Part I: Some Time Later
“This coffee sucks,” Pink said, quite loudly. The Daily News was open in front of her on the table. She was reading the gossip column, Rush and Malloy, about Lindsay Lohan and her legal problems in Switzerland and a designer whose boyfriend was having sex with the Prince of some Arab country. Somehow…the two stories were related.
Pink, Laird and Tim Tim were sitting in a Starbucks a couple of blocks away from the Museum of Natural Science, where Tim Tim and Laird had spent the morning popping Xanax and drinking free coffee in the cafeteria in between tours of Pompeii and Alexandria.
After a morning looking at plaster casts of people encased in ash for over a thousand years and listening to the single most boring presentation ever given about the death of a few thousand people (think Dan Rather on Ritalin and Wild Turkey and saying things like “capturing Pompeian life like a snap-shot”) Timmy thought coffee with a hooker was the perfect way to balance out the day.
Tim Tim took his black while Laird took his with cream and four sugars. Pink had ordered some pumpkin and cinnamon thing they were hoping to add to the menu in the winter. Elvis Costello was playing “Alison” through a little juke box and the prognosis on the pumpkin coffee wasn’t looking good.
“I mean it’s not that it’s bad,” she said. “It’s just so…pumpkin. It’s like drinking pumpkin pie,” she said. “I feel like a woman with no teeth drinking Thanksgiving dinner.” She took another sip. “Try this,” she said to Tim Tim.
He took a sip and shrugged his shoulders in vague approval. A dollop of the cream that formed the top layer of this over-flavored coffee was spread out over the boy’s top lip in a thin froth. Pink laughed and wiped his mouth with her sleeve. “You, little boy,” she said, “are hopeless. I can’t take you anywhere.”
Tim Tim pulled away, blushing. “I can do it myself.”
She pinched his right cheek and smiled at him. Tim Tim was smiling too, kind of. He just didn’t want Laird to see it.
“Somebody’s got to take care of you, kiddo,” she said. She kissed him on the forehead and gave him the rest of her coffee, which he quickly drank up. She flagged down the waitress, a pretty little blond thing who looked just out of high school. She stopped at their table with a big smile on her face, which didn’t last once Pink got to talking. “Let me get some real fucking coffee. Cream, two sugars, and if I even smell pumpkin, I’m gonna vomit all over the table and those ten dollar shoes you’re wearing.” She said all of this without ceasing to smile.
Laird wasn’t really paying attention, however, to what she was saying…just what she was wearing. She was wearing a hyper-short jean skirt and a red leather jacket with a white T-shirt that read, stretched tightly over her breasts, WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE. He was looking at her legs. Long, supple, tender flesh, thick at the thigh, trim at the calf.
“Keep staring, and I’m gonna charge you, asshole,” she said, yanking down the hem of her thigh high skirt.
“Charge me and I might have to demand my money’s worth.”
Laird floated a smile at her, but she just laughed at him, and the smile turned into a tight-lipped smirk.
Just as old Elvis was finished telling them all over and over that his aim was true, the juke flipped out the CD, with a loud, mechanical sound, kind of like a wind-up doll, and then put the exact same record back into the play slot.
The first couple of chords came up and Laird cocked his head. “Oh it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl. And with the way you look I understand that you are not impressed…”
The waitress came by with the coffee. Deborah was her name, according to the name tag, and she had a face full of freckles, and she set the coffee down a bit roughly. She was kind of smiling, but she looked as if she’d just drank a half gallon of curdled milk without stopping to breathe.
Pink licked her lips and smiled. “I’ve had guys piss in my mouth before,” she said. “So if you pissed in this, I’m going to know- and I’m going to kick the fucking shit out of you. Dig?”
“Whatever,” Deborah said and she tore the bill off a note pad and slapped it down on the table, shaking and rattling the coffee mugs.
Laird, trying not to think about Pink getting pissed on, asked the waitress, “Is this the same song?” Deborah, didn’t notice. She just watched as Pink took a long sip of coffee.
“See,” she said. “Coffee. No more fucking pumpkins.” She took another sip and smiled at Deborah. “Good girl.”
Deborah was about to leave, fake smile on her face, gum cracking between her teeth, but Laird stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Miss? Is this the same song that was playing before?”
“Um…yeah,” she said. “So what?”
“Is the machine broken?”
She shook her head and nodded towards a gaunt little man with hollow cheeks that seemed to cave inwards on his face and a shock of black hair so dark it was almost blue. He was drinking an iced coffee and sitting at a table in the corner, one hand on his drink, the other fingering one of five stacks of quarters. He was setting up for the night.
Nobody else was even looking at him.
“So, do you go to school, Deborah?”
Deborah squinted her eyes at Laird, and she laughed right in his face. “Fuck off, you junkie asshole. She pulled her arm away from him and walked back into the kitchen.
