Ablutions (9 page)

There is a scandal attached to their romance, and this is what it is: Joey had been Dana's gym teacher. Their relationship was uncovered by the high school vice principal, an ambitious man with adult acne, intensely disliked by students and faculty alike. He one night found Dana and Joey holding hands and kissing at the local pizzeria and did not intervene
but alerted the news media, who descended on the restaurant with their camera lights blazing and microphones pointed lance-like toward Joey, at that moment entertaining Dana by chugging Bud Light from a frosted glass pitcher. He was humiliated publicly and dispatched "with a flamethrower"; Dana was beaten by her father and suspended indefinitely. The vice principal was promoted and threw himself a party in the cafeteria and nobody, not one person with either professional or personal ties to the man, came.

But now Dana has taken her GED and the unfortunate tale is behind her. She lives alone in Culver City and works two part-time jobs and is happy enough with her life and with Joey but her youth will not allow her true contentment and as the months pass she turns an eye to you. Joey leaves town overnight for an interview at an all-girls Catholic school in San Francisco and Dana arrives alone at the bar, drunk, in a low-cut blouse. She stays after hours and takes off the blouse and her skin is flawless and everything is all over in a matter of three or four minutes and you and she sit side by side staring into the darkness of the back room, the smoke from your cigarettes drawn into the space and disappearing. You think you can hear her crying but you do not want to look over or ask her any questions or try in any way to comfort her and if she got up and ran out the door you would not stop her. "I've never been with a white guy before," she says, extending a chubby baby hand, your pants still gathered at your ankles.

Discuss Ginny with her short brown hair, her pug nose, and her plump red hands like spotted meat left to swell in the desert sun. Her eyes are popped and her pores emit a smell of chili dogs and french fries dipped in mayonnaise
and you cannot help but wonder what horrors reside in her large intestine. She actively attends both AA and NA meetings but is always the last to leave the bar and will often stay after hours, by which time you are helplessly drunk and accordingly interested in her large white backside. She follows you into the storage room and will partially disrobe to be fondled and lightly slapped but she always stops you short of achieving anything purposeful and she will never touch you but only be touched. Now she puts her clothes back on and is very red and she leaves the bar with her hair in a mess, smiling in twisted triumph at the thought of your unfulfilled and piggish desires, and you curse her and her teasing ways, for after all she has done this before, to you and others, and you tell yourself this will not under any circumstances happen again. It happens again and again and again and again.

Discuss Danielle. She is fifty-six, with brittle, overdyed burgundy hair and orange lipstick and many sad tattoos whose meanings she hopes to share with you. She is a friendly person but has a greedy little girl's heart and her eyes grow narrow as she drinks and she looks at you as if you were the last piece of cake at the party. Margarita salt is gathered at the corners of her mouth and you sometimes walk with her to the storage room but only if you are extremely drunk. (She is forever buying drinks and placing them before you and calls you a spoilsport if you demur.) There is an honest light in the storage room and you want to smash it out to put Danielle at ease but she does not appear to mind, despite the bad times imprinted on her face and the shadows that dance beneath her bangs and eye sockets as she leans and then lunges toward you. You are backed against the ice machine and the storage
room is spilling over and you want to scream and laugh and shout and punch Danielle in her gut but she is working your belt like an angry parent and you know that you have come too far to turn back and so you stare at the bare bulb until it burns out your eyesight black and pulsing.

Discuss the short, overweight Hispanic woman who follows you into the storage room after you winked at her. She is so unattractive you believed this would be harmless but she has misinterpreted the gesture as one of lustful beckoning, and now without even a kiss to share she is on her knees, and though you are well behind in your work duties and have no time for such things you find your hand is reaching up to lock the deadbolt. You try to concentrate so as to expedite the romance and are staring at the labels of the many bottles on the shelves when the woman begins grunting and you assume she is doing something to herself as well as to you and you are looking down to see if this is true when you notice that her hair is so thin she could only be described as balding or partially bald, and your jaw drops at the corpse-gray color of her scalp and the dainty, pink-and-blue veins crisscrossing her head like a roadmap. You manage to finish up and the woman is standing and holding you around your torso. Now you can see her scalp plainly and you want to know if she has recently gone through some cancerous ordeal but cannot think of a way to bring this up without causing offense. You ask if she is all right and the woman looks up at you, the eyes of a stranger. She tells you she misses her boyfriend.

Discuss the alcoholic and narcotics-addicted pharmacist woman who you believe is actually a pre-op transsexual male. She is short and thin with an attractive, heavily made-up face and drugged bedroom eyes. Her short black hair is crunchy from hairspray and her bare shoulders are covered with tiny bumps that you assume are the result of whole-body shaving or waxing. She has a different man with her every night; he is always dark-skinned and hairy and a little unsure and frightened. These are lonely men and they come to hate you when they see that their date has feelings for you, and they ask her to leave for another night spot; when she will not go they leave alone and the woman shrugs and looks at you suggestively. She has asked you many times to walk her to her car or to the ladies' room, and has asked to accompany you to the storage room, but you always say no because there are certain mysteries in the human world that you have never been curious about and here is one of them. But one slow night you are so drunk and so completely uninterested in breathing and living that when another bartender dares you to find out once and for all the gender of this being, you lead her by the hand to the back bar men's room. Her eyes are wide with sex-craving as you walk her into the stall and you embrace her and begin to kiss her and you will know in a moment whether she is male or female when her bare leg touches the cold porcelain of the toilet and she pushes you abruptly back and storms out of the bathroom and toward the front bar. You follow and ask her what's wrong and she is nearly in tears and wants to know if you honestly believed she was the type to be groped beside a toilet? Just what kind of a whore do you think she is? You tell her that that was precisely what you were hoping to find out and she slaps your face and
leaves the bar swinging her purse like a mace. There are five or six customers in the room and they are applauding the performance and you wave to them modestly and the bartender's face is set in inquiring stone.

