Ablutions

Four

Discuss your wife. It is the early afternoon and you are sleeping on the couch in the living room when she returns for the remainder of her things. She is packed and loaded and she wakes you up to speak with you. You are down on your luck but will surely pull yourself up by your bootstraps and afterward come out swinging. Now she looks at you and is thinking about her lost and probably wasted time and she becomes angry. Time is more important to young women than to men, she explains; this makes sense and you agree that it makes sense and you excuse yourself to vomit and though she does not know you are silently vomiting you are annoyed that so little has changed since she left you, because after all it would have been an exceptional feeling for her to come back and to see you dressed in clean clothes, with your hair combed and your glasses shining brightly, your shoes creaking with unbendable leather newness. Your wife is on the phone and you hear her tell someone she loves him or her and when she hangs up you say, who was that, who do you love? "I love lots of people," she tells you. "Who do you love?" When you do not answer she moves toward the door. A male voice calls out; you hear the honking of a car horn. "Who's that?" you ask.

"No more questions," she says.

"One more question," you say.

She stands there waiting for the question. But it is a cruel question and you shrug it off. She points to her watch and holds her palms out; you nod and point to the door and she is gone. Your telephone rings and you walk to your room to answer it. Your bed is made and the covers are cool and you bury your face in them, pulling the receiver to your ear. It is Simon calling from the bar and you say to him, good day, proud South African.

"Look buddy, are you on or off tonight?" he asks.

"What do you mean?" you say. "What's the matter?"

He says that he is tired of fielding calls from you when you are drunk and you say, what? He says that he has better things to do on a busy Saturday night at work than to listen to your abuse and you say, wait, what? He tells you that this last call makes the fourth time you have called the bar drunk and quit, and you begin to laugh and so does Simon, reluctantly. You explain or try to explain that you have been on the road and contracted a case of dreaded desert fever, and you ask is he aware that the symptoms of said disease include animal cruelty, sticky-wrinkly romance, and muddy drawers? He informs you that that is none of his business and he becomes angry again and reminds you that your job is to wash dishes, the work of an ape, and can't you do the work of an ape? And aren't you paid well enough, in cash? If you can't do it, he tells you, if you can't do this brainless work of an ape, there's a line of people waiting to do it for you, which is true and you know it is true and you, recalling your overdrawn bank account and upcoming rent, make a sincere apology to Simon and tell him you will shape up, not ship out, and he tells you he hopes so because after all, over the years he has grown sort of fond of you. You have three hours more to rest before leaving to open the bar and you are impressed with this length of time for it is somehow both too long to wait and also not nearly long enough.

You are sitting in the magical Ford outside the bar when Junior the crack addict walks up and steps into the car and you both sit there watching the building. His smell is otherworldly, like a demon from deep in the earth's crust, and he repeatedly passes the fiercest gas; he has been too long without his drugs and his body is causing a fuss. He does not greet you and you do not greet him; a rift has grown between you recently, or rather a rift has grown between Junior and everyone — he is in the worst way and the doormen say he has been robbing people with his machete blade after hours. You are not afraid of him and you do not believe he would ever do you any harm but you wish he were somewhere other than sitting at your side, wondering about the contents of your pockets.

He is fidgeting with a lighter and finally he says to you, "I need twenty dollars, man. I need it bad." When you tell him you haven't got any money he punches your dashboard and pouts, asking himself how long this torture might go on. You tell him to wait a minute and you enter the empty bar, retrieving twenty dollars from the safe. You walk it out to him and he is relieved to see this money but wants to know where it came from. When you tell him you stole it he looks worried and asks if you won't get into trouble, which is insulting because you know he does not actually care one way or the other. "Do your drugs or don't do your drugs," you say. "Don't stand around sobbing and bitching about it." He straightens himself up and nods and hustles off to find his dealer. All through the night you are bothered by guilt and self-loathing for speaking with him so harshly and angered that such a man could conjure these emotions in you.

Discuss your feeling of wonder when the pilfered twenty dollars is not reported missing at the end of the night. Discuss your routine of thieving that stems from this incident, and the criminal spree you quickly embark upon.

Your plan is to keep an at-home stolen-monies pile, separate from your life-monies pile, and to cultivate it to a respectable size and then, at some key point, utilize it dramatically. Within a month you have three hundred dollars and you feel great relief and satisfaction, as if justice has been served, and you wonder why you waited until this late date to begin stealing from the owner, who you (on a whim) decide is a bad man who expects you to gladly damage your mind and body with this potentially deadly work of washing dishes in a bar, and who has never asked you how your feelings were doing even though it is fairly obvious that they, your feelings, have been hurt and are still hurting yet.

But the pile of pilfered monies is not growing fast enough and you concoct another manner to steal from the bar and here is what it is: You do not take any money from the safe. For three hours during every shift you are alone in the bar, from six o'clock to nine o'clock each night; this is your time to shine. Two customers come in and order two beers and two shots and you charge them twenty dollars and you open the cash register (with its loud, clanging, official-sounding ring) but you do not enter the cost of the drinks into the machine and when these customers leave you retrieve the twenty-dollar bill and fold it into your wallet. When more customers arrive you repeat this routine and the next morning you count a hundred and twenty dollars to add to the pile. (There had been a moment at the end of the night, with Simon examining the register tape, when you were prepared to raise your hands and call the police on yourself, but he had said nothing and in fact had given you an extra twenty dollars because, he had told you, you actually seemed half sober for most of the shift.)

The strange thing is that from the time you began to steal, you have been drinking less. One reason for this is that you are fearful of being caught and wish to keep your head clear, but also there is something about knowing you are exacting revenge on those who have saddled you with this work life which has a calming effect on your entire attitude, and you are surprised to find that you are once again drinking not to black out your mind and feelings but for the old-time reasons of good-natured happiness and the desire to celebrate the rhythm of your own beating heart. And so you are faced with another of life's semi-annoying ironies: You were never such an efficient employee until you began to rob from your place of work. Now you are stealing an average of two hundred dollars per night, and your pilfered-monies pile is spilling over onto the floor. You purchase a chalkboard and hang it above the pile; across its face you write out things like: Sailboat? European Relocation? Motor Home + American Road Odyssey? These ideas and others rush you along in your life and you feel for the first time in years that you are living toward something of significance. Your wife calls to ask if you are doing any better and you say, if I were doing any better I'd explode, which she misinterprets as another one of your declarations of desperation, and she hangs up on you.

