Tony shakes his head. He shrugs. “You pull the shades. It’s dark enough.” Cisco walks over and sits.
“Tell me what she likes.”
“Can’t you take that into the bathroom,” says the white-haired woman.
“I’ll take you into the bathroom,” Cisco says.
“I thought you wanted to fuck Marylin,” Tony says.
Cisco nods. “I believe I do. But I don’t think she’ll let me.” He turns to the bar. “Rhonda?”
“Mm,” Rhonda shakes her head. “I don’t think she’ll let you either.”
Cisco looks down then up at the white-haired woman. “M’am?” She ignores him. “M’am, would you consider, you know … you and me, I mean, you know, after we get acquainted and all?” The white-haired woman leaves too. Cisco calls, “You could show me how to be nice!”
Then there are four, still life in a bar with the news.
Tony gets up. “Sorry Cisco, you can’t fuck me either.” On the way out he says, “Mal? Feeling lonely?” Mal forces a laugh and falls into a coughing fit. Tony senses violence, a scene teetering out of balance. You have to be careful with Cisco in a mood. Heidi won’t do Cisco; he’s fairly sure of that.
Out on the street he takes his bearings, watches the haze for movement, for clues on the feel of the day. A fairly young beggar watches and makes the move, hand out with a beg.
“Señor,” the beggar says. “Do you speak English?” Tony looks peeved; the only reason to work this slot is for a shot at the gringos with mush for hearts when it comes to life’s difficulties, like children, dogs, hunger, violence and so on. “Señor, four babies for food.” The begging hand punctuates the plea. It thrusts softly for back-up. “Señor, four babies for some money. Hungry.”
“Señor,” Tony says. “Four is too many. You should have worn a rubber. Here.” He pulls a condom from his pocket and puts it in the beggar’s hand. “Food, clothing, new cars, college education, sewage treatment. It’s all right here. Sorry we didn’t talk sooner.”
The beggar stares at the condom, puts it in his pocket and stares at Tony.
Inside, Mal confides that a fucking gold mine is waiting to be had in subdivision. He’s looked into it and can cut his lot in two for about fifteen bucks in fees. Cisco looks pensive. Mal says he can build a cottage and clear forty, fifty grand easy. Cisco drinks, spits back an ice cube and chews another. Mal says, “Fucking Tony gets weird, doesn’t he?” Cisco is still as a reptile on a rock.
Outside, the beggar thrusts his hand out. “Señor.”
“No, Señor. We are responsible for our actions. Are we not?” He wonders what’s worse, beggars or alcoholics. He wants away from both, but what’s left?
“What are you responsible for?” the beggar asks.
He shrugs, stepping into the sunlight. “For me, I suppose.” He steps off the sidewalk like he knows where to go and why and heads downhill for less resistance. And because Heidi’s is downhill, and he needs a nap. Maybe he and Heidi can fix a pitcher of margaritas, or drink a few beers and smoke a joint, or have sex, or talk about life here in the hills. They’ll smoke some cigarettes, throw the butts out the window and have another round. He keeps his pace downhill and feels sleepy just thinking about the carefree life available to those willing to live it.
VI
The Waking Dream
The haze fills in with dust and moves on a fitful breeze. The air thickens and smells like rain, cold and soupy. You can push it aside with your hand, but it closes back in on you.
The liquor takes the lumps out. Good liquor runs nine bucks a bottle but better than that is five bucks a split—elegant, slender bottles in pints, numbered like art. You can drink a split and get sincerely drunk instead of embalmed, avoiding those regrets and assorted miseries common to the undead on discovering life’s relentless continuation. Because the stuff has no taste but makes your tongue disappear while the eerie presence flows into the disappearing rest of you, first glowing on your palate, spreading like liniment, gizzard to toes, so you know another swallow can only make it better. Another slug can come on like heat lightning, opening your pores and eyes so nicely that a foolish drinker could think this is it, what the Japanese call kensho.
Pointing out this delusion, then diving into the bottle, another wayward soul introduced himself by way of dropping anchor in that snug harbor for souls adrift. Nobody knows his name, except for the name he earned on the night he arrived. Draining a tumbler of the amber elixir, then coming up for air in a soft, sad voice dissipating like smoke, he compared Centenario Tequila to the moment of insight. Nary a glint eased the clay as he remarked, “It is not kensho. But this will be my drink.” He found a silent opening and filled it. Heads turned. What? What did he say? And what? Did he express an opinion on tequila and its proper ingestion? Does he know what company he keeps? Him? Show us? What?
