“Gato!” they’d shout, and I pictured jaguars with badges in their fur.
Maybe I pictured that now as the cups came down. I put the lookout’s money in with mine in the cup marked D, watched it go up. The cup started down once more, but there was something wrong. The lookouts shouted, the cup swung hard, bounced off the stair rails, tilted, tipped. The lights went out.
I groped the scummed tiles for my bags. Broken bottles pricked my palms. I heard a burst of siren, then more shouting, then nothing at all. My hand brushed something, one of the tiny glassine envelopes. I scooped it into my fist. The lights came on. The lookout stood in the doorway.
“Got my bags?” he said.
“Bag,” I said. “One bag. You only gave me ten dollars.”
“I gave you twenty, motherfucker. You trying to rip me off?”
“No, man.”
“You little fucking junkie, trying to rip me off. Just give me what you’ve got.”
I walked toward him, opened my palm. We both sort of gasped when we saw the flattened cigarette butt.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I’m sure it’s over there near the stairs. Come on, let’s look.”
I wanted the lookout to follow me the way a father would, reserve judgment until it was clear a misdeed had occurred, maybe the way my father used to follow me when I was a boy, for he was a reporter and his job was to seek the facts, even if it was just the fact of who won a ball game or who’d ripped the sofa or stained the rug. My father always wanted to know what was truly happening.
Except maybe once.
There had been a big snowfall, and we stood in the driveway we’d just cleared, leaned on our shovels, sucked icy air.
“I remember,” my father said then. “I remember when you were a little boy. You had some words here and there, but you hadn’t really spoken a sentence yet. We were all waiting for your big first sentence. We were eating dinner and I was having my wine. I get up for some bread and knock over the glass. Wine spills everywhere. Stains the tablecloth. You know how your mother was about stains. We’re all sitting there afraid to speak, and you know what you said?”
“No.”
“‘I’m sorry.’ That’s what you said. ‘I’m sorry.’ Hah. You were always like that.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Listen,” said my father. “I need to tell you something. I don’t love your mother anymore. I’m seeing somebody else. Somebody I love. I care about you, but I can’t live with your mother right now.”
“She’s really sick.”
“I know. Believe me. That’s what makes it so hard.”
“You fucking bastard,” I said.
“Okay,” said my father. “I’m not going to let you speak to me like that too much. But right now is warranted. Give me what you got.”
I stood there, stared at him.
“That was it?” said my father. “Come on, take a shot. Sock it to me. Haymaker express.”
I cocked my fist, studied the salt bristles in his chin.
“Lay me out, baby,” said my father. “Onetime offer. Put the old fuck on the deck. Don’t be a damn pansy! I’m leaving your dying hag of a mother!”
I turned hard, took a few steps, and threw a huge hook at the garage door. We both heard my hand bones crack. I slid to the pavement, squealed.
“Oh, Christ,” said my father. “No good deed.”
He clutched me up and rolled me into the car, drove us to the hospital.
* * *
It was true about no good deed, or even bad deed, same as it was true about fathers and how they forget to love you, but it’s more that they’ve forgotten everything.
Maybe it’s just a classic American condition.
None of it mattered now. The lookout’s eyes filled with this silvery hate and he gathered up the collar of my shirt and commenced what people who have never been punched, people like me, call fisticuffs. He threw hard, perfect crosses, and my legs fell away and the blows did not cease. I could feel them, not feel them, their smash and wreck, the splintering of bone, feel my blood, this warm, barbaric blood, so rich and parasitical, pour out my nose and sluice out my mouth and down my throat and choke me with the shock of something terrible and unendingly foreseen.
When he was done, the kid leered down at me.
“Had enough?” he said.
“Yes,” I lied.
EXPRESSIVE
Folks say I have one of those faces. Not just folks, either. People say it. You have one of those faces, they say, a person can tell what you are feeling. Mostly what I’m feeling is that I’ve just farted, but I nod anyway, twitch up my eyes, my mouth, all earnest and merciful. It’s called Joy Is Here (So Don’t Be Such a Prune-Hearted Prick), or at least that’s what I call it. If you know how to work your face, you can make people think you feel anything you want, and with that power you can feel up anything you want.
Example: this chick, Roanoke, I meet at the Rover. She’s kind of dykey, the way I like them, has her own darts for the dartboard.
I buy her a beer.
“You’re kind of dykey,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, in the tone of her generation.
Roanoke rolls the dart in her hand. I glance off, swivel back with Harmless Fool / No Strings Attached / Penis as Pure Novelty, which sounds easy but requires most of the human face’s approximately seventy-three thousand muscles.
Next thing we’re back in her efficiency and Roanoke’s moaning with her hand on her mouth. She’s worried we won’t hear the door if the girlfriend comes home. We do hear the door, but that’s not the problem. The problem is efficiency. The apartment is laid out perfectly for dykes to discover they’ve betrayed each other and their way of life. A curtain around the bed might help.
I give Roanoke one more look before I leave her to the business of ducking creamers, ramekins. I call it Remember, the World Is Not Broken, Even If Your Crockery Is.
* * *
Folks, people, like to ask what you would do in a moment of great moral confusion. Would you save that burning portrait of Hitler painted by Rembrandt? Who cares? The serious question is what are you doing right now. Do you have time for another drink?
My friend, or, rather, anti-friend, Ajay disagrees.
“You’re an idiot,” says Ajay.
“Go back to fucking Mumbai,” I tell him. “Or whatever the fuck it’s called now.”
“Mumbai,” says Ajay. “And I was born here.”
“In the Rover?”
It’s not a bad place to be born. Every third beer is a buyback.
I don’t bother pulling a face. They never work on Ajay, not even I Know My Racism Amuses You, but It’s Still Racism, so I Win, and anyway it gets tiresome manipulating my universe. It’s nice to give those millions of tiny face muscles a break. Ajay goes up to the bar, and I keep my eyes peeled for dart dykes. When he comes back, I tell him all about Roanoke.
“You really are a fucking idiot. Go home to your wife.”
* * *
I go home to my wife. She’s sitting up at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, like she saw it in a movie about a wife sitting up for her shitty husband. She clicks her wedding ring against the side of the mug, which is my mug, a mug she gave me that reads WORLD’S SHITTIEST HUSBAND.
I tell her everything, but I can hardly hear my words because I’m focused on the nearly Dutch wonder forming on my face—Most Radiant Penitence. It’s a fairly simple purse-and-squint combo, but unless performed by an old master like myself, it risks smirk.
“Motherfucker,” my wife says, in the tone of an earlier generation. “Do you love her?”