One night, overly confident and gladdened by your plans, you lose your sense of propriety and steal three hundred and fifty dollars over the course of your shift. This proves to be too much, and at closeout Simon asks you questions that lead you to believe he suspects you of thievery (he makes no outright accusations but his opinion lingers in his every word). The next night you are setting up the bar when an exceedingly friendly man enters and orders a beer. He matches the tip with the beer cost and you, standing at the register, watch him watch you in the mirror above the bar and it occurs to you that this man could be a plant sent by Simon or the owners to uncover your fingers as either sticky or unsticky, once and for all, heaven help us, God bless us, may we rest in peace through eternity and the chilly outer reaches of space and time, so called (gavel slam). But Simon (or whoever) sent a man with poor eyesight and his squint gives him away definitively because there is no reason in the world for a customer to scrutinize your work this closely, so you, understanding your position, ring the order in properly, giving the register a wide berth so as to reveal the numbers of the transaction in neon, which the man sees despite vision problems. You hand him his change and he is acting the part of the glad beer drinker to your convivial, glad-to-be-here host. It occurs to you with a kind of wincing sadness that he is most likely an aspiring film star, and that this real-life role he is playing is his way of putting his skills to the test, and you can hear him saying to his bored-to-tears girlfriend or boyfriend, "If I can fool this bartender, I'll know that I've finally made it."

It is seven o'clock and a group of Hollywood types enters to celebrate the wrapping of a television commercial. They are throwing money at you hand over fist but the glad beer drinker still sits at the bar and watches your every move and you are becoming more and more annoyed by his presence when you think of your pilfered-monies pile, presently at a standstill. Hoping to get him drunk, you elect to switch him from beer to whiskey, offering him shots on the house, which he finds interesting, asking if you often give out free alcohol to strangers. You tell him, "No, there's just something so real about you, you know? From the moment I saw you I thought, There's a regular guy." The glad beer drinker is happy to hear this and he accepts the whiskey in his hand and thinks of the time in the hopefully-not-that-far-away future when he will be interviewed and asked about his years of struggle and toil — this story of fooling a thieving bartender would make a fine, humorous footnote. You give him another shot, and another and another, matching shots with him and egging him on, only the glad beer drinker is no drinker at all and soon he is rubbing his eyes and cursing aloud to himself and he does not notice when you put a Post-it over the display on the cash register to cover up its telling numbers.

The crowd swells and you no longer ring in the drinks but only open the machine for the change, keeping track of the amount coming in on a piece of scrap paper. You give the glad beer drinker a fifth shot and he begins talking about a play he is in, and he asks do you have any idea how taxing it is to have to cry every night? He tells you that if you write down your name he will put you on the ten-percent-off list, and you thank him. Now Brent the unhappy doorman comes over and you point out the glad beer drinker as a drunkard with covert plans to upset the serenity of the room. Brent nods and takes the glad beer drinker by the arm and tells him it's time to go now, champ. The glad beer drinker is confused and begins to shout that you don't understand who he is, and that you're all going to hear about this later, that it's going to be your jobs when he gets through with you, and Brent bends the man's arm back in a painful hold and the man submits with a yelp and the crowd celebrating their television commercial cheer the glad beer drinker on, taunting him and calling out into the black and flashing room, and the moment Brent leads the man out the door you pick up a calculator and add up the pilfered monies and this number impresses you and you wolf-whistle as you fold the bills away in your wallet.

Discuss the later happenings of Curtis. He once was lost and in fact had been missing but now is found, and he enters the half-filled bar in regular civilian's clothes, and you can tell by the bobbing of his head that he has been drinking elsewhere. He marches past the tables and stands rigidly before you, saluting and announcing loudly that Private Curtis is reporting for duty, sir! And you, thinking that Curtis has at last done something humorous, move to pour him a whiskey which he drinks in a gulp before repeating the salute, etc., and you say, "Okay, little less funny the second time," and he explains that he is not making a joke but that he has joined the Marines. You ask him if he is aware there is a war on and he says that he is, and that he will sleep well knowing that he's done his part, a phrase that makes you want to drown him, and you tell him that if he's joined the Marines during the bloody reign of the present-day commander in chief he'll quite possibly wind up sleeping a little too well, which he seems to think is in bad taste, and here is something new: Curtis is offended by your vulgarity. Hoping to mend fences, you tell him it's free drinks till closing time, and you wish him luck with every passing shot and he drinks the whiskey but continues to sulk at your insensitive remark. Finally you tickle him under his sickening, gobbly chin and tell him that everything is going to be all right, which is a lie, and which he knows is a lie of the highest order.

It's free drinks till closing time but Curtis passes out hours before that. The child actor comes by to pick him up and you greet him like an old friend (you do not know why you do this). You remember the last time you saw him, when the bar was raided and you gave him a kicking; the child actor does not know exactly what happened that night or who it was that bashed his face but he is aware on a base level that you acted in one unkind way or another — his reception to your hellos is chilly and distant and when you tell him how good it is to see him he merely belches. Now he is struggling to remove the body of Curtis from the room; you are watching him struggle; Simon is standing at your side. Simon served in the South African military as a youth and he shares with you his doubts regarding Curtis's assimilation into the war machine. As you watch Curtis's feet disappear out the door, Simon turns to you and says, "That poor bastard doesn't know what he's in for."

"I hope he dies out there," you say, and you laugh-sputter at the statement because it is a terrible thing to have said aloud and you hope you can play it off as a joke but Simon is staring hard at you, and now he knows for a fact something he has suspected for years, which is that you have a streak of hate in your heart and that it is deep and wide and though you have hidden it, it is unmistakably uncovered now, and he will never feel that previously mentioned fondness for you again, and you can see the words in his eyes as plain as day: I'm going to get you fired from here, mate.

Curtis is gone for five weeks (the child actor is gone for five weeks) but they return together to celebrate his, their return. You learn that Curtis did not go far in the Marines, was in fact kicked out of basic training because he could not shoot straight. "There's something wrong with my eyes. They tell me to shoot sideways," he says. He shrugs and clutches the whiskey you have brought him and when you ask how his feelings are doing he says the same thing he always says about those who reject him: "Fuck 'em in the ass." But you can see that his feelings are hurt and you wonder at the pain of a man stupid enough to be turned away from the Marines during a war.

The child actor has now clearly made up his mind about you and seems to have poisoned Curtis's mind as well, and you have never been so surprised as when they take out their wallets to pay for their drinks. They fan out their cash anticipatory and it seems to you that the world is running backward and you push the money away but they insist on paying and Curtis, looking at you as though you were his oppressor, says, "No more. From here on, we buy our drinks." "Okay," you say in a you-asked-for-it tone of voice, and you tell them the cost of the round and they cannot hide their shock, for it has been so long since they paid for a drink they have forgotten the value of good Irish whiskey and imported beer. They pool their cash and pay out the round (no tip) but you notice that for the next, which they order from Simon, they ask for Pabst in a can and whiskey from the well, and you walk over just in time to cheers them, only you are drinking Jameson, and it is golden blond in the cup whereas theirs looks and smells like dirty gasoline. And you watch their quivering throats as they toss the whiskies back and you can see that their bodies wish to reject the foul liquid but they push the alcohol down into their stomachs and look at each other and shrug.

