by Mike Barnes
Inside, with the blare and thump of music, and the little tables and chairs with men’s faces locked and staring, or bent together laughing, ignoring the flesh since it wasn’t going anywhere – the place reverted to more of the usual trappings. Though not completely. There were touches – dark wainscoting, something like red velvet covering the walls, scrolled and gilded mouldings on the mirror behind the dancer, its surface clean and polished like the brass pole at the front of the stage – that made “peeler palace” more than just ironic. Or ironic in a different way at least.
And the flesh. Female flesh. Young and sleek, brown and white and pink and all around. Onstage, between the tables serving drinks, writhing on the table dancer’s portable pedestal. Even the new bartender was gorgeous and nearly nude, none of Claudia’s problems with the bra-and-thong combo. A shock at first, as always, all the exposed skin after the street of clothes. But amazing, too, how quickly you got used to it. Some of the regulars turning to talk to their buddies out of simple familiarity, if not quite boredom, with the human wallpaper.
That would take some time with these girls. Dark-eyed, gym-toned. From Quebec, said Ramon, who’d filled in once or twice when Piccone had had DJ trouble. Controlled by bikers, he said, and usually dating one. “Muscles or a Porsche,” Sean had muttered over his fried rice at the Food Court. “Muscles and a Porsche,” Ramon corrected him. “No touching,” he warned the twins.
“Spaces in front, gentlemen. Or I can give you a table on the upper level,” said another suited greeter inside the door.
Hans took Lars and Leo down to the three chairs in droolers’ row. Ramon and Sean and I sat at one of the tiny round tables on the second level. Ordered our five-and-a-half dollar beers, an even twenty with tip. At first the twins kept turning to look up at us, embarrassed and excited, like kids sipping their first beers. But then settled down, following Hans’s example: the long steady eye-drink.
“Babylon,” Sean muttered, but quietly, the Blake bluster fading. And then just permitted himself, as the poet would surely have done, to feast on the opulence. The nakedness of woman is the glory of God. Sean had quoted a lot of things to me, but I remembered that one clearly.
“French . . . from Quebec,” the announcer kept reminding us, between and sometimes over the dancers’ music. “C’mon, gentlemen! A little parlez-vous in your lap – GIVE IT UP!” Pushing the table dancing. It seemed absurd, but after a few dances I found my eyes straying around the room. It wasn’t the lack of beauty, as in the Sherman dives, but the opposite problem: overabundance. Each girl was flawless: taut trim figure, dark sultry eyes, Colgate smile. A little taller, shorter, larger or smaller breasts – despite minor differences, they might have come from lust’s cookie-cutter. And the two-dance routines followed a set pattern, too. The first a flirty romp, thrusts and rolls to up-tempo rock. “Start Me Up” came on every third tune. “Jump” and “You Really Got Me” were other staples. Then the slow second set, languid, more like gymnastics. To candle-lit pop: “You Light Up My Life”, “You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me”. Shedding the G-string and making more prolonged use of the brass pole and mirror. Ending with the little blanket on the floor, and gymnastics moves – splits and walkovers – giving the room the Iris-eye. Focused at the droolers. Lars and Leo pushed shy bills onto the edge of the stage. Again Hans corrected them: holding a folded twenty between two fingers, letting the dancer squat over his hand and squeeze.
It was incredible. It was boring. It felt incredible to be bored. Some Roman looking for another bunch of grapes while slave girls fuck in front of him. But it wasn’t just me. The rest of the room came alive too, responding with claps and cheers, whenever a girl stepped out of line with a witty variation. The one who shadow-boxed, throwing jabs and uppercuts to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”. The girl in pigtails and baby doll pyjamas, sucking her thumb on the blanket over the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”.
Scanning the room, I saw Rick standing against the wall with his arms crossed. Looking the opposite of sleepy, and doing it in my direction. Who is this guy? I thought. The same question I’d been asking since my first sight of him. For the reasons Rick no doubt intended, and for others he couldn’t have dreamed of.
“A bouncer,” Ramon read my mind.
“A biker?”
Ramon shrugged. “Could be, man. They don’t advertise.”
Who goes home with a skinny girl with bitten-down nails? I thought, and felt guilty for trashing Claudia. But it was another mystery.
