Gesh’s gaze was fixed on the bouncer. For his part, the bouncer merely stood there, his eyes sweeping the room contemptuously. In front, elevated above a mass of straight-backed chairs and glossy cocktail tables, a folksinger perched on a stool and did early-sixties stuff about harmony and the brotherhood of man. “Cabbagehead,” Gesh muttered, still glaring at the bouncer. “Sink licker.” I tried to restrain him, but he brushed me aside. I watched as he made his way to the bar, ordered a triple créeGme de menthe — it came in a big water glass — cakewalked past the bouncer like a harmless high-spirited fraternity guy out on a date, then spun round and neatly upended the glass on the bouncer’s head.
“Sorry,” Gesh said with a sick grin.
For one stunned second the bouncer held himself in check — Is this guy serious? Should I be angry? — before hurling himself forward like a steel wrecker’s ball. I remember thinking, as the viscous green slop congealed the bouncer’s hair and startled his shirt, that Gesh had erred irretrievably, that we’d shortly be confronted by the police, and that I’d once again find myself digging deep for bail money. But Gesh surprised me. Stoned, drunk, and perverse as he was, he’d planned his move well—“Just counting coup,” he later explained — and at the moment of truth, with exquisite timing, jammed a glossy cocktail table into the behemoth’s knees. Reeking of mint, the big man took a fall, spewing drinks and crushing glass, wood and Lucite beneath him. The diversion gave Gesh — and me — time to dodge out the door, duck round the corner and stumble the length of a three-block alley like handicapped sprinters trying out for the Special Olympics. We finally pulled up behind an overflowing dumpster to catch our breath and erupt in nervous, triumphant, moronic giggles. This was silly, juvenile, undignified and ultimately unfulfilling, the sort of thing you did when you were sixteen. It was all that, but somehow it was hilarious, too.
In mid-laugh, as if it were a natural extension of the joke, Gesh suddenly doubled over to evacuate the contents of his stomach. I listened to his wet heaving gasps — the dying throes of a hero with a sword twisted in his gut — and began to feel queasy myself. “The smug son of a bitch,” he choked, and then gagged again. When he was finished, he straightened up, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and said, “What next?”
It was one-fifteen. We’d gone through the cocaine and all but six of the Quaaludes. The night had turned cold, and a dank insidious fog had begun to feather its way through the streets, smoothing angles, blurring distinctions. We headed away from Broadway, looking for a place I knew — or thought I knew — where we could have a nightcap.
I was feeling enervated, as if I’d been walking forever, part of a commando raid in Bataan that didn’t quite come off, a misguided explorer hoofing it back to civilization. The night had been a disappointment, there was no doubt about it. We’d left the apartment in high spirits, needful, aching with desire, and we’d struck out. Bombed. Wound up empty-handed and addle-brained, with a bad taste in our mouths. The amazing thing is that we’d expected anything different — this was the way it always was and always would be, world without consummation, amen.
In a way, it was like fishing. Once a year, having forgotten how insufferable it is, I would go fishing. A day would come when I would awaken to think of hooks, lines, sinkers, the mysteries of the deep, and then of broiled halibut or rock cod in black bean sauce. Like Ishmael too long ashore, I would hurry down to the marina, snuffing the salt air. Then I’d fork over thirty-five bucks to the charter-boat captain, stand in a knot of drunken sportsmen and vomit over the rail for six hours. Fish? By the end of the day I couldn’t imagine that that pounding pitching hell of an ocean was anything but the lifeless desert it seemed.
I was operating on this level of unhope when we pushed through the door of the bar I’d been looking for, only to find that this was a different place altogether. Strangers, clots of them, stared up at us — strangers who didn’t give a shit if I lived or died or ever again experienced love in all my fruitless wandering years on earth. Candles glowed ’on rough-hewn tables, smoke rose like mustard gas from a hundred cigarettes, the jukebox rattled with slash-’em/tear-’em rock and roll. I saw long noses, drawn canine faces, earrings, nose rings, blue hair, orange hair. No one was smiling.
“Uh, listen,” I said, taking Gesh by the arm, “I don’t think this is the right place.”
Gesh didn’t look overconcerned. He merely shrugged, and was about to advance on the bar when a muscular voice cut through the jukebox frenzy to shout out our names: “Gesh! Felix! How the fuck you doing?”
It was Rudy. Chinless, noseless, skin the color of ripe grapefruit. He was standing at the bar with a guy so short and deformed he could have been a chimpanzee dressed up for the occasion. “Hey!” Rudy shouted, ushering us forward, “I’d like you to meet my friend Raul.”
Raul was about four and a half feet tall, and there was something seriously wrong with his shoulders and torso. His shoulders were massive — big as a linebacker’s — and swelled out in a lump at the base of his head. He had no neck, and his chest and abdomen were foreshortened, so that he looked as if he’d been compressed vertically. I shook his hand and nodded at the crazed glint in his black eyes.
“And this,” Rudy was saying, “is Jones.” I now saw that Raul was flanked by a guy about thirty, a cool character with short hair combed straight up and back and wearing a tie the width of a tape measure. He nodded, and then took my hand perfunctorily. “My friends call me Bud,” he said.
“Hey, what you drinking?” Rudy shouted, and then asked where all the women were. “What,” he said, “did you strike out? Yeah?” He handed me an Irish coffee. “Don’t worry about it, man — me and Raul and Jonesie are on our way to this place where there’s some real action — right, Raul? — and you guys are welcome to come along if you want.”
Jones? Where had I heard that name before? Farmer Jones, Casey Jones, BoJo Jones. I beat on the brat, screamed the jukebox, I beat on the brat,/With a baseball bat. “Why not?” I said.
Outside, the fog had thickened. Cars vanished, parking meters were invisible at a range of ten feet, the light from storefronts was so diffuse it could have been spread with a butter knife. The five of us scraped out the door and shuffled down an alley, then crossed a street I didn’t recognize. Someone lit a joint and handed it to me. We walked on, our voices pitched low. Nobody said much.
If I was disoriented earlier, I was totally lost now — at first I thought we were headed in the direction of Chinatown, but with the fog and the various turnings I was no longer sure. “A block more,” Rudy said as we swung into a street as softly lit as a watercolor. I saw red neon off to my left, a sign winking on and off, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t make out the lettering. Then Jones’s voice, disembodied, was speaking somewhere behind me: “This is my street, man — see you tomorrow, Rude.”
“Hey Jonesie”—Raul’s voice—“what’s the matter? No lead in your pencil?”
“Tired, man. Hey, good to meet you,” Jones said, just a shadow now. “Ciao.”
We walked on. I glanced up and saw that the streetlights were truncated, dissolved in cloud, earth and sky become one. “You know, that Jones is a real pussy,” Raul said, and Rudy sniggered. I realized at that moment that I liked Rudy about as much as I liked snakes or trunk murderers, and that I liked his hunchbacked friend even less. And Jones — Jones was one of ten thousand people you meet casually and will never lay eyes on again, but still there was something about him that unsettled me. It was the name, I guess. Or the cool, faintly ironic look of appraisal he’d given me as we were introduced.