The regulars at the Calf were all talking about Sunshine, naturally. Trading stories, reminiscing, but, really, trying to keep the dead alive a little while longer. That’s another thing you do at times like these. Of course to them, she was just a friend from the Quarter. They had no idea what she had been to Alex—or to me. Some of the others might have known her, but we really knew her. It wasn’t cheap sentiment we felt. It was genuine loss. At that moment I needed Alex and she needed me in a way that was deeper and a little different from what we had known before. Death, when it hits near enough, upsets all arrangements. You reevaluate, scared and desperate, and everything around you suddenly seems doubtful. Tenuous. The relationships you have suddenly take on an increased intensity.
Alex felt it. So did I.
I was in my mid-twenties when I met Sunshine. We were both working at a hipper-than-thou dance club in San Francisco’s South of Market district. I was bar-backing; she was a cocktail waitress. I was probably the only straight male there that didn’t hit on her mercilessly, which was probably why she turned to me for friendship. I’d be there while she waxed delirious about the latest love of her life, the one who was going to make the difference, the guy who was going to seriously straighten her shit out. I’d still be there two weeks later, a sympathetic ear, when the romance went completely to hell.
For her part, she kept me company when I wanted to go catch a movie or shoot pool or abuse my liver. At first, we didn’t date. I didn’t want to be dating. I’ve never had a flair for it, for the formal courtship rituals. My first marriage had ended not too long before that in a finale that combined the apocalyptic elements of Play Misty for Me, End of Days, and the bloodbath at the end of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Sunshine had demonstrated to me, without having to try, that all women weren’t emotionally manipulative furies. So, Sunshine and I nursed each other. She was witty, compassionate, alluring, energetic, and intelligent, though definitely lacking in romantic judgment. We became friends, the longtime kind, the ones who’ve hurt together—the kind of friendship in which lasting bonds are made.
I sympathized with Sunshine. For her incompetent upbringing by hippie parents—“Sunshine” was her real middle name, but her first name was even worse—and for her unbroken run of bad luck with guys, but more because she was a decent person. Decent. One not so self-involved that no one else’s pain mattered. One who wasn’t overly sullen or apathetic or surly or stupid or any of the other traits that our generation and the one that followed were said to possess. She was certainly more generally compassionate than I’ve ever imagined myself to be. We didn’t fall in love, exactly, but it seemed that all our other relationships were such disasters that we were better together than apart. We understood each other.
So we got married. Not out of passion, but because our relationship worked. I wanted a permanent ally, someone I could huddle with while the rain was falling. She was that person. I was absolutely sure of it.
Then, somewhere along the way, my empathy with Sunshine had slipped over a barely definable line. I fell in love with her, and suddenly, our comfortable relationship didn’t work anymore. It had been based on friendship and respect, but not passion.
I’d changed. She hadn’t.
Even so, we might have made it work if not for San Francisco. That city is even less sympathetic to young newlyweds than to singles. No love lost there. Being native to the city meant nothing, not if you were trying to find a decent apartment without a six-figure income. Just a place to live, basic shelter, with running water and electric lights and a mailbox. Nothing extraordinary, understand, nothing unreasonable. But insatiable landlordish greed made for insanely high rents, which much richer people were willing to pay, and the whole sick, sadistic game just wore us out. So we left, disgusted. San Francisco rejected us like a pair of bad kidneys. We’d decided to try to make a go of it in New Orleans.
The best revenge is living well. We rented a spacious apartment here in the Quarter, with a monthly rent that couldn’t buy you squatting rights on somebody’s back porch in San Francisco! Last laughs sound something like this: hahahahahaheeheehahaha ...
The best revenge ... revenge ... tripwire ...
Sunshine had picked out the apartment. We were set. Life was good.
Ha! The wheels were already coming off the bus before we hit New Orleans, long before Alex left San Francisco to join us in the French Quarter.
Alex wiped her eyes with a small square cocktail napkin and numbly picked a cigarette from the pack she’d laid on the bartop. I lit it for her, lit one of my own. Alex is a head shorter than me and, if anything, scrawnier. Sunshine used to joke that Alex and I looked like matching scarecrows.
“She was my ‘little sister.’” Alex’s voice had a ragged edge to it. “If not for Sunshine—and you—I’d still be stuck in San Francisco. Probably homeless by now.”
