Greetings from the Vodka Sea (17 page)

Plumber wanted to scratch his lip, but his arms were gently strapped to the bed.
⁴⁷

It was the scar. The shell-shaped scar in the middle of his upper lip. The only reminder of an incomplete palate, surgically repaired in infancy. Plumber wriggled his lips, trying to scratch the half-vortex, the parenthetical mark, with his teeth. He managed to raise his shoulder to his mouth. Everything has its imperfections. Even beauty.

Mrs. Charles Bukowski gasped suddenly and opened her eyes. Plumber smiled wanly. She stared at him for almost a minute, perhaps allowing her eyes to adjust to the light.

“Where the fuck am I?”

“We're in intensive care, I think.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm —”

“And what the fuck are you looking at?”

Plumber turned his head as the woman started screaming for the nurse. Perhaps they'd sedate her, she seemed nearly hysterical. Perhaps they'd sedate him. There were rules, he supposed, about looking into the soul of the person beside you.
⁴⁸

HYPOTHESIS A.
If love is blind, then lust really needs glasses

Plumber was having a lucid moment. In the exercise yard, the sun setting right on time, waiting for his father, already late.

“We were talking about anger.”

“No. We were talking about men.”

“Same thing.” Roy took a big toke, enjoying the role of devil's advocate. “The point is that the emotional entry —”

“What the hell is that?”

“The emotional entry, you know, the context. The place where emotions begin and end. It's always hot for a man. For a woman —”

“Cold?”

“Precisely.”

“Which means?”

“Men are a hot medium. We demand engagement.”

“And women are a cold medium?”

Plumber nodded.

“Well, my girlfriend is demanding engagement, and she's definitely hot.”

“Now you're mincing words.”

“I thought that's was the point.”

“We're having an intelligent discussion.”

“Same thing.”

“I'll give you an example. My wife says I don't know how to express my quote unquote feelings. She says that's the problem with me, with men. That we don't know how to express our quote unquote feelings. But I say I do know how to express my feelings, but it just so happens that most of the feelings I want to express are not the ones she wants me to express. I get pissed off. I get angry. I get horny. I get happy when the Dodgers win, I get unhappy when they lose.”

“It's an old story.”

“Timeless.”

“But what has it to do with relative temperature?”

“Well, that's my point. My quote unquote feelings are dependent on circumstance. I have to look outside for my emotional . . .”

“Cues?”

“Thank you. Cues. While women, most women, evaluate the world solely on what's going on inside . . .”

“Women's intuition.”

“That's part of it. But I'm talking more about the shape of their emotional substance . . .”

“You're losing me here.”

“You know: what informs their emotion, or better, what informs their interpretation of their emotions.”

“Huh?”

“For example, I say ‘I'm going out,' and she says ‘Fine, go out.' But when I come home she says, ‘Where the hell were you?' and I say ‘Out,' and then she shuts up and goes to the bedroom and closes the door. I find her there a few minutes later, crying. It's got nothing to do with external circumstance, it's just that I happened to go out at a point when she was feeling vulnerable, and when I said ‘I'm going out,' she heard ‘I don't love you anymore.' The point is, their emotional context is cold because it is completely internal and is almost entirely dependant on whether or not a woman is feeling particularly loved at a given point in time and space. Our emotional context is hot because it is external, based on our reaction to an observable, for lack of a better term, reality. That's why all the greatest scientists are men, and the great sex therapists are women.”

Roy took a long toke. The cherry glowed red hot in the darkness.

“Plumber, you're a genius,” he said, after much consideration.

“Thank you, Roy. I try. In my humble way, I try.”

A wave of nausea washed over Plumber, and he barfed into his own lap. Roy called for the orderly. Plumber dropped to his hands and knees and barfed again, spewing almost nothing but air. Roy called for the orderly again as the woman in the bushes, hitherto unnoticed, shifted slightly to get a better view.

. . .

HYPOTHESIS B
. If object a orbits planet ß, then ß really has its work cut out

“Why did you leave Mom?”

“Why?”

“We've been discussing our families in group.”

“Really? What did you say about me?”

“I said that you were handsome. I said that you once played the voice of a fish . . .”

“Crustacean, actually.”

“I said that you were indecisive. In fact I said that you were positively definitive in your indecisiveness. And I told the story of how, when I was ten and first came to live with you, you made us both sleep on the pullout couch even though there were two perfectly good, albeit unfurnished, bedrooms in the apartment. And how we moved in two weeks later with that woman in the Marines . . . ”

“An actress, really. She only played a Marine on TV.”

“Well, she might as well have been a Marine, the way she barked commands at us. I told group how she used to make us line up by our beds in our underwear for inspection, and how the coin had to bounce off the bed before we were allowed to move on to breakfast, and how she wouldn't let you drive to work because she thought you needed the exercise, and how her mother with the limp and the moustache came to live with us, and you and I wound up sleeping, again, on the pullout couch, and how three weeks later we were on the move again. I told them how that's not your real hair, and how you spent your entire inheritance getting your teeth capped, and about the time you decided to save money on a Christmas tree and took me up north to cut our own, but then how the cops caught us and you had to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine, which wound up being the most expensive Christmas tree you ever bought, so instead of moving like we planned, we slept in the car for the next two months. And I told them how we moved to Seattle with that woman with two gold teeth and an enormous teenaged son who dressed in a yellow sarong and cried whenever anyone mentioned the last episode of
M*A*S*H*
, and how the son fell in love with you and used to follow you around and moon over you, and how we woke up one morning in the pullout and he was on top of you trying to force his tongue into your mouth, and how that same afternoon we caught a ride with that lady trucker who drove us all the way to Salinas, in part because she felt sorry for us but mostly because you were feeling her up and didn't think I'd noticed.”

