ENJOY ME
Logan Ryan Smith
Transmission Press
Chicago, Illinois
First Electronic Edition
Transmission Press, Chicago 60625
© 2015 by Logan Ryan Smith
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
“Bret Easton Ellis” first appeared in Great Lakes Review, Issue 2, Spring 2013 (nominated for a Pushcart Prize); “Blue Monster” first appeared in Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, Volume 7, Issue Four.
for Abby, Storma, and Summer
with apologies
for the disparagement
Oh, it’s a strange day
In such a lonely way
Some people look down on me
I know they like what they see
—New Order, Truth
Please don’t turn me off
I don’t know what I’m doing outside
Me and the telephone that never rings
If you were me, what would you do?
Me, I disconnect from you
—Tubeway Army, Me! I Disconnect From You
I just want to give you the creeps
Run and hide when I’m on the streets
Your fears and your tears
I’ll taunt you in your sleep
I just want to give you the creeps
—Social Distortion, The Creeps
I’ve got the spirit, but lose the feeling
—Joy Division, Disorder
table of contents
ENJOY ME
CAMERON WASHES GLASSES
GREAT AMERICAN
BRET EASTON ELLIS
MMBURR
BLUE MONSTER
GETTING THERE
OLD MAN BILL
CLEOPATRA
FATHERHOOD
QUAKING
A PARADE, ALWAYS
MUMMY
ENJOY ME
The crickets’ chirping is enormous and shattering, threatening to crack the glass of Jim Beam I hold in my hand that’s on the bar of Bourbon Bandits, my usual place, which is dark and was cool thirty minutes ago but has been getting warmer, muggier, and more claustrophobic as the crickets’ crescendo grows louder and louder as the conductor, standing before them on long, skinny black legs sprouting shards of black hair, urges this movement to its climax, louder and louder, each cricket’s sound bouncing off the other, louder and louder, until it’s overwhelming and incomprehensible as the sound becomes an inescapable whirring, painful, and monotonous note.
Then it’s just the murmur of the people around me smelling of patchouli and shower-less days that are full of a confidence given them by their young peers that’s informed them, erroneously, that the human body isn’t a disgusting, vile thing.
I stare at my glass of Jim Beam and try to hear the Joy Division song I put on the internet jukebox more than thirty minutes ago but just now comes on. The chatter, chanting, and yelling of San Francisco’s youngest and brightest—the future artists, authors, musicians, and pederasts—overtakes the song’s melancholy lull and I can only hear a stray bass line from Peter Hook and a barely intelligible mutter from Ian Curtis. I can’t even tell what song it is because I can’t remember which song I played and I’m on my fourth glass of Jim Beam.
The bartender comes up to me. He’s blurry, on a pair of long, thin black cricket legs that make music as they slide against each other.
“Hey, Luke,” Stan says.
“Yeah?” I don’t look at him, keeping my focus on my glass while trying to figure out what Joy Division song it was I played.
“Listen, I’m taking off. My shift’s almost over. Mind if we close out?” he asks, holding up the credit card I handed him when I took a seat here about an hour and a half ago.
“Who’s coming in?” I ask, swirling the ice in my drink, not making eye contact, surprised I can hear Stan over the babble.
Someone screams “Shot!” and for a second I’m thinking—hoping—someone’s pulled a gun and started shooting the place up, but it’s just a couple of kids near the open door slamming their tequilas down and calling for another.
I try to hide my immense disappointment from Stan, who I like well enough as he’s a good bartender, keeps my drinks flowing, and comps me plenty because I’ve been coming here long enough for him to think he knows me.
“Hey!” Stan says, snapping little furry fingers in front of my face. “Can I close out your tab or not? I gotta go, man.”
“Who’s coming in?” I repeat, raising my voice.
“Um,” he says, backing up from the bar, thinking hard to remember. “Oh, I think it’s Cameron.”
“No,” I say.
