WARNING; This post contains language and situations that may be deemed offensive. I offer no apologies, just a heads up.excerpt from my new novel Conspiracy Of Birds which should be out by the end of the summer.
Ruby, My Dear
I woke up after the sun had gone down to the sound of Darby trashing his room. He was growling like an animal and yelling incoherently, throwing himself against the wall we shared. He was hitting it so hard I thought maybe he was going to go through it.
I rolled out of bed and pulled my pants on and went next door to kick his ass, but I kept walking and went on down the hall to the bathroom and got in the shower. There was no hot water but that was ok.
By the time I was on my way back to my room, Darby was in the lobby going Tasmanian devil. Hank came over and decked him. Darby tumbled through a table, then laid on his back laughing. Hank waved him off and went out the front door angrily.
I got dressed with no idea what I was going to do. I wanted to take Debbie up on her offer to make up the Frank thing to me, but I didn’t want to go another round with him. My luck was sure to run out. There was a brothel near by and the action was cheap. I’d heard from Lucky they served Jack Daniels in the lounge (which was hard to find here) and I wouldn’t have to worry about getting ripped off.
The porch was crowded with a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals having a ‘spirited’ discussion about literature. I stopped for a second too long and Fitzgerald tried to get me to take his side about something. Before I could tell him I never liked him, Charles bashed him the teeth with his elbow. Fitz went back into the porch railing and crumpled like a sack of potatoes. This was all those boring sons of bitches ever did. Arguing over their own talent and intellect then going caveman when they didn’t agree with each other. At heart, we’re all fucking animals, and being on a college reading list doesn’t change that.
The brothel was called Damn Hot Cats and was run by Mama Lucille, a southern belle that must have been two hundred years old. She didn’t speak much when anyone entered, just nodded toward the lounge or the parlor. I headed for the lounge first. My head was pounding and I needed whiskey. I got a double and then another double. I drank three glasses quickly before a tall, thick girl in black silk sat on the stool next to mine. She smiled and I told the bartender to set her up. She had perfect curves, a big ass, and breasts that were spilling out of her lace. Her dark blonde curls hung around her face, like she didn’t care, and feline eyes glinted from beneath her locks.
We clinked our glasses together and knocked them back quickly. She slid off her stool and headed for the stairs, I was close behind. Up the stairs her ass swung hypnotically ahead of me. I could see the outline of a thong and my mind was getting lecherous.
When we got to her door, I was behind her, with my arms wrapped around her kissing her neck. She giggled and led me inside.
I started unbuttoning my shirt. She shoved me onto the bed. When I landed, I felt like I sank a foot into the mattress. It was the best feeling I’d ever had.
She pulled my boots off and my feet felt so light, I thought they might float away. Next, she was pulling my pants off.
We rode one another hard. The more we fucked, the harder I pumped, and the deeper her nails dug-I fell more in love. Maybe it was the poison in my system, but the earth was moving.
It came to a crashing halt when she asked to be paid. Her smile was gone. The glint in her eyes had become cold coal in a shit brown iris. Her curves were gray flabs that she shoved back into the silk. The beauty drained from her face. Her hair became a tangle of wires and knots. I tossed a few bills to her and got dressed.
I stepped into the hallway and touched the wall for support. It felt like warm raw meat. I could feel a pulse. Wet. I ran my hands along the wall, moving toward the stairs. I found a vein; it was so big it took both of my hands to get a hold of it. I squeezed, cutting off the blood.
Below, Mama Lucille shrieked from the parlor. I looked down and saw her stumbling into the lounge, holding her head with both hands. Her eyes were rolled up so far all you could see was white. I let go of the vein and she shot up right, reaching her hands to Heaven. Blood spurt from her nose. Everyone in the lounge was getting as far away from her as possible.
I grabbed the vein again and she did a header into the bar. Her brittle skull split under the rubbery skin. When she stopped twitching, people began to move in, muttering to each other. I slowly descended the stairs, not believing what I had just done. I told myself I was tripping. Just remain calm, and get the fuck out.
