Ablutions (15 page)

Discuss your feeling of wonder when the pilfered twenty dollars is not reported missing at the end of the night. Discuss your routine of thieving that stems from this incident, and the criminal spree you quickly embark upon.

Your plan is to keep an at-home stolen-monies pile, separate from your life-monies pile, and to cultivate it to a respectable size and then, at some key point, utilize it dramatically. Within a month you have three hundred dollars and you feel great relief and satisfaction, as if justice has been served, and you wonder why you waited until this late date to begin stealing from the owner, who you (on a whim) decide is a bad man who expects you to gladly damage your mind and body with this potentially deadly work of washing dishes in a bar, and who has never asked you how your feelings were doing even though it is fairly obvious that they, your feelings, have been hurt and are still hurting yet.

But the pile of pilfered monies is not growing fast enough and you concoct another manner to steal from the bar and here is what it is: You do not take any money from the safe. For three hours during every shift you are alone in the bar, from six o'clock to nine o'clock each night; this is your time to shine. Two customers come in and order two beers and two shots and you charge them twenty dollars and you open the cash register (with its loud, clanging, official-sounding ring) but you do not enter the cost of the drinks into the machine and when these customers leave you retrieve the twenty-dollar bill and fold it into your wallet. When more customers arrive you repeat this routine and the next morning you count a hundred and twenty dollars to add to the pile. (There had been a moment at the end of the night, with Simon examining the
register tape, when you were prepared to raise your hands and call the police on yourself, but he had said nothing and in fact had given you an extra twenty dollars because, he had told you, you actually seemed half sober for most of the shift.)

The strange thing is that from the time you began to steal, you
have
been drinking less. One reason for this is that you are fearful of being caught and wish to keep your head clear, but also there is something about knowing you are exacting revenge on those who have saddled you with this work life which has a calming effect on your entire attitude, and you are surprised to find that you are once again drinking not to black out your mind and feelings but for the old-time reasons of good-natured happiness and the desire to celebrate the rhythm of your own beating heart. And so you are faced with another of life's semi-annoying ironies: You were never such an efficient employee until you began to rob from your place of work. Now you are stealing an average of two hundred dollars per night, and your pilfered-monies pile is spilling over onto the floor. You purchase a chalkboard and hang it above the pile; across its face you write out things like:
Sailboat? European Relocation? Motor Home
+
American Road Odyssey?
These ideas and others rush you along in your life and you feel for the first time in years that you are living toward something of significance. Your wife calls to ask if you are doing any better and you say, if I were doing any better I'd explode, which she misinterprets as another one of your declarations of desperation, and she hangs up on you.

One night, overly confident and gladdened by your plans, you lose your sense of propriety and steal three hundred and fifty dollars over the course of your shift. This proves to be too much, and at closeout Simon asks you questions that lead you to believe he suspects you of thievery (he makes no outright accusations but his opinion lingers in his every word).
The next night you are setting up the bar when an exceedingly friendly man enters and orders a beer. He matches the tip with the beer cost and you, standing at the register, watch him watch you in the mirror above the bar and it occurs to you that this man could be a plant sent by Simon or the owners to uncover your fingers as either sticky or unsticky, once and for all, heaven help us, God bless us, may we rest in peace through eternity and the chilly outer reaches of space and time, so called (gavel slam). But Simon (or whoever) sent a man with poor eyesight and his squint gives him away definitively because there is no reason in the world for a customer to scrutinize your work this closely, so you, understanding your position, ring the order in properly, giving the register a wide berth so as to reveal the numbers of the transaction in neon, which the man sees despite vision problems. You hand him his change and he is acting the part of the glad beer drinker to your convivial, glad-to-be-here host. It occurs to you with a kind of wincing sadness that he is most likely an aspiring film star, and that this real-life role he is playing is his way of putting his skills to the test, and you can hear him saying to his bored-to-tears girlfriend or boyfriend, "If I can fool this bartender, I'll know that I've finally made it."