"It's bad but not that bad," the child actor says.

"It's bad but I've had worse," Curtis agrees.

You drink your Jameson down and your body welcomes it as though it were sunshine in a glass. Curtis and the child actor look at you but do not talk to you; they move down the bar to sit nearer Simon and you notice throughout the night that when these three speak they speak closely, in private, and that their eyes often fall on you: Three people who once liked you, who do not like you any longer.

Discuss your wife. She will not return your phone calls and has moved to Pasadena to live with and be closer to another man. You are at the bar, staring at the telephone and disliking it when Merlin enters for the first time since the party/orgy/bloodbath at Simon's house. The right side of his face is scabbed and he looks to be half starved and you are gladdened by his poor appearance because you have recently had many unpleasant dreams about him and have come to intensely dislike or hate him, and you wonder if he is addicted to drugs or living in his car or has contracted a fatal disease or fallen under the angry spell of a fellow witch-peer? He notices your happy and curious expression and is offended by it; he stands before you, resting his hands on the bar, and says after catching his breath, "You keep thinking about her but she isn't thinking about you. She's glad she isn't thinking about you. You weren't good for her life. Get on with your life. She'll never think about you again if she can manage it." He is exhausted by carrying the burden of these words and he walks heavily to the door, muttering to himself about a need for sleep and relaxation.

You are hurt by these words and you want to slash Merlin's face with a knife for saying them but he is gone and now there is nothing to do but live with them. You call your wife's new phone number and your heart sinks at the sound of another man's voice on the machine, with your wife laughing in the background at his humorous leave-us-a-message comedy routine. You hang up the phone and move to the whiskey assortment and take a short drink of Jameson (you are averaging a mere three or four short drinks per night now) but the taste is so terrible it makes you gag, and you cannot understand it because this has never happened to you before and you look at the bottle and say to its green-glass shoulders, bare and ladylike, "Not you too?"

You hear scuffling and shouting outside and you exit the bar to find Merlin being taken away in a police car; he is looking straight ahead and does not appear to be bothered or surprised by this. Junior is standing at the curb watching the squad car pull into traffic. You approach him and ask what happened and he tells you, "M-m-motherfucker walked out the bar and puked. M-m-motherfucker pulled down his pants and pissed." Junior points out the puddles of vomit and urine and you notice that he too has a damaged face and looks to be enormously fatigued and it occurs to you that perhaps the entire neighborhood, this small and unpleasant mini-version of America, is dying all together in a piece. You mention the theory to Junior but he is uninterested. He asks you for twenty dollars and you say no and he turns and walks away. His elbows are scabbed and he is missing a shoe.

Your pilfered-monies pile is two and a half feet high and it takes you the length of an episode of COPS to count it. Earlier that morning (you now wake up early each morning, without a hangover, feeling glad and clear-headed) you purchased paper money-bands from an office supply store and imagined the cash stacked in crisp and tidy piles as in the heist movies of your youth, but you are disappointed to find that the bills are frayed and crazy and that the stacks resemble kinked hair pushing out from under too tight headbands. At any rate, you have over three thousand dollars. You need more than this but not much more; you want to quit the bar and move on but you cannot, yet; you are anxious to carry on, as you feel that your time at the bar is limited in that you will soon either be fired/imprisoned or "be killed." You do not know how you will "be killed" — there are any number of ways — but one thing is certain: The hearts of the bar are against you, and they do not want you around them any longer.

Discuss Sam, the black cocaine dealer. He dislikes you now. He has his children with him and they do not like you and will not accept your offer of candy or maraschino cherries. Discuss Ignacio, who no longer tells you his impossible-odds penis-adventure stories. Discuss Raymond, who will no longer speak to you and whose rancid coffee breath you have not smelled in several weeks. You have been pushed from their society and you are confused to find yourself hurt in the same way you were hurt in the schoolyard those many years back when the boys took your new ball away and you were forced to play with stones in the dirt and sand. The whiskey continues to sting going down and you notice that the seals on the Jameson bottles are all broken. You realize they are empties that have been filled with well whiskey, the assumed reasons for this being to hurt your feelings, which it does, and to save the bar money, for if an employee is going to steal (as you are suspected of stealing) then there is no reason to furnish him with his drink of choice, when his drink of choice is a fine Irish whiskey. It makes you sad to think of a grown man (you believe it is Simon) funneling this nasty liquor into an empty Jameson bottle and you wonder if he feels happy as he is doing it, or does he also find it sad? A week goes by, two weeks, and he no longer offers to pour you a cupful with a creeping smirk on his face.

You decide you will not drink the well whiskey any longer and now purchase three or four airplane bottles of Jameson on your way to work, sipping these slowly throughout the night in plain view of the regulars, who taunt you, asking how much these cost, and you turn to tell them that it does not matter because after all you are not the one paying for them. Who is paying for them? they ask hopefully. But you are not so angry as to answer the question honestly. "I make my enemies pay," you tell them, and they turn to each other and say, Oooooh.

Lancer returns from the cozy abyss of the semi-successful Hollywood actor-writer to visit with his old workmates. This returning to the bar is an important event for him, though you cannot understand why, as he was around for only a few months, and yet when he bounds through the front door he acts as if he is falling in with beloved college chums at a ten-year reunion. He has a collection of people with him who look as though they were manufactured by aliens. He introduces them to you and they claim to have heard all about you, and they smile and beam at you and you do not know exactly why but after a time it becomes clear that Lancer has told them stories relating to your ability to render yourself useless. His dirty-blond hair has been bleached and he is deeply tanned; he is playing the part of a wisecracking swimming pool cleaner in a television pilot, he says. You ask him if he is enjoying himself and he replies by pointing to the breasts of one of his new friends. You ask him if this part he is playing is good or bad and he says that the quality of the piece is irrelevant — he is a working actor in Hollywood and the odds against this happening are so great that he would take the part of a singing shitpile if it kept him out of bars like this one. "But you seem to think it's the greatest thing in the world to be back," you say.

"Only because I don't have to be back," he says. "I mean with you I'm sure it's different — you work, you have your wife, you'll probably have kids, right? You're all squared away, but I have dreams, you know? Big dreams. And none of them were going to come true in a place like this."

