by Jim Nisbet
V = 4/3 × π × a2 × b
where
a = horizontal transverse radius
and
b = vertical conjugate radius
then, given these here pimento-stuffed Manzanilla olives (Olea europa pomiformis)
a = 3/8”
b = 1/2”
and so,
V = 4/3 × π × (3/8)2 × 1/2 = .09375 cubic inches
which, times two olives per martini equals 0.1875 cubic inches per martini. As opposed to the volume of one of those big green olives, where
a = 3/4”
b = 1”
and so,
V = 0.75 cubic inches
which, times two, equals 1.5 cubic inches. Not to mention, they’re completely tasteless and so green as in unfermented as to utterly resist the admonitions of the average set of public assistance dentures. So the difference between the two is
1.5 cubic inches - 0.1875 cubic inches = 1.3125 cubic inches
which cooks down to an incredible 0.727125 fluid ounces of vodka or gin—half a jigger! And Gerrold knows this. Gerrold lands the martini on a fresh napkin—never a coaster—in front of me. It’s brimful. Bacilli-like filaments swarm through the clear fluid. It’s topped by five millimeters of slush. Two modest volumes of olives dangle, speared by an as-yet-to-be-calculated volume of toothpick, but the sliver of balsa may be just enough to lend negative buoyancy to the discrete little fruit, we’ll wait for the third one to essay the algebra, it’s colder than Apsley Cherry-Garrard on the Ross ice shelf in August, that’s the southern, polar August, its cruelest month. And so, in short, I take a sip, and today, now, as of this moment, nobody else has to die.
FOUR
THE THING ABOUT BINGE DRINKING IS THAT THE ONE THING YOU know for sure is that sooner or later, while you know you’re going to wake up under that bridge abutment again, the question is whether you’re going to wake up there in one piece. You’re going to open your eyes quite abruptly. There may be sunlight. There may be flies. The wall of plastic bags caught in the chain link fence may be rustling in a slight breeze. There may be the usual regret, that you didn’t spend some of that five thousand dollars on a tetanus shot, or Stress B supplements, rather than two weeks in an SRO hotel and the vodka delivery system known as the martini, otherwise known as the oblivion package. When you are younger you can handle this sort of abuse—when you were younger, you did handle this sort of abuse. The miracle and the curse are the same, that you somehow survived long enough to where it really hurts, it is really damaging, it is terminally detrimental to your health. You’re surrounded by other people who are doing more or less the same thing to themselves. Some of them are genuinely crazy, of course. They’ve been driven mad by war, poverty, actuality, reality, compromise, women, men, children, gods, the snipped off end of a price tag in the collar of a shirt they wore for years, television, the lottery they never won, the lottery they did win, the mercury poisoning they got from a diet of clams and thermometers, robocalls, junk faxes, the repossession of their home, the loss of a job they had for 35 years, the death of a beloved pet, the laundry room in a sub-basement of The Four Seasons Hotel, cutting compound miters on thousands of 20 gauge 2x6 steel studs, lingerie catalogues—like that. It doesn’t help that almost everybody out here is aware that their fillings receive every frequency of broadcast signal. While cell-phone transmission has only made the fill-ceiver situation worse, most of us feel that, since cellphones have ostensibly normal people as if talking to themselves, thus providing some cover for the truly schizophrenic, the playing field has leveled somewhat. But the smart money knows the location if every unguarded power outlet in San Francisco, and often makes a buck by revealing one location or another to some homeless person stupid enough to be needing to charge the cellphone they need in order to keep in touch with whomever it is abuses them the most. Another upside is that cellphones have made it much easier to arrange deals for drugs, stolen goods, etc. The smart money actually knows a guy called Upside. Why do they call him upside? He works like this. One day Upside was sitting on a rock rolling a cigarette when a tourist said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’m trying to find my way to Fisherman’s Wharf.” Now, Upside knew that he could have thrown the rock he was sitting on and hit Jefferson Street, which is the southern terrestrial border of Fisherman’s Wharf. Upside knew he might even tap the tourist for a buck after the exchange of information, leaving the assholism on the tourist’s chit if he declined to help him out. But Upside doesn’t look on the upside. Hence his name. What Upside chose to do was lock onto the tourist with his mirror shades, like they were the binocular cross hairs of his nose cannon. It was a warm day in San Francisco, and the tourist had his jacket hooked on a finger and slung over his shoulder. He, too, had on a pair of shades. But he did not possess no nose cannon. “I don’t give a shit,” Upside suddenly yelled at the guy, “I just lost all my clothes.” “Oh,” said the startled tourist, while managing to add, “Well, you still have your tobacco.” Upside took a drag, as if considering this feel-good optimism—although, in fact, feel-good optimism is one of his pet peeves. At