Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

by Anthony Swofford

  Amy put her hand on my leg and said, “We have something else to get to, a bar birthday for one of his friends. But here’s my card. And I’d love to get your information in case I’m—in case we’re in New York sometime we can all get together.”

  The gossip man and I exchanged nothing, not a look or a handshake or a business card.

  They left.

  I read her card. I flipped it over and on the back she’d written the name of a bar and cross streets and the joyous greeting: SEE YOU IN AN HOUR OR SO.

  The country music band was turning the volume way up, which meant it was time for me to go. I thought I’d leave the business card on the table and let someone else meet her in an hour or so. Blondes in the lobbying game weren’t my ambition. I thought about it long and hard, and I decided it had been at least ten years since I’d slept with a blonde. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock. I could push it hard and be home by two in the morning. I could call Ava and she would be in my bed when I got to Manhattan. After a day like this I needed a body in bed and I needed to fuck. I couldn’t sleep alone tonight. But the question was whether or not I wanted to drive four hours or a few miles to not sleep alone tonight.

  I decided to save the gas.

  I wished everyone at the table a good night and told Colon and the staff sergeant that I planned to see them the next time I came to town.

  I DROVE TO Georgetown and found the bar, somewhere off of Wisconsin. I assumed that I’d show up to the gossip blogger’s friend’s party and that it might take me hours to peel the lobbyist away from her crowd, or that I had completely misread her intentions or that she was playing a game with me. All of these possibilities swirled in my head. There are only three things a man enjoys more than sleeping with a woman within hours of meeting her. And at this moment I couldn’t remember what those things might be.

  Dance music thumped, people spilled and drank drinks, bartenders poured more, a pushing match broke out between two heavily muscled kids in polo shirts, and I spotted Amy in the back of the bar. She sat alone.

  “Where is the rest of our party?” I asked.

  “I’m a party of one,” she said.

  I retrieved whiskeys from the bar.

  “So what are you doing, research for another book?”

  “Book?”

  “Those marines told me you’re a writer. They think you’re spying on them. They think you’re trying to do an exposé on Bethesda.”

  “If I’d seen poor care or dirty conditions I would write about it. But that place runs pretty tight, as far as I can tell. I was only on the ward for ninety minutes, but I sensed that the care is expert. A naval hospital is different from an Army hospital, in that there are no members of the Army running the show.”

  “Of course. Even the old marine loves the Navy. All this services pride is such bullshit.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe not. They found rat shit all over Walter Reed, right? My Polish cleaning lady would have been impressed with the spit shine on that ward. As they say, Joseph’s baby mama could’ve eaten off of that floor.”

  “So tell me, who the fuck are you?” she said.

  “I’m just a guy drinking whiskey with a stranger in a strange town. I should’ve driven home hours ago.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  There was no need to lie. “Depending on the week and which lies we are telling one another. I believe that for most of this week I had a girlfriend. But I can never tell. Where is your boyfriend?”

  “That guy? He was a one-night stand that turned into something it should never have. A wasted year. Still some nights he comes around. Did you sleep with this woman the first night you met her?”

  “Two days later. She had a live-in boyfriend in Brooklyn. I lived in Oakland and had a girlfriend in Manhattan. It was messy. It still is.”

  “Aren’t you too old for that?”

  “Someday I hope to be too old for it. But right now I am not.”

  “Neither am I,” she said.

  The bar had filled with more young drunk people. I wondered where they had all come from. They were so goddamn happy and carefree. I thought about the marines I’d scored the beer for earlier that night, sleeping on bunks now, listening to the nightmare confusion of one another, fighting their way through the long war.

  I smelled burned sand and scorched asphalt.

  Someone spilled a drink on Amy’s leg. I wiped her leg with napkins. She asked me to kiss her and I did and then she asked me back to her apartment.

  The sex from a one-night stand is never spectacular, it rarely breaks land speed records, but with Amy it was great. She was under thirty but she knew her body and was proud of it. She wanted me to want her and I did. We continued to drink whiskey, a not-very-good Canadian whiskey, as I recall, and we were still awake and talking when the sun came up.

