by Jim Nisbet
Silence.
Tipsy swallowed half the remaining half of the tequila.
Quentin said, “You don’t give an orphaned thong sandal about me and my problems, Tipsy.”
“It’s all about you, isn’t it.”
Tipsy paused the glass halfway back to the 2x8 and smiled.
Tipsy stopped smiling
“Some friend you turned out to be,” Quentin added.
Tipsy could hear tears in his voice. She put down the glass. “Quentin. …”
Quentin hung up.
SIXTEEN
CHINA JONES SASHAYED ALONG GEARY STREET IN BUFF-COLORED ASS-cheek-hugging felt bell-bottoms with a skinny concho belt threaded through its loops. The belt’s ten inches of extra tongue terminated in a chrome ferrule that dangled over his basket like the head of a serpent whose hollow tooth might excrete a syrup of venomous glitter, were it to be teased. Above the belt a form-fitting t-shirt with horizontal blue and white stripes with a pack of smokes rolled into one of its sleeves exposed his midriff. Its hem was high enough and the belt was low enough to permit all the world to see that he had a prominent inny that looked like a tree ear with a chrome stud in it, and that he waxed regularly. He wore a women’s cologne named Fumarole, and mousse in his hair sufficient for Tipsy Powell to have once referred to his head as Manitoba, and to the person beneath the hairdo as the veritable Dauphinette of the Manitoban Bratocracy, Population One. Emphasis on the diminutive feminine ending. He’d never spoken to the lush again.
The pants were snug enough that even a mere half a gram of meth bulged a rear pocket like the head of a nail under a coat of paint. China affected a disco purse, too—chrome sequins sewn to black satin suspended waist high by a thin silver chain—that held a couple of poppers, another half of methamphetamine, a driver’s license that said he was 28 years old (he was 38), three twenty-dollar bills, the key to the DeHaro Street cottage, and a card identifying him as a member of Balls to the Wall, a Folsom Street gymnasium with fifty or sixty weight-lifting trophies displayed in a glass case that enclosed three sides of the dutch door at which members queued for towels, vitamin supplements, steroids, growth hormones, glass pipes, and prophylactics.
He’d not been home since the kitchen sink backed up. He wasn’t sure how many days it had been, but he knew, for he’d counted, that it happened one month to the day after Quentin bailed. Quentin had absconded with all his books and clothes, too, and hadn’t so much as texted who what when where why, leaving China to conclude he’d been dropped like a dirty communion wafer.
But then, China had always known Quentin for the emotional coward that he was. From the beginning, he’d seen right through him.
Funny, mulled that diminutive module of his mind least concerned with his appearance and the buzz he’d been minting for some 36 hours, how empty a bookless room can look. Maybe that’s the idea? He hadn’t really given much thought to how handy books were but, as goes décor, they were almost as good as magazines. Quentin’s floor, even with China’s TV and cellphone charger and some clothes, which China had moved upstairs as soon as he’d figured out Quentin had gone for good, looked strangely denuded, almost Arctic, without the books. That the fog had decided to come back and sit on San Francisco for three weeks in a row only served to reinforce the impression of gloomy desuetude. That, and the eviction notice. That, and the For Sale sign.
For a while China had tried to liven up the room. He uprooted a sunflower from somebody’s front yard on the way home from work one evening and put it in a sake bottle with some water and a crushed aspirin. The bottle was transparent, however, so right away the display looked a little grungy, and, soon enough, the flower drooped. He’d thought aspirin was supposed to cure a hangover. Hahaha. And the only place it seemed to really fit was on the small dining table under the window. But it got in the way of the flat screen there so China really found himself at a loss as to where to place the display. Finally he put it on the back of the toilet where it soon died and where it yet languished, moribund, half its water evaporated and the other half a flocculated louche of ditch water.
