Last Bender

An hour and a half later we sat in his living room on a couple of lawn chairs watching the southern skyline and sipping gin and tonics.

“It’s just like being at dad’s, only the gin is better. No Gordon’s around here.”

The view south was of buildings like foothills slowly mounting the Wall Street towers. Several burnt orange skylights like pyramids at dawn hung in the air.

The apartment was oddly shaped, very wide and tall but shallow. The windows in the living room were nearly twenty feet high. The moldings looked like columns with pedestals. Except for the lawn chairs and a futon he had thrown down in the loft bedroom, there was no furniture. In one corner of the living room there were six small black and white TV’s wired up to motion-activated micro video cameras.

“No one gets in here without me knowing it,” he said.

“What about on the street? Can’t someone get you there, Bugsy?”

“Bugsy got shot in his living room.” He smiled and patted the briefcase. “I don’t keep shit in it, I keep these.” He snapped it open and strapped to the insides were two big pistols and ammunition and two long knives sheathed in leather.

“If you get arrested, these make it life.”

“Won’t happen. I’ve got people I can call. This firepower is nothing compared to what I can get. But that’s crazy stuff, not the way I do things. It’s a gentleman’s sport. I make a few large transactions, and distribute over a small network, mostly an entree, don’t you see? To fund other projects, like this. And the restaurant. It’s time to settle down. My roots are here, with you, and mom.” He made a weasel face and stood up to stomp around purposefully from room to room, checking the bags. Finally he returned with a cigar which he lit up before laying back in the chair. “Remember when dad smoked these?”

“Cubans? They made jokes about it. Then mom started to smoke them too. That’s the last thing I remember about him living with us.”

“Putz. Look at him now. I used to want to be like him. Working for the president, kicking ass in Dixie, and getting it kicked at Ole Miss. That was something. I saw that on TV and next day, I went to school all puffed up. Like–” He puffed his cheeks out and made two fists with his hands and moved his shoulders like a football player does when he walks down the hall at school. We both laughed.

“You didn’t go to school much in Larchmont,” I said.

“Oh fuck that. Those schools were lame. What are you gonna do? I got out fast and did other things. It hasn’t worked out too bad so far. So aren’t you going to ask me what I’m talking about?”

“I gave up on that years ago.”

“Weisenheimer, ey? A smart guy. I oughta–

“Ask you about what?”

“Boom zoom, Alice.”

“What girl have you been sneaking around telling me about. I mean, you don’t come out with it, why?”

He scowled and whispered, “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“About what?”

“Guess what I’m going to say.”

“How can I do that?” I asked.

“I’m married. You gotta meet her. She’s coming with us to One Fifth, then it’s Odeon for dinner. After that, we’ll see what time it is. There’s this bar Lucky Strike.”

“I can’t go there.”

“What are you, afraid of French junkies? So what if they’re fucking fools, it’s fun.”

“Afraid? I hate them. I don’t wanna go there. They’re using you for your drugs.”

He laughed a little. “Yeay-uh. Or I’m using them with my drugs, like I said, I don’t need to sell little bags of coke to make a living. Entree. Like in a restaurant, the main dish. To people who have money, and people who know people who have money, coke is like a business expense. It’s practically a write-off. Haven’t you seen the box? Check here to take the standard coke deduction.”

The lawn chairs creaked as we lay back in them and looked at the panes of light patterned on the sky. It was like being out there. Roy puffed at the cigar and blew smoke at the glowing tip. “I really love her. I’ve never loved anyone else in my life.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dawn. From Dallas. But she’s been living in Athens, Georgia. Three weeks ago I met her on an airplane and took her to Vegas where we got married.”

A face filled up one of the monitors. There was a beeping sound. Roy stood and marched over to the door. “That’s her.”

Dawn was cool whip white and about 95 pounds, with a sharp face and dark eyebrows. She had thin black hair that hung straight down with a flip at the shoulders. She was sickly in a non-New York kind of way, some sort of mall aetiolation, a pallor of unguarded fluorescent bulbs and K Mart makeup. Roy paced around swinging his hands behind him.

“Pleased to meet you, Alex,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. “Roy just loves you to death.”

Roy said, “Hey, no crack of dawn jokes either, cause I’ve made them all.”