No one looked my way. The whores began to cry for Mama Lucille. The men started to exit with me, because they knew they’d get no action that night. We poured into the street like soldiers without a war. The streets stunk of defeat. Of dirty money set aside for immoral acts.
Most of them headed for the bars near the beach. I went the opposite direction. Going where the streets got a little darker, and the bars were less crowded. I turned a corner and came to an intersection where the streetlights had all been shot out. The only light was coming from the giant red neon cross hanging over the door of the mission. Several homeless people milled around outside. They looked like ghouls, aimlessly dragging their feet in the eerie, red glow.
As I passed the mission a few of them looked my way, their eyes were dead. A preacher came out on to the stoop and sat down with a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. His eyes were weary. His nose was broken. He was probably wondering why he was here-He had that look. It must be difficult to get up in the morning and wade through this open sewer and do God’s work. The road of the righteous is not an easy one to travel.
Down a street with no name and around a corner set a cinderblock building that looks like it used to be a garage. It had been turned into a pool hall. I found it a few days before when I went out looking for work. The neon beer signs behind the bars on the window were the only indication it wasn’t an abandoned building. As I got closer I could hear a blues band inside.
The band was set up near the door, the singer looked my way when I stepped in. She had a glass of something clear, but it was obviously not water. She leaned heavily on the mic stand as the guitarist tore through a solo. When he stepped back, she growled into the mic, “Chain, chain, chainnnnnn-Chain of fools…” She sang another verse, then the keyboardist took a solo.
I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer and a shot. My head was still fuzzy, but I was seeing shit with amazing clarity and depth. I felt like I could practically see in the dark. I’d had no trouble navigating the dark streets, now I could see the light stubble of an old man asleep in the far back corner, where most of the light bulbs had burned out.
I knocked back my shot and started sipping my beer. The band finished the song like a train wreck and ambled off stage. The singer slumped at a table alone, where a bottle of gin waited for her. She poured some into her glass and emptied the tumbler before the band crowded the bar around me. The keyboardist sat to my right. He couldn’t even speak he was so drunk. He kept trying to order, even after the bartender had sat another rum and soda in front of him. He drank half of it and stood up, mumbled something under his breath and sat back down, nearly falling.
He laid his head on the bar and whimpered. I looked at the bass player who sat on the other side of the keyboardist. He shrugged and went back to his beer.
I looked around at everyone else. Mostly older men and women beat up by and burnt out on life. Half dead eyes. The drinks in front of them were the high light of their week. Their conversations were loud and unintelligible, mixing with and getting tangled up in each other’s words. It seemed like half of them didn’t know the music had stopped, the rest didn’t know it had ever started.
The one waitress was as drunk as the rest of us, and didn’t do much other than sit at the far end of the bar, and bitch about how much her feet hurt. No one was listening, except a short, chubby old man that looked like he’d eat out of her toilet just to be close to her. His watery, mouse eyes kept dancing up and down her ragged body. She must have been gorgeous back in the day.
After several minutes some of the band members started packing up their equipment. The keyboardist snored steadily on the bar.
I kept putting the booze down; shot…beer. Shot…beer. I had a small stack of singles in front of me that the bartender would pick a few from every time he brought me a new round. The more he took, the more there seemed to be. I started trying to drink away the stack of cash, but there was always enough for another round.
I was seeing things swimming in the bottles behind the bar. Mutant tadpoles. Worms with jagged teeth. They were mating. Shitting. Giving birth. Splitting in two, then again.
I looked at my shot. A tiny, four-armed, fuzzy worm was climbing over the rim, trying to get away. I flicked it off and drank my shot. Then I heard a whisper over my shoulder. You’re poisoned. So I drank my beer.
A fly landed on the back of my hand. I waved him off. He returned with a friend. I waved them both off. They came back four strong. More started buzzing around my face. Landing in my hair. They were all over the bar, hanging around my drink. I shooed them away, they came back with double the strength.
Then the room got hot.
