IN HIS DIALOGUE WITH PHAEDRUS, Socrates argues that it is Love that causes madness. We love what is beautiful, Socrates says, and are entranced by it so that the gods enter our souls and remind us of the Beauty we knew before birth, the perfect Beauty that cannot exist here in the world of flesh. Here on the earth, we see only the shadows of Beauty and hear only the echoes. But before we were born, Socrates says, we had knowledge of the world above, and we saw there true Beauty, in all its glory.
Now, in this life, sometimes it happens that Love can open for us the memory of our time before birth, when we walked with Beauty. And that remembrance is so profound in its power that we are captured by it and turn our eyes on it, unwavering and obsessive, heedless of the world around us and of the opinions of our fellow human beings, who will think we are mad.
Socrates says that this madness is a gift from the gods, well worth the price of scorn from mortals. But it is madness all the same.
Danny lived in an old green house called Boystown. I don’t know who actually owned the house. Whoever it was clearly had a laissez-faire attitude with regard to irregularities and goings-on. In exchange, the tenants of Boystown had an equally relaxed attitude toward repairs, services, and basic amenities. There were locks on the doors, but the keys had been lost so many years ago that no one could remember a time when the locks had been used. This was general knowledge, and it was not unusual for the boys to wake up and find unannounced guests asleep on the broken-down living-room sofa or helping themselves to coffee in the kitchen—so much so that it was frequently a matter of conjecture as to who actually lived there and who did not.
Danny and I were eating chicken and biscuits at the kitchen table at 3 A.M. when Jake wandered through. Whether or not he was an official tenant was unknown.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, and smiled. I don’t know if he was feeling friendlier toward me since the pool debacle or whether he was just resigned.
Danny’s bedroom featured teetering piles of papers and books, including coverless copies of Hamilton’s Mythology and The Dialogues of Plato, volume two, which I assumed, like mine, were gifts from Tom. Danny was careful to hook the door behind us from the inside. This seemed to me at the time to violate the whole free-access ethos of Boystown, and I didn’t know why he did it. I found out at 4 A.M.
It is a startling thing to be woken up by someone screaming, “Motherfucker!”
Repeatedly.
In fact, the woman pounding on Danny’s door at 4 A.M. seemed to have a vocabulary consisting almost entirely of the word fuck and variations on the word fuck. Oh, and bastard.
“Have you ever met Candy?” Danny whispered in the dark.
“I don’t think you’ve mentioned her,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said, and then added after a pause, “She’s sweet.”
Through the door, we heard Jake’s voice sounding firm but reasonable, as if faced with a wild animal that was considering biting him. His voice was low enough that we couldn’t make out the words. But after a while, Candy seemed to calm down, and awhile after that we heard her car drive away. Jake knocked once on Danny’s door.
“You owe me one,” he said, and then went back to bed.
As it turned out, Candy and Danny had only very recently ceased to be a couple. Extremely recently. So recently, in fact, that it was possible Candy had not yet fully absorbed the news.
Two days later, after it had sunk in, she came back in the night and slashed Danny’s tires.
Stinky saw it as his solemn duty to lift us Cave dwellers out of the ignorance and delusion we wallowed in. And out of all us wallowers, Commie Tom, in Stinky’s opinion, wallowed the most. Or at least he wallowed in the worst type of mud.
“Look,” Stinky said, leaning down the bar toward Tom for emphasis, “you can’t deny that there’s a fundamental flaw right at the very heart of your whole ideological edifice. Put your whole head in the bag—right in!” (This last was said to Hank, who had a bad case of hiccups and was being run through a gauntlet of cures by Stinky.)
Tom smiled at Stinky in the benevolent way people have at the end of the second beer when the third one is just coming up from the cooler. “How’s that, Stinky?” he said, and I could see the lines of his shoulders relax into the discussion. He put his foot up on the rung of the barstool next to him.
“Well, now, here’s the basic premise of my argumentation,” Stinky said, getting excited because someone was willing to talk to him about his theories, which was not always the case. “I think it’s obviously clear to anyone who’s given consideration to the point that communism just won’t work, not operationally. It goes against human nature. Against the very core of human nature.”
