THUGLIT Issue Ten

by Ed Kurtz

  I didn’t give a damn about Zelda’s hurt feelings or her bloody nose. She’d suffered worse before and had always managed to recover well enough. She probably would’ve agreed that she deserved the slap if it had been just the two of us sitting in our flat. She’d always been susceptible to reason at home, when it was just the two of us, a bottle and our own sacred revulsion of each other.

  But unfortunately for me, we were in a blind pig where I knew this kind of dust-up was frowned on by the man who owned it. In almost any other bar in New York, I could’ve just had the doorman put Zelda in a cab so I could continue my drinking.

  But the Painted Pony wasn’t any bar. It was owned and operated by Archie Doyle: Himself. Doyle liked me as far as it went, or at least he said he did. He ran speakeasies all over town and seemed to take over a few more every week. He was also something of a big shot with the Tammany boys downtown—the bunch who ran New York—though the reasons for his power were always vague to me. Then again, Doyle was always a vague sort of fellow.

  Doyle liked having celebrities in his bars and, following Gatsby, I was considered something of a minor celebrity. Some of my fellow writers, like Ernest, complained how they never get the fame and fortune they were due. I always thought that was probably for the best since we writers wouldn’t know what to do with fame anyway, other than complain. Still, I always thought Doyle didn’t care as much about our celebrity as much he did about the timely paying of our bar bill.

  As much as Doyle may have liked celebrities of all stripes, I knew he abhorred woman beaters. Whether the woman deserved it or not didn’t seem to matter to him. Like some errant knight in a poorly written parlor piece, he felt compelled to protect damsels he perceived to be in distress, even if it was from themselves.

  I didn’t begrudge Doyle this. We all have our own codes, I suppose. I just didn’t want his codes interfering with my nightly drinking. The silent glares I was getting from the drunks didn’t bother me. The prospect of being thrown out of here on a cold New York night while I was only halfway through my bottle bothered me greatly.

  I suppose another man might’ve grabbed his wailing wife and gotten the hell out of there before Doyle and his fat shadow, Fatty Corcoran, threw him out. But I’m not any other man. I’m a writer, and as a writer I was compelled to stay where I was and see the show, even though I would most likely be the villain in that show. Doyle and Corcoran had a flair for the dramatic that even I admired. Running would have been a wise move indeed, but another, more immediate fact prevented me from entertaining the notion.

  I was too drunk to move. I couldn’t feel my legs and hadn’t been able to feel them for some time. So I sat where I was and drank instead. As, I said, the bottle was only half empty, so that was something, I supposed.

  My wife continued to sob, bemoaning her bloodied nose despite the number of women who had already stumbled to her side to pat her hand and tend to her wound—telling her ‘everything would be just fine, honey.' Their verbal aloes were weak elixirs for that which ailed Zelda and me. Our wounds had festered for far too long for platitudes and soothing words to provide any comfort. Ours were afflictions of the soul medicated by an ample prescription of alcohol. A condition arrested, but incurable. Hence my love of drink and interesting company. Both of which are essential to my survival as a man and as a writer, but utterly loathsome to my wife. Hence the rap I gave her on the nose.

  I awaited the arrival of Doyle and Corcoran with the same dread that a drunk greets the sunrise. Inevitable and unpleasant but something that must be endured in order to get on with the greater tedium of life. My sole consolation was that I knew I wouldn’t have long to wait.

  For Tommy, the bartender, had already headed into the back room to tell Doyle what had happened. Like many of the other people in the blind pig that night, Tommy had heard and seen the argument, yet had done nothing to stop it. But once she yelped, indignation was universal and immediate in the speakeasy. A moment before, I was just another writer being a writer. A fiery, creative type. Not much was expected of me. But when I did what people like me naturally do, they were shocked and appalled. I was a villain for doing exactly what they expected me to do. I damned them as much as they damned me for we were all products of complacency.