The Shammy is shaped like a television set (her head is shaped like a toaster oven) but one night she draws you into the storage room with the aid of fishnet stockings and lipstick and whiskey and dim lighting and her sweet, truthful smile. Now she comes by every evening in hopes that the stars will once more shine in her favor, and this is very sad because she lives an hour away and takes public transportation to visit you, and because you are looking sickly and do not smell good and have not once said anything of consequence to her, and the idea that you are an inspiration in this girl's existence is a true life's tragedy.

She probably loves you but you ignore her because you will bring her nothing but heartache and you know that if you ever see her cry you will want to kill her out of pity. But when she enters the bar shaking and with ripped tights and tells you she was mauled on the bus you feel a kindness for her and tell her she can sleep at your place if she likes and take the bus back home in the morning, and this cheers her and soon she is drunk and beaming. Throughout the shift you tell her that there will be nothing sexual between you and that you are thinking only of her safety and comfort and she agrees completely but is telling whoever happens to sit beside her that she is going home with you tonight so that soon you are being teased by your coworkers and by the child actor and Curtis, who says, "You really bagged a babe this time, boy."

You drive to your home with The Shammy at your side.
You are once again operating the magical LTD. (When your wife left with the Toyota you were forced to clean and partially repair your old car. You had it towed to a shop, where the mechanic would neither confirm nor deny the vehicle's magical powers. When pressed, he admitted he was a Chevy man. He got the car running for under a hundred dollars and gave you a mesh-back hat free of charge.) You are very drunk and have to close one eye to see the road and The Shammy leans against you and coos and rests a hand on your lap and soon your resolution is forgotten and you wake up hours later to vomit and wonder at the broad, freckly body lying on what was once your marriage bed. The Shammy raises an arm, milky white and thick as your thigh, and tells you that she is starving and wonders where you will take her for breakfast before driving her home (you never said you would drive her home). She names a brightly lit restaurant frequented by acquaintances of yours and asks for the telephone and invites several friends to the restaurant as well. They have heard all about you, she says, and cannot wait to finally meet you.

Molly draws you from the bar to an after-hours cocaine house party where you refuse the cocaine of the hosts and are asked to leave. You do not leave but retire to their backyard; spying a tree house you climb up the two-by-four ladder with a half-empty bottle of Jameson between your teeth. This chips the bottle and you enter the enclosed tree house pulling glass bits from your tongue and gums. There is blood on your fingertips, not too much, and the whiskey burns the little cuts in your mouth and Molly finds you sitting Indian style, wiping the blood on your pants. She takes off your pants and hers and there is no way to accomplish
what she hopes to accomplish in so small a space without her head sticking out the glassless window, and so this is what she does. Your bodies are rippled with goose bumps and she is grunting and the light of the early morning is beginning to glow so that when you accidentally drool on her back you see your spittle is all blood and you imagine your teeth must be covered and smeared red, like a boxer, like a street fighter, like a man walking away from a senseless tragedy, and you grin and wish like a fool for a mirror and camera.

Peg leans you against the jukebox and rubs your mid-section and whispers crude things in your ear but will not go into the storage room with you. After a particularly free-spirited year when she slept with every male employee at the bar other than you she has vowed to reclaim her morals and will not have sex for thirty days, and has twenty days to go, and you wonder if she will make it. Her ride home abandons her and she is forced to stay after hours so that you can drive her but now she will not drink and she will not let you near her and there is a look in her eyes of mistrust and even fear, but she is not afraid of you, only herself. You imagine there was a particular incident that informed her to go celibate—an excess of drugs at a male-dominated party is your guess—but you have ceased caring about the misfortunes of others and can no longer remember whose troubles belong to whom and so you do not bother to ask anyone anything anymore. You offer to pay for Peg's cab fare but she says she prefers to ride with you, and you ask her if she is sure, and she says that she is, and she settles her bag on the bar and asks for a double whiskey, no ice, and you sadly serve her.

You are parked on Rossmore and the old-timey neon sign on the roof of her apartment building illuminates the exposed interior of the LTD and she is facing you and you are drunk but not terribly so and you curse yourself for not bringing along a bottle. Looking into each other's eyes and speaking together in low tones, it becomes apparent that she hopes you will walk her through her troubles and show her that male-female relations can be lovely even in loveless union. She is looking for lust fulfilled but she searches also for respect, and in this she is out of luck because you do not know her or like her very much and you do not respect yourself and so the most you can offer this girl is time out of her life and an unsatisfactory meeting of bodies and, if the fates are generous, a couple of laughs and good feelings. At any rate there will unquestionably be a divot in your hearts before dawn and Peg seems to pick up on this and after thirty minutes of groping and pawing (the car interior is growing damp with dew) she breaks away and with great exasperation says, "What do you think you're doing?" You are smiling, because it is an utterly stupid and boring question, and you say to her, "I am sitting in an American car, trying to make out in America," a piece of poetry that arouses something in her, and you both climb into the back seat for a meeting even less satisfactory than you feared it might be. Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty lobby and into the lurching, diamond-gated elevator and into her cluttered apartment to scrutinize her furnishings and unread or improperly read paperbacks, and you wonder if
there is anything more depressing than the habitats of young people, young and rudderless women in particular.

The wine is all sediment and the cork crumbles into the bottle and you sit at a yellow Formica table in the dingy kitchen of Peg, drinking the vinegary wine (she is picking out the cork pieces, you are chewing them) and hoping not to talk, but now she wants to talk, and to understand and suffer, and as a result become humane and wise. She leans in and is serious and meaningful and you know what question she will ask before she asks it, and then she asks it, and the asking is terrible: