“All I’m saying is if you can prove to a civil court judge that you have been intimidated, then the court will probably make this company pay your fines, give you loss-of-business restitution and also issue an injunction against them to stop molesting you. Then you’ll be able to hire another carter for your garbage which will mean you’ll have corrected your violations and made arrangements not to repeat them. As of this moment though I have to ask you to tell your customers upstairs to go and for you to lock up and not enter the bar again for customers till we restore your health permit. Do and the tribunal might rule that you lose your health permit for good. If you don’t close voluntarily now I’ll call a cop and city carpenter and have a hasp and padlock put on your door and remove yours. Touch our lock and you’ll be arrested and probably prohibited from handling liquor or food anywhere in the state again in a commercial way.”
“Close me. Don’t know from where but I’ll come up with something to open again.”
“That’s the only way to do it, Mr. Fleet—peacefully and optimistically.”
We go upstairs, he carrying my garbage bag. He’s a weak little guy or looks it and I say “Can I help you with that, no evil influence intended,” and he says no. I tell the one customer to pay up and go. As he’s leaving the bar I say “Wait, Walt—here’s your three bucks back. If you’re going to be my last customer then I want it to be like my father did, which was to buy everybody at the bar a last round before he turned the place over to me with this immediate huge deficit. Of course he had them three deep that night and his leaving was like a going-off-to-war celebration, when I just have you two here. You want one, sir?” I say to the inspector. “Even just that coffee or cocoa?”
“Can’t. I’m not even permitted to purchase a matchbook in any establishment I’m examining.” He takes my health permit off the wall, has me sign a release that he took it and puts the permit and release in his briefcase.
“I’ll be twenty minutes.”
I tear down the bar, wipe it clean, shut the lights, lock up and he asks for and I give him the keys. I sign another release for them and he tapes a sign on the door: “Premises Temporarily Closed by Order of Dept. of Health.”
“Everyone who reads that will think I’ve roaches and rats galore in there and never come back to eat.”
“Have them phone me and I’ll guarantee you’ve one of the cleanest bars in town.”
“Want to know something? Maybe I ‘ m cutting my throat by this but I want to say it anyway as a sign of my sincerity. I’ve seen occasional rats and mice in my cellar and of course roaches and trapped or poisoned them or chased them out and sealed up their escape holes. And a couple of times in recent years here an animal or two I’ve never seen before. I don’t even know where this thing comes from and never saw a picture of it in any encyclopedia or animal book when I went to look or heard or read of it talked about. They’ve long slithering flat tails and big round ears and little kids’ baby teeth and faces like platypuses these nonrats, though they’re no larger than our average-sized mice. Once or twice I swear I saw them and when I did they got scareder than I was and darted into the dark together and disappeared, not to be seen by me for another two years. They must come from the sewers through holes or pipes in my wall from yesteryear that are behind things that I think are for something else or never knew were there.”
“Several other bar places around town have told me about them. They’re little and light brown, right? and—”
“‘Little’ I said and that shade of color, yes.”
“And seem to thrive on underground dampness and coolness and garbage and the seepage from kegs of ale and beer. They apparently only travel in twos and are probably of opposite sexes our resident pest specialist says, since one’s always a lot furrier than the other and less the aggressor, but which sex that one is she doesn’t know. Nobody’s been bitten or even touched one yet though they say they have been sissed and spit at. You’d think, knowing the personality and armory you bartenders got, that in the fifteen years since they were first sighted, one of these cellar creatures would have been caught or shot or with a beer bottle or bat clubbed to unconsciousness or found one time down there after they had died a natural death. Since they’ve so far remained relatively timid and for all we know might be the same two going from bar to bar through their own subterranean paths, we kept it on the q.t. to the news so as not to alarm and frighten off the entire bar population and your clientele. But we would appreciate and are even offering a small reward and citation to the first bar worker who captures one alive and a small reward without the citation for one dead in almost any recognizable form, not that we’re encouraging anyone to endanger his life doing it.”
“So I learned I wasn’t crazy all along about these animals, which always till now kept me from telling anyone.”
We shake hands in front of the bar and he wishes me well and I walk in the falling snow to my hotel. Dayclerk’s on duty behind the desk and he says “Never seen you here this early. What’s wrong, you sick?”
“Just very upset. If my luck gets any worse—well, I don’t know, I haven’t all day stepped in dogshit yet. Any messages?”
Letter from the cemetery my family’s at, forwarded from my old address and requesting a teller’s check for the gravesite’s annual maintenance. “This is our final reminder. Snow covers a multitude of untidinesses but does melt. If you cannot settle this debt by next week we will distressingly be compelled to let the ground of your deceased loved ones overgrow.”
Other another bill from my previous landlord demanding I pay all of last month’s rent, even though I was burned out three days into it. Since, to get her off my back, I already sent her half a month’s rent and figure because she’s such a shrewdie she’ll collect fire insurance on my apartment fire worth five times what it’ll cost her to rebuild and then get twice the monthly rent I paid, I tear the bill up and drop it in the cigarette butt can by the elevator.
“Please for godsakes don’t throw your trash in there,” the dayclerk says. “That’s for tobacco objects only, which could ignite your letters and end up burning down the hotel.”
