Ablutions

Two

Dana is eighteen and gains admittance to the bar with her stepmother's ID card. Her stepmother is fifty-two years old. You are thirty-two. Dana's boyfriend, Joey, is twenty-seven. They sit together and laugh at you as you approach — they are small and brown-skinned and find something comical about your tall and skinny white person. You like them both very much and give them free drinks and they never once tip you but this is not due to any cheapness of heart but a lack of tipping money. Not that they would tip extravagantly if they ever won a large cash prize. They have never been and will never be flashy, money-throwing people, and this is fine with you because their eyes are genuine and they like you and you imagine them doing imitations of you when they are alone, hiccupping, struggling with gravity, and adjusting invisible eyeglasses.

There is a scandal attached to their romance, and this is what it is: Joey had been Dana's gym teacher. Their relationship was uncovered by the high school vice principal, an ambitious man with adult acne, intensely disliked by students and faculty alike. He one night found Dana and Joey holding hands and kissing at the local pizzeria and did not intervene but alerted the news media, who descended on the restaurant with their camera lights blazing and microphones pointed lance-like toward Joey, at that moment entertaining Dana by chugging Bud Light from a frosted glass pitcher. He was humiliated publicly and dispatched "with a flamethrower"; Dana was beaten by her father and suspended indefinitely. The vice principal was promoted and threw himself a party in the cafeteria and nobody, not one person with either professional or personal ties to the man, came.

But now Dana has taken her GED and the unfortunate tale is behind her. She lives alone in Culver City and works two part-time jobs and is happy enough with her life and with Joey but her youth will not allow her true contentment and as the months pass she turns an eye to you. Joey leaves town overnight for an interview at an all-girls Catholic school in San Francisco and Dana arrives alone at the bar, drunk, in a low-cut blouse. She stays after hours and takes off the blouse and her skin is flawless and everything is all over in a matter of three or four minutes and you and she sit side by side staring into the darkness of the back room, the smoke from your cigarettes drawn into the space and disappearing. You think you can hear her crying but you do not want to look over or ask her any questions or try in any way to comfort her and if she got up and ran out the door you would not stop her. "I've never been with a white guy before," she says, extending a chubby baby hand, your pants still gathered at your ankles.

Discuss Ginny with her short brown hair, her pug nose, and her plump red hands like spotted meat left to swell in the desert sun. Her eyes are popped and her pores emit a smell of chili dogs and french fries dipped in mayonnaise and you cannot help but wonder what horrors reside in her large intestine. She actively attends both AA and NA meetings but is always the last to leave the bar and will often stay after hours, by which time you are helplessly drunk and accordingly interested in her large white backside. She follows you into the storage room and will partially disrobe to be fondled and lightly slapped but she always stops you short of achieving anything purposeful and she will never touch you but only be touched. Now she puts her clothes back on and is very red and she leaves the bar with her hair in a mess, smiling in twisted triumph at the thought of your unfulfilled and piggish desires, and you curse her and her teasing ways, for after all she has done this before, to you and others, and you tell yourself this will not under any circumstances happen again. It happens again and again and again and again.

Discuss Danielle. She is fifty-six, with brittle, overdyed burgundy hair and orange lipstick and many sad tattoos whose meanings she hopes to share with you. She is a friendly person but has a greedy little girl's heart and her eyes grow narrow as she drinks and she looks at you as if you were the last piece of cake at the party. Margarita salt is gathered at the corners of her mouth and you sometimes walk with her to the storage room but only if you are extremely drunk. (She is forever buying drinks and placing them before you and calls you a spoilsport if you demur.) There is an honest light in the storage room and you want to smash it out to put Danielle at ease but she does not appear to mind, despite the bad times imprinted on her face and the shadows that dance beneath her bangs and eye sockets as she leans and then lunges toward you. You are backed against the ice machine and the storage room is spilling over and you want to scream and laugh and shout and punch Danielle in her gut but she is working your belt like an angry parent and you know that you have come too far to turn back and so you stare at the bare bulb until it burns out your eyesight black and pulsing.

