A wasteland of strangers (4 page)

Then Macho Man gave the finger, jabbing it into the air half a dozen times, and yelled, "iCarajo! Vete al carajo! Tu madre!" at the top of his voice.

"You should've popped him, man," Anthony said.

"Yeah. Next time I see him I'll break his ugly fuckin' head with a fuckin' tire iron."

I said, "Only if you sneak up behind him in a dark alley."

He raked me with his eyes. "What'd you say?"

"He didn't do anything to you."

"Came in here with a chip on. Tough guy."

"No, he didn't."

Anthony said, "You saw the way the dude looked at us. Mean, man, like he wanted to break our heads."

"Why don't you grow up, Anthony."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Say that again, Trish, I'll bust your lip."

"Now who's being mean?"

"I'm telling you, man. Go bitch on me and I'll pop you."

"I'm pregnant! I'm gonna have your kid!

I felt like screaming the words at him. But I didn't, because then maybe he really would smack me. He'd never laid a hand on me before, but there's always a first time. His eyes were hot and squinty, his face all scrunched up like a little boy getting ready to throw a tantrum. I've always thought Anthony's the handsomest hunk in Pomo and that I was, like, beyond lucky when he first asked me out; I practically wet my pants the first time he kissed me. But he didn't look handsome now. He looked mean, like he'd accused the Porsche guy of being. And a lot uglier, somehow.

Funny, but all of a sudden I wasn't so sure I wanted him to marry me. I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep on being with him, whether or not I had his damn baby.

Douglas Kent

STORM'S EYES WERE all over the strange beast as soon as it lumbered into Gunderson's Lounge. When it settled its hairy bulk at the other end of the bar, she shifted slightly on her stool so she could keep watching it without turning her head. Large, the way she liked 'em. Large and unsightly and endowed, no doubt, with no more than two active brain cells. What did she talk to them about afterward? Or were her postcoital conversations limited to contented sighs on her part, satisfied animal grunts and purrs on theirs?

You'll never know, Kent.

No Stormy nights for you, bucko—past, present, or future.

I lit a weed and studied my glass through the smoke. One more swallow to savor and on to the next. Dry martinis, the universal salve. The good folks at AA tell you that if you can't imagine a world without booze, you're a major-league alcoholic. I couldn't imagine a universe without booze. So what did that make me?

I knew what it made me, yes indeedy. My own brain cells pickled and expiring in daily droves. Ah, but there were still plenty left—too many, as a matter of fact. And the too many too active.

"How about another?" I asked Storm.

"No, I don't think so." Still staring at the Incredible Hulk who had wandered in out of the cold. "You go ahead, Doug."

"Don't mind if I do."

I took the last swallow and signaled to Mike for a refill. He brought it dutifully and quickly; Mike and I have an understanding based on mutual need. His, of course, being filthy lucre.

When I had it cozily in hand and a third of the salve working its warm way into the Kent depths I said, "Bigfoot lives."

"What?"

"Him. Humongous, isn't he?"

"Mmm. He came into the bank today while I was there."

"Did he now."

"I wonder who he is."

"Why don't you go ask him?"

Out came the tongue to slick her lips. The tip of it stayed out at one corner. I knew that gesture and the sultry expression that went with it; I'd seen them aimed at a dozen different men in the past three years. Never at me, however. The gesture and expression I knew well, but the moist lips and tongue themselves I didn't know at all and never would. Kent the deprived.

"I'll bet he's hung like a horse," I said.

"Don't be vulgar."

I applied more salve. "Sure you won't have another, pal?"

"I'm sure." Then, delayed reaction: "Why did you say that?"

"Say what?"

"Call me pal."

"Why not? We're drinking buddies, aren't we?"

"I suppose we are." Eyes on the fresh meat again.

"Aloof drinking buddies," I said. "Martinis and chaste good-night handshakes."

No answer this time. She wasn't even listening.

I gave my glass closer scrutiny, holding it up so the back-bar lights reflected in tiny distorted glints off the salve's oily surface. Time once again to ponder the oft-pondered question: Was I in love with Storm Carey, or was she just another whip-hard unit in the Kent bag of sticks? Tonight I felt more philosophical than usual. Tonight I decided it was a mixture of the two. Long ago I'd come to the conclusion that I was incapable of real love, the selfless, giving kind; but I was capable of a pallid, selfish version and within its boundaries, yes, I loved her. Ah, but was it Storm the woman that I loved pallidly and selfishly, or was it the insoluble mystery of her, her hidden eye that I couldn't reach or ever possess? A little of both, I decided again. Which was what made the stick that was Storm whip hard, the pain more exquisite when it was applied to the tender portions of the Kent psyche.

