The Night Counter (34 page)

I’M A FUCKING
piece of shit. I fucking hate my fucking life. Fucking asshole. I’m all fucked up.

Having silently completed these daily affirmations that uncountable years at AA meetings had not changed, Bassam finished what was in his glass and then motioned to Candy, the blond bartender, for another round. Candy had been working there every night for as long as he had been a customer, which he calculated to be a fucking long time.

“We’re like an old married couple, you and me,” Bassam said to Candy.

“What do you know about couples?” Candy muttered, as she usually did when he said this.

“Hey, I was good to all my wives,” Bassam replied, and that was mostly true. He’d married the first one at nineteen and the last one at
thirty-nine, but he was almost forty-four now and single. “Tonight it’s just you and me, babe.”

It wasn’t even an attempt at flirting, and Candy knew it. “At least I get paid to be here,” she said, leaning in with her silicone implants to borrow a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “What’s your frickin’ excuse, Sam?”

He’d run out of excuses long before. He tugged at Candy’s blond perm, her cue to bring him his second drink of the night. Her hair wasn’t her real hair, and he was pretty sure Candy wasn’t her real name. If it were, he thought, that would mean that every fourth time people fucked in Vegas and had a baby, the result would be a girl named Candy. That’s how many fucking Candys he knew here.

Just as he didn’t know Candy’s real name, she didn’t know his. Bassam’s name tag on the limo company’s suit uniform said “Sam.” So did the name tags of most of the other drivers who worked for the company. I am Sam, he thought, like half the fucking Arabs in America. The Samihs, the Samers, the Samirs, the Wissams, the Osamas—screwed over the most— almost all became Sams in America. However, the other Sams had accents.

Vegas was a long way to come just to be a dumb-ass driver. Maybe that was why nearly every other Sam always found it so damn necessary to inform passengers how he’d been a “man of medicine” or an engineer back in Morocco or Egypt or Pakistan.

For his part, Bassam never told his passengers how Fatima and Ibrahim had paid for his rehab and taken out loans to supplement his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Ann Arbor and Harvard, finding new false hope with every scholarship he was awarded. What the hell— maybe he wasn’t designing Fords and Lincolns like his high school buddies back in Detroit, but he was driving them. Ibrahim, who had lectured him on driving foreign cars, could at least be proud of that. And if Fatima ever came to visit, she could see that he wore a suit to work, as she had always dreamed he would.

Candy came back with Bassam’s club soda and apple juice. Bassam gave her a thank-you tug to her perm and took a sip. Fatima was right about him being on a bar stool in Las Vegas, but he wasn’t drunk. He’d
been sober for a thousand nights, ever since September 11, 2001, when he had realized it was too fucking dangerous to be both drunk and Arab in America. That was when he became a driver. Before that, he’d done dumb-ass jobs in which it was easy to stay drunk; that accounted for just about half the fucking jobs in Vegas. However, Bassam had never driven under the influence. Just as when he was a child his only wish had been to disappear so that he could not cause his parents any more grief, he did not fear his own death but feared causing someone else’s.

Bassam’s eye caught an extra-large couple holding hands and waddling into the bar. They pointed to the black-and-white photos of long-dead celebrities who once had gotten hammered here. Shit, Bassam thought, the couple fancied themselves slumming it off the Strip, getting to see the fucked-up natives in their fucked-up environment, as their fucking travel book probably suggested. Candy gave them a pretty smile, and they ordered some cheese fries with their beers. Fat Midwesterners— the Vegas cliché, he thought, the snobbery of an Ivy League education making a rare appearance. Then he remembered that for far longer than this couple could have been married, he, too, had been a Vegas cliché: a guy with a drinking problem sitting at a bar while his miserable wife was out crying shit-faced to her friends about him at another bar. But he didn’t drink anymore and had set his last wife free in a reasonably pleasant divorce. He had switched his addiction to gambling. Candy put down a picked-over bowl of peanuts from a table she’d just cleared. “Eat something before you piss off.”

“I’ll grab something on my way to the tables,” Bassam answered. “Just waiting on the fucking tourists.” He looked at his watch; it would be another hour before they ate all they could eat at the buffets.