  I didn’t have long to wait before Archie Doyle appeared with the loyal Fatty Corcoran close behind. While Fatty Corcoran’s immense belly and round features lived up to his moniker, one couldn’t say the same for The Big Mick. Archie Doyle was actually quite short, but thick shouldered and stocky with an air of power about him. He had a habit of rolling up his shirtsleeves to reveal forearms that belonged more on a blacksmith than a saloonkeeper. Most of my crowd like Ernest and Dorothy and the others wrote him off as just a common thug who happened to own a decent speakeasy.

  But I saw a light behind Doyle’s busy gray eyes that no common thug would have. I saw a kind of ruthless intelligence that saw the world as it was and responded accordingly. I so admired Doyle his paradoxes that I held my own in light regard.

  Something of a hush came over the noisy ginmill as people began to notice Doyle and Corcoran had come out from their back room lair. The patrons looked at him with a boozy reverence like the Israelites may have looked at Moses when he descended Sinai with the Ten Commandments. That is if the Israelites had been drunk on bootleg Canadian whiskey, of course.

  “Everyone take it easy and go about your drinkin’,” Doyle announced. “Just a little dust up between man and wife, is all.” He looked over at the bartender, who had resumed his place behind the bar. “Tommy, give everyone a round on the house to get ‘em back in the mood.”

  The promise of free alcohol caused the patrons to forget all about any anger they harbored toward me as they packed around the bar, focusing instead on getting their glasses filled.

  As Doyle pulled over a chair and sat at my table, Fatty lowered himself into the chair already opposite me with as much grace as his considerable girth allowed. Whereas Doyle often looked like he’d just walked in from a union hall, Fatty was sartorially elegant. So much so that I took him for a dandy, which, given his manner of speaking and acting, he most assuredly was.

  Both of them seemed content to just sit there and look at me, which made me uneasy, so I started the conversation by stating the obvious. “I take it you’re out here on my account?”

  Doyle relit the stub of a cigar. “We ain’t out here for our health.”

  “Or the company,” Fatty added.

  I grabbed the bottle of whiskey and poured myself a healthy drink, even though my glass was still half-full. Might as well get while the getting is good, as they say. I smiled at Doyle and Corcoran. “Care to join me? Have your snitch over there bring over a couple of glasses from behind the bar and I’ll be more than happy to share my bounty.”

  “That’s mighty white of you, Frankie.” Doyle took my glass and drank its contents in two swallows. Then he took the bottle from my hand, tapped the cork back into it and set it on the table in front of him. “You’re cut off.”

  I knew why he did it, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it. “That hardly seems fair, Archie. After all, a dustup between a husband and wife is sacred. Why, it’s even mentioned in the bible.”

  “Maybe,” Doyle said, “but that was a long time ago and this ain’t the Holy Land. This is my bar and women don’t get smacked around in my bars.” He looked over to my left at the gaggle of women tending to Zelda. “How you doing, honey?”

  Zelda was still performing for her audience with an abundance of tears and wails. One of the women answered for her. “She’s still in a bad way, thanks to that lousy drunk she’s married to.”

  Doyle looked back at me. “What caused it this time, Frankie? She say your writing was lousy again or did she say somethin’ bad about that punk you call a friend? That quiff Hemingway?”

  I looked at the bottle Doyle had taken away from me. The bottle he had set on the table in front of him. I didn’t feel the n
eed to explain myself to this rum peddler or anyone else. I just wanted to drink until the entire scene melted away the way it always did. Until nothing else mattered and I was alone and peaceful in my own drunken slumber.

  Yes, I wanted a drink, but I didn’t dare touch that bottle. What galled me most was that Doyle knew I wouldn’t touch it. He’d set it on the table in front of me, mocking me, daring me to take it like a lion claiming a carcass. But I wouldn’t. It may have only been a few inches away from me, but it may as well have been on the surface of the moon.

  “I want a drink,” I admitted.

  “And I want answers.” Doyle pushed the bottle aside and folded his hands on the table. He looked at Corcoran and said, “You think he belted her for running down his writing or his buddy? What earned poor Zelda a pop in the nose?”

  Corcoran shrugged his soft round shoulders. He was a big man beneath the fancy suit and layers of fat, but it took a good imagination to see it. “I would wager that it most likely involved his wife’s criticism of his friend. Any critique of the fair Hemingway usually prompts a violent response.”

