II

The Untruth Revealed

You can tell who came south committed to adventure, to the long march, the one up, bottoms up, sunrise or bust. With willingness in the air it’s anyone in a dress or a tie or dungarees and a pullover. You can tell when the sun goes down and the grackles quit their racket and the lights come up and the hopeful come out, who’s willing to call it a night of nights. The Patron Saint of Becoming Someone Else walks those narrow streets, beckoning the faithful to come forth, to get high, get it on, get down, get laid maybe, with rubbers of course, because we’re not suicidal like some of us used to be, not by a long shot. On the contrary, we merge here like tributaries to a greater flow.

Many believe that a confluence of souls like this one is hardly a matter of chance, no way; could flotsam drifting downstream form an island like this one? Just look around.

Synchronicity is another gringo luxury, a favorite cause of those who survive the complex rigors of the rigorous complexities. Some survive urban stress. For some it’s emotional duress. Sexual harassment challenged others. Cruel divorce burns a wide swatch. Flowing down to the little town that could, they come, they see, they schmooze.

Those born in the area understand a more fundamental gravity and a nature that selects survivors with far less of the warm and fuzzy, a nature in which the unfed starve, the unquenched parch, the chaff blows away. The end.

Church bells clang down the quietude one day near the beginning of the end. Tony Drury looks up and mumbles, “Last call.” His eyes close as if for better scenery.

A voice behind him groans from shallow slumber with the question paralleling the why of the place, “What?” Not too far away the gardeners root. The maids clean.

When enough survivors gather in town survivorship falls from favor. Maybe an eyeful of nature’s fittest has its effect. How can you say, “I’m a survivor,” with little Pedro in rags gnawing on a hard roll just outside? The refugee moniker gains currency for awhile, but that sounds so … Haitian. Many call themselves creative, call others judgmental, call women intelligent and attractive, call men sweet. But survivor is reserved for those with soiled hands.

On they come, swelling the southbound stream. Like lemmings by instinct, leaping on faith that the world is done for. It’s only a matter of time; live for today and so on and so forth. Nevermind the nomenclature, it changes so often. The main thing is to get on down.

The last days of the world leave two choices, in order to avoid further suffering. You can: 1) kill yourself quick and neat. Suey tried but was too slow, not so neat, way too mental and of questionable commitment. She doesn’t want to die, not really. It only made sense. She overdosed on downers, or tried to with twelve. It didn’t work. So she decided to 2) flee south to get drunk. Lawrence followed. He’s her husband. When they get pickled and slice each other up she accuses him of tagging along.

Heidi also reached the bitter end but never tells until much later with crying time at hand.

Kensho sought small death daily for years, picking away at the scab of his imperfection. He calls his compulsion pure and oriental. He purges himself of weakness by transcending pain, by bringing it on and trying to ignore it or not trying but transcending, which is different somehow and hurts more or less if you do it wrong. Tony Drury tells him that he only displaces a thing with a heavier dose of the same thing. Kensho returns a wry smile, as if Tony may just comprehend the ether. Kensho nods woefully and has another drink.

Only Malcolm claims happiness with himself, his past and his prospects. Cut from the core of complacency he loves how it all works out. A drug dealer by trade back in the glory days of drug-induced wisdom, Malcolm landed on his feet with money to live well. Grown fat, gray and pasty, he looks back for color and grit. With eyes sparkling like stars on the lone prairie, he recalls great highs, incredible sex, roping, branding and shooting from the hip. Malcolm will spin a yarn if you’ll listen or not. He tells a story and moves his body in parts, the gray, the fat, the afterwobble going from the back to the edge of his seat in a beginning, a middle and an end. He strains to dramatize a point but alas; a man grows old and can’t hump sod like he usedta.

