I looked around the bar. It seemed there was some kind of office softball team that must’ve come by after their game, as well as the usual mix of law students and neighborhood types. No one to wake Lil’ Petey up. I did some small circles with my shoulders and rolled my neck around; I had a touch of a headache and the beer wasn’t really helping matters yet.
I saw Patty squeezing her way back toward me through the crowd. She was carefully holding four shots in front of her as if they were hydrogen bombs she didn’t dare drop lest civilization endeth.
“I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of night,” I said, genuinely surprised at the offering. I wasn’t really thinking about getting shitfaced.
Patty smiled. “No one ever does until it happens.” She balanced the shots on top of the jukebox. “This is sort of a sampler. I didn’t know what you drank. I’m embarrassed, I should know what kind of poison my neighbor prefers. There’s Jack, Bushmill’s, Southern Comfort, and tequila. Your choice.”
I picked up one of the brown ones I thought was the Jack, shaking off a twinge of foreboding. “You had to get four shots, huh?” I said, grinning.
“Tequila for me,” she said, holding the glass up. “Please make the toast, neighbor.”
I raised mine. “Okay, well, here’s to you then, Patty. When you hear me retching later, please be kind and don’t yell at me to shut up.”
Mouths opened, hands tilted, and liquid was swallowed. I could feel the trail of fire go from the back of my tongue down through my pipes until it hit bottom and spread wildly in the dry grass of my stomach. I chased it with the bottom of my beer. “Blech,” I said, eyes tearing.
Patty was already holding up her next shot. I lived next to the female Bukowski, it seemed. She handed me the SoCo. “C’mon, take your medicine,” she laughed. “The faster you do it the less it hurts.” She tipped her head back and sucked the shot from the glass like the cowboys in the Westerns do when they’ve rolled into a saloon after a long day on the trail.
I downed mine as well, although my form was closer to that of a freshman girl at a sorority mixer, eyes screwed closed and a look of disgust on my face. I wasn’t an amateur when it came to shots, but sometimes when you haven’t properly girded yourself, they can be a quite a shock to the system. Like jumping into a really cold pond.
I went to the bar with watery eyes and fetched us two more beers, wondering how long it was going to be until the two doses of evil got into my bloodstream and reached my brain. Any moment now, any moment now.
We drank those beers and then started on two more that a waitress friend of Patty’s brought by on the house. Above the clamor of the bar, Patty was going on about what it had been like to live around here years ago, during the riots at the Stonewall. “Let me tell you something,” she said, leaning toward me, “the gay guys weren’t all muscled out like they are today. They were more effeminate back then. But they were still stylish as hell. And the cops, the cops were all these fat, out-of-shape guys in their polyester uniforms. Everyone down here was rooting for the gays. Less firepower but so much more panache.” She poked me on the shoulder. “How you feeling, soldier? Am I losing you?”
“No, I was listening,” I said, momentarily a bit unsteady. “Just getting my sea legs.”
“Hey, do you want to go somewhere else?” She held her almost-full beer up to mine. “I mean, after these?”
“Sure. I mean, maybe.” What time was it?
“Think about it. I know a fun spot. But first, the ladies’ room.” Patty strode off.
I was fading a little but game. Why not? All I had to do tomorrow was man the phones a bit, and remember to breathe. I could kill a lot of brain cells and still perform adequately, what a joke. Patty must’ve had an easy day in store as well. I had seen grown-ups drink before, but generally it was at weddings and things and they were wearing suits or pearls. Patty was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with STUYVESANT written in all caps on the front, with jeans and the sandals. If those sandals could talk. I guessed they’d probably say something like “Look out for that dog shit!” or something. Yeah, sandals didn’t seem like they’d have much of a personality. Those high boots girls wore, now those you’d want to sit next to at a party. They knew the secrets of the back of the knee.
Patty returned and then I went to the bathroom. I carefully used my foot to lift the toilet seat. I did my thing and then used my foot again to flush. I was like Daniel Day-Lewis when it came to using public toilets without touching them with my hands. If only I could manipulate my foot to turn restroom doorknobs, I could live without any fear of bathroom germs. Maybe someday.