“Now tell me how you see that, Stinky,” Tom said, offering Stinky a cigarette out of his pack.
“Clearly, communism implies and necessitates some degree of selflessness going forward,” Stinky said, taking the smoke from Tom. “That is, some degree of man putting his own fundamental ontological interest aside.” (To Hank: “Here, drink from the back side of this cup.”) He paused to light his cigarette on the match Tom held out for him.
“I don’t quite follow you there,” Tom said, taking his first drink of the new beer.
“Well, it’s fairly self-evident to any halfway observant personage that altruism doesn’t exist. That’s just a given at this point in time.”
“Plenty of people give to charity—,” Tom said.
“Tax write-offs. Pure self-interest. (Just keep drinking from the back side.)”
“—or just help out a neighbor.”
“See, that just exemplifies my point,” Stinky said, getting a little heated. “You help out your neighbor and, when you do, you make good and certain the rest of the neighborhood observes you doing it. Or hears about it, anyway. I’ve been reading some material about this topic—delving into the neuroscience of it. You see, it’s all about reputation or self-regard—thinking good about yourself, what a good guy you are. Releases endorphins. But nine times out of ten, I’m telling you, you wouldn’t even have utilized the behavior in the first place if you hadn’t somehow been socially forced into a corner over it. Socially speaking. Ninety percent of the time, in my estimation, you were probably hiding in the living room with the curtains pulled shut and the television volume down as minimally as it can go, just to avoid that exact same neighbor always asking, always wanting something, always looking for a handout. That’s just fundamental human nature. It’s all there, already encoded in your neurons with endorphins. It’s neurologically imperative to avoid people who don’t optimize your own self-interest. It’s a fairly proven data point in a lot of the literature I’ve been delving into.”
“There might be some debate about that,” Tom said. “There’s some interesting stuff in anthropology—”
But Stinky cut him off. “I can’t believe you’d be so gullible! Don’t believe everything you read, my friend. You need to apprise what you read more carefully. Try to utilize your brain here. Try to follow my line of reasoning. We start from the proposition that no man wants to be miserable. No man wants pain, and every man wants to make his own life better going forward. We all agree on that, right?”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” Tom said. He was sipping beer number three, and his eyes had a faraway look.
“Whatcha mean, you’re not sure?” Stinky shouted, and a little fleck of spit shot out from his mouth. “Every man is out for himself! You’ve got to be able to conceive of that! No man wants to be miserable, for Chrissake! (Boo!)”
The boo scared Hank so much that he dropped his beer, and we thought for a minute that this cure had finally worked, but then the hiccups started up again, just as bad as ever. Rafi wiped up the spilled beer with a towel.
“Buddha said desire is the source of pain,” Tom finally said when the commotion died down. “He was probably right. But still, we don’t get rid of our desires, it seems to me. We keep them close to us. Maybe like hidden treasures, buried but never forgotten. Is it that we can’t get rid of our desires, or is it that we don’t really want to?”
“You’re drunk,” Stinky said, slumping back onto his barstool.
“Moderately,” Tom admitted.
“Try thinking about naked women,” Stinky said to Hank.
“I never heard that one,” Hank said.
“Me neither,” admitted Stinky. “Maybe it won’t cure you, but at least you’ll be happy thinking about naked women.”
There was a pause while we all thought about naked women. Hank hiccupped.
“I knew a woman once in Denver,” Tom said. “She was a friend. I knew her husband, too, but she was the one who was my friend.”
Stinky glanced at Tom out of the corner of his eye and grinned. “Dog,” he said, and poked Tom with his elbow.
“No,” Tom said. “It wasn’t like that. I used to talk to her.”
“Always a good first step,” Stinky said, and poked Tom again.
“Her husband was a pretty fast-track corporate guy, and he was making his name then. He worked a lot, and she was on her own a lot.”
“It’s an old story, buddy.” Stinky leered. “No need to explain to us. Lonely women are low-hanging fruit.”
Hank hiccupped.
“She loved her husband,” Tom said. “And then they had a baby, and she loved the baby and loved her husband even more. When she talked about him, I could tell how much she loved him.”