Deborah squinted her eyes at Laird, and she laughed right in his face. “Fuck off, you junkie asshole. She pulled her arm away from him and walked back into the kitchen.
In the corner, the old man was silently mouthing the words to the song. “Well, I see you’ve got a husband now. Did he leave your pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake? You used to hold him right in your hand. I’ll bet he took all he could ta-ake….”
“Aaaaalison,” Tim Tim was singing so far off key that for a moment, Laird wasn’t sure what he was saying. “I know this world is killing youuuu. Oh-oh…..Aaaaaaaaalison………my aim is truuuuue.”
Pink lit up a cigarette and took a long drag while Tim Tim was singing. She tapped her ashes into Laird’s coffee when he wasn’t looking. His eyes were fixed on the old man. The guy, who looked at least eighty but probably wasn’t any older than forty or fifty, was crying in hard, trembling sobs that made his whole body shake. His hand jerked suddenly and the plastic cup of iced coffee hit the ground with a large, wet slap and the coffee rushed out over the ground. Some of the customers turned around with their mouths open, staring at this crying mess of an old man, but most of them just drank their coffee and read their newspapers. Bush was considering invading Iran, Madonna was building a Kaballah temple on the Upper West Side- a very posh kind of temple where you really had to be somebody to get in touch with your inner, spiritual Jewish person- and Brad Pitt was impregnating Angelina Jolie. That and, apparently, the lattés were particularly interesting that afternoon.
Deborah came out of the kitchen in a very casual stroll, as if nothing of any interest was going on, and picked up the cup and the plastic lid. “Refill this for you, sir?” she asked, and all the old man could do was cry and cry and cry and she took that as a yes and went bopping on back to the kitchen with an odd sort of spring in her step.
The song was playing again, and the old man was actually singing this time, not mouthing the words. “I’m not going to get too sentimental like those other sticky valentines, ‘cause I don’t …” he coughed, a deep, phlegm kind of cough, and he picked up right where the song was, not where he’d been, “…been loving somebody. I only know it isn’t mi-ine…”
“It’s sad,” Pink said, but she was filing her nails.
“Yeah,” Tim Tim said, taking a cigarette out from behind his ear and lighting it. “It’s a good song. I wish I could fucking hear it.”
Laird sat and watched as this old guy slapped the coffee-wet quarters from the table and sprawled himself over it, his face and his fine, thinning gray hair in a puddle of coffee and ice and he started to beat his head against the table. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was twisted in a hoarse, soundless scream while he cried.
A TV behind the counter was showing the Channel 9 news. Ernie Enastos had a brand new tan, and his teeth looked newly bleached. He was smiling as he read off some middle of the program story right after a report that Jim Morrison was spotted playing tether ball with retarded children in Wyoming. “Police are baffled as fourteen people have been reported missing in Queens in the last five days. The victims, including Richard O’Malley, a 69-year-old retiree from Ozone Park, all seem to have vanished without a trace, leaving no word with loved ones or family members. The police have stepped up patrols throughout the borough, and…”
“It’s the Rapture,” the old man said, sitting up straight, coffee pouring down his neck and into his shirt. “The time of the lord is coming.”
Kevin. Kevin made fifteen.
Deborah came out from behind the counter with a fresh coffee for the old man and she placed it in front of him and put his hand on the cup and gave him a pat on the head. “You be good now. The boss doesn’t want any trouble.”
The old man took the lid from his coffee cup and he raised it over his head as if to throw it. Kevin had been gone for almost a year. Laird, his hands wringing together and his balls shrinking up damn near into his chest, watched as the old man tipped over the iced coffee and poured it all over himself.
He started to scream.
“The End Times are here,” he said. “We’re doomed, all of us. None of us is safe.” He got up from his table so fast and hard that the table tipped over, and what change was left on it went flying like bullets across the room and the old man fell to his knees and sobbed and wept.
Nobody came out from the counter, but here were sirens in the distance. The show was about to end. Fourteen people had disappeared, the Rapture was coming, or it had already begun, and God’s only messenger was crying and slamming his hands into the ground, and from the smell of things, he was also shitting his pants.
Tim Tim giggled, and Pink stared, reaching up under her skirt to adjust her panties. She looked at Laird, who wasn’t even looking at her legs anymore and she flipped him off without him knowing it.
“The end times,” Laird said, thinking about Vermin and wondering if he still had credit with Verm for a deuce, or if he had any aspirin or sleeping pills or fucking birth control or something to make him forget what he’d just seen. “I think this guy’s for real.”
He was thinking about the Rapture, and he was thinking about Kevin.
When the police came in, the juke box clicked and whirred and whizzed, and a record was retracted, and another one snapped into place and began to play. “Well it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl…”
Laird started laughing.
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