Sorrow Floats (13 page)

I don’t remember my first drink in Amarillo. It went down in a two-handed chug. The second Yukon Jack straight up disappeared just as quickly, only by then I was partially aware of the surroundings—bar, black floor, a row of stools, scattering of tables, and a dance floor. Dust. I noticed the dust.

By the first sip of number three I knew I was in Pepi’s Lounge next to Pepi’s Motor Court and the Golden Sandstorm Cafe, which I later discovered was also owned by Pepi. Maybe he got tired of naming buildings after himself.

After the initial sip, I set number three on the bar to think about what had happened. I’d needed a lot of drinks since Dad died, but they’d been based on nerves and knots, mental stuff, nothing like the last few minutes after Lloyd took over driving. Out-of-control panic. And pain. Lots of pain. I had a problem here.

The drag part about admitting you are an alcoholic is that once you say it out loud, each drink becomes a moral battlefield. You find yourself glued to binge-or-starve consumption.

I knew a boy named Mike in college who rode motorcycles. Mike admitted he was an alcoholic. He would fight it and fight it and make himself a pissed-off mess, then he’d surrender and drink that first drink, just to relieve the pain. But one drink made him feel like such a failure that he’d say, “Hell, I’ve lost my self-respect, I might as well get drunk, comes out the same either way.” So he’d get blasted and stay that way for days, afraid to sober up for fear he’d have to rejoin the battle and relive the pain.

I considered my philosophy of daily maintenance doses more practical. At least I finished the semester. Mike left for Denver, and I heard later he died from something—an accident, I think.

However, staring out the window at the motel where my ever-expanding crew was cleaning up after the long drive, the person in me who observes my screw-ups when I drink had to face the truth.

“Shit,” I said.

“Huh?” asked the bartender.

“Never mind.” Truth isn’t all it’s built up to be. If everyone who is certain they are honest with themselves suddenly became honest with themselves, the streets would flow with the blood of suicides. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to commit suicide.

Pepi’s Motor Court was made of fake adobe almost the same white as Moby Dick. Why would anyone create fake adobe? It’s like a teenager going to Montgomery Ward and buying a fake pimple. What’s the point?

Marcella came out of room five and walked toward the cafe. Andrew had one of Shane’s harmonicas, which, thank the Lord, I couldn’t hear from the bar. He appeared to have his little heart set on bursting the baby’s eardrums while simultaneously riding on his mother’s insteps. Now there was a woman with a self-image problem. Marcella was so used to shouldering guilt that she’d thought I stomped the brakes because of something she said. The perfect mom for a kid who blamed her for every discomfort. Sort of a mother-son S&M combo, only in most families the mother takes it on herself to make the children guilty instead of the other way around.

I still didn’t believe she was Shane’s sister. People born in hell don’t have relatives.

***

Dad would have loved Pepi’s Motor Court. When Petey and I were kids the family used to drive to horse shows and rodeos, or sometimes we’d vacation at Grand Canyon’, and at night when it came time to stop Dad would circle whatever town we chose for like forty-five minutes, searching for a motel with the exact tacky shade of rosy-purply neon he preferred.

Mom would be tired from riding herd on two kids in a pickup truck all day, so she’d say, “Buddy, you just passed a perfectly good Holiday Inn.” Back then Holiday Inns were twelve dollars for two grown-ups and kids stayed free. But Dad had an instinctive distaste for chains—motels, restaurants, even gas stations. Right from its start he didn’t trust the franchise system.

Actually, Dad didn’t trust a lot of things in motels. If the sign out front said
Clean Rooms
, he reasoned anybody who had to tell you so was suspect. He avoided motels that accepted credit cards. Even though we didn’t travel with a dog, we never pulled in if Dad spotted a
No Pets
warning. He’d once been burned by a cafe with a “Recommended by Duncan Hines” notice out front, so he wouldn’t stay anywhere that was recommended by anybody.

My favorite was a motel in the middle of the Arizona desert where the rooms were shaped like concrete tipis. Nothing grew within miles of the place. Petey and I would run round and round the tipi, whooping and shooting invisible arrows at the other guests. The heat in the tipis was always broken, which Dad liked, but one night the desert was cold as the dickens and all four of us had to sleep in the same bed. Mom let us eat marshmallows under the sheets. Mom could see humor in situations back then. In 1961 we moved off the ranch and into the house in town, and Mom lost her sense of irony. Nowdays, she might literally die if someone ate a marshmallow in her bed.