  “So if you weren’t there to report about Bethesda, why were you there?”

  “I am often asked about the wars. And I say that the wars are a waste of human life on both sides and a deep strategic blunder. But I had never sat in a room with a wounded marine. And I needed to do that. But I am no clearer on what the wars mean.”

  “Do they have to mean anything? Can’t they just be a show of American force and power in a region full of Islamists and enemies of freedom?”

  “Wars mean something whether the wagers of the war want them to or not. Vietnam is still being fought here in DC. Kerry lost in 2004 because of the swiftboaters; Bush won in 2004 because he was a crafty and ardent draft dodger and thirty-plus years later he stuck to his story: ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot I was supposed to be flying planes in the National Guard. Sorry guys.’ ”

  “I just fucked a liberal,” she said. “My father will kill me. Aren’t you a marine? Like, don’t marines want to go to war and kill? Jesus. I haven’t fucked a liberal since freshman year.”

  “You are the first conservative I have ever fucked. We might as well do it again.”

  WE WERE UP front about never needing to contact each other again unless one of us was in the other’s town and wanted sex.

  I HURRIED BACK to Manhattan. Ava and I were throwing a dinner party that night at my apartment. I still needed to shop. I’d make roasted leg of lamb, pierced with anchovy and slivers of garlic and sprigs of rosemary.

  I drove I-95 back to the city. I took it slower than I had on my way down. Mostly I went the speed limit. I listened to NPR. I smelled burned sand and scorched asphalt.

  7

  Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas

  Before heading to Iraq again my friend Sammy threw himself a going-away party in Vegas. I’d had a strict twelve-hour rule for Vegas: land at six p.m., fly out by six a.m. the next day. Any more time in that town is completely ruinous to one’s cash flow and sanity. But Sammy talked me into a long weekend, Friday morning through Sunday night, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, and Ava and I had just broken up for the twentieth time and she was in the UK fucking some puffer with bad teeth and I needed to get out of Manhattan.

  Sammy knew some guy who knew some guy who had gotten us into a club with five-hundred-dollar bottle service, but before that we were eating the subpar food at the attached restaurant, a Manhattan import that had done ten cycles of anabolic steroids before being dropped down on the Strip. A couple of Sammy’s marines were along with us, senior enlisted guys who’d seen the same shit as Sammy in western Iraq. In this town, this club, this bar with all these dolls and all these straight guys wearing corset T-shirts and waxed eyebrows and Botoxed faces, the marines’ hostility was apparent: their hair was short and so were their tempers. They looked around the room as though choosing targets for an easy hundred-yard shoot. Their targets: anyone who might get in the way of their mission, and the mission, clearly, was women.

  I remember dancing and doing watermelon shots with a gaggle of Filipina girls from San Diego. It crossed my mind that a thirty-six-year-old man might spend his time in more sober or age-appropriate pursuits: say, whiskey and bull-riding. But it is hard to
argue against the beauty of a twenty-five-year-old Filipina doing watermelon shots on a dance floor. I couldn’t decide if I looked like a pervert or like a cohort or simply lost.

  A few bottles later, it was late, and the attrition rate for our evening was high: Sammy and I were the only ones left. While barely five-four and not much over 120 pounds, Sammy had been drinking like a pro all night, downing shots, beers, cocktails, whatever made its way in front of him. He had a war to get to but first he needed to drink.

  I would have been drinking the same way had I been on my way to or from Iraq. The first time he’d gotten back he’d been a little jumpy and had been smart enough to go to the base doc for some help. But all the pills did was keep him from getting hard and he couldn’t have that so he flushed them down the toilet. He downplayed what he’d done and seen but I knew whatever it had been, it had been enough. No one ever wants more war. But Sammy was going back. He didn’t have to go back. After twelve years in the Marine Corps he’d resigned his commission and matriculated in a graduate writing program. We’d talked about it and it seemed like the right thing to do. Certainly his mother agreed.