Lancer says that the airing of his show is fast approaching and asks if you would like to come over to his new house in the hills for the pilot bash and you, imagining how terrible a party at Lancer's house with Lancer's friends and Lancer's musical selections would be, say that you most definitely will not be there and Lancer, who had expected this answer, laughs, and he tells his friend that you are "one of a kind." He turns to you and says with a serious, straight face, "Will you watch it at home, then? Will you watch it at home and root for me?" And though you know you will not you tell him you will, and it means so much to him that your heart breaks a little, and you wish Lancer success in this strange world he has flung himself into and he hugs you and thanks you and when he says goodbye he hands you a hundred-dollar bill, which makes you ashamed, but he says there isn't anything to be ashamed of and you put the money in your pocket and walk him to the door. He and his friends are going to some other more glamorous bar, he tells you, a bar on the Strip, and you mock-retch and he winks and smiles and throws you a mint and is gone. This is the last time you will see Lancer in your lifetime.

You feel the hundred-dollar bill in your front pants pocket and you receive an inspiration, and here is what it is: You walk back into the bar and up to Simon, handing him the money, claiming to have found it on the ground. With all of his suspicions regarding your moral fiber, this is the very last thing he would presently expect you to do, and you can see his mind working, trying to find your angle in this, but at last he decides that there is none — he believes you have found and then turned in one hundred dollars in cash when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to slip the bill into your wallet. At the end of the night, after no one has claimed the money, Simon decides to split it with you, and he says that his faith in you has been restored and you say you are glad. He says that he is sorry for all the things he has been saying about you to the owners and you say, what? He says he will call them in the morning and take them all back and you say, what things? And you are so curious about these secret, evil words that you momentarily forget your stance and open your wallet to tuck away your fifty dollars and Simon sees how much cash you have, and that it has been stashed quickly and haphazardly, and there is no reason for you to have these hundreds of dollars when you have not worked for the past three days and were overheard complaining to a customer earlier about times being tight with your wife gone and the rent resting on your shoulders alone. So Simon, now knowing in his heart that you are a thief, takes the fifty dollars back and puts it in the cash register, and his eyes are swimming in vodka and cocaine and you are worried he will strike you with his cold South African hands but he only turns you toward the door and tells you to go home and get some rest and that you should clear your schedule for the next day because you will be receiving an important telephone call, one that you will not want to miss, but that even if you do miss it, it will not miss you, that is to say: You will be receiving a telephone call that will impart to you news of such consequence that it will transcend its own means of transmission.

Discuss the miracle that visits your life the next day when the phone rings and it is the voice of the owner's wife but she does not fire you or worry you with talk of police and prison as you had been expecting but informs you, through her chokes and sobs, that her husband has died in the nighttime of a massive heart attack. She says there will be a private wake held in three or four days at the bar and that it will be like old times, which you do not understand because which/whose old times is she referring to? She says that each attendee may, if he or she wishes, speak a few words in honor of the deceased, perhaps a fond memory or two, and you say that you will possibly take part but your experiences with the owner were limited and you wonder (to yourself) if you should speak of the time he broke wind in the storage room but did not apologize or even acknowledge it? Or should you discuss the time you caught him picking his nose in his office and you told him to pick a winner and he said that they were all winners? The owner's wife says that she thinks of each employee of the bar as her extended family, and you say, you do? She says that she wants you to know that the owner loved you personally and you say, he did? She says that she knows you loved him too and you do not say any words in response but make a neutral noise, which she luckily does not ask about, and the conversation moves on to practical business matters.

She says she has spoken with Simon about his suspicion that you are a thief, and she asks you what you have to say on the matter. When you do not answer she asks if you have noticed anything strange about Simon's behavior of late, and though you have not you say, yes. She says she has it on good authority that his cocaine intake has recently doubled and you, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, say tripled, quadrupled, and she sighs and says sadly, I see. She asks about your money-bursting wallet and you invent an excellent on-the-spot lie about your to-be ex-wife paying you cash for divided goods that had been purchased jointly and she, the owner's wife, previously a divorcée, presently a widower, apologizes for bringing it up and blames the talk and suspicions on Simon's obvious stimulant paranoia. You dismiss the apology and tell her you are focused only on her and her grieving family, a lie that she accepts gracefully and as fact and for which she thanks you, though for all the grand statements flying back and forth (her husband had one life to live, he played for keeps, grabbed the bull by the horns, worked hard played hard, etc.) the owner's wife does not sound all that put out by the death of her mate and in fact by the end of your conversation she is halfheartedly, piteously laughing at the thought of the remainder of her day, to be spent on the telephone, amassing praise and sorrow and condolences, some of it true, some false. She thanks you one last time and says that she will see you at the wake, and that by then she will have the Simon issue straightened out, one way or the other.

When you arrive to set up on the night of the wake the bar is empty but you see that a shrine has been put together in honor of the dead owner. The shrine is a foldout table and you look down at the objects resting on top of it, objects meant to conjure fond memories, objects that represent the interests of the deceased: Hamburgers, alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes. (There is a poster of a palm tree on the wall.) It is a sad collection but you are quick to remind yourself that the contents of your shrine would be similarly unimpressive and you instruct yourself to keep your unkind thoughts at bay. (When the thoughts return you ignore them or try to ignore them.)

Discuss your wife. She calls the bar phone and says that she needs to talk to you about proceeding with the divorce, a word that has the force of a physical object, and you suddenly have no hearing in your ears and though you have long expected this news it paralyzes you, and your wife is concerned by your nonresponse and she calls out your name, frantic and guilt-ridden. In a moment your tongue loosens and you find yourself able to speak and communicate, though your voice is small, your words pathetic and lost-sounding. She begins to cry and then curse you for making her cry, though you are doing nothing other than absorbing the painful information, and she reminds you of all the terrible things you have done and how poorly you treated her when you were together and she says, why couldn't we talk like this before? And you know that it is wrong, your coveting her only after she has left, and that if you were back together you would only return to ignoring her, and you think of what a tricky thing your heart is, and you wonder for the first time if perhaps you have been against yourself all this while?

You say to your wife that she should send whatever awful papers she can come up with to your parents' house. She asks why and you say that you are leaving. She asks where you are going and you say that that is to be decided, and you wish her good luck with her funnyman boyfriend and all his future jokes and she says, hey, wait a minute. You unplug the phone and wrap up the cord and drop it into the trash can.

Simon shows up at nine o'clock, his face red from alcohol. He finds the phone in the trash and without a word removes it, unwraps the cord, and plugs it back into the wall. The bar is still empty and you are alone with him but he will not look at you and you are once again worried that he will strike you down — this is the first time in six years you have seen him arrive at work intoxicated. He drinks one shot after the other and is clearly upset but when you ask him what's the matter he does not answer. Two customers come in and complain about the room's frigid temperature. Simon tells them the bar will host a private party that night, and to leave. After they go Simon finally turns to you. "She says it's rehab for me or I'm fired, mate."

