Songs of the Maniacs

by Mickey J Corrigan

  I watch her face when her smile widens. Even her eyes smile. She has green eyes, Irish eyes, and a lot of pale blonde hair. “You are not me, Ben, but you can play me for the rest of the night. I’ll take you up on that offer.” She unties the strings of her long white butcher’s apron. Then she looks over at me. “Who’s your date?”

  Are we really so different from one another?

  Ben speaks softly and Virginia waves me over to the bar. She indicates an empty stool and says, “You can have a couple drinks on the house, honey. As long as you don’t let this character run off before closing time.” Virginia points to Ben, then to a digital clock in an alcove above the long rows of brightly colored bar bottles. “See that he stays behind the bar until twelve-fifty. Then, after he clears out the room and closes up, then he can pull his disappearing act. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say. I cannot take my eyes off her, Virginia looks so much like the woman in my bartender fantasy. She looks like me in that fantasy.

  And now she has a name.

  I am full of unanswered questions. I want to know all about her: where she comes from and where she lives now, how old she is, who the man is she is going home to, how long she has worked at the bar. Does she like her job? I want to ask her, do you feel for your life, do you love your life?

  Ben is behind the bar now with the apron tied at his waist. Virginia talks to him about receipts, inventory, and which drunks have been kicked out for the night. Ben finally shushes her, gently pushing her toward the door to the back room.

  When he turns around to begin taking orders, Virginia stands in the doorway. We look into one another’s eyes. We look deeply, like lovers.

  She turns and disappears into the back room.

  When she is gone, I stare into the mirror over the bar. I am looking for Virginia, but I am only seeing myself.

  How disappointing.

  In the bar-length mirror I can see most of the room behind me. There are quite a few people in the bar for a Wednesday night, mostly young couples with their arms around each other and small groups of inebriated women in their twenties or early thirties. A few older men sit alone at the bar, drinking seriously. Professional drinkers, every good bar has them. There’s an old Wurlitzer jukebox, which seems to be programmed to play rock ‘n’ roll oldies.

  The ghost of Harry Chapin mourns the pitfalls of time passing until it has come full circle. Someone shatters a glass on the unswept floor. Ben looks up from juggling mugs out of the dishwasher and scowls. A woman hoots, one of those primal drunken laughs.

  There is a mild and uncomfortable tickle in my throat. I cough and clear my throat several times. Ben places a foamy mug of beer in front of me and says, “Try this on for size.”

  So I do. And it fits perfectly. It fits so perfectly Ben quickly brings me another one. When I ask him for a shot of Wild Turkey, he lifts those fine auburn eyebrows.

  “Sure?” he asks me, before complying with my request. “I’ll drive you home later, then,” he says while he sets up my boilermaker.

  I cannot remember the last time I forgot everything after drinking too much.

  Over my second beer, I dare to inquire about Virginia. Ben leans across the bar so that our heads almost touch. He is confiding in me again.

  I am all ears.

  “I love that woman,” Ben admits. “She’s fair and, like tonight, asks no questions. Because she likes me. She allows for my weirdness. I would quit obsessing and running off, just to make her proud of me. If I could.”

  When I ask where she’s from, Ben shrugs. “Virginia doesn’t talk about her life too much. But she’s run this place for years. She lives outside The City with her partner, the man who owns this place. Guy named Vic. Cool guy, savvy and tough. Guy’s loaded too. Nobody messes with Vic.”

  When I ask about Vic, Ben says, “He owns this whole block, including the deli,” before moving down the bar to refill a pitcher for a plump young woman in a head scarf and flip-flops.

  Virginia lives with Vic who owns the Big Boy Bagel Deli? Where the absence of dough makes the bagels what they are?

  Is Virginia nothing, yet important? Is she by any chance important to me? Might her cognition be nothing but a dream, an elaborate hallucination? Her own, or possibly mine?

  “Bartender,” I call out. “Can I have another round over here?”

  My mind has loosened from its tight collar and leash, and is beginning to wander freely around the back yard.

  What kind of mind is really free?

  “You want another shot, lady, or do you want to change your order?” Ben calls as he works his way back down the bar. He has a dish rag over one shoulder and his white hair shimmers in the fluorescence lighting up the bar bottles.

  “I want to change my order,” I say.

  What I don’t say is, I want to change everything.

  17.

  Anders doesn’t like the downtown part of The City at night. But he bucks up, and stands tall outside the crowded bar. He peers in through the open door. After a while, he wanders around the side of the building to wait in the darkness of the alley there.

  He squats down and rests. Anders’ hands smell like gasoline and fresh-cut wood. His fingers are sticky with ficus and palm sap. His eyes and nose are dripping again. Maybe this is from inhaling gas fumes and tree sap, not from anything inside his heart, Anders thinks. Or maybe the woman is making him leak.

  She has to move the story along, Anders says to himself. The clock over the bar does not tick, but time passes. Soon it will be too late.

  Anders waits and waits, his mind a blank sheet. Finally he stands up slowly. He walks out of the alley and around to the front of the bar. Anders is thirsty. He wants something, he wants everything.