“Oh god, christ, holy fucking jesus, doesn’t it wear you out saying that all of the time? Why did I ever marry you? A man I met on the plane to Dallas. Don’t you believe my momma didn’t warn me. So gimme a cigarette, I left mine in the car service.” She looked at me. “Car service. All those cabs driving around and you got to spend more money having one waiting around for you? No thank you. Hey. Ever see how jesus bites his nails? Like this, look–” She gnawed at her palm. “–Roy, get me something to drink.”

“Roy’s a big spender,” I observed.

She wiped her palm on her jeans and said, “That ain’t why I married him, but it didn’t hurt!” She laughed and blew smoke at the ceiling and pointed to the lawn chair with her toe. “If we’re going to entertain, we need another one of these.”

Roy handed her a gin and tonic, and sucked half of one down. I just stayed in the chair, hoping we wouldn’t have to leave soon. I asked, “So you and Roy just met on that flight?”

“Well, he likes to tell it that way, but the fact is I was saving up to come to New York City ASAP. All I ever wanted to do since high school was to move here and work in a photography gallery.”

“Just give me a few days,” Roy said. “There’s this girl I know from junior high who I keep meeting at parties. She’s an assistant at this gallery on Park Avenue South. A bunch of old Max’s people with uptown money. I’ll give her a call and see what she can do. Let’s get out of here, we’ll miss all the good hors d’oeuvres.”

“Is there even such a thing as that? I feel like I just got in,” Dawn said. She untied her sneakers and kicked them off and peeled off her socks and stretched out her toes, the nails painted red. “Either move over or get another chair,” she said playfully. He touched her feet and gazed up at her. “Your brother’s here Mr. Ploomis.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, Mrs. Ploomis. Remember when I screwed Eva on the top bunk?” he asked, as if this would be a fond memory of mine as well.

“Was that what you were doing up there?” I said.

“I don’t like war stories,” she said. “If you want, I can run down a few good ones myself. Like Danny Loredo. I let him bend me over a toilet and fuck me from behind for three lines of speed and a ticket to David Bowie. That’s what I thought short leather skirts were made for.”

“I always like cheap dates,” Roy said. “And a pale ass beneath a black skirt–”

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd/Petals on a wet, black bough.”

“I read that one,” Dawn said. “Freshman English class.”

“Pound,” I said.

“Don’t start boring me to death yet,” Roy said, standing and stretching out. He headed to the bathroom and yelled, “You better get dressed to go out, if you want to meet Larry Rivers.”

“Will he really be there Roy? You aren’t just making it up?” She stole his seat, winked at me and then looked at the view, visually enraptured.

“The man is totally nuts. And whatever you do, don’t talk art. Baseball, jazz, anything but art. They hate art.”

She pouted. “Well I could talk the airline business. My sister is a stewardess. Don’t know shit about jazz. You know they have less than a 24 hour turn around on flights to Tokyo? Just time enough to shit, shower and shave.”

“Do stewardesses do that?” I asked. Roy came out zipping up his fly and drying his hands on his pants. He rummaged around in the fridge, took time in the kitchen doing nothing and came back with a beer, sniffling.

“I’ll take a line too, but we won’t eat,” she said, stretching out on the lawn chair and letting her long bony arm dangle to the floor. I couldn’t help but notice a line of perfectly straight scars like railroad tracks on her wrists.

“Food sucks anyway,” he said. He handed her an amber vile and a small platinum coke spoon. She dipped it in four times and winced and sniffled. Then she dipped her fingers in her gin and tonic and was about to snort it up.

“Whoa!” Roy said. “Don’t be gross.” He brought her a glass of ice water. “The tonic and gin will burn and stick and you’ll get a bloody nose. Not sexy.”

“I get them all the time,” I said.

“You’re a man. Blood is sexy on a man.”

“Yeah,” Dawn said sarcastically. “Only women bleed I suppose. Where did you learn that poem?” she asked.

“In a Station at the Metro? It’s a warhorse. You said so yourself.”