“Well, what the hey,” Cisco towered over him, reached for the bottle and repoured. “Have another, Kensho.” Kensho didn’t blink. With mock contempt, or maybe it was real, Cisco waited for the newcomer to drink another like the first, so we could see what kind of man or fool he was.
Maybe his name was Frank. He was from New Jersey via Japan. The second drink slumped the clay to a sorry smile and he poured himself a third and one for Cisco, gaining attention if not respect. The scene was unkind and consequential, yet he eased the strain with soft movement and warm eyes. Intentions were familiar: man in a bind, and so were the charges: suspicion of superiority. All charges were dropped when his knees buckled.
He gained sympathy and acceptance, going in mere minutes from newcomer to man with a mission, with a mercy killing on his mind. Something was being drowned. Kensho appeared monkish, with his quiet way, his indifference and somber view, but he appeared so most often socially. A seeker of something else, he seemed self-righteous at first, holier than thou. The alcoholic core frown on that. But he made his point, deferring to every drink and drinker for what it might have to tell him. Pressed for reason on his thirst, his manner, his obtrusive humility, he smiled apologetically and attributed whatever you saw to years of training. He quit and came to Mexico to see if such astounding economy could suit the next phase of his journey. He worked free of the bindings of the prior phase, sorting things out and rethinking a thing or two. He fit in but he didn’t, introducing a passion to the neighborhood far different than passionate thirst.
He laughed at his new name, laughed at himself, at his brand—laughed at nothing at all after a month or so, after a few dozen bottles or so. The guy was a lush, maybe new to the lush life but a natural, holding his sauce with the best of the holders. Pressed for his drinking history, he said, “History?” laughing like he was stoned, but he wasn’t. He was shook up. Consensus was that he had no drinking past but could drink with the hardcore because of his years of training, which became years of constraint, years of pent-up demand.
Kensho meditates more than some people sleep. He can kneel anywhere, settle himself lightly, butt cradled in the arches of his feet, and stay an hour. He likes it, needs it as some people need to bathe or brush their teeth or drink. Cisco puts it, “Fucking A, Kenny, you’d rather sit there doggy-style, kind of, than fuck, I think.”
“Maybe,” Kensho says, preempting in a word his removal from sexual desire, in a word allowing himself down to the gross physical. Or he can get by without. Some of the women call him strange, very strange. This profile came in the beginning, when he defied political category; not macho, not gay, not really straight, sensitive but indifferent. Some of the women watch him askew, like lizards watch bugs, eyes rounding for a proper fix and a PHWEEGAA! Some savor him, covering secret hunger with strange, very strange. Some want him to want them, to see what they see alone at night in the mirror, arching their backs and touching themselves with a softness only a woman can apply. Some fear the miscue, a wrong word, a harsh sound, a turnoff, he’s so shy yet so alert. He shuts them up, doing nothing. They watch his slo-mo movie, each frame a woodblock
in posture, presence, low center. Some watch for a wrinkle, a bump, a gawk—for a glitch in his self-control. Some say you don’t need to watch for long, just look at his drinking. Some say no, his drinking is the ultimate in method and intent.
Nearly everyone watches when Leanne and her man/boy Dwayne saunter in late one day on their weekly sojourn to town for mail call, supplies and a drunk. Known as dos rubios—the blondes—they trace their love to when he was a mere teen, and she only had one tattoo. Now Leanne is forty-one or forty-nine, with carrot legs, a hind end that will fit in your hand, short shorts cut from a doily and wedged so far up she can powder her cheeks in the mirror. Her cause célèbre is tits bigger than her head—mongo casabas requiring two hands each that cost fifteen grand apiece, U.S., back when thirty grand was some real money.
Leanne was a pioneer in big breast surgery, ordering up the de Luxe gargantuan F-cups just after Wayne struck it rich in drug smuggling, just before Wayne got popped by the Federales and sent off to Escondido for a few years, maybe ten or thirty. They were sweethearts since before Wayne had money, because Leanne wasn’t in it for the money, fuck no.