  Anders looks inside. He can tell the woman has had too much alcohol. He knows that feeling, it has happened to him too. You feel separate from your body and your body feels real good. Before it begins to feel real bad, that is. But before that, the good feeling is in your body and in your head. Your heart feels light. Your mind is free of the problem of thinking about itself, and you feel like you want to push and push what is no longer there, hard and hard and harder.

  When the woman stands up, he can see that there is a hole there. An absence. An empty space for him to fit himself into. To push and push what is not there, hard and hard, harder than ever before.

  This is the moment Anders has been waiting for.

  18.

  The old man at the bar introduces himself and offers to buy me a drink. The next thing I know, we are sitting at a table with a pitcher between us and Francis is talking about the old days, which I assume means back when he still had hair. I am unable to look at Francis objectively at this point since I have imbibed way too much alcohol for that, but he seems harmless enough. I am focusing on loosening the tether until I feel totally free of it, so I am not listening to him as closely as I should.

  This becomes clear to me when he leans across the table, which rocks unsteadily until it decides to slope in my direction. A puddle of beer trickles toward me, so I block the oncoming tide with one arm. The wetness soaks into the sleeve of my blouse.

  My thinking is skewed, too. I too am off balance. I want to tip over so far I fall into another way of being.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” Francis is saying, his words tumbling over each other in their rush to get away from him. “If I was younger I’d want nothing more than to take you home and screw you ‘til the sun come up.”

  A man like all men. No different from the animals.

  “But you remind me of my sister,” Francis is saying. “And looking at you like that would make me cry.” When he lifts his mug it is shaking and slopping beer. Somehow he manages to drink deeply. Now I am listening. “She passed a long time ago, when we were just kids.”

  I dole out the proper verbiage, sip my beer. It is sad w
hen young people die but, after all, every story has the same unhappy ending.

  Francis rubs the top of his smooth head with one grimy hand. His nails are the permanent black of a car mechanic’s. His faded leather jacket is worn through in places and too large for his bony frame. He has utilized a piece of rope in place of a belt. Francis reminds me of the residents I work with every day. Perhaps he is one of them.

  “She was murdered. And the son of a bitch who killed my kid sister never got caught. He would have lived out his life free and clear, but I couldn’t let that happen. Wasn’t right. Why should that motherfucker get to go on living? Why should he eat pizza and jerk off while my sister rotted away six feet under? No, I couldn’t let it go. Wasn’t in me to do that.”

  I can hear Ben laughing with a group of women behind me. He moves around the room, clearing glasses off tables and wiping down the wood with a damp dish rag. I look over Francis’ head to check the clock above the bar. Thirty more minutes until Ben closes the place down. I sip my drink.

  “So I fuckin’ killed him myself,” Francis says. “And I’ll tell you this, I don’t feel one iota of remorse. The fucker deserved it. My sister was beautiful, she was real smart, she was going places. He was a sick fuck, a predator. He stalked her and took her life. So fuck it: I took his.”

  Francis starts to cough. He is working himself up over this bit of history or fantasy, whatever it is he is telling me.

  Whatever.

  Ben comes to our table. “Are you all right, Franny?” he asks.

  Franny? How odd. Another Franny, and wearing a black leather jacket. Not believing I will find anything, I lean over and examine the old guy’s left shoulder.

  Sure enough, the snake patch is there.

  The room spins. The acrid smell of grilled meat is making me nauseous. I excuse myself to head for the rest room while Ben gets a glass of water for Francis.

  Franny.

  I walk to the bar, then down the length of it to the narrow hall that leads to the rest rooms. Van Morrison’s “Comfortably Numb” is playing on the jukebox.

  When I enter the tiny bathroom, I am thinking about the bartender. This other woman’s life. What it would be like to be her, living out here in the world of the living. Instead of tucked away in the unreal world of other people’s dreams that feel like life, and life that feels like nothing at all.

  I no longer want the life I have. I never chose my work; my work chose me. Now I want to choose my own life. I want to choose who to be.

  I pull up my skirt and squat above the unpleasant toilet seat. Ben should put a little more elbow grease into cleaning the rest rooms. I pee, then wash my hands in cold water. The hot tap is broken. The small oval mirror over the white porcelain sink is speckled with dried soap. In between the grey patches I can see my face and it is not a reassuring sight. My eyes are empty, my cheeks sunken, my skin like paste. I look like a dead woman, a cadaver ready for advanced biology class. I don’t look like me.

  I look like one of the residents, someone suffering from an incurable case of SIPD.

  When I return to the barroom, I check myself out in the mirror behind the bar. I look like me again. I am sort of pale all over and fuzzy, like I have been drinking. But I no longer look like a dead body, like something out of a horror movie.

  I stop to stare at myself for a minute, pretending to fuss with my hair. I do look like Virginia, but I am not her. This remains disappointing.

  Francis and Ben are talking quietly at the table but both men shut up and gape at me when I sit down.

  “What?” I ask, but neither man responds.

  The smell of char-broiled beef hits me hard once again and I put my face in my hands. I remain still like this. I am trying not to vomit.

