"Fug 'em. The more we shit on them, the more they love
it. Besides, they have no place else to go."
Neither have I, Jason thought, turning to leave. "Who
knows," he said sarcastically, "maybe I'll find a juicy sex
angle."
"So much the better."
The meeting over, Jason walked quickly through the city
room, speaking to no one. What he needed now was a goddamned drink.
Alone in Art Smart's motel on route 63 on the outskirts of
Hiram, Jason pounded out his story on his Coronamatic. Beside him, amid the
clutter of cigarette butts, was a spiral notebook filled with scribbled notes
which he checked periodically for correct spellings. Goddamned oil companies.
They really were buying up the mines. An elite few controlling everything.
Bastards, he muttered, pulling out the last page of copy. They had no right.
After he'd revised and polished it, he lay on the bed and tried to calm
himself. Jane came to mind, only making it worse.
"You Martins," she'd once remarked, "are one
breed of angry, frustrated men. When are you going to realize you can't remake
the world, Jason?" It had started out as a mere lover's quarrel when they
were at Columbia together, sharing a room above a fish store on Columbus Avenue. Big Jake, his father, was a burnt-out case working on the copy rim of the
New
York Daily News
. He wrote catchy headlines, mostly to cop the ten dollar
prizes for booze money since his paycheck was sent directly to his wife.
"Why is he so angry?" Jane would ask.
"They screwed him over."
Her confusion later gave way to exasperation. Jane never
did understand the chemistry of pride mixed with indignation. Worse for her, it
was evident in their son, Jason III, who they called Trey. Luckily, the boy was
old enough to handle himself and proved a source of pride for Jason, despair
for his mother. She actually thought that by separating father and son, she
would be able to change that difficult mixture. Time and patience, he knew,
would give him his revenge--one could never escape from the genes.
"Just be sure to keep an eye on the boys
upstairs," Big Jake had always warned him. "You're just chattel to
them."
Someday, Big Jake told everybody, he would write
"the" book, a novel, one of great truth. He had died with the promise
on his lips.
"Your old man's brilliant," people told Jason,
"a genius," although no one could explain in what way, except that
under the influence he was remarkably articulate, a barroom performer. His
tongue never slurred. Eloquence would pour out in a barrage of eclectic
quotations, bits of esoteric knowledge on every conceivable subject from mathematics
to botany to poetry.
"Impotence. That's what it is," Jane had
concluded finally. She had meant the whole spectrum of his father's psychology,
not just his sexuality, which she could not have known. Yet in the way his
parents lived in their cluttered Jackson Heights apartment there was a nagging
thread of truth in what she'd said. His mother had dried up early and
swollen-bellied Big Jake rarely got to bed sober.
"It's not going to happen to me," Jason had
promised her. "I'm really going to write that book."
"Sure, Jason. Sure."
Jane never tired of analyzing him, basing her insights on
undergraduate psychology courses. It grew more relentless over the years until,
near the end, it became a constant barrage.
"You're just trying to get even," she would say.
"That's what it's all about."
"For what?" By then, the conversation had become
a painful ritual that repeated itself over and over again.
"For Big Jake, for his failure, for the injustices in
the world, for everything."
Even Jason's success in ferreting out corruption in the FDA
met with Jane's stony praise.
"Feel better?"
"I feel great."
She was surprisingly gentle when they finally parted,
knowing that setting him adrift after a dozen years of nesting, leaving him no
place to fly home to, no body to be near, no child to love, would unsettle him
more than her. She had been right. Without the family anchor he drifted, just
like his father. He bled for mankind, not for men. It was a journalist's
minefield. Life was unjust. Power corrupted. Big people hurt little people. He
knew that deep inside of him, he had the capacity to love. The problem was
drawing it out of himself, showing it to others. Knowing that only made him
more angry.
"I'll change," he'd promised, another part of the
ritual, knowing it lacked conviction. Secretly, he had tried. He had stretched
the fuse as far as it would go. Even analysis, which she had suggested,
wouldn't have saved them. He knew his own ingredients, his chemistry. He
did
want to get even and he could make up a thousand reasons why. Still, he
reasoned, how would it have made a difference?
