Homunculus

by Wintner, Robert;

  Charles is intimate with Dylan Thomas too, with whom he can hold a cocktail crowd at bay and in wonder at the roly poly man whose roly poly tongue trills lightly down the syllables. Charles can silence them, dominate them, lead them down to Dingle, from where he looks up and calls: “When I was a windy boy and a bit/And the black spit of the chapel fold, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women) …” The power is his. It requires those whose paths cross his at the moment to listen.

  To say Charles lives for sex isn’t fair to him or his game; more credit is due both. Suspension is his opiate and disbelief never withers so profoundly for Charles the stud as it does for Charles’ playing Everyman, lost in Mexico, dabbling in excess. But what’s a woman to think? He’s so articulate, so quick, so compelling with a bedside manner to ease all doubt, explaining away what might look crass and casual on the surface, but in reality can make you well. “We are here. Are we not? The time is now. Never again, shall we …” Or some such would flow mellifluously in perfect syncopation from the silky tongue to the soft fingertips settling gently in the zone of Eros.

  He loves, he says, simply loves, in public as well as in private. On earth as it is in heaven, he says.

  “They are us. We are them,” he announces one night beside a couple from the north, mid-fifties, neat and quiet. “Look at this. He loves his wife. She loves him,” he announces like a game show host at the top of the hour, as if double jeopardy or the lightning round is upon us. “Forgive me,” he says to them. “But am I right?” They affirm. “Thank you. You have children, yes?” They affirm. “You see, they have produced something. They share trust and comfort. They know who they will bed down with tonight. They have no exhilarating delusions. What’s the difference? We’re comfortable. We trust each other. Given a variable here, a doubt there, we know who we might bed down with. The difference is that we live in a fantasy. We share a dream. We seek the physical. They, on the other hand, have a future based on a different substance. Perhaps they’re the bigger fools, but they generate what we cannot.” A few diners stare at the oddball. A few carry on their chitchat and eat their beans. The few who know smile or shake their heads or whisper to those who don’t know. Charles assumes an audience. “They plan to go home in a few days. Am I right?” The couple nod, yes, he is right. Charles nods and yells at Pancho to bring these lovely people a drink, yes, a drink, on him. Yes, yes. A drink is what they deserve as if they’ve won the game. Charles then drifts, looking here and there for another lucky winner, drifting to the fringe and out.

  Down the street to check the action, lest something be missed, or maybe to down a few quickly in private to keep his obtrusive thirst to himself, he drifts out, drifts along and drifts back for another drink, another insight. He sits with the couple from the north or someone else for a drink and a chat as happily as he would with a recent divorcée, as if he really does care for more than the sweet reward. Charles likes the tourists and never calls them tourists; they’re travelers, too, another faction passing through. He hones his skill, charming the pants off average couples and recent divorcées. He makes them feel good, because he is good, a friend far from home. And his shirt is clean, pressed and nearly white with light starch.

  He’s sober then, early on, before the liquor gangs up. Later on his date can care for him if she will please step forward and identify herself. Former dates observe with a laugh, except for Rhonda, who sometimes steps forward or stands in if the first date leaves, or stands by like a homely lass who can’t get a date of her own.

  What a waste, Tony Drury thinks.

  “Lucky you,” Charles murmurs as if in response, salivating at Heidi. Way drunk, rheumy as a hound and just as sad, his eyes like windows on a warehouse, Charles wobbles on an upper cut from the demon. He catches himself but falls down when the demon connects. Then the date or Rhonda grunts and helps him up while former dates wax nostalgic over the well-worn script.

  But that’s later in the evening.

  Sober, Charles masters the ceremony with aplomb, his outsized orbs taking a room in a single roll. Then comes the voice to draw a crowd nigh with presence and timing. A few watch until the ruddy bloom wilts, until his lips lay thick as liver at room temperature, hardly grasping the fag slunked between them much less the inflection of a thespian of advanced skills.

