by Jim Nisbet
“Easy does it,” his neighbor concluded.
“That’s about the size of it,” Klinger agreed.
“You like to savor it,” the old man reasoned, “or you’re too broke to do it right.”
“Right in two.”
”Hit us again,” the old man told the bartender.
The bartender did as he was bade.
“Thanks.” Klinger toasted the old man with his freshened drink.
The old man nodded. “Minds me of a famous singer/ songwriter/guitarist I seen once, up there in Bolinas. You know Bolinas?”
“Heard of it,” Klinger nodded. “Up the coast a ways.”
“It’s thirty miles,” the old man said. “And you never been there?”
Klinger shook his head.
“You oughta go sometime,” the old man suggested. “They got trees and beaches and shit.”
“Yeah?” said Klinger, evincing no interest whatsoever. “Anyway,” the old man continued, “this singer/song-writer/guitarist guy had spent many a year practicing to be an alcoholic, as he himself put it. Got pretty good at it, too, as he himself put it. One thing, though, drunk as he got? He could still play the guitar, and he’d never buzz a string.” The old man took a sip of his own drink. “It’s about enough to piss a man off.”
“You play?” Klinger thought to ask, as he realized that the fluttering on the surface of his drink was the reflection of the blades of a ceiling fan, and not his optic nerve shorting out.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” the old man said. “I had the classic problem.”
Klinger raised an eyebrow. “And which classic problem was that?”
“I’m straying from my original story—.”
Klinger lifted both thumbs without losing his grip on his glass. “I got all day.”
The old man nodded. “I’m minded of another guy, who announced to his momma, one fine morning, when he was about nine years old, that he wanted to be a musician when he grew up. Well now, son, his momma replied, that’s all fine and dandy, but you can’t do both.”
Klinger affected half a smile. “I like her.”
“Me, too,” the old man agreed.
“You know her?”
The old man nodded.
“So what happened?”
“I grew up.”
“And the music?”
“Had to put it down. Children to raise, food to put on the table, wife to look after, job to attend to. Like that.”
“Uh …” Klinger said, temporarily at a loss. “Well? You probably got grandchildren.”
The old man assumed a thousand-yard stare and shook his head. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
Why am I drinking in this dump and acting surprised that I’m talking to a human train wreck instead of the president of Hewlett Packard? Klinger wondered to himself. He took a sip of vodka. The ice had gotten to it by now, diluting it slightly, but chilling it too. He had another sip.
“So,” Klinger said aloud, setting down his glass, “you spent your whole life taking care of a family that blew up or died off or disappeared somehow, and in any case left you with nothing but a guitar, in a case under the bed, that you no longer remember how to play?”
Abruptly, Klinger fixed his gaze on his drink. Every once in a while he’d get in a mood and find himself making aggressive remarks to perfect strangers which proclivity generated at least a fifty-fifty chance of fetching him a beer bottle upside his head as opposed to witnessing a fit of convulsive weeping, and he had scars where the hair had never grown back to prove it. Today, however …
“Something like that,” the old man said simply.
“Shit.” Klinger said gruffly. “I’ll bet you can play the chromatic bejesus out of a guitar.”
The old man shook his head. “Not really.”
Klinger slipped each of his hands palm down on the barstool, each under its respective thigh, and stared at his drink. “Anyway,” he said, “we were talking about a musician who was practicing to be an alcoholic.”
The old man nodded. “Indeed we were.” He lifted his glass and found it empty. “Damn,” he said.
“Hit us again,” Klinger said.
“Thanks,” the old man said, as the bartender covered the ice in the old man’s glass with Jameson.
“What kind of Irish is in the well?” Klinger asked hopefully.
“Standing Stone,” the bartender said. “Guaranteed to be the death of you.”
“Says so right on the label,” the old man said.
Klinger nodded.
“How about it, amigo?” the bartender asked him.
“Sure.” Klinger freed his right hand and downed his vodka.
“Don’t know how you can drink that shit,” the old man said, as he watched the bartender dispense a generous pour of whiskey into a fresh glass. “You’ll be shitting blood in the morning.”
