The Bell Tolls for No One

  “Sure,” said Joe.

  They got the beers and made small talk. Then Julie stood up and said, “I’m going to liberate this bar!” She walked over to the jukebox and put in some money. Then as she walked away she grabbed a guy who had just come out of the crapper. “Will you dance with me, mister?”

  They danced.

  Julie was great. She danced like she was fucking the guy right on the floor. Only it was better than fucking because she could get in more movements. All the men watched. Julie’s ass mashed and turned. She gave the feeling that she was out of control. Julie could really dance. Meanwhile she put her eyes on the guy with the most inviting look one could imagine. When the dance ended the guy came over and sat at their table. His name was William.

  “I wish I could really dance the way I wanted to,” said Julie.

  “How’s that?” asked Lawrence.

  “I mean, I really dance WILD! I mean, I just wouldn’t dare dance the way I actually feel! Sometimes I feel like I’m going to fly! Oh, I feel so WILD! If I could only let it go!”

  “You’re doing fine,” said Artie.

  Julie got up to dance with Lawrence. It did seem wilder than the preceding. At the end of the dance Julie and Lawrence whirled into the men’s room and locked the door. While they were in there Artie ordered three rounds of beers.

  “You’ve got quite a girlfriend there, Joe,” said Artie.

  “A real sexpot,” said Joe, “and she loves me. She just came off a ten-year marriage. The woman’s lib gave her the strength to break it. She’s a liberated woman. Intelligent. She’s got a lot of soul.”

  “And how,” said William.

  After a while Julie and Lawrence came out of the men’s room. They sat down at the table.

  “Lawrence sculpts,” said Julie, “isn’t it wonderful?”

  “You any good?” Joe asked Lawrence.

  “Pretty good.”

  “How about the money?”

  “Well, I haven’t made any money yet but it will be along.”

  Then Julie danced with the bartender. Near the end of the dance she got in real close and rubbed her box against him. When they broke the bartender had a hard on. He got around the bar and gave himself a double whiskey with water.

  “Where I come from in the country,” said Julie, “dancing is just natural. The trouble with some city men is that they think dancing is dirty. Out in the country dancing is just natural. Why, we have this big 4th of July dance every year and it’s just more fun! One old guy actually leaps around like some kind of frog.”

  “Dancing’s all right,” said Joe. “I got nothing against dancing.”

  “Me neither,” said Lawrence.

  “It’s just that,” said Julie, “some men just can’t dance good so they get jealous when I dance.”

  “Sure,” said Joe, “that’s it.”

  Then Julie went over to another table and asked a blonde kid to dance with her. They had been eyeballing each other. Julie began to dance and she really turned it on for him. Every man in the place had a hard on. The cat walked by and even the cat had a hard on. Julie was liberating the bar.

  “I could dance for hours,” said Julie afterwards. “I could dance night and day. I just love to dance.”

  Nobody said anything. Joe bought another round of beers.

  “We came here to eat but to hell with it,” he said.

  “You’re not getting nasty, are you Joe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you don’t mind me dancing with all these men?”

  “No, it’s all right.”

  “I mean, if you don’t like the way I act maybe I can find a man who does like the way I act.”

  “I’m sure you can.”

  “Now what do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, shit . . . ”

  “Now what’s the matter? Why are you swearing?”

  “Oh, Christ . . . ”

  “Look, Joe, you’re just jealous. I never met a more jealous man! You think I can’t feel your jealousy?”

  “I don’t know what you can feel.”

  “Listen, Joe, there’s something wrong with you. You oughta go see a shrink and get yourself untangled. This is the modern age. You act like some guy out of 1900. Look around and see what’s happening. This is the modern age . . . ”

  “Shit . . . ”

  “See? See? If you don’t want me, Joe, maybe I can find . . . ”

  Joe got out of his chair and walked toward the door. Then he was outside on the boardwalk. He walked down to the grocery store and got a pint of scotch and a six-pack. Then he went to his place, peeled the bottle, and opened a beer. He’d make the track tomorrow and the fights Thursday. He had to get out of it. Maybe he was 1900. Maybe there was a reason to be 1900.

