by Greg Baxter
When, after an hour of this, I saw that my flight still had no gate, I stopped in the smoking room – there are two in each terminal – asked an ugly woman beside me for a light, and chain-smoked three or four cigarettes so I wouldn’t have to bother anyone else: the black dude checking his texts, the cute girl with a tattoo on her neck, the obese man in a white beard wearing an NFL jersey, breathing as though he were about to dive underwater. The room was not ventilated well, there were few seats, and the ashtrays, which were deep, did not extinguish the cigarettes; they made a bonfire of them.
One man, on the phone, told his wife, Honey, I’m not smoking, I’m in an airport. Veterans and soldiers chummed up. A large bearded man, mid-forties, in a baseball cap and T-shirt with some writing on it, told a soldier, a short Latino with dimples in his fat cheeks, that running every morning in combat boots had busted his knees. He’d still be fighting, if they’d let him, if he had any cartilage left, and I knew it was the truth. Another old guy leaned in to the discussion; raspily he talked about his training, and the miles he ran uphill, and thanked the young Latino for defending his country.
I rejoined the non-smoking flow of the airport. I had three hours, and, sober, in the bright lights, the world’s busiest airport, the Christmas muzak, news-stands, CNN at every gate, I had the rats. It was almost midnight in Dublin, and the poison of forty straight nights – a true but accidental number – was starting to flood from my armpits, crotch and forehead. I’d withdrawn completely from my job, producing a drip of news and analysis so trivial that I could not remember what I did from hour to hour. Outside of work, I re-energized. I’d been teaching four nights a week all autumn, and in December my classes had ended, meaning I had money and time. It had been hectic and drunken and sleepless.
Moving through the terminals, observing the state of permanent transit, of people checking email on their phones, going over presentations on their laptops, I felt as though I’d been thrown from my city like a man thrown from his car in a violent crash. My body was beginning to tremble. This was sobriety, sobriety before the big sweaty slumber. I was beginning to hallucinate in the lights.
By the time I’d got to Terminal C my gate had been posted, and I found a bar near by. There was one empty spot. I put my bag down and took out a book. There were two gigantic black women bartending. The really fat one said, Whachoo want, baby?
A beer, please, I said.
She stood behind the row of taps and opened her eyes widely. You got to be more specific, baby, she said. The name on her tag was Latisha.
I didn’t recognize the brand – some microbrew, with pale, amber and winter ale versions. I’d forgotten that nobody in America just drank beer anymore.
The pale, I said. Is it good?
Oh baby, it’s good. They’re all good.
The other woman shouted, You get a shot for free, baby!
For free?
Free shot with any pint, the first said.
I looked down the bar, and everybody had shots. Okay, I said. Jack.
The other woman shouted, Howboutsometequilababy?
A man a few spots down shouted, Fucking tequila, baby!
The other woman said, All right, baby!
The man smashed a wadded-up five-dollar bill on the bar with the palm of his hand and said, Fucking tequila! Shit yeah, baby!
Everyone nodded.
Okay, I said, tequila, baby.
Premium for an extra two dollars, baby.
Fuck that shit, yelled a guy at the far end of the bar.
Yeah, I said, just the well.
You sure?
I’m sure.
The really fat woman said, Okay, ID, baby.
The guy next to me said, Teesha, how fucking old does a guy have to be to not get carded?
I looked at him. Teesha looked at him. Sorry, dude, he said.
I knew my US passport would be easiest, but some unhappy need to defy the whole setting, to resist re-identification, urged me toward the Irish passport.
IREland! Teesha shouted, and she showed it to the other woman, who did not look but exclaimed, IREland!
I had no doubt these women saw passports from all over the world every day, but they knew what sold chemistry.
Motherfuckers in Ireland start drinking at birth, the guy next to me said. His name was Jake and he was from California, but he lived in San José, Costa Rica, where he and his brother ran a property business. He was shaggy, in a T-shirt and flip-flops.
Welcome to America, he said.
