by Peter Plate
When I saw the welcome mat of his chest hair above the collar of his shirt, the bobbing of his adam’s apple and his desperate mouth, I had to love Eldon for the choices he’d made. What a talented man. I said to him, unkindly, “Do you have anything to say for yourself? Don’t just stand there. Speak up for yourself, damn it! I could make a lot of trouble for you!”
This was not a good time for him. He wouldn’t be able to look back over the scrapbook of memories that comprised the greater part of his adult life to see this caper as a victor y.
“It was an accident. I, ah, had to do some cleaning. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is that so? You made your move, now tell me what it’s about.”
“I wasn’t doing anything, Charlene. I was just tidying things up.”
“But who gave you the right to do this when I wasn’t here?”
“Nobody did. I’m a janitor. I can go anywhere I want to.”
“I’m gonna ask you again. Why are you doing this? Did somebody tell you to?”
He whined, “C’mon, you’re making more of this than you have to.”
I could neither extol nor repudiate the man; he would tell me zilch. Eldon saw the expression in my eyes, and like a pet when it sees its master acting strange, he turned sideways and began to whimper.
“You aren’t going to say anything about this, are you?”
“Is that all you’re concerned with? Aw, for fuck’s sake, I don’t give a shit who knows about this or not.”
“What are you gonna do with me?”
“How the hell do I know?”
If you’ve ever wanted to hit someone out of spiteful frustration, hit them proper and solid; you know that dishing out physical punishment is the best method to get rid of emotional discomfort.
However, I couldn’t slug Eldon, no matter how bilious I felt. I was right on the border of it, but that would’ve been counter-productive. He wasn’t that much taller than me and somehow this made me pity him. The pecker saw me wavering and he took advantage of it.
“Let me go, please. It won’t happen again.”
“Uh huh.”
“C’mon, Charlene.”
“Swear on it? You won’t go apeshit on me like this again?”
“Cross my heart and swear to die, homegirl.”
“Get out,” I pointed at the door. “And don’t ever come back.”
He swallowed once, then flung himself past me, leaving a bank of stale sweat and Thrifty Drugstore aftershave wafting behind him. My papers were strewn across the entire cubicle. Eldon had been diligent in his task. It would take me an hour or so to put everything away. I scratched my head, and got down on my hands and knees under the desk.
thirteen
Harry Hendrix was at the bar with a few of the others, Simmons, Rubio and Vukovich. The bartender was getting pickled, which made her friendly, and she was trading jokes with the guys.
Harry parked his elbows on the bar top, took his drink and held it up to the light, then said to me, “You know what? You’re dick whipped.”
My fellow social worker’s eyes resembled boiled eggs. Since I didn’t like eggs, I had to look away. Hendrix saw everything in polarized terms and took that for cowardice on my part. He said, “You’re going to get hurt. Getting married over and over, it’s an invitation to disaster.”
“I like my husband, Harry. He’s been kind to me, and he pays his own bills. My other husbands, they got me into hock. Have you ever been in debt? I hate it worse than getting a pap smear. I was at the pawnshop every other Friday. Anyway, when was the last time a woman was good to you? Do you remember?”
“Don’t ask, Charlene. Don’t ask.”
“Then don’t banter with me about that stuff.”
“Never mind then, but what’s eating at you?”
“What do you know about this Eldon Paskins?”
“Who’s that?” Harry asked, curious because he couldn’t recognize the name.
“The janitor. The guy who looks like an albino Charles Bronson.”
“I don’t know. We don’t talk. What would I say to him? You know, there’s people I don’t relate to, and he hasn’t made that much of an impression on me. What about him?”
“He was going through my desk.”
“You saw him do that?”
“Got him in the middle of it.”
“Have him arrested.”
“For that? What for?’
“At least get him fired. You should tell Gerald.”
“Yeah, right.”
