In the same implacable manner the bartender placed the eighth glass of beer cockeyed on the coaster before him. Sam leaned his head close to his right shoulder and tilted his head far back as if he would fire torpedoes at the man through his nostrils. He grinned at him. He remembered once he had gone five beers, that on a sweltering day of work, acutely dehydrated, physically drained. He had more reason to indulge himself tonight. Good reason, indeed! However, Mr. Bartender, Pourous Parasite of Patron's Paranomia, I'll not satiate that washerwoman's mind of yours with the reasons for my smirk! Guess what you can what cases the rushing tremble in my breast like coal crashing down a chute. Fat chance!
--On the house, Sam, again. You know, Sam, I gotta say. All these years, you come in, have your couple-three beers, smoke your cigar, come in quiet, leave quiet, don't say two words to anybody. Always the same, no change, sit in the dark, watch everybody and everything. You know, at first, I used to think you was one of these writer guys, you know? Get your stuff right from the gazookis. Then, some time goes by, and I get a pretty good picture you're a working stiff. You don't mind I say, for a long time I think you're using a piano with no notes--know what I mean? Like slow? Then, the college kid comes in and is trying to write something for class on that guy--what's his name? The one about whether the guy should jump from the bridge into the water to save his drowning brother, or something, you know? and he asked you some dumb question, and you talked straight through three beers, musta been three-quarters an hour, so now I think you're some sort of aluminum siding professor from Vassar, or Sarah Lawrence, but things don't change for you; they stay the same, all these years, they stay the same until tonight. So, whatever you do is none of my business, but I gotta say after all these years, I'm glad you found a nice girl. He winked, pointed his index finger like a six-shooter and his thumb triggered off a shot right between Sam's eyes.
Sam pointed his finger at him, snapped his finger behind his thumb. --Satre. Jean. Paul. Existentialism? Who gives a shit tonight? Stuff is all right if you're tired of jerking off. He waited until the man turned back to his business, then in the shadowy grayness turned to stare at him in the backbar mirror, stretching far out of his seat to do it. He couldn't see much, but from what he saw of himself, he didn't see a thing that was different. What did the bartender see that told him? Hell. Had to learn something after all those years behind the bar, if only how to make lucky guesses. He didn't see a thing! Did he? I wonder if he can tell if I lost a nice girl tonight, too. You stupid jerk! Where the hell did you get all that stuff about destiny, and we'll meet again? I'll tell you why I ask. Because she sounded pretty determined not to see me again! And I couldn't push myself onto her, make it some heavy point that she see me again. She could've said "yes" and then never showed up--ever! This way, I've got her thinking about me! About destiny. Suppose, just suppose we run into each other, what do you think will go through her head? Destiny! There, you jerk! That's where it came from, and maybe I really believe it. Even if I didn't come up with destiny, should I see her again, she won't have any negative feelings toward me, that she deliberately lied to get me off her back which would make her feel bad; with the positive aspect that we start off on neutral ground, no anger either way, with the possibility we can hit it off. That we might never see each other again is the reason you're putting away all these beers! You know something? They go down like they were water. I should be feeling something; I'm just stone cold sober. I remember reading about certain emotional conditions that override the effects of alcohol, where the person is so hyped-up from some psychological trauma that his body burns off the booze as fast as he drinks it. What is it with you? Because it was your first date? Ever. In your life? No. Because it was her, because it was Mary. Because we go back a long way, because our families had something to do with each other. Because we belong together. Big deal! Tell her! Wish I could! Wish she was sitting right beside me now, instead of that frowzy blonde that started at one end of the bar and finally has made it all the way up here between me and that rough looking customer. You'd think he was a cop, or something; so hawky! Try to eavesdrop. What are they saying?
--Got a light?
--Bet I got a light. Got something else raging hot, too.
--Oh?
--You wanna fuck?
--Why do you think I'm in here?
