Ablutions (18 page)

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.