I found Patty in our spot near the jukebox. The crowd had thinned somewhat since we’d arrived. I still wondered what time it was, but then I thought maybe I’d better not find out. Grabbing my beer and bravely taking a big gulp, I asked Patty, “So, what were you thinking about next?”
“Well, neighbor, I’m thinking we should leave here, and go to this private bar I know on Sixth Avenue near Twentieth Street. I think you’ll like it.”
“What’s its name?” I asked.
“I don’t know, actually. I don’t think it has a name. It’s in an apartment.” She proceeded to tell me it was an after-hours joint, a place that was open after the legal limit of four a.m. I had actually never been to one, but I knew Tina had had some fuckedup nights where she ended up at places like that. Patty explained that a lot of bartenders and waiters who worked the late-night shifts only got off at four, when no legal places were still open. These bars filled that need.
We drained our beers and walked outside. Patty immediately lit up a cigarette. I could almost see our apartment building from where we stood, and I was thinking of calling an audible. She took a long drag and let out a smoke ring. I watched as it curled up toward the streetlight and hung there, slowly dispersing and becoming part of the sky. It sucked that you could never see stars in the city, too much light leak. Patty yelled “Taxi!” and a cab pulled up beside us. She stamped on the butt and opened the door, and in we slid. She gave the driver an address and our heads snapped back with the G-force of acceleration.
I was feeling a bit like Jell-O as the cabdriver managed to hit every single pothole on his way up Hudson. Riding in the backs of cabs drunk sometimes made me a bit nauseated; all the grease and license stickers on the Plexiglas partition made it nearly impossible to look out the front windshield to see where you were going. I stared out the side window and watched stores and pavement and graffiti pass.
Patty let out a mighty cough as we crossed Fifteenth Street. One hand covered her mouth, the other braced against the partition, fingers flexed, white on the tips from the pressure. Her eyes were shut tight and a vein on the side of her forehead stuck out like a major thoroughfare on a map. She rolled down the window and spat. “Uggh,” she grunted.
“You okay?” I asked, as the car rolled to a stop at a light.
“Yep. No big thing.” Patty smoothed her hair. Her breathing returned to normal.
The cabdriver leaned his head back. He was a very dark-skinned black man, I guessed probably from Ghana—there were a lot of drivers from there, who knew why? He gave us the once-over, eyeballing us nastily; he was worried about having someone yak in the back of his cab. He shook his head and then punched the gas. He was a classic two-foot driver, one on the gas, one on the brake. I was sure that style had led to at least one vomit scene for him before, you’d think he would’ve figured it out.
We turned on Nineteenth and traversed the two avenues in silence. Patty stared out the window and I started to get tired again. But suddenly the taxi screeched to the curb and we were there. She pulled five dollars out from somewhere and we were standing on the empty avenue.
“You know,” she said, looking around, “some cabdrivers are very nice. The others just hate humans, they deal with them all day and are sick of them. Those guys are just dogs eating garbage, in my book.” She put her arm around me. “This way, neighbor.”
We walked up to the buzzer of a low-rise building and Patty punched the third-floor button. After a pause, the door buzzed open and in we went to the fluorescent-lit lobby. Patty pushed the button for the elevator. Immediately the door opened. Inside was a big-in-every-way man wearing an oversized T-shirt and sunglasses and holding a walkie-talkie.
Patty smiled at him. “Hi, I’m a friend of Gus’s. We’re just going up to his place.”
Gigantor didn’t miss a beat. “Five each.” I gave him a ten and the doors closed, the gears whirred, gravity was defied, and twenty seconds later we reached our destination. The Stones’ “Country Honk” was playing as we stepped from the bright elevator directly into a dark room. It did look much like it was someone’s apartment. We passed a few old sofas bordering a coffee table where some silhouettes sat laughing. It didn’t seem very crowded; there were maybe thirty people in a room that could have easily held a hundred. Patty led me into the kitchen, where a bald man in a white T-shirt in his early fifties was filling the fridge with Bud bottles from a cardboard case. I guessed this was the bar.