length he held the cigarette slightly away from his face, exhaled smoke at it. “I don’t give a fucking damn,” he announced. “Okay, okay,” the tourist said, backing away, adding, “Have a nice day,” as he walked away. People who passive-aggressively try to get in the last word are another of Upside’s pet peeves. When the tourist had managed to put about twenty yards between them, Upside yelled, “Why don’t you find your dick and shove it up your ass!” That’s why we call him Upside. If a situation can be made worse, he’s your man. Or you are, puts in the smart money. Don’t fuck with my hangover, I remind the smart money. If we’re going to play it like that, responds the smart money, you’re going to be one lonely son of a bitch. Don’t use that tone with me this morning, I advised the smart money, because if you do, I might start killing people for free. I thought we had a deal, came the reply, after a short silence. And another thing, I declare, no more of these pregnant pauses. I want rapid-fire patter. You hear what I’m saying? I hear what you’re saying. There came a prolonged silence. What did I just say to you? Rapid-fire patter. What about it? It takes two. And I suppose the hangover is the problem. No, it’s the drinking that’s the problem. There was a time, a body found itself at a loss for words? Yes? A body took a shower. Or stripped down and jumped into the Pacific. Or went jogging, worked up a sweat. Don’t come the acid with me, young fella. And where do you see a shower, a Pacific, or beatable feet? No place whatsoever. But the Pacific is about six miles thataway. Toward the sunset. Away from the sunrise. It is bright. You lost those shades? That would appear to be the case. You make it hard for a body to present its case. Since when do sunglasses present a case? How much money do we have left? None. Not a dime? Not a centime. Please directly address the absent or imaginary person or personified abstraction. Help yourself. You clear your throat of a good bolus, hawk it downwind with authority, and your stomach almost goes with it. What’s the name of that Hawaiian fish, you ask aloud, that pukes its internal organs when threatened? As go digressions that’s a good start. Nobody’s threatening you. Five thousand dollars, up in smoke, one might seek five thousand more, were it not a trope. Hangovers always make you rhyme. Son of a bitch, expostulated the smart money, find your dick and stick it up your ass. You left my dick in Phoenix, I said sadly. Oh no, don’t start in on her, the smart money bemoaned, not only because it was twenty-five years ago, and not only because no matter how you remember it you won’t remember it accurately, but in the main because, if you were to somehow find the woman in question, she wouldn’t remember it at all. If there been any design changes in women, I agreed. You’d be the last person from whom to seek information concerning them, the smart money finished. It’s when visions of sugar plums begin to dance in my head, I led out. That you most wish for full-time, mind-dulling employment. A double whammy, I agreed. Like war. I’m at war. I suppose that’s true. I get paid to be at war. Incredible that you figured
that out. Find a hole and fill it, I always say. I couldn’t abide dentistry. If you countenanced more latitude in your attitude you might have learnt to tune amalgam, for but one suggestion. What with all the people out here in the real world receiving way too many signals by means of their fillings, you’d never be out of work. This isn’t working, I abruptly state. I need less technology than I already have, not more. What technology is it, that you need less of? The technology of self-awareness. You’re too sensitive, the smart money guessed. I believe that it’s you, who, more than once, have been accused of condescension. Exquisite condescension, the smart money qualified. Condescension is an art form. Fuckem, if they can’t take a joke. I do not jape, nor cajole—in a word, I am not a cage to be lured into. Not like the Niners. That’s a fact. The road to fascism is paved with pass completions and pass interceptions. Equally. Now we’re talking. It’s about time. It seems like it’s taken all morning. It’s hard to get started, lacking aspirin. Painful. It’s like replacing one obscenity with another, fuck, say, with sheetrock. Or vice versa. As I was saying. What do you have against sheetrock? Martian vistas. That’s it? Can you see the mental shrug? Completely mental. Too short. The mouth tastes like a vole (Microtus) slept in it. You might have come up with a new simile, after all these years. How many? Close on to fifty, I’d say. Since we heard that bit about the vole? I’d say. They should put that on your tombstone. I’d say? You’d say. Not condescension as an art form? Exquisite condescension. Not Ici vecu de 1928 a sa mort La Capitaine Dreyfus 1859 - 1935? He lived that long? So it would seem. There’s a guy who got hosed. Yes. It reminds me of the day you helped Sinbad bind up that head wound. Head wound, head wound… It was a while back. Years. You know how a head wound bleeds. There was blood all over the place. He was so dazed he didn’t know whether he’d been whacked or fallen down, let alone in possession of the wherewithal to hold a compress to the wound. So you helped him. Cleaned