“Honey—” The husband caught the wink.
“Can I go to the buffet?” She studiously did not look at me.
“Honey—”
“G’outa my way. I’m gna buffay.” She arises for me.
“Take it easy.” He snatches her into her chair.
“I’m gonna have a roll and butter.”
“Wait till they bring the baron of beef for Christ’s sake.”
“Oh, you—”
“Okay, honey.” The husband glared at me in challenge. He looked like a very stupid elk in Yellowstone National Park.
“I’m gona the bar, you.”
“Stay where you are.”
“I’m gna the bar.”
“Like hell you are.”
“You…”
The waitress came. I tipped her but refused to order.
“I’m a woman.”
“Right, honey,” said the husband, rolling his eyes only very slightly.
“I’m a lady and you’ll never get another one.”
“Sure—” He bounces his fork tines very precisely against the table.
“And we’re having a great time.”
“This we know.” He rolls his eyes for me. Now we are in cahoots. We agree his wife is a drunken slob.
“And I’m a wom—auhbrappp—woman.”
“Exactly.”
“So lay off.”
“Okay.” A sigh.
“And I love the sea…”
I went ahead and ordered a drink, big belt of Beam’s Choice, and listened. The first thing I heard the woman say was “Nnnnnrrughp!”
“Oh boy.”
Then a long silence while they waited for someone to bag their dinners.
“Gawd, I love us!”
“You better believe it!” One of the men.
“I honestly really love all of us.”
“Right…”
“I’m a woman and I love the sea. Which is good.”
“Thin … slices of beef … English style. In a bag. It doesn’t seem right.”
“The main thing about me NNNGRUUGPH!” Everyone but the wife jumped away from the table, holding napkins at the ready. “Miss … oh … miss, uh I’ve made a mess. God I’m so sorry. Jese what a pig I am.”
I left. Shitsuckers.
* * *
There is something to be said for lining up a few cheap thrills ahead of time. As I grow older the cheapness is easier to come by; but the thrill is always the same twitching of half-shot nerves. My father is dead and he wasn’t any help to me anyway; but he was the only one I had and so at night I walk around and think I’m talking to him because he came from some place and was born in a certain year and he was my old man and he died in a certain year, as always, while there were still things to be said. And really, all I wanted to say was, So long, Pappy, I know it’s a lot of shit too. And whatever I might say about you as a father, you’re the only one I got. Still, you didn’t treat me like you should have.
But what I line up ahead of time is an imaginary stroll with him through some unsuspecting neighborhood, the old man’s face suspiciously Indian, blunted with vodka, turning to every detail in the street, nothing missed, no gaiety lost for knowing that it all ended badly.
Sometimes the stroll is down in the Casa Marina with the plywood gothic facades and the terrible sigh of air conditioning in the jasmine. Yet at the end of a street, the ocean will roll toward you hauling its thousand miles with a phosphorescent pull. I note an odd detail here and there, but my old man would be the one to spot the banker’s wife staring in an upstairs mirror, waiting for the scream to start in the shag carpet. Nevertheless, it was all acceptable to him; he would shrug. Drunk enough, he would turn his head between his upraised shoulders and look for the next instance of the disease, something crooked, the smell of a child’s run-over puppy hidden in the garbage, beginning to turn in the heat. Or simply the suddenly unkempt lawn of a young couple learning to watch the dream vanish. As my life quiets down, menaces begin to appear, and whether I’m inventing them or they are real doesn’t matter to me.
I stand for those who have made themselves up.
I am directly related to Jesse James. That is true. We were out of Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and hid him in our barn more than once. I have played in that barn, and in fact, it is within the gloomy space beyond the hay mow where Jesse James is supposed to have hung upside down, with his percussion Colts in his trousers. Cole Younger didn’t have his black impracticality, and while Jesse disappeared mysteriously with his beard in the nineteenth century, Cole Younger shaved every day and timed quarter horses on the brush tracks of Missouri when nobody knew what a quarter horse was. Everybody in my family lived on the edges of the Civil War, Key West, and the bloody borders; we couldn’t live on the main line. But we fought shit-suckers whenever we found them. My maternal connection, on the Jesse James side, owned an interest in a foundation horse still talked about, White Lightning, stolen out of Reconstruction Tennessee and taken to Missouri. If any of this is not true, I will say so. Two men came out of Tennessee to reclaim White Lightning and were not heard from again. There was a cloud on the title forever. All of this horse’s progeny were running fools, sorrels and chestnuts. My grand-uncle said that when they would come into the barn out of the rain to shake themselves dry, it sounded like thunder. And that was how you knew they could run. He said that if Jesse James had had colts out of White Lightning instead of just grade horses and plugs, he would have been governor of the state of Missouri. I personally think he was someone who could not live on the main line any more than me or my fairie uncle. And I’d like for nobody to find that out the hard way. White Lightning’s get came to one hundred thirty-six live foals; and the prettiest one, a chestnut with a blaze face, kicked him to death in a Missouri corral.
They could all run.
* * *
We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged as to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every other child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God’s Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody’s refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert.
* * *
There was a writer on Elizabeth Street who had had some success and broke down or burned out. We drank together once in a while in a bar whose owner had nothing more to say for himself than that he had thrown Margaret Truman out for disorderly conduct. He enjoyed needling the writer on crowded nights when the writer liked to stand up to watch the band playing.
“Down in front!” The owner.
“I can’t see sitting.” The writer.
“I said, Down in front!”
“Get fucked!” The writer.
“Line up!” The owner.
The writer fired a beer bottle at him and the owner put the bouncers on him and unloaded him on the sidewalk. The writer and I walked toward Captain Tony’s in the meringue night amid the social terrors of our epoch. The writer said, “I’m not going through with it, this work of mine. No one believes in it, least of all me. You’re a mess too.” I told him it was the age.
“Well,” he said, “the age is breaking my balls. I’m going home.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said.
“I had a friend, he took the scissors to his face. My sister’s a dead zombie in her twenties because of your fucking age.”
“If you picked me to stand up for the Republic, you got the wrong Joe.” I thought this was hideous, railed at as though I wanted any of this frightful shit-heel madhouse.