Blood, Guts, & Whiskey

by Todd Robinson

  “I used to love her,” I whispered, to change the tune in my head.

  Could be I was so intent on calming the fuck down, that I didn’t see him follow me. Could be my thoughts were elsewhere all the way to the hotel. Could be he took me completely by surprise at the door, me thinking it was room service. Could be, but I’m not sure.

  I’m not sure because I never saw his face, just the knife. Even when he stood over me after ransacking my room (rather poorly I’d say), I didn’t have to look at his face to know who it was; just the way he stood there and the way his right arm hung funny.

  So, I don’t know. Maybe I was inviting it. Maybe I’d put it together some time ago. I mean, all the guy had to do was remember where he’d passed out. And maybe Herman told him who’d taken him home that night. Why not, right?

  Fucking Benji, man.

  Could be I wasn’t so smart. Could be he wasn’t so dumb. Could even be she wasn’t so guilty. Fuck. Could be.

  Who Do I Have to Kill to Get a Little Respect Up in Here?

  Brian Murphy

  Alajuela, Costa Rica.

  Oh man, just to get some respect around here.

  After too long and too many encounters out of the ordinary, you start to wonder just what it’s going to take anyways. It’s not like you’re a tourist. You start to wonder if maybe it’s just too much to hope for—respect. Sometimes you wonder, “Who do I have to kill?”

  Still, you stay loose, you roll away from punches, then you beat a few heads. Bar Sin Problemas. Your idea. The bar and the name.

  A rock ’n roll bar without problems, in a dangerous barrio somewhere in Costa Rica? Bar of no problems? You must have been out of your mind. It’s a crash and burn bar for the locals unless you get a little respect around here.

  Weeks ago, when the beer distributor for the two national brands—Pilsen and Imperial—still hadn’t taken away the old neon beer sign outside with the old name, some kids drove their panel truck underneath the sign and you got up there with a can of oil-based black spray paint.

  As quick as you sprayed “Bar Sin Problemas” up onto the plastic, it ran—the words melting in black angst, running down the front of the sign. Barely legible. Spooky though. At night, the sign on, it cast a pale yellow silhouette down onto the parking lot in front of your place.

  The black lettering, spiked and wicked-looking, sometimes make you lose your bearings. Take you back in time. When you drive up on your Harley, it looks like a punk bar on Wells Street in Chicago—1979. Maybe that’s why you did the sign up in the first place.

  Your kid at the bar took potshots at you that night—the day you did the sign. Yeah, it was Sunday. Yeah, the joint was closed. Yeah, maybe he didn’t hear that it was you outside, screaming, “Mario, it’s me Sal. I locked myself out!” Maybe he didn’t hear you pounding on that front door.

  But you figured he would have had to hear you once you climbed onto the roof and kept screaming that it was you. You thought he’d wake up and walk out, see it was you, wave, and go through the bar to open the front door.

  After that didn’t happen, you figured he might hear you on the roof, banging and crashing like a storm without rain. And if he didn’t hear any of that, then for sure he’d hear the dog, Iggy, barking right in front of the door to the bunker he slept in.

  Maybe it was the dog’s barking that finally caught his attention. You were practically at the end of the building. When he did come out, waving the pistol like a drunk Pancho Villa, he then ripped off four shots right at you.

  All you’d wanted was for him to let you in with his keys, not show you what a maniac you’d hired to manage your bar. You dove for a drainpipe, and a portion of the roof came off and somehow wrapped itself around you like armor as you fell.

  You wondered if he didn’t know it was you all along. Costa Rican humor. Some such shit. Or maybe he was showing you how tough he’d be on intruders.

  You fired his ass, chased him the fuck out, hitting him with his mattress all the way through the bar—a long one, like, as long as a bowling alley.

  Now, your language deficiency—poor Spanish—is probably digging you a big enough hole that maybe you and the bar, will fall through it any minute. Hell, maybe you’ll end up in China if you fall far enough.

  You may as well have been in China. Your customers? They may as well be speaking Chinese. For all you know, they are. No one talks behind your back after you fired Mario. With as much Spanish as you know, they just say it to your face. Then smile so you buy them a drink.