  His belly hangs over his belt once he belts a few, and the only line at the ready is the pitiable one: “I’m an exactor. Exactor. Eggs Zactor. I’ll tell you tomorrow what that means. Of course, by then, it will be what that meant. It will mean what it meant. Or maybe it won’t mean anything. Maybe it will only … not mean … oh, something, what it meant …”

  But he isn’t pop-eyed, fat, slovenly, red-nosed, flushed and slurring when he isn’t drunk; he is the spark that runs the engine then. Or he can be. He can embrace the spirit of the crowd around him and capture the essence it longs for. He can be the used-to-be of it, come down to it from the very pinnacle of the best of it. Later in the evening, reduced to reruns, he plays to an audience unrapt and yawning; this is where we came in.

  His absence lets that crowd recast itself. Rhonda’s part gets bigger then, from bit female to lonely siren, crooning her blues to the blue horizon, telling the thin air what ails her. Charles encouraged a few men to pursue her, praising her voluptuous attributes for the good of the community. He could have played a Marine Corps recruiter as successfully, except with Tony Drury. Tony doesn’t need to see the world, but on a sneaky suspicion downloads Rhonda to his hard disk late one night easy as she downloads him. On a crooked walk home, drunk and wanting, they move into each other like shadows dissolving to a greater darkness.

  Because Rhonda with all her willfulness has needs and no guilt and wants to scratch the itch a woman needs to scratch. She doesn’t want to get it on like a man, or not like Tony Drury anyway, but she seeks something to fill an empty space. Voluptuous, yes, Tony Drury affirms straight away. Rhonda untethered rules the sky. He expected as much and gives her the opportunity for further expression. This too is great fun but a certain threat, since Rhonda is mental and worse. Her mere presence can undo the happily ever after already in place. Because before you know it, it can be you she sings and mumbles over.

  Not that her lyric is a bad place to reside; what man wouldn’t want a Rhonda on his trail, assuming of course the mentality is merely superficial? Her song begins harmlessly but grows hauntingly personal. She pines for the love that can be true, can be you but is not. He only wants to keep things pleasant in a stagger and a stumble down to the gross physical. She bounces too much for a long-legged woman with a scissors lock on his hips while singing off the cuff to a tune about two people in love in an alley in a little town in an undeveloped nation. She rhapsodizes, Dreary Drury gets laid, but he never paid. And now he’s waylaid … Tony … bo-oy …

  Tony does not appreciate the glib handle but forgives it in light of the terrific action, humping it up in an alley in Mexico with a whole heap of woman who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about underpants down in the dirt or condom wrappers sticking to her sweater or spilled drinks or ash burns or anything. Rhonda can splice wires or arc electrons with abandon. He likes the action but misses her breasts, because a man supporting the weight of such a healthy woman needs both hands, even with a wall to lean on, and he’s not ready for down on the ground, not yet, but he does want her breasts, so he eases her on down to her own two feet, where a modern woman should stand, he says. She giggles and says she loves it when he recognizes the need for feminine independence. He says he loves it too but looks worried because the in-out requires a squat now with her standing; it cramps his hips. Nevermind, he kisses her cheek, unbuttons her blouse, unhooks her bra and reveals her breasts, because you can’t count on a next time, because a presumptuous man is a man soon fooled. She watches him complete the physical. Terrific breasts, he says, putting them away. She tells him he’s a pooch but lets him go again at her place naked and prone, until she snoozes. He rolls off and says he can’t stay. “
I’m not ready yet.” He tucks her in and departs. Outside he feels relieved and relieves himself and loves the outdoors and Mexico.

  He respects her after that, because she never mentions it, never brings it up, even in passing, as if it were utterly forgettable. In time he hungers again and wonders when he can stand in again, because her needs don’t go away as often as Charles does. Nobody else walks her home, he thinks, because she needs drama and the others only sit and watch. Charles is her dream. Living it makes her wacky, makes her murmur and sometimes speak of happiness. On a barstool with a drink and a smoke she mumbles, “In two years I’ll be fifty.”