“At U.G.A. if you’re an art major, you have to study all the arts. When my poetry professor learned what I wanted to do he gave me what he called the Imagistes to study and that was the first poem I read. In high school we didn’t read poetry or hardly anything at all. Pretentious little fucker that one. He wanted my sweet and low, but older men, Mr. Ploomis excepted, are not my thing. And I did a semester of modern dance. I finally got to meet a few gay men. Lord I had no idea. You know what a genital wart is?”

“Sure,” I said. “You can get anal warts too.”

Roy cleared his throat. “Punishments from god for perversity,” he said.

“What are you now, a Baptist preacher?” she asked.

“You don’t believe in god,” I said.

“Things are meant to come out of your ass, not go in,” he said.

“Things are not meant to be anything at all,” Dawn said thoughtfully. “That’s what I always hated about church. God’s will was all mixed up in everything. But I see a random universe devoid of intention. You ever go into an old junk shop? It’s the difference between that and an antique shop. An antique shop is a selection, according to a criteria. But a junk shop is just a place where any old thing that walks in the door is for sale. You might have a Louis quattorze chair next to a mildewy stuffed bunny and a pile of tea-stained lace. Everything is just the residue of history, things too stubborn to fail or go away. Say you take a photograph. But you don’t see all the camera’s going to see. You just see the design. That’s what it is to look into the sky. There’s no more order to those stars than there is in this view.”

“Well,” I said. “This view is the result of intentional and orderly processes.”

“Only if they planned all these buildings at once. But they planned each one separately, and the newer ones were planned to fit in with the older, but in this city you knock ‘em down as often as you put ‘em up. See that sky scraper down there?”

“That’s the Woolworth’s building,” Roy said.

“Well, they put that up without a thought to anything but how it would look by itself.”

Roy said, “They put it up to be the tallest building in the world. They wanted to conquer the view, not enhance it.”

“And those right there, they were factories,” she said. “Any order is strictly aesthetic, imposed by me upon it. If my imposition is forceful enough, you’ll see it too.”

“What about the World Trade Center?” I asked.

“It’s like the ocean and the sky, everything else sinks beneath it.”

“We can go to the restaurant sometime if you want,” Roy said.

I made a brrr sound. “The place gives me the creeps. I won’t go up there.”

“In high school my parents took me to the city and we went up there. It had just opened. You take two elevators and it makes your ears pop.”

“Once I watched Japanese tourists take pictures of construction debris in the plaza. They thought it was art!” I said.

“Time to go,” Roy said, snapping his fingers.

“That’s what I’m trying to say. They must have seen art like that somewhere.”

Roy stood by the door tossing his keys up and down. I looked at Dawn. She was sitting up on the edge of the lawn chair with her feet on the floor and as she spoke, she spoke into the space formed by her hands in the air, as if she were turning an invisible, geometric construct and examining its points of connection and discord. “I think it’s time,” I said, standing.

“Oh, OK. How’m I dressed?” Dawn was not a dresser, apparently. I believe she was usually dressed in tight jeans and a variety of t-shirts. But she had deadpan beauty that got her into whatever place she wanted to go. She seemed a little nervous though that she should do something different, as she looked around. “I could put on that new sweater I bought, and I got my leather jacket.”

“Let’s just go,” Roy said. He squatted down by the equipment and put a tape into the VCR, to record the surveillance cameras.

One Fifth was crowded. There wasn’t a smokeless corner in all that marble expanse. It was packed with roving, hors d’oeuvres nibbling, wine sipping, martini guzzling, gossip getting people. Not a herd but a hoarde of tribes gathered together to plunder. The man of the evening, Larry Rivers, was talking loudly in a corner, surrounded by well-wishers in suits, in leather jackets, in blue jean jackets, bare shouldered and in stoles. Roy took off with Dawn, leaving me to drift in the Sargasso Sea among the spawning eels. The white wine in my glass was warm and syrupy. I ate a piece of fried cheese and bread and another shrimp toast. There was a very plain looking woman with long hair, standing quietly alone by a giant potted palm. I tried to talk to her but it didn’t work out very well. I had to walk away, and I didn’t know about walking backwards yet. I didn’t learn that till several months ago, when an old friend of mine in the book the trade stopped by. He had a hankering to read Thoreau in the park and only had a Times in his hand.

“What’s it like owning a store then?” he asked.

“The worst part is getting stuck in conversations.”