Not a new insight, but a sharper one than usual. Very good. I rewarded myself with more salve.

How long has it been that I've been gathering sticks for the old bag? Long time. Long, long time. The first few had been picked up in the bosom of Pa Kent's dysfunctional family. One or two more in Philly, fresh out of Penn State's redoubtable journalism school, suffering through graveyard shifts on the AP rewrite desk. None in Pasadena that I could recall; my first job on a real newspaper, brash and eager and confident and still harboring a few of what I laughably considered ideals. Santa Monica? Yep, I'd gathered quite a few in good old Santa Monica after the promise of a freehand daily think piece became instead a restricted twice-weekly Pap smear and then, after four months, evolved into a reason to quit when the bastard city editor arbitrarily determined that I wasn't columnist material after all and kicked me back onto the City Hall beat.

They came fast and often after that, all the sticks on the twenty-year ride to the bottom. One more large-city daily (never a big-city daily where Kent could strut his stuff) and on to a couple of small-city dailies, a succession of small-town dailies, and small-town twice weeklies, and finally all the way down, plunk, to the tiny-town, once-a-week sheets. How many papers and towns altogether in twenty years? A score? Two dozen? They were all pasted together in my memory, a gray blur like the booze-soaked remnants of a cheap montage. The only things from each stop along the route that I remembered clearly were the sticks: missed deadlines, broken promises, bitter firings, random rants and clashes. But those weren't the only mementos of the past two decades; there were plenty of other sticks, too, courtesy of one ex-wife (I wonder who's laying her now?), a gaggle of ex-girlfriends, more than one episode involving the nonperformance of a once dependable pecker, a clutch of drunk-driving charges, two or three sodden fistfights. Kent used them all, one by one (often, with certain favorites like the Storm stick), in the grand sport of Kent-bashing. And still the bag wasn't full nor the psyche fully flayed, nor would they ever be even if my liver and lungs held out for another ten years or more. Which was about as likely as a black lesbian with AIDS being elected to the White House.

Spend the rest of my short unhappy life in Pomo? Nope. Definitely not. The tiniest town yet, true, but there were tinier ones; tinier weeklies, too, than the Pomo Advocate, whose owners could be persuaded to tolerate the fine, ink-stained hand of Douglas Kent, crusading editor. The truth was, Pomowas wearing thin on me after three years. I wasn't used to holding a job that long, staying in one place that long. I should have been fired long ago. Instead, I was still enjoying undeserved freedom, the largesse of a large-assed absentee owner whose only interest in the Advocate was a modest annual profit gleaned from its advertisers. He cared not a whit for the contents of the paper. Neither, for that matter, did its subscribers; their primary interest lay in a weekly search for the correct wording and spacing of their ads, the mention and correct spelling of their names and those of friends and relatives, ad nauseam.

Perfect case in point: the long Kent-generated article last spring on alcoholism and its root causes in Pomo County. Isolation, alienation, high poverty level on and off the Indian rancherias, high jobless rate, high density of the homeless and elderly retirees and welfare recipients, lack of adequate social services—all the usual crap, re-shat and recycled. A temperance tract, in content and tone, on the insidious, long-range effects of John Barleycorn and his various spirited cousins.

I wrote it drunk, of course.

Blind drunk.

Kent was amazed when he read the piece in print. About a quarter of it was borderline brilliant, some of the best writing I'd done in years, drunk or sober. The other three quarters was mostly incoherent. Sentences that made no sense, paragraphs that had little or no continuity, logic that was illogical, misquotes, even a couple of dangling participles. A shameful mess, in sum, from the first word to the final period.

And the magnificent irony was, nobody noticed.

We received not a single phone call or letter of protest. One of the city councilmen, by God, stopped me on the street the day it ran and actually congratulated me on a "hard-hitting and thought-provoking article." If I'd been drunk at the time I would have laughed in his face. Riotously.

The humor struck me again now, and a sound burst from my larynx that had a tonal quality similar to the famous baying outside Baskerville Hall. Storm swiveled her head toward me. Others, too, including Mike and the Hulk, but I had eyes only for Storm.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. "Nothing's funny."

"Poor Doug," she said, and immediately resumed her optical fore-play with the brute.