Discuss the short, overweight Hispanic woman who follows you into the storage room after you winked at her. She is so unattractive you believed this would be harmless but she has misinterpreted the gesture as one of lustful beckoning, and now without even a kiss to share she is on her knees, and though you are well behind in your work duties and have no time for such things you find your hand is reaching up to lock the deadbolt. You try to concentrate so as to expedite the romance and are staring at the labels of the many bottles on the shelves when the woman begins grunting and you assume she is doing something to herself as well as to you and you are looking down to see if this is true when you notice that her hair is so thin she could only be described as balding or partially bald, and your jaw drops at the corpse-gray color of her scalp and the dainty, pink-and-blue veins crisscrossing her head like a roadmap. You manage to finish up and the woman is standing and holding you around your torso. Now you can see her scalp plainly and you want to know if she has recently gone through some cancerous ordeal but cannot think of a way to bring this up without causing offense. You ask if she is all right and the woman looks up at you, the eyes of a stranger. She tells you she misses her boyfriend.

Discuss the alcoholic and narcotics-addicted pharmacist woman who you believe is actually a pre-op transsexual male. She is short and thin with an attractive, heavily made-up face and drugged bedroom eyes. Her short black hair is crunchy from hairspray and her bare shoulders are covered with tiny bumps that you assume are the result of whole-body shaving or waxing. She has a different man with her every night; he is always dark-skinned and hairy and a little unsure and frightened. These are lonely men and they come to hate you when they see that their date has feelings for you, and they ask her to leave for another night spot; when she will not go they leave alone and the woman shrugs and looks at you suggestively. She has asked you many times to walk her to her car or to the ladies' room, and has asked to accompany you to the storage room, but you always say no because there are certain mysteries in the human world that you have never been curious about and here is one of them. But one slow night you are so drunk and so completely uninterested in breathing and living that when another bartender dares you to find out once and for all the gender of this being, you lead her by the hand to the back bar men's room. Her eyes are wide with sex-craving as you walk her into the stall and you embrace her and begin to kiss her and you will know in a moment whether she is male or female when her bare leg touches the cold porcelain of the toilet and she pushes you abruptly back and storms out of the bathroom and toward the front bar. You follow and ask her what's wrong and she is nearly in tears and wants to know if you honestly believed she was the type to be groped beside a toilet? Just what kind of a whore do you think she is? You tell her that that was precisely what you were hoping to find out and she slaps your face and leaves the bar swinging her purse like a mace. There are five or six customers in the room and they are applauding the performance and you wave to them modestly and the bartender's face is set in inquiring stone.

The Shammy is shaped like a television set (her head is shaped like a toaster oven) but one night she draws you into the storage room with the aid of fishnet stockings and lipstick and whiskey and dim lighting and her sweet, truthful smile. Now she comes by every evening in hopes that the stars will once more shine in her favor, and this is very sad because she lives an hour away and takes public transportation to visit you, and because you are looking sickly and do not smell good and have not once said anything of consequence to her, and the idea that you are an inspiration in this girl's existence is a true life's tragedy.

She probably loves you but you ignore her because you will bring her nothing but heartache and you know that if you ever see her cry you will want to kill her out of pity. But when she enters the bar shaking and with ripped tights and tells you she was mauled on the bus you feel a kindness for her and tell her she can sleep at your place if she likes and take the bus back home in the morning, and this cheers her and soon she is drunk and beaming. Throughout the shift you tell her that there will be nothing sexual between you and that you are thinking only of her safety and comfort and she agrees completely but is telling whoever happens to sit beside her that she is going home with you tonight so that soon you are being teased by your coworkers and by the child actor and Curtis, who says, "You really bagged a babe this time, boy."

You drive to your home with The Shammy at your side. You are once again operating the magical LTD. (When your wife left with the Toyota you were forced to clean and partially repair your old car. You had it towed to a shop, where the mechanic would neither confirm nor deny the vehicle's magical powers. When pressed, he admitted he was a Chevy man. He got the car running for under a hundred dollars and gave you a mesh-back hat free of charge.) You are very drunk and have to close one eye to see the road and The Shammy leans against you and coos and rests a hand on your lap and soon your resolution is forgotten and you wake up hours later to vomit and wonder at the broad, freckly body lying on what was once your marriage bed. The Shammy raises an arm, milky white and thick as your thigh, and tells you that she is starving and wonders where you will take her for breakfast before driving her home (you never said you would drive her home). She names a brightly lit restaurant frequented by acquaintances of yours and asks for the telephone and invites several friends to the restaurant as well. They have heard all about you, she says, and cannot wait to finally meet you.