“If you don’t want to do that, then don’t fuck with it, and don’t let it bring you down. We’re here to have a good time. Bart tested negative. There’s no greater victory in this life. Let’s drink to that.”
“We can drink to a lot of things. What about that woman you were seeing?”
“The chiropractor?”
“Yeah, her. Weren’t you talking about getting hitched?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“Liar. You chickened out.”
In the dim, Vaselined light of Clooney’s, Hendrix’s skin made me think of yesterday’s macaroni. Simmons was playing pinball. Rubio had gone over to another table to flirt with a couple of thirty-or-something ladies. Clooney’s was a nice place. It had a horseshoe-shaped bar, a football scoreboard on the wall, and a kitchen that served meatloaf and salisbury steak. A furry mutt was sleeping under a video machine. I was on my third beer, and we’d been in there for only fifteen minutes.
In the back near the toilets, Vukovich was smooching with this babe that I’d never seen before. He picked her up from the floor, as he was at least a foot taller than her, and she was french kissing him like a doe at a salt lick.
“That’s the pre-op he’s been seeing,” Harry said, blinking at Vukovich. “She’s from Vietnam, but no one knows that. It’s a secret.”
“What’s the secret?”
“She’s got no papers. She stays on Lexington Street near you. Matt says the ethnic Chinese on the block hate her. He’s worried they’ll turn her in to the INS.”
Simmons put a dozen quarters into the jukebox and singles by the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, the Isley Brothers, the Flamingos and Johnnie Taylor started ripping through the bar’s speaker system, one after another. This inspired Bart to strip off his shirt and to pirouette in a circle, shouting that he wanted to dance. I knew Harry was mad at me because of what I’d said, about him being afraid. That’s why he started yelling at Rubio.
“Hey, Bart! Put your shirt back on, you dweeb!”
Rubio heard him and without ceasing to shake his hips from side to side, hoping to impress the ladies with his dancing expertise, he flipped Harry the bird.
Hendrix chugged away at his beer, then smacked his lips with a certain kind of prescience like he was going to say something important.
“Charlene.”
“What?”
“I want to get away from the city. Take it easy. Go some place where I can have a break.”
“You want to leave San Francisco?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t I want to move somewhere else?”
“Where would you go? San Jose?”
“Nah, not that far. Maybe Oakland.”
“Gertrude Stein used to live there.”
“Who’s that? A broad you know? Why don’t you introduce me to her?”
“For one, she’s not your type, and anyway, you’re not leaving town, Hendrix.”
“The fuck I’m not. The rent is too high over here.”
I finished my beer and thought about having sexual intercourse in a field of flowers. What kind of flowers, I didn’t care. Getting loaded pushed me outside the circle of life, pushed me nearer to the other world and closer to eternity. “Harry,” I said. “I’ll make a bet with you.”
My co-worker’s face lighted up like a Christmas tree in a suburban living room window during the holidays. “Yeah? What for?”
“To see who stays in San Francisco longer
, you or me.”
“For how much?”
“Ten bucks.”
“Don’t be a cheapskate.”
“Okay, twenty-five bucks.”
“Consider it done, Mrs. Hassler.”
Having successfully removed his slacks, Bart Rubio was doing a striptease to the catcalls of the other patrons. He was about to pull off his jockey shorts when the bartender scolded him.
The women Rubio had been flirting with departed, re-affirming my belief that unless social workers are married, they never have sex, which makes them drink more than ever. I asked Harry if he wanted to go get something to eat, maybe a taco. It felt like someone had made a Cesarean incision across my stomach, and with the three beers in me, I was getting dizzy. Before Hendrix could respond to my suggestion, Rubio turned yellow and threw up, splattering the black and green floor tiling with a deluge of watery barf.
Clooney’s was filling up with its usual after-dinner blue collar customers. It was a signal that me and my boys should be heading out. The guys and gals who worked in the factories around South San Francisco by day didn’t like to drink with us social workers. But Vukovich had gone over to help Bart and Simmons was moping by the video machine, jangling the spare change in his pockets. Harry turned to me and asked, “You want another drink?”
