Ladies' Man

by Richard Price

  The guy next to me was a hasty shaver. Tiny shreds of toilet paper stuck in festive red clots to his neck and chin.

  The girls kept crowding in. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t think. Everything I could have said sounded so fucking stupid. A pretty girl was talking to two chinks. Piss me off. Talk to me! Talk to me! Please don’t make me say something stupid. I couldn’t take it. Couldn’t do it alone.

  Every schmuck there had a partner. I needed somebody to laugh and elbow with. Slap palms with after I blew it with a chick by saying I was cm assignment from Playboy. I needed reinforcements. I needed to pick up a gay first, a friend first, then some tail.

  The place was now jammed. I went outside, found a pay phone and got Donny’s number from Information. Nobody answered.

  I walked over to a new place, Fahrenheit’s. It had a different layout. There was no dining area, just a bar along one wall, several small tables and a dance area. On a raised platform a goateed guy played a guitar. He finished “Welcome Back Kotter,” then jumped into a Mamas and Papas medley.

  This place was less crowded; there was more space. No one was dancing. I bought a rum and o.j. A thin, sad-looking girl stared at the singer, her thumb hooked. over the top of her drink.

  “You know, I’ve been standing here fifteen minutes wondering what to say, so I’m just gonna say that.” I gave her a Mexican bandit grin.

  She mumbled something and I was off and running.

  “You know”—I winced seriously—“there are so many isolated people here. I can’t tell what they want, what they need.” I came on like Dr. Kenny’s one-man sensitivity clinic. Her arms were folded as if she were cold. I stretched back to the bar to deposit my glass. When I turned back some guy had squeezed between us and was riffing on her like a demon. Her fucking loss. That was it. I started looking for a guy.

  There were three prospects within ten feet of me. One was picking his nose, the other two weren’t. One down. Both the other guys were good-looking dudes. The guy nearest me was my height, slim and blond. The other was shorter, more muscular and dark like me. I liked him better. He was dressed nice—tweed pants, two-tone shoes and a brown turtleneck.

  “That guy’s fucking horrible,” I muttered to him and smirked in the direction of the singer.

  He chuckled.

  “This guy always play here?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never been here.”

  “Oh yeah? Me neither.” The guy sounded Brooklyn despite his Ivy threads and my accent degenerated until I talked like an extra from Marty. “Beasts.” I grimaced, scanning the women. “All fucking beasts. I’d like to dip their faces in dough and make animal crackers.”

  “They ain’t all bad,” he said mildly and I felt like a shit. They weren’t all bad at all. He was a better person than me.

  “You from Brooklyn?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “You?”

  “Manhattan.” I made it sound like Brooklyn. “Whereabouts in Brooklyn, Bensonhurst?”

  “Bay Ridge, you know Bay Ridge?”

  “Sure, my cousin lives in Bay Ridge. You know a guy named Mark Becker?”

  He shook his head.

  “My name is Kenny.” I casually extended my hand. “Kenny Becker.” I seemed more nervous introducing myself to this guy than I had been trying to score.

  He took my hand briefly in a short shake. “Terry Saperstein. You know something, Kenny? You’re right, this guy is fucking horrible,” he sidemouthed.

  I got a weird feeling of comfort when he said that. It was like the time Fat Al asked me what was wrong and called me by name in the diner that morning. Maybe Terry and I would become friends.

  “It’s fucking hard to get laid in here. All the fucking girls are in teams.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled.

  “It’s like the reason girls come here in teams is so each one can make sure the other doesn’t have too good a time.” I jutted my chin at two pretty girls in dungarees and blazers. “Like those two trombones over there.”

  I bought another drink. When I finally got my change and turned around Terry was gone.

  “Kenny, over here.” Terry was sitting in between the two girls, an arm extended to me. He worked faster than the Flash. “Kenny, this is Felice, she’s from Manhattan, too!” He offered me the girl with cupcake-sized tits and a Winky Dink smile.

  “You’re from Manhattan? That’s amazing! I’m from Manhattan!” I slapped my heart.

