I pull out my lighter just to tease her but she doesn’t find it funny.
Morrissey’s “Suedehead” comes on and I’m lulled by false sentimentality, forgetting what I was doing or why I’m here.
I hear crickets chirping, making out with zombies outside Bourbon Bandits’ open door. I hear parts of bodies falling apart. Lungs turn black at the chitter-chatter of unmanageable and toothless jaws. I don’t know how long it’s been, but there’s too many of them outside and I know the concert hasn’t ended by now.
On the TV a headless singer pantomimes singing. I don’t get it.
Passersby on the sidewalk outside push baby carriages. I don’t get it. It must be nearly midnight by now. Why are people pushing their babies around Geary Street at midnight when all the zombies and crickets and cops and monsters are out? Why are they taking their babies out at this time and in this place? I can only assume occultism. I can only fathom that this city is run by yuppies that worship Satan and sacrifice children.
I realize I’m standing in the threshold of Bourbon Bandits, my cigarette lit, half smoked, though I don’t remember smoking it.
I look back at Cameron. She watches the TV. It’s a computer-generated cartoon of a dragon and a girl rides it over the oceans. The dragon takes a sharp right turn and the girl falls off, hundreds of feet down, cracking her skull open on the ocean. The ocean, it looks so soft, but it breaks this animated girl’s head wide open. Her brain falls out like the yolk of an egg and drops to the sea’s floor. From it grow cities in which everyone is sentenced to die.
I throw my cigarette out the door, notice the zombie with the missing arm still sleeps against the Peruvian deli’s storefront. Cars zip by. Rain promises its arrival. I walk back to where Cameron works behind the bar, doing God-knows-what now.
“Why don’t you like me?” I snort, one misshapen pink hoof on the bar, the other clutching tightly to my drink.
“Please. You’ve had enough. No more for you, buck-o,” she says, motioning for me to exit.
“I need to know! Why don’t you like me! What’s wrong with me?”
“Luke, listen, get out now before I call the owner. He lives right upstairs. He’ll eighty-six your ass and then what will you do? Where will you go?”
“Cameron, please!” I’m begging. I notice in the mirror across from me that tears have formed in my large, round eyes.
“Out. Right fucking now,” she says coldly.
“Please, Cameron. No! Don’t kick me out! Please!”
Cameron shoots a look of both astonishment and bewilderment. Harried, she searches for her cell phone in her pockets, behind the bar, between bottles of Fernet Branca.
I finger the pocket knife in my pocket.
She can’t seem to find her phone. She looks puzzled, reserved, almost ready to give up.
“Do… I have to go?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, tired. “Please. Just go. You can come back tomorrow. But please just go. You’ve had too much.”
“But you don’t know what’s out there! They’re trying to get me! All of them! Fucking monsters! The monsters, Cameron!”
Across from me, in the mirror, I’m tearing at my eyes and blood streams from them. My mouth is wet and red and pleading.
Cameron walks toward the landline phone.
I won’t move. I won’t budge. I’m not going out there. I take a seat, light another cigarette, and hold my drink in a shaky hand.
“Out! Now!” she says storming back toward me. “The owner’s on his way. He’ll be here any second, and while maybe I won’t call the cops on you, he will.”
I drop my cigarette, and somehow I completely lose it.
Cameron’s long, slender cricket body vibrates. She grows wings that beat violently and I can taste it in the air: her fear. The sharp hairs on her legs start making music that sound like Vivaldi, but more modern, like Vivaldi was now writing music for bad movies.
“I won’t! I won’t go! I won’t do it! You can’t make me! Please, Cameron! Please let me stay!”
She looks down toward the entrance and I realize others are here now. Just a few. I have no idea how long they’ve been here. Perhaps a long while.
A cricket, quivering and senseless, bends over a low table near the bar’s narrow entrance. A zombie, its face skinless, abrasions and sores all over its arms and chest, grey and hideous, fucks the cricket from behind, becoming more violent with each thrust as the dark keeps rolling in.
A Robert Palmer song, which I did not put on the internet jukebox, plays “I Didn’t Mean to Turn You On.”