San Antonio
It was sunny and warm on my first morning in Texas, and I sat beside my father’s small pool for an hour or two in the late morning reading the sports section of the San Antonio Express-News, the worst ostensibly serious newspaper on earth, and a book called Hatchet Jobs, which I had found in some old boxes in the closet of my bedroom – boxes I’d always meant to ship to Ireland. My father had told me he had a surprise for me, and suggested I make no plans for the 24th, 25th or 26th. I knew what it was, of course – my father’s annual Christmas pilgrimage to the Holy Land of his unorthodox existence, the Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas. I had been looking forward to a little cigarette-less sobriety in Texas, just to give my body a break, but, having skipped breakfast as usual – a habit my father passed on to me, perhaps – I was drinking Miller Lites and smoking my stepmother’s Camel 100s.
My father’s house is a modest three-bed bungalow. It is very spare, neither clean nor dirty. My father, when he’s not working, watches a lot of golf and B-movies – he likes zombies – while drinking Miller Lites. He also plays card games on the computer, and my stepmother, Barbara, is always online or else drinking at Turtle Creek Tavern, a comfortable and windowless dive bar ten minutes away that opens at seven a.m. The Christmas tree in the living room looks absurd, but is earnest. At any moment, there are several abandoned cigarettes smouldering in ashtrays in various rooms. There is rarely any conversation, except about their cats – three of them, and one is gigantic and violent. There is a cool lifelessness about the place, and their lives have an unexaggerated harmony that I find comforting. I move, whenever I am home, from room to room without purpose. I look out windows for minutes at a time. I examine my father’s exotic succulents. I walk out back and throw a football to myself.
It was not even sixty degrees, but I was sitting at the pool’s edge, in jeans but barefoot, and without a shirt, sunbathing. My father was on the other side of the house, watering the driveway. It had been years since I last read Hatchet Jobs, a collection of caustic book reviews that had, I believed, unearthed and chopped up the roots of American literary pretence. I had just given up trying to sell my first novel, and the book reassured me that the publishing world was founded on the corrupt and flawed belief that the hacks and imitators I despised, and whose status I coveted, were the most serious writers in the country. They had been exposed. It felt like vindication. If I could not succeed, I could at least hold everything outside my imagination in contempt. I come back to the memory of my pettiness as to the grave of a tyrannical father – you are glad he is dead, but you wish you were the one who killed him.
After a while it was time to go shopping. My socks and boxers had been washed and dried, but I had no shirts except for a few yellow-armpit V-neck tees, and only one pair of jeans, which I’d been wearing since Dublin. I showered. The water in San Antonio is so dry that it barely seems to touch you. I didn’t have any toiletries, so I sprayed some old cologne, something from my high-school days, which hadn’t stirred in many years, on my armpits and chewed some gum by way of brushing my teeth. I put on my cowboy boots – the one great and unique thing about Texas being that nobody looks at cowboy boots strangely. By the time I was ready to leave, my father was standing in the back yard drinking a Miller Lite in his dressing gown, smoking one of his many lit cigarettes, his legs planted in gigantic brown fuzzy slippers. He was watering the pool.
I went outside to tell him I was going, and he slipped me some money.
He is like a Mafia Godfather sometimes: who carries cash around in his dressing gown? He is a private man, and always walking away from you, always wrapping up conversations you’re trying to continue. He searches for empty rooms. He communes with crossword puzzles, which he finishes by memory, not pencils, and the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know whether it’s a lack of interest in his own intelligence or a repudiation of it, but I sense that everything in life depressed him except for his withdrawal from it.
He was, my mother tells me, a dedicated and obsessive intellectual in college, and bound for great things in scientific research. He used to work for days in labs without sleep, growing beards and not washing, and his mother and my mother brought him food and refused to leave until they’d watched him eat. I try to link that old self to the one I know, but they are totally incompatible. He was also a pool hustler – it was how he paid rent some months – and this is slightly closer to the man I know, whose affinities and habits are always denigrations of ordinary values. He chose to leave research for medicine in order to avoid Vietnam. His brother Pete was already fighting there – he flew helicopters – and wrote letters home telling my father to move to Mexico if they drafted him.