Quentin had mentioned once that sunflower seeds are arranged in some kind of special spiral but China had paid no more attention to that than he usually paid to the rest of the overeducated poofster’s observations. Quentin was a study. He could go on and on about San Francisco real estate, economic trends, poetry, history, American foreign policy—“so-called,” as he used to say, “foreign policy”—let alone the spiral in the arrangement of seeds in the head of a sunflower, but Quentin knew next to nothing about contemporary music, television, cosmetics, sadomasochism, the Hollywood closet, or pharmaceutical stimulants, for a few of the more incredible examples. Quentin didn’t even care about the Giants, for chrissakes, and remained absolutely clueless about the Forty-niners. It was little wonder he could hardly hold up his end of an intimate dinner conversation. But in that, at least, Quentin wasn’t alone.
Having topped a block of Taylor at Bush, China, slightly winded, paused to raise the ever-so-lightly-tinted-ochre lenses of his charcoal-spotted butterscotch horn-rimmed glasses (shoplifted) for a squint at the tiny woman’s watch (ditto) whose jeweled dial barely covered the racing pulse on the inside of his left wrist. One fifteen. He’d only been up for twelve hours. He still had forty-five minutes of the lunch hour. He never ate lunch and didn’t go to work anymore but he always took the hour, usually whiling away the allotment with a toddy or two backed by a rail of crank in one of the many so-called pocket bars to be found around the purlieus of the Financial District. These bars were of a type—small, dark, not too loud, stiff drinks reasonably priced—tenanted by regulars who would leave you alone if that was the vibe you put out, while yucking it up with anybody willing to talk with them. The customers were rarely stratified into gay or hetero, young or old, transvestite or transgender, like they could be in other parts of town, usually holding no more in common than that they were thirsty and lonely whether employed or not, or, the Big Casino, lonely and independently wealthy. There were a lot of hotels in the neighborhood, too, which, vis-à-vis lonely big casinos, could come in handy.
As if the very street had read this thought, it presented China with an invitingly open door he’d never noticed before. A modest living room of a joint, it was called Patsy’s.
Inside Patsy’s was cozy, dark, and cool with but a single customer. Giants and Foroty-niners memorabilia festooned the walls, along with the usual booze advertisements, salted among photographs from both earthquakes, ’06 and ’89. The jukebox was a semi-modern affair, a small console full of compact discs hanging off the wall next to the bathrooms, of the sort that Quentin’s Quietus thingie could snuff. Although, as far as China was concerned, all Quentin’s Quietus thingie was really good for was embarrassing China. But from this machine, Frank Sinatra declaimed “You Make Me Feel So Young,” with Nelson Riddle, and not too loudly.
You make me feel so young.
You make me feel spring has sprung.
Every time I see you grin
I’m such a happy in-di-vi-du-al …
China had ever heard of Nelson Riddle but, cheered by the illusion of youth regardless, he took a stool midway along the bar and ordered a brandy with a soda back. The bartender, who may have been Patsy herself, filled a rocks glass with ice, cleared a selector spigot with a spritz into the undercounter sink and covered the ice with soda. “Lemon?” she queried. China nodded. She cleft a wedge on the rim of the glass. “Any particular brandy?” She placed two cocktail napkins on the bar in front of China, and set the glass of soda water on one of them.
“What’s in the well?”
Patsy leaned back to survey the counter under the bar. “Crocker’s Golden Spyke.”
China frowned. “Never heard of it.”
“You might want to keep it that way,” said a new voice.
China turned to face the customer wearing impenetrably dark shades sitting on the stool at the corner of the bar with his back to t
he front door.
“That’s not an attitude I find particularly fruitful,” China said with a certain coyness. Turning back to the bartender, he added, “At least, not when it comes to the fruitful experiences often to be risked by venturing into the unknown.”
“Fruitful experiences? Venturing? Unknown? Risk?” The customer groaned. “Ye minor fucking deities and extended clown triggerfish.”
The woman behind the bar leaned on her two outstretched arms, each hand of which gripped a few inches of the gutter on her side of the plank, and waited.
“Fruitful experiences,” the man repeated incredulously.
“Let’s try the well,” China said quietly. “Neat.”
“Was there some kind of high tide last night?” the customer inquired of the room in general. “There seems to be a deal of flotsam ringing the hills this morning.”
