Last Bender

6.2

There were a couple of fifty-year-old men at the end of the bar and some guys in their late twenties at a table drinking a pitcher and shouting.

“I’ll have a frosty schooner of your finest, barkeep,” Sally said when the bored, haggard, middle-aged man wiped up some beer spill from the place next to ours and threw down two coasters. He chuckled and the air in his throat sounded like old papers rasping on a pole. “That would be Michelob. I got Bud, Miller, Schmidt’s, Heineken’s, Becks, Guinness, Molson’s and Amstel Light in bottles. And Schlitz in cans.”

“Two Michelobs then, in frosted mugs.” She tipped back a little on the barstool legs. I couldn’t tell what her mood was. Everything she said to the bartender was in this fake voice. I waited for her to break, to say something but she didn’t; she sat there chewing on bar straws, putting the flattened cracked ones into the ashtray. Sometimes she’d chew one flat and take it out of her mouth and tap the palm of her hand with it, lips pursed. “Why didn’t you tell me about your father?” she asked, staring at the liquor bottles.

“I did.”

“What did you tell me? That he was a labor lawyer, that he worked in state politics. You didn’t say he was an activist, a radical, who was friends with those people. I don’t understand.”

“I don’t like talking about it. He knows everyone. But, he’s their lackey, one of a dozen guys you go to, to get something in New York. If you’re a liberal, you go to him. His schtick and his job are the same. You put five guys like my father in a room and you’ll get five simultaneous streams of bullshit. All talking at once. And he works fast. He’s never at a loss for words. No matter what happens, give him two seconds and he’ll have a theory, he’ll have supporting facts, he’ll have a one-liner. ‘Stocks always go down.’ ‘The pope brought hope to a great many people.’ The ego, the pomposity.”

She nodded. “O.K. I find it interesting that all you could come up with was, ‘oh yeah my father’s a lawyer.’”

“Is that what you’re mad about? It’s the second time tonight you’ve asked.”

“I said I’m not mad. It just feels like you don’t tell me the truth.”

“I didn’t lie to you!”

“I’m not saying you did.”

“What about your family?”

“Mine too! Nothing but secrets. A few years ago I found out about Lydia.”

“What about Lydia?”

“Well–” she looked suddenly uncertain, and I realized I had never seen her look that way before. “My mother’s not her mother.”

“I see.” That explained a lot. “I didn’t know. I guess you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m not sure that I should, it’s Lydia’s secret. She’d kill me.” We sat for a bit. “I can’t trust you Alex?”

“What do you mean?”

“What else haven’t you told me? You say you’ve never had a girlfriend, but you didn’t exactly seem like a stranger to sex.”

“I said I’d never had sex before, like intercourse. I never had any real girlfriends, but I had encounters. Over the years.”

“Who was the first girl you ever kissed?”

“Not on the lips but like french kissing?”

She laughed. “Yes, frenching.”

“That would be Jessica Lodz.”

“You’ve never mentioned her.”

I didn’t want to talk about her either, but it was better than my father. “This girl I went out with in 7^th grade who went nuts when she was 17. I mean, she was nuts when I knew her too, but not schizophrenic. Once I ran into her in at Uncle Carl’s Tavern–” 

“What’s that?” She smiled at me as she did when I talked about the suburbs, a little condescending, a little flirtatious.

“A venerable old man’s bar on the Boston Post Road in Larchmont, patronized entirely by underage drinkers. I was drinking quarter drafts and trying figure out why people do that, when she sat down next to me. I remembered her very well, so I said hello and she looked at me like she didn’t know who the hell I was and said, ‘Don’t ever confuse me with that twin bitch of mine! I’m Brandy, and I don’t believe we’ve ever met.’ I’ll never forget the smile she had on her face, she was all lit up, the way people get when they go mad. She was the first girl I ever really kissed. At least, no one had ever stuck her tongue in my mouth before. She did, in the basement of the psychiatrist’s house.”

Her expression became one of alarm. “That one with the Frankenstein torches?”