The building shakes and bad art falls off the black walls. The couple fucking at the front of the bar don’t notice and keep on until the zombie’s dick breaks off inside the cricket and they both scream as he pulls away from her, stumbling and bleeding.
“Listen,” Cameron whispers, now touching my wrist over the bar, something in her switching on as she watches the guy walk out of the bar, pulling his pants up ridiculously, clutching his crotch and screaming. The girl bent over the table laughs, stands up, puts the bloody pocket knife between her tits, pulls her skirt down, and exits.
“You can stay. Just calm the fuck down, OK?” Cameron says.
“I can? I can stay?” I ask, my tears coming to a halt, my lips stretching across my wide teeth as I grin painfully hard.
“Yes. Yes. Just… don’t leave me here alone with these monsters,” she says quietly, reaching across the bar and absentmindedly grabbing my hand.
I shudder inside at the contact. I quake. Nearly collapse completely at her touch. My heart grows heavy and sinks down into my guts and swirls. It hurts so much. It feels so good. I hold back new tears and pat her hand, consolingly.
Wild yells and yelps escape down the street outside. Sirens wail. Pieces of bodies roll in and out of the bar as if we’re inside a pinball machine.
I grab my glass of Jim Beam.
“OK. OK. Yeah, alright. I don’t have to leave?”
“No. No, Luke. Please stay,” she says in a small voice, visibly upset. “Just stay for a little while, OK? Here, I’ll get you another drink.”
Completely distracted, her eyes on the door, she pours me another drink. I light a cigarette and she says nothing.
The TV now shows sweeping green landscapes of either Ireland or Iceland or some place that starts with an ‘I.’ Every now and again, through the beauty of the place, I see the bones of broken hands reaching through the earth, some missing fingers, some with hooves, instead, kicking through the dirt. Faces pushing against the soil, sobbing and broken-hearted. Bodies falling apart against the beauty of the sun just now rising. Disintegrating. Turning to dust. Bodies just fading away into nothingness.
I look up and see “Enjoy Me Enjoy Me Enjoy Me” flashing over and over again.
I take my seat at the bar and look at Cameron, take hold of my drink, and try not to cry from the gratitude.
CAMERON WASHES GLASSES
Depeche Mode’s “Blasphemous Rumors” plays on the juke in Bourbon Bandits as the TV mutely replays the story from last night about a young church-going couple shot to death while sleeping on Stinson Beach. I sip my Lagunitas IPA, watch Cameron wash glasses, her thin arms moving up and down like pistons. In my head I can see the twenty-something couple giggly on the beach. I can hear the Pacific lick the sands so near them, calling them into it though they’ll never come. Then I hear them say, no, they’ll wait, they’ll wait for a more appropriate time to fuck—though they don’t use that word—and they touch each other’s faces like they love each other and look into each other’s eyes with such longing not knowing that that longing is spawned from not fucking and if they had fucked already they’d likely not be on the beach right now under stars, pretending, with the sound of waves wrapped around them and arms wrapped around each other for warmth with legs rubbing like cricket legs for song while blood flows and body parts swell and hearts beat hard in order to say no. No, they’d be somewhere fucking, behind closed doors
and not on a beach eventually falling asleep from the exhaustion of resisting temptation, of being faithful to the words of their parents, their churches, and themselves. And instead of the act of penetrating and being penetrated, instead they fall asleep under blue moonlight near a quaking ocean and western winds that carry clean salt and each get shot in the face only seconds apart.
And then I see Cameron behind the bar touching herself with her eyes closed, moaning.
It takes a moment but I finally realize she’s just washing more glasses, humming to the song. I look around the bar and it’s empty except for Old Man Bill sitting in the back at a table under an oil painting of a greased-up, well-built boxer in the standard pose. Only, this boxer has Bill’s old head attached to that adroit physique.
Old Man Bill looks at me. I look at him. He laughs. I look back at my Lagunitas IPA and drink. I throw five bucks on the bar, look back at Cameron who doesn’t look at me, and exit the bar into the bright three p.m. San Francisco sunlight and all the shit-stained glory of Geary Street and the Tenderloin.