China checked the inside of his wrist. “It’s one forty-five, sir.”
“Try not to dry out,” the customer growled. “You’ll raise a stink.”
This guy thinks I’m some kind of pansy, China sniffed to himself. He doesn’t know rough trade when he sees it. Or, he reflected slyly, maybe that’s exactly what he knows?
This kind of thinking was informed by one of the generalities China thought he’d discovered about life, which is, every straight man is at least a little bit queer, and a lot of them are way more than that.
The bartender set a rocks glass on the other napkin and poured the tumbler half full of an amber fluid. China took up the glass and saluted his gruff colleague. “Precisely.” He took a healthy swallow and choked a little. “Say,” he managed to fib, “not bad.”
“Three bucks a shot,” the bartender pointed out. “Although you should know that this is the kinda joint where management might throw a kid a freebie every third drink or so.”
“A vanishing paradigm,” the drunk pointed out contentedly.
China finished the drink. Is there a feeling in the whole wide world comparable to that of one and a half ounces of ethyl alcohol drowning one hundred billion neurons in a heart that has been up all night?
“On the other hand,” the other customer added, “there’s no accounting for taste.”
The bartendress dried her right hand on a towel and extended it. “You’re a brave man. My name’s Patsy.”
“Thank you,” China croaked weakly, taking the hand in his own. He set down the empty glass. The bartender refilled it.
Suddenly, China experienced a vision. I could start all over, he thought to himself. I could become a virgin again. I could pass the high school equivalency test. I could work in this bar part time. Patsy could play my mother. I could drink in moderation, or not at all. I could sleep only with people my own age or younger, and not for money or in-kind services. Maybe do the whole beard—wife, kids, career, and confine my flings to politicians and evangelists and this drunk over here. Although he’s kind of seedy. What’s the difference, anyway? Maybe I’d dress a little more conservatively. Though that doesn’t sound like much fun. I used to get health care at the law firm. Better I should re-up that job and help out at Patsy’s after work. Stop by the Cala Foods at Hyde and California for limes, lemons, and olives on the way in. Nice routine. A simple life. Quitting steroids and gak alone would certainly tilt me toward moderation, once abstinence had permitted my personality a certain refractory period. … He looked slowly around the bar, his hand still firmly in Patsy’s. Patsy had seen her share of bad men and crashed alcoholics, not to mention flamed-out dot-commers and their descendants, economists and bond brokers, not to mention—he assessed the woman across the bar in shrewd slow motion—the hippies, punks, and military personnel of bygone eras. Men, mostly. Patsy had the look about her of a grandmother who kept a sap under the bar. That’s it, China thought dreamily to himself, I could reduce my thirty-eight years of lies, deceit, and irresponsible cocksucking to one half of a simple moral dichotomy: give me your money, and I’ll give you a drink.
“Excuse me,” said a voice next to him. “Is this seat taken?”
“Why …” China abruptly emerged from his reverie. “No. It isn’t.”
“May I?”
“Absolutely,” China graciously responded. “The more the merrier.”
Patsy’s hand released his and, with a reassuring pat to his forearm, she replaced the bottle of Crocker’s Golden Spyke in the well, rapped the bar twice with a knuckle, and turned her attention to her new customer.
China took stock of him, too, and was immediately impressed. Well-barbered straight blond hair with traces of gray at the temples. Tanned and fit. Mid-fiftiesh. Sharp suit of a blue so dark it seemed black, with a tastefully muted and micronometric lavender pinstripe. Blue hosiery in the same value as the avocado shirt, lavender tie to match the pinstripe. Chocolate-colored shoes, possibly handmade. A modest but inescapable hint, in the cologne, of leather and money. China recognized the marque as Justine.
In the vast but quantum bitch-slap between the gakked-up diastole and ethanol-soothed systole, all of China’s well-intentioned resolutions regarding the future disposition of his character evaporated.
“I’ll be right back.” China stood off his bar stool and placed a coaster over the mouth of his brandy glass.
