbows, and knees to settle some point. It could last for 15 or 20 minutes. Then the fighters mopped up their faces and embraced, and with a round of applause, the game resumed. It was all thrilling and admirable and good. These were men who didn’t go around seething and wanting to hit other men, bile burning holes in their digestive plumbing; they hit and then got on with their day. I’d seen both Rick and Alfonse take guys apart, without art, but with plenty of passion. Once I even saw them fight each other. Beyond these things I knew almost nothing about these men, and I was not sure why I craved their approval, much less their friendship, but I did, I did.
Sometime near the tag-end of the lunch rush, as I bused tables, I saw a stunning, slim-shouldered blonde at table 17. She was in the company of an unsettlingly pretty dude with to
rn jeans and a grungy T-shirt. He had high cheekbones, a goatee, stringy Jesus hair, and petulant lips. The girl, who wore a plunging V-neck top, could have been a model in an ad for perfume or a fine brand of heroin, one of those pale, untouchable 60-foot billboard faces. And yet there was an unexpectedly homey touch that rendered her human. She wore a black hair band, one of those Hillary Clinton deals, an accessory I’d always found winning, and which endeared even the icy First Lady to me. It gave the girl a high, intelligent forehead. Unconsciously, I began filling in her Playboy questionnaire for her. Despite her designer-drug looks, she was a chick who liked solitary time in libraries, romantic walks on the beach, barefoot seashell-hunting. She abhorred rudeness and pretension. She would love to solve world hunger. She liked cozy sweaters and fireplaces, and her favorite novel was The Catcher in the Rye. She sympathized with outcasts and secretly longed to save them. She wondered why she was with this shallow, cocky, inappropriately dressed dickhead. She knew she was way too good for him. She’d already tired of his selfishness, his empty soul, his womanizing. She kind of hated herself (she had to admit) for being with him.
Poison bled from my heart as I watched them from across the room. He was on his cell phone, ignoring her, chatting importantly, making some appointment. He held up a finger, making the waitress wait for him to finish his call. Then he ordered for both of them, ordered in Spanish and mispronounced even the words I know, calling chicken ‘polo,’ like the game. He was in my restaurant – an upscale restaurant!; a place where important, well-groomed people dined!; a place people respected! – and he came dressed for the goddamn garage and mispronouncing words. Not to mention the chick, way too good for him. Especially the chick. He was in my house, pissing on my leg. It was more than I could take.
Passing through the kitchen, I dissolved six squares of Ex-Lax in his plate of mole con pollo. I hustled back to the sink before I was caught by one of the chefs or, worse, by Scabronis. Regretting that I wouldn’t be able to witness the dude’s face as it registered the onset of gastrointestinal horror, as he lost his coolness, as he scrambled flatulently to the door that read ‘Caballeros,’ I plowed through a stack of dishes, buzzing in the clench of nervous, nasty satisfaction. Twenty or thirty minutes later, I heard, ‘Benny! You, you shit-ass, Benny!’
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