I mean, these two middle-aged men,
salesmen both or managers maybe,
each bald but each in a different way,
gripping thin glasses of, for god’s sake,
scotch & water, seven & seven, beige drinks,
fumbled their escalation through quilted doors
to mix it up, settle some hash, pound it out
in the parking lot.
It was awful as their disconnected swings
dissolved into panted wrestling,
six inches of pale skin showing as the fat one’s
trousers twisted up his leg,
the slurred curses swallowed,
short breath gargled in the shuffle
as they tired of what had seemed
like the thing to do.
Somehow, I held their coats
and the fabric of each looked
especially weird under the
sodium lights outside.
It was embarrassing.
Locked together half under a Taurus,
wet from parking lot puddles
and the tall one’s shirt had ripped at the shoulder seam,
they half-rolled back and forth,
now silent save for whistled breathing
and the argument was lost
among the gravel and the bottle caps.
I draped their jackets together
across the hood of an Acura
and left them there,
but I kept the wallets.
I wanted to get out of there
before things got hideous,
before they agreed to respect each other,
shake hands, buy each other rounds.
I wanted to remember them
just they way they lay.
Showing posts with label bars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bars. Show all posts
18 July 2009
20 April 2009
Public Displays of Affection
First of all, I've never liked the notion of people making out in public. Beyond the tasteful peck, I never felt comfortable doing it and I don't really feel comfortable when other people are doing it, especially when one of them is this girl I used to practically live with. It makes me wonder what else is going on in private, especially when she bends this guy who's not me's head way far back, her hand all along the side of his face, and she opens her eyes to search through the generalized movement in this bar to find my eyes upon her and she smiles while she's kissing him and it's all so very much on purpose, the way her pupils are pushed to their limits to keep me in sight and the glimpse of tooth I catch when she bites his lip and now I feel sorry for this guy which is something I really feel uncomfortable doing since he's leaning against a woman for whom I once had (okay, I admit, still have) strong feelings and I never liked him in the first place, even before he started doing things like leaning into Valerie so she could gnaw on his face and smirk at her ever-so-ex-boyfriend over his shoulder without him having any kind of clue whatsoever what she was doing or that even though I feel sorry for him, I still wouldn't mind being him.
These are complicated feelings I realize, but I also know I wouldn’t hate her so much if I didn’t still love her so terribly much. Or just so terribly. That’s why this stupid bar napkin is so full of such stupid scribblings. I guess that’s what I do best.
His hand is on her hip but thinking about drifting down to her ass. I remember when my hand used to do the same kind of thing but now all it, my hand, can do is remember and write about remembering. I can’t imagine she’s happy, that Valerie is enjoying this but I can imagine the pain she knows I feel makes the pain I know she feels seem reasonable, seem manageable, seem like it might be bearable in the long run. His hand is migrating and I wonder if it, his hand, is having a feeling. I can see the way she is slowly moving back and forth, the soft echo of movement in the past and movement in the future. It describes a kind of motion that expresses a kind of feeling that I haven’t been able to have in a long, long time.
I need another napkin.
The waitress has distracted me and Valerie has distracted her man enough to be able to scoop some of his money off the bar and even if he noticed, which I don’t think he did, I don’t think he’d care. After all, it’s only paper and, unless things have changed a lot which I don’t think they have, she’s not wearing any kind of underwear. I think I ordered another drink but I won’t be sure until it gets here. I’ve got my own money.
It is a drink but it’s not the drink I asked for. Should I care? Or should I pay? Is it really a question? Look out; here comes my money!
I can’t quite believe that Valerie sent this drink to me. Will this kind of strangeness never, ever stop? Why is she wiggling her fingers at me like that? Why am I waving back? Why am I putting this glass to my lips and wondering if it is poison? I already know it is poison. And it tastes very, very good.
These are complicated feelings I realize, but I also know I wouldn’t hate her so much if I didn’t still love her so terribly much. Or just so terribly. That’s why this stupid bar napkin is so full of such stupid scribblings. I guess that’s what I do best.
His hand is on her hip but thinking about drifting down to her ass. I remember when my hand used to do the same kind of thing but now all it, my hand, can do is remember and write about remembering. I can’t imagine she’s happy, that Valerie is enjoying this but I can imagine the pain she knows I feel makes the pain I know she feels seem reasonable, seem manageable, seem like it might be bearable in the long run. His hand is migrating and I wonder if it, his hand, is having a feeling. I can see the way she is slowly moving back and forth, the soft echo of movement in the past and movement in the future. It describes a kind of motion that expresses a kind of feeling that I haven’t been able to have in a long, long time.
I need another napkin.
The waitress has distracted me and Valerie has distracted her man enough to be able to scoop some of his money off the bar and even if he noticed, which I don’t think he did, I don’t think he’d care. After all, it’s only paper and, unless things have changed a lot which I don’t think they have, she’s not wearing any kind of underwear. I think I ordered another drink but I won’t be sure until it gets here. I’ve got my own money.