My father’s house is on the north side of San Antonio, about fifteen minutes’ drive, on the interstate, from the first jagged burps of the Texas Hill Country – one of the landscapes my first novel inhabited. I do not write to make up stories, or invent characters, or to capture something of the age, or speak to it. I write in order to annihilate the mystery and magnitude of places in my memory, to exorcize their possession of me. Driving through the landscape, past the shopping supercomplexes by the highway, none of which existed in my childhood – the city now stretches inconceivably outward, repetitively, serving no purpose beyond enlarging the dominion of convenience – I felt a grey and painless repulsion. It had nothing to do with unfamiliarity. It would be alien with or without the sprawl. I can never hope to experience it. I have destroyed it.
After shopping, I drove the old roads – stringy, narrow, roller-coaster – that my best friend and I used to race around: Old Babcock Road, Cielo Vista, Boerne Stage Road. We had spectacular races, squealing corners, risking empty outside lanes with no visibility, daring overtakes through soft shoulders, burying each other in dust. I was timid in everything else: this fearlessness is a mystery. Back now, driving my father’s four-cylinder, hybrid Toyota, I took the roads slowly. I was out of practice anyway. Those back roads are still largely undeveloped and unchanged. I had driven them a thousand times during the period of my life in which every thought was a heart-pulverizing epiphany, but I felt nothing, not even the warm vacuity that fills the shells of old epiphanies. I was there for the first time, with that amnesiac pain of knowing it ought to mean something. I stopped for some barbecue in Leon Springs, a place with outdoor benches. Sometimes you are lucky and get bikers with handlebar moustaches, but mostly it’s retirees and fat grandchildren. I wasn’t hungry, but I always go there for a few strips of brisket smothered in barbecue sauce. I took the long way home, through my first girlfriend’s old neighbourhood, past some of the houses my family used to live in. There was no effect. I returned to find my father standing curiously still beside his large grill, drinking beer. I was starting to come down with something, a chest cold, so we got takeout rather than cook, and watched a few bad movies. He drank himself peacefully to sleep on the couch. A few hours later, I did the same.
Las Vegas
We boarded the plane mid-morning Christmas Eve, and I could already feel my heart tightening. My father had a dozen free-drink coupons and told the stewardess, Keep ’em coming. Then he winked at her. She said, You got it, baby. She did not know that we actually meant it, however, and by the fifth or sixth order, she said, surely lying, You drank it all, there’s no more.
My cold had worsened: earache, coughing, sore throat and head. I couldn’t get comfortable. My father had started me on Cipro – he has a tendency to overmedicate – and I knocked the beer back in gulps, because sipping was too painful.
It was warm and sunny in Vegas, but the weather in Vegas is irrelevant. We took the interstate downtown – the Strip is for Disneyland gamblers and Gatsbys, and though I admit the cocktail waitresses are worth the high table minimums, splendour doesn’t suit me; and it doesn’t suit my father. We prefer dereliction. The Horseshoe is the kind of place that, if you are not ready for the stink, the chipped paint, the ugly waitresses, the nicotine smog from bad ventilation, the rancid bathrooms, and the super-elderly, will sadden you back to the airport. But if this is what you have come for, then you are in paradise. We arrived mid-afternoon. Barbara had checked me in already, so I dropped my bag off, reapplied some deodorant, and was at the bar in less than ten minutes.
I ordered a beer and a guy next to me struck up a conversation. I told him I live in Ireland. Well, fuck, he said, Ireland. And then the bartender said he’d like to go to Ireland with his family and started calling me Irish. The whole place smelled like morning bar mist – the scent that is half mildew and half stale beer, which ripens in the light of day.