  Rock ’n roll suicide.

  So you need another guy—a manager. Bilingual. The city you’re in, this is a need that sorely screams to the locals, “Gringo. Ready to be fucked.”

  That’s what you’re thinking tonight, while you drive down to The Infernero, Alajuela’s “Little Hell,” to buy some coke. You’re thinking that you have definitely got a problem at the bar of no problems. So what else is new?

  When you hit the road into the barrio San José, you give your bike a little gas, then glide past the sleeping neighborhood.

  Past that, just down the road, silhouettes dance by an old wooden bus stop, under the lone streetlight. That’s where you’re going.

  Like always, whenever you see a dope supermarket on the street, you automatically feel a breeze charged with electricity blowing onto your forehead. Winter or summer, no matter where you are, you feel the heat of commerce.

  New York, Rio, or Chicago, it’s all the same. Dangerous business—the twenty-four-hour variety. Everyone is welcome. It’s how you grew up. You just always believed there had to be places like this. You’re in second gear. Puttering.

  The houses have disappeared. There’s just decaying brick shacks—crash pads. For laughter. For tears. For quick sex. Anything where harm of some sort can be done in private.

  At the bottom of the first hill, barrio San José, the Zamora street crews are out in force. Laughing and dancing to Limp Bizkit throbbing out of a boom box someone has set on the hood of a car, parked in front of the first shack at the bottom of the hill.

  There’s a soccer ball in play. Taxies and cars stop briefly. Tattooed boys run up to the open windows with large plastic bags filled with grams of coke. Transactions are quick, but rarely mirthless. This is Central America. Everyone knows how to laugh. Even when they’re dying.

  These guys, the boys you call the “Down, Down Boys”—Zamora’s crew—they all come to your bar. These guys are for the most part, your best customers.

  They have the first post that you drive by, down at the bottom of the hill.

  “Down, down. Boys.” They liked that. They know you’ve been down, down before—maybe will again, someday. One night at your bar, you played the Zamora boss and some of the kids Iggy Pop’s “Dum Dum Boys.”

  When you translated the lyrics while Iggy mourned the passing of all his boys, they all went nuts. They all wanted to be “Dum Dum Boys”—fearless and peerless. Their own revolution against all the ills and poverty that did its level best to keep them on the street. They loved that too.

  Mi Cumpa. Mi Cumpa. Screams go up when you rev down into first gear, then drop your feet. Sometimes you stay and try a conversation. There’s ten or eleven guys out tonight. They run to shake your hand. You’re a humble celebrity. You’ve been tough enough down here. It’s one of those places in the world where guts and a proven nutcase streak get you even further than money. Money ain’t shit down here. Anyone can have it. It’s just paper.

  You’d flogged some kilos of reefer to Beto Zamora—the boss—before the tax people arrested him, his mother, his lawyer, and half his family. This is a place where you’ve always been treated well.

  The Zamora without tattoos—the eldest brother, the straight businessman—was out on the street the very next morning after the bust, peddling coke. Zamora balls, tattoos or not.

  He was there to let the city know that the show was going on without Beto. Sin Problemas. You drove down that morning also. With a bottle
of tequila and a rose for the mother. He understood.

  Finally workers drifted back—the tattoo boys. But the main tattoo, Beto Zamora, he was locked up tight. You miss him. He at least had advice.

  Another night at the bar, he’d made a very small space between two fingers, then howled, “You’re only this far from fucked, Gringo.” Slamming down his shot, he came over and gave you a bear hug. Pointing to his chest, he said, “Igual, Gringo, igual.” Same as me.

  You dropped by the prison at San Sebastian and hung out with Beto for a while after his arrest. He had everything in there. Still, you’d already been in one five years. No matter how much you have inside, you still can’t come and go. Not even Beto Zamora. Any freedom you got—it’s got to have something to do with who you are to begin with. How strong. How patient. How content or how angry. So far, Beto seemed pretty free.