"Who says?" you say.

"You know who," he says. "And I've got to pay for half. Eight grand."

You do not have any comment for this, search as you might. When he asks what you said to the owner's wife you tell him, "I told her I wasn't stealing. She'd heard you were doing a lot of coke and I said that you were."

Simon nods. You think he is about to cry. Anyway, his lower lip is trembling. "So it's every man for himself," he says.

"It's always been every man for himself."

"Not always," he says. You are surprised by the emotion hovering at the surface of Simon's skin; you are moved when he searches out a fresh bottle of Jameson, real Jameson, which he had hidden some time prior. He breaks the seal and pours you a large shot, a triple, and pours himself one as well, despite the fact that he had been drinking tequila a moment earlier.

"I'm just trying to get out of here," you tell him, by way of apology.

"Never mind," he says. "Here, cheers." And he touches his glass to yours and downs the whiskey in a painful double gulp. You drink yours and you turn to greet the first of the mourners; they enter the bar in a line like postwar soldiers.

Discuss the drunken woman in the fur coat and smeared lipstick. She is a relative or family friend of the dead owner and she is angry at his passing. You ask if you can take her coat and she is offended and tells you in a slurring monotone, "Keep your hands offa me, Pigeon," which you do, excusing yourself to share another drink with Simon. You and Simon are now "old and true friends," as though you had dueled with sabers and were both wounded but neither of you killed. He says that he respects you, and you say that you respect him, and he is lying and you are lying. He is very drunk now and Sam the cocaine dealer is late and cannot be reached by telephone. You tell Simon about the small pile resting atop the shrine and he winks at you before lurching away into the back room. The drunken fur-coat woman is demanding service at the end of the bar and you turn to meet her rheumy eyes and she says, "Come on, Pidge, lady wants service down here." You approach her; her fists are rapping the bar and her hair is in her eyes and you cannot help but smile at her getup and outlook. "Speshalty of the house?" she says. You tell her there is a two-for-one deal on nonalcoholic beer with a one-round limit per customer and she nods her head and points at you, turning to share her dislike with someone beside her (but there is no one beside her). "Funny fucker," she says. "You're a real funny little fucker, aren't you? Now I'm going to ask you 'gain, Pidge. What's the speshalty? Of the house? You understand me?" And you, deciding you will ruin this terrible woman's night, say to her casually, "Long Island iced teas are nice."

"What?" she says. "Tea? I don't want any tea. I want a drink!"

You assure her it is a drink, and she asks if it is a strong one. When you say that it is she asks for two, and you go ahead and mix them into pint glasses: Well vodka, well tequila, well rum, well gin, triple sec, sweet and sour, topped with cola. She opens her mouth wide to locate the straw and takes a long sip, smacking her lips and nodding her approval. "Say, that's pretty good, Pigeon," she says. She finishes the glass in three minutes and takes up the second and staggers into the back room, nearly full now with the mourners.

The owner's wife comes up and asks that you have a drink with her, and you do. She is dressed in black and is approached by one mourner after the other; they tell her how sorry they are and remind her how special her husband was and that life is a tragedy for the living and dead both. She sighs and asks you to have another drink with her but you are out of practice and your head is beginning to swim and it is only ten-thirty and so you decline and she drinks alone. Simon has now ceased working and you and the owner's wife watch him through the doorway. He is telling a loud, would-be comical story but nobody is paying him any mind and he, realizing this, sidles up to the shrine with a cautious glance over both shoulders. You try to steal away the attention of the owner's wife but she will not be moved and she watches as Simon licks his pinkie, dips into the little pile of cocaine, and numbs his gums. She turns to you and says, "I can't believe I spent the day feeling guilty about sending that shithead to rehab." She asks for another drink and you make her one. You ask her if there will be any exceptions made to the no-complimentary-drink policy, pointing out that several people have taken offense to the idea that money will be made at a wake, and she shrugs and says that she doesn't care, and to give it all away, if only for a night. She leans in and tells you that she is going home, and you hold your hand out to shake it and she pulls you in to kiss your cheek. She leaves by the side door, smiling at you as she goes, and you wonder at her perfume and the lack of feelings in her heart for her dead husband. She looked beautiful in her mourning dress, you decide.

Simon is singing an eighties pop song in the back room. Someone calls for quiet and Simon shouts out, "Fuck it!" and it occurs to you that you will be in charge for the night, a fact that begets a special and uncommon plan in your mind, a plan to end all plans in fact, and you move quickly to the men's room and force yourself to vomit and afterward pour yourself a cola and slap your own face to wake your brain so as to see this plan through with a minimum of error. "Now," you say to the crowd of heads and bodies. They have filled the bar to capacity and are lining up at the door and calling out for drinks, sympathy, drinks, cigarettes, drinks.

You do not hand out free drinks but charge full price, claiming it to be the will of the widow, and also you tell the mourners that the credit card machine is malfunctioning and so it is a cash-only bar. There is some outcry over this, as it is a private party and surely the deceased would have wished it otherwise, but you claim to those complaining that the widow is beside herself with grief and that her instructions were explicit and that she said to you that your job was on the line over the matter, and you tell the mourners that you are sorry but your hands are tied, and you hold up your hands for emphasis, and they reach for their wallets and are angry but their anger is not for you or not for you only.

You place a Post-it over the cash register display which reads, Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, and Quickly. You never liked the owner, not his Mercedes, not his scaly bald spot, not the way he slapped your back with his stinging, heavily ringed hand when he greeted you. You are glad he died; you hope that the bar dies along with him and you are visited by the fantasy that you will go and see the widow and woo her and, once you have gained admission to her heart, you will with great seriousness and determination spend every penny she has in her widow's safe of lonely, bloody, loser money. (The Post-it elicits some questioning comments but surprisingly little in the way of anger or hostility.)