Once she was gone, it was losing Trey that had hurt the
most. His son! God, had he been happy to hear the doctor's announcement. A son.
A lifetime of hope and aspirations had been invested in that boy from the
moment of birth. All those dreams of immortality that went through his mind ...
Conception and pregnancy weren't only a woman's game, he thought bitterly. And
fatherhood. How could she have taken that away as well?
He got up and reread his copy, annoyed that his
professionalism demanded that he tell both sides. The fact was that the oil
companies would actually make it better for the miners, whose occupation was
grim at best. Their work was, quite literally, the pits--an exercise in
self-flagellation. Even the towns that grew up beside the shafts reflected the
bleak, joyless gloom of the underground caverns. Rows of dreary houses, bars
covered with imitation stone and cheerless orange neon; the inevitable church
steeples, some with odd Byzantine touches that reflected Eastern Europe's
remembered influence. At least at night you couldn't see the slag heaps.
He phoned in his story, took a cold shower, dressed in
jeans and T-shirt, the local uniform of summer night life, and walked along the
highway toward the flashing neon of "Johnny's Roadhouse Go-Go Bar."
Like all things in Hiram, it was an anachronism, maybe fifteen years behind the
times.
Squinting into the smoke, the smell of stale beer in the
air, he went in. A jukebox blared a noisy rock tune. In the South, the
clientele would be considered redneck. Here the necks seemed more than
figuratively coated with black grime. Every male along the bar had nails filled
with black half moons. He made fists to hide his odd cleanliness and ordered a
brew, served up straight in cold bottles. It seemed a badge of male dishonor to
drink from a glass. Even the few women present drank from bottles.
Above the bar, standing on a precarious wooden platform, a
go-go dancer in a tiny beaded skirt and bra bounced her tits and hips in time
with the music, her face as bored as the customers were eager. It was late,
nearly one, and the alcoholic level of the blood was high, reflected in the
cacophony of high-pitched voices.
He ordered a couple of rounds of rye doubles to go with the
beer, which came in over-sized shot glasses. He rarely drank rye, but Scotch
seemed almost effeminate in this atmosphere.
As the crowd thinned, the music grew louder. The booze drew
him deeper into himself, into that recessive pool of anger and self-pity.
By two A.M. the dwindling crowd seemed to develop a strange
air of expectation. He noted that the neon light had been turned off and heavy
canvas coverings had been pulled over the windows. He noted, too, that those
who were left bellied up to the bar, a mixed bag of all ages, including a
grizzled toothless gent who could barely keep his head up.
"Twenty bucks to stay," the bartender said. He
was built like a slab of stone with bulging neck muscles and an ample belly
that hung over tight-belted pants.
Without curiosity he took a twenty from a roll of bills in
his hip pocket and pushed it forward.
Suddenly music exploded in the room and the lights went low
except for one above the rickety little stage, on which a young blonde woman in
a white bikini stood, feet astride. Ruffling her hair, she twitched her tight
smooth full rump, swaying to the music with uncommon grace, obviously different
from the girls before her.
Bending forward, thrusting out her buttocks, she rolled
down her panties, showing tight perfect globes. There seemed to be a
simultaneous swallow in the crowd, the sound of a gulp, louder than the music.
Naked from the waist down, the woman unloosed her bra then straightened,
showing the proud posture of youth.
When she finally turned, the men applauded. He did the
same, less out of lust than admiration. The woman had the face and carriage of
a junior league hostess. Her hair cascaded in a perfect ruffled line. Even her
cheap makeup couldn't hide the strangely patrician aura about her. Her mouth
was set in a painted smile above an upward thrust cleft chin over her long,
swanlike neck.
In the icy white light, her body had no edges. High tipped
nipples jutted upward from the rosy centers of her full breasts. Her belly was
flat with a button that seemed to wink like an eye in step with her gyrations.