“No, what, Luke?”
“No, you can’t close out my tab. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here.”
“Listen, man, I need you to close out so I can get out of here.”
“Fine,” I say. “Close me out but keep my card back there. I’m not going anywhere.”
In stop-motion, large crickets hop in and out of the stools at the bar around me. Most have tattoos and smell like B.O. and some say things to me like “excuse me” and “hey, don’t I know you” and “I dug the reading you gave last week” and I mostly ignore these people infiltrating my space, shrug, and maybe smile a little to keep them away from me.
Stan shuffles away with my card, runs my bill, I sign the slip and tip well. Stan looks at the tip I’ve written down and doesn’t say anything, has no noticeable reaction to the fact I’ve tipped him forty percent of my total tab. But that doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve gotten used to the fact that no one really appreciates generosity and gratitude has long been dead.
Yeah, the only mistake was that you ran away… is the first bit of lyrics I catch from the internet jukebox. “The Only Mistake.” I’m not sure why I played that song. It’s not one of my favorites.
I step out of Bourbon Bandits onto the sidewalk of Geary Street and take my place among the zombies and psychopaths. How do I tell the difference? The psychopaths wear suits. The zombies have skin peeling off their faces and reek of rotting teeth and were likely the extras in a movie we were all in but forgot about.
I light a Winston as Cameron comes out of the door next to Bourbon Bandits. She shuts the security door. She’s wearing skinny jeans. Black. To match her long dark hair and bangs. Her pale shoulders and thin arms exposed because of her tight, flimsy white tank top. Her left arm’s tattooed with a large blue monster I’ve always tried to ignore.
“Hi, Luke!” she says as she bounces past me. “Back again, huh?”
I’m thirty-one-years-old, living in San Francisco, currently unemployed, collecting money from the government and the few bucks I get from magazines that publish my short stories and poetry. I’ve achieved nothing so far. I’ve written stories and poems, but no books and nothing that’s made me real money or scored me a teaching gig. I have no children and haven’t had a relationship last more than six months since I was twenty-three. I have three or four imaginary friends that I only like because their poetry is pretty good.
A zombie bumps shoulders with me and his jaw breaks off and falls against the cement. The few teeth that were left in it fall out, clink against the sidewalk like so many black pennies. Finally, the jingling comes to a stop as some roll into the gutter. I don’t pick up the jaw or his teeth since he barley notices and keeps shuffling on up toward Van Ness.
“Fucking asshole,” I mutter.
“Excuse me?” Cameron asks, her eyes big with the excitement of confrontation.
I look in through the open door of the bar, then back to Cameron. “Oh, no. Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you. Um, could you get that asshole out of my chair?” I ask, motioning inside tow
ard the douchebag sitting patiently in my seat where my drink waits for me as he waits for Cameron to show up and pour him a drink.
Cameron looks at me, confused, but then agrees to get the guy out of my seat, smiles and walks her tight ass into the bar.
Because I’ve wanted to fuck Cameron since she started working at Bourbon Bandits about six months ago I pull out a small plastic bag from my pocket, then my keys, and sneak a bump—though, really, there’s no reason for my subtlety as right when I replace the bag I see a zombie across the street in front of the Peruvian deli, squatting against the windows with a needle dangling out of his arm, shaking violently. The diners inside the deli pretend not to notice as his arm falls off and shatters on the ground. Then he’s lying in front of the building with just one arm, sleeping, apparently. Passersby step over him, kicking up the dust of his shattered arm.
It’s not late yet. Only nine o’clock or so. Cameron is behind the bar, and like a good bartender, she’s cleared my seat for me.
As I walk in and push past a mass of cricket mandibles vibrating uselessly, push past all these insects hopping haphazardly from table to booth to chair and to the back area to shoot some pool, I feel sick. I drop to one knee, put a hand on one of the cricket’s disgusting, shimmering legs, and get kicked away.