Simon, suffering from proletarian guilt, has returned to work but cannot work efficiently and only gets in your way. Sam is still missing and what little cocaine Simon could glean by dipping his pinkie into the dead owner's pile has not taken his edge off, or put his edge on, or whichever it is, and he is trying to act as though this is just another night of work but he cannot shake the shaker without it slipping from his hand and he cannot understand why the credit card machine is not working (you unplugged it earlier) and he cannot fathom and in fact seems a little frightened by this cryptic note covering the register display and all is stuttering, bumbling mess. Finally he turns to you and asks what the hell is going on tonight, and is it just him or does everything seem to be off and unfriendly and wrong? You tell him that you alone will handle this crowd and that his job should be either to go home and vomit into his pillowcase or else to monitor the happenings of the wake and maintain order, and you point to the back room where the mourners are growing drunker and louder and stupider but Simon, looking into the darkness of the room, says to you, "What do I care about them?" And then to himself, "Eight fucking grand." His feelings are hurting just as yours have been hurting and you think you should reach out to him emotionally, for you and Simon are merely pawns in this desperate game of profitable late-night liver abuse/suicide, but when you tap Simon's arm to talk about this he tilts his chin away (to display his handsome jaw line) and says he will not vomit into his pillowcase, will not vomit at all, and that he is sick of what he calls your "weird-word bullshit," and he combs his hair in the mirror over the bar and struts into the back room and you watch with a mixture of respect and pity as he falls to his knees and frankly inhales the dead man's cocaine pile. The back room falls silent over this, and you see a moment later that Simon is joined on both sides by two squirming bodies, also on their knees, scrambling to collect some of this pile for themselves — it is Curtis and the child actor, and the scene is so vivid to you, so vivid and gripping and horrific that you wave away drink orders and shush a nearby group of vocal mourners so that you can concentrate on the happenings with all your might and interest.

You want terribly to drink and one customer after another offers to buy you a round but you resist because, one, you must keep track of your fast-growing pilfered monies and, two, you want to be able to recall this night, which you suddenly realize will be your last here. The Teachers are at the bar, talking about the incident with the cocaine pile. They are disgusted and you hear one of them say, in a surprisingly grand statement, that death has devolved toward meaninglessness.

"What kind of an asshole puts coke on his shrine, anyway?" she wonders.

"Really," says the other. And then, "Course, that wasn't him, though."

"No," agrees the first. "But you know what I mean."

Simon, Curtis, and the child actor are sitting at the bar talking about you, gesturing toward you, staring at you. None of them are smiling and they have obviously been speaking about how much they have recently come to dislike you, and Simon has told his story about your telling the dead owner's wife about his cocaine intake and now you can overhear them calling you a rat and a dog, and you walk over and say, three little bears, three little pigs, to which they make no response. They are, you suppose, hoping to intimidate you. They are brooding, and you wonder if the cocaine from the shrine was heavily cut or entirely counterfeit, as they seem merely drunk. They are talking about this same thing: "You feel it?" Curtis asks. "I don't feel it. Do you feel it?" asks the child actor. Simon is dead drunk and totally confused, and you once more tell him to go home and vomit and be sick throughout the night and the next day. "Get it over with," you say. "These two aren't going to help you any."

"Like you helped me?" he says.

"Yeah," says the child actor.

"Yeah," says Curtis.

"Yeah," you say, giving up, because what do you care if these three do not like you? But as you turn away you realize with a shame-jolt that you do care. But what reason is there to care? You just do. You don't want to like them; you can't like them — they are unlikable — but you want them to like you or to pretend to like you, as before. It is some kind of diseased, anti-moral conditioning, you decide.

You walk down the bar and find the woman in the fur coat, an empty pint glass in her hand. One of her eyes is closed and she is shrugging and talking to Junior the crack addict, who has never to your knowledge been admitted into the bar and whose hulking presence is completely incongruous, upsetting your sense of aesthetics — something like discovering a rooster in a town car. Junior looks up at you and his face is scabbed and he is picking at it. He peels away a large scab and his wound is exposed and moist. His eyes are vibrating from bad drugs and he does not seem to recognize you. He is taller than those standing near him though he is sitting down. "My man," he says, snapping his fingers. "Seven and s-seven over here. Give the lady w-whatever she wants."

"Junior, how did you get in here?" you ask.

"I just came right in," he says, and his bloated fingers mimic a man walking. He holds out a wad of one-dollar bills. "What's a matter, my money ain't g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-green?"

"'Nother tea," says the woman in the fur coat.

You go outside for a cigarette and see that Brent is not at the door and that his car is gone. People are streaming into the bar now and there is very little room to move inside. People are screaming and slapping the bar for service. Mourners are crying openly on the sidewalk, their faces wet beneath the streetlights. You will never find out the reason for Brent's departure or where he has gone; you will never see him again in your life. You are turning to reenter the bar when you notice a body lying splayed on the sidewalk across the street, in front of the terrible building that vomits humans, a sight that makes the small cuts on your hands throb. Your chin instantly trembles and you begin to tell the mourners that there has been another suicide when the body shivers and stands and walks away, though for some reason you are not relieved by this, only confused and lost-feeling. Your hands are throbbing doubly now and you look at them, at the little cuts on your palms and finger pads, and you think of the game you used to play, counting these wounds and cuts in the sink water. Why did you stop playing this game? And what was the word the ghost woman used, the word you did not know but that she put in your mind for you to look up in the dictionary? And what happened to the ghost woman, where did she go? Were ghosts led away when it was time or did they simply know and go on their own?

"'Nother iced tea," the drunk woman repeats when you return.

"Seven and s-seven, my man," says Junior.

You make them their drinks and Junior gives you his money, asking for the remainder in change, only there is no remainder and he is in fact seven dollars short, which you forgive him, but he is outraged at the cost of liquor and he protests when you tell him that the fur coat woman's drink alone was ten dollars.

"For tea?" he says. "Ten dollars for a glass of tea?"

The fur coat woman smacks her lips. "Worth ever' penny," she says. "I'm a changed woman, Pidge. Gonna be iced tea from here on out."

But Junior will never forgive you. "Ten dollars," he says, shaking his head. He leads the fur coat woman into the back room, ducking to get under the doorway. You are preparing drinks when you see in the mirror that Ignacio has joined Simon and the others. He pulls out a flick knife and stabs in the direction of your back and the group laughs. You turn around and he secretes the knife up his sleeve and watches you contemptibly. "What the fuck are you looking at?" he asks.

"Out-and-out hostility," you say to him/them.

"So?" he asks, his arm hanging protectively over Simon's shoulder.

You lean in. Your feelings are truly, deeply hurt. "To think I humored you for such a long, long time," you say to him. And for a split second there is actual human emotion shuttling between the two of you, and you see that he partially regrets his going along with the group decision to ostracize you. But then he regains his footing and returns to his animosity. "Back up," he says sharply, waving his hand in your face. "Go tell it to someone who cares." Excellent advice, you think, and you look around the room for this person and when you do not find him/her you decide it is time to leave the bar and never return. But you cannot leave without packing your pilfered monies and you cannot pack your pilfered monies with these four sitting at the bar watching you. Now Raymond joins their ranks, pulling a pile of napkins toward himself. He plucks a pen from his ART SAVES LIVES T-shirt and begins to draw, occasionally looking up at you as though searching for hateful inspiration.

