The pain came on sudden that first time. Came on hard. Long, twisting lines of pain arcing through my skull from back to front, starting at the base of my skull, and tracing over the lumpy ridges of my scalp. Knives in my eyes. It hit me so hard, and so sudden, that I was barely able to lean my body over to the bar where I found a stool with my hands, and sat myself down in an effort to not fall off the planet as the pain spun up tight, in my head, and discharged over and over again.
The juke in the corner was kicking out an old song, something slow and guitar-driven, with the crumpled paper voice of an old man who’d spent too many nights emptying bottles of cheap bourbon down his gullet.
“I got a belly full of you and that Leavenworth stuff,” sang the gravelly voice. “Now I’m gonna get out, now I’m gonna get tough.”
I ran my fingers through my dry, unwashed and uncombed hair, and I settled in my seat, hunched over, with my head in my hands. I squeezed on my temples in that stereotypical “if you touch right here all the pain will go away spot,” but it did nothing.
It hurt so much that I was near crying.
The Gateway, something, a voice, said to me. Not the voice of the gravel- throated singer yelping from the juke. No, not him. This was something different. This felt…inside.
The Gateway.
My thoughts began to wander…wander and turn into something else. Sounds and images, not connected, or at least they didn’t seem to be. Old movies I’d seen, The African Queen, with Bogart, for one, a poem by William Carlos Williams that I read in High School, political speeches, a lecture, in high school, from a plump, middle aged maid of a health teacher, with bad skin, about the safety and security of abstinence. It was all happening at once, like a dream. I had a vision of my mother’s face and my father’s shoulders and the taking of the Americas from the Natives by the white man.
It asked me, Do you see?
The clinking and clanking of glasses opened my eyes, and there was Kevin, sitting next to me with a beer and a shot for himself and the same for me.
“It’s only just past one,” he said, looking more sober, more serious, than I could remember. “You done already?”
“What?”
His voice elevated, and slurred. He wasn’t as sober as he wanted to seem. “I asked if you were done. Are you fucked for the night?”
“No,” I said, shaking off that pain, that feeling. That voice. “I’m just…a headache. That’s all.”
I turned around, my back to the bar, and I looked around the place, my eyes…fuzzy. Pink, tall, with long, well-shaped legs, leaning against a pool table with bills jammed down the front of her tight, low-cut blouse. Chalk in her hand, she greased up the tip of the cue, locking eyes with a sleazy-looking guy with a neatly-manicured beard and slicked-back hair. Fifty riding on the game. She had high balls, and there were a half dozen of them sitting mid-table and against the rails. A solitary three ball sat, hanging around a corner pocket, aching to be chipped in. She smiled at the man with the Vitalis hair and the patterned shirt three buttons open to a dog’s hairy chest.
“I’m so far behind…whatever will I do?”
She looked over at Kevin, and ran her tongue over smooth, white teeth, and she winked.
Still smiling, she leaned over the table, as if she’d known her shot for hours, and she calmly pulled the cue back and forth between her nimble fingers. “Eleven,” she said. “Corner pocket.”
With a slow, smooth strike, she sent the cue down the other end of the table, where it struck the eleven and sent it slanting down to the other end of the table, briskly into the pocket.
Pink swung her hips as she walked past the man, and ran a hand over his exposed chest. She giggled and kissed him on the cheek. From where I sat, he knew he was done. She smiled at Kevin, who laughed and sipped his beer.
A skinny kid, Tim Tim, whose very fake ID said that he was 32 and from Switzerland, was sitting in a corner booth with his back to me opposite a Perry Ellis suit with sterling silver cuff-links and wire-rimmed glasses. They were laughing and drinking Heineken.
My head was throbbing.
A pale, skinny chick -probably a hooker- in skin-tight leather pants and a see-through halter was propped-up in front of the Roc-o-La juke box, and feeding singles into the machine, picking songs. It was something different now, something slow, and catchy, and she started shaking her hips slow and steady, and I felt my cock stirring in my pants, and I remembered that it had been over a month since I’d been laid.
Maybe longer.
I wasn’t looking at Kevin when I heard him say, “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I said, taking a sip of beer. The shot, probably something cheap and hard on the intestines, still sat on the bar next to his, waiting for ceremony, apparently. He looked like a lawyer, the guy with Tim Tim. Maybe an investment banker. “Sure I am.”
“Look,” he said. “I’m just saying that whatever I said last night, I don’t want you talking about it to anyone.” I didn’t know what he was talking about.
My hands were shaking, and even in cave-like darkness of the bar, my eyes were killing me from the light. “Yeah, Kev,” I said. “Sure thing.”
Kevin lit a cigarette, and he took a long, deep breath of smoke, and for a moment he became very quiet. Something old was playing now, something slow, and sad, and kind of bluesy, and Kevin sat with his head in his hands.
“…an’ Charlie, I think I’m happy…for the first time since my accident…”
Across the room, I saw Tim Tim, thin and frail, lead the investment banker, who was loosening his tie, into the men’s room, and the room was starting to spin, and Kevin said to me, “The thing you have to know, man…the thing you have to know is that none of this is anything but what it has to be. You know?”
Again, in my mind, the flash, the voice, The Gateway.
“I mean…I mean…everything…you know? I just…I mean, I didn’t…I didn’t plan it, you know, but it…”
It’s all connected.
“It fits. It all fits, and it’s all…I know what I’m doing, okay?” He drank deep from his cheap domestic, and he said to me, “This fucking city is dying anyhow…you know?”
I said that I knew, though really only half connected to what Kevin was saying. I squinted and pushed the palm of my hand directly into the center of my forehead. Pressure on pressure.
My eyes were dry, and they were throbbing. I’d taken some pills before, whatever Tim Tim had in the medicine cabinet.
“This fucking city.”
I’d had too much to drink, and my feet were numb, and my face felt like it was on fire.
“I think…”
A deuce of junk, a two dollar shot straight to the blood stream in a stall in the men’s room, cooked in a spoon, and slammed into a freckle. The feeling…
“…you need to slow down, Ricky.”
…the feeling of flight. That rush of escape rifling through my body. Sliding down a silky rainbow made entirely of the best fucked you’d ever been.
The room was spinning, and I looked at Pink leaning over the table, and I looked at the men’s room door, and the lights were starting to flash, like the close combat of muzzle flares in the dark, off, and on and off, and nobody seemed to notice.
“Verm tells me you’ve been buying from him,” Kevin told me, as I reeled myself back in, but only in pieces, trying to follow the conversation.
Pink dropped a combination, sending the 14 and the 10 into opposing corner pockets, and the well-manicured beard was looking at his fifty now instead of her ass, my head was splitting open, and there were blue and white lights everywhere, and my eyes were on fire, and my throat was dry, and I could hear moaning from the men’s room, and Kevin was…laughing.
He was laughing…and I was falling apart.
No comments:
Post a Comment