Patty got a Bud and I got a Jack and Coke, hoping the Coke would wake me up a bit. At this point in a late, late night, trying to wake up was among the stupidest things I could choose to do. Also, a quarter-glass of cola was not going to undo any sort of damage. That would take drugs. And I could probably get drugs here. I shook the evil thought from my head, took a sip, waded through a few people, and sank into an easy chair against the wall. Patty pulled up a stool next to me and we drank, surveying the scene. People were generally older than I would’ve expected; only a few folks looked like they were in their twenties, the rest spanning that hard-to-pinpoint age of above thirty and under forty-five.
“A lot of the people here work at St. Vincent’s Hospital; they get off their shifts and need a place to go. A lot of city workers on the eight-to-five shift as well,” Patty said. “Sometimes there’ll be sanitation workers; you’ll smell those, and also a lot of the guys who deliver flowers to the flower district. It’s early for most of them, though.”
I straightened up and reached into my pocket, wondering exactly what time it was. My cell phone read 4:27. Pow, right in the liver. There was no turning back now. I took a big swig of my drink. I was on the moving walkway to Shametown. I promised myself that, before I shut my eyes later, I would drink an entire Gatorade. A friend had once told me that the best hangover prevention was Pedialyte, the medicine designed to keep infants from becoming dehydrated. I made a mental note to buy a case. Then I smelled something. Something warm and familiar. It wasn’t fresh-baked bread.
Patty was exhaling a cloud of pot smoke from a Rasta-style cone-shaped joint. “I finally got some of my own,” she smiled, passing it to me. “Do you want a little, or have you had enough?”
I took it and sucked in the sweet smoke. I tried not to think of her cold or allergies or whatever it was. “I want more than enough,” I coughed with a bad British accent. Out came the smoke. “What movie?”
“I don’t know,” said Patty, taking the joint and putting it to her lips. “Apocalypse Now?”
“Arthur,” I said. It was one of my favorites. Dudley Moore played a drunk amazingly well. My second-favorite movie with a drunk in it was My Favorite Year, starring my pseudonym, O’Toole.
Patty passed the joint back to me. “Dudley Moore, it was so sad what happened to him. Watching him degenerate like that, it made me cry. You know he was a fabulous piano player, but after he got sick he couldn’t even do that. I saw him on Sixty Minutes before he passed, poor thing.” She coughed and I heard the sea inside her shift.
I took a small pull on the bone and gave it back to Patty. “I’m done, thanks.” My mind started speeding along and I found myself humming the sappy Christopher Cross tune from Arthur, “When you get stuck between the moon and New York Ci…ty…” I was thinking about Dudley, maybe he brought it on himself, maybe he flew too close to the sun by marrying Susan Anton, she was like a six-foot-two internationally credentialed piece of ass and he was like five-nothing and jowly. Then I felt bad. You shouldn’t joke about others’ misfortune. But others’ misfortune was often the best thing to joke about. Some comedians made entire careers out of it. Cartoons too. Look at Tom and Jerry. I fucking hated that Jerry. Asshole mouse. The best way to kill him, I thought, would be to feed him a fistful of Alka-Seltzers and a quart of tomato juice, then duct-tape closed all his orifices and wait for the big bang. Or was it his orifi? I took a sip of the Jack and Coke and breathed. My synapses were at DEFCON 5.
Patty was staring off over her shoulder, giggling. I figured she must have been as big a mess as me. I was a huge mess. I was a toilet. I was at the bottom of the landfill where all the toilets went, soiled and shivering but dancing gamely like a Rockette. “What are you giggling about, huh?”