Molly draws you from the bar to an after-hours cocaine house party where you refuse the cocaine of the hosts and are asked to leave. You do not leave but retire to their backyard; spying a tree house you climb up the two-by-four ladder with a half-empty bottle of Jameson between your teeth. This chips the bottle and you enter the enclosed tree house pulling glass bits from your tongue and gums. There is blood on your fingertips, not too much, and the whiskey burns the little cuts in your mouth and Molly finds you sitting Indian style, wiping the blood on your pants. She takes off your pants and hers and there is no way to accomplish what she hopes to accomplish in so small a space without her head sticking out the glassless window, and so this is what she does. Your bodies are rippled with goose bumps and she is grunting and the light of the early morning is beginning to glow so that when you accidentally drool on her back you see your spittle is all blood and you imagine your teeth must be covered and smeared red, like a boxer, like a street fighter, like a man walking away from a senseless tragedy, and you grin and wish like a fool for a mirror and camera.

Peg leans you against the jukebox and rubs your mid-section and whispers crude things in your ear but will not go into the storage room with you. After a particularly free-spirited year when she slept with every male employee at the bar other than you she has vowed to reclaim her morals and will not have sex for thirty days, and has twenty days to go, and you wonder if she will make it. Her ride home abandons her and she is forced to stay after hours so that you can drive her but now she will not drink and she will not let you near her and there is a look in her eyes of mistrust and even fear, but she is not afraid of you, only herself. You imagine there was a particular incident that informed her to go celibate — an excess of drugs at a male-dominated party is your guess — but you have ceased caring about the misfortunes of others and can no longer remember whose troubles belong to whom and so you do not bother to ask anyone anything anymore. You offer to pay for Peg's cab fare but she says she prefers to ride with you, and you ask her if she is sure, and she says that she is, and she settles her bag on the bar and asks for a double whiskey, no ice, and you sadly serve her.

You are parked on Rossmore and the old-timey neon sign on the roof of her apartment building illuminates the exposed interior of the LTD and she is facing you and you are drunk but not terribly so and you curse yourself for not bringing along a bottle. Looking into each other's eyes and speaking together in low tones, it becomes apparent that she hopes you will walk her through her troubles and show her that male-female relations can be lovely even in loveless union. She is looking for lust fulfilled but she searches also for respect, and in this she is out of luck because you do not know her or like her very much and you do not respect yourself and so the most you can offer this girl is time out of her life and an unsatisfactory meeting of bodies and, if the fates are generous, a couple of laughs and good feelings. At any rate there will unquestionably be a divot in your hearts before dawn and Peg seems to pick up on this and after thirty minutes of groping and pawing (the car interior is growing damp with dew) she breaks away and with great exasperation says, "What do you think you're doing?" You are smiling, because it is an utterly stupid and boring question, and you say to her, "I am sitting in an American car, trying to make out in America," a piece of poetry that arouses something in her, and you both climb into the back seat for a meeting even less satisfactory than you feared it might be. Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty lobby and into the lurching, diamond-gated elevator and into her cluttered apartment to scrutinize her furnishings and unread or improperly read paperbacks, and you wonder if there is anything more depressing than the habitats of young people, young and rudderless women in particular.

The wine is all sediment and the cork crumbles into the bottle and you sit at a yellow Formica table in the dingy kitchen of Peg, drinking the vinegary wine (she is picking out the cork pieces, you are chewing them) and hoping not to talk, but now she wants to talk, and to understand and suffer, and as a result become humane and wise. She leans in and is serious and meaningful and you know what question she will ask before she asks it, and then she asks it, and the asking is terrible:

"Why did your wife leave you?"

