Nick's Trip

  “I asked for a manhattan,” he mumbled loudly.

  I thought of the only explanation. “Sorry. I must have used the dry vermouth instead of the sweet vermouth.”

  “Listen,” he said with a fierce stare and a voice informed by sixty Chesterfields a day. “When I order a manhattan, I don’t want any kind of vermouth, you hear? Pour an ounce of bourbon into a martini glass and drop a fuckin’ cherry in it. Understand?”

  I nodded that I did.

  For the summer I had four shifts a week and accumulated quite a bit of cash in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Ironically, I picked up some investigative work soon after I started at the Spot.

  The first was a shadow job on the wife of a greeting-card salesman who suspected her of adultery. The salesman had out-of-town accounts and subsequently was away from home three days a week. I spent a good amount of time sitting in my Dodge at the parking lot of her office building in Rockville, smoking too many cigarettes and listening to what was becoming a decidedly boring, unprogressive WHFS. At noon I’d follow her and a couple of her friends to their lunch destination, then follow her back to the office. It wasn’t until her husband left town, however, that she cut loose. On the day of his departure she left work early and drove to some garden apartments off the Pike. Two hours later she was gone and I was reading the name off her lover’s mailbox. The next day they met at Romeo’s apartment for a lunch boff, and I snapped his picture as he walked out the door to return to work. I gave the photos to the husband and watched his lips twitch as he wrote me a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. It took the better half of a fifth of Grand-Dad that night to wash his broken face from my mind.

  Shortly thereafter, the parents of a high school sophomore in Potomac signed me on to get to the bottom of what they hysterically perceived to be their daughter’s growing interest in satanism. I hooked up with her fairly easily through her mall-rat friends and we had lunch. She seemed bright, though unimaginative, and her devil worship turned out to be no more than hero worship. She was into Jim Morrison and her ambition, man, was to visit his grave in Paris. In the conference with her parents I told them that in my youth I had survived a fling with Black Sabbath and early Blue Öyster Cult without killing a single cat. They didn’t smile, so I told them to relax; in six years their daughter would be driving to law school in her VW Cabriolet and listening to Kenny G like all her other friends from Churchill High. They liked that better and stroked me a check for two hundred and a half. After that I resolved to be more selective in my cases (my bar shifts were keeping me solvent), but I’ll never know if I would have held to it since in any case the phone, for the remainder of the year, neglected to ring.

  Summer passed and then the fall. When I wasn’t at the bar I spent my time reading, jumping rope, riding my ten-speed and, once a week, sparring with my physician, Rodney White, who in addition to being a reliable general practitioner was a second-degree black belt. Occasionally I kept company and slept with my friend Lee, a senior at American University.

  The mayor’s arrest on charges of possession was big news, though that event was more significant for the local media’s shameful self-congratulatory arrogance and their inability to see the real story: the murder rate was at another record high and the gap was widening between the races, socially and economically, every day. But of course there was no story there, no angle. The colonizer and the colonized, just like the textbooks say.

  This was also the year that I was to both lose and make two special friends. The friend I made was Jackie Kahn, a bartender at a woman’s club called Athena’s, located two doors down from the Spot. As I was walking past the windowless establishment one evening in late September, I noticed a flier tacked on the door concerning an upcoming “womyn’s” march. I stepped inside and, ignoring a few mildly unfriendly stares, went directly to the bar and had a seat. The bartender gave me the once-over before she asked me what I’d have. She had short black hair and high cheekbones, and deep brown, intelligent eyes. I asked her name first and she said it was Jackie. I ordered a Bud.

  After she served it she said tiredly, “Why do you want to come in here, make trouble or something? I mean, we don’t mind getting a few guys now and then. But they’re usually the New York Mary types, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I’m a high school English teacher,” I said, feeling a sudden rush from the two bourbons I had rocketed before closing the Spot. “I noticed a misspelling on your flier outside. You have women with a y. Just thought I’d point it out.”

  “That’s the way we spell it,” said a humorless type with slicked-back hair sitting to my left. I had the feeling this one didn’t like me much. She confirmed it with her next suggestion: “Why don’t you just move it the fuck on out of here, chief?”