  And then one day he called me: the commandant of the Marine Corps had signed his resignation, but Sammy couldn’t say goodbye to the Corps. That afternoon, observing the marines he’d been training for six months, it hit him like a roadside bomb—he knew he couldn’t send them back over alone. He’d rescinded his resignation, and that is why we were wasted in Vegas.

  I looked up from our booth and a meaningless conversation with someone and saw that three bouncers, three huge bouncers, had cornered Sammy by an elevator bank. Together they probably weighed ten times as much as he did.

  He was smiling, that big huge dumb marine smile, the smile that says, “Come on, fellas, let’s have a dance.”

  I rushed over.

  One of the bouncers said, “Is he your boy? You better get him the fuck outta here if he’s your boy.”

  I said, “He’s cool, man. He’s a crazy-ass marine, and he’s going over to Iraq again. Give him some leash.”

  “He’s wasted, you gotta get him out of here or we’ll send him down the trash chute.”

  I talked Sammy into the elevator and, stumbling, we made it back to our room. I delivered him to the shower, where he stripped and cold-showered himself.

  It was late, but it wasn’t yet daylight, which meant I still had time. I’d gotten a local girl’s number back at the club. Wanda. She had drugs and she came to my room. In the suite, sunk down into the couch, with this girl I’d just met, I did drugs until noon. She had a story, and that’s why I sat doing drugs with her. She was completely gone, but she had a story.

  Earlier that night she’d stolen her boyfriend’s Yukon and driven in from the suburbs and she wanted to party. She’d left her kid at her mom’s house and she was going to party all weekend, because she’d found out her boyfriend was sleeping with one of her friends, because that is how you teach a man who is treacherous with your heart: you steal his SUV and drugs and you go off and play with strangers.

  I don’t know why I loved her story so much, the bleakness of it, the raw fact of people fucking each other over, the totally ballsy act of this petite woman stealing her thuggish boyfriend’s car (and his drugs) on a Saturday night and going into the city for a party, so clearly a death wish that it must have resounded with me. I knew all about the pleasures of the death wish. Here I sat in the middle of my own, blowing my brains out with cheap drugs.

  Of course, this was neither the first nor the last time I’d done drugs with a stranger in a hotel room.

  I JEOPARDIZED SAMMY that night. If the girl’s boyfriend had somehow found us, if hotel security had gotten a tip that two people were doing blow in a large suite on the thirty-fifth floor, who knows what could have happened, and Sammy would have been implicated despite being passed out in the shower, and I would have ruined his career. I hadn’t given Sammy enough thought, and in retrospect I’m ashamed. A marine always looks out for his platoon. How had I forgotten?

  And I was too wasted for sex. I’d wanted nothing more than to get a screw on with a sexy black girl from the Las Vegas suburbs, but we just sat there all morning talking about what a crazy place Vegas was and how you had to be an animal to live there.

  SAMMY HAD ANOTHER friend who knew a guy who knew a guy, and we got some choice real estate at a pool party. The scene at the pool party replicated the scene from the night before except everyone wore fewer clothes. I was neither tan nor in very good shape, and so I stood in a corner of the pool drinking beer and not chatting with anyone.

  Sammy attracted an unending parade of girls, and I talked to some of them, and they all seemed the same: attractive, in very good shape, possibly fake breasts; mostly they lived in LA or New York and they worked in film or real estate. We talked a lot about TV shows I’d never seen but had heard of, a particular show from that series, the amazing second season of that series.

  We met a couple, Claire and Tony, from Long Island. They were on vacation with their parents. She was a nurse and he ran an auto body shop. They were great people, the kind of people I had grown up with and never met in New York City. He talked vaguely about being a criminal as a kid, and she laughed and rolled her eyes. And we drank.

  I had a flight out at two but I changed it to three, and then to four, and then to five. I was supposed to fly to LA to see a woman I’d met on the East Coast a few weeks earlier. I didn’t want to see her: making the plan had merely been a function of boredom.

