Patsy Cline falls to pieces. The bed smells like disinfectant, with a hint of breezy fabric softener. Bounce, I mutter to myself. Downy. I flop on the mattress, belly down. Then wiggle around like a nervous cockroach and clumsily cover my ass with a towel. Take deep breaths, meditative. I wish my heart would stop pounding and I wonder what Jude is doing to young Jeremy and abruptly Patsy is muscled aside by Kenny Rogers. “The Gambler.” I want to laugh but I can’t.
The door opens with the coo of a dove. Hello.
Open my eyes and at first I think there is some mistake. The girl is barely five feet tall in a little plastic white dress that clings to her like wet tissue. Her hair is a massive, fizzy black nightmare. She has arms and legs thin as sticks and surely this is illegal. The girl is maybe fourteen. I roll over and try to sit up but she pushes me down with a cool hand and now I see her face. Tiny wrinkles around her eyes and
mouth. And her breasts are surreal, too large for her body and perfectly round and defined by the clean hard edges of the surgically enhanced. Her breasts swell above her ribcage as if they might float away.
What’s your name? she says.
Um. Fred, I say.
Please. On your tummy, Fred.
And what’s your name? I say.
I am Veronica, she says.
A slight accent but her English is not bad. Better than the troll’s and no doubt better than your average American’s. I think she is Vietnamese but then I am only slightly less stupid than the next white guy when it comes to distinguishing one East Asian group from another. Veronica runs a hand up my thigh and pulls the little white towel aside. I don’t have an erection yet but I can feel the blood gathering. She smiles faintly and I feel a gentle twitch of nausea. I roll over onto my stomach and close my eyes.
Veronica has great hands.
This is not a massage, however. It’s foreplay. It’s like being tickled by silk feathers, by the tiny velvet fingers of dolls. Her hands roam up and down my legs, stroking my ass and thighs and feet with the sweet lazy touch of a lover and now one hand sinks shivering between my legs to lightly touch my penis.
What’s this? she says.
I don’t like this hide and seek shit, usually. But it’s nice to close my eyes and pretend I’m twelve and playing doctor with the girl next door. I don’t remember her name but she has dirty blond hair and crooked teeth and she smells like strawberry lip gloss and maybe, just maybe she has a fucking Band-Aid on her knee, oh my.
What do you want? she whispers.
I open my eyes and roll over. Veronica massages my chest and belly and leans close to me, rubbing her hard round tits against my arm. What do you want. What do you want. I want her to do whatever she wants to do. I want her to be professional. I want her to touch me for money.
You want to make love, she says.
Love. The word seems grotesque.
I don’t think so.
Veronica shoves one finger into her mouth and sucks at it. You want?
Why not?
You will give me nice tip, she says.
Of course.
Veronica is already bored with me. She sighs and mechanically lowers the straps of her dress and her cartoon tits bounce into my hands. She allows me to fondle her nipples for approximately ninety seconds, then pushes my hand away. Veronica straddles my torso, her ass in my face. The white plastic dress is short and quickly rides up over her hips and under it she’s wearing a black lace thong that is too small for her and her shaved red pussy is two inches from my face and I am tempted to lift my head and bite her, to rip at the thong with my teeth but now she is nibbling and kissing at my rock-hard dick and briefly I am confronted with an image of Jude wearing the same black thong and she’s laughing or crying and Miller stands over her and just as Veronica sticks her pinky in my ass I grab her by the shoulders and push her ravenous mouth away.
Stop, I say. I’m sorry, but just stop.
And with that, the transaction is finished. Veronica hops off me and
quickly straightens her dress. She adjusts her mass of hair and I see now that it’s a wig. She leaves the room and I lounge there, a frog waiting to be dissected. I have been injected with that shit that makes the blood purple and gelatinous and still I feel empty as hell. I just want to get the fuck out of here. I reach for a tissue and swab at my package but it’s pretty gory down there, still rock hard, now marked with red lipstick. I won’t wash her mouth away without a nice long bath. The door opens again and Veronica slips through, smiling. She holds a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a warm washcloth in the other. She hands me the soda and I sit there like a soiled child while she wipes down my gear with the washcloth. And when she’s finished, she holds out her hand. I give her the Diet Pepsi and she frowns. I reach for my pants and pull out three twenties. Veronica rolls her eyes and I pull out another one and now she smiles and nods and the money disappears into her shoe. Veronica asks if I am not thirsty and I say no, thanks. She shrugs and leaves me to dress myself and when I open the door, Troll is waiting to escort me out.
