Budding Prospects (17 page)

I sat in the car debating with myself. The threat of Jerpbak and the desolation of the greenhouse tugged me in one direction, undifferentiated needs and personal loyalty in the other. Was I walking out, or was I going to see this thing through? A pithy question. I sat there chewing on it as the night settled in around me and the jukebox thumped seductively from behind the yellowed windows of the tavern. At first, I had no intention whatever of going in—I’d stopped in the parking lot solely to think things out—but then I began to feel that what I needed was a drink. Just a single drink, something comforting and calming—a warm cognac, for instance. But no, it was too risky. I’d been burned once—the thought of the previous debacle at Shirelle’s made me wince—and it would be foolish to tempt the Fates yet again. No: a drink was out. Absolutely and positively.

After a while, though, I found myself casually examining the other cars in the lot, as if they could somehow give me a clue to their owners’ personalities, mores and penchants for unprovoked violence. There were three of them, all American-made, all beat. I recognized the sagging Duster with the
I
’
M
MORAL
bumper sticker, but the others made no impression on me. The Duster, I realized, must have belonged either to Shirelle herself, one of the Indians or the wasted old character who’d restrained George Pete Turner on the unfortunate and only occasion I’d encountered him. But George Pete, as I vividly recalled (and here I unconsciously reached down to rub my calf in the vicinity
of his dog’s initial assault), drove a pickup, as did Sapers. The chances, then, were that neither was present. Of course, all this was purely speculative in any case, as I had no intention whatever of passing through that redwood door.

It was then that I had an inspiration. I’d been sitting there for nearly half an, hour, getting nowhere, when it suddenly occurred to me to call Vogelsang. He was, after all, the manager of this operation, wasn’t he? Its guiding light and chief executive? I pictured him cozily ensconced with Aorta in his Bolinas museum, calmly chewing fish flakes while he rearranged his femur collection or sorted through his box of glass dog eyes. Yes. I’d call the son of a bitch and lay the whole thing in his lap, force him to make the decision for me. Hello? he’d say. Vogelsang, I’d say, this is Felix. I’m quitting. Yes, of course—why hadn’t I thought of it before?

The hinges of the big redwood door grated like marrowless bones, cigarette smoke and rockabilly yelping enveloped me, one foot followed the other, and once again I found myself standing before the bar in Shirelle’s Bum Steer. The place was precisely as I’d remembered it, no detail altered: the gallon jars of pickled eggs and bloated sausage, the souvenir pennant, the dusty bottles of liqueur. Shirelle, in mauve eyeshadow and a pink see-through blouse that looked like the top part of a nightie, was hunched over the telephone at the far end of the bar. In back, the customary Indians leaned over the pool table as if they were part of the déeAcor, while at the bar, two old men were engaged in a raucous debate. “I say it was the best thing I ever tasted in my life,” hooted the first, who seemed to be the randy old coffee drinker from the diner—or his morose counterpart. “Aaah, you’re a iggorant shitsack,” said the other, whom I recognized as George Pete Turner’s emaciated crony. “Any fool knows you can’t cook a decent piece of salmon without a slab of fatback pork to season the pan.”

I took a seat at the end of the bar and glanced significantly at Shirelle, who ignored me. She was exchanging passionate tidbits over the line with some up-country Lothario—Delbert Skaggs’s most recent successor, no doubt—and had neither time nor inclination to see to the needs of her customers. I was annoyed. But even more so when I saw that she was using the public
telephone—obviously the only one in the place—which hung from the wall in a disused nook at the nether end of the bar. I dug out a ten-dollar bill, creased it, and laid it on the counter. “Shit,” snorted the old boy from the diner, “and I suppose them beans you fed me and Gerard last Saint Pat’s day was supposed to be something fancy, huh? Chili con carney, Texas style, is what you called it, didn’t you?” Pool balls clicked behind me, one maudlin jukebox tune dissolved in a jangle of trebly guitars and another started up without pause. I slapped the bar and jerked my finger at Shirelle.

I watched as she poured a final dollop of lewdness into the receiver, set it on the bar and came toward me, bosoms heaving beneath the flimsy blouse. She gave me a toothy smile that didn’t show the least hint of recognition—just as well, I thought—and said, “What’ll it be, honey?”

I ordered a Remy with a soda back. She poured herself three fingers of vodka and served me the cognac in a smudged water glass.

“You call them beans? I’d as soon have eat my own socks as that hog swill.”