A marvelous inspiration: You act as if the phone is ringing and you rush to pick it up. You turn and watch these five ghouls with a look of growing concern on your face. You cover your ear as though the music and bar noise are upsetting your conversation but you call out, loud enough to be heard, "Now? You're coming in now? No, Simon's in the bathroom. Drunk? No, he's had a couple. Not drunk, though. I'll tell him you're coming. All right. I'll tell him. Yes. Goodbye." You hang up and see the group is watching you intently and you move over to them and share your invented news, which is that the owner's wife has heard that Simon is too drunk to work, and she is mortally offended he picked the night of her husband's wake to disregard his duties. She is on her way, you tell them, and if she finds him any more drunk than usual — that is, too drunk to work — she will revoke her offer of a partially paid rehabilitation with his position intact upon discharge and simply fire him outright. Now the group is confused about what they should do next. Simon is talking and you are all listening to him and it sounds as though he thinks it best that he "face the music," but after asking him to repeat his syrupy words you realize he is saying, "What's this music?" He says that it reminds him of a special girl, a long-gone girl, a girl who stole his heart, and he starts describing her physically ("Tits right outta National Geographic") when Sam the cocaine dealer walks up and is verbally brutalized for his tardiness at so crucial a juncture as this. By way of explanation Sam says that he is slow-moving for two reasons, namely his mourning the death of the owner, his old friend, and also because of some mystery-violence, and he points to a cut on his face, a small, deep puncture just below his eye, which does not issue blood but looks grotesque and painful. It is a long and vicious story, he says, and would anyone like to hear it?

However, there is no time to lose, or rather there is, but you must pretend there is not, and you hustle the group to the privacy of the back office, and as they are settling Simon onto the leather couch you take Sam aside and tell him the story about the owner's wife and the looming threat of Simon's unemployment. When you are finished you ask him if he can straighten Simon out and he says of course he can, but only for a fee. You instruct Curtis and the child actor to rifle Simon's pants and they do, discovering his wallet, which is empty; you instruct everyone to chip in for Simon's pick-me-up but nobody moves. "I only have enough for myself," says the child actor. "I don't even have that much," Curtis says. "I was going to take some of his." Finally you inform the group that if Simon is fired (the owner's wife is on her way, you say again), they will all be forced to pay full price for their drinks forever, news that brings forth the necessary cash, and in a moment Simon is being propped up on the couch and a mirror full of cocaine is placed below his pasty pink face. You tell him he will soon be all right and he looks up at you and smiles, or nearly smiles, or possibly sneers, and you wonder if this will be the last time you ever see him; you hope it is but at the same time you experience a feeling like friendliness tinged with remorse. "Goodbye," you say to him, and to the group. They say nothing. You turn and go.

You return to the bar and take up the pilfered monies in a bank bag — the overfull bag will not zip closed and you wrap it in a dishrag. The mourners are frantic for drinks and have begun throwing napkins at you and calling you unkind and vulgar names; when they see that you have returned only to leave once more, the largest man in the crowd stops you by placing his fist on your chest, and he spins you around and orders you to go back to work. He is drunk and wants badly to strike you down; you turn to tell him there is an old man having a seizure in the parking lot and that he will die if you do not bring him his medicine, and you hold up your coat, claiming it is the old man's. Now this enormous drunk becomes heroic, and in a flash he is pushing the customers roughly out of your way to clear a path, shouting, "Move it! We're trying to save a life here!" He shuttles you past the screaming masses and as you enter the back room he slaps your shoulders and wishes you luck and Godspeed. You thank him and tell him to help himself to the beer cooler while you are away and he says that he absolutely will, and he rushes off to do just that.

There is a twenty-person line for the bathroom but you need desperately to urinate and you cut to the front, claiming an employee emergency, and you suffer the many jeers and boos of the impatient crowd. The man at the head of the line is in a rage, and he says that "they" have been in the lone stall for fifteen minutes and you pull yourself up on the stall door to peer over and you are surprised to see that the fur coat woman is fellating Junior, or had been fellating Junior, as she seems to have fallen asleep mid-task. Junior is delicately slapping her face. "Focus, baby, focus," he says. She opens her eyes and goes back to work automatically. The size of Junior's erect organ is preposterous. It is enough to blind your eyes. It is, you say to yourself, impossible.

"How are you not famous?" you ask him, and he looks up at you.

"Papa was a rollin' stone," he sings, though you are not sure if this is his answer or if his mind is elsewhere. There is blood running down his face. This is the last time you will see Junior, and you wave goodbye.

You are urinating in the sink. The man at the head of the line is watching you; he has blown his own mind with anger and frustration. He is hitting the wall and you wonder if he will hit you, but he does not, though he wants to and claims that you deserve to be hit, which you suppose is probably true and you agree with the man that it is true. You zip up and walk past him and he spits on you and you feel the spit hit your back. The people in the line like this and they applaud and congratulate the spitting man, and you look back and see his glad, bashful face, and you watch him accepting the handshakes and awkward high-fives of his neighbors, and he is so proud to have spit on you and you are certain that this has been the highlight of his day and night and the sight of his fat, glad face seizes your throat and you sob, and you will sob more if you do not pay close attention and contain your emotions, which you do, but you wonder why this man's meaningless life and face aroused such a feeling in you, a feeling that should, at some point, be discussed. You unwrap the dishrag from the bank bag and use it to wipe the spit from your back. You drop the rag to the ground and spit on it.

You enter the back room headlong, the bank bag tucked close to your side. Instantly you are aware that something has happened here since your trip to the bathroom, some type of upset, for the people around you are motionless, their eyes all directed at a fixed point in the room's center. You follow their eyes and see that the shrine has been toppled and that there are two groups of men, the previously-warring and the to-be-warring; some of them are bleeding from their faces and you, folding your arms to watch one last act of depravity, say it aloud to the man standing next to you: "Perfect."

Discuss the two previously- and to-be-warring parties. On one side are the brothers and uncles of the deceased. They look like members of the Mafia or anyway what members of the Mafia look like on television and in movies: Large, imposing, masculine, unshaven or lazily shaven, and out of shape. Opposite this group are Simon, Curtis, the child actor, Raymond, Sam, and Ignacio. Ignacio is at the front of the pack and he has his knife out; he is slashing at his impenetrable pants with the blade and saying, "See? You see that? Cocksuckers!" Apparently he is hoping to show that he cannot be hurt or that it will be difficult to hurt him — his eyes are larger, uglier, and crazier than you have ever seen them and you realize that his many stories of violence and retribution were probably half true. But why, you wonder, are these groups at war? You ask a woman at your side and she says, "Those big guys caught the blond bartender eating a hamburger from the table. One of them hit him and then they all went nuts." You look at Simon; he has some remnant of the sandwich clutched in his fist and there is mustard smeared on his cheek, mingling with the blood trickling from his nostrils. He is shivering and has clearly done his fair share of Sam's cocaine but not enough to straighten himself out entirely. He is straddling two worlds, lost somewhere between being overly drunk and overly high, and he does not understand what is happening and you have an urge to help him because you can see that there will soon be more violence and that the bar crew is at a disadvantage in both the size and the sobriety department. Finally you call out to him, beckoning with your hand, and he locates you in the crowd and smiles and waves. Then he looks down and sees the bank bag under your arm, and you suppose he does not understand the precise reason you might be holding such a thing but he does know in his heart that it is incorrect and he makes a move toward you, saying, "Wait. No. Wait a minute. Stop." You back up, looking for an exit, wondering if you will have to fight to remove yourself, but then you see that this will not be necessary because Simon has walked directly into the group of men he was only a minute earlier warring with and they, believing that he is making a hostile advance, knock him to the ground, sending the halved hamburger flying through the air, and the two groups now dog-pile each other, clumsy hands swinging in the smoky semi-darkness.