“Which one you guys is Sean?” said a woman. She had long brown hair and was wearing a black G-string and bra. Carrying the little round pedestal. It was the shadow-boxer, the mix-it-up twinkle still in her eyes.
Sean, blotching up in the cheeks and dome even in the dim light, was too flustered to react. No words, not even lip twitches. Looking down past his shoulder I saw the twins twisted in their seats, laughing and grinning. Shouting or maybe just mouthing what looked like “Go, Mumbles!” Hans grinning too.
Sean got his dance. Sinuous writhings and wriggles down to within an inch of him from the pedestal. And, given the size of the table, we, along with the patrons close to us, got most of Sean’s dance too. In some ways, being the recipient of the smiles and soft words and hot looks from close range could be as much burden as privilege. That was certainly the case now, to judge from Sean’s face, which looked more anxious than enthralled. Looking away was rude, but to stare straight at? The best place to enjoy it was from nearby.
I was enjoying it, when something smashed against my shoulders, clamping hard and yanking me up out of my seat. Before I had a chance to look back, to look anywhere, I was being propelled stumbling through the tables toward the door, knocking people and things out of the way, the hands lifting as well as shoving, an almost floating sensation except for the sharp blows of hitting things. “No touching!” shouted the voice. “No touching, pervert!” By way of explanation for the spilled drinks and toppled tables. And possibly to the staff as well. This wouldn’t be the prescribed exit procedure at the Gentlemen’s Club. Probably, given the size of the bouncers and the price of drinks, it hardly ever happened.
The suit at the door opened it as we approached, and the hands behind me sent me sailing through the air. I crashed down on three points on the sidewalk. A knee, a hand, my face near one eye. Skin tore off all the slam-down spots, hard jolts followed by more painful scrapes, skin shearing off. I lifted the bad hand, the palm red and bleeding, and got myself over on my side in time to see a leg and foot on a short backswing. Then the black pointed boot was flying toward my crotch and there was only time to begin rolling forward, just far enough that it thudded into my thigh. A point of incredible arrow-sharp pain, boot driving into bone, waves of nauseous ache rolling outwards from it. An inkling of what I would have felt if the boot had hit its target a few inches north.
“You were warned,” Rick said loudly. About what he didn’t say. The other bouncer smirked from the doorway as Rick climbed with his wide-assed, splay-footed walk back inside.
I was still lying gasping on the sidewalk when the others joined me outside. Scuffling a bit in solidarity as they were shoved, though not thrown, through the same doors I’d gone flying through. “Oafs!” Sean brayed after the door had closed.
“Shit, man, you look like shit,” said an L, sounding impressed.
The rest of Robert’s wake was less eventful, though it went on a while. Hans begged off, saying that he’d had “enough thrills for one night, boys.” The rest of us continued down King Street to Ramon’s apartment, a walk-up over Book Villa across from Denninger’s. It was only a few blocks, but I was limping badly by the time we got there. The pain jolting in my leg with each step was bad enough that I wondered for a moment if the bone was broken. Then realized that I wouldn’t be able to stand, much less walk, with a fractured femur.
To the twins’ repeated question – “Why, man? Why?” – I had no answer. But neither did I think it was a huge mys
tery. Rick felt a need to assert himself over me. Because of Claudia? Because he’d had a bad day? Who knew? You didn’t survive as a Rick by analyzing the drive to dominate.
Cleaning myself up in Ramon’s washroom, I assayed the damage in the mirror. My left hand had taken the worst of it. White shredded skin with blood still oozing between the strips. Soap hurt it, water hurt it, any movement of the fingers hurt it. There was something bad I wanted to do to Rick. So bad, and so badly, I couldn’t decide on what it should be. Just misty blurry pictures – of blood, of a huge face screaming – flitting by. The scrapes on my cheekbone and knee were raw but more superficial, though red and puffing up already. When I lowered my pants I saw an angry red dot on my thigh, surprisingly small, though I knew it would colour and spread in concentric rings.
There’d been a couple of Chile Dogs gigs where I’d launched myself from the stage into the dancers, landing hard when there weren’t enough of them to catch me. Our sparse crowds only demanded it occasionally, whether from boredom or exuberance, but in either case it was best to comply. But this flight and fall hurt more than the voluntary kind.