I squeezed her hand. When , Alex had called us from San Francisco, I’d picked up the phone. I’d immediately recognized the taut, raw-nerved desperation in her voice even before she told me she needed help. She was twisting at the end of her rope, mentally and financially. She was going broke paying $1150 a month for a crummy studio apartment. A studio! That’s a goddamned broom closet with a bedpan in San Francisco and doesn’t come furnished. And she wanted out.
Sunshine had insisted that Alex join us in New Orleans. She’d had a blast showing Alex around the Quarter and teaching her the ropes. We had only been living in town for a few months, but Sunshine acted like a native.
I was so proud of how quickly Sunshine adapted to New Orleans, to the French Quarter in particular. It was harder for me. She seemed to fit right in.
It was probably—no, most certainly—too good a fit.
They call New Orleans the Big Easy, and it is that. Jobs and relatively cheap apartments are easy to find, even in the Quarter. The pace is Southernly slow, and there’s the general sense that no one expects much of you. It makes for a kind of slacker’s paradise. Sunshine landed a gig waiting tables on St. Louis Street, and I snagged one for myself just off Bourbon. Fine? Dandy? Not entirely. As we settled into the rhythm of the Quarter, Sunshine began to change.
She was better off here, I knew, than in San Francisco. Without the pressure of worrying about simple survival, I could see her relaxing, the knots untying. And it was nice, very nice having her in my life. We had a chance to actually be a couple. She seemed to be happy ... but we really hadn’t left our problems behind us.
Patterns repeat, of course, and Sunshine had always been drawn to men—especially the bad ones. And the Quarter is full of temptation for those who look for it. I knew her eyes were wandering, like a kid’s in a candy store. As our lifestyle adjusted to the nocturnal schedule required by our jobs, she began to stay out later and later, often coming home after sunrise. She stopped watching movies with me, and she slept most of the time she was home. Bit by bit she pulled away into the night, until, not long after Alex had settled into her own place, Sunshine asked me for a divorce.
“It’s not about you, Bone,” she’d insisted. “I just need my own space. I need to find myself, find my passion. I feel like I’m tied down. We’ll still be friends.”
Those dreadful words. The masquerade ended. The lights came up; the masks were set aside.
I told her that I loved her. She told me that she knew it, then she smiled, kissed me on the cheek, and walked away.
So we divorced, almost as quietly as we had married. We both agreed to keep tight and maintain our friendship. For a while, it worked.
Our marriage had not cured Sunshine’s addiction to men, so I wasn’t really surprised when after a month or so she found the same sort of relationship troubles here that had plagued her back in ’Frisco. Bad boyfriends were her habit. It was another of her habits, though, that started causing me to worry.
I knew that Sunshine had been a drug user of th
e recreational sort. Pot, painkillers, nothing stronger I knew of—nothing that showed on the surface, anyway. But if she used while we were married, she kept it quiet. She never brought any dope into our apartment. Her life had never derailed because of it, no more than alcohol has destroyed my life. Yes, I drink. No, alcohol doesn’t take the higher moral ground over narcotics. Yes, a lot of the Quarter’s social scene revolves around the bars, and the Quarter is where I live. Why do you ask?
After we split, I started hearing through the rumor mill that she was getting a bit heavier into the drug scene. I didn’t like that—didn’t like that I was hearing it, that is. I try to avoid bar gossip, but it’s frankly impossible. Drama is a way of life for some Quarterites, usually those with the least going on in their lives. If they can’t find that drama or melodrama, they invent it, and they’ll do every damned thing in their power to make you a part of it. Or at least to listen to them and take their side.
This time they were talking about her, Sunshine, which was disturbing, but it was also, incidentally, a sure sign she’d been absorbed into Quarter society. She left the St. Louis Street restaurant for Big Daddy’s. Again, I wasn’t surprised. People bounce around in the business. No big deal.
I wasn’t seeing so much of her. It was a slow change, slow enough that I didn’t realize it right away. Maybe I didn’t want to think she was ducking me ... actually, that’s bullshit. I didn’t want to think I was doing the ducking—which might well have been the case.