The crowd pushes in to catch a sharper glimpse of the slaughter, and as the room constricts you sneak away to the luxurious silence of the magical Ford. Your hands and shoulders are shaking from nerves and fatigue but you have the presence of mind to hide the bank bag deep beneath the passenger seat before entering traffic. You drive slowly home; the side streets are empty, the anonymous smaller roads of the slumbering working class. You do not see any policemen and you pat the seat beside you in thanks. You leave the Ford idling in the carport and bound up the stairs to pack a suitcase before writing a note to the landlords with instructions to sell your furniture and enjoy the deposit. You gather your previously and newly pilfered monies together in a pillowcase and return to the Ford to make your lifetime getaway but you discover that this last trip home has used up the car's magic entirely; the engine has seized and will not turn over. You sit in the carport, exhausted, staring at and feeling amazed by the utterly dead dashboard. You return to your house and call a taxi service; the dispatcher says a cab will be there in fifteen to twenty minutes and you thank her and unplug the telephone and place it in the trash can. You return to the Ford to wait. The crickets have ceased chirping. It is that unknown and otherworldly chasm that exists between the nighttime and the day.

The pockmarked counter man is kicking the bottoms of your feet and telling you to wake up. "Wake up," he says. It is seven o'clock in the morning and your face is slick with dew and sweat.

"What?" you say. "What?"

"I'm calling the cops."

"I'm awake, I'm awake," you say, standing up too quickly and nearly fainting. You sit back down. You were asleep atop your pillowcase of money. Your suitcase is at your side. You are in front of the car rental agency.

The taxi driver who brought you here, an African immigrant with deeply black skin and worried yellow eyes, had been curious about you and asked you some questions so as to understand your place in the world.

"But the agency does not open for several hours," he had said.

"That's all right," you told him. "Distance from the scene of the crime is what's important now."

"Scene of the crime," he repeated. His eyes flashed at you in the rear-view mirror.

"I tipped poorly though I knew it was wrong," you explained. "I spoke closely and with bad breath. I drank recklessly, without remorse. I spoke excessively about myself with no regard for truth or the boredom of others." You scratched your face and nodded, agreeing with yourself. "I slept badly but I've lived to tell the tale."

"You are making a joke I think," said the taxi driver.

"I don't know."

"You are unhappy?"

"I have been unhappy," you told him.

"But now is vacation time?" he said hopefully.

"You're a nice man," you said, and he shrugged.

The pockmarked counter man is not so nice, and worse, he remembers you from the last time you were here. His outlook, which was previously poor, seems to have worsened and so you can only assume that his life has worsened. It is sad to think of the daily workings of this ugly, unhappy man, and your head is hurting but you have no aspirin to ease your pain. You ask the counter man for aspirin and he says he has none; somehow you know he is lying to you. So here is the final trial, the renting of a vehicle from a man who does not like you and who will never like you, but whom you must deal with in an efficient manner lest you remain without transportation, which would allow you the freedom to roam and escape, but to where you have not yet decided.

"What's the quickest route out of California?" you ask.

"What?" he asks, tapping the keys of his keyboard. "What?"

"I want a fast car this time," you say. "Forget about the leg-room. I want the fastest, most dangerous car you've got on the lot."

The man leans over and sniffs forthrightly. He asks that you prepare yourself a cup of complimentary coffee, which he has just brewed, and you do, and it tastes terrible. You stand near the brochure display and listen in on the counter man's telephone conversation. He is speaking once more with his regional manager, and once more he is hoping to render you carless, and he speaks of your unpleasant odor and your desire to escape the state of California, and once more the regional manager sides with you, and you understand through the comments made by the counter man that his boss is similarly disinclined toward the Golden State: "Smog, I know, sir. Traffic, yes. Yes, the pollution. Yes, I understand, sir. But this guy…"

It is no use, and the counter man is forced to rent you the car. By the end of your transaction the man is slamming down pens and handling the paperwork with unconcealed malice and you watch him going hatefully through the motions and you feel a distinct pity and sadness for this man, and just after he hands you the key to your new sports car, which you plan to demolish through misuse and overuse, you say to him, "It's none of my business, but I think it might be time for you to switch professions."

The man's face is cold and thoughtless. "It's none of your business," he agrees.

"It's none of my business," you say, "but I think it might be time for you to quit working altogether."

"Quit working and do what?"

"Try to be happy?" you say.

The man is looking into your eyes. You hoped to offer him an alternative to his present, obviously unsatisfactory lifestyle but your words sounded silly and childish, and though you had his attention for a moment you have now lost it and he returns to tap at his keyboard, shaking his head at your foolishness.

"Thank you," you say, and as you walk to the door, to your sports car waiting at the curb, the tapping of the keys trails off and you believe he is watching you and thinking about you and wondering about what you have said to him. And as you drive away from Los Angeles you think of this man tapping and worrying and hating, and you think of the kindhearted taxi driver and all of his probable problems and backaches and heartaches, and you think of Simon, presently unconscious on the putrid carpeted floor of the bar, his face dirtied with ashes and blood and mustard, and you think of yourself and of the six years you spent with your skeleton arms shivering in the cold brown water of the bar sinks and you are repulsed with yourself for allowing your unhappiness to continue for so long a time, and you promise yourself that you will never be stuck in such a position as this again, that you will try to be happy, as you said to the counter man, childish or silly or otherwise, it makes no difference. I will try to be happy, you think, and your heart and chest feel a plummeting, as in the case of the hurtling rollercoaster, and your heart wants to cry and sob, but you, not wanting to cry, hit yourself hard in the center of your chest and it hurts so much but you drive on, your face dry and remaining dry, though it had been a close call, after all.

Time passes and you shake your head. "Work will drive you crazy if you let it," you say. You do not speak for a long time after this.