“Oh.” He nodded his head with such sincere sagacity that I sensed that something remarkable was about to happen. My friend has these dark, very kind and patient eyes, and his presence is calm. “You’ve got to practice walking backwards. When you find yourself in a conversation that you have to leave, but don’t want to offend the other person, you slowly walk away backwards, and keep talking. Don’t stop talking, just back away until they disengage, nodding and smiling. It works every time.”

“So the thing is,” I said, “don’t get trapped, right?”

“It doesn’t work if they’ve got you backed into a corner.” He shook his head. “Avoid that before it happens.”

And so I just told the woman by the giant potted palm that I had to go to the bathroom.

Two hours later we were in a car service headed to Odeon. We pulled up to the place, this big neon sign, behind a couple of limos. Inside it was like a dive almost, only clean. As clean as any place gets. We took a table with maroon and black banquets. Ceiling fans stirred the smoke like a paddle in the Gowanis Canal.

Our waitress wasn’t terribly expressive; she took our drink orders and went away.

Roy said, “What’s with that?”

“With what?” I asked.

“That didn’t seem, I don’t know, aloof to you?”

“Well it’s not the House of Pancakes, Roy,” I said. The room was packed, the conversation deafening. It was like this giant party going on. And it seemed like the same party we had just left.

“I come here all the time!” he said. He craned his head around looking for her. “Well if that cold bitch is so made out of ice I don’t get anything from her, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

Dawn laughed. “What are you going to do, go fuck her? Because you know that no husband of mine is going to cheat on me, at least not if I know about it. Cause if he does, I’m gonna kill him.”

The menu had all the usual bistro stuff on it. Moules and frites and steak au poivre and a half chicken. “I’m not hungry really,” Roy said, grinding his teeth together. “I think I just want a burger and like, ten martinis.” He laughed. “Where is she? So what about the party? Was it good?”

Dawn sighed. “I’m exhausted by it. I talked so much bullshit to so many people. I think I need to watch Love Boat for a week. And I didn’t come here to eat a hamburger. I’m getting the steak tartare, and frisee with lardons.”

“So what did you do at the party?” he asked me.

“What do you think? I stood there doing nothing. It’s a beautiful restaurant.”

They recapitulated the conversations they had had and disputed the minutiae of the party. By the time dessert arrived we were one of the only people there and our waitress was sitting down at a table nearby counting her tips and talking to a friend.

“When you’re done with that, come here and sit with us,” Roy said.

She looked up from her money and blinked at him. I could see it on her face, she was going to say no and say it nastily. But she said, “I guess so. I get a shift drink.”

“This is my wife, Dawn,” he said, when she sat down next to me in the booth. The woman she was with pulled a chair up. “You girls wanna get high?” he asked.

“Sure,” they both said. He handed the waitress a vial and she snorted some.

“We’re waiting for Hong,” they said.

“I’m Helen,” the waitress said. “He works in the kitchen.”

“Dorothy,” the woman not dressed like a waitress said.

“We’re going to Lucky Strike. Wanna come?” Roy asked.

“Hong too? Hong’s my boyfriend.” Helen said. “We’re from Canada.”

  I had one drink at Lucky Strike, this brightly lit place on 9th Street that was all windows, and there was nowhere to sit. Roy was grilling Hong, a middle aged, slightly heavy, Asian man with a gold flat top, about some air force base in Germany. Hong only spoke German and a little English, but the waitress seemed to understand him.

“Hong’s from Viet Nam,” she said.

“Ja, ja, scheiser, man. 1968, I go.”

“He went to Germany,” she explained.

Hong laughed and rocked on his heels and drank down some beer. “Nine year!” he said, shaking his head.

“He was a porcelain engineer in Viet Nam, so he got a job in a toilet factory.”

“Ja, ja! Scheiser man. Oh that was bad. But gutt money, ja?”

“We live in Brooklyn, with Dorothy’s brother Tom. They have a band.”

Dorothy said, “That’s how we all met, right?”

“I was at that air base,” Roy said, finally.

“Ja ja, scheiser man.”

I went to the bathroom and then, didn’t really return to the table but drifted out onto Third Avenue. It had turned cold and misty and was starting to drizzle. The streets were slickening and the leaves of trees and bushes were holding back the water.