  “Oh yeah? Whereabouts?” She was a petite blonde, semi-drunk, weaving in place with Arthur Murray dance steps to keep from falling down.

  “This place is wild, huh?” I didn’t know what else to say. Terry was sitting with Felice’s teammate, heads down, rapping intensely and quietly.

  “I’m doing a paper for Sosh on how people rap in singles’ bars.” Felice almost fell against me.

  “Oh yeah? Which college?”

  “Queens.”

  “What year, senior?”

  “I’m a soph.” That meant nineteen. I started one of my death trips in my head again. Nineteen was like my baby cousin. “You in college?” That made me feel bet- _ ter. . “Nah, I graduated.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Dartmouth. You ever hear of Dartmouth?”

  Felice leaned over and tapped her friend on the arm. “Mary, he went to Dartmouth.” Terry made a face. I guess he wasn’t getting anywhere. Mary was mousy and unhappy-looking.

  “You know Jeffrey Fein?”

  “Fein, Fein.” I bit my lip and cocked my head.

  “He’s a senior, he’s on the squash team.”

  “Nah, I graduated three years ago.” I winked at Terry, but he didn’t know me. He wouldn’t have known I was talking out of my ass.

  Felice staggered slightly in Terry’s direction, smiling at him. Terry returned the smile. Mary glanced away. I moved between Terry and Felice.

  “Hey, does anybody remember this?” The guitarist started singing his own lame version of “In the Still of the Night,”

  “Does anybody remember who sang that?” No one answered. A few couples started dancing. It was the Five Satins but I wasn’t going to be the putz to yell it out.

  “How about this one, who did this? Does anybody remember this? ‘Earth Angel.’” Nobody remembered; everybody remembered. “Who gave a shit. The people there who remembered hit tunes from 1956 I think would be more into forgetting. Besides, if they were old enough to actually remember dancing to that stuff and were still doing this scene I don’t think they would be into advertising.”

  The floor was littered with couples.

  “Hey!” A drunk, fat guy stepped away from the bar and roared, “Does anybody remember this?” He grabbed his crotch with both hands, laughed, turned to leave and smacked his forehead on the doorframe.

  “You wanna dance?” That was Felice asking me.

  We danced without grinding. I liked the weight of her arms on my neck. I rested a hand on her jutting hipbone, my drink in the other hand; I had a new girlfriend.

  “Hold on, one second.” I set my glass on the bar and when I turned around she was dancing with someone else. It seemed as if every time I turned my head I got bird-dogged. I felt crushed; what happened to the love that once was ours?

  She was dancing with Terry. Mary sat at the bar, angrily scratching her scalp with a long nail.

  I was getting ready to split when the song ended. Felice grabbed my arm. I was back. -

  “Hey, you all wanna get stoned?” she asked. Tricky question.

  “Not here,” I said, giving Terry the high sign. “Let’s all go up to my place.”

  “Great!” Felice grabbed Mary’s arm, too. “Let’s all go up to Kenny’s!”

  Terry gave me a shot on the arm like “Good goin’, man.” I felt like a team player. Life was great.

  Trouble. Mary didn’t want to come along. Felice was honor-bound to stick by her friend.

  I ushered Felice to the corner alcove bet
ween the bathrooms and made a last-ditch plea for a party time.

  “I can’t, I gotta stay with Mary. You want my phone number?” She rummaged in her bag and whipped out pen and paper.

  Back at the bar, Terry was gone. Mary still sat like a geriatric at a window.

  “Where’s Terry?” I asked her.

  “Home,” she muttered, like, “Fuck him anyway.” For some reason, Terry’s splitting hurt the most. I’d been used.

  I turned down an offer to go bar-hopping with them.

  I walked up Second Avenue, pissed as pissed could be. But I knew. I knew all along what the score was. Even before I showered that night I knew what the fucking score was with that scene.

