Last Bender

6.3

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

“Hey,” we said. They each had a six-pack of beer under their arms. They looked at each other, we moved up and apart and they sat down.

“Help yourself to the beer,” Simon said.

“His is better than mine,” Tammy said. She opened a Blatz and put it down next to her hairy leg. She took out a package of Drum, scratched her nose and rolled up a cigarette, which she put in her mouth and pulled out again, spitting tobacco threads. Pffth pffth. She pinched the end and put it back in her mouth and lit up. Simon took out a pack of Kreteks and offered Sally one. Incredibly she reached forward and said, “I’ll take one, sure.”

I didn’t react, it was so odd. I said to Tammy, “I thought you’d be working by now,” and to Simon, “and that you’d be dancing at The Loft or something.” The smell of cloves diffused on the air. In Java, in the evening, after it rains, the soup men come out and bang the sides of their bowls and cry, “Soto Ayaaamm…Soto Ayaaamm,” and the air smells of cloves and tobacco and water evaporating off of hot concrete into palm trees.

“Well, anytime you put a weekend between a solstice and the full moon things aren’t going to go right.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?”

“Some asshole called in a bomb threat at The Loft and everyone had to leave,” he said.

“No, you told me once, on the full moon closest to the solstice you.”

He interrupted me with a loud short laugh. “No way, you fucking elephant you. Her girlfriend found out and tied her up and left a message on my machine. Literally. She had a ball gag in her mouth, I couldn’t understand her.”

“And I thought you were working at CB’s,” I said to Tammy.

She made a sad face and said, “I had to go home, I got bodily fluid on me.”

“Stop! No.”

 “Yes! I 86’d this bum who wouldn’t leave and he puked all over the vestibule. It splashed on my leg, and it got on my skin! I swear, it doesn’t wash off. It’s still there, I can feel it touching.” She clawed the air and ground her words up with her teeth.

“She scrubbed it too, with a brush, till the skin was raw. Anyway, I hear there’s a bonfire down by the river. Thought we’d check it out.”

“You’re nuts to walk down there,” I said.

“Hey, safety in numbers, right? I thought we’d pick up a few people along the way. Everyone’s out tonight. I saw Roy and Lydia.”

“They were at CBs too,” Tammy said. “but they left cause Lydia didn’t know anyone in the band. It used to be like ten, twenty people. Now nobody knows anybody anymore.”

“I don’t know about a bonfire,” I said.

“There’s no hurry,” he said.

Tammy shook her head in disgust. She couldn’t get over it.

“I don’t blame you,” Sally said. “I got spit on me once. This bum asked me for change, and I was going to give it to him but he lurched into me and said, I’m sorry. When he said sorry he spit and the saliva hit me right here.” She touched the skin above her lip. “It smelled like ripple. I ran all the way home.”

“It burns!” Tammy said.

“She’s having quite a week,” Simon said.

Tammy sighed. “Oy vey. Matthew’s mother called looking for him. He wasn’t at home, and he had apparently called his psychiatrist to ask what would happen if he took a hundred phenobarbital. Matthew was in my bed. He had showed up totally fucked up at 6 in the morning, he had been at Mud with Ellen and Eloise, but I didn’t think he was od’ing. She called 911 and I tried to wake him up. I dragged him around the room shaking him, but he was like a sack of shit. The paramedics gave him smelling salts. But he didn’t get up, so they took him out on a gurney. And they were fucking jerks. They were like, you know, another suburban brat.”

“Is he going to be all right?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. He had tubes in his nose, but he was O.K. Funny. They didn’t search his pockets. He asked us to give him his dolls. I took them out of his pants pockets and brought them home. He insulted the psychiatrist, of course, who was Chinese or something. Matthew kept saying, ‘It’s a little nippy in here….’ He told me that like five times. And he hates the nurse, this sixty year old black lady who never stops talking.”

“That would be my grandmother,” Simon said.

“Oh get out, she’s not sixty.”

“Sixty-four; and she looks fifty, but acts ninety.”

“Who’s that, your father’s mother?” I asked.

“No,” he said, drawing out the o dramatically. “He’s the youngest of ten. His mother’s petrified somewhere down in Jamaica. We used to visit them sometimes, my god.” He shook his head. “That woman is made of something, I don’t know what. She’s like, JR, or Vito Corleone. She sits up there on her verandah and she is the boss. That must be where he gets it from, only we aren’t coffee bean pickers, we’re his children.”

“He’s not so bad,” I said.

“You don’t hear him when you’re not there.”

“Well that’s true.”

“So,” Simon asked. “How did the meeting of the two tribes go? That stepdad of yours is a trip.”

Tammy shrieked. “Oh my god, those eyebrows!”

