When the safe swung open, I saw pharmaceutical scales, bags of mannitol and cocaine, plastic tear-sheets of Mandrax stacked like corrugated cardboard, a big food-storage Baggie full of twenties wound tight as pencils and secured with rubber bands. Rudy extracted a miniature medicine vial from the safe, and then fished around in one of the milk baskets for a bag of pot and a package of cigarette papers. For the next half hour we sat cross-legged on the floor beneath posters of John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and deposited various substances in our oral and nasal cavities while we shammed the roles of host and guest. The conversation consisted of ejaculations like “Um, yeah, that’s good,” and a continuing exchange between Rudy and Gesh that invariably began with one or the other of them saying “What do you hear from X lately?” After a while they seemed to run out of mutual acquaintances and a paralyzing silence fell over the room. This was the signal for Gesh and me to rise and lay out half our weekend’s allowance—painstakingly hoarded against our eight-dollars-per-diem salary—for two grams of coke and fifteen Quaaludes. Then we wished Rudy well and went out to tear the town apart.
It was six o’clock. We drove to North Beach, parked, and ambled down the street in a blaze of neon. I was feeling good, the pavement clicking beneath my heels, windows struck with light, people on the street, music in the air. After the months of exile, after the countless deadening hours that weighed on us like some wasting disease, this was exhilarating, a rush, and even the clash of traffic and the stink of exhaust gladdened my heart. I’d been around the world with Magellan, eaten my own shoes and seen the worst, and now I was home again. When Gesh said, “Let’s have a cocktail,” I was already dancing in the street.
The first place we stepped into featured thundering rock and roll and naked women grunting in a mud pit. We had two stingers and one quack apiece, and perked ourselves up in the men’s room with a line of coke. I stood with my back to the bar, propped on my elbows, and watched the artificial mud cling to the nipples and moisten the crevices of the wrestling women. My teeth were on edge, and I found myself leaning into Gesh and shouting nonstop over the music as the coke worked on the verbal centers of my brain. This was good, I thought, this was what I wanted: excitement, cheap and loud. I felt expansive, generous, witty and invulnerable.
Twenty minutes later, as the effect of the coke waned and the methaqualone began to pour sand in my joints, I waxed philosophical. What was this need, I mused, for chemical oblivion? The world was full of drunks, junkies, kat-chewers and ether-sniffers. Kids stuck their heads in buckets of paint thinner, bears bloated on fermented berries, cats rolled in catnip. And here I was, stoned and getting stoneder, on holiday from my new vocation—itself an indictment—and watching a pair of big-titted women slog around in a tub of artificial mud. Understanding hit me like a truck: I was a degenerate. I was no part-time scholar and contractor on the rebound from the recession, I was a dope fiend and a dope dealer, saboteur of lives and minds, a gutless profit-monger and mammon-worshipper. Jerpbak had been right to single me out and pin me to the wall: I was dangerous, subversive. Suddenly I felt depressed, filled to the neck with sadness like a carafe with bad wine.
I sipped glumly at my drink and watched as one woman straddled the other, pinning an arm behind her back and mounting her rodeo-style. Then Gesh emerged from the men’s room, pushed his way through the crowd at the bar, and slipped me the vial of cocaine. I took it, retired to a stall in the men’s and did two quick toots. Within moments, I felt better. Immeasurably better. I was no archfiend, no blighter of lives or robber baron: I was just a regular guy, out on the town, feeling good, an entrepreneur providing a service for society. That’s all. No harm. I ground my teeth and fluffed my hair in the mirror, the exhilaration returning. I was handsome, healthy, soon-to-be-rich, and I was sowing some oats. Big deal. When I shoved in beside Gesh at the bar, a murmur of appreciation rose from the patrons, and I turned to see that the mounted woman was forcing her antagonist’s face into the mire while simultaneously slapping her flank like a jockey coming off the wire.
The next place had a pool table and smelled of hot grease. Two black dudes in purple pants and a silver-haired character in a suit sat at the bar. A frazzled blonde was shooting pool, the TV was tuned to a sitcom and a web of falsetto voices crooned from the jukebox over a thumping disco beat. Gesh went to the men’s room. I ordered beers and pressed two quarters to the rail of the pool table. The blonde never even glanced up.