A one-armed, cross-eyed man hobbles over to me, asks for change, his breath smelling of week-old tuna and rancid spinach. Before receiving an answer, he hobbles past me, yelling scripture. He trips and falls to the pavement, shattering into a million shards of glass.
I cough and light a cigarette and put on my Wayfarers. Somebody in a waist-apron scuttles out of a storefront with a dust pan and broom and sweeps up the mass of scattered shards, muttering obscenities, disgusted, before disappearing back into the store.
An airplane roars overhead and everybody stops what they’re doing and looks up before moving on.
Fog is somewhere under the Golden Gate Bridge waiting to eat us all, but it’s staying there, invisible, for the time being, waiting for the right hour to cover and consume us.
It’s 2002 and the future isn’t here yet. I take a look at the extremely thin, aged black man across the street with a needle in his arm, passed out in a non-descript doorway before pulling out my tiny bag of coke, taking a bit on my finger and rubbing it on my gums.
I don’t move for five minutes until the world proves itself to be a brighter place full of promise.
I need a job so I walk over to the newspaper dispenser on the corner, pushing through one-hundred different versions of myself, each with a deformity, then put my fifty cents in and try to open it only to discover that yet again newspaper dispensers oppose me and don’t want me to know what’s going on in the world.
I jiggle it. I jammer it. I boggle it. I hit it. I hit it again. I kick it and it falls over into the street and the door pops open. I reach in, take my paper, close the door, hold up a hand for oncoming traffic and search the classifieds. Horns blare. Brakes squeal. Cars zip around me. Swear words are spat. Middle fingers wave before their owner’s reinsert them back into their asses.
The classifieds tell me I’m supposed to be using the internet to find a job. I throw the paper into the street where one-hundred different deformed versions of myself run after it and fight for the paper’s different sections. I wonder who ended up with the personals. I wonder which of us will be put out of my misery.
I get lonely so I wander back to Bourbon Bandits and peek inside and see Cameron getting fucked from behind at the bar by an eight-foot tall, obscenely muscular dude wearing only a football helmet. His body is webbed in thick, pulsing purple veins. His blue lips are pulled back into a grimace behind the facemask. He’s got her long brown hair wrapped around his bulging forearm. Cameron’s face is blissful, beautiful, barely shaken. Old Man Bill is in the back under his self-portrait, toothlessly laughing and clapping and banging his hand on the table. I close the door, take a drag of my Winston Light, notice the junky across the street is no longer there and how the fog slowly, painfully slowly, rolls over the low buildings across the street.
I peek my head back inside the bar and Cameron’s watching the TV showing again the story of the couple that had their brains blown into sand and she has the volume up and there’s no one in the bar wearing a football helmet and Old Man Bill’s nowhere to be seen.
Pictures of the couple are shown and they don’t look older than seventeen and I assume the news is lying about their age. Then I see moonlight falling on sand and hear waves crashing against it and driftwood hollowly banging against other driftwood. And I see feet moving through the whitewash, hiding footsteps in the sound of waves kissing the beach. There’s a couple up ahead and a gun in my hand and the couple cuddles closely against each other, the Pacific wind gently pushing into the girl’s hair, lifting it with invisible fingers, and, God, I feel so lonely and the moon is big and bright and there’s no stars, there’s never any stars, and the ocean is stupidly endless and dark, and the driftwood gets louder, sounding like old bones fighting to get out of bed to meet another day, and the couple—one of them snoring—gets closer, lying there on the beach in their two sleeping bags zipped together as one, and they’re so pretty and young and the world is crashing around them and they’re so innocent, his hands on her face and her arms wrapped harmlessly around his middle. I see them at my feet, the waves telling me to do it, that no one deserves this, that no one deserves anything and it’s a lonely fucked up world and before I know it their heads explode beneath my feet before either has a chance to open an eye and for a second I’m grateful they went so peacefully.
Suddenly the sun sets and the fog drops and I’m covered in ground clouds and dying light. One-hundred lame versions of myself bump into me on their way to more important places, such as hospitals, burial grounds, and open, welcoming legs. One of them turns to me, a mouth full of black spots, and says, “You’re a real piece of work, you are,” before tossing a quarter at me and moving on.