  Charles keeps time with her because she doesn’t cling, and he doesn’t mind if she gets it in the alley in a pinch. In the meantime, friends can screw every few days or new moon or after each period or if the bus is late. “Isn’t it amazing how things work out?” Charles asks one morning after an evening with Kirsten McGrew, whose friends call her Trixie, whose detractors call her Trixie McScrew, whose husband, Joey, is two weeks late returning from the world above. Charles doesn’t mind—”Sixty years old, and he calls himself Joey.” Kirsten laughed and laughed, because Charles can deliver the fun and Joey is late and the night gets later until the crowd thins down to tab A, slot B, and she laaaughs all the way to slurring time. Charles wallows, licks, tongues, humps, slurs, swoons and searches the wee hours for one-liners to keep her going. Because even with his dick in the dirt Charles can make you laugh. They struggle for just one more at sunrise when Joey comes home and Charles grabs his stuff and throws himself clean into the next room and onto the sofa and into the deathlike sleep of the pitifully drunk. He snores as Joey walks in. He wakes in a daze with utter embarrassment and asks, “What are you doing here?” Joey insists that he lives here. Charles looks around and says, “Oh, gosh.”

  He stops for coffee and a splash on his way home since it is Tuesday and he passes that way. His arrival in rumpled clothing is like the cock crowing. Not that Charles needs the old gang to know that, yes, he has inserted his greater self between the legs of last night’s date. No, his need is already filled. He’s merely a social animal seeking succor.

  “I mean the way it works out in life with maturity and development and dealing in the truth. I think men who have names for their dicks are really strange,” he blares through the fog, running his basso profundo up on the shoals of remorse. He plows the pain with vigor for a brand new day in the never never hills. Some moan. A few drift. Some dabble in solid food. Charles orders it black, “Yes, and could I have just a thimble of Cointreau on the side.” He waits happily for the bolt that will bring him back, bring him up, bring him on.

  He sips it, slurps it, groans ovations to it, makes all gone of it and asks for more of it. He looks around, laughs and croaks, “Before I got as mature as I am now, they called mine the twenty-seven-incher.” Some say Charles defaults to smut in compensation for failure. Drawing a few dying laughs he bowls down the quietude, shattering the peace like ninepins. “For awhile they called it Hebrew National.” He squeezes a chuckle from the convalescent crowd, then pounds his lines to tedium. From former dick names he goes to peculiarities of former wives to yesterday’s excellent shit, down to firmness, taper, natural grease and a sense of closure so satisfying that he can’t help but feel a certain patriotic gratitude for the often maligned organisms of Mexico. Some walk away. Charles likes that; he says audience control can take many forms, if an actor is dynamic.

  Two blocks down Trixie McScrew shuffles sleepily from her boudoir to hug her husband. She ignores his headshake and tells him he missed a real humdinger. “Oh, him,” she says, shooing the invisible fly. “He slept on the couch. We were sooo toasted.” Joey looks the other way, because, well, you have to get along in a small town.

  Charles coaches Trixie psychically from down the street, guiding her through the method of being hopelessly hungover and in no shape for cootchy coo. “You must bathe at once,” he mumbles, but then he jumps up, ducks out and looks down the sleepy street. “The joke’s on us,” he says, his voice plowing the gravel. “Drinking hard and calling it fun.” He ducks back in. “Or worse, fulfillment. No more for me, no sir. None for me today, I’m clearing my mind. I’m sticking to the cheap and tawdry. Now that’s living. Look at me already, fresh as a god … damn … daisy!” He wheezes and turns back out for a deep clearing of glottal debris and comes back in to explain, “It’s a joke, I tell you. A gob o’ this, a pile o’ that. Dust by the handful. Boy oh boy.” He makes a fist and casts it aside as if flinging the dust, or maybe he won’t punch someone. He stares off intensely and says, “Isn’t it queer, with the holes and pegs? This one we want. This one we don’t. This one stinks just right. This one smells like shit.” He pummels it pointless. A few more drift out and then a few more until it’s empty barstools between the two of them.

  “Light of my life,” Rhonda says. Joey McGrew appears in the door. Charles closes the distance between himself and the nearest woman. He puts an arm around her. She turns to him.

  He whispers softly as she ever hoped for, “Rhubarb rhubarb. Mumbo jumbo.” Their lips touch. She whines like a cat with an itch. “Sing to me,” he whispers, and she does—blues in G with marginal swing.

  “You smell like a wo wo woman to me. You smell just like Trixie McScrew.”