The door opened and in walked a slender man in a blood red suit. He sat down four stools from me, on the other side of the keyboardist. He ordered bourbon on the rocks. I looked over at the waitress-obsessed old man. He licked his lips with a forked tongue when she bent down to pick up a dollar someone had dropped. I turned to the bartender to order another round, but he was walking into the back cooler.
The keyboardist suddenly woke up and looked around.
“Hey, we done playin’?”
“Everyone left,“ I told him.
“Shit, man. They didn’t take my gear…How’m I gonna get it home?”
“Just take a taxi.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Didn’t you get paid tonight?”
“S’posed to. But those fuckers let me get plastered then they screw me. Every time.”
The man in red pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off two c-notes, American.
“Hey, you can have this, if you go play ‘Ruby, My Dear’ before you leave.”
The keyboardist looked at the money and happily took it from him.
“No problem…be happy to!”
He played the song like Monk. His eyes were closed and his face was close to the keys. If it wasn’t for the spastic bouncing of his foot you’d think he was falling asleep again.
I looked over at the man in red. He was hunched over his bourbon, muttering to himself. He slowly turned to me with a warm smile.
“Don’t believe a word they say.”
“Who?”
“Any of’em. Doesn’t matter. Politicians. Preachers. Doctors. They all lie to screw you over.”
“What do they gain?”
“They take your money.”
“I’ve never had much to take.”
“They take your freedom.”
“No one’s really free anyway. They’re taking what I never had.”
“They take your ideas.”
“I don’t have any. It’s all been done.”
“They take your choices.”
“Same as freedom, I’ve never had a choice.”
“You chose to leave your family. You chose to make their lives incomparably hard. You chose for your son to be a bastard. You chose to make someone die.”
“I didn’t feel like I had a choice then. Seemed like my family’d be better off without me.”
“You’ve got an answer to everything.”
“Just about.”
“You’ve got the whole fucking thing figured out.”
“No.”
“So why trust’em?”
“I don’t.”
“Why question sound advice?”
“I haven’t heard any.”
“Why are you closed to what I have to say, before I’m done saying it?”
“Because I don’t believe in you.”
“Good.”
He knocked back his bourbon and smiled to himself.
“Good.”
He stood up and walked toward the door. On his way out he pointed his finger at the keyboardist, like a gun, his thumb dropped like a hammer and he faded into the darkness of the street. Once the door closed the keyboardist stopped playing and unplugged his amp.
The flies started to disperse, and the room started to cool off. I pocketed my money and stood up. The bartender nodded to me and started wiping down my spot on the counter. I held the door open for the keyboardist as he lugged his case and amp out the door.
We stood on the sidewalk lighting cigarettes. There was a cabstand across the street, with one lone taxi driver snoring loudly behind the wheel. Otherwise, the street was empty. He started to cross, but I stayed where I was. I knew what was going to happen. I started looking up and down the street for the car that would come out of nowhere and run him down. But there was nothing.
He knocked the roof of the cab and got into the back as the cabbie woke up. The engine revved and the taxi sped off down the street. I started walking back the way I came. Before the taillights had completely disappeared, I saw the cab run a red light and get t-boned by a bus. I stopped and watch them skid and tumble through the intersection, then out of view.
I looked to my right and saw the red neon cross of the mission and started walking toward it. Most of the homeless people had gone inside for the night, but a few still sat on the steps with bottles in paper bags, talking in low murmurs. The alcohol was eating my insides. The brick walls were moving like water. Faces kept floating to the surface. I started retching and heaving. I grabbed a trashcan and vomited into it. It was dark, but my blood was glowing, so I knew I was throwing up blood. Then the worms came.
At first I thought I was going to choke to death, because I couldn’t get any breath or muster enough strength to push them out. I felt them squirming up out of my stomach, into my throat, trying to get down my windpipe. Then several slithered over my tongue. I got air into my lungs and coughed.
Like a bulldozer, everything moved up and out. Huge worms splashed and squirmed all over the garbage can and over my boots. I kicked them away and staggered toward the mission, spitting and wiping my mouth.