It is seven o'clock and a group of Hollywood types enters to celebrate the wrapping of a television commercial. They are throwing money at you hand over fist but the glad beer drinker still sits at the bar and watches your every move and you are becoming more and more annoyed by his presence when you think of your pilfered-monies pile, presently at a standstill. Hoping to get him drunk, you elect to switch him from beer to whiskey, offering him shots on the house, which he finds interesting, asking if you often give out free alcohol to strangers. You tell him, "No, there's just something so
real
about you, you know? From the moment I saw you I thought,
There's a regular guy." The glad beer drinker is happy to hear this and he accepts the whiskey in his hand and thinks of the time in the hopefully-not-that-far-away future when he will be interviewed and asked about his years of struggle and toil—this story of fooling a thieving bartender would make a fine, humorous footnote. You give him another shot, and another and another, matching shots with him and egging him on, only the glad beer drinker is no drinker at all and soon he is rubbing his eyes and cursing aloud to himself and he does not notice when you put a Post-it over the display on the cash register to cover up its telling numbers.

The crowd swells and you no longer ring in the drinks but only open the machine for the change, keeping track of the amount coming in on a piece of scrap paper. You give the glad beer drinker a fifth shot and he begins talking about a play he is in, and he asks do you have any idea how taxing it is to have to cry every night? He tells you that if you write down your name he will put you on the ten-percent-off list, and you thank him. Now Brent the unhappy doorman comes over and you point out the glad beer drinker as a drunkard with covert plans to upset the serenity of the room. Brent nods and takes the glad beer drinker by the arm and tells him it's time to go now, champ. The glad beer drinker is confused and begins to shout that you don't understand who he is, and that you're all going to hear about this later, that it's going to be your jobs when he gets through with you, and Brent bends the man's arm back in a painful hold and the man submits with a yelp and the crowd celebrating their television commercial cheer the glad beer drinker on, taunting him and calling out into the black and flashing room, and the moment Brent leads the man out the door you pick up a calculator and add up the pilfered monies and this number impresses you and you wolf-whistle as you fold the bills away in your wallet.

Discuss the later happenings of Curtis. He once was lost and in fact had been missing but now is found, and he enters the half-filled bar in regular civilian's clothes, and you can tell by the bobbing of his head that he has been drinking elsewhere. He marches past the tables and stands rigidly before you, saluting and announcing loudly that Private Curtis is reporting for duty, sir! And you, thinking that Curtis has at last done something humorous, move to pour him a whiskey which he drinks in a gulp before repeating the salute, etc., and you say, "Okay, little less funny the second time," and he explains that he is not making a joke but that he has
joined the Marines.
You ask him if he is aware there is a war on and he says that he is, and that he will sleep well knowing that he's done his part, a phrase that makes you want to drown him, and you tell him that if he's joined the Marines during the bloody reign of the present-day commander in chief he'll quite possibly wind up sleeping a little too well, which he seems to think is in bad taste, and here is something new: Curtis is offended by
your
vulgarity. Hoping to mend fences, you tell him it's free drinks till closing time, and you wish him luck with every passing shot and he drinks the whiskey but continues to sulk at your insensitive remark. Finally you tickle him under his sickening, gobbly chin and tell him that everything is going to be all right, which is a lie, and which he knows is a lie of the highest order.

It's free drinks till closing time but Curtis passes out hours before that. The child actor comes by to pick him up and you greet him like an old friend (you do not know why you do this). You remember the last time you saw him, when the bar was raided and you gave him a kicking; the child actor does not know exactly what happened that night or who it was that bashed his face but he is aware on a base level that you acted
in one unkind way or another—his reception to your hellos is chilly and distant and when you tell him how good it is to see him he merely belches. Now he is struggling to remove the body of Curtis from the room; you are watching him struggle; Simon is standing at your side. Simon served in the South African military as a youth and he shares with you his doubts regarding Curtis's assimilation into the war machine. As you watch Curtis's feet disappear out the door, Simon turns to you and says, "That poor bastard doesn't know what he's in for."