Stinky looked perplexed and a little disgusted. “So what happened?”
“Nothing. I moved to Chicago eventually. We lost touch.”
Stinky snorted. “I am failing to see what in the hell this discourse is about.”
“I remember this one time . . . ,” Tom started, but then he stopped and didn’t tell the story after all.
“Did you get any?” Stinky asked.
“Never even tried. It wasn’t like that.”
“Jesus H. Christ, man! Why didn’t you just bang her on your way out of town? Her husband most likely never would have become cognizant of the situation. And even if he did find out eventually, you’d be long gone. Did she get obese or something postpartum?”
“What I’m trying to say,” Tom said, “is that sometimes the longing is the best part, I think. Or a good part, anyway. Sometimes I would go places where I thought she might be and, I tell you the truth, I could hardly even breathe, thinking I might see her. Longing is a powerful thing.”
“And so you’re telling me you liked being miserable over some fat chick, and you never even got any?”
Hank hiccupped.
“I wonder where she is now.”
“I dunno, man.” Stinky shook his head. “All I can say is that if it had been me, I would have banged her but good on the way out of town. Even if I was a goddamn communist.”
Hank hiccupped. “Me, too,” he said.
The Bartenders’ Ball, of course, came only once a year. The rest of the time, an average night after closing at the Cave was pretty quiet—a handful of people hanging around killing time until they could figure out a way to go to sleep. The bartender restocked the beer. Vera counted the money. Pancho sat at a table in the corner with a deck of cards, and as, one by one, we all finished what we were doing, we would join in the special Cave version of rummy. The rules became more complicated and byzantine as the night wore on. Some of them were: If someone discarded a six, the direction of play reversed. Every third three that was played, you had to change hands with the person whose birthday was closest to yours. If a Dolly Parton song came on the radio, you had to discard all the face cards in your hand. The people with scores in the middle at the end of the night had to buy shots of tequila the next day in Tia’s for the high and low scorers. This was to discourage mediocrity.
Now that Danny and I were seeing so much of each other, he came after closing to the Cave from the café uptown where he worked tending bar, and sat with Pancho and Rafi and Vera and me and played rummy.
In the town around us, almost everybody was asleep. The two taxi drivers who parked their cabs at the corner of Camellia and Thornapple Streets dozed, stretched out in their backseats. The policemen nodded off behind the wheels of the cruisers over on Juniper Street. Clyde was finished with the after-last-call fried-chicken rush and yawned behind the cash register in his lonesome pool of light. The frat boys from the college were asleep on their backs, snoring in their beer-soaked beds. The waitresses from the uptown restaurants had gone home and taken off their shoes and rubbed their feet and let their dogs out and gone to bed. Blossom had two more hours to go before she had to get up and start making biscuits. Men with clear consciences dreamed next to their wives. By the light of the test pattern on the TV screen, lonely insomniacs stared at the familiar furniture of their bedrooms and listened to the crickets.
But the Cave dwellers stayed up until dawn, smoking cigarettes and playing cards until the nighttime vanished. The nighttime was somehow far too lonesome to sleep in.
In the blue morning light, Danny would fall asleep in my bed. With his eyes closed, he looked younger, though sometimes he frowned or stirred with uneasy dreams. And once he shouted “No!” so loudly he woke himself up, looking dazed. Later he told me he didn’t know what he had been dreaming. I thought that maybe those dreams were the reasons he didn’t like to sleep too much, but Danny never said anything about them to me, and I never asked again.
Socrates spends only half a sentence discussing the moment when one prisoner is freed from his chains in the depths of the cave. He says only that the prisoner is freed and is compelled—for the first time ever—to stand. Socrates does not tell us who it is exactly who frees and compels the prisoner. He does not tell us how this particular prisoner, out of all the company, is chosen to be the one who, against his own will, eventually becomes enlightened. Why this one from among his fellows?
Perhaps Socrates skims so blithely over this moment—which is, nevertheless, the turning point of the whole story—precisely because part of the point is that it could have been any of them. It is the effect of the journey upward toward the light, the effect of the sunlight itself—rather than anything particular about the person who takes the journey—that makes the difference. The faceless being who frees only one prisoner does so without regard for the virtue or the intelligence or even the willingness of the chosen one. It could have been any of them.