“Godammit now, McCarey,” George Pete’s crony snarled, “you’re going to get me steamed you keep up like that. Thirty-seven years I put in in that kitchen at Tootses’ in San Jose and I’ll be a bare-assed monkey if I can’t out-chop, out-fry and out-charbroil a sorry scumbag like you any day of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said, as Shirelle set my drink down. “Are you going to be using the phone much longer?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, already leaning back toward the recumbent receiver like a dancer doing a stretching exercise, “just a minute or two more, that’s all.”

I lingered over my drink. Not simply because cognac is meant to be lingered over, but because I had neither the money nor the intent to overindulge: I was there to make a phone call. Period. I thought about nothing, the music droned on without pause, George Pete Turner’s crony waxed passionate on the subject of batter-dipped okra. When my glass had been empty for some minutes, I motioned once again for Shirelle, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was bent over the phone, both hands
cradling the mouthpiece, her rear projecting at an angle and twitching idly. I began to develop an intense dislike for her.

I slapped the bar again, more violently than before. This time not only did Shirelle look up, but the two epicures as well. They’d been arguing a fine point of ham-hock preparation—whether to add flat or fresh beer to the stock—and both now desisted to turn and give me a wondering, distracted look. Shirelle again set the receiver down and joggled toward me. “Another?”

I pushed the glass forward. My voice was strung tight. “The phone?” I said.

Her laugh was like a bird of prey, shooting from its perch to swoop down and stun its object with a single explosive thrust. “My God!” she shrieked, “I’m so embarrassed! You know, I just forgot all about you, honey.” She puckered her lips and blew me a sympathetic kiss. “I’ll just be a sec,” and then the phone was stuck to the side of her face again, for all the world like some kind of malignant growth.

I was on my third drink before I finally got to the telephone. I couldn’t seem to find Vogelsang’s number in my wallet, so I had to go through information, losing a fistful of dimes in the process and systematically alienating three or four operators. He wasn’t listed, of course—except under one of his many aliases. The aliases were a joke, like the ads he ran in
The Berkeley Barb.
Dr. Bang was one of them. I tried it. No listing. With the aid of a fourth cognac, I began to recall others: O. O. Ehrenfurt, Malachi Mortis, Teet Creamburg. Nothing. I was frustrated, angry, nervous—each failure seemed to intensify the crisis, drum at my stomach, raise the ugly specter of Jerpbak from the grave of distilled spirits in which Shirelle had helped bury it. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered a company name he’d used two or three years back—Plumtree’s Potted Meats—and I had the exasperated operator try it. To my surprise and everlasting relief, she did show a listing for Plumtree.

My fingers trembled as I dialed, the words etched in acid on my tongue:
I’m quitting, getting out, flying the coop, throwing in the towel.
There was a click, the line engaged, and I was suddenly assaulted by a mechanical hiss immediately followed by an
ineptly recorded version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” done entirely on Moog Synthesizer and what sounded like an off-key triangle. After a full two minutes of this, Vogelsang’s recorded voice came over the wire:

This was succeeded by a rasping evil snicker that suggested nothing so much as a Bluebeard or a Dr. Mengele in the midst of one of his experiments, and then the click that disengaged the line.

None of this had given me much satisfaction. Whereas a moment before I’d been anticipating the release of unburdening myself—of arguing, cursing, demanding explanations for the inexplicable and allowing myself to be soothed by Vogelsang’s crisp, confident tones and professorial diction—I was once again adrift, already two sheets to the wind and utterly paralyzed with indecision. What to do? Buzz into San Francisco and stuff loyalty, camaraderie, responsibility and trust, or creep back to the summer camp like a condemned man waiting for the blade to fall? I didn’t have a clue.

Huddled there in the corner and clutching the receiver as if it were a resuscitory device, I sipped at my drink and glanced forlornly round the room. A blue haze of cigarette smoke blurred the atmosphere and dimmed the feeble flicker of the wall fixtures (which were molded, I noticed, in the shape of steer horns). I could just make out the form of the three Indians, all lined up in a row now, gravely chalking their cues and contemplating the configuration of balls on the table before them as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe. Shirelle had joined the two epicures at the bar and was engaged in a hot debate over the length of time a three-minute egg should be cooked.