"I hope he dies out there," you say, and you laugh-sputter at the statement because it is a terrible thing to have said aloud and you hope you can play it off as a joke but Simon is staring hard at you, and now he knows for a fact something he has suspected for years, which is that you have a streak of hate in your heart and that it is deep and wide and though you have hidden it, it is unmistakably uncovered now, and he will never feel that previously mentioned fondness for you again, and you can see the words in his eyes as plain as day: I'm going to get you fired from here, mate.

Curtis is gone for five weeks (the child actor is gone for five weeks) but they return together to celebrate his, their return. You learn that Curtis did not go far in the Marines, was in fact kicked out of basic training because he could not shoot straight. "There's something wrong with my eyes. They tell me to shoot sideways," he says. He shrugs and clutches the whiskey you have brought him and when you ask how his feelings are doing he says the same thing he always says about those who reject him: "Fuck 'em in the ass." But you can see that his feelings are hurt and you wonder at the
pain of a man stupid enough to be turned away from the Marines during a war.

The child actor has now clearly made up his mind about you and seems to have poisoned Curtis's mind as well, and you have never been so surprised as when they take out their wallets to pay for their drinks. They fan out their cash anticipatory and it seems to you that the world is running backward and you push the money away but they insist on paying and Curtis, looking at you as though you were his oppressor, says, "No more. From here on, we buy our drinks." "Okay," you say in a you-asked-for-it tone of voice, and you tell them the cost of the round and they cannot hide their shock, for it has been so long since they paid for a drink they have forgotten the value of good Irish whiskey and imported beer. They pool their cash and pay out the round (no tip) but you notice that for the next, which they order from Simon, they ask for Pabst in a can and whiskey from the well, and you walk over just in time to cheers them, only you are drinking Jameson, and it is golden blond in the cup whereas theirs looks and smells like dirty gasoline. And you watch their quivering throats as they toss the whiskies back and you can see that their bodies wish to reject the foul liquid but they push the alcohol down into their stomachs and look at each other and shrug.

"It's bad but not that bad," the child actor says.

"It's bad but I've had worse," Curtis agrees.

You drink your Jameson down and your body welcomes it as though it were sunshine in a glass. Curtis and the child actor look at you but do not talk to you; they move down the bar to sit nearer Simon and you notice throughout the night that when these three speak they speak closely, in private, and that their eyes often fall on you: Three people who once liked you, who do not like you any longer.

Discuss your wife. She will not return your phone calls and has moved to Pasadena to live with and be closer to another man. You are at the bar, staring at the telephone and disliking it when Merlin enters for the first time since the party/orgy/bloodbath at Simon's house. The right side of his face is scabbed and he looks to be half starved and you are gladdened by his poor appearance because you have recently had many unpleasant dreams about him and have come to intensely dislike or hate him, and you wonder if he is addicted to drugs or living in his car or has contracted a fatal disease or fallen under the angry spell of a fellow witch-peer? He notices your happy and curious expression and is offended by it; he stands before you, resting his hands on the bar, and says after catching his breath, "You keep thinking about her but she isn't thinking about you. She's glad she isn't thinking about you. You weren't good for her life. Get on with your life. She'll never think about you again if she can manage it." He is exhausted by carrying the burden of these words and he walks heavily to the door, muttering to himself about a need for sleep and relaxation.

You are hurt by these words and you want to slash Merlin's face with a knife for saying them but he is gone and now there is nothing to do but live with them. You call your wife's new phone number and your heart sinks at the sound of another man's voice on the machine, with your wife laughing in the background at his humorous leave-us-a-message comedy routine. You hang up the phone and move to the whiskey assortment and take a short drink of Jameson (you are averaging a mere three or four short drinks per night now) but the taste is so terrible it makes you gag, and you cannot understand it because this has never happened to you before and you look
at the bottle and say to its green-glass shoulders, bare and ladylike, "Not you too?"