  The phone rang. It was Julie. “Listen, Joe, if you ever get over your stupid jealousy, let me know. There might be a chance for us then. But right now there’s no way.”

  Joe didn’t answer. She hung up. Then he went to the refrigerator and made a salami and cheese sandwich. He ate it with a beer. Then he had a shot. Then he stretched out on his bed and looked at the little cracks in the ceiling. The cracks made designs. He discovered an elephant, a horse and a bear. And they were all dancing.

  Pete Fox is a gem. My friends wondered why I can laugh at, with, and during Pete Fox. Pete is 1930. Pete is 1940. Pete is a fat Bogart. Pete is early Edward G. Robinson.

  Pete is James Cagney. Pete is dull as warm piss and funnier and more tragic. Pete is myself when I am drunk, very drunk. Pete is all the worst parts of me put out where I can see them.

  Pete usually arrives around midnight with something to drink. He places himself on my couch almost flat, just the head looking up at me.

  “Where’s Linda?”

  She’s gone. This is Liza.”

  “Oh, Liza. Liza! Oh . . . ”

  He looks at me. “Hank, you don’t mind if I try to make it with Liza? I couldn’t make it with Linda. I tried to make it with Linda. Do you mind if I try to make it with Liza?”

  “Pete, no man ever owns any woman, nor does any woman ever own any man.”

  “But Linda was so pretty . . . What happened between you and Linda? . . . Geeez!”

  I take a drink and don’t answer.

  He looks at Liza from flat on his back. “Linda . . . I mean, Liza, hahaha . . . do you mind if I try to make it with you?”

  “Yes, I mind very much. I don’t want you.”

  “Ah, hell, you don’t have to be that way! I’m just trying to be friends! Don’t get mad!”

  He straightens up from the couch, pours himself another wine.

  “This is good shit, ain’t it, Hank?”

  “It’s o.k.”

  “It must be. You’re stayin’ right up there with me. That’s what I like about you . . . I can drink with you and talk to you. I can’t talk with most people. Hey, you know what happened when I left your place last time?”

  “No.”

  “I got rolled.”

  “Rolled?”

  “Yeah. I went up around Cahuenga Blvd., they call it Siff Gulch. Anyway, I’m drunk, you know, and I’m walking down the sidewalk and here comes this young girl, she looks pretty good, you know, and she puts it to me, ten bucks, she says. So I say o.k. Well, we get in my car and I give her the ten and she starts going down on me. She’s pretty good, you know.”

  He looks at me and I nod. Of course, we are both guys who get so much of it that we can tell the pretty good from the other. So I nod.

  “Well, she’s working away, you know. She’s taking a lot of time, doing it right. Suddenly she pulls away. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ I ask. ‘I don’t want to do it!’ she says. ‘What ya want to do?’ I say, ‘leave me with a rock? You can’t leave me with a rock! I’ll beat the shit out of you!’ ‘I don’t care,’ she says, ‘I won’t do it!’

  ‘All right, baby,’ I say, ‘just give me my ten back then!’ She gives me back the ten and I let
her go. Man, she hasn’t been gone five minutes . . . I look for my roll, I always take it out of my wallet, you know. I had it all rolled up with rubber bands. You know, she found it? And everything was in there, my i.d., driver’s license, and the money. She found that.”

  “A real pro,” I say.

  “I’ve been rolled dozens of times,” says Pete.

  “Me too, Pete.”

  We drink our wines and wait for something. Then Pete looks at Liza.

  “Linda . . . I mean, Liza, hahaha . . . Boy, Hank can really pick ’em, one after another . . . You know, I knew Frances too. Well, she had a little grey in her hair, and now she’s got those snaggles straightened out in her teeth, she looks pretty good . . . ”

  He pours another wine. “What I’m really saying is that I could go you, baby!”