Patty turned and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Oh, nothing. I just had déjà vu. I was thinking for a second that we were the same age. Because that’s how I feel, especially when I’m tipsy, and when I look at you and see your little line-free face, I forget that I’m a lot older. This could be any night for me from twenty or thirty years ago, you know?” She smiled. “Anyway, I was thinking about this one guy I used to run with, Douglas, and how we used to always smoke pot in bars, kinda like this. Back then, I’d get so nervous and paranoid when I was high. I always thought some stranger on their way to the bathroom was going to narc on us. I was really silly about a lot of things, you know? Well, you don’t know, but you will. But then again you kind of won’t I guess, because I kind of don’t. I’m still silly about so many things. Maybe it’s because I never settled down or had kids, but I think my brain is in arrested development or something like that. Or maybe I’m just drunk.” She laughed, took a long swallow of her Bud, and sank back into her seat. “But I’m happy with it all, you know? I did pretty good,” she said quietly.
People had been arriving at the apartment, and little by little, it had filled up. I reached into my glass, took out an ice cube, and sucked on it, finally crunching it up between my molars. The time had come. “What do you think, Patty? Should we split before the sun rises?”
Patty stood up and stretched. “Yeah, let’s go.”
We got into the elevator with the big fellow and went back down to the lobby. It was that time when it’s almost light but it’s not but it is. We walked to the curb to hail a cab as a jogger bounded past. We looked at each other and cracked up.
It happened in the cab as we were speeding toward home. A bad wave of exhaustion and nausea. “Suddenly feeling grim,” I said through tight teeth as I rolled down the window. Stupid fucking child-safety window only went down partway. Great, I was going to have to thread the needle. With vomit. But fuck them all, I didn’t care if I puked in my shirt and had to wear it all day in the hot sun at a beach volleyball tournament.
“Keep it together, Jason,” Patty said, rubbing my neck. “We are so close.”
I bit my lip and focused out the window on the blur of the awakening city. The wind blew through my hair but I still felt like shit. We finally pulled up at the corner and I jumped out of the cab and started racewalking toward our building. Heel toe heel toe. Patty caught up with me a second later. “Let’s get you upstairs, partner.”
I never noticed it before, but the sun rose really quickly once it got itself started. Everything was turning yellow and the fucking birds were squawking. Patty opened the door and we hurried inside. Bad sweat drenched my brow. I took the stairs two at a time, keys already in hand. I wasn’t going to make it. I reached our landing and made a desperate attempt at the lock, but it was too late. Krakatoa erupted deep within me and I covered the bottom of my door with what Jesse Jackson might’ve called a multicolored mosaic. Sucking for air, I tried to remember what I had eaten, my face inches above the mess. The smell hit me and I retched again. This was the worst, the fucking worst. I was on my knees waiting for the next wave. I wiped my mouth with my forearm, tears in my eyes, nose running
. “I’m going to fucking die,” I groaned. I let fly again. Less colors, more liquid.
Patty kneeled beside me and put her hand on my back. “No, you’re not,” she said.
I retched again, inverting my stomach like a reversible raincoat, but nothing came out. “Ugh, Christ! How do you know?” I cried, and spat into the puddle.
“Because it takes one to know one.”
I looked over at her, a string of saliva hanging from my mouth.
“Lung cancer,” she said.
I contemplated the tight little smile and the eyes that didn’t wink to say, “Just kidding.”
“I’ve got lung cancer,” she repeated, her voice steady, her expression stone.
I turned back to the dirty floor. The taste of bile rolled over my tongue. Gravity took it from there.
12
After twenty-four hours of whispering “I promise I will never drink again,” I was back at work Friday morning, on time. I felt mostly better but Wednesday night had been like a punch to the throat. I manned the receptionist desk, uncrumpled my brown bag, pulled out a bagel and OJ, and went online to see if any interesting e-mails had arrived during my sick day. Stacey had written, inviting me to dinner with her and Eric that night. I felt I could handle it, and so I replied in the affirmative. Besides, I had a few things I really should be asking them if I was to actually accomplish anything before my next rabbi class.
Tina had written letting me know there was an eighties-themed party that night as well. The thought of alcohol and girls dressed up like Olivia Newton-John circa Xanadu gave me the sweats, but I knew enough to know you never knew. That was the thing about promises; you could always say, “I made you, and I can break you.” I hopped on IM.
doodyball5:
howdy
tinadoll:
I Just Want My Pants Back Page 13