“Why don’t you go play with the big boys tonight?” Candy suggested.

Because, he answered silently, I could end up a big-ass winner. Over his lifetime he had gotten used to being a loser, and as a sober man, he didn’t want to go out of his comfort zone. Kicking tourists’ asses was still living in Loserville.

Candy’s bar was Bassam’s favorite, as familiar as shuffling an old yellowing deck of cards. Although he had been a cheap-ass customer for the last thousand days, he had spent several years here as a functioning drunk and a few more years as a nonfunctioning drunk. Hell, Candy even kept his framed black-and-white photo of Fatima above the cash register for him. The bar owner, who was somehow related to Candy, appreciated Bassam’s business over the years, and Candy said she didn’t mind having one more photo to dust. Ibrahim had told him as a teenager—or, more accurately, juvenile delinquent—to honor his mother even if he couldn’t respect his father. Keeping Fatima’s photo in the place where he spent the most time was his way of doing that, although he didn’t look at the picture too often. He wanted to stay sober.

But Fatima was with him even at the gambling table. Just as she could juggle the entire price list for all the varieties of olives at all the Arab
ducans
in Detroit, Bassam could memorize every card laid down at a game; he had a photographic memory for up to five decks of cards. Altogether, that was only 260 things to remember.

His fucking sci-fi-freak friends in high school thought that with such gifts, he would be a brilliant fucking mathematician one day. But while they had stayed home and watched
Star Trek
, Bassam had met a girl. She had told him that if he really wanted to take a trip into outer space, it would be better to smoke grass with her than watch
Star Wars
at the mall for the twenty-second time. Her boobs had been damn convincing. When he had come home that night with the high worn off, the quiet— aside from that giggling kid Amir—of his parents’ home had become even more unbearable. Before going to bed he took a few shots of his father’s
araq
. Fatima had said it was for special occasions, but with Laith and Riyad gone there never would be special occasions in the house again, and no one missed it.

Candy handed Bassam the bar phone. “Sam #2 said to call him when you settled in,” she said.

He pushed the phone away. “I don’t feel like calling the fucking butthead back,” he answered.

“I thought you’d say that,
ya hamar.
” Bassam turned to find Sam #2, né Hossam Akawi, standing behind him, wearing a Utah Jazz cap.

“Baseball caps and Arabs don’t fucking go together,” Bassam said, and reached to take the cap off.

Sam #2 put the cap back on. “Neither do Utah and jazz, so it’s all good.”

Bassam shrugged. Immigrant philosophy beat anything he’d studied at Harvard.

The two drove the same Town Car, with Sam #2 usually taking the night shift and Bassam the day shift. It didn’t really matter to Bassam, but Sam #2 had a family and liked to spend daylight with them.

Sam #2 motioned to the club soda. “God keep the evil away,” he said in Arabic, holding up the mother-of-pearl cross around his neck to Bassam’s face. Bassam didn’t speak Arabic but understood it well enough to know that Sam #2 disapproved of him in all languages. He couldn’t tell Sam #2 that he needed this sober view of drunks to disgust him into staying sober. That, he believed, would make him sound like a fucking pansy wuss.

“I’m not drinking, pal. This is just home,” Bassam explained. “Everyone needs a fucking home.”

“A fucking home, asshole?” Sam #2 ranted. “What do you fucking know about not having no home, jerkoff? Let me tell you about not having no fucking home.”

Then Sam #2 went off on his own personal Lebanese tragedy. It was the only rant in which this devout Greek Orthodox used the word
fuck
and all its derivatives. The fucking war in fuck-all Lebanon when he was a fucked-up child. Then he became a fucked-over man without a fucking home because it was occupied by displaced squatters the one fucking night he and his beloved mother had gone to visit his father in the fucking hospital where a UN doctor was trying to amputate his leg again, which had been badly amputated the first go-around by a fucking overworked doctor. Finally, he fucking fled alone to Syria in a fucking van one night as his mother fucking sobbed. Then there were all the fucking long
years of fucking struggle in Jordan to get a visa to fucking Las Vegas while he got a fucking Ph.D. in law from the fucking University of Jordan.