Below was a dark curly bush, the upper part of which had been shaved into a
heart's shape.
"My little valentine," he chuckled.
The men were uncommonly silent, lost in private fantasies.
"Makes a dead man hard," a hoarse voice said
beside him. Jason agreed completely, feeling his own tumescence begin.
The girl performed an exhibit more than a dance, but that
seemed okay with the crew that watched, in fact anything would have been okay
with them; she was like an angel that had simply descended from outer space. He
wondered if he were fantasizing himself, embellishing the woman's charms with
his own overheated imagination. He had been womanless for quite awhile now.
Even before she'd left, Jane had withdrawn herself and occasionally he
experienced a "nocturnal emission," something that hadn't happened
since he was an adolescent. It always disgusted him, reminding him of his
joyless existence and stimulating his self-pity.
Watching the girl in his drunken state, he became convinced
she was throwing out a special scent, sending him a personal message. He
ordered two more rye doubles in quick succession.
He watched in awe, inspired by the awakening desire in
himself. Still, his reporter's instinct nagged at him. How had this lovely
woman come to this place? Was he investing her with a mystique that didn't
exist, something dredged up from his own intense yearning? He persisted in
questioning his reaction to the woman--it was the curse of the journalist. He
had to hack it to the bone.
His excitement grew and he wondered if the others felt as
he did. Even the old man had ceased his nodding, a thin smile lighting up his
unkempt whiskered face.
Not only me, he told himself, his journalist's mind quickly
flipping the coin of logic. The men were ready for it, conditioned. How many
would rush home and finish it with their blubbery, protesting wives?
The music's end was a signal to the bartender, who flicked
the light, darkening the stage and the woman disappeared. The spectators
settled up, emptied their glasses, and filed out into the night.
"One for the road." He signaled the bartender,
who hurried over and poured.
Jason caressed the glass as the bartender mopped the bar
clean. He felt his stomach tighten as he mustered the courage to say what had
to be said. Emptying his glass, he felt the spur of sudden inner heat and the
drunken illusion of courage.
"She do private performances?"
The man scowled, looked up for a moment, then went back
about his mopping.
"That's her business," he said. He looked at
Jason's empty glass, an unmistakable gesture of termination.
"I'll lay a hundred on you."
"On me?"
"You know what I mean," Jason said. For him, it
was totally off the track, as if he was suddenly not in charge of himself. What
the hell am I doing?
"And a hundred for her." He seemed to be saying
it in another language, another voice. He took out his roll and put it on the
bar. Like in the movies, he thought. Choreographed machismo.
"Hey Dot," the bartender called out in a booming
voice. There was silence, then a rustle behind the walls of bottles. She came
out from a doorway in tight jeans and T-shirt.
"He wants to give you a C," the bartender said,
not mentioning his own stake in the enterprise. She came closer. Such close
proximity did not shatter the illusion. She inspected Jason and smiled, seeming
childlike, innocent. If there was a hardness in her, it didn't show.
"I'm Jason Martin," he said awkwardly, clearing
his throat.
"I told him it wasn't my business," the bartender
said quickly, suggesting to Jason that there was nothing more between them.
Jason was thankful for that.
"My boyfriend's in the mines 'till five," she
said hesitantly, betraying her interest. A part of himself was disgusted. She
looked toward the bartender.
"What's your business is your business," he said,
clearly anxious to close.
"I'm just down the road at Smart's," Jason
pressed. "Leaving tomorrow. Just passing through."
Surely it's not her first time, he told himself, but she
seemed so guileless. Was she that good an actress? Or was it natural? That was
too much to hope for.
"I have to pick him up at five," she said,
apologetically. A battered clock on the wall read 3 A.M. Fifty bucks an hour,
he thought. More than I make. She seemed to be watching him closely.
"Where you from?" It was the first slight crack
in the illusion, the first hint that her junior league facade wasn't real. He
shook off the thought. He needed her. Needed her now. But why? He was following
a lead, he told himself.
"Washington, D.C.," he said.