Discuss the sisters Valerie and Lynn, who invite you and a regular named Toby to their apartment after hours. Toby is a quiet, drowsy young man who drinks warm gin with PBR chasers; he sees the girls to the bar exit with a promise to follow close behind and returns to clap and laugh about the probability of forthcoming nudity. He urges you to hurry with your cleanup but does not offer his help. He is waving the directions to their apartment in his hand and he asks which of the pair you like better and you say you don't care and will leave it up to him. He weighs the pros and cons of each, saying that the younger of the two, Lynn, is prettier and sweeter, a bring-home-to-mom type, but Valerie looks to be more immediate, vulgar fun. And while Lynn might look nicer on his arm, it would stand to reason that Valerie would be the more skilled behind closed doors. It is all very exciting for Toby, this choosing of women, and you enjoy seeing him so happy, and you wish that you too were happy, and you have another large drink knowing there will be no noticeable effect on your disposition and that it will only make you sicker the next morning and probably render you incapable of anything sexual that night. (There is no taste on your tongue and it is like you are swallowing gusts of hot air.)

The sisters' apartment is even filthier than you had imagined it would be (the bathroom is unspeakable). Valerie and Lynn are in transition from one trend-based lifestyle to another and there is a feeling of limbo, past and present fads and interests muddling their slang, clothes, and décor. They are both on cocaine and their chatter is confusing to follow but it appears their current hope is to find work as traveling burlesque dancers. Toby is all ears and interjects when the girls gasp for breath, offering his encouragement and complimenting the furnishings. "I think this is the most comfortable couch I've ever sat on," he tells them.

Throughout their speech the sisters have been disrobing, an article of clothing at a time, and they now stand before you wearing only their underwear bottoms and high heels. It is all Toby can do to keep himself composed and he jabs you with the point of his elbow with such force that you cry out in pain and the girls ask if it would be all right to run through their newest routine and Toby says sure, sure, of course, goddamn, and you say sure, and they dim the lights and put on some music and perform a surprisingly well-rehearsed 1950s-style dance number that involves much breast-spinning and has Toby in a near frenzy — he cannot hide and does not seem to want to hide the fact that he has a full erection. The girls are bent over and smiling at you from between their legs and Toby like a zombie crosses the room to slap their backsides and comment on the resulting jiggle of flesh and of the two it is the younger and prettier sister, Lynn, who responds to this treatment, and she leads Toby down the hall to her bedroom. Valerie stands and is panting, her hands on her hips, and she takes you into her room and turns off the lights and lays you on her bed, asking dirty sex questions that you are supposed to answer with dirty words of your own but you cannot get started and your head is burning with whiskey and cigarettes and when she takes off your pants and lays her cold hands on your body your pulse is still and nothing happens. She abandons this project and asks if you will do her a favor and then she describes the favor and there is no time to answer yes or no before she throws a leg over your face and you are forced into action, allotting her fifteen minutes of your life before pushing her off and walking pants-less to the bathroom to wash your face, and here your heart jumps when you see your reflection because you are covered in blood. Valerie walks in and does not apologize but says you look like a scared clown and laughs as she sits to urinate. You can hear Lynn down the hall in the throes of passion (it would seem Toby knows a trick or two) and Valerie watches you scrubbing the blood from your stubbly beard with her toothbrush. "I always get the dud," she says, standing and flushing, pink swirling water in the sink and toilet.

One night, drunk but steady, you decide you will not go immediately home but look into one of your proposed after-hours adventures. You do not suppose you will see it through but you are curious about it all the same and you bypass your neighborhood and head west on the 10 freeway, toward the ocean. There is a ways to go and you chainsmoke and drink whiskey from an emptied soda bottle as you drive. On the radio a man is imitating a chicken singing "In the Mood." You are imitating the man imitating the chicken and spilling whiskey down your shirt front as you choke and laugh.

You park your car opposite the Santa Monica pier and find it is not dark and deserted, as you hoped it would be. The fun rides are still lit up and in the distance two security officers, a male and a female, are leaning over the railing and talking. They are standing close together and the male is pointing out at the ocean; the woman is nodding. They are near the end of the pier and you cannot see their expressions but you believe they are smiling. It is a romantic enough scene but antagonistic to your plans, and you toss out the empty soda bottle and drive north, down the California Incline, toward Malibu. The console clock reads four in the morning.

