The Last Bender, Chapter 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

          “This jerk leaves his native land to pursue a career in stoop sitting,” the neon fat man said. I hit the button. Traffic was crawling. We were at Forbes Square. Malcolm’s statue soared overhead, the wheels of the motorcycle dwarfing idlers taking lunch in the dry areas between his feet. I was paralyzed by fear. It felt like a slowly expanding pool of gasoline.

          By the time I parked I was debating what brand of cigarette I would buy to go with the shot and a beer I planned on drinking while shooting pool. Since six years of sobriety had come to a conceptual end I thought I ought to celebrate with a drink. Why wait for dinner? Why not start right away?

          The blue and white neon sign blinked on and off. An inch of black grime covered the windows on either side of the doors. Rain ran off the air conditioner and onto my head. I stepped in and blinked. There was the usual smell of beer and smoke and slightly rotten food. How the place got like that was hard to figure. It wasn’t that long ago that it was a dingy recruiter’s office. To the left was a jukebox and a couple of worn-out booths. To the right was the bar. Straight ahead, beneath a rectangular light, was the pool table. Bright balls were spread out on the glowing green. An elderly man with skinny arms and a large bald head was shooting a rack by himself. He looked very serious. Behind the bar was a big man who looked like he’d have to drive with his head sticking up out of the sunroof. He stared down at the newspaper, whistling softly and writing-in answers to the crossword. He wore a white apron over a red lumberjack shirt and yellow suspenders. He had a full head of white hair that stood on end and framed his face, which looked like headcheese. The veins on his nose were breaking through the sidewalk. His ass began right up around his chest and terminated in two stork-like legs which had to cart around his hard, jutting paunch. When he wrote he stuck his tongue out.

          He was not fazed by the door slamming shut. But it did awaken the eye and mouth of a lantern-jawed hennahead polishing off a pack of generic smokes in front of him. “Cempany, Luke,” she said, looking at me like I’d just said I could guess her bra size.

          “Don’t be mad on account of me, lady.” The only other customer was a guy in a tool belt who sat handcuffed to the bar with a shot and a beer.

          “Who’s med?” she asked.

          “You got a problem, bub?” He didn’t look up to say it.

          “Maybe I do. Maybe I was told to bring it here.”

          “Someone gave you bad information then.”

          “Who’s the fella playing pool?”

          “Your next question better be how to find the place you got lost looking for when you walked in here.”

          The two dogs in my heart stopped sniffing each other’s anal glands and started at it, teeth buried in the hackles. I searched for that spot, that certain point deep inside I could press to quiet one and chase the other. It was like pulling myself up by a rope tied around my neck. “Can I have a club soda please?”

          He plopped some ice in a glass, squirted soda on it and squeezed a tricorn hat of lime. “Two bucks.” I gave it to him and waited for the old man to finish his game.

          “Hey Luke, het me again, eh?” the woman whined. The man in the tool belt hadn’t budged. Luke poured a shot into her short glass and splashed some soda in. Then he returned to his crossword.

          The walls were tacky with Legion bathos. Old recruiting posters, yellowed headlines of routs and invasions, a flag and other irritating patriotic knick-knacks.

          “Why den’t Joey talk teh me no more, Luke?” Her whine cracked on the vowels.

          “What am I, a shrink? Fuck Joey!”

          “Sem cemfort you are,” she said, giving her head a palsied shake.

          “That’s what the booze is for, ain’t it?”

          “Hey lady, who’s Joey?” I asked.

          “Oh god, now why’d you go and ask her that for?”

          She spoke over him. “My prince Joey, mister. He fexes stofs.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve and lit up a cigarette. “Smoke?”

          “No, thanks. Were you married?”

          “Neh. Not merried. In love.”

          “I know how that is,” I said.

          Luke looked up and hissed, “Now don’t we all know how that is? Lord Jesus fuck me if I don’t know what love is.”

          “Why you got teh blespheme, Luke?”

          “I ain’t blasphemed!” he said indignantly. Then, as if to emphasize the point, “Since when ain’t it right to invoke the lord? My god, I’m surrounded by idiots. Drunk fucking idiots.”

          The man in the tool belt started to crack up laughing. He shook his head, blew out his lips, said hee hee and haw haw haw and carried on like he’d just been tickled pink. With renewed distemper Luke surveyed the laughing man, his coldcut mask congealing into an angry stare. He said, “You didn’t. You better not. We don’t think it’s funny!”

          “Luke baby, he cken’t help it.”

          “Ain’t there some other bar you can spend your welfare checks in?” he asked. Then the cause of Luke’s recent surge of activity became apparent in the slowly diffusing reek of urine. “God damn it all to hell!”

          The laughing man wheezed and whistled through a crooked row of green teeth. He hoisted the shot and chased it with the beer. Luke penciled in another answer. The laughing man got quiet. He started mugging for a drink.

          “Luke beby, he wents you.”

          That was when the phone started to ring.

          “Ain’t I seen it?”

          “You’re looking at the peper, hun.”

          “The fuck you think the paper is?”

          It rang with a relentless, mind wrecking monotony.

          “I’ll pay, I’ll pay,” she said.

          “Oh, shut up and drink,” he said, cramming the pencil behind his ear and standing. “You,” he said to the laughing man in the tool belt, “you I’m cutting off if you so much as fart on that stool.”

          The phone continued to ring. I started to grind my teeth. The soda was flat. It did nothing to still the nervous flywheel going in my gut. He picked up a bottle from the speed rack and poured clear liquid into the glass. Then he refilled the beer and counted out some change from a puddle, wiped it on his apron and rang it up. Very slowly he made his way to the phone.

          I couldn’t take it anymore. I burst out, “Arncha gonna answer it?” That stopped him dead. Now he was going to go twice as slow.

          “New guys don’t talk to me like that.”

          “Mister, den’t listen to hem. Put en a song. Semethin’ I can deence to. Semethin’ for me and Joey, mister. Wheddya say?”

          Luke resumed his creep towards the phone. Now each time it rang it was like an electric current passing through my brain. Between rings came the clack of pool balls, followed by a thunk. Finally he reached the phone and lifted it with evident distaste and delivered his inimitable greeting of yeah-hey. The man sank the last ball. I got up.

          “Joey, it’s for you!” Luke yelled and the laughing man stood up, waddling slowly to the phone. Luke came out from behind the bar and wiped the puddle of piss off the stool. I fed a dollar to the table and racked the balls up. After the break I started to settle down. Not that I’m much of a pool player. I grew up playing with my father at Duran’s on Sunday afternoons after church, or at Julian’s on Fourteenth Street with my friends. But sometimes I run the table and that’s just what I did. Laraby thought he was so god damn smart. He should have left me alone. It took two more racks thinking about it, before the man came in.

          “You Bartell?” he asked. Hidden in his hand was a dark rum on the rocks. He had an even, friendly voice.

          “Why?”

          “Cause if you is, I’m picking you up for Juice.”

          “Let’s go. I don’t need to finish the game.”