  “He’s all right,” Jackie said, surprising me. She was looking at me with a smile threatening to break across her face. “What do you really want?”

  “A beer,” I said, and extended my hand. She shook it. “My name’s Nick. I bartend over at the Spot. Didn’t feel like having that last one alone tonight.” I chin-nodded to the table in the corner. “Thought I’d shoot a game of pool while I was in here. That all right, Jackie?”

  “Sure.” She nodded, then leaned in close and, with an amazingly quick read of my personality, said, “But do me a favor, Nick—don’t be an asshole. Okay?”

  I began to frequent Athena’s fairly regularly after work for a beer and a game of pool. An ex-Brooklyner named Mattie would wait for me to come in and we’d shoot one game of eight ball for a five spot. Athena’s was typical of most of the women’s bars in Washington. It was owned by men who saw it only as an exploitable market niche and therefore tended to neglect it in terms of cleanliness and decor. But it was a place to go. To sensationalize the scene would be to give it too much credit; lesbian bars were the same as any other singles bars, with the identical forced gaiety and underlying streams of sadness. People met and fucked or resisted and went home alone.

  Jackie and I began to spend time together outside of our jobs, going to the movies or having a beer or two at some of the saner places on the Hill. She was an accountant at a Big Eight firm downtown and moonlighted at Athena’s for relaxation and to escape the masquerade that was apparently more necessary for gay women than it was for their male counterparts. Occasionally she’d poke her head in the Spot to say hello, and invariably one of my regulars would boast that he could “turn one of those ‘rug munchers’ around” if he had the chance. This was especially exasperating coming from guys who hadn’t even been mercy-fucked by their own wives for years. As our friendship developed I began to pat myself on the back for finally having a close relationship with a woman that didn’t involve sex. It had only taken me three and a half decades to learn. What I didn’t know then was that Jackie Kahn would have the largest role in the single most important thing that I have ever done.

  The friend I lost was William Henry. Henry was a deceptively quiet young man with an offbeat sense of humor who had migrated from the South to take his first job out of college as a reporter for a local alternative weekly. I met him when he sat in on a meeting where his tabloid’s sales manager pitched me on buying space when I was advertising director for Nutty Nathan’s. Though I didn’t step up for any ads, Henry and I discovered from that meeting that we had very similar tastes in music. I hooked up with him downtown a couple of times—once to see Love Tractor at the Snake Pit and on another night to check out a hot D.C. zydeco band, Little Red and the Renegades, at the Knight’s Work—but after my career at Nathan’s blew up, I heard from him only through the mail. He was that type of friend who, without an explanation, would send me headlines from the New York Post or buy me unsolicited subscriptions to Australian biker mags, publications with names like Chrome and TaTas.

  In July, William Henry was found murdered in his condo above Sixteenth and U, just around the corner from the Third District police station. He had been stabbed repeatedly with a serrated knife. A wi
tness had seen a thirtyish man with a medium build leave the building at the time of the murder. The man was light-skinned and wore a blue T-shirt that appeared to have been stained with blood. The Metropolitan Police spokesman said in the Washington Post that an arrest was “eminent.”

  For a few days after that the Post ran a daily article on the slaying, returning to their favorite theme of Small-Town Boy Comes to Murder City and Meets His Fate. But when it was clear that the story would not have a pat ending, the articles stopped, and William Henry’s killer was never found.

  I WAS THINKING OF Henry when I stepped up to Boyle that night and gave last call. Buddy and Bubber were gone, as was Melvin. He had left when I put George Jones on the deck. The tape always sent him out the door. Darnell was in the kitchen, cleaning up. I could see his willowy torso in the reach-through and hear the clatter of china, muted by the sound of his cheap radio, as he emptied the dishwasher.

  Dan Boyle placed his palm over the top of his shot glass to signal he was done, then drank the rest of the beer from the bottle sitting next to it. I asked if he wanted to put the night on his tab and he nodded, seeming to look both to my right and to my left simultaneously.