When she finished, I racked for eight ball and she broke with a shattering crash that sent a pair of low balls leaping for the pockets. I never even got to shoot. Gesh was next. She ran six and then missed. Gesh came back with a run of five before blowing an easy setup in the corner pocket. She missed. He missed. Then she sank the two remaining balls and made a neat cross-table cut on the eight to win it. “Nice shot,” Gesh said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Tanqueray martini,” she said. “Straight up.”
Gesh introduced himself.
“Chinowa,” she said, extending her hand.
“And this is Felix.”
She turned to me, her mouth a pout of concentration, eyes like ceramics. “Rack ’em up.”
We played her for the next hour or so, alternating games, and she never relinquished the table. She never seemed to lose control, no matter how much she drank, the cuestick flicking cleanly through the nest of her fingers as if it were tapped into her nervous system. Gesh and I, on the other hand, grew progressively weaker as the alcohol, in combination with the methaqualone, began to affect our coordination. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to enjoy humiliating us, neatly cracking down ball after ball, executing tricky bank shots and wicked side-pocket cuts, while we lurched around the table, spilling beer and fumbling for the chalk.
We hung on. I don’t know why—for her sake, I guess. I had begun to develop a deep and abiding appreciation of the way her calves flexed as she leaned over the table, the percussive clack of her heels dancing a cha-cha in my head. My third beer went down like water. I swallowed another Quaalude—for poise—and began to construct a scenario for the evening. Chinowa, who with her strong fingers and sure stick was obviously a bundle of seething erotic appetites, would phone her tall lusty roommate, the four of us would hit a few clubs and then retire to my apartment for foreplay and afterplay. Gesh leaned over a giveaway shot on the eight ball, his eyes dulled, tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth, and I knew he was envisioning a similar scenario. He would beat her with a flick of his wrist, beat her finally and authoritatively, and we could all relax and get out of this dump. As the Fates would have it, however, he miscued, the white ball skewing off impotently to kiss the far cushion and then perversely dribble back to the center of the table. Chinowa’s laugh was sharp and disdainful. She bent over the eight ball and slammed it into the pocket as if she were hitting a punching bag.
We were reacting to this, tugging at our beards and fumbling for the necks of our beer bottles, when a short lilting whistle—the tinkle of a door chime, one note up and one down—penetrated the miasma of castrato “baby-baby” emanating from the jukebox. Slowly, like turtles cooking in the sun, we rotated our heads in the direction of the bar. Mr. Silverhair had pushed himself up from the barstool and stood smoothing his locks for a moment, and then, without a backward glance, strode purposefully out the door. Our heads swiveled back to Chinowa, who at the first fluttering note had straightened up as if she’d been slapped, dropping the cuestick to the floor with a clatter. Now she snatched her purse from a stool at the bar and hurried out the door, the clack-clack-clack of her heels echoing like gunshots in the sudden dramatic silence between songs.
“She wasn’t worth a shit anyway,” Gesh said, cramming the nether end of a three-pound super-chicken burrito into his mouth. We were outside, on the street, holding take-out burritos the size of skeins of yarn. “Yeah,” I said, wiping guacamole from my face and fighting to talk, chew and maintain my balance all at the same time, “and b
esides, it’s too early to get pinned down for the night yet.” It was nine o’clock. Gesh examined his watch carefully, as if it could not only tell him the time but plot the progress of every available female in town to boot. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, we got to get to these clubs, man, and start dancing.”
It was a noble sentiment, nobly expressed. Unfortunately, as he formed the syllables of the final word, a word that connotes motion and grace, he lost his balance and staggered back against the window of a Chinese herbalist’s shop. The shop was dark, the window resilient. The burrito, however, was not so resilient. It dropped from his hand and split open like a rotten banana. On his shoes. The shoes, and the cuffs of both pant legs, were smeared with a méeAlange of salsa, chicken, green chilis, sour cream, beans, onions, guacamole and rice. Gesh merely stared down at his feet, as he’d stared a moment earlier at his watch, a look of dim incomprehension creasing his features. He could have been the village idiot, puzzling over his intertwined shoelaces. A motorcycle snarled down the street, someone shouted from a second-story window. Finally Gesh waved his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal and said “Fuck it,” his voice thick with retardation.