“I wanted to tug on them when I first met him,” I said. “I thought they were attached to the glasses.”

“You could hear what’s her name–” Sally said quietly.

“Ursule,” I said.

Simon cracked up. “Ursule!”

“No, Ursyul,” Tammy said

“You could hear her on the stage.”

“But my mother very nicely told her to shut up.”

“She’s good at that,” Sally said.

“That’s where she comes from,” Simon said. “People down south–”

“She’s professionally polite.”

“But she always marries Jewish men,” Sally said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s her thing. She’ll tell you all about it.”

“I get the psychiatrist, and now I get your father. But why Herb Cheese with the eyebrows and Ursule?”

“Herb Czischz. His other children are quite pleasant. Jews who wear plaid and have wine and cheese parties.”

“But compared to the others–” Sally said.

“It’s the trade-in thing,” Tammy said. “She’s tired of being tossed. She wants a man who’ll treat her right.”

“He does do that,” I said.

Simon started to laugh. “Yeah, I’ll never forget going over there with you one night and after we’d had a few she told us that the chiropractor practiced tantric yoga. She had a gleam in her eye.”

“You know what they say,” Tammy said.

“What’s that,” Sally asked.

“You know, they sit there chanting but they don’t come. Sorry Alex.”

“So it’s like Zen sex or something?”

Simon said, “It’s yoga rooted in magic, like Kabala. The erotic sublime.”

“Have you read de Rougemont?” I asked.

“No,” Simon said.

“Who’s he?” Sally asked.

“French guy, wrote this book about Romance. Love in the Western World. He says troubadour poetry was the art of Gnostic outlaws. Sex is creative and redemptive. Through strife and ecstasy, the union of body and soul is achieved.”

“The church of mad love is such a holy place to be,” sang Tammy.

We sat for a while watching the people go by. Everyone was out on the street, and as it got later there were different rushes as different bands stopped playing, bars closed or opened. But now there were a lot of bums and crazy people walking around. Guys with bags on their heads and gangrene in their toes. The war wasn’t over; it went right on in their heads.

Henry, a friend of Simon’s, came along and stopped. He was an extremely tall, thin man with a bleached crew cut that looked like a fine hairbrush on a tarnished copper handle.

“Henry,” Simon said. Henry stopped striding and looked at us.

“Oh, hi. I didn’t recognize you.” He put a foot up on the step. “Mind?” he asked, pointing to the beer.

“His is better,” Tammy said, offering him a Blatz.

He waved it off and took one of hers. “What a weird night,” he said. “Man.” His voice was oddly formal and diction precise. “They didn’t need two people on, so I went home. There’s not enough room back there anyway. We kept bumping into each other.”

“That’s no good,” Simon said. “You were headed home?”

“Nah. There’s this bonfire I keep hearing about, in the park by the river.”

Simon clapped his hands. “Ha-ha-ha. I told you there was a bonfire.”

“That’s what I heard anyway,” Henry said. He took out a pack of Luckies and laughed drily.

Simon said to Tammy, “You got any more of that smoke?”

“No, I left it home. I still ain’t got over the last one,” she groaned.

“Pussy,” Simon said. “Come on Alex, let’s go get some.” I stood up and followed him. Sally watched me go off with a worried face, and caught me looking back at her. We walked up to 9th on First and made a right. “So I got my ticket to Milan,” he said.

“What about the apartment?”

“An old friend of mine, we shared that loft on University, before I got this place, Buddy? There’s something wrong with him and the doctors don’t know what, maybe leukemia. He’s kinda lost. I mean, I love him, and he’s got no place to go, and I’m leaving town. I was worried he’d beat me for the rent but Ronny said he’d keep an eye on that. I gotta trust them but–”

“You could lose the place. Isn’t it kind of soon to be going?” I looked at my feet.

“I’m gonna miss you too. You could always come and visit.”

“If the Klingons manumit me.”

“This is it,” he said, stopping in front of a storefront with the gates pulled over the window and an unlit door. There was a sign that said, Kiwi Lounge. I followed him into a small vestibule with a glassed-in booth, like an old theater. The inner door was opened, and men were playing pool. Everyone was black. Simon took out a ten and slid it under the glass to a man seated on a stool. “Two bags,” Simon said. The man slid two nickel bags full of pot to him. Simon nodded and smiled and the man remained expressionless.

“The Candy Store is closed?” I asked, pointing to the blue sign hanging over a shop two doors down.

“They’re strictly a daytime operation. Very family oriented.”

“So that’s it,” I said. “When do you leave?”

“End of summer.”

We walked along in silence, a sadness churning in me. 

Back at the stoop he asked Tammy, “You have papers?” tossing down the weed. He rolled up a couple of joints and they went around. “They did Ubu Roi tonight. Sally was Mere Ubu.”