  A phone number. Christ. A phone number. I could have stayed home, got in bed with the Yellow Pages and had an orgy. But screw it. It wasn’t my scene anymore. I didn’t slave forty hours a week to dress up Friday night, piss away twenty bucks’ worth of liver-destroying alcohol all for a phone number. What a goddamned life. All for a phone number, maybe a kiss, a date, a poke, a fuck. Then work Monday with fantasies of cozy weekends in a New. England cabin, snifters and turtlenecks by the fire, romance, marriage, planning for some mythical, magical future. Strolling down Saturday night for the Sunday Times. It was a fucking mirage. A goddamn public relations lie. A scrap of paper with a phone number. It was whacking your pud or buying a cute blouse in Bloomingdale’s and thinking you’re hot shit because you know the bartender’s first name and are reading all of Kurt Vonnegut and being proud to qualify for a Master Charge and getting sinking feelings in your gut every time the phone rings because you don’t know if it’s him/her from Dirty Ernie’s or your whiny unappeasable cunt of a mother and where the hell are the Valium and all those goddamn young swingers go back, go back, go back every Friday night because maybe this week, maybe this week. That bastard selective amnesia. That, goddamn Las Vegas of the heart. And everybody was getting taken to the cleaners. Going home wearing a barrel. Snake eyes up the ass. Just like me.

  I stomped all the way up to Eighty-sixth Street in the cold. The streets were littered with well-dressed singles window-shopping bars.

  I stopped at a small bar, not to score but because for the first time that night I needed a drink. The place was called Mr. Natural’s. No music, no dancing, a small tight crowd. A four-foot-wide lounging lane ran the length of the bar. The bartender had a longish shag cut. He looked like an Afghan hound. Most of the crowd seemed to know each other. As a matter of fact, I’m sure they did—they probably bumped into each other every weekend.

  “You look like a deep thinker.”

  That came from my right. She was thin and nervous with a narrow head,. high cheekbones and suspicious eyes. Her hair was in a permanent like a model in a Lady Clairol ad and she smoked a thin cherry-scented cigar. . ;

  “That’s exactly what I am, a deep thinker,” I rested an elbow on the bar and gave her my best Marcello.

  She was a trainee buyer at Altaian’s, hated it, hated bars, hated her sister whom she lived with on the Upper West Side (Hey! I live there, too!) and never got drunk. I tried one of her cigars. Some guy tried to bird-dog me. She shot him down as I looked away like I could care less. I knew I would score because she said hello to me first. Her name was Kristin.

  I grabbed her wrist, tilting her watch slightly toward me. It was eleven-thirty.

  “Do you have an appointment?” She smirked.

  “Not at all, I just wanted to see what time it was because I’ve been up since Wednesday.” I had no idea why I said that. I just was checking the time to touch her arm.

  “Wednesday, huh? You look pretty rested to me.” She peaked an eyebrow skeptically.

  “That’s because; I’ve mastered the catnap like the Chinese. They stay up all night reading, then fall into these intense five-minute sleeps now and then during the day.”

  “Sounds very Zen to me.” She ditched her cigar. I was pretty sure she was goofing on me. Suddenly I felt very tired, as if to back up my Wednesday story. If I wasn’t going to score in the next five minutes I would just as soon go home and sleep.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you, is your sister older or younger than you?”

  “Older, she’s thirty four.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.” That sounded hopeful. She had twelve years’ desperation on Felice.

  “How old are you?” She sounded defensive.

  “Me? Thirty-two.” I added two years to make her unparanoid. I wanted to ask her to come back with me right then, but I pussied out.

  “Are these mainly regulars?” I squinted around the bar, bored with my own question.

  “Oh yeah, about three quarters.” She didn’t look around.

  “You come here a lot, hah?” I asked, helping myself to another of her cigars.

  “Yeah, usually with my sister. She’s home recuperating from visiting our parents.”

  “Where, in Florida?”

  “Nope.” She smiled. “New Jersey.”

  “What, Orange?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Well, this is my first time here, which I’m sure you heard before, but it’s true.” I felt myself shifting into lightweight candidness. “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t even be here tonight except I’m totally out of my skull, totally nuts.” My mouth felt like it was on automatic pilot, but I was feeling a little better, relaxed, more connected than usual.’ “You know what I’ve been doing this week?” I winked. “I’ve been yelling at my TV, going to peep shows. I went back to my old hangout, from when I was a kid. I’ve been through a whole bunch of deadend bullshit this week. A real nowhere week. I also quit my job today.” I ran it down like errands. “I’ve been working six years as a Bluecastle House man, and I just up and quit.” I grinned in triumph.