Out in the living room, the others were chasing some leftover pizza with beer. Ramon was rewinding a video of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. When he was ready to push play, Sean raised his hand and said, “A eulogy.”
“A poem! A poem!” the twins chanted. Probably they had read an elegy in high school.
Sean looked at them and closed his eyes. And when he opened them it was a poem, one he pronounced slowly, staring at a spot above our heads.
From span to land is a step in the night,
a dip in the dark between dusk and daylight.
Though bridge to bay may be chalked on the air,
no lines will connect the one who went there
to players left dancing with masks and props,
who stumble on levels, who balk at drops.
We observed a brief silence. “To Robert,” Ramon said, and we all repeated it – “To Robert” – and clinked beers. “The Wall” came on. Sean glanced at me. His poem might have been partly an apology, in which case it was written as much to me, and about us, as for Robert’s sake. Guilt again. Even at his own wake Robert flitted out of view. I felt the scrap of paper with Neale’s poems in my back pocket, but it wasn’t the time to ask.
Conversation went on around and over “The Wall”, which we’d all seen many times before. You caught it on bar screens and in people’s apartments everywhere. When I did turn to the screen, some of the familiar images, which I’d never found too interesting, reminded me of my Rick-thoughts. Like the guy bloodily shaving off his eyebrows in the mirror. It was nothing very specific. Just the weird, drawn-out sense of torment. What Ramon called its “sadism vibe”. Sean grimaced in places, barked laughter in others, as if a coarse drunken buffoon had blundered into a verse recital.
Ramon cut up a generous quantity of lines and we did them. Sean’s eyes widened and watered, and the twins began giggling softly, but I felt little effect from it, at most a sharpening sensation, a blade whetting. Some metal rods poking into the damp earth of booze, so we could go on drinking and talking without slithering out of shape so quickly, becoming mud.
“It must suck to be dead,” L said. Eyes fright-flick wide: it might have been the first time it had occurred to him.
“No,” his brother said, “it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t feel like anything. Because you wouldn’t know, right? You’re dead.”
“You might,” Ramon said. A Catholic, I assumed. By upbringing anyway – but then a friend had told me once the Church granted “separations but never divorces” from itself.
“Indeed,” Sean said. “But I think what we’re really talking about” – with a wave at the pizza box, the frosted mirror, the bottles and “The Wall” – “is what it feels like to live among the dead. In the words of Ford, that’s Job One.”
One twin said something to the other, and they both giggled, and one said, “Oh fuck off, Mumbles. You’re just mind-fucking us.”
“Yeah, stop mind-fucking, Mumbles.”
Jeu d’esprit. That’s a mind-fuck.
“Not a lot to fuck with, gentlemen. Even for an involuntary celibate.”
The three of them left a short time later, and Ramon turned the sound down low, though he kept the video on. He got us both another beer, and took out his bag again.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I know, it’s weak shit,” Ramon said, but went about preparing a thick line for himself. “Someone stepped on this load big-time.”
“Supply problems?”
“Yeah, man. Getting squeezed a bit.”
“Rick?” I guessed. It might have been the word squeezed.
Ramon shot me a sharp look – Can I trust you? – but his stone, and just his own passivity, eased it away. Suspicion, I was beginning to learn, took energy.
“Most of the stuff comes through The Tulips. Lately anyway. And now Rick’s supposed to be the man.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning how we do things forever isn’t good enough suddenly. He wants names of my buyers. Which there’s no way, my home town. People I know. So I get this diluted shit. On top of prices go up.”
“What’s his problem?”
Ramon gave his shrug. Just one shoulder, the other arm still dicing with the razor. “I don’t know, man. Somebody he owes maybe. Or just greedy. Like me and my little girls. Some people, they just want in. No matter how good their deal is, it’s always, let me in, let me in. Further, you know, man?”
“Tell him to fuck off.”
Ramon looked up from his work. “You’ve seen Rick?”
“I’ve seen Rick?”
“Oh shit, man. Sorry. I’m pretty gone. How’s it feel?”
“Like I’m in ‘The Wall’.”
“Sorry, man.” Ramon bent down and inhaled his line smoothly, getting all of it in one pass. He closed his eyes for just a moment and then opened them. Like a man tasting a chocolate or a sip of wine. No strong reaction: the essence of cool.
