In Nine Kinds of Pain
Page 3
Well, maybe that’s not so true this morning. There aren’t any bottles in the kitchen, none in the copy room, none in the . . . let’s see, storage room behind the staircase, none in the tank in the bathroom. There’s the mystery, the rub, if you will—did he drink them last night, or is someone onto him and is tossing out his stash? That would be bad, someone intruding on his world and tossing out his stash. That’s not playing fair. He gave up driving, driving, just to keep people out of his world, and now they intrude anyway. Why would someone get rid of a perfectly good unopened fifth of Captain Morgan? Hmm? Don’t they know how expensive that stuff is? That’s not just chugging rum, my friend; that’s on-the-rocks-with-a-dash-of-Dr.-Pepper rum. That’s stuff that even he takes the opportunity to dilute, which is a rare feat in itself, mind you. Tossing the Captain Morgan is not playing fair, not at all. He gave up driving for a little bit of privacy! Driving! All he wants in return is a little privacy. Is that too much to ask?
Then again, he’s getting ahead of himself here. Maybe he did drink it. But if he did drink it, it must have been last night, because he just brought that brand-new bouncing baby Captain back to the rectory yesterday when he picked up the Seagram’s.
And if it was last night that he drank it then he was probably already way past his tolerance level. He was already into his semi-near-conscious Nirvana even before he got back to the rectory. And if that’s the case, that means that he probably threw it up even before it hit his belly, which means that’s fifteen bucks in the toilet.
He goes back into the bathroom and looks down into the toilet bowl. Yep, there it is, probably. There’s the burgundy cloud that’s probably the Captain Morgan, mixed with something that he had earlier in the evening, probably. A mixed drink, in his toilet bowl. Only one way to find out if that’s the Captain Morgan or not. That’s right—a taste test. He gets on his knees in front of the beautiful cool white toilet and sucks the aroma through his nose to make sure that it’s actually vomit in the toilet and not something else.
Now, back to his office.
He’s always had a stash that’s for really really really dire straits—the Smirnoff bottle in the sacristy. It always makes his skin crawl to know that there’s a stash of his in there—in the same room with his Holy Cloth, in the same room where he rinses out the Holy Chalice. No one would ever find a vodka bottle in there, mainly because no one else is really supposed to be in there but him and Father Bologna. And Father B just goes about his business, not saying a word, a real holy man, a real priest, not snooping like so many others who come through the rectory. The sacristy is off-limits to everyone else but him and Father B and the Smirnoff. And that’s final.
He needs to go to the sacristy now. He can’t wait. It’s important that he start the day the healthy way, fortified with vodka and all its essential vitamins and iron. But he needs it now. Just look! Look down at his hands! See what he’s saying? The shakes! The shakes are already starting! Thanks a lot. See what’s happening here? With the Captain Morgan overboard, making its final appearance in the rectory, he’s already overextending himself. He’s hitting the limit right now! Everything’s crashing down around him! Just look at his hands! Just look at them shake! Now what do you expect him to do? Not go to the sacristy, even though there’s a perfectly good bottle of Smirnoff going to waste in there? What, you want him to trudge down to the Red Red Robin in this condition and at this time of day or something? You just don’t get it, do you? The Smirnoff’s only down the hall in the sacristy! Why do you want him to go all the way down the street right now to the Red Red Robin? That’s ridiculous!
He goes into the sacristy. With any luck Father Bologna has finished the morning mass and has taken off to visit the elderly or give Last Rights to someone or feed the naked or clothe the hungry or whatever it is that he does when he hits the streets. The man is a real priest, I’m telling you. A real holy man. You can’t say anything derogatory about the guy. He really goes about his day doing good deeds, like a Father Mother Theresa or something, and he probably does it without even thinking once about where he’s going to get his next drink, I bet. Father B doesn’t even think about alcohol, except when it comes time for the Blood of Christ. You have to respect a man who doesn’t even think about alcohol. Now that’s willpower. A real priest with real willpower.
With the sacristy vacant, the search is on for the never-been-seen-by-human-eyes-or-filmed-by-modern-day-cameras bottle of Smirnoff. It has to be in here. If it’s not in here, if that bottle isn’t in this sacristy, then heads will roll, let’s make that clear right now. Heads will roll! A perfectly good bottle of . . . oh, here it is.
Smirnoff, old friend, waiting patiently for my return. If only you had soft lips for me to taste, if only you had glimmering eyes for me to look into, if only you had a nose then you could smELL MY BREATH RIGHT NOW BECAUSE IT’S REALLY RANK WHEWW! God! How could breath smell so badly coming from someone who’s still alive? Please answer that one!
He strokes the bottle fondly, remembering the first time he had nerve enough to stow it away in the sacristy. A wild youth, he was. Vodka doesn’t turn, does it? Or, the real question—could vodka turn enough for him to not want to drink it? Was that even possible? Not likely, but he’ll risk whatever to find that out. The bottle’s a little dusty; neglect. He’s sorry. Neglect’s not a sin, really, if you’re speaking about a liquor bottle, right? He could see the neglect of children or the neglect of a spouse as a sin, but a liquor bottle? He wonders. He’ll have to get back to you about that one.