In the men’s room he tapped a little mound of crystal into the fold of skin between the clenched thumb and forefinger of his left hand, snorted one such bump with each nostril, then fell into an intimate inspection of the face in the mirror over the sink. It was miraculously unlined, this face. Moreover, his torso stood in excellent shape, and its costume projected a decisive chasm of caste between himself and, say, buff guys who drive delivery trucks for a living. China’s true portrait, in short, yet tarried in the attic of his soul. The speed burned his maxillary sinuses like he’d inserted a length of red-hot wire into each of them. Someone tapped at the locked door.
“Five minutes,” he said over his shoulder, hooking the toilet seat with the toe of his shoe so that it fell with a clatter.
“So sorry,” said a man’s voice, and, after a pause, the door of the adjacent women’s room opened and closed.
Best to bump the bump, China decided, and he snorted half again as much as previously. Tears started to his eyes. Putting things away and holding his head back to ensure there were no telltale granules clinging to the well-scoured bore of either carefully depilated nostril, dabbing the tears with bath tissue, he flushed the toilet, turned to the door, threw a mouthed “Wish me luck” with a wink and the tissue over his shoulder toward the chancred mirror, and, smoothing and resmoothing the fabric of his trousers over the cheeks of his ass with the flattened palms of both hands, he debouched.
Back at the bar, he found himself alone.
“Where’s my fan club?” he asked Patsy.
“Lon the homophobe, there,” Patsy indicated the catbird seat, “drinks the morning shift. Don’t make no difference what kinda argument he’s started, he goes home every day at two. Like clockwork. This other guy,” she indicated the stool in front of which a drink waited, “will be right back.”
Sure enough, the handsome gentleman in the expensive suit duly reappeared, leaned casually against the bar, and looked very frankly at China.
“Cheers,” China smiled. The speed had ignited his speed-dependent tinnitus. No problem. What’s to hear? The news? More than once, China had done an amount sufficient to incite a sloughing of audio frequencies of the sort to be heard when tuning a short wave radio. He knew his limits and—he cranked a rictus smile for no reason apparent to anybody else—he wasn’t there yet. He knew this because, at the moment, the tinnitus was a discreet frequency of 5,000 hertz, and the only thing twenty decibels of 5,000 hertz gets in the way of is a whistling tea kettle.
The handsome stranger returned the smile and took up his glass. “You should have let me in,” he said quietly. “I had something for you.”
China could have idly strung out this banter for an hour or so, via protestations along the lines of
, I’m just off the bus from Boise and I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, or, there are some things a girl just doesn’t share with strangers and the bathroom is one of them; but he sized up his man and cut to the chase.
“You might have passed a note under the door.”
The man smiled. “I didn’t have a pen.”
China extended his hand, knuckles up, fingertips down. “China.”
The other responded reciprocally, knuckles down, fingertips up. “Holden. But you can call me Miou Miou.”
“We could go back later,” China suggested, “Or any time for that matter.” He made a little face. “It’s just a bathroom, after all. Unless … ?”
“Tea,” the man shook his head modestly, “is not my scene.”
“Nor mine,” China hastened to assure him. “It’s just that, when in Rome. …”
“Understood,” the man agreed, “and enough with the sotto voce already. Would you like another drink?”
“Absolutely,” China replied.
Holden pointed. “That’s brandy?”
“It was,” China said, downing it. Thanks to the crank, China could barely taste the cheap brandy. He showed Holden the empty glass and redeployed the rictus smile. His teeth looked like the tiles on a much-used re-entry vehicle.
“Bartender,” Holden said.
“Her name is Patsy.” China was not the one to pass up an opportunity to come on like a regular.
“Yo.” Patsy looked up from a copy of The New York Times double-trucked flat on the far end of bar, between herself and the now vacant catbird seat, where the light from the open street door favored reading.
“What’s your best brandy?”
Removing and folding a pair of half-lens reading glasses, Patsy walked down the bar as she surveyed the top shelf. “Looks like this Amygdales d’or shit.” She pronounced it Amig dah-lee’s door. Holden smiled. “It sounds Irish.”
China shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” Patsy said doubtfully.