  Liza and Pete are both sitting on the couch. Pete stretches out sideways, put his head near Liza’s leg, looks up . . . “Baby . . . ”

  I start laughing and Liza gets angry. “You big hunk of shit,” she says to Pete, “move off!” Pete sits up. “Listen, I was here when Hank smashed all of Linda’s teeth out. She was a bloody mess! You shoulda seen her. I ain’t never hit a woman. I’m a real MAN!”

  We don’t see him any more for two or three nights, then around midnight he shows. He is in bermudas and t-shirt and has a bottle of wine and a woman and a little girl with him.

  “Hi!” he says.

  I let him in. There are introductions. The lady is Tina. A very severe face. She has been hurt by a dozen men. Now she goes to the Unitarian church and is filled with causes, and she finally knows the kind of man she wants but it’s too late because the body is gone and the charm and the originality are gone. Her hair is white. She’d make a fine nun. Her daughter exuberates. Her daughter hasn’t met any men yet. Her daughter is 7. Liza tells the daughter that there are some toys in the corner. The daughter’s name is Nana.

  I open Pete’s bottle and began pouring drinks into the glasses. Pete has already been drinking.

  “You know, Hank,” he says, “I heard you out the window last time I left. I heard you say to Liza, ‘Liza, the gods have sent this man to me! I am so fortunate!’ You did say that, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “You know that Nana knows Marina, don’t you?”

  (Marina is my 7-year-old daughter.)

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, they know each other.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Then he looks at the severe Tina sitting very upright upon the couch, clutching her wine glass in her crucified hand. Then he looks back at Liza and myself.

  “You know, I been trying to make Tina for a long time!”

  Pete drinks some wine, looking down into his glass, then looks up.

  “Yeah, ha, ha, ha, I been trying to make Tina for a long time . . . but I can’t seem to make it . . . can I, Tina?”

  He looks at her. Tina doesn’t answer.

  “Of course, I can’t get it up, anyhow. I can’t get the damned thing up! So even if I made her . . . ? . . . ?”

  Pete drinks again at the wine. “This is good shit, ain’t it?”

  “Sure, Pete.”

  “I notice you’re stayin’ right with me. It has to be good stuff. I like to talk with you Hank. Even though you did smash all of Linda’s teeth out . . . ” He looks at Liza. “I told you he smashed all of Linda’s teeth out, didn’t I?”

  “You told me,” said Liza.

  “Yeah, I been trying to make this woman . . . ” he looks at Tina “. . . for a long time. But, hell, I can’t get it up. I doubt that I can get the damned thing up . . . ”

  “Listen,” says Tina, “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get Nana to bed!”

  “Oh, what the hell, baby!” says Pete.

  “No, we’ve got to go.”

  Nana and Tina leave. I pour some more drinks.

  “You’re a tough guy, Hank. But I’m a tough guy too. Did I ever tell you how I got these cauliflower ears?”

  “Yeah, Pete.”

  “Well, you heard some of the stories but you haven’t heard all of them. How come, Hank, you ain’t got no cauliflower ears?”

  “I’d rather give than receive.”

  “Linda, I mean Liza, have you ever seen my cauliflower ears?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you ain’t looked at them real close, have you?”

  Pete gets down on his hands and knees and starts crawling along the rug. Liza is sitting in a chair by the fireplace. He crawls toward her.

  “I got these cauliflower ears, Lisa.”

  Pete crawls toward her. He is a very heavy man, close to 250 pounds, all beerfat and whiskeyfat and the easy life of some money. The rug hurts his hardshell knees and his butt is rammed upward quite awkwardly. His face is eaten by flat afternoons and greasy foods. He has never considered suicide or that life might be meaningless. He likes football, bad poetry, Iceberg Slim, and more than enough to drink. He crawls forward.

  I know what is going to happen. It is the unfolding of a slow movie that one can’t stop. It is preciously great. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it. It’s Cary Grant. Dimple in chin, forever. It’s all the sad and wonderful and horrible things. It’s everything, lousy things that I have done without feeling and all the lousy things that I will do in the future without feeling, and all the lousy things that will be done, thusly, to you and to me and to all. Pete crawls toward her, the snail in the china closet, the holy grail filled with $1.69 of cheap wine . . .