He rubs his forefinger to his thumb for traction and slowly turns the cap. The shakes, they make it difficult. But, as always, pretty much, he successfully removes the cap and downs the remainder of the bottle. Nails scratch up his back and rub his fur the wrong way, ring his neck and push an “Amen!” out of his throat. With his eyes closed the fireworks begin and end red orange green and blue shining yellow purple too yee-OWW! THAR she blows! Now see, had that been his Captain Morgan, that last statement would have been more appropriate, don’t you think? How can you get “Thar she blows!” from Smirnoff vodka? That doesn’t make any sense. But he said it anyway. And his shakes have stopped for now, he notices, so all’s well again in his world.
Time to go back inside the rectory.
One small teeny-weeny stop in the bathroom again to down some Listerine should kill the slightest hint of alcohol on his breath, at least he hopes so. It won’t really kill it, actually, but maybe someone who cares or someone he wants to lie to will think that the alcohol on his breath is from the Listerine rather than the vodka and stay off his back. Listerine’s a beautiful thing, don’t ya know. Gets rid of any nosy busybodies, and kills the bacteria that causes bad breath. And it smells mediciney, too, unlike Scope or one of those minty kinds that don’t mask the alcohol smell. Listerine—the golden miracle worker.
It’s eight-fifty-three. The red clock says so. I do more drinking before nine o’clock than most people do all day, he thinks. He wonders why the morning mass is over with already, since it was supposed to start at eight and an hour hasn’t even gone by yet and there’s no one in the church. Was it his turn to say the mass this morning? Did he promise Father B that he’d handle the morning mass and then drank the time away? That’s one thing he can always say about himself—it’s rare that his drinking interferes with his parish duties. Maybe once in a great while, but he doesn’t allow his world to interfere with the world of the Church. If that ever happened, if those two worlds ever collided, then he might be
reprimanded for his drinking and he didn’t want that to happen. Right now he needs to be left alone about his drinking. That’s his world, and he makes a lot of sacrifices to keep those worlds from colliding. Driving! Remember?
Eight-fifty-five. Time to get some breakfast. As he walks to the kitchen he thinks about the fact that he likes his curly hair. Curly, light gray hair. His curly hair always hid the fact that he had just woken up. He always leaves his curly hair kind of messy—you see, the messier it is, the harder it is for someone to figure out that he’s been sleeping on the floor of his office all night. The tricks of the trade. Study them, and learn them well, Grasshopper, and maybe someday you can be a successful drunk too, like he is. He has the coffeepot already put together, thinking ahead as to what condition he might be in come morning, so he sits it on the stove and lights the burner. He pours some Cheerios, the rest in the box of Cheerios, into a salad bowl and eats it without taking a breath, the milk glugging in. Then he quickly drinks the abandoned milk left in the bowl until he feels it souring in his stomach. Then he stops. He wonders if the Smirnoff is going to reject the company.
He reaches to his shirt pocket. No cigarettes. He wishes he had a smoke right now. He wishes he had a drink right now. He would take a drag from his cigarette, then tip the glass to his lips and watch the smoke fill it, bouncing off the alcohol and invade the space that the alcohol abandoned. They go hand-in-hand, booze and smokes. Friends ’til the end.
He stands, slightly losing his balance but quick to recover, brushes off his plain light-blue shirt—he’s missing his white collar again—then walks out of the kitchen. He makes his way down the hall, past his office/sleeproom, to the side rectory door.
And that’s when he sees him, outside on the side stoop.
Father Costa opens the side door. The man is bleeding from a head wound, probably. And Father Costa is here to help, right?, here on this earth to serve God, here to help those in need? This man is obviously in need. So why is it so hard to help him? Maybe because he needs to leave now to get to Drink’s to buy a bottle. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Father is needy, too, and not because of a massive head wound like this man, but because of a massive black hole in his stomach that can only be filled by the sweet nectar in a liquor bottle. The absence of a drink is making his heart grow fonder. This man isn’t.
The man is looking down at his feet, his hair like a red waterfall covering his face, blood everywhere. “Here, you know, come in,” Father Costa says. He grabs the man’s arm. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
Dallas Sharper
Very still in the car, Dallas is in harmony with his surroundings. He has become part of the car he sits in, part of the cushion attached to the vehicle standing on the street across from the liquor store that’s in the burrow that’s a part of Detroit that is in the house that Jack built. He would like to think that he has gone unseen the whole/hole time he’s been sitting in the car but knows that, even though the street seems slow-motion to stagnant this morning, he is the Center of its Universe. The street stirs in synchronization with his movements; it stops when he stops, it goes when he goes, then stops again when he feigns a stop and goes again when he goes. He’s a cop, and that’s what happens when a cop’s in the Corridor of West Avenue, even if that cop’s in plain clothes and driving an unmarked Chevy Impala. He is the Center of its Universe. Constabularic centricity—a sub-theory even Einstein would legitimize.