***

Shane wheeled through the room five door and sat in the parking lot staring off west at the sunset. His hair was slicked down à la TV evangelist, and he had on a clean shirt buttoned right up to the Adam’s apple. His head bobbed and weaved, making him look mechanical—an extension of the chair instead of the chair being an extension of him.

Assuming he wasn’t lying like a dog and Marcella really was his sister, I wondered if they’d ever whooped and shot invisible arrows. If a person is handicapped when you first meet them, it’s hard to conceive of them the other way. At what age had Shane turned pompous? Ten? Six? You wouldn’t think a six-year-old had the capacity for pompous, unless you’d met Andrew. Which led to another question: Wouldn’t most people with the ego to name a boy Blah-blah Jr. use it for the first son?

“Shit,” I said again.

“Huh?” asked the bartender.

“I’m avoiding my truth-facing session.”

“You want another shot?”

“Of course.”

***

The three-piece band played “Jambalaya,” “Stand By Your Man,” and “Big Balls in Cow Town.” Some oil field roughneck types shot pool while some cowboy types tromped a circle around the dance floor. The few girls present seemed to prefer cowboys to oil—who can blame them? The farmers nursed beer and looked sullen. Who can blame them, either?

I did my own drink nursing, determined not to waste myself before the appropriate time. Only amateurs throw up before last call. I wondered why they call making a drink last “nursing.” I can see the baby-on-Mama’s-tit analogy with alcohol, but in my experience babies are hungry. Auburn sucked it down fast as I put it out, as if I might be yanked away at any moment. What little I nursed Shannon she was slower, somewhat like a bar nurser. Sometimes she fell asleep at the wheel.

On “Across the Alley from the Alamo” the energy level of Pepi’s picked up a couple of notches. It was a noise deal—the dancers shuffled louder, the pool player broke rack with more oomph. Took a moment to figure out what was waking people up, until I heard the harmonica riff twisting in and out of the guitar lead. Shane sat at the base of the band platform, puffing his rosy cheeks into a hand-held microphone. He had two harps cradled in his left hand, different keys, I guess, and a jailbait cowgirl on his lap. Shane, the jailbait, and all three band members seemed especially pleased with themselves.

The bartender paused in his lemon cutting. “The old guy can really blow,” he said.

“That’s one way to put it.”

“I heard he lost his legs riding Tornado.”

Anyone even vaguely connected to rodeo in the sixties knows who Tornado was—the Babe Ruth of Brahma bulls. The most famous cow athlete of all time. Cowboys still take their hats off at the mention of his name, which is a bigger deal than you think. Those old cowboys never take off their hats except for showers and sometimes sex. A hard-core code follower even tips his over his face to sleep.

To say Shane rode Tornado was akin to saying I danced the two-step with Hitler.

“You really believe that?” I asked the bartender.

“If Mr. Rinesfoos says he rode Tornado, you better know he rode Tornado.”

“Mr. Rinesfoos?”

After his break, Shane spun circles on his left wheel while the cowgirl in his lap squealed and did nose-to-nose bumps. I’d wager tomorrow’s bottle she’d never been on a horse. As he flashed in the circle, Shane pinched butts all around. The fluttery girls took this as an honor bestowed on them by the life of the party. The boyfriends grinned like a bunch of good sports. Crippled or not, if the pervert ever touched my ass, I’d wheel him through the jukebox.

It’s weird when the whole world takes delight in some guy you think is a dirtbag. Everybody’s-wrong-but-me doesn’t wash when other people make the claim, but I’m different.

Shane played “Setting the Woods on Fire” with the band, then did a solo version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that was pretty moving in spite of coming from a man with three chins. I was raised country but broke loose in college when I discovered Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and the Mothers of Invention. Those frat boys I went out with were big on Bread. Psychedelic wonder rockette as I became, some elemental deal from my upbringing left me susceptible to Hank and Patsy. I tried to outgrow sentimentality and failed.

Just as Shane had me dewy-eyed, he spoiled the mood by leading the crowd into a round of “Cotton Eye Joe.” That’s the one where everybody drapes arms around each other’s shoulders and hops up and down, and at the proper moment they all shout
Bullshit
. I hate “Cotton Eye Joe” above all things rural in America.