She is a woman of spirit and proved it by tattooing her splendiferous peaks with a map of Acapulco running south to just above her crotch, Escondido, where Wayne does time. Heading farther south to inner thighs, the road leads to Love won’t die. Nobody travels that route now without remembering Wayne.
Beaten by time and wrong boyfriends, leathered by too much sun and a million smokes, Leanne looks ready for the wild frontier, rough and tough enough to set any hombre straight if he thinks he can squeeze those hooters without permission. Why, she’ll beat him down in the goddamn dirt. This is a posture, a reality implant allowing the appearance of heft, firmness and durability.
Leanne butchers her own meat. “I butcher my own meat,” she tells friends or tourists so they can stick that in their pipes and smoke it. No femme fatale prissy priss here. Maybe she needs the feel of it, for validation or revenge. She cuts the heads off chickens mostly, because killing rabbits is so awful. She kills rabbits, because she butchers her own meat. She eat vegetables on her own, because nobody needs meat, and it is a bloody fucking horror show, but if you do, you ought to butcher it yourself, unless you’re a pussy.
Dwayne is twenty-nine, or twenty-three, a surf rat, down and dirty with the tank top, the shaggy blond hair, the yellow pallor, the zits, baby fat, bad diet, baggy jams and his own commitment tattoos—Surf or Die, Outside Atapecahua, Almond Eye, Malabierto—the droopy eyes, the nicotine jag, the empty wallet, old snot rag, beer gut, whiskey voice, flops, oogies, hangnails, the works. Ah, youth; Dwayne can bounce back by noon after drinking all night like it’s nothing. He talks like a surfer too, often saying dude and radical, gnarly and bitchin’, even here in the hills, because the clean break is still in his heart.
Leanne says it’s so weird, first Wayne and now Dwayne, and weirdness is understood. She found Dwayne on a street corner with his mannequin, Carlotta. He picked up Carlotta on his last stop in Brownsville, cheap, on account of she lost a few fingers. “Shitchu know what she’d run retail? Shit. They were gonna fuckin’ throw her away!”
Now he dresses Carlotta in his latest designs, fashion and jewelry. She’s anatomically correct, since he drilled her a couple nice holes and lined them with this Teflon kind of Flubber shit that stays real slicky for awhile but then it doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter since you can’t get in there to clean the glop out unless you stick a hose in there and that could fucking melt her. Fuck that. He leaves the missing fingers unrepaired as a reminder of what brought them together. “Besides, anyone can lose some fingers.”
He points out Carlotta’s youth; you can tell by her nipples. He calls them pert and paints them brown and glues a few pubic hairs on her bikini line. He’s old fashioned that way. He repaints the nipples with more red, because he’s an artist and a humanitarian. Humanity and art are two of Dwayne’s drives, so he removes Carlotta’s metal rod. “You think it was easy?” he sometimes asks. “I could of shattered her whole asshole. She can lean anywhere now. I don’t know, I think it helps her relax. I know I wouldn’t want a pole up my ass all the time like that.” He laughs. “Besides, it didn’t look right.”
Leanne rolls her eyes. She doesn’t draw the men like she used to, but her bosom is still a terrific novelty. Everyone wants a feel.
Charles asked once for a feel, and after lengthy indignation, sensitivity, sincerity, bartering, assurance and advance payment, she consented. He grasped one gently, lowered his face, turned sideways, shook and listened. She cried foul. No more feels, and she laughed like Dwayne, laughing off the absurdity of it all.
She knows what Charles really wanted, what all the guys really want. Nobody minds her presumption. She’s colorful and playful, sometimes holding still so geographic disputes can be settled on her map.
Leanne’s physical beauty is historic, but her tits will never go away. They precede her in life. If you’re new in town, or you buy her a drink or get lucky, she might move from behind you to the front of you, dragging those melons across your arm. Cisco tried to feel them with his triceps. He said it didn’t work so well, but still it was pretty neat.
On the day dos rubios meet Kensho, Dwayne carries the new boom box Leanne bought him last night when they made up, after they fought. Dead drunk is a weekly ritual of the night before the in-town drunk, so they won’t have to hit town too thirsty. The dead-drunk night is out on the rancho, a more appropriate place for violence since, after all, it is home. Leanne bought the blaster for Dwayne because he tried to choke her but not to death, not really, and he is a sweet guy, he really is. He carries it on his shoulder like the brothers on TV, tuned to the only signal in town—WJZS, StereoRay, StereoRayyy … Dio—Aaava Marii-iiyaa. Radio AM Leòn Guanajuato!
