“I been thinking about you,” says the writer. “You and your trashy friends laying waste to our mythology. You’re gonna choke on it, you smut-mongers.”
“Keep it up, I’ll tear out your windpipe.”
“Let me buy you a drink.”
The Whistle Bar: the bartender is talking into mid-air. He’s an old friend and won’t let people bother me. Also, he keeps pushers off me on a specific basis. He won’t let them give me coke; whereas a Percodan or Eskatrol guy can get through. The next week, the diet changes. “I’m glad the college girls have gone back,” raves the bartender, “I don’t want any more pussy. I don’t want it, I don’t like it. I’m fuck-foundered. I’m to where if I was with Miss World, I’d lose my hard-on over a barking dog. I’d rather dynamite shellcrackers on the Caloosahatchee.”
The hotel across from the post office burned down that night and we watched the inferno from the balcony drinking straight Lemon Hart on ice. I filled my mouth with one-fifty-one and hung out over the tourists and blew a flame into the night, a flame from my mouth to encourage the burning hotel to leap the street.
The writer said, “I’m a goner, see. So, I’m willing to help a new guy.”
“I’m not a new guy,” I said. “I’m Swiss cheese.”
“Shut up you mouth. You might write someday. Your memoirs. The overnight sensation. You may turn to immortality to keep from looking down the street. The immortality of an artist, you should know, consists in the lag between his death and the time his collected works are flushed down the loo. I got the title for your memoirs, chum, and I been carrying it like a hot potato till I could run into you. I want you to call it Eleven Ways to Nigger-Rig Your Life.”
He had a piña colada in his bony surgical hands and he held it up like a chalice attempting to watch the burning hotel through the milky glass. I went home and wrote a letter to my brother Jim on the Olivetti. Then it seemed that I couldn’t read what I had written. And hours passed. I don’t know, you just drift away. Then you can’t wake up. It’s the middle of the night, no-man’s-land. They’re all laughing at your handwriting. It seems like a small thing but you suspect that it will kill you. One thing leads to another; daytime arrives on an evil wind. You can’t get your hand off the doorknob, your teeth out of the girl’s teeth. Increasingly, you can’t remember anything and you are suspicious that perhaps you shouldn’t. In the end, your only shot is to tell everyone, to blow the whistle on the nightmare. It will work for a while; no one knows how long. The worse the dream, the more demonstrative you must become.
I took to the stage.
7
I CAME HOME Wednesday night loaded, having had enough of the writer. An isometric bull with the jaws of a wolf was guarding the door to the patio. So I knew I needed coffee. It was raining.
The instant coffee dropped in veils through a fathom of hot water and then a cockroach fell off a framed recipe into it and drowned. I flipped him out with a butter knife and bethought myself of change and a new life.
O Catherine, don’t leave your dead meteor! I’ll be better for you and the weeping will end. I’ll be better for you and the weeping will end.
* * *
Yet when I awakened, something still hung over me. I went over to Francis Street for bollos and coffee and was taken aside, right on the sidewalk, by a man who wanted to know if I had any angles on local attics. He was a collector of everything but especially of barbed wire and Orange Crush bottles. He had the world’s largest collection of early New Mexico burglar alarms and that wasn’t even an area of specialization for him. “No attics,” I said simply.
He said, “Take it easy, pal. I’m not gonna bite you.”
I ate the bollos and drank the coffee. Back out on the street, I noticed something: my shadow was pointing in the wrong direction. I was walking toward the sun and my shadow was straight out in front of me.
Then the police pulled the big cruiser up alongside of me and kept it at walking speed until I nipped up Lopez Lane and bought an aloe plant for a dime.
When I got to Roxy’s, all was not well with her. She was now engaged to marry Peavey and she was rolling around the floor, fully dressed, crushing a fine old straw hat with each revolution. I ordered her to her feet. She got into a kind of crouch and ran across the room into an armoire. That was the end of the hat. Then the phone book walked to the sofa like an octopus before it sloughed to a stop.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. She got up and began to march. Her diphthongs seemed to last forever.
“I’m never going to enjoy life,” she said. “I hate everything.”
I got out of there.
* * *
They are raising the contents of a wrecked galleon below Key West, Nuestra Señora de Atocha. There is distress; for, in addition to the numerous pieces of eight, they are finding coke spoons. There has been an attempt to describe these as spoons for ear wax. They won’t go in an ear. The divers knew what they were. They find jeweled rosaries and crosses; they find swords. The divers pay off bar tabs with pieces of eight. Where did all that coke go? And how much did this New World brain-raker have to do with the Golden Age of Spain?
They hauled two cannons up on the beach at the foot of Greene Street. Catherine and I went to look at them. The bronze was sea green and cast dolphins curved at the trunnions. The tops of the cannons were beveled flat and polished by sea turtles.
Catherine said, “Will they still shoot?”
“Where’d you come from?”
“I saw you standing here. I said to myself, ‘What’s he doing with those cannons.’ And I’d been thinking about you.”
“Let’s go someplace and get drunk.”
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” I said. I wanted minestrone and Frankie Laine records, something other than this heat, the steady clangor from Mike Brito’s shipyard, and the thought of Roxy marrying Peavey. I had no sudden ideas for making Catherine fall in love with me again; on the other hand, she wasn’t leaving the key; and, given that she was out of work, I gathered I might, I said might, be part, I said part, of the reason she was staying.
I wandered into the street a little and Catherine motioned me to the curb. I suggested going to the bank and making a cash withdrawal and investing it in party drugs. She was very much opposed to this idea in all respects and, in fact, challenged the notion that I had any bank account at all. I thought to nip this one in the bud. She suggested that my short-term memory loss was getting to be a problem to me more than anyone else.
We went into my bank, a mozarabique mockery at the foot of Duval Street. Most of the staff was drinking coffee and arguing. One teller’s window was open and a line of more than twenty people wound around the inside of the bank to this teller. Catherine and I got in line and were there for a very long time. A Cuban immigrant, a woman in her fifties, carrying a plastic mesh bag with a can of Bustelo coffee in it, arrived at the window and said something to the teller in a soft voice. He looked out into the indeterminate space beyond her shoulder and said, “I can’t understand you.” He was resting the point of his pencil on the counter. He turned it carefully and rested the eraser while she repeated herself.
“I don’t speak Spyanish,” he said. She said in broken English that it was English. He said, “I don’t speak your English.” The coffee drinkers glanced over. “I can’t understand that,” he said to them. Then he called down the line, “Any motel owners?” Two signaled. They came forward and he collected the take.