I swallowed the dregs from my glass, ate the olive, fired up another cancer stick, and got quietly off the stool and wove my way to the can. Where I took a leak and, of course, managed to dribble on myself before I got the shriveled-up, uncooperative old soldier safely tucked away again inside his Fruit of the Loom bunker. When I turned on the sink tap, water splashed up out of the bowl and wet my shirtfront. Naturally.

"You're pathetic, Kent," somebody said.

I looked up. In the mirror a bleary-eyed, smoke-haloed gent was giving me the eye. Looked just like me, poor bugger, poor Doug. I winked at him; he winked right back.

"A cliche," he said, "that's what you are. The cynical, drunken newspaperman. A bloody cliche."

"Right," I said. "Absolutely right."

"You were born a cliche," the face said. "From the moment you popped out of the old lady with the umbilical cord wrapped around your scrawny neck and your wizened little puss blue from cyanosis, you were doomed to lead the kind of miserable life you've led. A cliche using a series of cliches to grow into an even bigger cliche, and never once rising above the sum of your parts. You're a self-fulfilled prophecy, Kent, that's what you are."

"You bet," I said. "Fucking A."

"That's why you ended up here—in Pomo, in Gunderson's, in this smelly crapper talking to your fuzzy, cliched image in the mirror. You couldn't have ended up anywhere else. You'll sink lower, too, and when you finally die it will be in the most cliched way possible. You pathetic schmuck, you."

Squinting, I saluted the son of a bitch. Squinting, the son of a bitch saluted me.

I wove back out to the bar. Storm, as expected, had moved in on the strange beast; she was sitting on the stool next to him, her head close to his, her hand already on his thigh. Kent, I thought, you ought to be a weather forecaster. You can predict a Storm with the best of 'em.

I kept on weaving to the door. Nobody noticed, of course. Nobody paid the slightest attention as the crusading editor, the self-pitying gutter philosopher, the cliche supreme stumbled out into the night in search of more salve and another stick for his heavy, heavy bag.

Storm Carey

THE HUNGER WANTED so badly to fuck him, this new one in town. He'd been on the edge of my mind since the bank, and when he walked into the lounge I thought it must be fated for the Hunger to get its wish. It thought so, too. Its demands were immediate. As I watched the stranger hunched over the bar sipping his beer, the demands grew feverish. Never satisfied, wanting more, wanting new, wanting . . . what? What else besides what I kept feeding it?

Almost from my first awareness of the Hunger, two months after Neal's fatal coronary, I thought of it as a mouth, a thick-lipped, nibbling mouth deep within my body. Shrunken at first, the nibbles tiny, then expanding as its need grew, opening wider, nibbling more insistently, probing with something like a tongue as it moved down through my chest, hardening my nipples, down, tightening my stomach and groin, down, fiery breath making me wet, fiery tongue licking ...

Cunnilingus from within. That was the sensation and that was how I described it to the shrink I visited for a while in San Francisco. She was very interested in the concept; what woman wouldn't be? Her interpretation was that the Hunger was grief-born, grief-sustained. Neal and I had been deeply, passionately in love, had enjoyed fabulous sex together throughout our marriage; his sudden death not only left an enormous gap in my life, but in my sex life as well, and so psychologically I had created the Hunger in an effort to fill the emptiness for brief periods. All the men were substitutes, surrogates: Through them I was trying to resurrect both Neal and the powerful physical intimacy we'd shared. But, of course, that was impossible, which was why the sex with them was never satisfying (and why it left me feeling cheap and disgusted with myself), why the Hunger renewed its hot, nibbling demands again so soon afterward.

All well and good—a reasonable analysis as far as it went. But the Hunger was more than just sexual need, more than a yearning for Neal and what we'd had for nine years, more than a gap filler and a psychological desire for love and intense human connection. The Hunger was something dark, too, hidden behind the mouth's thick lips and searching tongue. Something I couldn't reach or understand, and until I did, something I couldn't hope to satisfy. The Hunger's purely sexual demands frightened me, but not half so much as its unknown dark part. I tried to explain this to the shrink, and she seemed sympathetic, but her opinion was that it was, in fact, sexual: the so-called dark side of sex, childhood fears, religious and societal taboos, all that. When she kept trying to convince me of this, I ended our sessions. She was wrong; whatever the dark element was, it was not sexually related. And not she nor anyone else could help me find out what it really was. I was the only one who could do that, and someday I would.