A few minutes later I said, “You don’t seem too upset.”
His hands raised, palms up, off his knees. “What’s my option?” But then he frowned. “Just about the buyers part. I like working at the gallery. I mean it’s okay.”
“Some serious tabs there?”
He chuckled, but that didn’t make him sloppy. “Everybody needs to relax sometimes.”
Before I left, we stood at the top of his fire escape for a few minutes, talking in the warm night air. Music coming from an open window somewhere nearby, a summer sound. Parking spaces and alleys below. Lights from the Broadway Theatre on King William. Tail end of an eventful night, we seemed to fall into a philosophical mood, getting reflective together.
“What would you do if the little girls stopped visiting you?” I said. Neither of us had spoken for a couple of minutes. We were leaning on the steel railing.
“You mean what will I do? They don’t visit anybody forever.”
“Yeah. Then.”
“I’d be sorry. But maybe I’d get going on something else. Start looking anyway.”
What? I thought. Didn’t say it.
“I’m a good DJ,” he said. “I give the people what they want.” The same boast he’d made, a very modest one really, the night of the Gala Preview.
“Did you ever give Barbara what she wanted?”
As soon as I asked the question, which entered my mind out of nowhere, I knew the difference between my usual pawn probes and what Armin did. Something equally mysterious perhaps, the results maybe even more unpredictable, but focused and purposeful. Deliberate.
Ramon shrugged. But his shrug had more dimensions than many people’s vocabularies. This one was a slight, almost slow-motion lift of his shoulders, with an equally slow, slight smile above. Ultimately, and beauty aside, I didn’t think anyone over twenty would be able to stand that shrug for long. He was stuck with his little girls.
&nb
sp; Two of whom, sure enough, arrived just as I was leaving. Crotch-cutter jeans, halter tops, nipples perking as the night cooled down toward dawn. Giggling as I turned sideways to squeeze past. I looked back up at Ramon, standing by his back door with his hands up again in that helpless gesture.
“Follow you, man,” he called down.
Hearing that, the girls giggled louder, heels clacking as they climbed.
Angela screamed in the middle of the night. That and the light snapping on jolted me awake. She examined the bruised, skinned face she’d glimpsed in the dark.
“Oh, poor baby. Who was it?” Then: “Just a minute.”
She hopped out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. The pause gave me the time I needed to configure things correctly. Even on Robert’s account I couldn’t mention The Tulips. Angela was against strip clubs. It seemed to be a weight issue more than a feminist one. She’d admitted as much in a tearful “body image” session.
“Just a bouncer with some bad memories of the Dogs,” I said when she came back with her supplies. Alcohol, swabs, antiseptic cream.
“I’d like to bounce him.” She stoppered the alcohol bottle with a cotton puff, upended it. “Or is he too bad?”
“Too bad for me, apparently.”
Sting of the alcohol, then cool air. Soothing cream rubbed in with good, gentle fingers.
12
I’d mostly sucked as a guitarist, but I did have one useful skill. I could often find the missing chord. Usually, with our songs, that meant the third chord. We’d have got the first two, working by trial and error from someone’s scratchy tape, but we’d be stuck on the third. After we’d exhausted the chords that other well-known songs had used in that progression, we’d have to fall back on more esoteric methods. Such as casting back to high school music class to figure out what the seventh would be, or the minor third, assuming you knew the key. I could stumble along this way, and did sometimes, but I had a more occult method I preferred. Letting my hand stray up and down the neck of the guitar, an absent-minded caress except that I was trying to sense presence within absence. Letting my fingers curl into chord shapes, some known, some not. Sometimes, when it felt stronger, pressing the strings down for a closer feel, but still not strumming yet. I imagined I was using a dowsing wand, or reaching out with a telepathic tentacle into the songwriter’s mind. I never really understood how it worked. But it was as if, by stepping out from what I did know, concentrating – not too hard, relaxation was key – on what I didn’t, after a while the space would want to complete itself and my fingers would close on the missing shape and I would strum with complete confidence. My bandmates would stare at me open-mouthed, as if I’d been Hendrix all along and had only been messing with their heads. We seldom had money for coke, but pot was always in good supply. Blotter acid, too.