Fake House (9 page)

I emptied a clip from my AK-47, bent down to retrieve the loose change from his pocket, doffed my V.C. helmet, and disappeared into the jungle.

Nine o’clock came and went and there was no sign of Deborah.

Around midnight, when I was already in bed but not yet asleep, the doorbell rang.

She came in, carrying two bags, looking flustered and apologetic. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s all right.”

“I brought some beer.”

I smiled.

“Were you sleeping?”

“I was lying down, yes.”

“Can we drink in the bedroom?”

“Sure.”

I could never recall her looking this haggard. She had a history of working one weird job after another, at the Rite Aid or something—when she was working at all—and the last time I had heard about her, she was going out with some drywaller from Port Richmond.

We stripped to our underwear and tucked ourselves quickly under the blankets. The heater in my apartment didn’t put out very much, and it was extremely cold outside.

“This beer tastes good!” I exclaimed after downing the first can.

“It’s Rolling Rock!” Deborah said.

“Anything is good if you haven’t had it for a while.”

“Are you broke?”

“I’ve been selling practically all my books,” I gestured toward the nearly empty shelves. Deborah’s features, even in the dim light, looked worn out and forlorn.
You are like a sister to me
, I mused,
we’ve known each other forever
.

“I’m down to ten bucks,” she said as we both burst out laughing. I bent over the side of the bed to reach into the brown bag for another beer.

“Who’s that guy who answered the phone this morning?”

“That’s Walter.”

“Who’s Walter?”

“Walter’s seventy-two.”

“Seventy-two!”

“I’ve been staying with him.”

“Why?”

“I was evicted from my apartment.”

I pondered this information for a few seconds, then said, “Were you two, uh, lovers?”

“He would try to touch my butt when he passed by behind me, and every now and then he would try to kiss me.”

“And that’s all?”

“I wouldn’t let him do anything else.”

Deborah, I had noticed by this point, smelled unwashed, and there was a strong odor of tobacco issuing from her mouth.
How come
, I wondered,
some men get to sleep with virgins and I get to lie next to a bag lady?

I opened another beer and wrapped my leg across her midsection, as I’m wont to do when I’m with someone.

“Let’s turn off the light,” Deborah said.

“Are you ready to sleep?”

“Soon.”

“Okay.”

“You mind if I take my bra off?” she said after the light was off.

“Go ahead.”

We shifted positions a few times, found a comfortable
arrangement, lay still for a while, and said nothing. The three beers I’d had, on an empty stomach, were making me drowsy.
In a few weeks
, I thought,
the money will be coming in again, and this entire period will be but a bad memory
.

“You want to hear something funny?” Deborah said, breaking my train of thought.

“Tell me.”

“But you must promise not to tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“I almost became a prostitute!”

“No way,” I said as I put a hand on her breast.

“I tried to get work at this escort service, but I was fired after only one day.”

She turned her body sideways, nudged her nipples toward my face, and as I slipped my hand inside her panties, peeled her underwear off.

“I was sent to this hotel,” she continued, “and I was really nervous, and this Japanese business guy answered the door, and he looked at me, and he slammed the door in my face!”

Her vagina was all dry, but she guided my hand back inside her as I tried to pull it away.

“That reminded me of something I read once,” I said, “Have you ever heard of Arthur Koestler?”

“No,” she answered, still arid.

“There’s this story of him traveling through Azerbaijan. He was on a train, and the conductor opened the door to his compartment, and there was a peasant girl sitting there who wasn’t supposed to be there, and the conductor was about to send the girl away when Koestler said, ‘That’s all right. She can stay.’ ” I paused at this point, propped myself up on an elbow,
and took a swig from my fourth can of, by now, piss-warm Rolling Rock.

“Is that it?”

“No,” I said, easing myself back down. “As soon as the conductor left them alone, the girl started to take off her blouse, and Koestler said, ‘No, no, you don’t have to do that,’ and the girl got all pissed off and said, ‘I’m sure the gentleman is used to finer ladies!’ ”

I let out a loud guffaw at this point, but Deborah did not laugh with me.

