Ablutions (3 page)

Curtis loses his job and begins bringing things from his apartment into the bar as tips: Stereo equipment, DVDs, a video camera, and compact discs. At first the gifts are wrapped and labeled for individual employees but as his possessions dwindle he begins filling a gym bag with whatever detritus is lying around his room—books mostly, mutilated, frantically highlighted texts offering too clear a glimpse into Curtis's private life:
An Illustrated History of S&M, Grappling for Dummies, Homemade Explosives 1-2-3.
When there is nothing left to give, Curtis stuffs his coat pockets with pornographic magazines and hands these out indiscriminately throughout the night, speaking all the while of friendship and lasting cheer and the importance of sticking together. You now bring him drinks if only to condense your conversations and divert his increasingly psychotic gaze. No one else seems to notice his decline, but you expect he will shortly crack and
run rampant with a knife, or lob a pipe bomb into the bar. It will sever your body at the waist and your legs will cancan out the door, heading west toward the ocean on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Curtis is waiting by the Toyota after hours. He wants a ride home. You are drunk and cannot think of a lie to tell him and you walk around to unlock his door as if you were on a date. You are driving along in silence when he begins, out of the blue, to weep on your shoulder. You do not know what to do. You want to crash into a wall and die. He is also drunk and talking through a bubbling mask of spittle; now he will tell you his story. He has been evicted, he says, but breaks into the apartment to sleep sitting up in the closet. The new tenants are due at any moment and he lives in unending fear of their arrival and hasn't slept more than three hours a night for the past week and what little sleep he has had was riddled with nightmares. (He is standing by the sea watching two large red fish casually eating each other's faces. Soon they are but two wagging, blood-spitting tails.) You extend your sympathies but feel in your heart that Curtis has found his station in life, that he
belongs
in a closet dreaming of murderous sea life, that he
deserves
to live in a state of perpetual unease. And yet it is an awful fate, and you place a pitying hand on his shoulder and tell him that everything will work itself out.

"When?" he asks.

You are idling in front of Curtis's/not Curtis's apartment and he leans in gripping your hand and asks with absolute earnestness if he might live with you and your wife. He cannot pay you any rent but is handy with around-the-house repairs and will be happy to run errands. He says it will take him three to five months to get back on his feet and through the murk and fog of your drunken mind you are visited by the image of Curtis in his underwear sitting on the couch in
your living room shouting at the television set. This fills you with hysterical apprehension and your ensuing fit of laughter is completely out of your control. Now Curtis is gloomy and will not get out of the car. He asks for five dollars and you give him twenty and it occurs to you that you are witnessing the birth of a homeless man, and you will never again be one of those who look upon a staggering wino and say, "How did he get to be so low down?" Curtis is muttering bitterly from the passenger seat; he seems almost to be mimicking the idling engine.
Putter putter putter
—it has been a long Saturday night and you are tired and the sound lulls you to sleep and when you wake up at dawn you are alone and the car has run itself out of gas.

Discuss the apartment building across from the bar. It sits above a massage parlor and twice you see people drop from a high window to the sidewalk. You do not cross the street to view the results but your heart is hurt and confused by the sight of the falling bodies. They fall with certainty or with confidence; they seem to want to fall faster. (In your dreams, the bodies are always falling and will always fall from this building. You are always standing on the sidewalk, smoking and staring at their point of departure.)

You do not ask about but overhear the doormen speak of the incidents and you learn that the first was a suicide, the second a homicide. A third falling body follows on a night you are off sick and you feel as though you have missed an important engagement. Tony, the man who collects the empty bottles at closing time, sits with a beer listening to the after-hours talk of the building and bodies and he leans in and tells you it is the building's will to expel its occupants. With
a fluttering, arcing hand he says, "The Terrible Building That Vomits Humans."

Discuss Simon, the managing bartender. He was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa; after winning a modeling competition he immigrated to Hollywood at twenty years of age. Now forty, his hair is still white-blond and full, his body still fit and tanned, but after two decades of alcohol and cocaine abuse his face is beginning to sag, his dreams of success as an actor growing increasingly irrelevant. He swivels at the hips like an action-figure doll and delivers clipped witticisms and superfluous personal information with shocking redundancy. If, for instance, he has decided once more to quit drinking he will be sure to tell every customer about it all through the night, whether they are interested or not. "It's a question of mind over matter, mate," he will say. A few days later he will tell the same people about his plan to abstain for three long months. He is "Givin' the liver a breather, buddy." A week later he will be back to drinking tequila and when confronted with his earlier proclamations will plead ignorance or say that he had only been joking. He is the type who drops his towel in the sauna so that if you look—you cannot help but look—you will see his chiseled buttocks and uncircumcised penis, an image that will flash in your mind's eye for days to come like a death threat.

As manager, Simon has the unpleasant job of keeping the employees in line, and you sometimes find that he is screaming at you. He screams only when you are very drunk and so the gravity of his reproach is always misplaced and forgotten and the next day at work he will apologize and you will not know what he is talking about but you will forgive him
anyway and he will bring over two drinks so that you might restore peace and you will empty the glass and think, This must be how it feels to have a stepfather.

Each morning you wake up wondering how hung-over you will be. You are partially asleep or partially drunk or both and at first you cannot gauge your own suffering and you cast a hand outward and ask yourself, how does this hand feel? What about the arm, the shoulder, the chest, the torso? Is there any aching or discomfort in the legs? On a pain scale of one to ten (one is a finger-flick to your skull, ten is death), what is the rating from the neck up? You blink your eyes to test their sensitivity to light and crane your neck to crack your spine and gravity is pushing on your swollen, dehydrated brain and you inspect your body for wounds or tenderness. You are your own doctor, sympathetic but ultimately disconnected.