The events of the remainder of that evening—and especially their sequence—were never quite clear to me. But I can say with assurance that we drifted in and out of a number of clubs that featured heavy metal, new wave disco, punk, blues, blue-grass, reggae and bossa nova, and that we lurched across various congested dance floors with various women and made lewd, drunken proposals to all of them. Our breath was foul, our legs unsteady. We slammed into doorposts, stepped on people’s feet, were twice refused service. At one point, I recall, Gesh took umbrage at the appearance of a massive, iron-pumping, head-cracking bouncer at a tidy little club in which everyone was neatly dressed and behaving himself. “Fucker looks like a neutered cat,” Gesh growled, jabbing his finger in the direction of a young giant who lounged watchfully in the corner, his arms folded against a chest so muscle-inflated he might have been wearing a lifejacket.
Suddenly I was sober. “Are you crazy?” I said. “That guy’s arms alone are bigger than my entire body.”
Gesh’s eyes were glazed, his face hard. In the candlelight, the scar that split his eyebrow had a dull sheen to it, like the white of a hard-boiled egg. For answer, he merely shrugged. I knew Gesh well enough to appreciate his volatility—I had only to think of his confrontations with Vogelsang, his impatience with Dowst, the rage that consumed him when the pump broke down or the Jeep failed to start—and I could see that something had set him off, could see that he was looking for trouble. “Come on,” I said, “this place isn’t for us. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Gesh’s gaze was fixed on the bouncer. For his part, the bouncer merely stood there, his eyes sweeping the room contemptuously. In front, elevated above a mass of straight-backed chairs and glossy cocktail tables, a folksinger perched on a stool and did early-sixties stuff about harmony and the brotherhood of man. “Cabbagehead,” Gesh muttered, still glaring at the bouncer. “Sink licker.” I tried to restrain him, but he brushed me aside. I watched as he made his way to the bar, ordered a triple créeGme de menthe—it came in a big water glass—cakewalked past the bouncer like a harmless high-spirited fraternity guy out on a date, then spun round and neatly upended the glass on the bouncer’s head.
“Sorry,” Gesh said with a sick grin.
For one stunned second the bouncer held himself in check—Is this guy serious? Should I be angry?—before hurling himself forward like a steel wrecker’s ball. I remember thinking, as the viscous green slop congealed the bouncer’s hair and startled his shirt, that Gesh had erred irretrievably, that we’d shortly be confronted by the police, and that I’d once again find myself digging deep for bail money. But Gesh surprised me. Stoned, drunk, and perverse as he was, he’d planned his move well—“Just counting coup,” he later explained—and at the moment of truth, with exquisite timing, jammed a glossy cocktail table into the behemoth’s knees. Reeking of mint, the big man took a fall, spewing drinks and crushing glass, wood and Lucite beneath him. The diversion gave Gesh—and me—time to dodge out the door, duck round the corner and stumble the length of a three-block alley like handicapped sprinters trying out for the Special Olympics. We finally pulled up behind an overflowing dumpster to catch our breath and erupt in nervous, triumphant, moronic giggles. This was silly, juvenile, undignified and ultimately unfulfilling, the sort of thing you did when you were sixteen. It was all that, but somehow it was hilarious, too.
In mid-laugh, as if it were a natural extension of the joke, Gesh suddenly doubled over to evacuate the contents of his stomach. I listened to his wet heaving gasps—the dying throes of a hero with a sword twisted in his gut—and began to feel queasy myself. “The smug son of a bitch,” he choked, and then gagged again. When he was finished, he straightened up, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and said, “What next?”
It was one-fifteen. We’d gone through the cocaine and all but six of the Quaaludes. The night had turned cold, and a dank insidious fog had begun to feather its way through the streets, smoothing angles, blurring distinctions. We headed away from Broadway, looking for a place I knew—or thought I knew—where we could have a nightcap.