Before the wave of nausea envelopes me, I swallow it back and taste bile in the back of my mouth, then a spindle of stomach acid unravels from my stomach and scorches the soft palate of my mouth. Someone helps me up. A soft voice that says, “Are you OK?” I don’t respond, just take my spot at the bar. I wonder if I should do more coke.
Then the bar clears out. Almost completely empty. It’s Friday night and I have nothing else to do and like it this way and Cameron is here so I stay. I don’t want to leave.
I down my glass of Jim Beam and am pleased to hear Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel” playing crystal clear from the internet jukebox. I find a little too much pleasure in my anxiety to find out what I might have played next.
“Where’d everybody go?” I ask Cameron as she cleans glasses.
Giant lizards eat rancid rats on the TV screens at each end of the bar, sucking out their eyeballs first before shoving their scaly muzzles into the rats’ open and bloated bellies and flicking their long tongues down the rats’ ears, testing their brains. A flashing neon light in the middle of the bar reads “Enjoy Me” below a beer’s logo I’ve never seen before.
“I think LCD Sound System is playing over at the Great American,” she says, barely looking up from washing those grimy pint glasses.
“Oh yeah?” I ask, not really caring. “Who’s opening?”
She smiles, “Shitty City Titty Twister.”
“Ah, well there’s the real draw,” I say, smiling, making sure we make eye contact and that she realizes I’m the only one in the bar.
She gives me a quizzical look and I hear the splat of zombies outside vomiting their lungs out against the pavement and losing their bowels in the middle of the street.
“What?” I ask. “I’m not funny?”
“Uh, not sure what’s funny there, Luke,” she says, putting glasses away and moving down the bar.
“So, you can make a joke that’s not even a joke, but I can’t respond with something equally unfunny and get a smile out of you?”
“Just finish your drink, Luke.”
“Quit saying my name,” I say, under my breath.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
The TV now shows lions humping, then devouring antelopes. Large red ribbons of flesh open up on the screen, but no blood sprays the way you’d expect to see in a movie. But I’m not sure if I’m watching a movie or a reality program.
I light up a Winston at the bar, finish my drink like I’m told to do, and ask for another.
“Come on, Luke, you know there’s no smoking in here,” Cameron says as she grabs my empty glass and fills it.
“Come on, Cameron, no one’s here,” I complain.
She looks at me, perplexed, and antennae grow out of her forehead and her mandibles flitter back and forth something unintelligible as her legs push together, making an intolerable sound, while the TV shows a fuzzy video of a naked girl in a bed, her ankles tied to the bedposts, her arms tied behind her back, her face covered by a George W. Bush mask. Two men, stark naked, stand opposite each other, bedside. One wears a Hitler mask with a grotesquely large, pink grin, and the other wears an oversized Simon Cowell mask, though I’m not sure if it’s a mask or actually Simon Cowell. It probably is Simon Cowell, I tell myself, and it’s Simon Cowell that’s holding a large, serrated knife. He holds it before him, turns and looks up at the corner of the room where the camera films it all, shows us the knife, then turns the knife on himself and slices off his left hand, slowly, cutting through tendon and bone. He falls to one knee, the hand with the knife in it on the bed, the other hand rolling under the bed. The girl on the bed in the George W. Bush mask writhes against her restraints, but we can’t hear anything from the TV, only the Soft Cell song, “Sex Dwarf,” that I put on earlier, now finally playing.
I’m wondering why Cameron doesn’t watch this, doesn’t notice the TV and how intently I’m watching it. Then Simon Cowell, seemingly about to lose consciousness, stands back up, takes the knife and thrusts it into George W. Bush’s neck, her tits swaying violently for less than fifteen seconds before coming to a complete halt. Then Hitler and Simon Cowell have sex in the blood-soaked bed, George W. Bush pushed off to the side, dangling off the bed, arms tied behind the back, legs still tied to the bed posts.
I turn my head away and Cameron stares at me intently.