Lady? You don't know how lucky you were! You were just about to approach me, and I would've put you off, too, like the others. Can't you see? When a man's in love, no other woman will do? But there is a shorthand in this world, isn't there? If it can apply to two people, it's just as good for two companies, two nations, two worlds? So? What's the shorthand to Paradise? Dumbass. He told you, Wanna Fuck? What if you said that to Mary? Would she understand? What would she do? Wonder what would happen if I went up to her father and said, Mr. Dolorosso, I'm Sam Scopia who loves your daughter, Mary, very much and we're going to get married and fart on your blessings? Jesus! You must be drunk. What's going to happen when Sol comes back? Wonder how he is, and what he's doing. Poor guy. Take all that on himself. Like he invented the fucked-up gene that gave the world that madman. Crazy, fucking, ego-maniacal sons-of-bitches. How do they know what's good for someone else when they don't know what's good for themselves? Everybody's an expert until they participate. When my folks learn I got paid for four weeks and spent it all! They'll scream and curse, but they won't kill their facchino as long as they think they can get a few more years wages from him. Yeah. But you've got a lot to learn. Remember the time you got a bonus from Sol, and you used most of it for yourself: a real good chef's knife, the Escoffier cook book; then you told them! You poor jerk of a love slob you had to tell them thinking they would adore you because telling the truth meant more than the money! To make up for it, who know? It may be the reason they're passing your birthdays by, so they won't have to get you a present. You're really part of a class family, there, Sam. Real Class. Grubby peasants in this world don't deserve more than shit from the higher ups. Just like the Communists, they treat everyone alike, no classes, just one big oozing mess of comparable shit. They lie through their fucking teeth. Not everyone drinks frozen Stollie. The bullshit bag 'o wind leaders sip champagne through buck teeth while the rest of Russia drinks Troika Piss. Just exactly who are the people who feel oppression is a better state of life than any other? Brainwashed. Well, whoever you are, you may vote yourself to hell--a place where only you goosestep a march on a very thin line with a very heavy rifle back and forth back and forth unceasingly while everyone else around you picnics, and drinks, and laughs, and loves! Human beings that are miserable to human beings are miserable human beings. Now, Mary? What are we going to do about you? You know I've been trying to avoid thinking about something I don't want to think about, don't want to perceive to be in this world. I did say it before, didn't I? You weren't listening. You were, but to the wrong voice--to these two horny bastards. You wanna finish your drink? she asks him; and, he says, sliding off the stool, I need to get rid of fluids better; and she tells him I got a place; and leads him down the length of the bar and out the door and he's walking two feet behind her yet everyone could see his hard on prodding her bouncing big ass all the way. Sam grinned. As if no one in the bar wasn't looking when she reached over and rubbed his cock stiff. Destiny. He picked up his beer, setting it back down squarely in the center of the coaster. There was a finesse only the true craftsman understood. Keeping the world square was part of it. Ingurgitating the beer was an anomaly. But it came up even faster, under the elevated structure shielding the short cut home, soon after he passed the couple humping, perhaps the same pair that was in the bar, standing up he was, his pants around his ankles, her back against the I-beam supporting girder, her ass anchored on a little ledge, her legs locked around his waist, lips sucking lips, arms one continuous band about each other, his bare bottom thrusting back and forth rhythmically, breaking the kiss long enough to admonish her to "...wrap some fucking meat around it..." In consideration of their str
atospheric ascent, Sam moved a good distance away before he graecked out his whole and entire stomach: beer, pastrami, roast beef, hard pickle. And fear. It derived from the ethereal psycholuminescence that hung onto him into the nigritude, finally slipping about him, grabbing both ears and shaking his head back and forth, back and forth.
--You will never see her again! Do you understand! Do you?
--Fuck you, I won't. It's our destiny!
--You had your chance. No chance for instant replay; no chance to replay it differently. Just nothing. What you did is what is done. You fucked up. You live with it! That's all you're getting out of this life, Sam Scopia. Ready to try another? You're only a charity case in this one; you can only improve in the next one.
--Don't you understand if I don't see her again, I'll die?
--Now you got the picture. It's called the moment of maximum educability--your brain can live forever, it's your body that's dead. Ha!
Almost an hour later, nakedness seemed quite appropriate as he sat on the edge of his bed, his chin resting on his breastbone, his hands limp between his legs guarding his privates, his mind untethered itself from body, room, stale air, hushing light, and flew as a tempestuous whirlwind into the trionispheres of past, present and future to seek out the answer. Discarding numerous possibilities, it centered finally on hope. First, the hope of hope that she would be his. --I hope Mary Dolorosso will be mine, I hope. Discarded. Not strong enough. Better a prayer providing some dynamism. --Please, God! Let her be mine! But impetration deprived the foundation of solidity, insinuating impuissance.