  I’ve wasted tens of thousands of dollars on flights booked late at night, out of boredom: meet me in London, meet me in Baden-Baden, meet me in Seattle, meet me in Rome; I’ll fly you to Tokyo, I’ll fly you to Paris; I’ll fly you anywhere but here.

  I finally stopped calling the airline to change the flight and instead I started calling around town for a new room. I wasn’t sure how many days, at least three or four, I told reception at every place I called. I finally found a room at the Wynn, in the tower suites, for five hundred dollars a night.

  THE ROOM WAS twice as big as my apartment; the bath could hold three people. I settled in for a bath. I was sunburned now, and kind of drunk. I’d been ignoring my phone, ignoring the thought of Ava in London, or wherever she was, fucking someone else. I dialed her and hung up. I sat in the bath, reading In Cold Blood.

  I stayed in the suite a week.

  8

  Freddy Business

  Freddy drove a different car every time and he’d meet me anywhere in Manhattan. He didn’t go to Brooklyn, only punks dumb enough to drive miles for a single deal did that, and the drivers in Brooklyn were shit crazy out of their minds, worse than Chinatown. Freddy said he’d be there in twenty minutes but then he took an hour. It was a smart tactic for a drug dealer, always keep them guessing, always keep those dumb rich white motherfuckers wanting more, sitting around in their dumb rich white bars paying ten dollars for a beer. And the next time he told me an hour he was there in five minutes, texting, “WTF? There are f’ing cops all up in this place.”

  It was Manhattan, so of course there were cops everywhere. But it was below Ninety-Sixth Street and above Canal so the cops didn’t do much but try to get laid.

  Sometimes it didn’t matter how long Freddy Business took because I was already high, because someone had copped so much the night before that, despite our having been awake until noon, there were still a few bags going around, and it seemed like the party would never end and that the cops were after me no matter what I did so why not do a shit-ton of drugs?

  Freddy pulled up in his car in front of the Swan on Twentieth Street. One of my friends was doing yoga on the sidewalk and another was talking to an NYU coed who was reading Sophie’s Choice at the dim light of the bar. But I was buying tonight so I jumped in Freddy’s car. Freddy never drove; big enormous black guy who would either break your neck or shoot you if you did some stupid shit always drove and he never said a word, but he looked at me and nodded and
I thought, He must think I am one stupid white boy.

  Freddy didn’t like this block so his driver drove east and then south on Park, west on Sixteenth to Sixth Avenue, and then up to Twenty-Sixth and east again. Pulled up in front of 15 West Twenty-Sixth Street, where I’d once had an office. What did I do there? Nothing. What did this mean? It meant nothing, it was simply a place to pull over, but it made me nervous. It made no sense, it made no sense at all, but why would a twelve-hundred-dollar drug deal make any sense wherever the dealer parked? Across the street people were paying astronomical prices for Texas BBQ and beer. Who would spend so much money on BBQ? Some nights I would, but not tonight, tonight I’ll eat nothing, I’ll barely eat anything for three days.

  I was buying for three and for the weekend so I told Freddy I’d go big, and I pulled the cash out of my pockets; I hadn’t even counted, eight hundred of it was mine, four hundred cobbled together by friends, and Freddy counted it and said it was a thousand, but maybe I didn’t give a fuck because it was Thursday night and Freddy had the drugs packed like jewels in his glove compartment.

  My father once told me: always carry hundreds and fifties. It is proof you go face-to-face with a banker. If you walk around with a bunch of twenties in your wallet you look just like all the other assholes who use the ATM, so I handed Freddy hundreds.

  Freddy was jumpy tonight, and he kept counting the money again and again, coming up with different numbers, saying now it was seven hundred, telling his guy to drive around the block again, down Broadway now, past Madison Square Park.

  “Dumbass white motherfuckers in line for two hours for a ten-fucking-dollar cheeseburger,” Freddy says. “Let’s call it a thousand,” Freddy says.

  Now I’m nervous, now I want out of the car, I want my money back and never want to do drugs again: Go back in the Swan and flush the drugs you have down the toilet, I think. Tell those assholes you’re doing drugs with to fuck off.