  Boyle was square-jawed and built like a heavyweight prizefighter, with stubbornly short, dirty blond, Steve McQueen–style hair, circa Bullitt. The age in his bleached blue eyes exceeded his thirty years. He drank methodically, and when he spoke it was through the tight teeth of an angry dog.

  Many of the on-duty detectives who frequented the Spot wore their guns in the bar (it was, in fact, a police regulation that they do so), and most of them got tanked up and weaved out into the night without incident. But it wasn’t Boyle’s weapon (the grip of his Python always showed from beneath his wool jacket where it was holstered) that was disturbing, or the fact that he even carried one. He was clearly on the edge, and he was the last guy in the bar who I ever would have fucked with.

  “Hear anything more on the William Henry case?” I asked him carefully. I bent into one of the three sinks and rinsed out the green bar netting.

  “You knew him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Haven’t heard anything,” he said. “But I’ll lay you ten to one your friend got burned for drug money. In this town, it all boils down to drugs. Let me tell you what it is. It’s”—he glanced around the room—“it’s the fuckin’ boofers. You know what they ought to do about the drug problem in this city?” I didn’t answer, having heard his solution a dozen times. “Take ’em out in the middle of the street and shoot ’em in the head. Public fuckin’ executions.”

  I said, “Check on the Henry case for me, will you, Boyle?” He rose clumsily, nodded, and with a tilted, heavy gait made his way across the room and out the front door. A trace of snow blew through before the door closed.

  The lights dimmed in Darnell’s kitchen. He walked out, wearing a leather kufi on his head and a brown overcoat. Darnell was tall and bone-skinny and pushing forty. He had done time and from that had gotten a thick white scar from the back of his ear to the underside of his chin. The scar made him look tough but, whatever he had been, that part of his life was clearly over. He was soft-spoken and introspective now, and though it was obvious that he would never rise above his position in the kitchen, that futility did not prevent him from reporting to work every single day. He was, as one of my regulars had described him with special emphasis on the word, a man.

  Darnell and I looked through the transom window and watched the steady diagonal fall of thick flakes, a picture that seemed unreal from our warm vantage point. Darnell, hoping for some company, said, “You headin’ up my way?”

  “I’ve got some work to do,” I said. “Think I’ll stick around, check my antifreeze.”

  Darnell looked at the pyramid of liquor on the wall and then back at me. “What you want to drink that nasty shit for? Shit kills your spirit, man.” He shook his head and walked to the door, then turned. “You want me to lock up?”

  “No, I’ll get it. Thanks, Darnell.”

  “Check you tomorrow, hear?” He waved and then he was gone.

  Dimming the lights even further, I finished wiping down the bar, placing all of the ashtrays but one in the soak sink. Then I slipped Robyn Hitchcock’s Queen Elvis into the deck and listened to the quiet intro to “Wax Doll” as I poured myself two fingers of Grand-Dad. I brought the shot glass to my lips and with closed eyes tasted sweet velvet.

  I opened my eyes to a shock of cold air and a memory fifteen years old. Billy Goodrich glided across the dark room and had a seat at the bar.

  “Hey, Greek,” he said. “Aren’t you gonna’ offer me a drink?”

  TWO

  THE FIRST TIME I met Billy Goodrich he was sitting on a wooden bench in Sligo Creek Park, rolling a huge spliff with the care and precision of an artisan. This was in the fall of my junior year, and my first semester at Blair High in Silver Spring. My grandfather had used a Maryland relative’s address to get me in, alarmed as he was at my subpar sophomore performance in the D.C. public school system.

  Billy yelled, “Hey, Greek,” and I did a double take, surprised that one of the more popular students even knew who I was. “Come on over here and help me out with this number,” he said.

  We split the joint (the handshake of my generation) and then laughed awhile over nothing. After that we played one-on-one at the park courts for the rest of the afternoon and our friendship, with the uncluttered reasoning that accompanies those years, was sealed.

  Billy Goodrich was one of the better-liked kids in school, though not for the usual reasons. He wasn’t the best-looking or most athletic guy; neither was he the friendly intellectual who even the most brutal students grudgingly learn to respect. What he had was that rare ability to fit in at the fringe of every group—hippies, grits, geeks, jocks—without conforming to their constrictively rigid codes of behavior and dress. He did it with an infectious smile and a load of self-confidence that bordered on, but never slipped into, conceit. As I had always hung with Jews and Italians and other Greeks, he was also the first truly white-bread friend I had ever had.