  “See, I got these cauliflower ears Liza? Now see this one?”

  He turns his head sideways. He is a child of a mountain of a man. He is infinite and distant, yet like a horseshoe or a turnip.

  “That’s the one. Now look at this other one.”

  Liza sits there looking at the other one. And then the thing that we all know is going to happen, happens. He straightens his head, opens his eyes wide, then pokes his head forward between Liza’s knees. It is entirely too much: it is too wonderful and horrible and beautiful and foolish to believe. I begin laughing. I can’t stop. Pete holds his pose. Liza leaps up.

  “You son of a bitch! I don’t have to take that!”

  “But Liza . . . ”

  “I warned you from last time . . . ”

  “What the hell’s the matter, Liza, honey?”

  Pete turns and looks at me over his back, over his ass crouched in bermudas.

  “Now what the hell’s the matter with her?” he asks me.

  He leaves soon after that. But I’m sure he’ll be back. Our wonderful Cagney. Our Alan Ladd. Our 1937 hero. I hereby light altars to him. Let it be known. Somebody must be sacrificed. Do you remember the tiny grains of sand in the old-fashioned hourglass? Out of one globe and into another, dripping. And when one globe was empty, an hour was gone or 12 hours or 24 hours or however they were constructed? But I always cheated. I kept turning the globes back and forth, frustrating the machinery . . . Pete Fox is something like that. I use him. I am sorry if I have used him and I realize that it isn’t quite right, but I like to laugh whenever possible, and Pete will never know and if he did finally find out, he’d only be proud.

  Precious holy things finally lack accurate glory.

  I’d had a breakup with Jane and she was the first woman I had ever loved and my guts were hanging out by a string, and I started drinking, but it was the same, it was worse, drinking only shot the pain upwards, but I was angry too because she’d slept with another man, and a real idiot sort too, as if to punish me, and it killed some of the love but not all of it, and to make sure I wouldn’t find her in one of the bars in town and start the agony all over again, I took a bus (I’d had my driver’s license revoked for drunk driving) to Inglewood that afternoon and started drinking in a bar full of rednecks, a bar decked out to look like Hawaii, and since Hawaii seemed the falsest place in the world to me I walked into the bar and started drinking, hoping for a good fight with some redneck, hopin
g for a good fight with anybody, but they didn’t bother me and Jane kept lighting up in front of me, scenes of her walking across the floor or putting on her stockings or laughing, and I drank faster, played songs and conversed wildly with people, completely out of reason, but they laughed and the more they laughed the worse I felt.

  Finally, late that night, I was 86’d and I walked along the sidewalk wondering how in the hell you could get a woman out of your blood and your gut, and I found another bar and drank quietly until closing time; it was Saturday night, well, it was Sunday morning and I walked along outside not quite knowing where I was going.

  Then I saw this large mortuary, one of those colonial structures with long rows of steps very well lit by all these lights and I walked up to the next to the top step, stretched out and went to sleep.

  I awakened to what seemed a traffic jam on the street below. Cars were honking, people were screaming and laughing, and as I sat up to look at them I heard laughter and catcalls and saw two cops rushing up the steps toward me . . .

  When I awakened I had forgotten what had happened. The walls were hung with tapestries. It was a very fine place. Perhaps somebody had, at last, found out what a good person I was and I was getting my reward. A class place.

  Then I looked at the door. Bars. The window. Bars. I was in jail. I walked to the window and there was the ocean.

  I later found out I was in Malibu. It reminded me somewhat of the time I had awakened to piped-in music and there was a long row of guys standing in the sand all handcuffed to this chain of handcuffs. There was a loose set hanging at the end. I walked up to the loose set and held out my hands. The cop looked at me and laughed. “Not you, buddy, you’re just a drunk. Here, you get your own special pair.” He snapped them on. As usual—too damned tight.

  Two cops came and got me. They pushed me into a squad car and drove me to the Culver City courthouse. When I got out of the car one of the cops took the cuffs off and walked into the courthouse with me and sat next to me. I was third or fourth.