  Ben whispers, “What happened to her?”

  Francis is silent. I imagine he shrugs, or maybe he points to the empty pitcher on the table to indicate the blame for my condition resides with the alcohol they both encouraged me to consume. Or allowed me to consume. Who am I kidding? I chose to drink here tonight, my condition has nothing to do with them. My eyes remain closed.

  I can hear them whispering but I am not listening. Blah blah blah. Talk all you want, I am thinking.

  Then my thoughts darken until there is only the darkness inside my head, a blackness growing blacker. Like a starless, moonless night on the beach.

  Gradually, the bar buzz recedes. I can no longer smell that awful odor. I can no longer feel the presence of the two men on either side of me, the press of the back of my thighs against the chair I am sitting in, the weight of my head in my hands.

  All of the sensory data around me has disappeared. Nothing is left, not even a thought.

  I am the absence of thought.

  19.

  What Anders knows is this: when someone else is drunk enough or high enough or traumatized into a state of shock or in a coma or near death, that is the moment. That is when you can find a place for yourself, move in and slip inside. That is when you can press hard, hard and harder, until it happens. And you do it. You change. You change into someone else.

  The woman is naked and the hole gapes like the hole in a bagel and it is asking to be filled with something made of flesh and meat and air, something that can be pushed inside hard and harder. The nothing that is there, it is there asking to be remade, to be made into something, something that feels.

  When the gun goes off people are screaming and there is the deafening sound of solid material tearing or bursting. Thoughts formed from a new type of perception entirely enter Anders’ mind in a gentle flow. He thinks: You dream you are the people you dislike. There is no escaping your dreams. Sometimes you cannot wake yourself up. None of us can do anything about who we are in the darkness of our own minds.

  Anders lies on his back on the sticky floor that smells of rubber and smoke and flat beer. His eyes are closed, but he sees it anyway and it is rising from his chest where a hole has formed, a big bloody hole. It rises above the tables and Anders wills it to go just a few feet more. He wills it with everything that is in him to go into the woman.

  The double wail of an ambulance siren fills in the hole that is the distance, growing louder and closing up the gap until it is filling Anders’ head with the promise of sorrow and pain. His chest is wailing too, blowing and raining like some tropical storm. He can no longer see what rose from his chest to hover above him, to float above the barroom, to flit like a cloud above the blonde head of the woman as she hugged herself, curled tight in the lap of her chair, weeping and shaking.

  20.

  Ben is driving me home in a car he has borrowed from someone. When I try to open my eyes, I realize they are already open. I feel like I am dreaming, but instead I am living.

  Ben is talking about the number of young people who are suffering from mental illness these days. He is talking about the increasing speed of onset for the various personality fragmentation disorders in college-age students and kids in their twenties. He is saying it is a plague, a modern-day plague.

  “The idea that these disorders can be fixed or controlled is a fantasy promoted by the public relations departments of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations. It’s a joke. I mean, all I see are people going off the deep end. Like that guy tonight. I don’t see anyone getting better. I don’t see the students who have SIPD graduating with honors and getting good jobs, thanks to their daily doses of Adjuster. You know what I mean?”

  I do know what Ben means.

  “What happened with the lawn guy?” I ask.

  I cannot seem to rein in my untethered mind. Flashes of memory spark on and off. Francis and the silver gun, the little baby gun he slipped from a pocket of his leather jacket. The smell of gasoline and big hands wrapped around my throat. Noise, blood, sirens, screams. The man who mows the lawn with the hole blowing open, the gaping hole. The skeleton in the mirror. A snake p
atch on the sleeve. The storm, the college photo, the number one hundred and eleven. The emptiness and the alarm bell going off in my head, an alarm that is still ringing.

  My memories are like a movie without continuity, a slide show out of order.

  “What lawn guy?” Ben asks. “Are you all right? Jeezus. Vic is going to blame me when I show up with you in this condition. I mean, how many drinks did you have tonight?”

  Vic? As in Victor? What does he have to do with tonight and Ben and me and my condition? The fire alarm bell in my head is banging itself on the sides of my skull. I roll down the window, and as I do so I realize we are near the beach. And we are riding in an old Volkswagen.

  “What year is this?” I ask about the car. It looks like an antique.

  Ben gives me a baleful glance. He sighs heavily. “Vic is not going to be happy about this,” he mutters to himself, ignoring my question.

  The full moon looks smaller in the wide dark sky, and softer, dimmer, as if it might be slowly receding into tomorrow. We are driving fast on the deserted ocean highway. I lean back against the headrest and close my eyes. The alarm in my mind keeps on ringing, but quieter now. I have a feeling of distance, as if everything I once knew has been left far behind.

  I do not want to go back to work tomorrow. I do not want to go back to my office on the quad, Celia and her ugly dreams, Justin and his hallucinatory thefts, Sasha and her hot pink napkin arrangements, the nothingness of my bottles of Diet-Water, the loneliness inside everyone’s head. Especially the loneliness inside my own head.

  “Hey Ben, can we stop for a while, maybe take a walk on the beach?”