Leaving Las Vegas (9 page)

“We’ll see you all again tomorrow. Bye Bye for now,” says the TV host right before being drowned out by the applause of the studio audience, which seems to magically louden, as if by command. This is then replaced by a momentarily black screen and the reassuring voice of the network, “The fun’s just begun and there’s plenty more to come. So stay tuned all morning for plenty of laughs and prizes, starting with.…”

That would make it ten-thirty, he thinks. He has one hour to kill until the real bars open. One hour until he can sit and drink pretty in the restaurant bars of West LA and Beverly Hills. That’s when his day really begins. His stomach will be ready for bourbon
and beer, or martinis, or whatever. He’ll sit and drink away the afternoon, smiling and laughing with movie people, or west coast stockbrokers, exiled from their natural time zone, or anyone else who doesn’t have to go back to work. One hour is just right. He’ll go home, have a quick glass of vodka and a shower, put on some nice clothes, and be in Beverly Hills between eleven-thirty and twelve. Make it closer to twelve, say eleven-fifty. That way it won’t seem like he’s been waiting for the bars to open.

Time has become very important to him, much more important than it was when he had a job. Too many times he has awakened at three a.m., having passed out the previous evening, only to find nothing alcoholic in the house. He has felt the panic increase exponentially as the minutes click off the eternity between him and the legally wet world of six a.m.. His carefully laid stockpiles, meant to carry him over the tundra of two to six, were often consumed blindly from the abyss, after the line of careful laying had been crossed. Once he gave up and rushed to the all night convenience store, where he was grateful for the privilege of overpaying for a family size bottle of Listerine. Eight minutes later, parked in front of his apartment, the bottle was half empty and he had begun to calm down. He shut off the car, stopped the internal combustion.

So his life is punctuated by legislative break points and red flags of custom. At six a.m. the hardcore bars open and the stores can sell, though they sometimes choose to withhold, imposing their morality on some poor, sweating, shaking mess looking for his fix. Nine a.m. is considered a safe opening time for the bars that don’t like to admit that people drink that early but can’t let the business slip completely away; bartenders in these places tend to pause disapprovingly for an imperceptible moment before handing over a drink. The next milestone is eleven-thirty. At eleven-thirty everyone is willing to admit that the drinking day
has begun and they proudly open their doors and pour their drinks. It’s smooth sailing until midnight, when, if they haven’t already, the more reputable bars bail out. Any place that stays open passed midnight is probably good until two—actually one-forty-five—the most important time of all. Never let two o’clock happen unless there is more liquor in the house than you could possibly drink in four hours—no small quantity.

It takes about five hours to drive from Los Angeles to Nevada, land of anytime alcohol, and there are no commercial flights at that hour. Teasing, gnawing, when you’re out of liquor at two-thirty in the morning it looms, conceptually bad, in the back of your head. Ben has often thought it through, but it’s just not a solution; by the time he would get there the bars would be open in LA.

It’s ten-thirty-one. Ben drains his glass and stands up. He mutters, “thank you,” and turns toward the door without waiting for an acknowledgement. Outside it’s still overcast—spring in Los Angeles. He walks straight and sure to his car. He feels okay, swinging up.

On his way home, having stopped off at a liquor store for a can of beer to drive by, Ben feels elated. His day is in gear and he has everything to look forward to; he has a plan. Things will tick along fine now. He turns up the radio and thinks about what album to listen to while he gets dressed. Checking his pocket, though he already knows its contents, he confirms that he’ll need to stop at the automated teller machine.