Hendrix’s lips were moving; saying no would have insulted him. Those idle threats he made about leaving the city; the poor schmuck had nowhere to go. This was it for him, the Mission. I looked down at my watch. I should’ve been home an hour ago. “Sounds good to me,” I said.
The crooked smile on Harry’s seamed visage was worth every second of the sacrifice I would make. Cantankerous or not, it didn’t take much to please him. “Two vodka doubles with Bud chasers,” he told the bartender.
While we drank, Harry talked and I daydreamed about my first years on the job. According to Petard, my star had been rising along with his. At a private meeting, just between the two of us, he’d explained himself to me.
“We’re in the driver’s seat, Hassler. Everybody knows about us. I can taste success, and you know, after all the shit I’ve been through, it’s going to be good.”
Gerald had been standing close enough for me to feel the electric, tactile charge of his charisma. His molten eyes, destructive eyes that had mesmerized women into doing things they regretted, were scoping out the runs in my stockings.
“My strategy is priceless, Charlene. Do you want to know what it is?”
“Okay, shoot.”
“Give your clients everything you can. The rewards are in the long run, and they will be incalculable.”
“Where’s that going?”
“To the top, that’s where. Do you want to come with me?”
The memory, reheated like instant coffee, was a dream that’d kept me drinking for years with Frank, Hendrix, and Rubio.
It was about eight o’clock when I left Clooney’s. Hendrix took a cab home. The others were staying to watch basketball on the television in the bar. The stern, Calvinist shadows of Anderson’s Funeral Home across the street dwarfed me while the vodka and beer clashed in my stomach.
I turned around and started my walk home, turning up Valencia Street, strolling by the Bombay Bazaar, Casa Lucas Productos, Puerto Alegre and the alleys of Clarion and Sycamore. I swung back onto Mission where I ran smack dab into a jam. A throng of dope fiends from the Sunrest Corner bar, teenage couples, mariachi musicians, maybe a couple of hundred people were gathering near the Christian Science Reading Room, the An-Da Jiang Acupuncture Clinic at the corner of Nineteenth Street.
Four police cars and an ambulance were in the middle of the road with a fire truck. The police had gotten out of their cars and cordoned off the intersection with that yellow plastic crowd control ribbon they used while two Public Health Service medics examined a man laying in a pool of his own blood.
The gunshot victim was shirtless, sallow, sockless. Someone in the multitude said he had been popped in the head. Other witnesses testified he’d gotten it in the back. But one thing everyone agreed upon: the victim didn’t get shot in the face, which was something to cheer up about. Because if he had to die, his visage needed to remain intact, or there wouldn’t be an open casket at the funeral. In a Catholic neighborhood like the Mission, if that went down, the tristeza would never end.
I kept going, heeding the golden rule of Mission Street. Didn’t your mother ever tell you? It is best to steer clear of the weird shit, the demands made upon our faith in other human beings.
After checking out a few items at the corner bodega, first sniffing at the red chile hanging in bunches next to the spider webs on the ceiling, then at the gnarled onions and the garlic in their ancient cardboard boxes, it became apparent to me that I wasn’t hungry and that drinking had something to do with it. I went back out into the deserted street to my building.
By the time I got to the landing on the fourth floor, I was winded. A slob who was going to croak from a heart attack at the entry to her own dwelling. I thought of knocking, but before I had the chance to, the door opened a crack. Frank, looking anxious, was framed in the orange glow of a lamp on the floor.
“Where the fuck’ve you been?”
“I know, I know. I had to stay after.”
“Smells like it. Hey, did you see the police around the corner?”
“Yeah, I was there.”
“What happened?”
“An accident.”