I could kill myself sometimes. I am cast adrift in California and though I may appear to be easily confused, I know exactly what I’m doing. Through the filter, removed. One angle black and white fuzzy with no sound. I am talking to myself on a wet sidewalk tainted with yellow then red of traffic lights in a strange city and I’m not wearing a watch but I imagine it’s been less than an hour since I left the hotel room. I have just had my cock effectively gobbled by a stranger and I am feeling no pain and now I am aware of blue neon behind me, the fading signature of a ghost.
I
LEAVE THE
P
ARADISE
S
PA
and walk up Geary to Jones. Enter the bar called Mao’s that is empty but not. The walls are painted with black and white murals of old world film actors. Charlie Chaplin. Fatty Arbuckle. Laurel and Hardy. They stare and stare and I feel surrounded. I go to the bar and an old guy with silver hair and little round eyeglasses comes over, puts a napkin in front of me. The empty barstools to my left and right are too perfectly aligned and a little creepy. I ask for ice water and two shots of whiskey but I am really tempted to demand a glass of hydrogen peroxide because my mouth feels wrong. It feels like it’s full of fucking cigarette ash. I suck down the water in a long furious swallow, drooling. The bartender has a lazy brown eye that wanders around loose as a marble while the other stares straight through me.
That’s gonna be eight dollars, he says.
I give him a twenty and tell him to go ahead and bring another shot.
Long day? he says.
Endless, I say.
The bartender shrugs and glances up at one of the overhead televisions. There are seven of them, I notice. On two screens are the same silent baseball game, the Dodgers and Braves. Three of the others are running old movies. Bette Davis howling and bug-eyed and completely nuts on the left. Jimmy Stewart peeping at his freaky neighbors to the right. And Laurence Olivier tediously dying straight ahead. The last two screens are gray and blank.
Are you Mao? I say.
Professionally speaking, yes, the bartender says.
Interesting name for a bar.
It’s all about mind control, he says. Propaganda, baby. The customers come in here like suicidal sheep and the televisions mesmerize them. The old movies make people melancholy and therefore thirsty. The baseball keeps them sedated. Think about it. Television and advertising and the power of mass hypnosis were completely unrealized before Mao and Hitler showed us a thing or two. Of course, it would be financial suicide to name a bar after Hitler.
I stare at him and he laughs, low and rasping.
The place is kind of empty, I say.
Yeah, he says. What the fuck do I know?
What about soft porn, I say.
Nah. He waves a hand. Don’t want the wrong element in here.
I shrug and swallow the first whiskey.
Pull up a stool, boy. You might as well stay a while.
I sit down and take slow, cautious sips of the second whiskey. I would hate to get drunk. I grin to myself and look up at the Dodgers game and see that the Braves are methodically destroying them. The players on the Dodger bench are serene, peaceful. The camera moves in on one young black player, a rookie who wears silver wraparound
sunglasses even though it’s a night game. He stares out at the field as if he’s sitting in church and his face is frozen, cut from stone. The camera lingers and now I detect the faint twitch of artery or muscle below his jaw.
You said that the customers are suicidal, I say. The sheep.
The bartender nods. Yeah.
What do you mean by that, exactly.
Huh, he says. I’m not a goddamn psychologist and wouldn’t want to be. But it seems to me that anybody comes into a bar and sits by himself and sinks five or six cocktails one after another and never says boo to another soul well he’s got a gun to his head. He’s just taking his time about it.
I regard my own row of drinks.
Don’t take offense, he says.
I wouldn’t.
The bartender grins. Like I said previously. I don’t know shit.
You ever think about it, Mao?
Pull my own plug?
Yeah.
Once or twice a day, in the morning especially.
The morning?
What the hell. I’m sixty-four years old. I got arthritis. I try to jerk off and all I get is a fucking cramp in my neck. Thinking about suicide is the next best thing.
Right.
You want another? says Mao.