“You were telling me a story,” Klinger said.
“So I was. Singer/songwriter/guitarist is sitting on a stool in the bar, facing an audience. He’s completely drunk. There’s a shot glass brimful of tequila sitting dead center on a second stool, right next to him, directly below the peg-head of his beautiful big-body D-35 Martin, a guitar he’s managed to hang onto his whole life.”
“How old is this guy?”
“Seventy if he’s a day.”
“Damn,” admitted Klinger.
“Not sure how he made it.” The old man looked at his whiskey. It had always amazed Klinger how some people could let a drink just sit in front of them for what invariably seemed an eternity. “So he’s rambling, this guy. He’s got on the ten-gallon hat, the concho belt, the brush-popper shirt with nacre buttons, a duster, boot-cut jeans, and riding-heel cowboy boots. It’s raining outside. Do you remember when it used to rain in California?”
Klinger nodded. “I do.”
“Special, wasn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Every year, regular as clockwork, Mother Nature would show up in late October, early November, Thanksgiving at the latest …” The old man swept one hand at arm’s length over the bar to his right, then repeated the gesture to his left. “… and wash away six months of piss and dogshit and good intentions. Just wash them away.”
Klinger nodded. “And sin.” He nodded again.
The old man lifted his glass. “And sin, brother.”
They toasted and drank.
“So every now and again, while this guy is telling this goddamn endless story, he’d reach over and pluck up the shot glass with two fingers, like this. And he’d lift it over the peghead of the guitar and around the shoulder strap and take a sip, like this.” The old man demonstrated the move. “Then he’d put it back, dead center on the second stool. And the whole time he’d never take his eyes off the audience. Not once. By and by,” he continued, as he set down his own drink, “the tequila was gone. But the goddamn story continued. Two or three times he’d reach over for the glass, never taking his eyes off the audience, lift it to his lips, find it was empty, betray not a whit about the discovery, set the glass back down again, and go on with his goddamn story.”
“What was this story about, anyway?” Klinger thought to ask.
“The good old days in Greenwich Village. Is there some other subject?”
“I don’t know.” Klinger looked at him. “Never been there.”
“Well, see? What do you know?” the old man nodded. “By and by, some friend of this guitarist sneaks up behind him and takes the glass, thinking to help him out by fetching a refill.”
“Now there’s a friend.”
“A woman, actually,” the old man recollected. “Pretty thing.”
“It’s always a woman.”
“There’s a lot to that not growing up stuff,” the old man agreed. “More than meets the eye.”
“Sounds to me like it’s nothing but what meets the eye.” “There’s a point in there somewhere, I’m sure,” the old man said, somewhat frostily.
“My point exac
tly,” Klinger replied pointedly.
“But the bartender,” the old man persevered, “who is annoyed that his musical evening is turning into a therapy session run by a drunk, tells the young lady that her friend is cut off until he takes the trouble to do what he’s being paid to do, which is sing and play the songs for which he’s famous and which changed the world for the better back when we was all hippies.”
“Speak for yourself,” Klinger advised him tartly.
“I am,” said the old man. “So, naturally, she waits. By and by …” The old man snapped his fingers. They didn’t quite snap, so he snapped them a second time. “Our guitarist does it again.”
“He reaches over—.”
“—and makes as if to pinch up the shot glass.”
”But the shot glass isn’t there.”
“He doesn’t turn a hair.”
“I’ll bet he twitched internally.”
“Actually, the twitch was quite visible.”
“Didn’t he look over at the second stool, just the least glance, to make sure he hadn’t missed?”
“Nope. He knew it wasn’t there. So, he draped the unemployed hand on the neck of his guitar and went back to his story.”
“This sounds excruciating,” Klinger said.
“It was that,” the old man agreed, “but it was raining too hard to leave gracefully.”
“So …”
“So, by and by, he does it again.”
“He reaches over—.”
“—And makes as if to pinch up the shot glass between thumb and middle finger.”