It is a drink but it’s not the drink I asked for. Should I care? Or should I pay? Is it really a question? Look out; here comes my money!
I can’t quite believe that Valerie sent this drink to me. Will this kind of strangeness never, ever stop? Why is she wiggling her fingers at me like that? Why am I waving back? Why am I putting this glass to my lips and wondering if it is poison? I already know it is poison. And it tastes very, very good.
09 April 2009
Werewolves Everywhere You Look
Number One
Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.
Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.
The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.
Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.
Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.
"Whoa," said Mark.
Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.
"Hey, Don," she said.
"Hey, Julie," Don said.
She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.
"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"
Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.
"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"
Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.
"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"
Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.
"That was harsh," said Mark.
"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."
Number Two
It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.
At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.
I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.
I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.
""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"
His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."
The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."
I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.
Number Three
Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.
Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.
"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"
"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"
Stuff like that.
When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.
"Cleaning up in here!"
"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"
Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.
The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.
But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.
While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.
"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."
Don's head felt like it was in a thing like a box or in a thing like maybe a real big fist and it was closing and Mark over there in the kitchen was not helping anything feel any different. Mötley Crüe was pounding out of the speakers of the boom box Don's sister had loaned them, the boom box she'd put on the windowsill and nobody had moved since. Maximum volume created maximum distortion and the music was set to both. It didn't matter that much to the boys, either of them; they'd memorized the whole album years before.
Mark was cutting oranges into quarters with a big commando-type knife. When he'd gotten about one thousand chunks of orange piled up on the counter, he jammed the knife into the formica surface. He starting scooping up orange quarters and dumping them into the refrigerator. Although the music prevented Don from actually hearing anything else, he did see Mark's lips move and Don knew that Mark had just said "Awl riot" in the way that was his, Mark's, trademark. It meant the same thing as "victory" or "how unusual" or "I can't think of anything else to say." It was like Don's own bandanna, like the one he had tied around his neck in ninth grade and it just became something he kept on doing; it become the thing he always did. People said, “Don. You know, the guy who has that bandanna around his neck all the time.” Everybody did things like that, like Mark always said "awl riot" and Don wore a bandanna around his neck and this girl or that girl wore a lot of gold-toned rings on every finger or another wore red eye shadow all the time or some such thing. Everybody did something that they did all the time.
The boys' apartment was a good apartment because almost everybody who lived in the complex worked day jobs of some kind or else had a bunch of kids that would keep them all pretty busy and out of the way. Nobody was out much during the weekdays and Don and Mark could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Don might bring over one of the guys from his baking industries classes or Mark might cruise one of the high school parking lots. Just like that, just about every day there was a party.
Don's headache was getting much better. It seemed to have a little life all its own, that headache. It came and went like an old friend though lately it was making more and more of its own decisions without asking Don and it, the headache, seemed to be getting desperate as if it were running out of time, running out of choices. Don was the guy who hated pain. He had never and probably would never get used to it. He was the kid who was scared of spankings because they hurt. He was the one who wouldn't fight, who would eat shit on the playground rather than risk getting hurt. Don used to lie awake in his little bed in his Mom's apartment trying to sleep and just keep seeing himself falling off his bike into gravel, getting "swats" from his PE teacher, burning up in some horrible car wreck.
Don tried to stop thinking about his headache specifically and about pain in general. He drank some more beer and looked at their clock with its electrical cord trailing down to the outlet. Don wondered if they sold aspirin at liquor stores. While he was doing that, the tape in the machine ended or stopped or something and in the shock of sudden silence, both boys realized that someone was knocking really loudly on the door.
"Whoa," said Mark.
Don opened the door and it was this friend of one of Mark's girlfriends; her name was Julie. She was sixteen and she liked to come over to the apartment when she was supposed to be in study hall and she'd wait around hoping someone would get her high or show her some deep attention and then she'd go back to school for social studies or hygiene class or something. This girl always wore a black, TV-type detective fedora kind of hat. It was her trademark.
"Hey, Don," she said.
"Hey, Julie," Don said.
She sat down on the living room floor and lit a Marlboro Light. It was the kind of cigarette she bought from a machine rather than risk get carded by convenience store clerks. Don went back into the kitchen near Mark.
"Did you guys ever have Mrs. Lamont ever?" Julie asked them. "For English?"
Neither Mark nor Don said anything. Don was looking through some empty cassette boxes, not thinking about his headache, and wondering where all the tapes were.
"Well?" Julie asked and she whipped her head around to look right at them and her black TV hat almost fell off. "I mean, did you?"
Don moved as quickly as he could to the front door and opened it back up. Sunlight came in sheets through it.
"Hey, Julie," Don sort of said. "I mean, see you later, okay?"
Julie just sat there a second and then she stood up really fast and just left.
"That was harsh," said Mark.
"Nah," Don said back. "Not really."