And yet that choice, made so carelessly as to be unworthy of comment by Socrates, will make all the difference to one poor prisoner. Without desiring it or deserving it or even understanding it, his whole world is about to be changed. His whole world is about to be destroyed.
Danny said he traveled “unencumbered,” which meant in practice that he shed his possessions in an erratic but ongoing trickle wherever he went—lost hats, lost paychecks, lost library books and sunglasses and car keys. It wasn’t long before his Durham Bulls T-shirt was behind my couch, his cigarette lighter on top of my refrigerator, and his shoes under my bed, abandoned or misplaced. But once a man’s shoes live under your bed, no matter how haphazardly they are left there, it starts to seem that you are on no extended one-night stand, no passing fling. You start to think that maybe the two of you belong together. You get used to having him around—or at least having his things around.
Because sometimes Danny himself didn’t come down to the Cave for a while and I wouldn’t run into him anywhere around town. When he wasn’t around, I would pretend to pay attention to what other people were saying and pretend I didn’t notice he wasn’t there and pretend I didn’t mind. After about three days or so, though, missing him would get to be so bad that I might even find myself paying attention to Stinky talking, just to have something else to listen to other than every tiny sound outside on the street—just in case it turned out to be the sound of Danny’s voice as he was coming in the door. I would become, after just a few days without him, weirdly attuned to the sound of his name. Danny. I became so incredibly alert to the sound of his name that I could hear it just in the way that another woman drew in her breath to speak. Before she even said his name, I knew she would. I could always tell because she had the same haunted look on her face that I saw in my own mirror. Danny.
So when two college girls from uptown poked their golden heads through the Cave’s door in the early evening and squinted uncertainly into the gloom and the more diaphanous of the two said to her friend, “This is the place he comes,” I knew right away who he was. I could tell she was looking for Danny just by the way she sat at the bar, posed on the barstool like a bright and delicate bird, reminding me of my cousin Belle. I thought of how Belle had once shown me how to pull my shoulder blades together when I sat. “Makes your belly smaller and your boobs bigger,” she said, posing. I’d tried later to re-create her stance in the mirror, with little success.
Standing there in the gloom of the Cave, I lit a cigarette even though I already had one going. Sometimes it is practically impossible to smoke as much as you need to.
“Hi,” they chirped at me, smiling wide smiles and shaking their sunshine-colored hair off their shoulders. “What imported beers do you have?”
I pointed sullenly to the list on the wall. They studied it intently, biting their lower lips in pretty indecision and twirling identical strands of hair around identical forefingers in unconscious unison. Then they both ordered the Mexican beer we all called Orinada (Spanish for “puddle of piss”) for obvious reasons and asked me if we had any limes. We didn’t.
I got their beers and opened them and then made change from their new twenty-dollar bills, feeling suddenly like a brunette troll in the world of blond fairies. I noticed how grubby my own hands looked, with the telltale beer-opening callus on my right forefinger, compared to their clean white skin and discreet manicures. I moved to the other end of the bar to be out of range of both their Love’s Fresh Lemon perfume and their bubbly conversation. I didn’t want to hear them say his name. Danny. I turned the TV on and Jeopardy! sprang to life. I turned up the volume, but even that couldn’t erase the glowing expectation they had carried in with them and the consequent gloom that engulfed me. I picked up someone’s coverless copy of Mythology from where it had been abandoned by the tip jar and tried to concentrate on the story of Hera’s jealousy causing her rival, Io, to be turned into a heifer, seeing the justice of this more clearly than I ever had in the past.
It was a slow evening, and they stayed a long time, looking up every time the door opened, their bright expectancy dwindling slowly through uncomplaining patience into restlessness and then boredom to end, finally, in peevish snapping. It was perhaps unbecoming to them but was less grating on my nerves, at least, than the initial self-assured giggling had been. Finally, after a whispered conversation involving clearly mimed exasperation and much glancing and suppressed gesticulating in my direction, the more pert of the two leaned across the bar and rather peremptorily called me over from my glum little lair at the very farthest end of the bar.