I pick the paper scraps out, shake the sand off and put them in my pocket. Helena comes out of the elevator as I’m about to go in it and I tip my hat at her. She acts like she doesn’t know me and I hold the elevator button at L and say “Shaney, tenant in the hotel here, friend of the nightclerk Eric, how you doing?”
“Oh yeah or at least I think so. This morning, am I wrong? I was so freaking sleepy and didn’t have in my lens. Fine thanks,” and stands there staring at me and I say “Well, isn’t fair keeping other people upstairs from using the elevator, so I’ll be seeing you,” and she pinches my sleeve and says “Want company? I could take an hour’s detour and you were terrific last time, despite what I might have said in my sleepiness—you really got me going,” and I say “Not today thanks though thanks for asking, I mean that, and you know I didn’t do anything of the kind to you,” and go in the elevator and press my button.
“Don’t depreciate yourself,” she says as the door closes, “or you’ll never get anywheres good.”
There’s a lilac smell she left that I like and I almost feel like riding up and down another time to keep sniffing it. Reminds me of me on her, just faint traces of her body especially around the armpits and breasts, though mixed with my liquor and after awhile her sweat. And also of my grandmother when I was a boy, not only the toilet water she always wore but the bunches of lilacs she vased in one vase on their bar’s free food counter every spring and made me trolley from home at least once a year then to smell them. “Stick your big nose in there, kiddy,” she’d say. She and my grandfather are also at that gravesite.
In my room for almost nothing better to do I take the bandage off even if I’ve a week to and stick it in the wastepail. Maybe the wound will heal faster in just plain air but what the hell do I know? In the mirror I’ve a long raw ditch in my head and the stitches have almost
disappeared. Metal plate inside my skull I’m afraid to touch I can’t even look where. Otherwise I’m quite a mess. Bags under my eyes, lost weight in the neck and face, skin paler, hair greyer, right side of my head again hurts, eyeballs bloodshot when I never noticed them anything but all white before, even my teeth ache. So my bar’s locked up. All right, forget it for now. If anything, till you get yourself more in control, just try and joke about it, and ten seconds later: piss, shit! How’ll I make my way when I haven’t got hardly a pot saved to lick from and have to soon pay the bar rent and other bills and this hotel in a few days? and I slam the medicine chest door till the water glass falls off the toothbrush holder underneath and bounces around in the sink while I try to catch it before it breaks.
I drink a stiff drink and another and slap the mattress with my fists and shout “Christ, sons of bitches,” and then think easy there, getting nowhere by this, they could knock down the door and lock you up for being a sicko for all you know and I lie on the bed and think what to do to get my permit back and stop from losing my bar for good and right away drop off for an hour when I was trying my hardest not to.
I dream about being naked in bed with Helena though here she has specks for breasts and a much larger rear but is her same age and I’m only a year older than her and she comments on my “delicious sunbit skin.” She’s supposed to be my sister, a telegram she hands me says, who in truth died of a doctor’s mishap at home when she was eleven and me twelve and is also at that gravesite. And just when I’m about to shoot in her with more body thrills and force and noise than I had in real life this morning and maybe ever and Helena screaming my ears out too, I awake from the sound of a Sanitation snowplow grating against the pavement.
I pace around the room and can’t think of a thing to do about how to reopen the bar and get my trash picked up on a regular basis. Tribunal? What do I have for it and another inspector that’s new? Lawyer? Just for a talk with one what’s to lose? I fish out the business card that lawyer slipped into my wallet at the hospital ward, call her and say “Janie Pershcolt? Shaney Fleet here, remember me?” and she says “Sure, how are you, what’s up?” and I tell her what’s happened till now to me since I last saw her, and when she asks, refresh her memory a little about what went on before.
“You know, for a moment I couldn’t place you apart from the rest of my prison charges but now I do. How’s your gash? You really got stabbed bad.”
“Hit with a pipe. Bandage came off today.”
“Knife or pipe, it’s cause for celebration, right? because it means the doctors think you’re getting well, so I’m glad.”
“I took the bandage off myself, so I don’t know if it was the best thing.”
“Don’t worry, you look better with it off, right? And when you look better your spirits soar, which always improves the healing process, so coming up right behind it should be your complete cure. Okay, what I can do for you straight off the skin of my head is the following. Present the civil court a petition of redress in your name exerting upon them in no uncertain terms the pressing need if not fullfledged professional necessity on your part to, nah, that won’t do. Your predicament’s more complex. Give me a day to filter through it. But it by all means seems, and this is from the heart, not the legalese brain, that every human being conducting a legitimate business in the city ought to have the indivisible right to get his commercial trash collected just as every private carter ought to have the same right to refuse to handle a customer if it’s not because of race, religion, sex and the rest of those reasons. But let me quote my rates so we later don’t have to resort to blows over it because we didn’t know such and such was the price, right? For the brief I’ll have to draw up in your behalf in the next few days and which should rescind your fines and violations, impose a restraining order on Stovin’s and force one of the other carters to accept you as a client, it’ll be eight hundred dollars plus whatever ancillary expenses are required for cabs and calls and so forth, agreed?”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You own a bar, don’t you, so you must do well.”