Leanne spots new talent from the door, shuffles over to the bar and hovers behind Kensho, his arm a hare’s breath from her spectacular, nine-inch cleavage. She mews for a couple cold ones, then reaches around for a lime, or a napkin, or the salt, or some Q-tips, embedding his arm in the vortex of heaven—V-neck, no bra, all warm and clammy. “Excuse me,” he says, turning away, no look back. A few men ogle, a few women grin.
Leanne looks offended, because he didn’t wedge his elbow in there. From the middle of the room Dwayne calls over the surf rock blasting in his ear, “What’s he, some kind of fucking monk or something?” Dwayne is open-minded that way, a regular free spirit on the sexual motivation thing.
Turning away boosts Kensho’s stock with the women in witness who long for a man who has to have it but can take it or leave it. But turning away is no accident for Kensho, no effort. A lifetime of discipline makes it easy, makes it natural, makes it compulsive. He turned away from his family and his father’s business, from a modest scholarship and his father’s help, turned away without anger or resentment, but with a slow, soft movement. He turned west and went so far it was called the East, flew to Japan and checked into a school that taught the old ways for modern times. Kensho turned away from the world, down to each hour in the day. He turned to discipline and non-attachment, until the moments came and went with no seams, no friction; with no where else to turn. He reached the center of the universe, the place of perfect posture, in which he and the other stellar bodies followed their infinite curvature. Kensho went away and now returns with marginal success, just like on the outbound leg.
His school showed its students the innate oneness of cleanliness, simplicity and emptiness, and the freedom from chaos and disappointment therein. The school taught acceptance of life in a vacuum and called it practical, no cherries, no nuts.
He sits at the point of departure. He hears the chirp, the gust, the rustle and allows stillness where a pedestrian would merely babble. Everyday life in the secular world does not come easy after training twenty-five years, six days a week, eight hours a day. He rose in the hierarchy of the anachronism, until the day of his greatest non-attachment, when he turned away fr
om that which revolved beneath him. Kensho lived for esoteric pleasures most humans cannot grasp. He reflected, meditated and contemplated, realizing in time that life needs living.
Like all pleasures, these too wanted change. Like most cults, this one was also led by a man given to excess in the reverence of his name. Unlike most cultists, Kensho got the picture and split. Realization and innate oneness took a quarter century.
But if he left the fold, he kept the discipline, for the discipline is him. The way is still pure, and he practices, meeting life in its moments, on the path. Time in its infinite cycle darkens with the new moon, from whence brightening is the great potential. He sits in Heidi’s courtyard, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at dusk, sometimes at midnight. He asks permission to follow the lure of the masonry coolness, the shadows and brooks. Heidi says sure.
Tony thinks a rarer bird would be hard to flush. Kensho’s warmth and generosity, and moreover his lesson by simple example are something to see. His mere presence is a state of mind to be shared, no diatribe required. He hardly spoke at the beginning, before the liquor loosened his tongue.
But even drunk he’s different. He doesn’t discuss human behavior because he doesn’t want to. Some consider him mannerly and shy. Some think him cautious and deliberate, socially constipated, unable to cut loose, get down and let it roll. He thinks them inconsequential, insatiable. He lets you know without telling you that you make no difference. He will buy you a drink because you want one. His time is your time. He has all anyone should need. He’s too good to be true but pulls it off with calmness and etiquette, adapted to the ways of humanity on earth. He weakens physically as a result of his remarkable absorption, but this too seems deferential to frail humanity, what he knows by way of experience.
Tony Drury can’t believe that a man sitting in Heidi’s courtyard like another brick can let her orgasm song go in one ear and out the other—on down Canal Street like a little bird or a giant condor. She moans lowly at first, working up to rhythmic gasping, steady and rough as a one-lung engine, up to a stutter near the red line, sobbing at the high end and giving it up. Tony is pleased and relieved in his own right to ring the landlady’s bell; yet this much commotion makes him wonder what difference he makes. Why not bring in a steam piston and hang a banner out the window: Heidi’s Coming! He doesn’t complain, except for pointing out the difficulty this shrill reminder must present to Kensho. “Reminder of what?” she asks.
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