I was feeling enervated, as if I’d been walking forever, part of a commando raid in Bataan that didn’t quite come off, a misguided explorer hoofing it back to civilization. The night had been a disappointment, there was no doubt about it. We’d left the apartment in high spirits, needful, aching with desire, and we’d struck out. Bombed. Wound up empty-handed and addle-brained, with a bad taste in our mouths. The amazing thing is that we’d expected anything different—this was the way it always was and always would be, world without consummation, amen.
In a way, it was like fishing. Once a year, having forgotten how insufferable it is, I would go fishing. A day would come when I would awaken to think of hooks, lines, sinkers, the mysteries of the deep, and then of broiled halibut or rock cod in black bean sauce. Like Ishmael too long ashore, I would hurry down to the marina, snuffing the salt air. Then I’d fork over thirty-five bucks to the charter-boat captain, stand in a knot of drunken sportsmen and vomit over the rail for six hours. Fish? By the end of the day I couldn’t imagine that that pounding pitching hell of an ocean was anything but the lifeless desert it seemed.
I was operating on this level of unhope when we pushed through the door of the bar I’d been looking for, only to find that this was a different place altogether. Strangers, clots of them, stared up at us—strangers who didn’t give a shit if I lived or died or ever again experienced love in all my fruitless wandering years on earth. Candles glowed ’on rough-hewn tables, smoke rose like mustard gas from a hundred cigarettes, the jukebox rattled with slash-’em/tear-’em rock and roll. I saw long noses, drawn canine faces, earrings, nose rings, blue hair, orange hair. No one was smiling.
“Uh, listen,” I said, taking Gesh by the arm, “I don’t think this is the right place.”
Gesh didn’t look overconcerned. He merely shrugged, and was about to advance on the bar when a muscular voice cut through the jukebox frenzy to shout out our names: “Gesh! Felix! How the fuck you doing?”
It was Rudy. Chinless, noseless, skin the color of ripe grapefruit. He was standing at the bar with a guy so short and deformed he could have been a chimpanzee dressed up for the occasion. “Hey!” Rudy shouted, ushering us forward, “I’d like you to meet my friend Raul.”
Raul was about four and a half feet tall, and there was something seriously wrong with his shoulders and torso. His shoulders were massive—big as a linebacker’s—and swelled out in a lump at the base of his head. He had no neck, and his chest and abdomen were foreshortened, so that he looked as if he’d been compressed vertically. I shook his hand and nodded at the crazed glint in his black eyes.
“And this,” Rudy was saying, “is Jones.” I now saw that Raul was flanked by a guy about thirty, a cool character with short
hair combed straight up and back and wearing a tie the width of a tape measure. He nodded, and then took my hand perfunctorily. “My friends call me Bud,” he said.
“Hey, what you drinking?” Rudy shouted, and then asked where all the women were. “What,” he said, “did you strike out? Yeah?” He handed me an Irish coffee. “Don’t worry about it, man—me and Raul and Jonesie are on our way to this place where there’s some real action—right, Raul?—and you guys are welcome to come along if you want.”
Jones? Where had I heard that name before? Farmer Jones, Casey Jones, BoJo Jones. I beat on the brat, screamed the jukebox, I beat on the brat,/With a baseball bat. “Why not?” I said.
Outside, the fog had thickened. Cars vanished, parking meters were invisible at a range of ten feet, the light from storefronts was so diffuse it could have been spread with a butter knife. The five of us scraped out the door and shuffled down an alley, then crossed a street I didn’t recognize. Someone lit a joint and handed it to me. We walked on, our voices pitched low. Nobody said much.
If I was disoriented earlier, I was totally lost now—at first I thought we were headed in the direction of Chinatown, but with the fog and the various turnings I was no longer sure. “A block more,” Rudy said as we swung into a street as softly lit as a watercolor. I saw red neon off to my left, a sign winking on and off, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t make out the lettering. Then Jones’s voice, disembodied, was speaking somewhere behind me: “This is my street, man—see you tomorrow, Rude.”
“Hey Jonesie”—Raul’s voice—“what’s the matter? No lead in your pencil?”
“Tired, man. Hey, good to meet you,” Jones said, just a shadow now. “Ciao.”