Henry nodded “Was that in the space on First Street? IA’PS?”

“Yeah,” Sally said. We shifted around on the steps so he could sit down. “But I’m sick of talking about it.”

“Oh,” Henry said. He smoked some and passed it on. A guy walked by saying, I got it I got it I got it, man….

“Where is the moon anyway?” Tammy asked.

Henry pointed up into the western sky. “Right there.”

She followed his finger and stared at the big moon sitting ripely in the sky. “It would look much better from the Hudson now,” she said quietly, but not to herself.

A loud bang, a cherry bomb, and everyone flinched. Then a whole pack of firecrackers. A car alarm honked distantly. There was not much traffic anymore on First. Stromboli’s Pizza was long closed. There was a slight breeze and the temperature dropped. I pulled my jacket close and took a sip of warm beer. There was a spritz. Simon lit a Kretek and the air again smelled of cloves.

“Can I have another?” Sally asked. He wordlessly held the pack up but she couldn’t reach. It was right before me. I drew one out and handed it back. We made eye contact, but I couldn’t read hers in the light. She was so fierce in her condemnation of tobacco. Even at home she would sometimes say something when the air was grey in the middle of the afternoon and you could watch it layer in the window light. And I was so often her excuse. Now I was complicit in her habit of hypocrisy. Take her voyeurism, in the face of her equally passionate denunciations of phallogoccularcentrism. She had an attested love for language, movies and hardons.

There was a man who lived across First Avenue with a flaccid penis long enough to strike the insides of his knees like a clapper. I had never noticed him before; the only person I ever saw over there was the ancient white-haired woman who sat every morning for three hours, staring out the window. One of our first mornings together I found Sally in the chair watching the building across the street. I sat down beside her, hoping to share in her coffee induced reverie, only to follow her gaze through the glass and into an apartment across the street, where the man was leaning naked against his window, pendulum swinging.

“My god,” she said. “Can you imagine that inside of you?”

I handed her the cigarette and even lit it with Simon’s lighter. I would have to ask her later why she smoked it.

The sky darkened.

“I’m hungry,” Simon said. “You wanna go to Binibon?”

“I think I’m going to go to that bonfire,” Henry said, standing. He brushed off his trouser legs, pushed the glasses up his nose and laughed.

“Be careful walking down,” Simon said.

“Yeah,” said Tammy.

Henry laughed again. “It was nice meeting you–”

“Sally,” Sally said.

“Alex.”

“Ha, that’s right. Well, goodnight.” He walked off, bony, tall, like an English banker, into the dark.

We walked to First Avenue.

Sally said, “I’m not hungry. I think I’ll just go home.”

“I’m going to watch the sunrise on the roof,” Simon said.

“That sounds cool,” I said. I wasn’t tired. I felt myself accelerate as the world slowed down, and with the dawn I became more alive. Sometimes it takes twenty-four hours just to wake up.

“There’s something we have to discuss,” she said. “On the way home.”

“What?”

“Country matters.”

“Goodnight guys,” I said in front of Gem Spa and walked off with Sally through newspapers, stepping over the legs of Deadman, who was everywhere.

The cast party had died down to embers and was glowing on the couch in front of the TV. There were half-finished beers crammed with cigarette butts next to every chair and covering all the tables. We went into our room and undressed and lay in the dark. Suddenly she sat up, fished around in her pants and took something out. I thought it was her diaphragm maybe, in pursuit of the promised country matters. But she lit up a cigarette instead, and not a clove one.

“Why are you smoking?” I asked.

“I have always smoked from time to time. But I never told you.” In the glow of the cigarette she looked tired and sad, almost middle aged.

“Can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

She rocked back and forth a little, pouted and smoked. I lay down and she said, “I just wanted to be good. Not bad good, good good. I can’t stand it, this feeling.” She started to tremble and cry. I didn’t put my arm around her or anything. I didn’t feel like getting up. “Well, I’m good at my work. I love it. I don’t need to be an actress.” She stabbed out the cigarette and bent her face down over mine. Her hair fell in my face and we kissed. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe and started to pant. She broke away and I sat up. Blood poured out of my nose and onto my chest. She handed me some tissues and I held them up against my nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have smoked that in here.” I tossed the bloody tissues on the floor and we kissed again. A desire took shape in my mind, for our two fires to twine and grow, flame by flame, into a baby, and that baby would grow and when it was grown, we would die. Two hours later I awoke to the terrifying sound of ottomans rolling across the floor, and that desire remained to astonish me, as it does today, because it has never happened since. And if she moved back, what would it mean, that feeling. Because I could feel it again, in flickers. It was happening then, it is happening now.