When I did see her, she was ... off. The rumormongers had it that she’d become a full-blown druggie. I made an effort not to be influenced by that. It was tough. She wasn’t looking right. Behavior, familiar mannerisms, everything about her skewed just so ... out of adjustment. I tried to get her to open up. I did the good friend shtick. But she laughed it off, changed the subject. Something wrong with the laugh, too—brittle, off-key. I persisted and got told, bluntly, to give it a rest. That I had lost the right, with the divorce. That stung, especially since our parting hadn’t been my idea.
Her behavior continued to deteriorate, though I couldn’t have said just how, exactly, she was different. Even those changes I could see weren’t extraordinary, weren’t really cause for alarm. But she felt wrong to me. I saw her less and less.
I’d known her almost six years, was married to her for one. I was thirty-one. Friends had come and gone, and I was used to that, could accept the fact like a grownup. But Sunshine had been more than that to me. I didn’t want to lose her ... but I sensed she was going, her life heading toward self-destructive territory well beyond her normal range—sensed, second-guessed, but didn’t know. And I didn’t have the stamina, the cojones to stick with it, to get her to talk and tell me what was happening to her, to offer her a hand and make goddamned sure she knew that I was still—always would be—there for her.
I realized in mid-sip of my rummincoke what my last memory of Sunshine was going to be, what I’d got myself stuck with, and drank off the rest of my drink in a gulp. When Padre came by to repair my glass, eyes small and distant behind his spectacles, he asked, “You taking it all right, Bone?” Padre was in his forties, fit, even-tempered, long hair pulled back into the same ponytail I wore during the summer swelter. He was a first-rate bartender, able to handle capacity tourist crowds here at the Calf without breaking a detectable sweat.
“I’m taking it,” I answered. We were brothers-in-arms, service industry cousins. Sunshine, too, had been a waitress. You could say we’d lost one of our own and wouldn’t be significantly over-dramatizing it. Padre poured Alex another drink as well. Of course, he didn’t know what I had lost.
That last memory of Sunshine, the last time I’d actually seen her ... it wasn’t pleasant. That pissed me off, and once more tonight there was nowhere to put the anger.
I counted back, fingers tapping the sweating side of my rock glass. Eight ... no, nine days ago. It had happened at Molly’s, the one on Toulouse, not Decatur. Happened. The Incident. Shit!
I was off work a little early, just after midnight, had stopped in at Molly’s to shoot some solitary practice pool, where I roll three balls at a time randomly onto the table and take them down in the best order. It gets one thinking strategically, and that’s good, since I don’t always leave myself a decent next shot when I’m playing.
Sunshine came in—no, came rolling in with that pitching stagger of someone who is too drunk to be out in public any longer but is being borne along by reflexes and remembered motor skills. You see this particular form of locomotion pretty regularly in the Quarter. It’s funny—sometimes—if it’s a stranger, especially a tourist, since it’s like watching a child who’s snuck half a beer at a Christmas party weaving and wobbling around.
Seeing Sunshine in that state made me wince. Normally she was a very capable drinker. Fact is, most of us Quarterites are. We drink—oh, yes, we do—but getting sloppy or hostile or weepy is looked down upon, and your friends will step in if you start making a habit of it, partly to spare you the embarrassment, partly to keep you from getting into real trouble.
There is no last call for alcohol in New Orleans, no 2 a.m. cutoff, no laws even preventing you from walking around with an open container. In short, nothing to stop you from pulling a Nicholas Cage à la Leaving Las Vegas—that is, drinking yourself to death. Nothing except those people that might give a damn about you.
Sunshine looked wrecked. I stared at her a few seconds from the far side of the pool table ... and God help me, my first and surest thoughts were for slipping out the bar’s other door before she spotted me.
She didn’t just look drunk. She was wound up, in a fumy, heaving fury, eyes spinning in opposite directions, like she was going to come apart, right apart and right there, in an explosion sure to take out the entire room. I had seen her angry; I had seen her distraught and hysterical. Her emotions could rev high, into the red. But this was new to me.
I quietly laid down the bar cue I was using and—yes, cowardly, totally cowardly—I edged for the door.
Molly’s wasn’t crowded, but when Sunshine saw me, she shrieked, and all conversation stopped. The juke wasn’t playing, and there was only ambient street noise from outside. Inside, that sudden instant of silence reverberated.
