Last Bender

2.

Roy and Sally’s sister, Lydia, were best friends, and it was Lydia who had the apartment first. They had become friends years earlier. I remember the night. I was lying on the bottom bunk watching The Crawling Eye on channel 9. I was neither awake nor asleep. The eyes attacked Forrest Tucker in the gondola, high above an alpine valley. Roy had come in on the last train out of Grand Central. He had been gone for days. I heard him rummaging around downstairs in the kitchen, slamming cabinet doors and bumping into things. He came upstairs and rested a moment outside my door before pushing it open and hanging by one hand from the frame. “I just met the coolest girl,” he said, loudly, “scalping J Giles tickets in front of the Academy. She was out there selling acid. So she gave me a hit, and I thought it was going to be some beat blotter but we walked around and started tripping our asses off. She says to me, ‘Hey man, let’s go buy some Seconal for when we crash.’ She knew this guy, a brother named Race. So we went to see Race, you know, north side of the park there, and he was this Vietnam vet with a maroon beret and he was…” Roy looked around and pulled out a flattened pack of Lucky Strikes and said, “Ha ha. Scary. That dude was scary. Race, man.” He lit the cigarette and the smoke circled up from his fingers and drifted into the light in the doorway, framing his head in a haze. His hair was so long it almost touched his ass when it was wet. But when it dried it was all ragged and it curled and waved over his shoulders and rose up off of his head into the room and now his hair was like filaments in a lamp.

I sat up in and stopped watching the TV. He was gesticulating into the room with his hands, but never quite stepping into it, as if he were speaking as much to my mother and the psychiatrist as to me. My mother didn’t get mad much, not about coming in late, but she didn’t like it when you woke her up. “Roy, shshsh,” I said.

“Well, can I come in or what?”

“Just shut the door and keep your voice down.”

“So she says then–”

“Who? What’s her name?”

“Lydia,” he sang, and stepped into the room, clicking the door shut. “She wanted to go to this place called Max’s, said it was cooler than the Academy. Ever hear of Max’s?”

“No. What’s that?”

He squatted down and flicked ashes into his hand. The hair hung over his face. He was dirty. He smelled bad. His bare feet were black and grey, fringed with the torn cuffs of his bell-bottoms. “I know you don’t like the smoke.” My nose and eyes were welling up. His voice dropped and he became conspiratorial. “You know who Andy Warhol is though, right?”

“Yes.”

“Max’s Kansas City is this whole Warhol thing, guys in make up who dress up like chicks, transvestites and fags, you know? There was this band called The NY Dolls. I couldn’t fucking believe it. It’s was like this fucking train wreck. And the walls are breathing, I’m seeing snakes and thinking that Race knew something about me. And Lou Reed was there. After that, like 5 in the morning, we went down to the river and watched the sunrise, making out on this bench, and I had to tell this bum to go fuck himself. We started to come down then and took the Seconal and crashed at her place on First Avenue. When we woke up, it was night, and I don’t know if I even slept at all, I just had these acid dreams. Somehow we ended up at a Columbia frat party. There was a keg and a band.” He shook his head sadly and asked himself, “What the fuck am I doing here?” He stared at the TV and said, “Forrest Tucker, biggest dick in Hollywood.”

Before going to Puffy’s we had dinner at Issa. It was not the kind of place I would expect Roy to pick out. It occupied the first and second floors of a brownstone set like a brick in a glass box. The street was abandoned. The ten million people who enter Manhattan each day had all gone home, except for a few late diners and the tourists around Grand Central. The air smelled like steel grates pulled down over windows, and heaps of paper garbage.

Everyone was in a blue or charcoal suit. Sconces reflected dully off their greased quaffs. Half the diners were Japanese. There was a balcony at a crazy angle to the main dining room, which was brightly lit. The black tables were set far apart, and it was quite spare, like a gallery without art. There was a loud rumble of conversation.

A woman in a kimono escorted me to the back, where there were two tatami rooms. Roy’s was the multi-limbed and faceted concoction of denim and leather. Sheepishly I took my black high tops off and added them to the line on the floor, beneath a rustic wooden bench, next to a pair of battered brown cowboy boots, Lydia’s sparkle pumps and a very plain pair of worn black shoes. Off to the side stood Roy’s white and copper snakeskin boots.

It was 9:45. As I had hoped, they had ordered without me and were examining a plate containing some sort of appetizer. I squeezed in next to Lydia and a guy named Hen, who had a long tendril of dirty blond hair, a wispy, tangled beard and a leather eye patch that twitched when he blinked. He had lost the eye to an infection caused by Yak dung, while hiking in Nepal.

The appetizer in question was causing a stir of protest. Lydia’s face was hidden behind a curtain of black hair as she bent over the plate, smelling a thick, brownish-yellow S, garnished with a shiso leaf and a nerve of daikon.