“Which still isn’t there.”
“Which he had forgotten.”
“Or was expecting to arrive at any moment.”
“Either way, we had to watch him repeat this performance three or four times before somebody finally yelled out for him to shut up and play us a tune. That’s when it got pathetic.”
“It’s been sounding pathetic to me for some time.”
“‘I can’t,’ the guitarist told us, and he clasped his picking hand to his throat. ‘I’m parched.’”
Klinger had no snappy retort for this.
“A silence descended on the whole room,” the old man said. “There was fifteen or twenty people packed in there, not counting a pool table, but at that moment you could hear a burrito going round and round in the microwave behind the bar.”
“Pretty quiet,” Klinger allowed.
“The bartender relented and the girl delivered our guitarist his shot. He made a point of downing it in one go. Then he set the empty down, dead center on the stool, and proceeded to play and sing the prettiest, saddest, loneliest ballad you ever heard. He wrote it, too. And he buzzed not a string, forgot not a lyric. He even yodeled at the end. Real plaintive.”
Klinger and the old man weren’t the only people in the present-tense barroom, but now a silence descended over this one, too.
“It was enough to tear your heart out. Two or three women in the crowd started cryin’. I’m not makin’ this up. When he finished, the damn bartender bought a round on the house.”
“If I pulled a stunt like that,” the present-tense bartender declared, “I’d be out on the street with the rest of you bums.”
“But we’d be brothers,” the old man suggested.
“Until the time came for the next drink,” the bartender suggested.
“All of about fifteen minutes,” the old man agreed. “Brotherhood is volatile,” Klinger observed, thinking the while of Chainbang’s attempt to cheat him out of his cut. “Say,” Klinger said aloud, “anybody seen today’s Chronicle?”
“There’s one right here,” the bartender said, handing one over the bar. “No Sports Section.”
“Organized sports pave the road to fascism,” the old man said.
Klinger frowned. “Haven’t I read that somewhere?” The old man looked at Klinger, then shook his head. “I seriously fucking doubt it.”
Klinger quickly perused the Metro section. He found no mention of a liquor store clerk getting himself killed in the course of a robbery. Nor of a subsequent arrest in the middle of Webster Street. This brightened Klinger’s outlook considerably. “Say,” he said, “how about another round?”
The bartender poured. “This one’s on me. That was a good story.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Klinger said, genuinely touched. “Thanks.”
“It’s that kinda joint,” the old man said, not without satisfaction. “So what if it’s in the Tenderloin?”
“So,” said Klinger, after the first sip of his fourth drink. “What happened to that genius old drunk, anyway?”
The old man regarded the shimmer atop his refreshed whiskey. “He quit drinking,” he finally said.
“Really?” said Klinger.
“Really?” said the bartender.
“Yep,” the old man affirmed. He lifted his glass and toasted the room. “Then he died.”
FOUR
It’s like some monotheistic entity damned me to a thousand years of insomnia, Klinger thought, just to demonstrate that he has the juice. There can be no other reason. I’m just not important enough to—. I’ve got to get some sleep.
After any number of convivialities, free drinks, matched rounds, spillage, and forgotten knee-jerk quaffs, Klinger got out of the bar with $57.32 of the $120 he’d entered with, as drunk as a man of high rank in a feudal society, which he was not.
Out the front door of the Hawse Hole a racetrack turn launched him up one flight of stairs into the lobby of the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel. Against a blown-up backdrop of a Hetch Hetchy Valley photographed before the O’Shaughnessy Dam turned it into a reservoir in 1923, five years after the hotel itself was subdivided into ten by twelve rooms intended to accommodate merchant seamen returning from World War I, a sleepy clerk took $51.42 cash up front for three nights’ stay, leaving Klinger with $5.89 mad money, in exchange for which he received a key bound by a beaded chain to a plastic one-inch fisherman’s anchor.
“Up three flights, take the hall to your left, Room 335. The moaner two doors down is a permanent resident, so I don’t wanna hear about it.”