“I don’t believe you,” Tony says. Malcolm laughs sanguinely; he can well understand how a man might doubt what a man has seen. But he laughs short, reaching into his pocket for proof with the deck. Two-shots, mostly, young Malcolm and date, as if he foresaw his need for proof. He grunts and gobs in a mild convulsion, his chalky arms and jowls pulsating liver spots like a giant squid in springtime. Malcolm’s photos often make him spasm. They memorialize his happiness. Those were the days. He never tried to kill himself. Why would he? He could have died any day anyway, and he had it all. He came south the best way possible, on the lam. He sits back in old glory as his deck gets dealt round the table, doggy-style gone dog-eared from years of scrutiny. Sometimes he hocks into a napkin, which is a terrible thing to see but not as harsh as the swallow. “Do you still do this?” Tony asks. Malcolm laughs again and raises some stubborn residue. “Do you want to do this again?” Tony asks, turning another card.

“Gimme my pictures back,” Malcolm says, reaching.

“I’m only asking,” Tony says.

Malcolm gasps, “What do you think, Mr. Cockhound?”

“I think you should take good care of these pictures.” Malcolm laughs it off. Tony considers him a useful object of derision and shakes his head in disbelief, thumbing the deck. “Hmm …,” he commiserates every few shots. Malcolm basks. “Don’t you wonder where they are now?” Malcolm does wonder but for now he nods at Pancho and stirs the air with a forefinger; the deck is good for a round anytime if a man has a sense of fair play and reciprocity. Do you think it was easy getting shots like these? Tony doesn’t mind, chuckling at a close-up of Malcolm tonguing not just any sphincter but one at the hind end of a pert young blond with impish eyes on Malcolm, who hams for the camera, which he holds at arm’s length. “Did everyone say ‘cheese’?”

Malcolm is pop-eyed and grinning in the sphincter shot, a lifetime younger and thinner with only little blemishes where big blotches now emerge. “I really needed one of those shutter timers,” he explains, sitting back with a new beer. “Take a look, Pancho.”

“No. I see my mother. I kill you,” Pancho says. Malcolm har hars. Pancho has seen the deck since before it got dog-eared.

“I never got into assholes, myself,” Tony says.

“Your loss,” Malcolm says, sanguine again.

Tony knows he lost something. He can’t put his finger on it but he doubts assholes. He sits back with his new beer in the afterglow of a break in the wait. It’s stimulation like this that can stir a rethinking of your own glory. Tony’s therapist called him insincere. Tony felt sincere in appraising his therapist: fop, egghead, idiot. Therapist diagnosed moral weakness. For a buck and a half an hour, Tony thinks, therapist should tread gently, not touch nerves. Some people are acutely sensitive to Seconals. Tony took six. Therapist said, “Sincere people take twenty. Or thirty. Some follow up with wrists or they achieve success with …”—they achieve success!

“I’d like to see you take six,” Tony said, doubting therapist could handle four, apprising the therapy experiment a failure. He told therapist of closing his eyes at high speed and counting to twelve Mississippi already, approaching fourteen.

Therapist laughed. “A man who wants to die keeps his eyes open and doesn’t count past one. You’re depressed. That’s all. It happens.”

Tony tallies fees and travel time at minimum wage and gets depressed; eleven hundred dollars. What a set up.

“You have a gift,” therapist said. “A joy. You like a good time. You talk about fun and feeling good or not feeling good. Now you don’t feel so good. Time is up. See you next week.”

Or next life, Tony thinks. “I like that,” he told therapist. “The part about the gift. The joy.” He allowed a marginal smile. “But you don’t get it. I don’t feel pain. I didn’t even mind when they pumped my stomach.” Therapist reflected on stoicism. “They stick a hose down your throat to suck up the stuff and spew it into a jar, in case you didn’t know.”

Therapist condescended, “You paint a grisly picture. But you didn’t care because you took six Seconals.”

“You got it wrong, Mr. Therapist. I wasn’t depressed. I plain didn’t care, pure and simple. Why can’t you understand that?”

“We’re out of time. Let’s end on a different note. Why are you so dead set against accepting your depression?”

Tony laughed and laughs again months later—“Does your mother know you’re queer?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Same deal. It’s a loser question, isn’t it?”