So, then, flitting frenetically as a hummingbird from coral bell to coral bell, gasping, straining, urging all, then, finally, he was prepared to resign, to accept unsatisfactory powers, he caught peripherally the shadow form of the Mundificator. He ruled a world with which Sam was not unfamiliar, but which made his flesh crawl as if covered with manylegged tiny creeping things. He didn't understand the reason: Because he came here only when he was terribly frightened, or confounded with a mystery, or heavy with self-imposed responsibility, and that when he came as a child, and lasted until there was no more real innocence to be lost. It was a world of magic which he improvided, where he resolved all fears, all questions, all burdens. Why is dead? --Why is a little boy worried about such things? Dead is not for you! --Aha! But I see the dead man every week! Is that how we get dead? Is that how I will get dead? Then, I must never get dead. My Mummy must never get dead! My Papa must never get dead! Dead means having to be nailed to a cross. Aha! So? Now, my little voyager through this life, bursting frontiers of your world almost every day, how do you combat dead? How do you protect those gods of parents from dead? Dead people are gone. They go. They don't hang around. So? Be dead and stay around.
--I'm dead.
--You are not dead. You are alive.
--How do you know?
--I know.
--Prove it.
--Dead people don't bleed. Stick a pin in your finger. You will bleed.
--Ouch!
--See? You are bleeding.
--Yes, I see. So dead people do bleed.
That would never do, he couldn't go around sticking pins into people to find out if they were which. How do it then, indeed, but by magic! Magic always worked best when you won in a race, any race, just so long as you allowed some small possibility that you might lose inasmuch as you played against yourself, and you invented the game and the rules. --I can get from here to the telephone pole before a car passes me! --I can brush my teeth and scrub my face before the toilet stops filling. --I can count every person in the first two pews before the music stops. Then, there were those things you couldn't do. Everybody knew you weren't supposed to step on a crack or you'd break your mother's back! How about walking down the street with someone and having to go around a person or a pole or something on opposite sides? How about your shoelace becoming undone? Then, there were omens and magic formulas for neutralizing them, like if you dropped your Lucky Aggie, you countered the bad luck by spitting--usually it was always to do with spitting--and then spinning around three times as fast as you could. But, this was all a long time ago and Sam couldn't remember what used to work and what didn't, as well as the fact that the resurrection of such memories was a matter of convenience though not at all conviction. There was some strong reliance on the Mundificator. He could see him. The black man garishly bedecked, the bleached bones reflecting the African moon, which caused him the problem. The Purifier of Evil was called upon by his people to stop the moon from being blotted out. It was moving inexorably right out of the heavens. The penicillins of the day came in the form of a very young woman, who, a few weeks after she was born, had the inside of the lips of her vulva scraped raw and sewed together; then as she got older, she would be circumcised--her clitoris would be nipped--all to assure everyone concerned that the offering was a virgin, indeed. With some small elaboration, and great justification, the mundunugu would slice into the girl and do magical things with her blood-dripping heart, even consuming some of the warm liver, perhaps untangle some of the intestines though she had stopped screaming some time before. No matter. Before long, the blackness would leave the moon, the people would be saved, and the Witchman knew what he was doing, all right. The fact didn't escape Sam. There was only one hair's breadth in a mile that didn't say the Mundificator was so much bullshit. But, it was that microscopic measurement of belief in the magic man's ways that made Sam find a mirror, and set to work. With a razor. And his chest. A bloody mess.