The air is dry and warm and you find the Malibu pier deserted and dimly lit. You park the car and walk down the beach and beneath the pier. Small waves lap over the barnacled pylons and the pier lets off a long, settling moan and you reach out your hands to feel the vibration through the mossy wood. The pylons are tall as trees and seem to be leaning or falling toward one another. You bend down to touch the water and it is cold but not so cold as you thought it would be and you take off your shoes and wade in up to your ankles, feeling with your feet the hard sand of the ocean floor. As your skin acclimates to the water you know that you must see your plan through and it becomes in that instant a significant ambition and you clamber up the beach to the side of the pier and jump onto the railing and lift yourself over. You disrobe to your underwear and run twenty paces before coming to a tall white gate, its top arched and slick. Using the pier railing for support you climb around so that your body for a moment is hanging over the ocean. You run forty more paces and hit another fence, identical to the first, and you notice an elevated shack at the end of the pier. A light is glowing in one of the windows and you decide you have gone far enough. Once again you climb over the railing, only now you are facing the ocean. Looking down to gauge your height you find you cannot see the surface of the water and you search the sky for the moon, but the moon is not there. The warm wind runs off your torso and legs and your mind turns to the loveliness of narcotics and alcohol and women and you are shivering though you are not at all cold and you feel that you could cry now. You cannot see the water but the shore is a long ways off and you know it will be deep enough and so you count aloud, one, two, three, and you hold your breath and jump out into the night.

You are sitting in your car outside the bar, drinking from an airplane bottle and smoking a cigarette. You are forty-five minutes late and there are three empty airplane bottles at your feet and you have been parked for over an hour but are not yet ready to go to work. You no longer push headlong into your shifts and it is becoming more and more difficult to enter this building and in fact it is a constant worry so that you wake up thinking of the colorless faces of the customers and the cold, wet dishrag that hangs from your belt loop and slaps at your leg. Also you are always fighting one illness or another or one endless illness that never entirely dies, as you do not give your body sufficient rest and respite from your appetites. Now your body tries to reject the airplane-bottle whiskey by vomiting but you better the body with deep, mechanical breathing of the fresh night air.

As you exit the LTD, Junior the crack addict sneaks up and lifts you off the ground in an embrace and roars in your ear that he is back, back, back, muthafuckas! He sets you down and you catch your breath from laughing. "I really thought you'd died," you tell him. "That little guy was going around saying he'd killed you." "Hey man, no muthafuckas killin' me," Junior says. He has been in jail for three months and was released just this morning. You ask him how it went and he bugs his eyes at the stupidity of the question. You ask why he was arrested and he bugs his eyes doubly and rests his fists on his hips. You give him twenty dollars and listen to him talk about his latest plans — forthcoming construction work, doorman work, and a management position in an as yet unopened jazz club. Where he got this last idea is anyone's guess but when he describes himself standing at the bar in a suit and fedora with alligator shoes and purple silk stockings you cannot help but believe in some part of it. It is now only a matter of months, he tells you, a matter of hanging on.

He is eager to return to his routine and judging by his looks has already indulged profoundly in his drug of choice. He intends to make up for lost time, he says, with ninety days of his life stolen away forever when he wouldn't hurt a soul in the world, and when every day is a gift from God. He tucks the twenty away and turns a critical eye on you. He has heard you are doing poorly and asks if he might help. He infers that your job is in jeopardy but will not name the source of this information. "You're getting too deep up in it," he says. "Why do you think they call 'em depressants? You ought to do like me, see?" He points to his eyes. "Stimulants. Stimulated." Thanking Junior for his concern and insights, and promising to return soon for a longer visit, you walk to the front door of the bar. "Stay positive," he says in parting.