Therapist nods with grave insight and sinks beneath the surface of his patient’s memory. Tony Drury drinks a toast to the mistakes you make in life in order to learn. On the other hand, joy and a gift for fun is a good prescription, so maybe the pump and therapist were worthwhile after all. “Like to see you take six,” he mutters.

“What?” asks Bill Maxwell. “What did you say? Did you say something?”

“No. It was nothing,” Tony says, waving it away. He came south on a mood swing, not from depression. He was having no fun, and now he is. Just look. Other voices rise, contentious and observant, drowning each other, trying to prevail. An odd calm emanates from Bill Maxwell, a fair-haired, wholesome-looking, middle-aged, well-groomed fellow who can catch a woman’s eye in daylight if she didn’t see him last night. Bill is from Texas, so he wears cowboy boots, blue jeans and shirts cut from tablecloths. He has no hat, but nobody asks why. He came south to paint, with gentility in his manner and on his canvas. He paints every day to noon or so. Then he sleeps, rising at dusk for a drink, the first of many. Bill Maxwell changes nightly for the longest running show off Broadway. His face gets painted red and his eyes go yellow under his harrowed brow. Then comes the shellacking. Bill gets down, sometimes to his knees, fragmenting over Texas, the constraints of campus life, bad feelings, the coed paradox and art. He paints dusty skulls under blistering skies beside ghostly saguaro with open arms, paints early in moderate pain and heavy daze, paints free of the load on his chest.

Bill Maxwell says, “Gee, it’s a beautiful day,” which is a simple thing to say but seems profound coming from a man of few words and many credentials. Formerly the Edward Meunch Associate Chair for 20th Century Depth, Professor William Manchester Maxwell climbed the sheer rocky face of university politics to the summit of academic excellence, academic appreciation, academic power. Then he abdicated. Some assess his academic success as a function of his disarming air, of nonthreat combined with the basic skills of art appreciation in an advanced academic matrix. Others say humbug; you don’t rise like that on basic skills. Bill Maxwell understands depth from experience in the deeps. Some say he suffers undoing in bottles and coed underwear. Some say all who live long enough suffer undoing.

So maybe a beautiful day is real, possibly deep with the mere sound of a nonassertive man harking to the sunny blue sky. A few people look at the clock. Sho’nuff, noon thirty. Bill’s handsome smile looks slept in, still a good two hours from finding its normal curve. Heads rise in deference to the beautiful day, because a man like Bill Maxwell can say so and be heard for a change.

Because Charles would fill the room with himself if he wasn’t gone, and on the off-chance that Bill would have spoken, Charles would have pressed him on beauty, on the futility of painting, the primitive nature of Texans, those stupid fucking hats, hopeless alcoholism and all that shameless macho bullshit like walking bowlegged and fucking barnyard animals for chrissake.

With Charles gone, tolerance settles like a mist. You can look up and side to side and feel gentleness and yes, it is a beautiful day. Tony likes Bill Maxwell and his art. It’s easy to look at, a pleasure to contemplate, honest and straightforward, like Bill Maxwell.

Tony likes Tomàs too, who chirps, “Esta un dia màs linda que todos, si ustedes sabes mi verdad, menos Carlos.” Tony worries that Charles’ absence may also lead to insufferable nonrestraint. Tomàs fits neatly among those who came for art like Bill Maxwell has done but who spend their days on theory and intention. What these artists understand best is each other. Half manuscripts gather dust; frayed canvases fade; klieg lights flicker in a figmentary might-have-been or a more strident yet-could-be.

By encouraging each other in the common pursuit these artists comprise a colony. Virtue sustains them. It derives from purity of form in obeisance to a muse. It pays a few of them but not most of them. For most, money converts to pesos and dwindles in ounce increments at La Mexa or the Legion or any one of many wonderful bistros. Shrinking funds and artistic hunger allows a greater flourish than that enjoyed by alcoholics wasting time. Some hurry to achieve livelihood before the money runs out, to taste greatness before their livers give out. Some get by, like Bill Maxwell, whose paintings sell regular enough, and every Christmas he has a show. Most share only the dream and the difficult, lofty view: money, how gross; where do I sign? Down the hatch is concise and definite, no waiting and what a relief. Up north they complained. In Mexico they don’t need to. They can have a burrito, take a nap and see what might shake out later.