I shake my head.
Well, then. When are you going to eat a bullet?
The third whiskey sits before me, untouched. My stomach is
gurgling for lack of food and the bartender is a madman. I think he should have called this place The Faustus. I think my skull is full of black ice. Mao begins to wipe down the bar with a rancid yellow towel. The stink of mildew. That lazy eye drifts by, unfocused. The fucking thing is making me seasick and I try to ignore it.
Were you ever married? I say.
Mao jabs one finger at the lazy eye. No, he says.
I shiver, unsurprised. That eye would be hard to deal with.
You? he says.
A long time ago, yeah. But she killed herself. Blew herself to bits.
Mao looks up. You serious?
Yes.
Then I apologize to you. That was some insensitive shit to say.
I tell him not to worry about it. I tell him that it was a long time ago, another lifetime. Mao nods and murmurs and graciously tilts his head to the left so that I don’t have to face the lazy eye. I tell him she was very brave, my wife. That she killed herself only out of the desire to sidestep a slow death. I am tempted to tell him that I don’t have arthritis, that I spend a lot more time daydreaming about various gruesome ways to kill myself than I do actually bothering to masturbate. I’m not quite sure if this is true, however. And while it has a nice ring to it, I don’t think such a confession would exactly put a smile on Mao’s face. Anyway. I am trying to cut back on these incidents of drive-by intimacy. I stand up and tell him thanks and realize I am a trifle unsteady. I am wobbling. The third whiskey remains untouched and I ask him to please raise a toast to the next suicide that walks through the door.
Outside and yes, noticeably drunk. I have no sense of direction, no sense of time. I am wobbling on a street corner in downtown San
Francisco. Vision is unreliable and after six, seven blocks, I am fast approaching blackout but not yet illiterate and the street signs that loom fuzzy black and white along my periphery identify this corner as 6th and Mission and danger is everywhere. Don’t laugh but I think I’m being followed. I hear footsteps, echoes. I take a few steps and I hear the scrape of leather against stone behind me. I stop walking and the echo is gone and I know this is the paranoia of bad movies.
The nostrils twitch and I smell feces.
Cut away to handheld camera, delirium tremens.
I swing left and right now full circle and find the shitter, a runaway white girl sixteen maybe seventeen, a poor little crackhead crouched in blue doorway with bright yellow miniskirt bunched around her waist, leaving a wet black steaming coil of shit on someone’s stoop.
Daffy.
This could be a clip from
20/20
. Lost children etc.
Probably her condition should trouble me, it should offend me or move me somehow. But I am too drunk and blind and preoccupied with my own problems to care about the public health and anyway it’s not my doorway. The girl has to poop somewhere and even now her lips curl into a yellow snarl because I am staring at her. From her point of view, I am a stupid drunk middle-aged pervert and I’m staring at her, I’m invading her personal space. And if I breathe a word to her, if I offer to help this girl or give her money or a word of advice she will surely bite me.
I stand with my back to her a moment. Drunk but not unaware. The shitting girl is exactly the sort of lost soul that normally I would be compelled to help. I have a touch of Travis Bickle in me, says Jude. The watcher, the idiot avenger. But I’m not half the psychotic cracker that Travis was and I like to think my social skills are better by a
mile or two. Anyway, something possesses me to turn around and ask the girl if she needs help. She has finished shitting by now and I can smell it. Her face is cracked and yellow and what’s left of her brown hair is thin and stringy. Her eyes are black holes but I notice with a kind of horror how shapely her legs are.
This girl was once a beauty.
Five dollars, she says. Give me five dollars.
I fumble with my money and locate a five dollar bill. I don’t want to think about what manner of service she might provide for five dollars. And when she sees the money, her small teeth flash.
Hey, mister. Let’s go. I’ll make you feel alright.
I shake my head, confused. Because this isn’t going to help her and I don’t know what will. I try to think what Jude would want me to do. She’d want me to be kind to this girl. Take her to IHOP and feed her pancakes with blueberry syrup, then coax her life’s story out of her. Then go out and kill the father or brother or boyfriend who made her like this. But I can only imagine that. I can only give her the five dollars and turn away from her but she grabs at my arm, her nails raking the skin along my wrist.