The room is already full and tossing or listing as a vessel over rough waters. Simon, returned to the role of manager, catches your eye and makes a show of psychically mutilating your character from across the bar. (At first he had refused the offer to resume his previous duties but a bonus was offered, a trip to some desert resort, and he came back to work with an extreme sunburn/new attitude. You are happy that he is in command again; you felt a keen pity for him when he was demoted, to the point that you wished he might "be killed.") He throws a rag at your face and nods in the direction of the bathroom. "Clean it up," he says. He is very angry but you do not attempt any excuses or penitent greetings; you walk past the line and into the men's room where you find a large pile of excrement perched on the seat of the toilet. Though this is the personification of your work fears you do not so much as sigh but take up a handful of napkins and, holding your breath, pick up the pile to ease it into the clogged, near-overflowing toilet, only its weight is too terrible to consider and you drop it into the filthy water. This creates a splash and your thighs are covered and you inhale the smell and vomit straight away like a fire hose and it covers the toilet seat and tank and spreads across the floor. Simon is standing behind you. "You'll have to clean the puke up too, mate," he says. "That's just the way of it." The child actor is standing in the doorway laughing and calling to Curtis that he might also witness the scene. Now they are both laughing and holding their stomachs and Simon is sorry for you and pushes them back down the hall and asks you in a mournful tone to try to finish the job hastily as there is a backup of dirty glasses and after all it is Saturday night.

You mop up the vomit and head to the bar to wash the stacks of glasses, hoping to numb your active mind in this mindless work but find that you cannot. You move sideways toward the whiskey assortment but there is Simon, shaking his head. "Not tonight," he says. Half an hour later he steps away for a cigarette and you rush to pour out three pints of alcohol, two Jamesons and one well gin, and you take these to the end of the bar where the child actor and Curtis are sitting elbow to elbow. They are still laughing at you and you nod good-naturedly before presenting a pint to each of them and holding yours high and calling it a race whereby the loser pays. They are rippling from bad street cocaine and gulp hungrily at the glasses and in three minutes they have finished up, neck and neck. You have secretly emptied two-thirds of your whiskey into the trash can but point to the remainder and say the round is on you, and the child actor and Curtis cheer, and you drink what is left in the glass and return to work.

As you bus the room and drain the sinks and replace the limes and olives and ice and napkins and straws and liquor and juices you keep a close watch on Curtis and the child actor, for no amount of cocaine can overpower a pint of eighty-proof alcohol consumed in so short a time, and you are curious to see how the drinks will take them. At first there is no noticeable difference other than their sudden, shocked silence. Then the smiles drop from their faces and their heads look to have tripled in weight and their eyes lose all focus and the child actor reaches out for a glass of water that is not there. Ten minutes later Curtis falls from his stool and does not get up. The child actor is afraid and uses his last burst of energy to push through the crowd to the bathroom. As he rounds the corner you see vomit spray from his nose holes and Simon turns to you with the mop and says, "I'm afraid it just isn't your night." He is laughing and you should be too but you cannot laugh or smile anymore. Raymond looks up from his drawings and corrals you as you pass. He is drunk and he brings his little ruler to your forehead and drags its edge from your hairline to the bridge of your nose and says, "You are forgiven." You snatch the ruler away and whip it over Raymond's head and it fans across the room and hits an oblivious fat woman on her chin. Her male companion stands and bares his fists but he does not know where the ruler came from. The woman covers her face and starts to cry.

Heading down the hall a man asks if you are working and you point to the mop and bug your eyes at the question and he hands you a cellular phone he has found. This gives you an idea and you do not clean up the vomit but lock yourself into the storage room and call 911 to report your suspicion that there is a bomb set to explode on the premises of the bar. You give a detailed account of an overheard conversation between two swarthy, bearded men and before you are even off the phone you can hear the shrieks of the customers and the breaking of glasses as firemen rush through the bar to clear the room. You reach up for a bottle of Jameson and break the seal, taking a long drink and inhaling deeply from a cigarette. When the evacuation is completed you let yourself out of the storage room and the bar is empty, and you walk from one side to the other drinking the whiskey and smoking, and crying softly — you cannot tell if the reason is relief or sadness. You look for Curtis's body but it has been moved. On the bar where Raymond was sitting you find a half-crumpled drawing of an adolescent boy, shirtless and in cutoffs, with a penis like a lasso. He is whipping it over his head and looks very happy to be living. You stuff this into your pocket and walk to the men's room where you find the child actor in a ball beneath the sink. There is drool draining from the corner of his mouth and his eyes are open to slits but you cannot see his pupils, only the reddened whites, and his breath is indefinable and you stand and kick him hard in the stomach and he vomits a cupful of gin and bile. Wiping the tears from your face you set your whiskey bottle and cigarette on the sink countertop and stand back against the far bathroom wall and rush forward to kick him in the center of his moaning face.