“Look,” she said without any pretty lip-biting at all, “there’s this guy I met, and I heard he comes in here all the time.” I steeled myself, hardened my face so I wouldn’t betray anything at the sound of Danny’s name. “Do you know a guy,” she asked, “named Billy Joe?”
I felt my knees go a little bit weak, and it occurred to me then that she wasn’t actually such a bad sort of girl after all. I frowned deeply and tried to look like I was thinking hard. “Never heard of him,” I said.
“Come back soon!” I called cheerily after them as they disappeared out the door, waspishly bickering at each other.
Danny himself turned up much later that night with Jake, Charlie Blue, a black eye, and the laughing-eyed smile he always had after the tequila started to kick in.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he laughed at me. “I sure am glad to see you. Where’ve you been hiding at lately?”
“I’ve been right here,” I said, feeling petulant.
“Well, now, that’s a shame,” he said, “because you should’ve been with me. We’ve been having a pretty good time. You could’ve been having a good time, too. Don’t you have any sense?” He grinned all lopsided at me across the bar.
“Some of us have to work,” I said.
“It’s a shame,” he said again, shaking his head. “That’s what it is—a crying shame. I mean, what with you being so pretty and all.”
He sighed a big fake horse-sigh and tried to look sorrowful and failed, and I laughed.
“There were two girls in here earlier,” I ventured as casually as I could, “and I thought they might have been looking for you.”
“Pretty girls?” he asked, leaning closer across the bar.
“Maybe,” I said.
“And there were two of them together, you say?”
“They looked like girls from the college—like maybe cheerleaders or something.”
He leaned even closer. “Mercy! Two pretty cheerleader girls roaming around together looking for someone.”
I was watching his face. “I thought they might be looking for you,” I said again. “Couple of pretty blond girls out on the town.”
He was so close to me now that he could whisper. “My, my. That is a shame, too, because to tell you the truth, I find that just at the moment here, I can’t stop thinking about this one brown-haired girl.”
Then he tugged a lock of my hair and pinched me on the arm and took away my cigarette to smoke himself.
Danny tended bar at a café uptown. It was clean and well lighted and as such seemed an alien land to the Cave dwellers, who all felt that we appeared to our best advantage in subdued lighting and standing in contrast to outrageous background filth. The café was not without its charms, though, such as drinkable coffee and a fully stocked bar open at 8 A.M. Also, the patrons seemed extremely unlikely to vomit on you or even near you. Even though the waitresses were all beautiful and friendly, Hank and Stinky never came around.
Neither did Vera or Rafi or even Pancho. I felt like a spy and maybe a traitor when I first went to see Danny, skulking in the door sideways and scuttling to a seat at the far end of the bar, hidden from sight by the gleaming chrome cappuccino machine. Jake sat with me. Jake often hung around when Danny was working, not talking much, sometimes reading a coverless book from Tom, sometimes just nursing a beer. I was happy to see him at the café because, among all the well-dressed, intimidating customers there, at least he was a face I knew, someone who wasn’t a stranger.
Danny’s bartending was a performance to be envied. He teased everybody, flirted with everybody, and made everybody feel like they were the only one, special to him and lucky.
I was driving down a two-lane highway once when I saw a man changing a tire by the side of the road, and in the five seconds he was in my sight, it was clear that he needed no help—he knew exactly what he was doing, exactly how to change a tire. And just as I passed him, he finished tightening the bolts and, without looking at it, twirled the lug wrench once in his hand—like a bored baton twirler—without even noticing what he was doing. In those five seconds, I fell in love with that man. I told this to Rafi and he understood what I was talking about right away.
“Oh, God, yes,” he said. “Competence is so sexy.”
Danny at work was like that—making conversation and drinks with casual grace. As a consequence, there were always one or two women sitting at the bar wearing too much perfume and leaning too far forward, intent on him, eager. I watched him slipping between their fingers, and he would catch my eye and wink at me. I wondered how many women he winked at in the course of a night.
I never, from the very first, intended to fall in love with him.
But I couldn’t help it—I watched him mix a drink without ever looking at the bottle he was pouring from and I completely lost my mind.