CHAPTER 12
A WRETCHED DEPRESSION, the spissitude of coagulated self-pity, impounded Sam Scopia's brain the next morning like a cataplasmic neoplasia. It was fully developed and in place before the first discernable needlepoint of consciousness broke through the pervious nigritude of an uneasy sleep. It started as a slow, upward drift though unable yet to decode the anomolous signals until he received the message to open his eyes. He found himself unable to do so. His mind rocketflashed in analysis, first, to identify his situation; and, second, to respond with some solution. His head felt as if a lagbolt went from ear to ear anchoring his head to the bedstead. Then, a welling in his chest, a stricture in his throat, and by all damnation! A painful pressure from behind his eyeballs which were aching for relief from a roiling sea of tears. What? Mystery of mystery! Whereof doth this arise? As discomforting as it all was, what an exciting new experience! He forced himself to waken fully. Everything intensified. He eased his eyelids until he caught the startling, filtered oozy grayness of morning's first light. So? He hadn't died. But what was that feeling? Electrified, his eyes opened wide signaling his own recognition of his precarious status, and then closed again. Somewhere from within the depths of his body he understood primarily one thing: He couldn't allow the tears to flow. Once the floodgates were tampered with, they'd be uncontrollable. What? Him cry? He had never cried! He scrunched his eyes; choked out a cough; then grabbed at his face with both hands, his fingers holding hard, digging in as if it were impenitent plasticene. He forced himself to think, to identify the culprit. Aha! So that is you! Despair! What new meaning is brought to the word! Prior peripheral contact had not prepared him for the feelings hammering at his psychic vitals. Who are you? Response: I am thine Oppressor! Call me Hopelessness! How nicely your harbor does receive me. I am flexible, accommodative, and imperishable, if you wish. Don't fight me, like with a woman; you cannot fall into my arms without also getting caught in my clutches. No! No! Don't think of getting out of bed! I need you to meet my sisters: Helplessness and Noselfworth! Now admit it! There's no way you can break the pattern, and it's out of your control, you stupid shit! You are doomed, so accept your half-death this morning! Yes! Yes! And which half would you like embalmed? What difference? None! I shall decapitate one, incapacitate the other. Not that you really have a choice, rendered, as you are--ineffectual: totally human. You realize, don't you? That was your primordial mistake; acknowledge that fact. You were quite secure, quite a productive au
tomaton, inspired by the fuel of countless layers of lies, denials, rationalizations. All these merely evoked a plenipotentiary for antiexacerbatory evasive excuses for what you considered was society's behavior towards you, when, in reality, it was your own frangibility the courier hastened to conceal. But what matter that as long as you were able to function day by day by day by deadly day? incarcerated as you were in a miasmic bliss of constantly incrassating ignorance--of your own conjuring, mind you!--you were a living testimonial that even self-flattery can make one's own self of a fool useful. Who knows? In such contemptible and pitiable stupidity you might have ended your days. That is no longer to be. No more than you can draw the same breath of air twice. Now you can never draw a cool breath inflamed as you are with your night's autodecortication. A pretty darn good job, too, considering you did it with your eyes closed. Now what? Deal with that strange sensation. What is it like? Suspended animation. Worse. A soul desiccated in Hell, anabiosis. Floating inside a vacuum bulb. Instinct, self-preservation directs the search for a tether. In my flailing the delicate burn of a silk thread speedrunning between my fingers, and instantly I'm rappelling on this side of sanity; movement: antidote of depressions's ennui. Think! What has happened? All these years, the deep concern that I would die unfullfilled. It wasn't so bad this fear though I refused to face it. Then, after last night, sitting with a beautiful woman, there, just for me; gone, because of me never to return, all is hopeless. All through this night, I've tried to hide this fact by discovering other things wrong with myself. Before I knew it, my involuntary nervous system goes to pot. This brings on a delightful acute anxiety attack which says I've lost control of my life, also makes me become something special which makes me regain control followed by repetition general. Yes! Round two, coming up. Anxiety upon anxiety. Woe is me! How? How? Woe is me, how? Distract yourself! Set yourself free! Force yourself to part the path! Okay, I can do that! I can do that! No matter how much I may enjoy this misery, I can shake it free. Okay. First, tell me! Tell me, will I ever see Mary Dolorosso again? Don't you understand, you worthless piece of dusty shit, you will die without ever having sniffed the very essence of life? Here we go again! Emerging from the fuscous muddlement was one startling clear fact: Mary Dolorosso had opened a door of his life that would never be closed again, and, thus, the person he knew as Sam Scopia was instantly and markedly changed.
A Matter of Love in da Bronx Page 18