Your wife enters the room and you sit up in bed to greet her, a sudden movement revealing that you have a spectacular hangover and are in considerable pain. Your body is humming and your blood seems to be running against itself and you can hear your blood churning and try to describe this sound to yourself: A toy engine submerged in water. A propeller plane buzzing in the sky. The plane is hidden in fog. It is ten miles off.

Your wife is folding and unfolding sheets. She asks how you are feeling and you say the word
great.
She says you seemed drunk the night before, that you were singing, and you tell her you were not drunk but jolly. She heard you fall in the bathroom, she says, and you claim to have slipped on a sock. It was not your sock but hers and you could have been knocked
unconscious. You could have been killed. Your wife says nothing to this but sighs, and you tell her that if she still doesn't believe you then to go ahead and count out the aspirin in the bathroom cupboard (she always counts out the aspirin in the bathroom cupboard), for if you had been drunk, as she says, you would surely have eaten some before bedtime. Count out the aspirin, you say again, and see that none are missing, but she does not budge, she only nods, and you know by the somberness of the gesture that she has already found the aspirin all accounted for. She moves to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and there is a resonant crash as she drops the kettle into the sink to fill it and you wince at the sound and flip your pillow in hopes that the cooler cotton will chill your whiskey-warm face.

Your wife has long suspected you of covertly purchasing and consuming aspirin on your way home from work and she rifles the car for empty Advil packets and telltale 7-Eleven receipts. In these investigations she is always unsuccessful, as you are careful to discard your aspirin evidence, but she is certain that at some point each night you are floating aspirin atop a bellyful of whiskey and doing your body irreparable damage that will shorten your time together. She has cried about your aspirin abuse and once cursed you and demanded to know your aspirin secrets, but you only held her and told her lies. (She knew you were telling her lies.) What she does not know is that you have a bottle of aspirin tucked in the back of your study closet and that you eat them like strongman vitamins. What she does not know is that at another time, in another neighborhood, and hidden from another woman, you kept aspirin in the glove compartment of your magical car. Once you hid your aspirin in a shoebox, once in an acoustic guitar. You have always hidden your aspirin from some nosy woman who thought to come to the aid of your defenseless organs. When
the woman went away you would move your aspirin into your bathroom cupboard and gobble them freely and without fear of reprimand, but sooner or later a new woman would arrive and declare your lifestyle unhealthy and you would be forced once more to hide the bottle. This routine only brings you closer to your aspirin and you come to adore them in a star-crossed-lovers type of way. It is a doomed affair and will end in misery and death.

Now your wife's kettle is boiling (she is punishing you by letting its whistle blow) and there is apricot-colored bile rising from your stomach like mercury in a thermometer. If your wife finds you vomiting there will be no debating whether or not you are hung-over and your plans for the day will be ruined. (In the nighttime you dreamt of a cold movie palace and its rippling red curtain rising to reveal distraction from the coming day's agony.) You get out of bed sweating your whiskey sweat and your head is dizzy and pulsing and you are walking in the agitated hunchback style, first to your study for the aspirin and then to the bathroom, where you turn on the shower and radio and drop to your knees before the toilet.

You are a trained silent vomiter. You do not sigh, you do not moan, you do not breathe heavily, you vomit on the porcelain of the toilet rather than in the toilet water, and as far as your wife knows you have never once vomited in all your time together. This skill was not developed overnight and you are annoyed that you will never be able to share it with others, and you wonder if you wouldn't benefit from having a best friend. But wouldn't he then want to share his talents with you? And is this perhaps all that best friends do? Sit around discussing their talents? You are not interested in the talents of others and you decide you must be cautious about whom you let into your life.

You flush the toilet and watch your vomit as though it is a
departing train. Your stomach is empty and you will probably not vomit again on this day and you decide to take five aspirin, this in addition to the six you took the night before for a total of eleven in eight hours, which according to aspirin labels, doctors, girlfriends, and wives the world over is very bad for you. But you have been following this routine for so long you do not dare stop now and you cringe when you imagine how bad your hangovers would be without the aspirin.

You step into the shower stall with the bottle at your side. You are cautious to keep a hand dry as you tip it back and pour the aspirin into the cup of your palm, and you have counted out four when you spy a large, foreign pill peeking from the bottle's lip and your eyes widen and you exit the stall to pour the bottle's contents onto the countertop. You find four of these white pills mixed in with the aspirin and your heart is breaking with happiness as you eat them. You cannot recall how you came to possess them but you commend yourself for not taking the pills the night before, and you allow yourself to think of your drunken, blacked-out other half not as a man to fear but as one upon whom you would call if you were ever in trouble. This is a fantastic lie but because you are telling it only to yourself you do not feel bad about it.

You return to the stall and your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view, a reverse eclipse, and you watch with your eyes closed, your body propped in the corner of the stall like a mannequin. There is a knock on the bathroom door but you ignore it. The white planet is half exposed; it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward, and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say. Your words reverberate off the green and greener tiles of the shower stall
and there are footsteps in the hall and you pretend they are the footsteps of liberating soldiers and you call out to your wife, "Let me take you to the movies," but she does not answer. "I want to go to the movies today," you say, and think again of the rippling, rising curtain in the cold dark room of the theater, and of your wife's soft hand in yours and of her face, not angry and tight as it has been so often lately, but soft and pretty, as when you were courting, and she loved you, when she said she would help you, with freckles on her chin that you could touch with your fingertips anytime you wanted. But what words might you use that would restore your wife's faith in you, when you have used up so many words already, and when the words have all proven false? There are always other words, you tell yourself, there will always be some combination of words that will return your wife's love to you, and you hold your hand to your mouth to hide your smile. There are so many things to be happy about you do not suppose you will ever be sad again.