“Maybe,” Hickory said.
“He shouldn’t have let himself get that way.”
“Maybe we should try and grab some sleep.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“I could use some of that.” I went to the table and poured myself a shot. The girls wore faces so thick they could’ve been spirits from an ancient play. At a low, nearly subliminal volume, Black Francis with his half-scream/half-croon kept repeating his line. It is time, it is time, it is time for stormy weather. “Is that some kind of joke?” I said, and killed the sound.
“Ode,” Lucille said.
“What?”
“It’s supposed to be ironic,” Hickory said.
“You’re just pissed,” Lucille said, “because of that time Black Francis said he wanted to cut your ponytail off.”
This was true. We’d gone to Smarts, this trendy LA hole you could spot a handful of stars in any given day. One night we found Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, and Ethan Hawke playing pool together, drunk as goons in a depot. The night in question we’d run across Black Francis — AKA Frank Black, AKA Charlie Thompson — hiding in a corner, scowling with his porcine eyes. I had a ponytail then, like Lucille said. What Lucille did not say was how I’d whipped it into Charlie’s face and told him I had to take a shit.
“Black Francis,” I said, “is a pudgy glob of snot with a tude.”
“You,” Lucille said, “were just too much of a puss to say anything to him. Basil would’ve kicked his ass.”
“Basil would’ve eaten his ass clean out if he’d thought it would get him somewhere.”
“He’ll kick your ass the second he gets back and I tell him about all the smack you’re talking.”
“He can eat my ass, too. Just like you. Eat my ass.”
“Maybe you children could save it?” Hickory said.
“Don’t look at me,” Lucille said.
“She sure as hell isn’t going to look at me,” I said.
Hickory started toward the stairs. “I’m going to lie down.”
Lucille and I sat there twiddling, furious in our ineptitude.
“We’re pretty sorry, all right,” I said.
“All I want is to get the hell out of this dump.”
“Whatever I’ve done to get on your bad side, I’m sorry.”
“Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?”
“Have it your way. But remember. You’ve got to deal with it till we’re gone.”
“You’ve got nothing, AJ. No life, nothing. If I thought otherwise, I’d say you make me sick.”
I shuffled across the room like a freshly spanked child and stopped before a penny on the carpet. Old Abe’s face in copper profile must’ve done something to me, because from out of nowhere, like some cat in a game show from Mars, I was swirling in a vortex of happenstance and quirk: Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were slain on Fridays, in the presence of their wives, both were shot in their imperial skulls. John Wilkes Booth was hatched in 1839, Lee Harvey Oswald in 1939. Lincoln had a gofer named Kennedy, Kennedy one named Lincoln… Yes, yes — and the hip bone’s connected to the leg bone. One bygone Christmas, before the looney tunes had stepped up to conk her, my grandmother gave me a two dollar bill, a Pet Rock, and a book of disco dance steps, including the Bionic Boogie, the Weekend Two-Step, and Le Freak. Last year, on Christmas Day, in a drunken tango down Waller Street with a girl named Date, I fell to the walk before a makeshift sign of bamboo and cardboard, its words scrawled with a paintbrush in the hand of a child: On December 24th THIS DATE PALM WAS STOLEN BY A SHORT WHITE MALE WITH SHOULDER LENGTH BROWN HAIR MERRY X-MAS DIRT BALL! And Lucille Ball’s all-time favorite show was M*A*S*H, and Amos Alonzo Stagg, AKA The Masher, invented the football dummy in 1889. Scat of the opossum, a beast that plays dumb when scared, is called werderobe, scat of the otter, spraints. The Yokut Indians used dust of spraints mixed with a liquor derived from the coffee bush to rid minds possessed by an odious spirit from the lands of thunder song and rattles. And while Jelly Roll Morton died believing he’d been cursed by a voodoo witch, Hippocrates ushered medicine from the realm of muddled superstition. Love is superstition, superstition, danger. Danger is an owl in the night.
SPC Stuyvesant Wainwright, IV
B Co 16th En Br
Operation Joint Endeavor
APO AE 09789
5 Feb 96
Dear Andrew Jackson Harerama vanden Heuvel
How are you my night-owlish friend? I’ve not heard any news from you since before you took on that job at State. Write to me and tell me what your plans are for the future.
I got a Christmas card from Jacquelyn and she said you weren’t seeing each other anymore. But that was two months ago. I’m sure things may have changed by now. I wrote Basil about him breaking up too and said we could be 3 bachelor amigos when we get back. But I’m sure your situations will have changed by then.
Life here in Bosnia is usually boring but occasionally dangerous. The first American just died yesterday — the papers/news media are filled with speculation as to how. Military intelligence has informed us that he went out to take a shit (right off the road). He was squatting down and saw something in the ground. He took his Leatherman pocket pliers and poked at it. The medics found half his leatherman embedded in his brain! Lovely, huh?
Yesterday I spent all night day burning shit. 9–1/2 hours to burn 1/2 barrel of shit and piss. It is a smelly, shitty detail but somebody has to do it. Ha ha. We pour diesel into the 1/2 barrel (which sits below the bench in the 3-seater latrine) and stir it up. Then we light it and stir it constantly. Sounds like fun, huh? I can’t wait for a job with a desk, buddy!
Buddies forever,
Stuyvesant
It was all too horribly true…
I had no money, I had no power, Lord of the Latrines I was, Prince of the Pubes, credentials alone to have got me elected President of the Cult of the Fool. How does such a man break out like wild dogs, much less like a parakeet? How does such a man give his ghosts the bodies they’ve lost, much less make them bleed?
Next to the bath, the cabin had two upper rooms. Dinky was unchanged, mumbling his flow of applesauce and bile. I groped my way into the second room, fixed on purging myself and the girl in it of the germs that kept us low.
Tweet, tweet, tweet, my darling, tweet, tweet, tweet!
And the moments, dear, look how fast, look how lithe and fleet!
MOST NIGHTS I LAY ON MY COT PICKING PETALS off imaginary daisies and conjure visions of those hours with Avey May Jones, of how as she melted to my words it struck me she’d grant my wish at last and give both body and words to me in return, if not forever then for what was left of that one sad night. All my life I’d dreamed of finding her. For all those days and all those years she’d been the knot of my dreams, my honeyed lump of winter mud, my mud song, simple, warm. I wanted to get stuck in her, all right. I wanted to stay that way forever…
I told her what had happened the time I came home to find Roper and Lucille. I told her what had happened at the Trophy Room, too, when Dinky and Basil had opened their can of fucked-up worms and set high the bar of mutilation. Then I told her the story of my wicked worthless life, of everything I’d thought I knew myself to be, who I was and where I’d been, and where I’d wanted to go and be. Had I tried to present myself as anything more than pitifully pitiful, she’d probably have abandoned me on the spot. However foolish I’d been till then, I was smart enough in those few moments to know my limits. The only thing worse than denying you’re pitiful is to act it while you are.
“Nothing I told you tonight was the truth,” she said. I’d just finished up my tale of squalor and abuse. “About myself, I mean. When we were playing Truth or Dare.”