Tomàs is first to remark the difference of Charles not there. He refers to Charles’ absence obscurely, demurring to a local school of art. No one says boo for a few days more, and a few days later a new woman is again conjectured. She will be a divorcée who will ride the wild rooster on the learning curve of love, who will soar to freedom and know what she’s been missing. Because Charles can cure a need, fill the gap, supply the dose.

He works best if the woman is in reasonable physical condition with a warm heart and a beginner’s mind. He can teach her everything. Charles of the flaming spirit is his persona for modern women who have become encyclopedic on childbearing, private schools, shopping, social gatherings, bourbon, telephone talk, the occasional fling; those women who need more. Oh, the divorcées come down. Many have money. Some spent years with aerobic video. They seek cheap living, independence, adventure and fabulous dining.

Charles’ niche among the divorcées is comical and routine. But a comedy leading to sacrificial hearts becomes humorless, then cruel. A few of Charles’ inductees stay on, some resentful and damning, sustaining each other in the class-action indictment that isn’t funny until Charles pleads for the defense. With umbrage he explains: “I do not pursue women. I am simply there.”

“You don’t mean simply there,” Rhonda says. “You mean egregiously available.” She lights a breather with flourish unlike the other fifty-nine she lights in a day and a night—the others get lit quick, incidental to dialogue.

“What is that? Egregious. I like that. Is it good? Am I that? Am I grejesus?”

This fag gets torched for drama with a deep pull and a big radius, like the fag is life and she wants a gulp of it, like this is the point transcendent. She fleshes it out, plumps it up and blows sequentially smaller smoke rings down to a pucker where she kisses thin air and lovelorn fate before blowing it away. “I’ll keep it primitive, Charles. Extremely available. Aggressively available. Like a franchise hamburger available. Easy as pie available. A real game cock. Impeccable manners and generous with a tip. And so cute when he’s drunk, really, even when he, you know, can’t make it.” She takes another hit.

Charles waits in catatonic repose as if waiting for comprehension. He nods short. He understands; Rhonda needs a load off her chest. He says, “I think I’m consistent. It might not be the consistency you’d hoped for. But then, that would be a rerun of your marriage, wouldn’t it?” Rhonda’s eyes lower as truth etches her face. But Charles can’t win this one, because a man of his tastes must sacrifice the short score to maintain odds on the greater victory. He goes to manhood, nature and conciliation: “Look, I’m sensitive. I’m a nice person. I take care of others when I can.”

“It’s true,” she says. “You’re a stud stallion with a gentle disposition.”

“I think stud stallion is grandiose,” Charles says.

“I’m sorry,” Rhonda says. “I get carried away.”

“I try to be a gentleman. I do my best. I fail from time to time. I think gentleman, good company, clean shirt, hung like a rhinoceros. That’s me.”

Laughter ends that portion of the show. Rhonda would light another smoke, but the one she has is only half gone so she hurries it along with a big pull. “I love you, Charles. You are a dear man. And you’re hung better than a rhinoceros. You’re hung better than one of those blood pudding thingies. You taste better, too. Hmm.” She quickly grins and shrinks to indifference. “Then you disappear. Now I know: you get tired. You need a rest before the bus. You like to freshen up for the new group, right?”

Charles hangs his head. “You’re right. Blood pudding. A rest before the bus.” He hopes concession will end the round. He likes the play, but not the aftermath. Rhonda requires winners and losers and matched wits. The fray isn’t good for her or him or those in earshot who could get the wrong impression. Because Charles is good to Rhonda, good for her and good with her in the short run.

Rhonda too rose in a day and night to the dizzying heights of enchantment where love rings true, to find herself like so many before and after, up in thin air all alone. Another smoke ring fades away.