A car was honking downstairs in the street, making my head pound. Frank put his muscular arms around my neck and said, “I’m happy to see you, booger.” He melted his mouth on mine. I knew what kissing was for: like any other arrangement, it’s what you do to get through to the next person when talking becomes pointless.
Our union, his and mine, it didn’t even have the faintest stink of compromise. This man was so tolerant of me; nearly anything I said or did was fine with Frank. On occasion, this had led me to gross speculation. How could I have a marriage with someone who wasn’t critical of me?
Domestic tranquility was a precedent for me because in the book of matrimony, my divorces had been sordid. Fattened by huge telephone bills, drunken nights at El Tico Nica and Doc’s Clock on Mission Street, and arguments arctic in their ferocity.
“Sugar? You okay?” Frank asked.
There are choices to make when you come home to your spouse. You could tell him about drinking vodka with Hendrix, how you listened to the man rhapsodize about his horniness. You could describe the day at work and what a fucker Eldon had turned out to be. Or you didn’t have to do any of that.
“Everything’s fine, Frank. Almost fabulous.”
“Why don’t you sit down. You want something to eat?”
“It can wait,” I replied.
“You sure? I was going to make rice and veggies.”
“With tofu?”
“And with zucchini.”
“What about mushrooms?”
“I was going to stir-fry it in lemon and ginger.”
“Nah, I’ll skip it.”
“Are you trying to lose weight?”
There were no secrets between me and him. I copped to it. “Yeah, I am.”
Frank was my junior by four years. I had trouble getting a handle on this; everyone was younger and taller than me. I thought my age made me clever; nothing exceptional, but I was beginning to see that wasn’t the case. Getting older only made you more zombielike to yourself.
But my third husband? His relative boyishness, nigh onto thirty-one, kept me clinging to the better things in life. It was a sensational idea to be around Frank because he spoon-fed optimism into me, and because someday, like the buffalo and the welfare recipient, my life, too, would turn over a new leaf.
fourteen
Two years ago, while working through another divorce, I’d met Frank and I had taken up with him to rebound from that split. My second husband had sailed off in a squall of discount liquor, not even pretending to say goodbye. A woman in his
life had been someone to purchase the alcohol, to keep him company while he drank and to use as a scapegoat when he was coming out of his stupor. He never liked having any witnesses after a binge. I had a knack for getting in the way.
I know it sounds bitter: that’s why I left.
Neither of my ex-spouses had made any claims on my money, knowing with their own savage insight that the wage of a social worker wasn’t anything to fight for. I was left with a nagging, unrepentant feeling like the blood in my vital organs had been desiccated. When you broke up with your mate, you couldn’t get that blood back. It didn’t recondense, didn’t reincarnate itself, and never passed through your arteries and capillaries again.
Frank had been married before as a teenager. He had a daughter and son. They were living in Los Angeles with their maternal grandparents and working in a Salvation Army cafeteria. Sorry to say, we didn’t see either of them that much.
The night always brought out desolate thoughts in me, especially when I was in bed after one of your basic weekdays. I looked at Frank, and at his glistening, obdurate erection. I knew that it was time to turn out the lights. I leaned over and switched off the bedside lamp.
Some of the iciest people I’d ever met were social workers. Lavoris, for example. Someone who needed a personality transplant. She was glacial, advertising the characteristics of a freshly mopped public toilet. But Frank was not like her.
“Remember that manual we looked at? Go slow,” I said.
Frank got on his knees and assumed the missionary stance. He was the first man I’d ever met who could execute this position with any finesse or authority. He made it feel luxurious and I lifted my legs for him, splaying them, which was saintly of me, because only some women did that for their lovers. Then he speared me with his organ and I jabbed his buttocks with my feet.
I cradled him in my arms, feeling like I used to when I was a girl. Back then, I’d stare out the window at the full moon rising over the skyline and fantasize about being a heroine, a notable figure. I licked Frank’s ear and contracted my pussy around the base of his cock and said, “You’re a treasure.”