What the fuck was a Ph.D. in law? But Bassam was shamed silent, as he was when the other Sam cabbies one-upped one another’s geopolitical sob stories, shaking their fists at the television news while they argued with the words coming out the anchors’ mouths.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Bassam said. “I’ve got a home, dude, but why go there when I’ve got all this fucking sunshine here?”

Sam #2 looked at Bassam’s pasty face through the glare of his twenty-four-hour neon life.

“Yeah, that’s some tan you got going on, buddy boy,” said Sam #2, all fucked out.

“It’s all in the sunny outlook, my friend,” Bassam explained. “You get to be unlucky here. In other places, they’d call bad luck being a loser.”

“Luck, schmuck, listen good,” Sam #2 said. “There’s a belly-dancing convention at the Luxor. I got Sergei’s car. I convinced him to take the day off. I’ll drive that, and you drive ours. That crazy Russian has no idea what he gave up.”

Sam #2 wasn’t excited about half-naked women. He once had told Candy that his wife, whom he had met while getting that Ph.D. in law at the University of Jordan, would have been Miss Palestine if there still were a Palestine. Candy had been so moved by this that she had punched Bassam, who was sitting at his usual stool, in the shoulder, as if it were his fault someone didn’t love her that much.

What Sam #2 was excited about was the Saudis. They were in town and would be all over these belly-dancing girls, drunk and horny. The tips promised to be huge.

“You don’t need me,” Bassam said.

“I hooked us a two-limo family,
habibi
. Take the limo I drove over in,” said Sam #2. “I’ll go get the other one and meet you at the Luxor in an hour. Don’t be late,
compadre.
”

“Arabs speaking Spanish bugs the shit out of me,” Bassam called out after him.

Candy put down another club soda, his third tonight. For variety, she had added cranberry juice. She handed him the phone. “Take this call,” Candy said. “I’m not your goddamn secretary.”

“I’ll be there, shithead,” Bassam said into the phone. “Don’t fucking check up on me every fucking minute.”

“Hello?” Laila said on the other line. “May I speak to Bassam?”

Shit. His sisters usually called the bar earlier “just to say hi” in case he was hanging his head in a toilet puking and/or dead. He used to try to explain that he wasn’t suicidal, just self-destructive. Still they called.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Bassam said cheerily.

“I’m fine, same as usual,” Laila replied, always acting as if he had had the common courtesy to ask after her. “How are you?”

“Super,” he said, as usual.

“Super,” Laila said as they lapsed into silence.

“Well, I’d better get going, Sis,” Bassam said.

“Sure, I just wanted to say hi… and let you know that Lena is in Las Vegas … for a convention.”

“Half the people in Las Vegas are here for some convention or another,” he told her.

“She’s staying at the Venetian,” Laila added. “Maybe you could drive her somewhere or something.”

That concluded Laila’s big attempt at interfering.

“New wife?” Candy asked as she took away the phone.

Bassam shook his head. “You got any brothers or sisters, Candy?” he asked.

“Not really.” She shrugged. “But I got a couple of half ones.”

“I got nine … or seven,” he said.

“Very funny,” she said, helping herself to another cigarette. “Sam #2’s waiting.”

His sisters had all come out to help him over the years. Even Laila
had gotten on an airplane to bring him books on taking it one day at time. There might have even been a Koran in the book bag. The books all had colorful covers, and so he knew that his mother had helped Laila pick them out. He had taken Laila to see Wayne Newton, this chubby housewife whose oldest son was nearly his age, who was being eaten up by a cancer he was afraid to ask about. She had begged him to have faith in a dream.

But Bassam hadn’t spent enough time sober to have any concrete dreams. There was his early plan to be the next David Bowie. That had been in the mid-1970s, when he had worked at Amo Zaki’s falafel shop to make the money for an electric bass. But the nights in those clubs had led him to become a pioneer in a new wave of cocaine addiction. When the principal had called to tell Fatima that Bassam had been caught with coke, she was furious. “How could he use Coke?” she had said. “Coke is on the Arab boycott list of companies doing business with Israel. Shame,
aabe
. Pepsi. Pepsi is okay. I am not raising Zionists.” That was how far Bassam and his choice of drugs had stepped away from his parents’ immigrant bubble.