him up a bit. You always carried a canteen full of vodka, in those days. A shame to waste it on a head wound, but one does what one can. Point being? Point being it was an hour before you got back to finishing those potato chips. You were sitting on the sea wall on the north side of the parking lot next to the St. Francis Yacht Club, watching a big freighter head out the Golden Gate, yourself being watched by a Western gull (Larus occidentalis), as you gradually became aware that the hand with which you were eating the chips out of the bag had not been washed since you bound up the wound on Sinbad, who, as you recall, in a fit of delirium tremens the last time you’d seen him under the bridge, had happened to mention that he’d tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus, which is commonly spread by… you look at the handful of potato chips… blood contact. There came a long pause. So this is how it ends, you think like a Jay McInerney character. Do you really want to give a single thought, at the beginning of the end of your life, to Jay McInerney? You crush the chips in your fist like they’re gold and you’re Fred C. Dobbs, and there’s no water to trade it for. That’s probably not an apt pair of similes, but you’re improving. Awk, says the Western gull, and it raises both wings in gratitude or in self-defense as you scatter the handful of chips along the top of the seawall, and another, bigger gull lands immediately, its echoing plaint barely audible to you, full of wonder as you are as to how frayed the far end of your twine has turned out to be. But you don’t give it the whole bag, because that size is almost four dollars now. No, you roll it up and tuck it into the hood of hooded Niners sweatshirt they gave you at the foodbank the day before yesterday, and you step down to the water’s edge and wash your hands in the chill waters of the San Francisco Bay. Bleach, you think. Why am I not under the bridge abutment, where the smart specie always clean their syringes with bleach between uses? Many of them enjoy to watch a syringe as it spurts straight up. A sign you live, as it were. Delight the wellspring of the future. It says so on the door of the yoga studio. For the time being, sea water will have to do. Down there, along the beachfront, a half-mile away, is a public restroom, maybe with hot water. In the opposite direction, down Bay Street, along the Marina Green, through the doglegs of the parking lot cozening Gas House Cove, past Fort Mason, up one hundred steps and over the cypress-shaded hill to Aquatic Park, past the Maritime Museum, there’s another public restroom, close aboard the Dolphin Club, right before you get to the Hyde Street Pier. It, too, might have hot water. A little further along, down Jefferson Street and up Taylor to Bay, there’s a Safeway, where you might have purchased a bottle of bleach, if you had had any money, which gets us back to the seawall next to the St. Francis Yacht Club and the canteen nowhere near full of vodka, and for the second time in a day you called on the vodka for its antiseptic, rather than its analgesic, property. What is a substance with anti-analgesic, pain-inducing properties, if not throe-inducing, and hence, right away, without tarry, we come to he who craves or indeed offers, sells, procures pain, the throe-monger. Once I was President. Oh yes, there’s a woman under the bridge who calls herself the First Woman President, or Madame President, for short. A pity, as you watch it trickle over the palm of the theoretically afflicted hand, and redoubled sufficient to scrub the two hands together, and trebled as an equivalent does makes its way down the gullet, but easy come and easy conceived, as my mother used to say, a harridan, in short, scolding and vicious and well out of it, lo these many fiscal years. And that’ll be enough of that memory, a total scatological construct by now at any rate, at this distance you can scarcely recall the sound of her voice, although the odor of a mildewed and remaindered non-fiction novel allows something of her essence to spring to mind, a history of the Dreyfus affair, for instance, the outbound freighter has been replaced by an inbound one, and, now the hands have been cleansed, out comes the bag of potato chips along with a question, to wit: does the priest, having masturbated, wash his hands before mass? Any more, for that matter, than he flogs himself with a length of barbed wire? I think not. Hot and cold running water in the sacristy is on the to-do list. Two more reasons not to attend upper-case M Mass, the not-to-do list is endless. Just the other day the Pope expressed himself quite well on the subject, proclaiming the use of prophylactics as contributing to the spread of HIV virus rather than its containment. There you go again, pal, enticing the masses into the cage, there to fester along with their beloved Niners forever. Listen, man, I told you, don’t be getting so worked up. You got a point, you told me, and you filled your mouth with potato chips. Now wash that down with some vodka. Yassuh. And, excepting this existential heart attack, the day passed as it should. Nobody died, for example, at least not within your immediate perimeter. Least of all the Pope. His time will come, as yours nearly