Jackie and I began to spend time together outside of our jobs, going to the movies or having a beer or two at some of the saner places on the Hill. She was an accountant at a Big Eight firm downtown and moonlighted at Athena’s for relaxation and to escape the masquerade that was apparently more necessary for gay women than it was for their male counterparts. Occasionally she’d poke her head in the Spot to say hello, and invariably one of my regulars would boast that he could “turn one of those ‘rug munchers’ around” if he had the chance. This was especially exasperating coming from guys who hadn’t even been mercy-fucked by their own wives for years. As our friendship developed I began to pat myself on the back for finally having a close relationship with a woman that didn’t involve sex. It had only taken me three and a half decades to learn. What I didn’t know then was that Jackie Kahn would have the largest role in the single most important thing that I have ever done.
The friend I lost was William Henry. Henry was a deceptively quiet young man with an offbeat sense of humor who had migrated from the South to take his first job out of college as a reporter for a local alternative weekly. I met him when he sat in on a meeting where his tabloid’s sales manager pitched me on buying space when I was advertising director for Nutty Nathan’s. Though I didn’t step up for any ads, Henry and I discovered from that meeting that we had very similar tastes in music. I hooked up with him downtown a couple of times-once to see Love Tractor at the Snake Pit and on another night to check out a hot D.C. zydeco band, Little Red and the Renegades, at the Knight’s Work-but after my career at Nathan’s blew up, I heard from him only through the mail. He was that type of friend who, without an explanation, would send me headlines from the New York Post or buy me unsolicited subscriptions to Australian biker mags, publications with names like Chrome and TaTas.
In July, William Henry was found murdered in his condo above Sixteenth and U, just around the corner from the Third District police station. He had been stabbed repeatedly with a serrated knife. A witness had seen a thirtyish man with a medium build leave the building at the time of the murder. The man was light-skinned and wore a blue T-shirt that appeared to have been stained with blood. The Metropolitan Police spokesman said in the Washington Post that an arrest was “eminent.”
For a few days after that the Post ran a daily article on the slaying, returning to their favorite theme of Small-Town Boy Comes to Murder City and Meets His Fate. But when it was clear that the story would not have a pat ending, the articles stopped, and William Henry’s killer was never found.
I was thinking of Henry when I stepped up to Boyle that night and gave last call. Buddy and Bubber were gone, as was Melvin. He had left when I put George Jones on the deck. The tape always sent him out the door. Darnell was in the kitchen, cleaning up. I could see his willowy torso in the reach-through and hear the clatter of china, muted by the sound of his cheap radio, as he emptied the dishwasher.
Dan Boyle placed his palm over the top of his shot glass to signal he was done, then drank the rest of the beer from the bottle sitting next to it. I asked if he wanted to put the nigart put thht on his tab and he nodded, seeming to look both to my right and to my left simultaneously.
Boyle was square-jawed and built like a heavyweight prizefighter, with stubbornly short, dirty blond, Steve McQueen-style hair, circa Bullitt. The age in his bleached blue eyes exceeded his thirty years. He drank methodically, and when he spoke it was through the tight teeth of an angry dog.
Many of the on-duty detectives who frequented the Spot wore their guns in the bar (it was, in fact, a police regulation that they do so), and most of them got tanked up and weaved out into the night without incident. But it wasn’t Boyle’s weapon (the grip of his Python always showed from beneath his wool jacket where it was holstered) that was disturbing, or the fact that he even carried one. He was clearly on the edge, and he was the last guy in the bar who I ever would have fucked with.
“Hear anything more on the William Henry case?” I asked him carefully. I bent into one of the three sinks and rinsed out the green bar netting.
“You knew him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Haven’t heard anything,” he said. “But I’ll lay you ten to one your friend got burned for drug money. In this town, it all boils down to drugs. Let me tell you what it is. It’s”-he glanced around the room-“it’s the fuckin’ boofers. You know what they ought to do about the drug problem in this city?” I didn’t answer, having heard his solution a dozen times. “Take ’em out in the middle of the street and shoot ’em in the head. Public fuckin’ executions.”
I said, “Check on the Henry case for me, will you, Boyle?” He rose clumsily, nodded, and with a tilted, heavy gait made his way across the room and out the front door. A trace of snow blew through before the door closed.
The lights dimmed in Darnell’s kitchen. He walked out, wearing a leather kufi on his head and a brown overcoat. Darnell was tall and bone-skinny and pushing forty. He had done time and from that had gotten a thick white scar from the back of his ear to the underside of his chin. The scar made him look tough but, whatever he had been, that part of his life was clearly over. He was soft-spoken and introspective now, and though it was obvious that he would never rise above his position in the kitchen, that futility did not prevent him from reporting to work every single day. He was, as one of my regulars had described him with special emphasis on the word, a man.
Darnell and I looked through the transom window and watched the steady diagonal fall of thick flakes, a picture that seemed unreal from our warm vantage point. Darnell, hoping for some company, said, “You headin’ up my way?”
“I’ve got some work to do,” I said. “Think I’ll stick around, check my antifreeze.”
Darnell looked at the pyramid of liquor on the wall and then back at me. “What you want to drink that nasty shit for? Shit kills your spirit, man.” He shook his head and walked to the door, then turned. “You want me to lock up?”
“No, I’ll get it. Thanks, Darnell.”
“Check you tomorrow, hear?” He waved and then he was gone.
Dimming the lights even further, I finished wiping down the bar, placing all of the ashtrays but one in the soak sink. Then I slipped Robyn Hitchcock’s Queen Elvis into the deck and listened to the quiet intro to “Wax Doll” as I poured myself two fingers of Grand-Dad. I brought the shot glass to my lips and with closed eyes tasted sweet velvet.
I opened my eyes to a shock of cold air and a memory fifteen years old. Billy Goodrich glided across the dark room and had a seat at the bar.
“Hey, Greek,” he said. “ Aren’t you gonna’ offer me a drink?”
TWO
The first time I met Billy Goodrich he was sitting on a wooden bench in Sligo Creek Park, rolling a huge spliff with the care and precision of an artisan. This was in the fall of my junior year, and my first semester at Blair High in Silver Spring. My grandfather had used a Maryland relative’s address to get me in, alarmed as he was at my subpar sophomore performance in the D.C. public school system.
Billy yelled, “Hey, Greek,” and I did a double take, surprised that one of the more popular students even knew who I was. “Come on over here and help me out with this number,” he said.
We split the joint (the handshake of my generation) and then laughed awhile over nothing. After that we played one-on-one at the park courts for the rest of the afternoon and our friendship, with the uncluttered reasoning that accompanies those years, was sealed.
Billy Goodrich was one of the better-liked kids in school, though not for the usual reasons. He wasn’t the best-looking or most athletic guy; neither was he the friendly intellectual who even the most brutal students grudgingly learn to respect. What he had was that rare ability to fit in at the fringe of every group-hippies, grits, geeks, jocks-without conforming to their constrictively rigid codes of behavior and dress. He did it with an infectious smile and a load of self-confidence that bordered on, but never slipped into, conceit. As I had always hung with Jews and Italians and other Greeks, he was also the first truly white-bread friend I had ever had.