The jailbait in his lap raised both hands high when she shouted
Bullshit
, practically sticking her tits up Shane’s nose. Some guy with sideburns down to his armpits grabbed my hand and tried to drag me onto the dance floor. He wouldn’t take “No” for an answer, so I said, “No, cocksucker.” He left me alone after that. Drugstore cowboys hate it when you call them cocksucker.

Through the noise and cigarette smoke, I saw Lloyd working his way down the bar, showing the picture to each hunched-over nurser. He had on a clean pair of overalls that looked exactly, down to the soft right thigh, like the pair he’d had on since we met. His hair was Vitalis slicked, with the part running straight as a knife edge. Gave him that untrustworthy look of a door-to-door Bible salesman.

When he came to me, I said, “I’ve been thinking this over seriously and I’ve decided that I’m not, technically speaking, an alcoholic.”

He had the photograph in his left hand and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his right. “I’m happy to hear that,” he said without a smile. “What made you decide?”

I set down my drink and held up three fingers. “First, it doesn’t run in the family. Second, when I wake up with a hangover, I never crave a drink right off the bat. None of that hair-of-the-dog jive for me.”

Lloyd looked me in the face. I’ll never quite get past those eyes of his. “And third?”

“Third, I never black out. Real alcoholics black out entire days, and I remember every move until the moment I fall asleep.” Third was partially a lie. Only partially since I never lost an entire day, but there were times I went from A to B with no idea what happened in between.

Sipping drinks, I’d come up with a fourth reason that I didn’t tell Lloyd because it’s an old bar joke: How do hospitals define alcoholic? Anyone with insurance. I didn’t fit that description, either.

Lloyd kept staring at my face; made me nervous. “I’m glad you discovered you’re not an alcoholic,” he said.

“So am I.”

“Answer me one question. This afternoon, if I’d told you I had hidden a bottle of whiskey somewhere in Moby Dick, what would you have done?”

“Did you really?”

“Reality is not the point, Maurey.”

I stared at my drink in search of answers. I had none, then I had six, all of them lies, then I had none again.

Lloyd held his hand out toward the tattooed truck driver on my left. “Have you seen this woman? Her name is Sharon Carbonneau, but she may be calling herself Sharon Gunderson.”

***

From there the evening took on a fuzz mode. Cowboys danced as roughnecks chain-smoked around the pool tables and farmers sulked. Shane sang a few songs in a voice like a cartoon frog. The women ate it up. Lloyd finished the hopeless quest number and sat alone at a table drinking Cokes. I had another Yukon Jack and ate a pickled egg.

I thought about something Sam Callahan said in one of his short stories: “You can’t be paranoid unless you once trusted; you can’t be cynical unless you once believed; you can’t hate unless you once loved.” I wasn’t paranoid, cynical, or hateful, so I must not have ever done those other things, either. I missed out.

A narrow-hipped boy in a Rainbow Radiators windbreaker asked me to dance on “Walking After Midnight,” and I did. The boy had lovely fingers and sweet breath. His eyes reminded me of Auburn. At the end of the song I allowed myself two seconds of resting my cheek on his shoulder, but when he asked for a second dance, I said, “No thanks. Two in a row is more of a commitment than I can handle.” The boy looked at me funny, which was to be expected, and went away.

I felt flat. I didn’t want to drink more, didn’t want to stop drinking, wanted to find the motel room and take a shower, didn’t want to leave the anonymity of the crowd. I wanted to think about the children I’d had and lost and the men I never had but lost anyway, only I was too tired to sink. Even depression takes energy.

What I really wanted was to be young again—before sex, before whiskey, before anyone I loved died.

“Where’s Shane?” Lloyd asked.

With effort, I raised my eyes from staring at the dew ring my glass left on the bar. “Hustling jailbait on the dance floor.”

“No, he’s not.”

I looked over toward the band. Three or four couples had their eyes clenched in ecstasy or desperation or something as they slow-dance-hugged across the floor, but none of them were sitting down. “People disappear from the bar, they’re either outside drinking, outside doping, or gone somewhere to get laid.”

“He’s not drinking.”

“Can you be sure?”