did. That was something, wasn’t it. I imagine it was. If only you could remember it. If only I could remember it. How the revelation did seep through your very cellular structure, that, in giving aid to your fellow man, you might verily perhaps have sealed your own kismet. That would be ironic, to say the least, to see a man who has spent his entire adult life trying to die of natural causes, and that sooner than later, somehow persevering to the point of meeting his death by the hand of charity. Your waxing conceptual, here. Eliding, more like it. From potato chips to the Pope to the bridge abutment to the sea, from one public restroom to the west, to another to the east, pulverized by indecision, incapable of discerning the moral relativity of one bathroom over the other, unless you take into account that the one more likely to have hot water is exactly twice as far away as the one less likely to dispense hot water, and so if you take a chance on the shorter walk and discover the hot water to be nonexistent there, you’ll wind up walking two miles instead of half a mile to your goal, and is this what they call ethical subjectivism? Or are the two bathrooms and their possibilities a prime example of value pluralism? It seems to me, says the smart money, that what we have here is a prime example of the exquisite condescension of upper case G God, relative to the human condition. If you were in any other world theater, Bangladesh, for example, and presumably having no resour
ces whatsoever as regards your personal hygiene, whereas if at your age your weren’t long dead already, you would eat the potato chips and the HIV virus be damned, as, for one excellent point, by the time AIDS kills you something else would already have accomplished the deed long since. So what’s good for the goose is good for the gander? No, no, not at all. Rather, it’s very much akin to the accommodation you’ve reached with your penchant for killing people who offend you. How so? Well, you’ve managed to contain the impulse at least to the extent of getting paid for what you, sooner or later, will not be able to restrain yourself from doing. That’s true. True? It’s brilliant. Thank you. But if you’re following my logic here, what if the flag were to be hung one day, you picked up the package, the photo turned out to be that of a young woman, and, in the vent, the young woman turned out to be a nursing mother. Then what? That’s an excellent question. I presume what you’re driving at is, should the baby be done in with its mother, since, without her, it will find itself pretty much done in, in terms of suffering at least, if not in terms of life outright, anyway? Is that what you’re driving at? You are coming on like an odious creature, but yes. I don’t know, to tell you the truth. But, since I am inclined not to do my fellow hominid any favors… You see where I’m going. The frailty of life, the helplessness of a fellow mortal, these mean nothing to you. No more than their strength or power. So, let’s see, let’s say you were a feminist. Were? I am a feminist. Okay, you’re a feminist. Now, let’s further suppose you are an anti-interventionist. What the hell is that? Well, let’s say that your country has become hopelessly mired in the politics, cultural mores, and ethical byways of some other country. Afghanistan, for example? Afghanistan, for example. Yeah. Afghanistan, for example, where girls can’t go to school, and if they do, they get acid thrown in their face. But that’s their culture. Somebody’s culture, anyway. Yes. So it’s not a secular world, it’s a religious one. Religiously controlled. Okay. What about it? Is it your position as a feminist that girls in this country should be allowed to go to school, despite it’s being culturally unacceptable, just because they would be allowed to go to school in your country? More like, just because they go to school in my century. Interesting point. Yeah. Trans-eonic. An eon contains two or more eras. Oh yeah. Okay, let’s narrow it down some. Let’s. Let’s look at it that, because of the evolved technology in your era, you have managed to launch and land your heavily armed time machine in that other country’s other era. And there they are, in their era, throwing acid into the faces of girls who dare to go to school. What do you do? Ahm, get back in my time machine and go back to my own era? Probably a good idea. Unless you want to grapple with a whole other era. Yeah. A whole other era. Let’s take it a step further. Okay. What if they have oil in that era? Petroleum. Uh, hold them at gunpoint and take their oil and fill up the tank on the time machine and ship it back to our era? Sure, why not. They’d probably be fine with that, so long as you didn’t try to make them let their girls go to school while you were at it. That’s probably correct. Okay, what if some girl came up and begged you to take her back to your era. That would probably depend on what she looked like, and whether or not I were heterosexual. What if she told you that if you left her behind they were going to throw acid in her face just for talking to you, just as soon as you left. You’re messing with my mood, here, I feel that I’m getting grumpy just trying to parse all this horseshit. Bear with me. Bear with you? I’m stuck with you for life.