  Charles’ backs off and speaks softly of honor and tact, glancing downward, then doorward. When the coast clears, he says hormones are the biggest joke of all and no man can be held accountable for their rapacious nature. But he, for one, works to end the female complaint against those who roll off, roll over and snore.

  “You are the antidote,” she says. “Hardly the dream date but you do last. You do.”

  “I hate being wrong, you know, on love,” he says. “Broken hearts are the worst road kills. How does it make me feel, and for what? Like an executioner at sunrise, that’s what.”

  “She’s not that sensitive,” Rhonda says.

  Then comes what it all comes down to. “You move it all around but it comes out the same. None of it means squat.” He longs for liberation. Mornings are hell, with the self-consciousness, the hangover, the strained silence, the pitiful husband, the awkward exit. Who can eat?

  “But you did enjoy yourself?”

  “I’m not happy. I think you of all people know that.”

  “I think all people know it, Charles.”

  “I’m so unhappy, I’m not feeling well.”

  “Why don’t you give yourself a break then?”

  “Worse yet, I’ll feel pretty good by noon.” A few people drift in. “I’m a pussy hound and an alcoholic.”

  Cisco bellies up and mocks the obvious. “Duh …”

  Charles ignores him. “It’s everything I could have hoped for but the price gets too high. I’m sensitive as the next person. You know that. I have a large need. Feed or perish is my evolutionary struggle. I know it’s wrong. But it’s only physical. I mean no harm. I think you perish either way.” He hangs his head. “I think I’m wrong. I think I’m all physical. I think I have no spirit. I think my friends don’t understand. I know I’m difficult, but they can leave the premises. What can I do? Anyway, my drive does not dilute my love. Not for you.”

  “How sweet,” Rhonda says. “A sentimental moment, fresh-fucked and hungover. Poor baby.”

  “I hope you never doubted me.”

  Kensho steps to the bar. “As long as you doubt yourself, you have a spirit.”

  “Please,” Heidi says. “Charles has no doubts.”

  Charles turns. “I love you, Heidi. You know that.”

  “But you love me more, don’t you,” Rhonda says.

  Suey says, “He loves perfectly for the moment, like a sex maniac or a dildo.”

  Charles turns away and closes the scene softly, “He is neither a maniac nor is he wooden. He plays by method.” He pauses as if to challenge those he loves.

  Rhonda says, “He loves but not from the heart. His heart is the hardest par
t of him. Isn’t that a shame?” She smokes up a cloud and hides in it.

  Suey ponders, “I thought your heart was in your chest.” Charles smiles and turns for a rare exit on someone else’s line. Rhonda watches him down the street.

  A few days later someone says the new girlfriend must be good.

  Someone says it isn’t a woman but a blowup doll who won’t complain. Morning deflation will keep her quiet until he needs to pump her up again.

  Some tsk tsk; some ignore the gutter talk. Someone says maybe this one is different, maybe he’s in love and it’s holding his interest.

  Rhonda smiles sadly and lights a smoke. “He’s already in love,” she says. “It’s not working out so well.”

  Kensho says total immersion often precedes insight.

  Lisa Brown is new in town but knows a thing or two about experience and doesn’t mind sharing. She says, “Yes, insight or drowning.”

  Nobody says more, so the shrine of distillation becomes meditative, until a pilgrim suggests a small sacrament, just one, to get things going. Melanie Maerz says she’s so excited that Bob and Jane Jenson are arriving tomorrow, because she loves them, because they’re so great. Lisa Brown doesn’t know Bob and Jane but after hearing about them and their unusual lives, she’s certainly looking forward to meeting them. Melanie asks to be corrected if necessary, “But aren’t these tamales to die for?”

  Lars Holmgren, who’s been seeing Melanie for the last week or so, says, “Absolutely.”

  III

  What Are We Without Art?

  An expatriate community is most characterized by drinking. What else can you do? But in a town rediscovered for perfect light and dramatic landscapes, sharp contrast and gentle form, art can displace thirst until late afternoon nearly every day.

  But siesta time is sleepless one afternoon, because a gathering at La Mexa interrupts nappy-poo. Margaritas before four press the issue for some, but breaking news on the dish-fed tube presses greater issues. We interrupt this program …