The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (8 page)

“Plenty of people give to charity—,” Tom said.

“Tax write-offs. Pure self-interest. (Just keep drinking from the back side.)”

“—or just help out a neighbor.”

“See, that just exemplifies my point,” Stinky said, getting a little heated. “You help out your neighbor and, when you do, you make good and certain the rest of the neighborhood observes
you doing it. Or hears about it, anyway. I've been reading some material about this topic—delving into the neuroscience of it. You see, it's all about reputation or self-regard—thinking good about yourself, what a good guy you are. Releases endorphins. But nine times out of ten, I'm telling you, you wouldn't even have utilized the behavior in the first place if you hadn't somehow been
socially
forced into a corner over it. Socially speaking. Ninety percent of the time, in my estimation, you were probably hiding in the living room with the curtains pulled shut and the television volume down as minimally as it can go, just to avoid that exact same neighbor always asking, always wanting something, always looking for a handout. That's just fundamental human nature. It's all there, already encoded in your neurons with endorphins. It's neurologically imperative to avoid people who don't optimize your own self-interest. It's a fairly proven data point in a lot of the literature I've been delving into.”

“There might be some debate about that,” Tom said. “There's some interesting stuff in anthropology—”

But Stinky cut him off. “I can't believe you'd be so gullible! Don't believe everything you read, my friend. You need to apprise what you read more carefully. Try to utilize your brain here. Try to follow my line of reasoning. We start from the proposition that no man wants to be miserable. No man wants pain, and every man wants to make his own life better going forward. We all agree on that, right?”

“Well, I'm not so sure,” Tom said. He was sipping beer number three, and his eyes had a faraway look.

“Whatcha mean, you're not sure?” Stinky shouted, and a little fleck of spit shot out from his mouth. “Every man is out for himself! You've got to be able to conceive of that! No man
wants
to be miserable, for Chrissake! (Boo!)”

The
boo
scared Hank so much that he dropped his beer, and
we thought for a minute that this cure had finally worked, but then the hiccups started up again, just as bad as ever. Rafi wiped up the spilled beer with a towel.

“Buddha said desire is the source of pain,” Tom finally said when the commotion died down. “He was probably right. But still, we don't get rid of our desires, it seems to me. We keep them close to us. Maybe like hidden treasures, buried but never forgotten. Is it that we can't get rid of our desires, or is it that we don't really want to?”

“You're drunk,” Stinky said, slumping back onto his barstool.

“Moderately,” Tom admitted.

“Try thinking about naked women,” Stinky said to Hank.

“I never heard that one,” Hank said.

“Me neither,” admitted Stinky. “Maybe it won't cure you, but at least you'll be happy thinking about naked women.”

There was a pause while we all thought about naked women. Hank hiccupped.

“I knew a woman once in Denver,” Tom said. “She was a friend. I knew her husband, too, but she was the one who was my friend.”

Stinky glanced at Tom out of the corner of his eye and grinned. “Dog,” he said, and poked Tom with his elbow.

“No,” Tom said. “It wasn't like that. I used to talk to her.”

“Always a good first step,” Stinky said, and poked Tom again.

“Her husband was a pretty fast-track corporate guy, and he was making his name then. He worked a lot, and she was on her own a lot.”

“It's an old story, buddy.” Stinky leered. “No need to explain to us. Lonely women are low-hanging fruit.”

Hank hiccupped.

“She loved her husband,” Tom said. “And then they had a baby, and she loved the baby and loved her husband even more.
When she talked about him, I could tell how much she loved him.”

Stinky looked perplexed and a little disgusted. “So what happened?”

“Nothing. I moved to Chicago eventually. We lost touch.”

Stinky snorted. “I am failing to see what in the
hell
this discourse is about.”

“I remember this one time . . . ,” Tom started, but then he stopped and didn't tell the story after all.

“Did you get any?” Stinky asked.

“Never even tried. It wasn't like that.”

“Jesus H. Christ, man! Why didn't you just bang her on your way out of town? Her husband most likely never would have become cognizant of the situation. And even if he did find out eventually, you'd be long gone. Did she get obese or something postpartum?”

“What I'm trying to say,” Tom said, “is that sometimes the longing is the best part, I think. Or a good part, anyway. Sometimes I would go places where I thought she might be and, I tell you the truth, I could hardly even breathe, thinking I might see her. Longing is a powerful thing.”

“And so you're telling me you
liked
being miserable over some fat chick, and you never even got any?”

Hank hiccupped.

“I wonder where she is now.”

“I dunno, man.” Stinky shook his head. “All I can say is that if it had been me, I would have banged her but good on the way out of town. Even if I
was
a goddamn communist.”