Number Two
It was extremely near closing time and, okay, I will admit that I was very drunk. I had run out of cash early in the evening and had been running a tab on my credit card. I was drinking shots of vodka and glasses of draft beer. I figured out a long time ago that those are the kinds of drinks you drink when you don't want to commune with other people. If you drink something with pineapple or grenadine or other vivid colors, you're asking for someone to talk to you. Even ice can be dangerous because it makes that attractive clinking sound on the way to your mouth. A shot and a beer meant something else altogether, something kind of morose and silent.
At least, that what I always thought until this guy at my left told the bartender to “give me another round and put it on that pussy's tab" and jerked his big thumb to his right which was directly at me. The bartender looked at me and I was pretty surprised and didn't really know what to say and then the drinks came up. Everybody within earshot was looking at me. I still didn't know what to do but I knew I didn't like what was being done. I didn't know what to do so I nodded and listened to the acid laughter drip out of the Thumb and his buddies drinking on my tab and basically the rest of the entire bar was laughing, too. They all seemed to have figured out that they had it made no matter what I was drinking. My choices had become extremely limited.
I finished my vodka, decided to leave the rest of my draft on the coaster, and slid off my stool in a humble, I'm-off-to-take-a-leak-Sir-but-I'll-be-right-back kind of way as if I was really worried about keeping on his good side, what he was going to do to me next, what he was really thinking about me. When I got near the exit door at the back of the room, I stopped and looked back toward the bar. I waited like that until the Thumb had the time to look over and wonder where I had gone off to and when I was getting back. He was still thinking about me, thinking about me paying for more drinks, and maybe even missing me. The bar was crowded enough, I figured, to keep him from just charging into me swinging his big fists and, I figured, he'd want to tell a few people what he was going to do to a drink-buying pussy like me. I figured that once he saw me, I'd have about half a minute to get ready. I kept staring at him until he looked over his shoulder, I locked my eyes onto his, I pointed my finger straight at him, I made a hooking kind of gesture, and I made my mouth make "You" real obvious. And then I crashed backward through the exit door out into the parking lot.
I was shaking and scared as hell, hyper-conscious of how bad all my calculations probably were, and how even my few seconds where fading away fast. I was just about ready to give it up and run when I found what I was looking for, a big flat piece of landscaping rock. I got to that rock, grabbed it, and the door swung open. The Thumb was alone. I took my swing and the rock split his nose cleanly down the middle, squashed it up under his right cheek. He just stood there and watched the blood ruin his nice shirt.
""Okay? Fair?" I tried to whisper. "Want to quit now?"
His eyes cleared up and he said, "Now, I'm going to kill you, now."
The rock bounced against his left ear. It sounded soft and wet when it hit but he didn't react the way I hoped. He made a noise like "woof" and then he made another noise that sounded like "fucker."
I started to really panic. I tried to think about what I should do next. I threw the rock straight at his mouth and ran. I figured that if I could get to my car and start it and drive, I could run back and forth over the Thumb until his pieces were too small to do me harm. He didn't follow me, though. I got my car door open and I twisted my key into my ignition and, as I drove out and away, I could see he was still standing there bleeding under the light of the “no entrance/exit only” sign.
Number Three
Even though he was pacing everywhere through the house, even though he acted like he was bored to distraction, Jackie really wasn't. He was just Jackie, Jackie here and there throughout the house.
Once in a while, he would stop at the door of the kids' room and call in.
"Are you kids okay? Do you need something?"
"Your mom will be home real soon. Okay? Kids?"
Stuff like that.
When he was out in the kitchen, he finished washing the dishes, scoured out the sink, scrubbed the cutlery a second and then a third time, scoured out the sink again, and started on his shirt and pants. He yelled toward the kids' room a lot.
"Cleaning up in here!"
"Getting things spic and span in the kitchen!"
Things like that to keep them posted on how things were going with him getting ready for their mother to come home.
The stains on his clothes were difficult and he couldn't even start to think about the stains on theirs or the other messes around the house he was going to have to start cleaning. His clothes took a lot of rubbing and scrubbing and some "god-shit-fuck-goddammits" before they came away clean (or cleaner than they’d been before he started trying to clean them). In between all those times he was scrubbing at his clothes, he was still pacing around the house only he was naked and looking out the windows and discovering that he was wandering away from the sink and his dirty dirty clothes again and that he was smoking a cigarette in the hallway near the bedrooms and the doors to theirs, the children's rooms.
But Jackie got everything all washed out and rinsed and hung up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. When he saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he saw that he had no shirt on which made him look down and remember that he had no pants on either.
While he was in a closet getting fresh clothes, he heard the crunching noise from the gravel in the driveway. Jackie went lurching out into the hallway tangled up in his new, fresh, clean clothes; he was all tangled up in those arms and legs in an eagerly comical kind of way.
"Kids!" he called. "Hey, kids! Your mom's home."
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