  Riding home from San Sebastian that day, helmet hanging from the handlebar, feeling the wind catch your hair, you dodged the few traffic cops that cared enough to chase you for driving without a helmet. As you smoked the first cop car, you realized just how similar you really were to Beto Zamora. It was a game you played.

  Driving away from the boys after buying eight grams, your hog wants to decide what to think of the rotten petrol you filled up with earlier. It decides. It sputters and you barely keep it running. Then, after a righteous backfire, that bitch wants to fly.

  You shotgun some coke and kick into third gear and build speed, up towards where there’s nothing but dark, winding road and coffee plants. The only sound in the world, you and the hell you are raising.

  Getting back now, it’s close to five. Too lazy to open up the big doors, you chain up your Harley outside. Just as you click the padlock closed, a taxi pulls up. There’s three girls inside. You don’t need a Berlitz course to know that this is a good thing.

  They’re friends of a dolly you spent a few hours with a while back. She’d come to your bar with a group, and while they were drinking, you left for her place, then brought her back an hour or so later. That was when Mario was still there, before he tried to kill you.

  She lived in the row of cottages behind the huge meat processing plant, Cinta Azul. You’d always heard that it was a dangerous place. Poverty brings dangerous to desperate, wherever the poor live. This was such a place. Rooms out in back of the front cottages rented daily, weekly, monthly. Whatever. Very little asked. Just stay alive to pay tomorrow.

  Pulling up, you chained your bike to the one tree out in the parking lot—really just dirt and stones. She told you not to worry about the bike.

  To get to the rooms, you followed her through a concrete hallway with dim moonbeams coming through from the roofless top to light your way. There was a common shower and latrine on one side off the hallway. You thought how interesting a place like that could be in this dark. Then you thought about your bike. Maybe you would have been worried, except that you couldn’t take your eyes off the girl walking in front of you, her ass swishing and swinging.

  She whispered that she’d wet her pants. She didn’t mean with urine, by the way. She told you they were spotted with fluids she claimed she couldn’t stop.

  You told her to keep the juice flowing. She shuddered as if a cool breeze had suddenly swept down from the hog farm behind the cottages and along the river. You remembered fragrances. Her perfume, then the hog farm, and finally, the baking smells of alcohol from the still they worked day and night over at the farm. Pigs and drunk Costa Ricans—twenty-four-hour lunacy.

  Down here, every Costa Rican you meet tells you, “Pura vida.” Pure life. As you reach for baby love’s naked shoulders once she drops her blouse, you laugh, thinking about the hog farm.

  Baby, now that’s pura vida.

  Sure enough, when you pulled her pants down, there was a dull white froth and more juice smeared onto her underwear. You ripped her panties off and her cunt began to squirt like a fountain. For a minute you felt like Superman. Then you dragged your finger against her dark, purple lips and juice was all over your arm—an explosion of desire.

  Definitely that was your feeling when you went back there on your own, days later—four in the morning. You gambled your bike for flesh. It’s not like you could drive up quietly. Everyone in the whole joint, rooms and cottages, knew you’d just driven up. Gringo loco. Looking for that “good thang.”

  That’s what need can do. Needing dope, a woman—anything. Need means taking a chance.

  But oh, lookee here. It’s her three friends. So you let them in and put the dog out in the back. He’s pissed. He’d gotten into one of the ladies’ purses and when you saw him running around with a tampon in his mouth like a cigar, you realized he’d steal the show.

  You get everyone a drink. Then put on some New York Dolls and sit back to view the scene. Warm soft light, no noise outside, and three semi-to-very hot pros sitting close and showing a lot of leg and chest.

  There’s nothing sexier in the whole world than being with a woman in a closed bar. All right, maybe only to you. But multiply one woman times three and you’d hardly get an argument from too many men.

  If the girl you’d slept with out there by the factory was nasty good, her friends this morning remained, as yet, unquantified. They were an unknown pleasure. Or maybe?

  That’s all right. You know that there’s nothing they can steal. You serve them beer. That’s cheap. Their company suddenly is ludicrous. No one seems to want to see your office, or to check the plumbing out with you in the woman’s washroom.

