“Firemen?” one of the tourists said.
“Yeah, the hose, you see. The nozzle, you know?” And his right hand dove under the counter, swept his brown mustached face with the towel, and disappeared again under the bar. From the jukebox, Sam Cooke was wailing “... It’s been a long, a long time comin’, but I know, a change gonna come, oh yes it will...”
Kip looked at Rudy from the other end of the counter.
“Sure,” Rudy said, sniffing and touching his nose as he looked around, “I live by there, below and behind. And in front of it is the bay, with its vessels of ferries and ships and tankers and tugboats and sailboats and cruise liners. On light windy days like this, it’s like a big parade out there.” Rudy was getting carried away with his descriptions again.
“Right, Rudy, hey?” Kip laughed from the other end of the counter.
“You’re chuckling over your glass again. You’re getting drunk, my man,” Rudy said, walking toward Kip, and as he got closer, whispered in his ear, “C’mon inside, man. I gotta show you something. Harry!” Rudy called, and a man approached the bar. “Harry, I know you’re the wrong man to put behind a bar, but what the hell. I got no choice. You got seniority.” And the men sitting at the table where Harry came from exploded in laughter and derision. “Take over for a few minutes, will you?” Rudy said.
Kip got up quickly, too quickly, but, graceful to the end, he managed to keep his balance by bending his knees slightly. He lifted the split board at the end of the counter and followed Rudy to a narrow hallway and into a small room. Rudy switched the light on.
“What is it?” Kip asked the bartender.
“Nothing,” Rudy said. “I just wanted to get you outta there. What’s up, my man? What’s eating you, champ?”
“Rudy,” he said, “I need some money.”
“I knew I asked a stupid question.”
“I gotta borrow some money, Rudy. You gotta help me out.”
“How much do you need? I’m afraid to ask.”
“Two thousand.”
“Dollars?”
“No, pesos. Of course, dollars!”
“Jesus Christ, who’d you kill? Two thousand dollars, Jesus Christ!” After a moment, a change came over the bartender’s face. “It’s that bad, huh?”
“It’s bad, Rudy. You know me. I never asked you for nothing...”
“I know. I know that, champ. Maybe I can come up with some of it, but...”
“Whatever you can, Rudy...” And he told the bartender about Nena and himself and the racetracks that afternoon.
Kip, the son of a blacksmith in the Philippines, had arrived about seven years ago. Rudy had put him up for a while to help him get started because, as he said, “I believed in the kid. He had potential.”
Some years back, Kip had doffed his blades of burning steel for a pair of leather gloves and became the champion of four divisions of boxing in the Philippines. Now only in his thirties, he had whirlpooled into calamity after calamity, disaster upon disaster, bad luck upon bad luck.
“Sometimes I feel I have degenerated into something untouchable. In my prime, Rudy. In my prime!” he told the bartender in Filipino. Rudy spoke no Filipino, but he understood enough of it.
Rudy’s cousin, who visited the Philippines frequently, had told him that he had seen Kip fight. According to him, Kip would sing and cry after winning each championship title. The Crooning Champion from Cebu, they called him. He was a sight to behold. Blood streaming from cuts on his face and sweat glistening, he would belt out a mushy love song from his heart... and weep right there in the ring. He was the only fighter in the history of Philippine boxing who had held four titles simultaneously. He had lost them all, of course, one by one. Bad management, age, and time, the most corrupt of all handlers, drove and sucked him into the nightlife of fast women, drinking, and gambling, and those were not really in his nature. When he came to Rudy five years ago, he was sleeping by the benches and sidewalks and enclaves of Howard Street and the Tenderloin district. After Rudy got him the job as a cab driver two years ago, Kip became pretty stable. During this time he married a woman from a prominent family from the Philippines, for papers only. Her people had given him some money.
And then he met Nena. That is, he met Nena again. They’d met in the Philippines before, in Cebu City, at some party. But she was very young then. She was nineteen and he, the multidivision champion, was twenty-three. Her older sisters and their friends had thrown Kip Benito a party; Nena was just a tagalong. They hardly noticed each other. That was years ago. Kip was still the champion then, and Nena, who knew nothing of boxing, could not have cared less about his athletic prowess. But Nena, now in her mid-twenties in San Francisco, probably cared even less. All she saw in him was a soft-hard man, quick and graceful in some ways, but awkward at times. Later on, and above all else, she saw in him a man who did not quite know how to lie.
Kip was not a frequenter of Blanco’s. He was not a drinking man to begin with, though he always kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around. Even in his days of debauchery and squandering, he had never acquired a taste for hard liquor, and beer just made him full after two or three bottles. Crowds often made him uneasy, though he enjoyed people and company. He did not feel comfortable drinking liquor and he did not feel comfortable drinking with a crowd. And the crowd at Blanco’s, well... it was Rudy that really prompted him to visit Blanco’s every now and then. But not this time. This time it was for something else.
He told Rudy everything: that he needed the money for Nena’s “going away,” that they planned to go to Seattle but he had lost it all at the racetrack. She would rent a place near a relative of Kip’s in Seattle. He would go to Alaska and work, then, after a couple of months, return to her in Seattle. And from there, with money in hand, they could make more permanent plans together.
They wouldn’t get married even if they could, not right away. For Kip was already married, and his wife’s family had paid him two thousand dollars, and were giving him an additional five hundred every three months until their divorce. It had now come to the end of the third year and Kip was going to collect his last five-hundred-dollar installment of the marriage deal. For such an arrangement, he’d had to do some things that inconvenienced him, and probably his wife, too, now that he thought of it. They’d had to see each other a couple of times a month, spend a weekend with each other, and be seen together in public every now and then. But that had not become a chore for Kip until he met Nena again.
“Call me after you get the five hundred from your wife,” Rudy told him. “I’ll see what I can come up with.” And they both headed out of the little room and back into the bar. The tourists were now sitting down at a table, talking and drinking.
Kip sat back down on his stool and said, “Bartender,” wiping the counter in front of him, “one more for the road.”
When Rudy came with his drink, there were two white men sitting beside Kip. They were drunk and harassing him. Kip had had a few drinks too many, this he knew, but he did not allow the two men to bother him much. His mind was on more important things. He managed to wiggle his way out and leave. He caught Rudy’s eye as he did so, and they gestured each other goodbye.
Out in the night and under the garish lights from streetlamps, Kip stopped by a phone booth near the City Lights Bookstore and called Nena.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded a bit hoarse.
“You still up, Mahal?”
“I’m waiting for you.”
“Don’t wait up for me. How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess. Well, not really.”