One of the bums held his bottle out to me.
“Looks like yew needa drink!”
I swiped at the bottle heading for the stairs, but without warning the sidewalk came up and sucker punched me. I rolled over on to my back and touched my bloody, tender cheek. Stars were falling out of the sky, fading, as they got closer to the ground. I looked at the neon cross. Christ hung from it. Blood running down his face. From his wrists. From his feet. From his side. His expression full of sympathy for a baby bird that fell from its nest.
All I wanted to do was die. So I closed my eyes and tried to. But I didn’t.
I woke up lying on a bench inside the mission with a cold pack over the side of my face. The priest was holding it there, when he saw that I was awake, he told me to hold it. I must have been out for a while, because when I sat up I felt slightly less fucked up than before I got there. Nowhere near sober, but I wasn’t feeling worms in my stomach anymore.
The priest sat down beside me.
“Havin’ a rough night?”
“I reckon.”
“Do you need a place to crash?”
“No, I’m at a hotel…somewhere.”
“What brought you here?”
“This is the closest thing to a church I’ve seen since I got into town.”
“This is a church.”
“Looks like an abandoned gym.”
“It is. Was. We converted it years ago.”
“Needs some work.”
“Yea, well, there’s not much money in this kind of business. We rely on the kindness and donations of others, mostly.”
“No one’s been kind or donated shit since when?”
“Since we got the building.”
“You look like you want to give up.”
“No, I’m just tired.”
“Are you making progress?”
“A little.”
“How many souls you figure you save on a daily basis?”
“I couldn’t say, but if I only save one, then all the feces and vomit and stench and blood and sweat and profanity have been worth it.”
“I can’t imagine being that committed to anything. I mean, you don’t even know if it’s real.”
“I have faith.”
“What’s faith? What the fuck is that? Just a leap in the dark. What if there’s a cliff? What if you’re wrong?”
“The burden to worry about that stuff isn’t on me. I believe and I go forward. If I’m wrong, by the time I find out it’ll be too late to do anything about it, so why dwell on it? I’m right though.”
“I never had religion. My wife did. She was always trying to drag me to church.”
“You ever go with her?”
“Once. I felt like the whole congregation knew I didn’t belong. Just kept feeling the eyes on me.”
“Where’s your wife now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Divorced?”
“Just absent.”
“So…you were looking for a church. Here you are. What can I do for you?”
“I need to know what to do. I’ve been runnin’ for a while. Did something I shouldn’t have done, which got me blamed for somethin’ I didn’t do. I came here to hide. Heard I’d be safe. I came here to hit rock bottom so I could rebuild myself from the ground up, but all I’m doing is floating in limbo like I have been for most of my life. I’m gray. No matter what I do, I’m never really bad or good, just not particularly right.”
“You’ve been trying to walk with one foot on the road of the righteous and one foot on the road paved with gold.”
“Maybe. Well not exactly. More like I’m walking on the strip of grass between the two.”
“You gotta serve someone. You’re life has no meaning. Step onto one of the roads, and your life will be defined.”
“Which one?”
“Which one do you think?”
I was tired of talking. This conversation was pointless, because I already knew what he’d say to each one of my questions. Ultimately this would lead to him asking me to repent and accept Christ as my personal Savior. Then I’d be able to dance on through the gates of Heaven when my death finally caught up with me (speaking of which, I’m surprised it hasn’t shown up in town yet).
I took the cold pack off my face and closed my eyes against the spins. The priest asked me if I wanted some coffee, something to eat. I shook my head and stood up.
“Why don’t you let me fix you up a cot?”
“It’s ok. I remember where I’m staying now.”
“Alright. Well, good luck. Come back anytime you need to talk.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey, remember this; God’s heart breaks for his children who have yet to come home.”
I paused at the door and considered that. I nodded and walked into the predawn darkness, which was cool and the fog was rolling in.
After a block I looked back, all I could see was the neon cross glowing brilliantly. There was laughter in the distance, then a crash that must have been someone stumbling over a garbage can.
5.5.2006