  Still, you strut like the little red rooster. It’s the Sal Palermo show, all the way live, at the bar of no problems.

  Except that they want to smoke some reefer. You got coke—cocaine, that is; forget about Coca-Cola—you got that too. You got every brand name and variety of booze they allow in the country. You figure you’re fairly easy to look at. In other words, in such a poor place, you have pretty much everything.

  Everything you got here, except reefer. You just sold fifty kilos. Not that the girls would have known that. Now, all you wish for is a joint. Like, “Lord, is that too much to ask for?”

  Invariably, someone will have to roust a taxi, take them “down, down,” and buy some pot. It’s light out—after six, when the taxi pulls off. Now there’s two dollies. Now you’re tired. It’s a wash. Fuck it. But, not only that, you’ll be up till next winter if you keep falling for this shit. Your eyes hide under raccoon circles of black.

  Just as invariably as the one is leaving in the taxi—divide and conquer—the other two have suddenly found so many things to talk about that now they practically ignore you. That’s fine. You want them gone. Maybe you will sleep a little if you can.

  But every time you write the girls off and return to the study of the tequila bottle you are slowly emptying along with too many beers to count, the girls chat away and you can’t help but hear the word moto repeatedly.

  David Johanson wails “Lonely Tenement” while you start to put one and one together. Moto. That’s motorcycle in Spanish. And as far as you know, you’re the only one present with one.

  You start to doubt seriously that they’re talking about what a good find you are because you’re charming, handsome, and you have this extraordinary motorcycle. They play fake when you look their way. Sometimes, although you’d barely seemed to notice, you catch them whispering. You know a setup. This one is a cartoon of poor subtlety.

  When the taxi returns and everyone is reunited, they all decide that what would really be swell is for all of you to go back to their place—the surreal dump—“cottage nightmare row,” where who-the-fuck-knows-what can happen to a gringo in that labyrinth at seven A.M.

  What a great idea. Why stay here where there’s every amenity imaginable, and now, even some pot to smoke?

  No, they won’t hear of it. Promises start to circulate about blowjobs given by all three. Crazier sex than you’ve ever had. Well, sure, they couldn’t know about the girl and the snake. You laugh. They all are
telling you at once to follow them on your moto.

  You say, “Right, right, the moto. Sure. Why stay here where it’s cool and safe and we have booze, coke, places to fuck, when I can drive my Harley over to a sweltering shitbox and risk my life?”

  All three girls laugh and nod, yes, of course. Still, they add moto enough times that you begin to get the picture. They are very hopeful to see you at the cottages.

  You tell them enough “Cynical Hall” wisecracks to let them know there is no chance you are going to stay here alone when you can go hang out with three women in a shithole.

  One of the little bombshells with the circus tits is on your phone. Moto is heard over and over again. Obviously your bike is part of some grand agenda among quite a few early risers, or late going to bed, gals and pals.

  When you hear her on the phone, you go out in front of the bar and unchain your hog. Coming back into the bar, you start to swing the heavy link chain with fast and cutting kung-fu moves.

  The girls have already called a taxi. Now it seems as if they are all in a hurry to get out into the heat and go back to their slum.

  You don’t mind getting rid of them. They want you to drive up there on the bike. Each girl has managed a promise that you will never forget the sex this morning.

  First, you ask, “What sex?”

  Finally, to get them all out, you let them know you’ll be following shortly on the bike after you have taken all the tampons away from the dog, then feed him his three double-sized cans of tuna.

  Another taxi shows up and everyone kisses you on the lips and cheeks and all try for an excuse that might force you to get a better look at the six sets of darkly tanned breasts. A nipple here and there. They want to do you harm.

  In this city, even one tough bitch can be every bit as dangerous as a man. In this fucking world, you always keep reminding yourself, you will always be a visitor. Not a tourist, but never exactly ever really one of them. And these bitches here? They suddenly don’t seem human. Just flesh and long sharp nails. Harpies to rip you apart. Leave your bones to rot. Not the future Mrs. Palermo here, you say to yourself and laugh.