“You covered the bases.”

Plumber shifted from one hip to the other. The leg bindings were loosened now, but his wrists were still strapped to the bed. A protective measure only, to stop him scratching his eyes when the giant blue spiders crawled across his face.

“I thought the details were relevant. Like the time you left me at your mother's place while you went to work down south on a series of commercials . . .”

“I was a crustacean. I was in demand.”

“And how your mother . . .”

“Your grandmother . . .”

“— used to wash my hair every night with lye soap and vinegar, and how she kept an autographed photograph of you in every room and gave one to everyone who came to visit her, and how when you came to get me you gave her a stack of autographed photographs and borrowed a hundred dollars from her. I told group a lot of things because that's what we do in group and because I am coming to realize that these little details, these tiny particles of my life, collectively define who I am, while the larger arc, let's call it the narrative or even orbit, really only establishes my relative position in space. My counsellor suggests I try to live more in the here and now: the particles. I am choosing to follow that advice. So, Father, you've never told me why you left her.”

“You see, I was working on a pilot with Jan Michael Vincent.”

“Father.”

“There were rumours swirling of work for out-of-work actors with Golden Globe potential . . .”

“The truth.”

“The truth?”

“Please.”

“The truth is that one morning I woke up and looked at your mother. She was still sleeping, and I looked over at her and thought how beautiful she was. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. And as I lay there looking at her, it struck me how I didn't really know her. Really, we were man and wife, but we were strangers. And that frightened me. Not so much the fact that we were strangers — you get used to that — but the thought that we were perhaps growing less strange, that in fact over time we might no longer be strangers at all, but intimates. Not that the idea of being intimate with someone frightened me. It was the thought of becoming something other than what I was. That's what frightened me. I never wanted to become anything. I wanted only temporary. I am, after all an actor. That is my fate.
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.
”

“That's your answer for everything.”

David Plumber Sr. looked at his watch.

“To become something, that's too much like death.”

Dad looked at his watch again.

“Well, I must be going.”

“Goodbye, Father.”

“Goodbye, son.”

. . .

THEORY X.
The speed of a heartbeat increases as its distance from the sun decreases

In line for dinner at the commissary that night, she was staring at him from behind a mound of mashed potatoes. She had an almost heavenly look of disgust on her face. Roy said, if looks could kill . . .

Plumber had been at the centre for five and a half weeks. He hadn't had a drink for five weeks, and he'd never felt worse in his life. Plumber and Roy took their dinner in the solarium. Afterwards they went for a long walk in the exercise yard. They played volleyball by the pool until bedtime. And every time he looked around, there she was. The woman. Mrs. Charles Bukowski. Standing there, in the shadows. Watching.

COROLLARY TO THEORY X.
E=MC
²

I'm having an out-of-body experience, I think. I am asleep on the bed, or rather watching myself asleep on the bed. The woman is there. She's strapped my arms and legs to the four-poster and begun to remove her pink housecoat. “You're an ugly man,” she says. No argument here. “You are ugly inside, you're ugly outside.” I couldn't agree more. She removes her pink pyjama top. Her giant breasts sag to her belly. She takes off her bottoms, her belly hanging over her pubic hair. I feel myself getting hard. She climbs on top of me and plugs my cock inside her. Her breath is putrid, like onions and rotten eggs, her flabby body covered in oily boils. She rides me bitterly, joylessly, scowling, grunting, digging her dirty nails deep into my shoulders, and I wake up screaming from the pain, with her on top of me, riding me, her dry box holding onto my cock like an angry fist, and just as I'm about to come, the orderlies peel back the doors and enter. “Fuck you!” she screams at me as they carry her out. “Fuck you, you ugly, ugly man!” I couldn't agree more. Fuck me. Fuck me, I'm an ugly, ugly man.

SUMMARY.
All things are relative; conversely, all relatives are things

Understand, Plumber wanted to die. What he didn't want to do was linger.

The Mardi Gras Detox Centre was a case in point. After six weeks — the recommended course of treatment — he was clean and sober. The alcohol had had time to work itself out of his system. He was saved but not cured. Every day would be a struggle. He was ready to go home.

They gave a party in his honour. Plumber was asked to say a few words. He declined.

Goldberg picked him up at the front door. A photographer snapped his photo stepping into the agent's SUV. Plumber smiled and waved; Lilly had done it again. Plumber got in the car.

Goldberg had good news. He'd landed Plumber a plumb job on
Santa Clara Nights
. He would play the Contessa's good and evil twin sons. It was a field day for an actor of his calibre. Meanwhile, he would still stay under contract to Levitz and Sherwood, who had no immediate plans to kill him off.

Plumber nodded. “Where's Dad?”

Goldberg revved the engine of his BMW SUV. The giant station wagon lurched into action.

“I said, where's Dad?”

Goldberg smiled and looked in his side-view mirror.