  The details of those years are unimportant and certainly not unusual. Billy had a ’69 Camaro (the last year that car made any difference) with a 327 under the hood and Hi-Jackers in the rear. There was a Pioneer eight-track mounted under the AM radio and two Superthruster speakers on the rear panel. On weekend nights we drank Schlitz from cans and raced that car up and down University Boulevard and Colesville Road, trolling for girls and parties. On the nights when we got too drunk the cops would pull us over and, in those days, simply tell us to get on home. Our friends enacted roughly the same ritual, and amazingly none of us died.

  I had part-time work as a stock boy, but on the days I had off, Billy and I shot hoops. Every Saturday afternoon we’d blow a monster joint, then head down to Candy Cane City in Rock Creek Park and engage in pickup games for hours on end. The teams always ended up being “salt and pepper,” and the losers did push-ups. Billy had a cheap portable eight-track player, and on those rare occasions when we’d win, he would blast J Geils’s “Serve You Right to Suffer” over the bobbing heads of the losing team. Eventually our overconfidence (and the desire to unearth the wet treasures that simmered beneath the red panties of our Blazer cheerleading squad) pushed us to try out for the varsity team, but Billy didn’t have the heart and I, in truth, lacked the ability. The day we were cut we walked the path in the park and, with laughter and some degree of relief, split a bumper of beer and huffed half a pack of Marlboros.

  After graduation Billy, who had already been accepted to an out-of-state school, took a construction job, and I continued to work as a stock boy at Nutty Nathan’s on Connecticut Avenue. The prospect of another humid season carrying air conditioners up and down stairs was upon me, so when a customer I had befriended offered me the opportunity to tow his ski boat down to the Keys for two hundred bucks, I accepted. Billy’s construction job was kicking his ass so he asked to com
e along. I secured a leave of absence from Nathan’s with the help of my friend and mentor Johnny McGinnes; Billy simply quit. We made plans to stay in D.C. through the Fourth of July and leave the following day.

  The summer of ’76 was not just the tail end of my childhood, a fact of which even then I was vaguely aware, but also the end of an optimistic era for an entire generation. The innocence of marijuana had not yet, to use the most emblematic example, become the horror of cocaine, and the economic and political emergence of minorities hadn’t yet been crushed by the moral bankruptcy of the Reagan years. But our Bicentennial celebration reflected none of this, and what I witnessed on Independence Night was simply the most spectacular party ever thrown in downtown D.C.

  The next day Billy and I prepared to leave. We attached a hitch to his car (mine, a ’64 Valiant with push-button transmission on the dash, never would have made it), changed his oil, and filled up the tape box. The tapes we were to return to most were Lou Reed’s Sally Can’t Dance (I can’t hear “Kill Your Sons” now without the druggy heat of that summer burning through my memory), Robin Trower’s Twice Removed from Yesterday, Bowie’s Station to Station, Hendrix’s mind-blowing Axis: Bold as Love, and the debut from Bad Company. We cut the black BAD CO. logo off that tape’s carton and glued it, facing out, on the Camaro’s windshield, to let any doubters know just who we were. There was also the odd business of a plastic grenade hung from the rearview, and a new bumper sticker that read MOTT THE HOOPLE: TELL CHUCK BERRY THE NEWS. For recreation we had copped, from Johnny McGinnes, an ounce of Mexican, a vial filled to the lid with black beauties, and half a dozen tabs of purple haze; there were also several packs of Marlboros scattered on the dash. We were eighteen years old and certain that the world’s balls were in our young hands.

  And so we took off. We put together four hundred dollars between us, and our plan was to travel around the South until the money ran out. Billy picked me up, and my grandfather stood and watched us from the front of our apartment house, tight-lipped and with his hands dug deep into his pockets, until we were out of sight. His shoulders were hunched up, and he grew smaller in the rearview as we headed down the block.