I drop the cigarette from my mouth that went out a long time ago, pick the quarter up from the sidewalk, and take off my Wayfarers.
Then I’m all alone on Geary. Nothing but me and the fog and the end of the day. I make a mental note to pay my internet bill.
I pull out a cigarette and walk into Bourbon Bandits and Cameron tells me to take it outside. I finish the cigarette outside. It’s six p.m. I go back inside. The bar is still empty and Cameron pours me a pint of whiskey and soda water. Old Man Bill sits below his portrait, telling jokes to himself about Polacks and laughing.
“Does he ever stop laughing?” I ask Cameron.
“Huh?” she says, as if she didn’t even realize I was there. The TV has a picture of Old Man Bill on it and he’s laughing. Then it’s just the usual porn.
“Laughing. Does Old Man Bill ever stop laughing?” I ask.
“Um, I don’t know, Luke,” she says and starts washing more glasses, though I have no idea where all these dirty glasses are coming from when it’s just me and Old Man Bill, and it looks to me like Cameron is touching herself so I avoid the TV and watch Cameron wash glasses.
GREAT AMERICAN
The very early, dark morning pulls down around us as we stand outside of Aberdeen Tower on Geary Street enshrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke, giving as many dirty looks to tight-pants-wearing walkers as those we’re receiving.
A woman in a fur coat covered in blood pauses before us, talking on an ancient, bulky mobile phone as her dachshund takes a tiny shit. Then she moves on, leaving the steaming brown package behind.
“Let’s go over to the Great American,” Gem says.
“It’s two-thirty a.m., Gem. It’s closed,” Sanchez, in his grey three-piece suit, says coolly through a fog of gin breath. A tall and skinny black-haired model in a tight glimmering white dress and heels clings to him, her eyelids heavy.
“I work there, dipshit. I have the keys,” she says, dangling them in front of his face. She’s had maybe eight Jameson and soda waters but she’s not showing it.
Kevin’s across the street smoking and looking down at us from his second-story apartment window. I motion for him to come down and join us. He flicks his cigarette out the window, spits and walks out of view.
> I have visions of San Francisco burning down in mountain-high flames, which fills me with momentary euphoria, but I walk out into the middle of the street anyway and nearly get hit by some silver foreign sports car speeding past as I stamp out Kevin’s discarded butt.
“Jesus, be careful,” Gem says as I return.
A stream of hoofed drunkards in large nose rings clod past us, snorting and running at red lights with their oversized rhinoceros heads aimed low. One of them charges the traffic light and meets the aerodynamic fender of another expensive foreign car and goes rolling over the top of the speeding vehicle and crashes to the asphalt in a torn up mess, blood squirting from a major artery in its inner thigh and dribbling from its muzzle and neck while it lies motionless, veiled in miasma.
Nobody does anything. Then one bystander up the street calls animal services. Later, in the morning light, they’ll scrape it from the street and incinerate it in a grey cube of a building somewhere in Emeryville.
“What do you think, Luke?” Gem’s drug dealer, Eric, asks. He’s been tagging along all evening, playing Limp Bizkit on the juke and thinking it funny and making Cameron, who joined us earlier for a short time, grow nervous and leave.
“What do I think?” I ask.
“Yeah, want to go over to the Great American? Gem has keys.” He fidgets, pulls the hood of his No Fear hoodie over his head and stuffs his hands in the pockets. Sniffles.
“I have ears, asshole,” I say, and Eric guffaws.
“Well?” he asks.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say, and take a drag from my Winston and look to see if Kevin’s back at the window but he’s not and the light’s off.
I see ghosts in the shadows twist and turn and waver and I feel a coldness reach down into my throat, triggering my gag reflex, causing me to cough, nearly vomit.
Gem’s on her phone calling friends and my small crowd of glitterati moves up around the corner to the Great American Music Hall where I once took Serena to see Neutral Milk Hotel. We sat up in the mezzanine, in the seats farthest in the back, and while the sound poured over us she let me put my fingers inside her, and, after, as we were about to leave, she said “thank you” and “I love you” before using her connections in the music world to get back stage where I was not allowed to go. Then I left and never heard from her again.
Enjoy Me Page 2