Klinger stared at the key. “Three-thirty-five,” he repeated. His breath came with some difficulty and not a little audibly.
Having resumed his seat behind the counter, the clerk took up a large pair of tailor’s shears. “Right in one.” Without sparing another glance for Klinger, he resumed his close perusal of a celebrity magazine, open on the desk before him.
“Moaner,” Klinger repeated. “Moaner …”
“He doesn’t go on all night, as a rule,” the clerk said, as the twin blades of his shears carefully limned a starlet’s gam. He moved the back of his head toward a clock on the wall behind him, which had twelve Chinese ideograms on its face. “It’s already late.”
“Already late,” Klinger repeated stupidly. Existentially, as he might have enunciated if he possessed breath sufficient to the task, it’s never been so Late as it is Now. If I just had another drink …
“Run along,” the clerk suggested. The tips of his shears nipped the image of the actress just between arm and ribcage.
Run, Klinger was thinking to himself, as he bounced off the farther wall of the stairwell. As if with languor he arrested his rebound by clinging to the banister with both hands. Run home.
The room, once achieved, seemed hardly worth the effort. There was a window, nailed shut. There was a radiator, cold as a dead man’s armor. If they ever find the entropic core of the universe, Klinger mused, it’s going to turn out to be a lump of cast iron beneath a window that can’t be opened, and I’ll be in there with it. The floor had been carpeted wall to wall a long time ago, but now its polyester fibers yearned an inch or two into the foetid troposphere like hairs in the mouth of a feeding anemone—Take it easy, Klinger told himself, it’s just threadbare carpet. Merely sordid. Nothing new. Nothing terrible. Plus it’s dry in here. There’s a roof. There’s a lock on the door …
A moan came through the wall. A cry between unheard sobs, maybe. Nothing out of the ordinary.
The bedding appeared to be clean, a small miracle, until he peeled back the blanket to discover an uncommonly long pubic hair dead center on the sheet. Flicked by thumb and forefinger, the hair scampered across the sheet and disappeared over the far edge.
As if possessed by a suicidal animation, that hair, thought Klinger, and he proceeded to get lost and found in his own shirt. I like that. I endorse suicidal animation.
The pillow smelled like the driver’s seat in the oldest bus in the transcontinental fleet, but Klinger hit it face down and paid the odor no mind. With suicidal animation his sense of collective identity fled in the wake of the multi-cornered hair, over the edge of consciousness and into the seething abyss of the universal, non-internet id.
Wherein, though it be a mere blighted star in a galaxy of predominant neuropathies, every mind continues to twinkle. In this case the mind of Klinger ginned up a full-blown parable complete with sights, sounds, smells—altogether haunting tactilities, to wit:
Chainbang, spawn of Amerindian-Chinese ancestry, convinces Klinger that if they could scare up the means to score a pair of bus tickets to Leadville, Colorado, they could make their fortunes.
“My forbears all had shovel teeth,” Chang Yin tells him, opening his mouth. “Put your fingers in my mouth—here. Touch the roof behind the incisors.” Klinger does so. The two top incisors launch backward into Chang Yin’s mouth like upside down water slides. “Melungeon tri-racial isolate,” Chang Yin says around Klinger’s fingers. “Could be Mongolian, could be Choctaw, hey—,” he snatches Klinger’s wrist, pulling the fingers out of his mouth and twists. “Could be miscegenatin’ Appalachian peckerwood.”
”Okay, okay …” says Klinger. “The fuck difference … this swarm …” He bats the air in front of his face.
After a lot of fooling around which consumes a molar volume of oneiric neurons, Chainbang reverts to his given name of Chang Yin for the purposes of this venture and perhaps in order to evade detection by Interpol, as he and Klinger materialize down the three front steps of a mystical Greyhound bus eastbound from Salt Lake City—picks, headlamps, thermal underwear, hickory shirts, gum boots, and galluses all packed into army surplus rucksacks, canteens and enameled cups clanking—in front of the snow-bound US Post Office in Leadville, Colorado.