  She looked at me admiringly, a slow smile on her lips. “Wow, how does it feel?”

  “Good,” I said without thinking. “Great.”

  “Whata you gonna do now?”

  I shrugged with more devil-may-care bravado than I felt. “We’ll see.”

  “I wish I had the nerve to quit.”

  “Hey, just do it. The only way to do it is to do it.” I put my hand on hers for emphasis. She moved her thumb against my finger.

  “But aren’t you scared?”

  “Who me? I’m terrified. I told you, this has been some bitch, of a week. An unreal week.”

  “A ‘not me’ week?” She nodded knowingly.

  “A what?”

  “Not me. That feeling when you’re so cut out of it you don’t even feel like you’re living inside your own body. It’s worse than a bad mood. It’s a nothing mood.”

  “Oh ho, not me, hah? Yeah, I’ve been in a ‘not me’ mood, on and off, for many years if you wanna know the truth.”

  She tapped a cigar on her thumb.

  “The best years are over, kid. High school, the guys, the playground, the girlfriends. It was all there. The passion was there. I was alive then, not like now. Shit. Now sometimes I want to hold a mirror to my mouth to see if I’m still breathing, but then, then I was really wailin’. I used to have everybody on the floor all the time. I was court jester of the ‘in crowd.’ They used to call me Kenny the Riffer.”

  “I hated high school. I was one of those drag-ass depressed girls always schlepping a clarinet case around. We would have hated each other.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, hey, I don’t mean to say I was the king of the school.” I was afraid to veer her into a down mood.

  “I was real lonely in high school.” She finished her drink. I tried to catch the bartender’s eye, but he was jammed down at the other end of the bar.

  “Well, I was too. I mean on the inside, because I was like a separate person watching myself do my routines. Always. That’s loneliness, isn’t it?”

  She nodded. We were quiet for a while. We ordered another round of drinks.

  As I sat there staring at my drink I thought of La Donna singing “Feelings” up onstage
, me sitting alone mi the Carnegie wanting some girl to touch the back of my head, to slip her hand around me and press her palm into my forehead—my hands, teen-age hands, Donny clutching, grabbing for a mindless riff to save himself from silence. I hoped La Donna would make it.

  I hoped someday we would be together again. I felt crumpled, deflated.

  I started out trying to save Kristin from a down trip and I wound up dancing alone in my head at a one-man blues bash. It must have been showing in my face because her tone became softer, more personal. I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to get laid.

  “See, like I said, I had a rotten time in high school. But it wasn’t high school. I think the problems with me started a lot earlier. I was brought up in such a way that . there was no way I could have enjoyed high school. My mother was constantly telling me how horrible a child I was. Once when I was six she came back from church and told me she asked Jesus why, what she did when she was a kid that was so sinful that He punished her by giving her me as a child, see. I grew up with that bullshit, and when my older sister Patty drowned at a beach when I was eight my mother said, ‘I wish it was you instead.’ So, by the time I got to high school I felt so goddamned nonhuman and hated I didn’t have a chance in a thousand.”

  Maybe La Donna and me would get together sooner than I imagined. I was changing, I was thinking. I could help her. We could both make it.

  I latched onto the last few minutes of what Kristin was saying. She sounded like some therapy head. What a big pile of bullshit. She was sucking wind too. I cut her short by grabbing her wrist.

  “Yeah yeah yeah, but let me tell you something. No matter what happened to you, no matter where you’ve been, you’re here now, and now is what you got to deal with!” I banged the bar with my fist. “You know, you can spend your whole life thinking about the past and feeling sorry for what happened or didn’t happen, but ah, wherever you’ve been, you’re here now and here and now are where you’re gonna find the things you need. Now, I’m hurtin’, you’re hurtin’. The answer is here, not back there.”