Being a Quarterite, I’ve dealt with drunks. Being a waiter in the French Quarter, I’ve dealt with them professionally—that is, I’ve calmed them down with overwhelming reason, which is better, though less satisfying, than resorting to physical persuasion. Sunshine, wheeling on me with berserk eyes I didn’t recognize in a face I’d known for six years, was more than drunk. There was an added tweakiness, a terrible elastic intensity to her manner—a craziness booze can’t easily deliver.
Sunshine’s shriek hadn’t had any words in it. It was just primal sound meant to freeze me in my tracks, which it did. Long enough for her to pounce on me.
The bartender, a gal I’d tipped well for the one cocktail I’d bought since arriving, was moving to intervene, but it was a long way around the bar.
This twitched-out, hag-like, violent-ward-nutcase version of the woman who was once my wife and best friend meanwhile proceeded to lay into me. She went for my guiltiest exposed nerve—where had I been, why was I avoiding her? Who the hell did I think I was? It was a tirade, and barely coherent. She raved, her arms whipping wildly. All heads were turned in the bar, watching, and I was embarrassed to be a part of the spectacle. It was a short hop, though, from embarrassment to resentment.
My shift that night at the restaurant had been typically unpleasant. I’d wanted nothing more than a little quiet time to decompress, which I’d been managing to do before this happened. It was a nasty shock seeing Sunshine like this, and worse, much worse, that she was pulling this psychodrama on me, in public. Maybe I deserved some of what she was saying. That got me angrier, but I couldn’t just stand there and put up with this shit.
So I gav
e back what I was getting.
“Yeah, I’ve been dodging you! Take a look at yourself, for Chrissake! Listen to yourself! You’ve become a doped-out freak lunatic I’d cross the street to avoid! You think you can talk like this to me? Me—me?” Or words to that effect. I was suddenly seeing red.
Tripwire ...
The bartender broke it up, and I left, and I didn’t see Sunshine again. And now that was it. That was the end of all our time together, and there wasn’t going to be any more.
My second rummincoke was gone, and I couldn’t remember tasting it. I was reaching for another cigarette. This is what we would do tonight, I realized, Alex and me and the regulars who knew Sunshine. We’d sit in here and drink somberly, and probably more than one of us would get drunk, and there would be more tears and maybe some anger. Sunshine would remain dead, and nothing whatsoever that we did would mean anything.
“Bone ... ?”
Alex was looking at me. I had stood from my stool.
“I’m going to find out if anybody knows anything more.” I heard my words like someone else was saying them. “Want to wait for me?”
“I’ll wait.” She looked at me, in a way that said more than her words, “Be ... careful.” She squeezed my hand, before letting go.
I looked at her again, and I realized how lucky I was to have a friend like her. She’d been there for me after Sunshine had left me. She was here for me now that ...
I couldn’t think it. I couldn’t think of anything else. I left the bar.
* * *
Excerpt from Bone’s Movie Diary:
I wept when George C. Scott died. Brilliant of course in Patton, but also not to be forgotten are his performances in Anatomy of a Murder, The New Centurions, The Hustler, Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital. For that matter he was terrific in The Changeling & even Firestarter—say what you will. I wept actual tears. I had seen him in movies since I was a kid. Maybe that familiarity, maybe having him suddenly gone from my landscape, whatever, it saddened me. I felt it personally. I also think it points up a fundamental flaw in me: I prefer movies to people. I don’t say this to sound cool; I’m not particularly proud of this trait. I know, in my head, that the real world deserves more attention than films. Movies are make-believe. Life is supposed to be experienced firsthand. Blah blah blah. Know what? I don’t want to live my every moment to its fullest. I want, sometimes—and probably more often than most people—to watch others living, watch their dramas and interactions, their pratfalls and unlikely coincidences, their terrors, hopes, joys. When a film convincingly conveys these other lives to me, I’m enthralled. I’m entertained. I can feel for these pretend people, I can appreciate the craft of the performers, the talents of the cinematographer and director. I can feel emotions I might not, frankly, ever experience in my life—not with such depth or clarity, anyway. So, it’s a failing on my part. I cried for George C. Scott, not because a flesh & blood person had passed from this world, not because I personally knew him. But because he had been so many different & wonderful people to me. Same when Vincent Price died. And Steve McQueen. John Candy (& if you can’t enjoy him in Splash, laughter is a stranger to you), Rod Steiger, Audrey Hepburn, River Phoenix, Bette Davis ... my friends, how I miss you all.
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