Money, money. He’s going through a ton of money these days. When he lost his job last week he gained a sizable final check; his former employer really liked him and felt terribly guilty about having to fire him. Never mind that he unwittingly delayed the dismissal meeting by staying all morning at the bar and, after checking in with the receptionist, was on his way out for an early
lunch when his boss caught up with him. Ironically, had he known what was in store for him that morning, he would have made it a point to be on time; he is very conscientious in that way. So they called him in—by then he did know what for—and asked him to leave. He felt so bad, not that he was being fired, but because his boss was on the verge of tears. How could he blame them? For the last year and a half his daily routine had been: Come in late, say eleven; flirt with the receptionist; go to lunch early, eleven-thirty; return from lunch late, about three; copy must-do list from today’s calendar page to tomorrow’s; walk fast around the office; leave early, no later that four-thirty. Everyone knew it for almost as long as he did, and he knew that they knew. It all just flowed so nicely that no one wanted to fuck with it. Not that he didn’t have his value, he did. He could be counted on to, at least, not let anything become a crisis, and he fixed everything that broke. The latter was not even required of him, but he could, so he did. He knew that being
handy
is the kind of conspicuous skill that makes it easier for others to tolerate you. They tolerated, and even liked him, for as long as they could. They eased their guilt by cutting him a padded check. Chockful of make believe vacation pay and sick leave, and iced with severance play pay, it was intended to help him get back on his feet while he looked for another job. But they knew and he knew that what it really represented was a whole fucking lot of booze.

Money, money. His final paycheck, added to what was left of his once substantial savings, gives him a net worth of around five thousand dollars. On top of that, he can wring at least that much again out of his credit cards; he’s always been a good boy, and it will be sixty to ninety days before little flags start appearing next to his name on monitors and printouts from here to Arizona.

Money, money. That gives him ten thousand dollars in drinking money. If he stops paying his bills, and only pays, say, one
month’s rent, and keeps up his virtually non-existent social life and eating habits, then it can pretty much all stay drinking money. If he drinks one hundred dollars a day—and he can—he’s got one hundred days to drink. It’s just an arithmetic operation, simple logic.

In his kitchen he picks up the bottle of vodka. Center stage on the white tile counter and always threatening depletion, this is his home bottle. This is his sick bottle, his too-late bottle, his one for the road bottle. This is his utility bottle; it keeps him at his default setting. He pours a tall glass and cuts it with a splash of tonic. It’s quite a lot of vodka, and it represents his last hurdle of the morning. He feels all right now, but if he can get this down he knows that he won’t embarrass himself in public. Throwing up at your barstool is frowned upon in Beverly Hills. He carries the full glass into the shower with him, just to be on the safe side.

All goes well, and by the end of the shower he’s feeling great. Craving music now, he drips over to the stereo without waiting to dry and plays one of the twenty-some cuts that he tends to play over and over again when he’s been drinking, that he tends to play over and over again. He pours another drink and dances back into the bathroom for an ambitious morning shave.

To Ben, shaving is evidence that everything’s fine. These few minutes of socially suggested practicality tend to convince him that he, like the rest of the normal world, is just living his life. He’s just another guy that gets up and goes through a regular routine, wades through a non-spectacular day, and comes home and goes to sleep. He’s a cog in the machine. He’s a soma-driven epsilon who happens to be plagued with imagination. For instance, his habit is to shave around his mouth first; that way, he can sip his drink even if he’s not finished shaving—his mind never rests.

He looks in the mirror and doesn’t care that he is an alcoholic. The issue is entirely irrelevant to him. He does all this deliberately,
with purpose. Yes, of course I’m an
ale,
he thinks. What about it? It’s not what the story is about. There are a million ways to croak; he’s only plucking a piece of life. Let go and fuck God. There are a thousand mind manipulations. As he and his friend used to joke about: It’s time to cut your hair, get a job, and just give up. Ha Ha. The crime is not that he’s an alcoholic; big deal! The crime is that he’s disoriented, big time.

He gets dressed to the music, sometimes dancing with himself in the mirror: will you go out with me? He puts on too much too expensive cologne so he can stink of a different kind of alcohol. Tie done up right and suit looking sharp, he spins on his heel and walks into the living room, where he trips over the low coffee table and crashes through its glass top. He groans once and then starts snoring.

