It was then that I had an inspiration. I’d been sitting there for nearly half an, hour, getting nowhere, when it suddenly occurred to me to call Vogelsang. He was, after all, the manager of this operation, wasn’t he? Its guiding light and chief executive? I pictured him cozily ensconced with Aorta in his Bolinas museum, calmly chewing fish flakes while he rearranged his femur collection or sorted through his box of glass dog eyes. Yes. I’d call the son of a bitch and lay the whole thing in his lap, force him to make the decision for me. Hello? he’d say. Vogelsang, I’d say, this is Felix. I’m quitting. Yes, of course — why hadn’t I thought of it before?
The hinges of the big redwood door grated like marrowless bones, cigarette smoke and rockabilly yelping enveloped me, one foot followed the other, and once again I found myself standing before the bar in Shirelle’s Bum Steer. The place was precisely as I’d remembered it, no detail altered: the gallon jars of pickled eggs and bloated sausage, the souvenir pennant, the dusty bottles of liqueur. Shirelle, in mauve eyeshadow and a pink see-through blouse that looked like the top part of a nightie, was hunched over the telephone at the far end of the bar. In back, the customary Indians leaned over the pool table as if they were part of the déeAcor, while at the bar, two old men were engaged in a raucous debate. “I say it was the best thing I ever tasted in my life,” hooted the first, who seemed to be the randy old coffee drinker from the diner — or his morose counterpart. “Aaah, you’re a iggorant shitsack,” said the other, whom I recognized as George Pete Turner’s emaciated crony. “Any fool knows you can’t cook a decent piece of salmon without a slab of fatback pork to season the pan.”
I took a seat at the end of the bar and glanced significantly at Shirelle, who ignored me. She was exchanging passionate tidbits over the line with some up-country Lothario — Delbert Skaggs’s most recent successor, no doubt — and had neither time nor inclination to see to the needs of her customers. I was annoyed. But even more so when I saw that she was using the public telephone — obviously the only one in the place — which hung from the wall in a disused nook at the nether end of the bar. I dug out a ten-dollar bill, creased it, and laid it on the counter. “Shit,” snorted the old boy from the diner, “and I suppose them beans you fed me and Gerard last Saint Pat’s day was supposed to be something fancy, huh? Chili con carney, Texas style, is what you called it, didn’t you?” Pool balls clicked behind me, one maudlin jukebox tune dissolved in a jangle of trebly guitars and another started up without pause. I slapped the bar and jerked my finger at Shirelle.
I watched as she poured a final dollop of lewdness into the receiver, set it on the bar and came toward me, bosoms heaving beneath the flimsy blouse. She gave me a toothy smile that didn’t show the least hint of recognition — just as well, I thought — and said, “What’ll it be, honey?”
I ordered a Remy with a soda back. She poured herself three fingers of vodka and served me the cognac in a smudged water glass.
“You call them beans? I’d as soon have eat my own socks as that hog swill.”
“Godammit now, McCarey,” George Pete’s crony snarled, “you’re going to get me steamed you keep up like that. Thirty-seven years I put in in that kitchen at Tootses’ in San Jose and I’ll be a bare-assed monkey if I can’t out-chop, out-fry and out-charbroil a sorry scumbag like you any day of the week.”
“Thanks,” I said, as Shirelle set my drink down. “Are you going to be using the phone much longer?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, already leaning back toward the recumbent receiver like a dancer doing a stretching exercise, “just a minute or two more, that’s all.”
I lingered over my drink. Not simply because cognac is meant to be lingered over, but because I had neither the money nor the intent to overindulge: I was there to make a phone call. Period. I thought about nothing, the music droned on without pause, George Pete Turner’s crony waxed passionate on the subject of batter-dipped okra. When my glass had been empty for some minutes, I motioned once again for Shirelle, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was bent over the phone, both hands cradling the mouthpiece, her rear projecting at an angle and twitching idly. I began to develop an intense dislike for her.
I slapped the bar again, more violently than before. This time not only did Shirelle look up, but the two epicures as well. They’d been arguing a fine point of ham-hock preparation — whether to add flat or fresh beer to the stock — and both now desisted to turn and give me a wondering, distracted look. Shirelle again set the receiver down and joggled toward me. “Another?”
I pushed the glass forward. My voice was strung tight. “The phone?” I said.
Her laugh was like a bird of prey, shooting from its perch to swoop down and stun its object with a single explosive thrust. “My God!” she shrieked, “I’m so embarrassed! You know, I just forgot all about you, honey.” She puckered her lips and blew me a sympathetic kiss. “I’ll just be a sec,” and then the phone was stuck to the side of her face again, for all the world like some kind of malignant growth.
I was on my third drink before I finally got to the telephone. I couldn’t seem to find Vogelsang’s number in my wallet, so I had to go through information, losing a fistful of dimes in the process and systematically alienating three or four operators. He wasn’t listed, of course — except under one of his many aliases. The aliases were a joke, like the ads he ran in The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Bang was one of them. I tried it. No listing. With the aid of a fourth cognac, I began to recall others: O. O. Ehrenfurt, Malachi Mortis, Teet Creamburg. Nothing. I was frustrated, angry, nervous — each failure seemed to intensify the crisis, drum at my stomach, raise the ugly specter of Jerpbak from the grave of distilled spirits in which Shirelle had helped bury it. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered a company name he’d used two or three years back — Plumtree’s Potted Meats — and I had the exasperated operator try it. To my surprise and everlasting relief, she did show a listing for Plumtree.
My fingers trembled as I dialed, the words etched in acid on my tongue: I’m quitting, getting out, flying the coop, throwing in the towel. There was a click, the line engaged, and I was suddenly assaulted by a mechanical hiss immediately followed by an ineptly recorded version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” done entirely on Moog Synthesizer and what sounded like an off-key triangle. After a full two minutes of this, Vogelsang’s recorded voice came over the wire:
What is home without
Plumtree’s Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
This was succeeded by a rasping evil snicker that suggested nothing so much as a Bluebeard or a Dr. Mengele in the midst of one of his experiments, and then the click that disengaged the line.
None of this had given me much satisfaction. Whereas a moment before I’d been anticipating the release of unburdening myself — of arguing, cursing, demanding explanations for the inexplicable and allowing myself to be soothed by Vogelsang’s crisp, confident tones and professorial diction — I was once again adrift, already two sheets to the wind and utterly paralyzed with indecision. What to do? Buzz into San Francisco and stuff loyalty, camaraderie, responsibility and trust, or creep back to the summer camp like a condemned man waiting for the blade to fall? I didn’t have a clue.