The basement was indeed right out of The Black Cat, as my mother had reported to her in The Oyster Bar, but there was another section in which the hewn rock had been covered in plaster and painted, with a pool table and a bar (never used. There was also another room. “No no. Roy’s ‘office’ was down there. That’s where he kept his stuff. And did he have stuff. There was a record player, and a radio, a couch for making out on, and a desk covered with copies of Steal This Book and The Anarchist’s Cookbook and a deep and extensive collection of underground comics and dirty magazines. When Roy was 13 he would lean back in his chair reading R. Crumb, smoking whatever our mother smoked and he could steal. He kept his fireworks in a duffle bag under the couch and his money in a locked metal box in the closet. Before doing anything he would retrieve the box to assess his finances.” Roy’s finances. He kept small notebooks and records of all of his transactions, in a neat hand, with page after page of columns of numbers, totals, deficits, loans and repayments. He functioned as his own bank, one part lending to the other and the other paying it back.

“So you made out with this girl in Roy’s office, on the sex couch.”

“Not really. It was on the floor next to the pool table.”

She shuddered. “Weren’t you scared of getting caught?”

“Roy and Eva were throwing a party. There was a live band and people were jumping naked into the pool. Jessica cornered me and asked where the pool table was, she had always wanted to learn how to play. I avoided the basement. Once I saw a giant centipede on the floor and I never wanted to go back down there. Only Roy felt comfortable in the basement. Even the psychiatrist kept out, except to get things he had stowed away there from his old days, like the skis. But whenever he did he’d stay down there a long time and would emerge looking thoughtful and serious. He’s fascinated by mummies and urn burials and basements and grottoes. ‘Put him in mind of the grave,’ my mother used to say. It was his underworld, where he would commune with the primitive drives, the autocthons, the eidola, the daemons and the sparks.”

“And Jessica and you?”

“We acted out our savage desire on the ground, on top of some old blankets that smelled like naphthalene. Pool is not a game I like, and I’m not much good at it either. Didn’t matter. She was a little like you.” Sally opened her mouth to say something but I continued. “Commanding. I followed her lead. She got me to the floor, I don’t remember how, but I do remember the jolt I felt when she pushed her tongue into my mouth.” Then she took off her shirt and bra and let me feel her up. After that, I had this overwhelming urge to avoid her, which makes no sense, since all I could think about was having her tongue in my mouth and those big tits. Sally was angry. I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not mad now, you asked.”

She said nothing.

“Jessica killed herself in an insane asylum two years ago. Eva called to tell me. They both followed this band Rat Race Choir around. Are you jealous of a dead girl who kissed me long ago, Michelle Furey?”

“It’s not that long ago, and I’m sure you did more than kiss her. Fess up.”

“I don’t know. She was beautiful but totally nuts. And her face and her voice would change. Someone must have abused her. She lived alone with her father in this big apartment complex near the high school. They had a basset hound. You’d go over there and it was like one of those Roger Corman acid movies, people getting high and listening to T Rex and what was that band, Uriah Heap. Remember Uriah Heap?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Jethro Tull. Thick as a Brick. She painted her fingernails purple and she had no eyebrows. Once she came to my house with this friend of hers and ate a half a gallon of chocolate chip mint ice cream with sardines and butterscotch sauce. She truly had a lascivious smile. And we did have one other encounter, many years later. You’re right.”

Oh yes we did. One night, very late, Jessica was with Eva and another friend, Kath Hoeffer, and they called from a pay phone in town. Eva was on the line but she handed the phone to Jessica, who sounded very high. “Oh Alex,” she said, “I’m so horny…”

I thought she was joking. “Why?” I asked.

“Oh please, Alex.” I could hear them giggling in the background.

Another voice came on the line, not familiar. “You have to meet us. In Manor Park.”

They didn’t say where, so I stumbled around in the dark looking for them, heart booming in my ears. I Thought I had been tricked and was heading home when I saw three cigarettes on the bench of the pagoda, hovering above the Sound. There was wind off the water, it was a little damp, and a piece of moon was poking through the clouds. The last of the crickets were singing hard. I walked up to them and they shrieked. Jessica grabbed me by the hand and hauled me off behind some bushes where she started to make out with me. Her clothes were drenched in musk; she tasted like Southern Comfort and smelled of sweat and cigarettes beneath the heavy perfume. She pushed my hand down into her pants and wriggled around on my finger, which got wetter and wetter. It went on like that until she stood up and walked away. Then Kath Hoeffer came and started to kiss me, shouting, “Fuck me, oh yes, fuck me fuck me fuck me.” When I reached between her legs she squeezed them together. Then she got up and Eva came back. She kissed me slowly, passionately, one hand on my cheek, her eyes closed. When we came up for air she smiled and said, “See you next weekend.”