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing. The girl left the compartment because she was pissed off. Nothing happened.” I glared at Deborah, a little annoyed. “The girl was a prostitute, get it? What Koestler thought was a simple peasant turned out to be a prostitute!”

Deborah rolled on top of me suddenly. “Bui,” she said, “am I ugly?”

I hesitated, unwisely of course, but answered, “Of course you’re not ugly.”

I flipped her over so that I was now on top of her.

“Am I beautiful?” she asked, continuing her interrogation.

I hesitated, again unwisely, but said, “You’re not ugly!”

“Of course I’m ugly,” Deborah said. “That’s why that Japanese guy slammed the door in my face!”

“You’re not ugly,” I said again, with more conviction this time, and gave her a full kiss on the mouth, which tasted, to my dismay, like an open can of Skoal chewing tobacco. “You’re beautiful,” I blurted. “You’ve always been beautiful.” I was becoming delirious with my own momentum. “That Japanese guy is ugly. You’re beautiful! Maybe he’s used to finer ladies. Ha! ha!”

I
N THE
V
EIN

I was hesitating in front of the Holiday Lounge, a place I had been a thousand times. I took out my cash and counted it again. Twenty-seven dollars—five cents a day for 540 days. I started to walk away but thought,
Fuck it
, turned around, and walked right into the Holiday Lounge.

I had forgotten how stale the air was, like tuberculosis, like the air on a Greyhound bus. Everything else was familiar: the drop ceiling like a vast Mondrian; the mural fragment of a waterfall, showing a pair of female legs dipping into a green pool; the Tiffany lamps dangling over the bar, with yellow tinsel garlanded between them; the portrait of a crying clown; the painting of a stag; the curving red-velvet wall, rubbed raw in spots, behind the small stage. I strode straight for the end of the bar and found myself a seat. There were maybe eight customers in the whole place: an old man in his late seventies, arthritic and trembling; two tittering Bolivians; a black queer on a recon mission.… A chubby girl was dancing on stage. Norman was behind bar.

“Remember me?”

Norman squinted behind his bifocals. “Steve?”

“No, Tony.”

“Did you move away?”

“I moved to Holmesburg, Norman, for eighteen months!”

“What did you do, mug somebody?”

“Possession.”

Norman looked skeptical. “How long did you serve?”

“Eighteen months.”

“Only eighteen months?”

The guy next to me leaned over: “Hey, I was in Nam for eleven months. I’d rather go to jail for eighteen months than go to Nam for even a fuckin’ day.”

The vet looked a little too young to be a Vietnam vet. His face was smooth, his eyes smiling. Maybe they had sent him in as the NVA tanks were rolling into Saigon. “Both of you guys are losers,” Norman said. Then, to me, finally: “What would you like?”

“A Bud and a double Stoli.”

The chubby girl wasn’t so chubby after all. Her thighs were chubby but not her breasts. She had dyed-black hair, black lips, and black nails, a Gothic chick. Her bra and panties were still on and she was prancing around not doing much, someone you’d see at the beach. I tilted my Bud toward my lips but managed to miss them, spilling beer on my shirt. The vet laughed. “It’s a two-dog night tonight. The other one ain’t so hot either.”

“She’s all right,” I said.

“No, she’s not.” The vet laughed.

The other one, a very tall blonde, was making her round collecting tips. She was wearing a countrified outfit, plaid top and bottom, all ranchy and homey. She had a kind, bewildered face, a face to wake up next to. She was rubbing her ass against the old
man’s knee. She wiggled and wiggled while Grandpa trembled, before saying coquettishly, “Stop digging!”

The vet whispered, “Whores, the whole lot of them.”

Two days before I was released, Lady Di died. We were sitting in the day room watching it on TV, all seven of us except Fila Khiem, a Cambodian punk we called Pol Pot Belly, who was napping in his cell. Hank, a burly blond guy with a greasy goatee, a shit surgeon in a previous life, stood up and solemnly said, “The world has just lost a beloved slut, ladies and jism, but it will soon gain another one.” Everyone burst out laughing. Mitch leaned his fat frame into me, slapped his tree-trunk thigh, and said, “Sheeiiiiit!”