“Put. It. Out. Luke. Now,” she says.
I shake myself out of my stupor and remember how beautiful she is and how little I know about her. She’s fuming right now and I can’t stop looking at her. But I find a nearby glass with a little bit of beer left in it, take one last quick drag and drop the mostly unsmoked cigarette into the glass.
Blowing the smoke out the side of my face where I believe a hole has been developing over the last two years, I say, “Happy?” I smile and when I do I notice one of my front teeth is missing, though I can’t recall when that happened.
Cameron smiles back at me and says she is. When I look back at the TV there’s a commercial with a bunch of jack rabbits making fun of a rattlesnake that has a baby rattle at the end of his tail instead of the rattle it should have been born with. They’re all laughing at the snake as he tries to be menacing.
I feel a passing sense of empathy.
The Nine Inch Nails song, “Closer,” comes on the internet jukebox and I sing along, watching Cameron down at the other end of the bar, cleaning glasses, and I’m trying to be jovial and playful by putting a lounge-singer twist on the chorus of “I want to fuck you like an animal!” but Cameron either can’t hear me or is ignoring me because she doesn’t even look my way.
Suddenly I remember the pocket knife a friend left at my place one night. It’s in my pocket, where it’s supposed to be, though it isn’t mine. I’ve been meaning to give it back, keeping it on me in case I ran into him. But I think he moved to Berlin. Or Bakersfield. I’m not sure.
“Enjoy Me” flickers in the middle of the bar and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My snout has grown wider and my forehooves look infected and swollen. The small patch of hair atop my pink head, I swear, right now, in this bar light, looks like it’s gone fucking grey. But I’m positive it was still dark brown this morning.
I look around the bar, remind myself that no one is here but me and Cameron. I look at the TV. It’s just a basketball game. The door’s open and the dark night outside seeps in. Blackness—more of it comes into the room and I hear the moans of zombies strolling Geary Street outside. It’s almost like coyotes, but only if the coyotes had already had their throats slit before having a hand forcefully shoved through the skin of their bellies where fingers play with their intestines and break through the wall of their stom
achs, finding that the impaled has had so little to eat.
“Enjoy Me.”
I grab my drink, pull out another cigarette—not to light, just to taunt—and walk down to the end of the bar where Cameron stands.
“Hi, Luke,” she says, working the glasses behind the bar, though I’m trying to figure out why she still has so many glasses to clean since the bar has been nearly empty except for myself for the last forty-five minutes or more.
“Quit. Saying. My. Name,” I say, then smile.
She doesn’t look up at me. “What?”
Outside: sirens. Gunshots. Multiple wounded. Guts on the street. Just a little further east on down the street. Maybe down on Leavenworth. Someone is clutching their chest and fighting for breath as flashing red, white, and blue lights parade over them. One cop laughs and says, bending over the fella clutching his chest, “This one’s bit the dust!” And the guy screams, “No! No I haven’t! Help me! Help me!” and the blood gets darker on his chest as he screams and is thrown into the meat wagon and the meat wagon speeds off, all sound fading. And then the lights in the back of the meat wagon turn off.
“Nothing,” I say. “You know, Cameron….” I take a drink of the Jim Beam, fumble the Winston between my fingers, and wonder what it’d be like to light it, smoke it halfway down, despite her protests, and shove it into her eye.
“What, Luke?”
I settle myself, take a breath, try to control the urge to lash out, knowing I’ve already asked her a couple times not to say my name.
“I’ve always liked you, Cameron,” I say, purposefully mentioning her name.
“That’s nice, Luke.” She’s still not looking at me.
“I don’t think you heard me.”
“Huh?”
“I said I don’t think you heard me, Cameron.”
“No, Luke, I heard you.”
“What’s your problem then?”
“I don’t have a problem. I heard you. Just drop it, OK? And don’t light that cigarette. I’m warning you.”
Enjoy Me Page 1