Very still now in the apartment, much like it must be in any empty apartment or house, families at work, perhaps on vacation. Ben is in communion with the rest of the motionless stuff that patiently occupies space and waits to be fucked with; he is an object of his own device. The refrigerator clicks on and off, faithfully cooling its near-empty interior, pursuant to its agreement as a major appliance. A hand moves on a clock—actually, all the hands move on all the clocks—but to all intents and purposes, it is silent. A heart is beating. Organs are deteriorating. There is something forbidding about this place. It can be felt between the thumb and the index finger, like noxious paint fumes to a blind man. The sighted might observe that the paint is a very bad color indeed and either leave now or pine for the previous coat.

When Ben awakens it is dark. Panicked, he instinctively looks at his watch. It’s ten-thirty and he relaxes a little. Disturbed glass
clinks and crunches as he gets to his feet and shakes himself. This day is shot, but everything else seems to be in operating order. By way of a test he walks to the kitchen: slight soreness, no blood so far. What a fucking mess. He drains the vodka bottle into his glass and goes to the mirror, no blood at all. After brushing the broken glass out of his hair and replacing his ripped suit coat with a sports jacket, he walks down the block to the liquor store and buys a couple of fifths, so he can deal with this unfortunate twist in his day and come up with a plan for tonight. Actually, he feels pretty well rested.

He can make the walk to the liquor store okay now, other times just barely. He misses walking, the brisk hikes down the boardwalk in Venice, or along the canals, or not so brisk walks on the sand, where the outcome of each step is too unfamiliar to master. Walking made him feel independent, a fast moving visitor observing the lives of those whom he passed. He used to walk fast, faster than anyone else, though it was never an effort for him. He would just cruise along comfortably at his normal speed, passing everyone on the sidewalk and causing any unfortunate companion to alternately walk fast and jog in order to keep few their trailing paces. He used to walk everywhere—the library, the grocery store, the mall in Santa Monica—now he drives. Physically crippled with alcoholism and psychologically afraid of being too far from its source, his walking radius has become the distance from his front door to his car. The liquor store falls just a half block outside of this parameter, so he makes an exception. But he does miss those long fast walks. That was something he could do better than anyone he’s ever known, or known about.

On his way home from the liquor store he falls behind a beautiful girl walking her dog. He hasn’t seen her face, but she is beautiful from behind. Not just her shape, which is quite nice, but her whole walk, her feeling and movement. This girl is
pleased with herself. He considers for a moment that this may be the only art that he remembers how to appreciate, and he’s not sure if that’s a good, bad, or neutral aspect of his personality. She is beautiful right now. If he never sees her face, or if he sees her face and doesn’t like it, she is still beautiful. He views this particular opinion as a refined and matured version of how he would have felt as a boy; back then he would have hoped that she had a pretty face. He still does, of course, but her beauty is, for him, no longer dependent on her face. He thinks about her panties as his mind wanders, encompassing her in an overstated fantasy. Panties may be a bit too specific for a short walk behind an unknown girl. Again he wonders if the mental twist is positive or negative. Positive, he decides, you can never be too specific. But then, the infinitesimal must be, by definition, as infinite as the infinite. She has stopped. All of a sudden he is beside her, looking into her inquisitive face. Disappointed, he smiles and walks on. She is very young indeed.

Back at home he has a couple of glasses of vodka, washes up, gets dressed again, and refills his glass on his way out the door. He’s decided to drive to Beverly Hills and catch last call at one or two places before wrapping up his night at some of the grittier bars which are closer to home. His driving, as usual, is pretty even. Weaving is for amateur drunks, not for him. More than once he has driven alongside a black and white for miles, totally stoned and unconcerned. He knows that he won’t fuck up by driving sloppily and getting busted; he’ll just fail to react quickly to a situation one day and either kill himself or someone else. He finds this latter possibility, murder, intolerable, so he tries not to think about it.