Hank hiccupped. “Me, too,” he said.

The Bartenders' Ball, of course, came only once a year. The rest of the time, an average night after closing at the Cave was pretty quiet—a handful of people hanging around killing time until they could figure out a way to go to sleep. The bartender restocked the beer. Vera counted the money. Pancho sat at a table in the corner with a deck of cards, and as, one by one, we all finished what we were doing, we would join in the special Cave version of rummy. The rules became more complicated and byzantine as the night wore on. Some of them were: If someone discarded a six, the direction of play reversed. Every third three that was played, you had to change hands with the person whose birthday was closest to yours. If a Dolly Parton song came on the radio, you had to discard all the face cards in your hand. The people with scores in the middle at the end of the night had to buy shots of tequila the next day in Tia's for the high and low scorers. This was to discourage mediocrity.

Now that Danny and I were seeing so much of each other, he came after closing to the Cave from the café uptown where he worked tending bar, and sat with Pancho and Rafi and Vera and me and played rummy.

In the town around us, almost everybody was asleep. The two taxi drivers who parked their cabs at the corner of Camellia and Thornapple Streets dozed, stretched out in their backseats. The policemen nodded off behind the wheels of the cruisers over on Juniper Street. Clyde was finished with the after-last-call fried-chicken rush and yawned behind the cash register in his lonesome pool of light. The frat boys from the college were asleep on their backs, snoring in their beer-soaked beds. The waitresses from the uptown restaurants had gone home and taken off their shoes and rubbed their feet and let their dogs out and gone to bed. Blossom had two more hours to go before she had to get up and start making biscuits. Men with clear
consciences dreamed next to their wives. By the light of the test pattern on the TV screen, lonely insomniacs stared at the familiar furniture of their bedrooms and listened to the crickets.

But the Cave dwellers stayed up until dawn, smoking cigarettes and playing cards until the nighttime vanished. The nighttime was somehow far too lonesome to sleep in.

In the blue morning light, Danny would fall asleep in my bed. With his eyes closed, he looked younger, though sometimes he frowned or stirred with uneasy dreams. And once he shouted “No!” so loudly he woke himself up, looking dazed. Later he told me he didn't know what he had been dreaming. I thought that maybe those dreams were the reasons he didn't like to sleep too much, but Danny never said anything about them to me, and I never asked again.

Socrates spends only half a sentence discussing the moment when one prisoner is freed from his chains in the depths of the cave. He says only that the prisoner is freed and is compelled—for the first time ever—to stand. Socrates does not tell us who it is exactly who frees and compels the prisoner. He does not tell us how this particular prisoner, out of all the company, is chosen to be the one who, against his own will, eventually becomes enlightened. Why this one from among his fellows?

Perhaps Socrates skims so blithely over this moment—which is, nevertheless, the turning point of the whole story—precisely because part of the point is that it could have been any of them. It is the effect of the journey upward toward the light, the effect of the sunlight itself—rather than anything particular about the person who takes the journey—that makes the difference. The faceless being who frees only one prisoner does
so without regard for the virtue or the intelligence or even the willingness of the chosen one. It could have been any of them.

And yet that choice, made so carelessly as to be unworthy of comment by Socrates, will make all the difference to one poor prisoner. Without desiring it or deserving it or even understanding it, his whole world is about to be changed. His whole world is about to be destroyed.

Danny said he traveled “unencumbered,” which meant in practice that he shed his possessions in an erratic but ongoing trickle wherever he went—lost hats, lost paychecks, lost library books and sunglasses and car keys. It wasn't long before his Durham Bulls T-shirt was behind my couch, his cigarette lighter on top of my refrigerator, and his shoes under my bed, abandoned or misplaced. But once a man's shoes live under your bed, no matter how haphazardly they are left there, it starts to seem that you are on no extended one-night stand, no passing fling. You start to think that maybe the two of you belong together. You get used to having him around—or at least having his things around.

Because sometimes Danny himself didn't come down to the Cave for a while and I wouldn't run into him anywhere around town. When he wasn't around, I would pretend to pay attention to what other people were saying and pretend I didn't notice he wasn't there and pretend I didn't mind. After about three days or so, though, missing him would get to be so bad that I might even find myself paying attention to Stinky talking, just to have something else to listen to other than every tiny sound outside on the street—just in case it turned out to be the sound of Danny's voice as he was coming in the door. I would become, after just a few days without him, weirdly attuned to the sound
of his name.
Danny.
I became so incredibly alert to the sound of his name that I could hear it just in the way that another woman drew in her breath to speak. Before she even said his name, I knew she would. I could always tell because she had the same haunted look on her face that I saw in my own mirror.
Danny.