Ablutions (17 page)

"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?"