“Give this jailbird a beer and a shot on me,” the vet said to Norman.

We clanked bottles. The vet rolled up his shirt sleeves. “Check this out.” I saw a slight, almost imperceptible discoloration of the skin on the inside of his right elbow. “Shrapnel,” the vet explained. “You know, in many ways I’m glad I went to Nam. Once you’ve been shot at, once you know that your life can end—just like that!—before you even had a chance to do anything, there is this whole new other dimension to your life. Some experiences mark you as a—”

“Excuse me,” I cut the vet short, “I have to make a phone call.”

“Asshole,” I muttered as I walked to the pay phone near the men’s room to call my mother. “Mom?”

“Tony?”

“I’m out, Mom.”

“You’re out?!”

“I told you last week I’d be out on Tuesday.”

“Jesus!”

“I’m in a bar having a beer.”

She started to talk to someone else away from the phone. I noticed the new pinball machine. Johnny Mnemonic: Meet the Ultimate Hard Drive. Then: “You want to talk to Uncle Aaron?”

“Sure.”

Uncle Aaron was my mother’s boyfriend. They had been going steady for about three years. “How you doin’, Tone?”

“I’m okay, Uncle Aaron.”

“Good to hear from you, very good to hear from you, kid. Listen: I have a bottle of cognac here; we can shoot the shit later.”

“Sounds good, Uncle Aaron.”

“Listen: You know I’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer?” He already sounded plastered. “Prostate cancer?”

“Yeah, just a month ago. Listen! You know what I’m saying?! It’s like this: The good Lord is always fuckin’ with you, one way or another; you go to jail for selling rocks, I have prostate cancer.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Aaron.”

“You’re sorry?!
I’m
so sorry. He fucks with you to wean you away from all this bullshit, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’ve got to go, Uncle Aaron.”

“And you want to know something else: your sister ran off with a Chinaman!”

My mom came back on the phone: “It’s all right, Tony. He’s a biker but only half Chinese. Adopted, I think. I’ll tell you about it when you get home.”

I returned to my seat and saw that the tall blonde was dancing. She had stripped to her panties, baring tan lines and a pair of pancake tits. Many more people had come in: two guys in business suits; an E-Z Park attendant; a house-painting crew … “This one flashes,” the vet advised. She was folded in half and leering
at me through her V-shaped legs. Then she flopped down onto her stomach, her ass sticking up and jiggling in a riding motion. This is what I must have looked like to them. “Three inches deep and all that power over us,” the vet opined. “Five inches,” I said. Meaning the asshole. Hankenstein jammed his big toe into me before he enlarged me with a razor. He inverted it into my slot and stroked up. Mitch was sitting on my back, holding me in a half nelson, while two guys, Timothy and Rufus, were sitting on my legs. She dimmed her eyes and stroked herself through her pink panties and, for a nanosecond, pulled the partition aside to give me a glimpse of what they were hallucinating. “She’s winking at you, kid,” the vet triumphantly said, as if he was responsible.

I drained my Bud. “How do you fit four faggots on a bar stool?”

“I don’t know.”

“You turn it upside down.”

“Ha, ha, that’s pretty good, ‘you turn it upside down!’ I got one for you: Why do women wear makeup and perfume?”

“Why?”

“Because they’re ugly and they stink!”

I saw the vet’s sallow face framed by mud, with shit in his mouth, shit in his eyes. “Do you know that in prison you lick your own spoon after every meal?”

“Whoa! Is this a joke?”

“Yeah! And one time this guy, Hankenstein, fucked me with my own spoon!”

It was past midnight when I left the Holiday Lounge. It had apparently rained hard while I was inside. Puddles pitted the street. My face felt tingly. I had to stop twice to throw up.

I took out my money and counted it. I had exactly $1.75
left, enough for bus fare plus 15 cents. The ride to my mother’s house would take at least an hour.