  Doyle flicked his cigar ash into the tray and looked back to me. “I gotta say the fat man’s on to something, Frankie. You can take people running down your writin’ or callin’ you a two-bit scribbler, but Christ help the man or woman who gets between you and that blusterin’ Nelly who comes in here.”

  I was too drunk to sneer, but I tried to anyway. “Literary criticism from an illiterate bootlegger and his obese dandy sidekick.”

  “Art is the opiate for the masses,” Fatty said, “and I am an ardent consumer. Of art. Of life.” He patted his round belly and smiled. “Of many things.”

  I didn’t know which of them I loathed more at that moment. Then Doyle broke the tie by saying, “Why do you stick up for Hemingway, anyway? He’s a big boy. He fights his own battles. You two sweet on each other or somethin’? Not that I’m runnin’ you down or anythin’ like that. Just curious, is all. Why even Fatty here has what some might call…certain peculiarities, and he’s been my best friend for damned near forty years.”

  “However peculiar you may believe my tastes to be,” Fatty said as he examined his nails, “you may rest assured they’d never be so peculiar as to extend to involve Hemingway. I abhor bullies.”

  Doyle laughed and slapped the table with an open palm. “Ain’t he somethin’? The two of us crawled out of the same gutter down in Five Points, yet he winds up with all the fancy words and I wind up with the booze business. Funny how life shakes out, ain’t it, Frankie?”

  But I didn’t share his humor. In fact, any sense of humor or mirth had left me the instant Doyle took the bottle away. “Your view of the world never fails to fascinate me, Archie.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. Maybe you’ll put me in one of your books. Maybe…”

  The bar grew quiet again as the front door of the place slammed open and I saw Ernest come down the stairs. “I hope you bastards are stocked up on hooch,” he announced as he slammed the door shut, “because I’m in a drinking mood tonight.”

  Doyle’s crude innuendos aside, I’ll admit I always felt better whenever Hemingway was around. His easy masculinity had always appealed to me, but not in the way Doyle—or even Zelda—thought. He had a rugged, worldly quality that made people love and fear him in a way I knew I never would. He’d been an ambulance driver in the war, a correspondent and man of action in the years since. He faced things in his own way and on his own terms in ways I could not. At least, not without a tremendous, pressing guilt soon after. I suppose we most admire the qualities in other people that we find lacking in ourselves. In that regard, I admired a great deal about my friend Ernest Hemingway and resented anyone who tried to turn that admiration into something more than that.

  When we’d first met in France, Ernest always had a knack for spotting people in bars, no matter how crowded, and he spotted me now without my having to wave. He shouldered his way through the patrons lined four deep at the bar; waiting to get their share of Doyle’s promised booze.

  “Hey, Scotty,” Ernest said with good nature. This was his usual demeanor before drink made him combative and sullen. “Say, why the long faces?” Then he looked over at Zelda and her attendants. “What’s wrong with Zelda, anyway? She have one too many?”

  I was going to answer, really I was, but Fatty Corcoran answered for me. “One too many punches in the nose. Courtesy of her husband, your friend. It seems he was emulating you or some notion he has of you.”

  Ernest scoffed at the fat man. “I don’t recall asking you a damned thing, Tubby. I was talking to my friend here, not you.”

  Doyle stopped looking at me for the first time since he’d sat down and looked up at Ernest instead. I saw a playful cruelty in his eyes and I began to worry, for Ernest would see it too and he wouldn’t stand for it. “You’re talkin’ to my friend now, Nelly. And you’re talkin’ to him in my place. You’ll be respectful if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Well then I guess that makes you Archie Doyle,” Hemingway said. “I’ve heard about you. My name’s Ernest, not Nelly. Best you and your fat friend here remember that.”

  “I remember how Frankie here used to be before he ran into you in Europe,” Doyle said. “Just your run-of-the-mill scribbler who couldn’t hold his liquor. After you, after he met you, all he could talk about was you and your great talent. And how nasty he’d get when anyone didn’t agree that you walked on water.”

  “His admiration of your qualities is entirely misplaced,” Fatty said. “I’ve read your work.”

  I watched Hemingway dig in, hands on his hips. “That so? How’d they read to you?”