At the slightest glitch/beat from the street he instinctively checks his gun. He decided this morning that it felt like a three-gun day, the heat stirring the kettle of the street and more Bang-Bang for his Buck, but then he opted to leave one at home and only take two instead. Most of the Plain Clothes in Detroit carry a back up, so two’s not that uncommon. He decided before breakfast to go with the Glock 21 and his older Colt .38 Special. He also wanted to bring along the Glock 20, since it was the same caliber as the Glock 21 (.40) only smaller and more compact, but didn’t want to launch onto the street with two Glocks loaded for bear. Glocks can go off too easily. Two Glocks can go off Two easily. The .38 Special, however, isn’t as temperamental as a Glock and will hide quietly on his belt until a time when it’s so needed. Even though the Glock 20 is smaller, he chose the 21; More visibility equals less activity. The 21 is more visible (“See it, fear it, taste it. Thank you very much.”). He almost hates bringing the .38 Special out onto the streets, though, because that’s his morning partner. His morning partner. An explanation: each and every sun-up he’ll look into his dining room mirror and the man looking back (looking very much like Drew Carey) will put a Colt .38 Special (very similar to his) alongside his brow and pull the trigger, the torpid hammer eeee-pit-CRAT, and the wonderful silence that follows.
To insinuate that he’s too timid to empty his head atop his dining room buffet, though, only depreciates the value of his years on the force, depreciates the strength he’d built through the thickness of his invulnerable badge, depreciates the noble selflessness he’d shown in warding off such a selfish act, and so forth. He admires himself for keeping the chambers of his .38 empty, and won’t let anyone think otherwise of him. In his eyes, he’s a man of character.
Dallas knows that the Corridor has circumscribed its hospitality by pulling in the red carpet for the night. There isn’t much to see here in the mornings. Mornings would drag for him when he worked Vice in the Corridor. When he switched to Homicide a few months ago, the Corridor was . . . well, was still relatively quiet in the mornings. This morning it’s quiet. The Corridor comes alive at night, though, with hookers, dopers, guys talking smack, Brothers from Another Planet sucking on a crack pipe (“Crack is back, jack!”), pimps and thieves, probably a few rapists to give the whole/hole place more atmosphere. Like this shithole needs it, right? But it’s morning. It’s now . . . nine-eleven in the a.m., says Seiko. Nine-eleven—oop, nine-twelve in the a.m. in the Corridor and still no movement. Only fifty-seven more seconds until nine-thirteen and, when the time comes, as it surely will, Dallas expects the Corridor to be just as quiet as it is now. Fifty-one more seconds. Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. Forty-seven. Forty-six.
Dallas sees his life before him, tick-tocking away.
Baby and Dante
“Lemme up,” Baby says. But he doesn’t move. “Dante-honey, please lemme up.” He snorts and lifts his thin branch-arm off her, and unplugs his dark-brown leg from between her chocolate-brown legs. Peeling the wet sheet from her thigh, she straightens, pulls her damp tanktop back down to her flat stomach, and walks toward the bathroom door.
“You g-goin’ in there, Baby?”
“Yeah, what you think? Why, you want some water?”
“Naw,” he muddles.
She turns toward the door, and then turns back. She gazes at him, a deer in the road. She can’t turn away from his smirk, the headlights. His smirk is giving him away; she thinks. She then crawls into his eyes: large-ball-bearings-black-all-pupil-cold-with-no-feeling, and she thinks they give him away, too. She tip-toes back to the bed and stands over him. He rolls his body toward the night table and picks up a cigarette.
“Honey?” she says.
“Yeah, Baby?”
“Dante-honey?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s in the bathroom?”
“It’s hh-h-all good, Baby.”
“What’s in the bathroom?”
“I said it’s all good. Let it g-go.”
“I heard what you said, nigga. Now c’mon, what or who in the got-damn bathroom?”
“Why you say that? You b-be trippin’ too much.”
“Because of that, you know, look at you. That devil grin on your face.”
“Devil grin? You trippin’.” He pounds his head into the pillow, the pillow relents. He flicks his pink plastic lighter a few times. “This damn thing outta juice? What’s up wit dat?”
“Dante, please answer me.”
“You got your lah-lighter wit you?”
“My purse, honey.”
“Well? Could you umm . . . today?”
She remains a deer in the headlights for a few more seconds before backing away from the bed. She goes to her purse, atop the TV, burrows around inside, then pitches her lighter to him. Before she goes back to her post alongside the bed she peels off her damp cotton panties and changes into a dry pair; she changes her tanktop into a dry one, too.
“Dante-honey.”
“Yeah, Baby?”
“You still got that devil grin on your face.”
“I do?” He takes a drag. “What the hell do I have to grin about?”
“What’s in the bathroom, honey?”
“If you so nosy, go look.”
“What was you doing while I working last night?”
“Go l-look.”
“What’s in there?”
“Go look.”
“Dante-honey?”
“Yeah, Baby?”
“What’s in there?”
“Go look.”