My father goes about his gambling ritualistically: he plays his four or five favourite slots for a few hours, warming up, before two long sessions at craps interrupted by dinner, then a long warm-down at a few progressive slots and finally Bobby’s bar for a nightcap. Barbara plays video poker and slots, never tables, and she is always lucky. It is as though the gods sprinkle gold dust on her fingers. The next day, for instance, she would take over my poker machine at the bar so I could play roulette, and the first hand she got was a royal flush worth a grand. I am not lucky, and gamble like a cowardly scavenger. I sit at the front bar, which used to be Po’s bar – Po was a tiny Vietnamese man who knew the injury status of every Division 1 football quarterback in America – anxiously pacing the room with my eyes. I try to be cool, because I know that tables and machines sense fear. That day I played twenty-five-cent video poker for free drinks, building a mountain of snot-soaked tissues and checking over my shoulder. After three or four beers I became drunk again, and I became invisible: for lack of interest the tables had looked away. I stood, cashed out, and felt for my wallet. Barbara, a hundred bucks up beside me, like it was nothing, said, Good luck!
I found my spot: an empty roulette table. I assumed she was lonely and unhappy, and would give herself freely. In hindsight I should have picked a full one, one already giving it up. I sat down and got a hundred dollars’ worth of chips. The dealer, a tall man with a giant salt-and-pepper moustache, said, Which colour would you like? I hadn’t expected the question, and I was stumped. Which was the luckiest colour? I saw myself at the edge of a great crashing whirlpool and rowed on in like an idiot. Orange, I said. Ten minutes later I had nothing, not a single chip. I hadn’t hit one number. The dealer said, Better luck next time. Humbled but alive with defeat, I went back to Po’s bar and sat beside Barbara, who was up another fifty. How’d you do? she asked. Not good, I said. And the whole process started over again.
A man beside us was telling dirty jokes. No one of common decency joined the bar. Everybody was a jack of some unhappiness, some dispossession. There were some thugged-out black dudes who were trying to order drinks with loud Yos and throwing large-denomination chips at the bar. Downtown, for a short time a decade before, had become a hot spot for the B-list hip-hop crowd – outside of rodeo week they had free rein there, and could act like kings – but there was no point flashing power and beauty around people who were trying to crawl back down the social ladder, or were entirely off it. All hope and prosperity flowed toward the Strip. People sometimes come downtown to sightsee the old Vegas, and they look upon it with disbelieving interest – why would someone pick this dump with the Bellagio only twenty minutes away?
We had had a plan to get prime rib and lobster at the top-floor restaurant, but Barbara wasn’t hungry – she had not slept the previous night – and my father and I agreed that the prime rib in the downstairs diner was the same a
s you got on the top floor, at one-fifth the price, so we ate there.
I was down about three hundred dollars by the time midnight rolled around, Christmas officially, but my nose had stopped running and I felt fine. I had lost all that money at roulette. I found my father and Barbara at about half past twelve standing at Bobby’s bar, talking to Bobby, a diminutive and ebullient Italian man who’d been there almost fifteen years. The barback – I’ve forgotten his name – looked as out of place as he could’ve been beside Bobby, recalcitrant and disturbed. Tall and hunched, he never smiled and spoke only to curse at small tips. Barbara said, Your dad almost got in a fight.
My father smoked his cigarette and grunted with indifference, saying: Fucking asshole.
He, my father, had been sitting beside Barbara at Bobby’s bar, though Bobby hadn’t been there, when a guy on the other side of him said, Hey, do you have to blow that smoke in my fucking face?
My father, who might have apologized if the guy had asked politely, said: Move to the non-smoking bar, you fucking asshole.
I had come too late to see what this guy looked like, but Barbara said he was huge and my father said he was fat. Either way, my father was too old to get into fights, and he had a cage surgically installed in his neck because his spinal cord, from arthritis, had started to fuse together. The guy continued to mutter insults until Bobby arrived and Barbara told him the whole story. Bobby told the guy and his friend, You just fucked with my best customers, get the hell out and don’t come back. They refused, and the barback said to Bobby, I’ll throw their asses out. Eventually they left, calling back to the whole scene, Downtown trash! My father’s parting gesture was to give him the finger and shout, Goodbye!