“Alex!” Roy shouted.

“You eat it first,” Lydia said, lifting her head. “Oh, look who’s here.” Lydia’s breasts were bursting up out of her v-necked t-shirt. She wore a black leather mini skirt and charcoal fishnets. She had a wide mouth, and dark eyes. Silver bracelets slid up and down her arms and she toyed with the rings on her fingers when she spoke, which was with a slight, drug induced whine.

“Lydia, Roy, Hen,” I said.

Hen stood to shake my hand, putting his one blue eye on my face, patch quivering. “Good to see you,” he said, nodding, in a quiet voice.

Roy punched my shoulder across the table.

“So, what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the plate.

Hen said, “Roy was in Tokyo hanging out with these Japanese dudes. He remembers something they ate–”

Lydia shook her head. “Thinks he remembers. I mean, look at what he ordered.” She held the plate up to me. “It looks like a slug, Roy! Is that why you brought us here? To eat slugs?” More women in kimonos arrived to put down four orders of sashimi and seaweed, arranged on wooden blocks. She turned to me and said, “Have you met my sister Sally?”

Sally looked nothing like Lydia. Her skin was pale; she had a high forehead and a long face. Her eyes were stretched in disbelief, looking as miserable as I felt. “No.”

Sally regarded her plate critically and picked up a piece of tuna with the chopsticks. She had a peculiar way of holding them, fingers curled.

“Sally, this is Alex, Roy’s brother.”

She nodded curtly and ate.

“You’re telling the story all wrong,” Roy said. “I met those guys on the plane.”

“Oh my god, what is it, three times now?” Lydia asked, holding her forehead in her fingers.

“Pass the soy sauce,” Hen said softly.

“C’mon, the plane was the best part. How often do you get bumped up to first class? That was pure, dumb luck. Now, I always travel in a nice suit. But I figured, since I was going to Japan, I should dress up like Texas, you know? So I got on my Brook’s Brothers suit, and a bolo tie and one of them Texas ten-gallon hats, and my snakeskin boots. I was feelin’ pretty you know–” and he lifted his pale eyebrows knowingly. “There’s these two Japanese dudes getting drunk on the plane, right? Pretty soon, I’m knocking back the sake with them. Eventually it gets around to what I do. So, I take out my roll like this–” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills three inches thick, “–and say, ‘Ahm in awl,’ meaning to explain how it is that I’m a welder. But he looked at my boots and hat and after that, I’m the Texas AWRman and they’re showing me off to all the natives, calling me JR and shit. We drank for days in the coolest bars I have ever been to. Psychedelic pinball machines, and women, not just fucking whores, who by the way will do anything, and it’s not nasty Bangkok. But get this, they still have Geisha ladies there. Talk about sophisticated. I mean, a geisha ain’t the same thing as a whore, right?” He addressed this last part to Sally, who stared at her plate and chewed quickly.

“Not a fucking whore, no,” Lydia said, “but like Sally says, they’re cortisones.”

Sally raised an eyebrow at Lydia and mumbled, “Courtesans.”

“Well, they both reduce swelling in a man,” Lydia said.

Roy shifted around on the chair and stared at me with clear blue eyes. He looked absurdly healthy, with ruddy skin, thick brown hair trimmed close on the side and mussed up on top. He wore a faded black Harley-Davidson T shirt, tight in the chest, and his arms bulged out of the sleeves. “Sometime we’ll have to get the fugu here,” he said.

Hen looked at him and laughed. “You can’t get fugu here, it’s illegal.”

“Why the fuck you think so many Japanese business guys eat here? For the tuna?”

“Maybe because it’s Midtown. Fugu is illegal. Why take a chance on a law suit?”

“It’s illegal to fuck a chicken but you can do it fifteen blocks away and no one’s gonna sue.”

“God, shut up already, no one cares,” Lydia said. “So what was I telling you? Oh yeah, so she came and got me but I was asleep. God, two in the afternoon and the bitch is literally banging down my door. I go to call the cops and notice not only is my phone gone, but he took the fucking TV. Can you believe it? It’s not worth twenty bucks, but that fucking no dick junky stole my TV. So no, I didn’t see General Hospital today. I didn’t see anything. If it ever happens again I won’t get up till the next day. I’ll take a ‘lude and go back to sleep. So where’s the sushi? I can’t eat rawr fish without the rice. It’s like eating dead pussy.” I looked at Sally across the table. She was holding a piece of raw tuna up to her lips. The soy sauce and wasabi ran down the side of the fish and made a fat drop on the plate. She popped the piece into her mouth. I did the same. The wasabi gusted into my nose and spread across my tongue and the warmth suffused my forehead. I inhaled and looked up. Our eyes met. We smiled. We ate.