One night, drunk but steady, you decide you will not go immediately home but look into one of your proposed after-hours adventures. You do not suppose you will see it through but you are curious about it all the same and you bypass your neighborhood and head west on the 10 freeway, toward the ocean. There is a ways to go and you chainsmoke and drink whiskey from an emptied soda bottle as you drive. On the radio a man is imitating a chicken singing "In the Mood." You are imitating the man imitating the chicken and spilling whiskey down your shirt front as you choke and laugh.
You park your car opposite the Santa Monica pier and find it is not dark and deserted, as you hoped it would be. The fun rides are still lit up and in the distance two security officers, a male and a female, are leaning over the railing and talking. They are standing close together and the male is pointing out at the ocean; the woman is nodding. They are near the end of the pier and you cannot see their expressions but you believe they are smiling. It is a romantic enough scene but antagonistic to your plans, and you toss out the empty soda bottle and drive north, down the California Incline, toward Malibu. The console clock reads four in the morning.
The air is dry and warm and you find the Malibu pier deserted and dimly lit. You park the car and walk down the beach and beneath the pier. Small waves lap over the barnacled pylons and the pier lets off a long, settling moan and you reach out your hands to feel the vibration through the mossy wood. The pylons are tall as trees and seem to be leaning or falling toward one another. You bend down to touch the water and it is cold but not so cold as you thought it would be and you take off your shoes and wade in up to your ankles, feeling with your feet the hard sand of the ocean floor. As your skin acclimates to the water you know that you must see your plan through and it becomes in that instant a significant ambition and you clamber up the beach to the side of the pier and jump onto the railing and lift yourself over. You disrobe to your underwear and run twenty paces before coming to a tall white gate, its top arched and slick. Using the pier railing for support you climb around so that your body for a moment is hanging over the ocean. You run forty more paces and hit another fence, identical to the first, and you notice an elevated shack at the end of the pier. A light is glowing in one of the windows and you decide you have gone far enough. Once again you climb over the railing, only now you are facing the ocean. Looking down to gauge your height you find you cannot see the surface of the water and you search the sky for the moon, but the moon is not there. The warm wind runs off your torso and legs and your mind turns to the loveliness of narcotics and alcohol and women and you are shivering though you are not at all cold and you feel that you could cry now. You cannot see the water but the shore is a long ways off and you know it will be deep enough and so you count aloud, one, two, three, and you hold your breath and jump out into the night.
You are sitting in your car outside the bar, drinking from an airplane bottle and smoking a cigarette. You are forty-five minutes late and there are three empty airplane bottles at your feet and you have been parked for over an hour but are not yet ready to go to work. You no longer push headlong into your shifts and it is becoming more and more difficult to enter this building and in fact it is a constant worry so that you wake up thinking of the colorless faces of the customers and the cold, wet dishrag that hangs from your belt loop and slaps at your leg. Also you are always fighting one illness or another or one endless illness that never entirely dies, as you do not give your body sufficient rest and respite from your appetites. Now your body tries to reject the airplane-bottle whiskey by vomiting but you better the body with deep, mechanical breathing of the fresh night air.
As you exit the LTD, Junior the crack addict sneaks up and lifts you off the ground in an embrace and roars in your ear that he is back, back, back, muthafuckas! He sets you down and you catch your breath from laughing. "I really thought you'd died," you tell him. "That little guy was going around saying he'd killed you." "Hey man, no muthafuckas killin' me," Junior says. He has been in jail for three months and was released just this morning. You ask him how it went and he bugs his eyes at the stupidity of the question. You ask why he was arrested and he bugs his eyes doubly and rests his fists on his hips. You give him twenty dollars and listen to him talk about his latest plans — forthcoming construction work, doorman work, and a management position in an as yet unopened jazz club. Where he got this last idea is anyone's guess but when he describes himself standing at the bar in a suit and fedora with alligator shoes and purple silk stockings you cannot help but believe in some part of it. It is now only a matter of months, he tells you, a matter of hanging on.
He is eager to return to his routine and judging by his looks has already indulged profoundly in his drug of choice. He intends to make up for lost time, he says, with ninety days of his life stolen away forever when he wouldn't hurt a soul in the world, and when every day is a gift from God. He tucks the twenty away and turns a critical eye on you. He has heard you are doing poorly and asks if he might help. He infers that your job is in jeopardy but will not name the source of this information. "You're getting too deep up in it," he says. "Why do you think they call 'em depressants? You ought to do like me, see?" He points to his eyes. "Stimulants. Stimulated." Thanking Junior for his concern and insights, and promising to return soon for a longer visit, you walk to the front door of the bar. "Stay positive," he says in parting.
The room is already full and tossing or listing as a vessel over rough waters. Simon, returned to the role of manager, catches your eye and makes a show of psychically mutilating your character from across the bar. (At first he had refused the offer to resume his previous duties but a bonus was offered, a trip to some desert resort, and he came back to work with an extreme sunburn/new attitude. You are happy that he is in command again; you felt a keen pity for him when he was demoted, to the point that you wished he might "be killed.") He throws a rag at your face and nods in the direction of the bathroom. "Clean it up," he says. He is very angry but you do not attempt any excuses or penitent greetings; you walk past the line and into the men's room where you find a large pile of excrement perched on the seat of the toilet. Though this is the personification of your work fears you do not so much as sigh but take up a handful of napkins and, holding your breath, pick up the pile to ease it into the clogged, near-overflowing toilet, only its weight is too terrible to consider and you drop it into the filthy water. This creates a splash and your thighs are covered and you inhale the smell and vomit straight away like a fire hose and it covers the toilet seat and tank and spreads across the floor. Simon is standing behind you. "You'll have to clean the puke up too, mate," he says. "That's just the way of it." The child actor is standing in the doorway laughing and calling to Curtis that he might also witness the scene. Now they are both laughing and holding their stomachs and Simon is sorry for you and pushes them back down the hall and asks you in a mournful tone to try to finish the job hastily as there is a backup of dirty glasses and after all it is Saturday night.