I finished my cognac. In combination, and on an empty stomach, the drinks were beginning to have a twofold effect—first, of intensifying my feelings of guilt and disloyalty, and second, of exacerbating the panic I felt over the nasty coincidences that
had begun to infest my life. I sat there, half-drunk, warring with myself. I probed an ear for wax, toyed with a coaster that showed a red-nosed man crashing a car through his own bedroom wall, tapped my feet on the brass bar-rail. And then, as I couldn’t decide what to do—I found I was unable either to let go of the receiver or to get up from the barstool—I thought I might as well take things a step at a time and put something on my stomach. When Shirelle turned to pour herself another double vodka, I ordered a beer and two pickled eggs.

I don’t know what it was—the taste of the eggs, the odor of the vinegar or the odd amalgam of egg, vinegar, soda cracker, and beer—but I was suddenly skewered with nostalgia. These eggs, this beer, this depressing disreputable rundown backwater dive—together they recalled other eggs, other beer, other dives. I thought of a college friend who’d spent every waking moment cloistered in a saloon killing piss-yellow pitchers of draft beer and whose only sustenance derived from beer nuts, beef jerky and pickled eggs. Brain food, he called it. He drank up his book money, his date money, his food, rent, gas and clothes money, he grew pale, his flesh turned to butter. I worried about him—until I quit school. The graduation announcement came the following year, his name prominent at the top of the page, summa cum laude. I thought of a girl named Cynthia, who climbed mountains, wore lederhosen over her rippling calves and once let me creep under a table in a dark bar and stick my head between her thighs. I thought of fights, forged ID’s, vomit-streaked Fords. The eggs tasted as if they’d been unearthed in an Etruscan tomb, the beer was flat. I ate mechanically. Faces drifted into my consciousness, epoch by epoch, counters on an abacus. Then I thought of Dwight Dunn.

Like Phil, Dwight was a touchstone. We’d gone to school together, double-dated, squeezed pimples side by side, we’d struck out, scored, experimented with tobacco, alcohol and drugs together, we’d postured, pronounced, chased the same women, earnestly discussed Nietzsche and Howlin’ Wolf late into the night. Dwight had been best man at my wedding; when his father died I flew in from the West Coast and sat up with him. We were children, adolescents, bewildered adults. Dwight had stayed in New York—he was living on East 59th Street now
and working for a public relations firm—but we’d kept in touch. Unlike Phil, he was a straight arrow, steady—I could picture the baggy chinos, madras shirts and Hush Puppies he favored, and the look of pained concentration (as if he’d been forced to decipher
Finnegans Wake
while undergoing electroshock treatment) the contact lenses gave him. Dwight, I thought, alcohol tugging at my flesh, good old Dwight. At that moment I was visited with my second inspiration of the evening: I would call him, call him and listen to his soft stuttering laugh and the comforting rhythms of his speech.

I dialed like a man in a burning building. Come on, I thought, counting the clicks, and then the information operator was on the wire, quick and efficient, and I scribbled the number on my bar napkin and called collect.

“Hello?” Dwight’s voice sounded distant, weary. For an instant I thought I’d wakened him—but no, it was just after ten in New York.

The long-distance operator interceded with a deadpan impression of Desi Arnaz: “Colleck call for any wan from Fee-lix: will you ’cept the charge?”

“What?” A tapping came over the line, and I envisioned a repairman in Kansas hammering a downed wire back in place. “Yes, yes—put him on.”

“Dwight?”

“Felix?”

“How you doing?”

“Fine,” he said. “What’s up?”

I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give him specifics anyway. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m a little depressed.” Just then Shirelle threw back her head and laughed like an abandoned old whore with a meter on every orifice. “Did I tell you I’m rooming with Phil?”

We talked for half an hour before I understood the reason I’d called. “Listen, Dwight,” I said finally, “you think you could read me something from one of your notebooks?”

Dwight was a compulsive record-keeper—no, he was pathological, half a step removed from the crazy who keeps his own feces in labeled fruit jars. Not only did he list every experience he’d ever had—everything from breaking up with his girlfriend, rupturing his spleen or being victimized by pickpockets in
Madrid to buying a pair of shoelaces—he kept track of every meal he’d eaten, the clothes he wore, states, counties and municipalities visited and distances traveled, gifts given and received, feelings felt, gas, electricity and water consumed, the number of points he’d scored in an intramural basketball game in junior high, cab fares, tips, the books he’d read, movies he’d seen (including where and with whom), records, shoes and nose drops purchased, every bowel movement, hiccough, belch and whimper of his life. He could tell you how many streetlamps line FDR Drive and how many times he’d passed under them, give you a blow-by-blow account of a trip he’d made to visit his grandparents when he was thirteen, describe Radio City Music Hall in terms of the number and texture of the seats.