“It’s a small inexpensive joint for too much rent and with all the companies who service me raising their prices from month to month. It barely stays afloat.”
“Then sell it, because you can’t win without a lawyer. With the rest of the money from your bar’s sale and possibly compensatory penalties you’ll get from Stovin’s, you can open another place.”
“I couldn’t get much for the bar. Maybe a little something for a few of the older fixtures. But nothing enough for opening a new bar and zero from anyone for taking over the bar’s name and lease.”
“What kind of ready money do you have then?”
“A hundred, fifty, like that but at the most.”
“To get even the brief typed without pages of smudge marks and wine stains and a couple of court copies made will cost me more than that.”
“Then how about one of those free voluntary whatever-they-are lawyer organizations for people like me who can’t afford high fees?”
“Mine’s not high, it’s low. But because it’s the slow season and with my own onslaught of bills to pay, I could reduce it for you by two hundred or so.”
“I still can’t, so what about that Legal Aid group?”
“I hope your joint earned you a poverty level income or less last year and the state declared you an indigent, because if not, Legal Aid can’t touch you.”
“I at least got above poverty, thank God.”
“Was what you earned the same amount you reported?”
“Every penny I made I reported and paid all the taxes on too.”
“No wonder you’re in so steep. I don’t know what to say, baby. You haven’t the money, then you can’t engage me and for sure no other lawyer and you’re now wasting what might be left of your hard-earned income on what I charge for professional advice over the phone. That costs twenty dollars per quarter of an hour, seventy-five for the full. If I handled your case that charge would be appliable to the big fee. Since we only spoke fourteen minutes, my timer says, plus my chitchat now about what I cost over the phone and so forth, which I don’t charge for but is time-consuming. I’ll make it a flat seventeen just for you. Mail it to my business card address.”
“What I phoned for wasn’t so much advice but an estimate.”
“Fifteen then, but that’s rock bottom.”
“Still, it doesn’t seem fair.”
“You send me that fifteen, chiseler, or I’ll haul you into Small Claims and get you for what you owe me plus what my rates are to take two hours away from work and cab fare back and forth,” and hangs up.
I call back and say “Listen, Mrs. or Miss Pershcolt, don’t forget how you first got me. I’ll tell the judge that by law you’re not supposed to take me on as a private client when I was originally assigned to you as a public.”
“You win, you mooch, but I hope those Stovin creeps and all the city department slobs wind up with your shirt, socks and jockeyshorts and whatever you got underneath and in the middle of a major street.”
“Thanks, lady.”
“Oh, you going to be so asinine to give me an argument about that too?”
“No, I don’t know what asinine is, but go on, get out of my life—die why don’t you please, you SOB,” I scream and she’s laughing and I hang up.
I think give it up, sell out, let it go for peanuts if that’s the only way to get rid of it, walk away from it even if that’s what it has to come down to, start another bar in some other city or a different business in this one or work for a barowner or chain or just give yourself the time to do whatever you want to do with the money you might end up making from the bar’s sale. But those aren’t constructive thoughts how to deal with the two main problems: what to do about reopening the bar and carting away its garbage, so think some more.
Maybe if I don’t think about it and do something else for the next few hours or entire day, something
will come to my head like a bomb going off. But what do I know from anything to do but work, eat, sleep and now drink? I pour another scotch and think forget that too: you’ll be blind by the night and a lush by morning or getting to be with maybe never another constructive thought about anything again but taking another drink, which isn’t.
I pour the scotch back in the bottle, lick my fingers where it dripped, put my rubbers and coat on and go to a movie house around the block just to do something but thinking about drinking and the garbage and bar.
Nobody stands so I squeeze along my aisle, brush an opened box of candy off my seat, sit down, my foot accidentally kicking an empty beer or soda can which rolls a few rows to the front before stopping I suppose against a seat leg or someone’s shoe. But I leave in an hour. After twenty or more years of not seeing a picture except on the bar’s TV, and that just snatches of but I don’t think ever a whole one straight through, it seems I’ve lost all interest in them or just can’t get in the mood and also every seat I tried was too uncomfortable with springs popping or padding sticking out and the theater seemed infested besides.
I buy a book off the paperback rack at the drugstore and go to a coffeeshop and read it while having a sandwich and milkshake. It’s a novel about an old plantation family years ago. Maybe it’s a good story and the writing’s surely all right and scenes and people true to life or at least what I know from those days, but the book or maybe just reading them or particularly at this time just isn’t for me. I give the book to the counterman along with my tip and money for the check and he says “Don’t bother, I can hardly rest long enough to breathe.”
“Give it to a customer and he’ll appreciate it and maybe give you a bigger tip.”
“All right, I’ll give it to a customer. Hey mac,” he says to me, “like to read a terrific spicy new pocketbook for free?” and we laugh and I lay down an extra quarter to my tip and take the book and drop it in a trashcan on the street. Now that’s the type of guy I should’ve got to work for me when I had the chance: tough but good sense of humor and smart and he looks honest and reliable, though who can tell till you really see?
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