  Fatty glanced at him before returning to admiring his nails. “Like the rum-soaked ramblings of a flake. A man so scared of his own shadow that he bullies others, praying to God no one notices his own fear.” A small smile appeared on his fleshy face. “I must admit that what I’ve read of Zelda’s work, on the other hand, shows far more promise and depth.”

  I watched Ernest redden—really redden the way he would when he was about to slug someone. He took his hands off his hips and balled them into fists at his sides. “You a professional critic, fat man?”

  “No, simply an ardent lover of good literature, hence my utter distain for anything that you’ve written thus far.”

  “How about you get up and face me when you say that instead of playing with your goddamned nails.”

  Fatty didn’t move.

  Doyle smoked his cigar. “You’re a real tough guy, aren’t you? A real war hero.”

  “I saw my share of action,” Hemingway said. I knew he was as proud of his foreign service as I was embarrassed by my own lack of it.

  “Funny, I heard you were a turd-snatch in the Army.”

  “Ambulance driver on the front line, rum peddler. Volunteered on my own. Where’d you serve?”

  Doyle smiled through his own cigar smoke. “Sing Sing. Five-to-ten for grand larceny and assault. I behaved myself so they let me out in four.”

  “Bet you were pretty popular inside.”

  Doyle shrugged. “I’ve got friends everywhere, kid. Too bad you can’t say the same. Just about the only one who can stand you is old Frankie here and this poor rummy’s too drunk to know a real man when he sees it. Guess that’s why he likes a cheap imitation like you.”

  Ernest surprised me by not throwing a punch. “I’ve seen more action than you or this fat swish here ever have.”

  “I never swish, my friend,” Fatty said, wagging a stubby finger. “I swagger and often stagger, but never, ever swish.”

  Doyle patted his friend on the arm. “That’s tellin’ him, Fatty.” Doyle was still smiling when he looked back up at Hemingway. “Don’t let Fatty’s delicate airs fool you, Nelly. He’s got sand. He’s not like some people who run off to Europe because they can’t hack it at home.” Doyle took a drag on his cigar and let the smoke seep out through his nose. “People like you.”

/>   Ernest reddened again, worse than before. Why he hadn’t started swinging yet was beyond me. I knew Doyle and knew it wouldn’t end well for Ernest. But Ernest didn’t know Doyle at all. Perhaps it was some primal instinct that made him think better of it. For one simply didn’t swing at Archie Doyle.

  Ernest turned his anger on me instead. “Drink up and let’s get the hell out of here. There’s plenty of places to drink with better company, too.”

  Doyle laughed. “There he goes again, Frankie. Runnin’ out when the goin’ gets tough. Bastard’ll probably get the next boat back to England or wherever he’s hidin’ out these days. And you call this punk a friend of yours? Swinging at women is fair game, but a man is something else.”

  Hemingway ignored him. “Finish your drink, Scotty and let’s go.”

  But Doyle was in a playful mood. “I finished it for him, scribbler. He can go any time he wants after he apologizes to the lady over there.”

  Hemingway looked over at Zelda. “Her? Why?”

  “He slugged her a couple of minutes ago,” Doyle said. “Probably because he thought she deserved it. Probably because he thought that was something you’d do under similar circumstances.”

  “She gets mouthy when she’s drunk and probably had it coming.” Hemingway looked down at Doyle; his face still red. “I hate mouthy people. Men or women. Drunk or sober. I find the more they talk the less they do. Just like you.”

  Doyle’s eyebrows rose as he carefully placed his cigar in the ashtray. He looked calm, almost content as though he’d finally gotten what he’d been waiting for. “And what about you, scribbler? You drunk now?”

  Hemingway turned to face him completely now. “Not nearly enough to be able to stand a hellhole like this. Why’d you ask?”

  Doyle gently stamped his cigar in the ashtray. “Just didn’t want you to be able to use bein’ drunk as an excuse is all.”

  “An excuse?” Hemingway laughed. "An excuse for what?”

  With a fluid swiftness I confess I didn’t know he had, Doyle grabbed the bottle he’d taken from me and smashed it up against the side of Hemingway’s head.