“Why’d she kill herself?” asked Sally.

“She was crazy. Didn’t want to live anymore. She’d been hospitalized three or four times. She hanged herself with a scarf.”

Sally stared at her beer. “That’s ghastly.”

“Let’s drink up and go.” She had half a beer left and so did I. We chugged them down and looked at each other strangely. Now we were both someone else. Beer chuggers. Out on the street I said, my throat still tingling from the draft (which I imagined foaming up in my stomach, rising through my esophagus like smoke in a chimney), “Why am I on the spot here? You don’t reveal yourself to me either.”

“Because I did reveal myself tonight,” she said, her voice breaking out of a whisper. Again she revved up and motored forth leaving me behind. This time I trotted after her. She was stiff, stomping along, panting for breath. I stopped her and saw the tears build up in her eyes. They didn’t fall or even brim.

Sally asked, “What’s with you?” She shook her head and bit her lip. “Let’s go. I don’t want to think about it.”

“What’s the story, Sally? Everyone said it was good. What do you think happened?”

She made a little noise, something like what I imagine a death rattle to be, except with a very slight dissonance of pleasure.

It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end

Confused, whirled in a tangle.

Either way, she walked on and I followed her, south to 9th Street. We crossed Third and walked on Stuyvesant, over cobblestones, past St. Mark’s Church in a warm breeze, dark and quiet, through the black iron fence, people walking by ahead. She turned south to 8th Street and then east. In the middle of the block between First and A she stopped and sat down on a stoop. I sat down next to her.

“One night last summer I sat out here with Christopher and Lydia.”

“Did he make fun of her?”

“Of course not. They’re friends.”

“You know I was starting to feel like I could take them on in there, and we had to leave.”

She looked at me like I had said, My feet began to chew horse luck. “What you said was incredibly stupid, if by stupid I mean uninformed. But it was a stupid conversation. I wasn’t listening till you said the thing about Foucault and Nietzsche.” She shook her head. “Then it got sad. I was feeling good but when they stopped talking, I had to leave. I guess I was embarrassed.”

“That’s how embarrassed you were, that we had to leave?”

“Embarrassed of them. It seemed so meaningless, and pompous, as you say. I thought they were hurting you and I got upset.”

“I’m not that easily hurt. I was whetting my blade.”

“Then you’d better do some different reading because you don’t really know anything about it other than that you’re against it.”

For some reason I was weary of that particular argument. “It’s an interesting situation,” I said. “Because I do want them to respect me and like me, but I must say, I don’t actually really respect Sylvio, or Powell, or Montana–”

“Stop it, you know her name.”

“Cleopatra, but in my favorite flavour, cherry red. Antonia. And Dean is harmlessly silly.”

“I thought what he said was very true and sensible.”

“I thought you were not listening.”

“Recording. I was an auditor of those events, though my mind was focused elsewhere.”

“I too have been gazing at your navel.” She looked down at her belly, but it was covered by the sweater. I smiled. “Made you look.”

“That’s funny, because I can see you have your dick in your hands.” Damn if I didn’t look too. She smiled.

“Dean is OK, and Christopher,” I said.

“So it’s just the women you don’t like. The lesbians.”

“Well, I don’t mind their Sapphic desire, if that’s what you mean. It’s their aggressive, self-righteous hostility. And Sylvio is not a lesbian, is he?”

“Have you ever even read Nietzsche?” she asked, sitting up straight and facing me almost primly.

“Zarathustra and Ecce Homo. And if you ask me, Nietzsche is infantile, always in a brilliant temper tantrum. No one could live the life of a Superman without being a boor. In fact, I’d say the thing that’s wrong with our world is that we’ve all become Nietzscheans. So that makes him the greatest philosophical prophet of our time. And Jarry as well. We are locked in a permanent antithesis from which it is impossible to create without destroying it with irony first.”

She groaned, clapped her hands and fell forward onto her lap. Her shirt and sweater slid up and exposed the small of her back. “I’m going to go up in smoke.”

“It’s a nice night for it.”

“Longest night of the year,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes sir. The 19th of June.”

“And the longest is the 21st. Today’s Juneteenth.”

“June what?”

“Emancipation Day. The slaves.”

Simon and Tammy walked right by us. They stopped a few feet down the sidewalk and backed up. “Hey,” they said.

“Hey,” we said.