Privately among the men Charles’ defense is more sincere: “I made her come. That was all. Her husband never did. Say what you will; I think she deserved it.”

Rhonda struggles onward, fooled by the mirage but pressing for the oasis. Some say she stays because of Charles, but that opinion comes mostly from the women who know what a rotten bastard Charles can be, with his charm, his manners, his clean shirt, local flair and big, thumping dick. Yet they know as well that somehow a man can be molded to open his eyes to the value of a woman like Rhonda, and to count his blessings and cherish her and treat her like the evolved being she is instead of a slut.

Charles says he’s unfairly judged, that he only plays the role he retired to. “It’s hardly even supporting,” he says. “I play a randy domestic in a lowbrow comedy. Would a tragic romance be fair to any woman? I think not. Not in view of such lighter fare. I awaken the passion. Am I condemned for that?”

Yes, he is, because nobody believes him or his claims of honesty or innocence. Leggy, classy and maybe a shameless flirt, Rhonda captures a charm of her own. She came south a few years ago with her son, who was seven or ten, whose father paid for private school soon after arrival. She came to paint, after her divorce and her last diploma, after twenty years in art history, art theory, drawing, painting, law school, motherhood, moot court and PTA. For twenty years she improved herself while her husband worked to get ahead and gave his weekends to football, golf and strange leg. It would have been all right if she’d had some fun instead of changing diapers and stacking degrees into middle age. It’s not fair. A woman can have sex easy enough, but women don’t want it easy, not like the husbands do. He wasn’t so different from Charles but couldn’t hold a stick on entertainment value.

Maybe life would have been different off campus. But she enlisted early for the long haul, hoping a man would emerge from the heap of meaning. Degrees were rationalized with potential for more pay and a tighter niche, but reason transmutes to nonsense when you eat the whole curriculada and wonder what next. She gave up on rationale. The world might support another lawyer, but they seem so bored. So she broke free for art at forty-five, when nothing made sense but beauty and truth. In Mexico she smokes and hums an artful lyric in need of a score.

Her classic features would be beautiful if not chiseled to hawkish intensity, making her look more predatory than receptive, making her easy to see but hard to be seen by. For a night and a day she softened from bird of prey to songbird at sunrise. Fresh off the bus, she knew she’d made the right decision, the tough decision, the kind of decision a modern woman must make for independence in a modern world. Charles taught her to take nothing for granted. He confirmed that she was not over the hill; the cock still crowed on her fence. They met by chance on her arrival. She needed a drink after her long journey to new life. He smiled and told the bartender to put it on his tab, please. Did he work this bar often, she asked. No, he said, he used to, but now he did better up the street. She thought he was joking. The place was empty. She ordered another and one for him and paid up front to show her independence or fortitude or something conceptual. He saw her offer and raised her two more, and in no time he called her bluff with an inside straight—after a lovely dinner, of course.

“Any one of you could woo her if you weren’t so drunk and lazy and would put yourselves out a little bit and show a woman a decent time.” Charles scolds Tony lightly, Cisco foolishly and Tomàs laughably. He eggs them on, building a case for romance with Rhonda and delivering it with flair, if delivery occurs before midnight, before his face puffs and his eyes dull like stagnant ponds.

Then he slumps, slurs his lines, strains the monologue and fails at dialogue, until romance is a faulty drain field. No one can stop the seepage, when his rosy cheeks filigree with capillaries, and he leads with his nose, and his windswept hair slumps with his posture. Then you can ask what any woman sees, especially one like Rhonda, who may be yesterday’s tamale but is still plenty hot, who could have her pick in a heartbeat. Whatever she sees in Charles, it fills her up; nobody believes his plea for help either, because she appears unreceptive to all but him. Tony says it isn’t right to have such cake and eat it too. Cisco says he doesn’t know about cake, but he’d give a pretty peso to gnaw on that bone. Tomàs says Charles and Rhonda have a very complex relationship.

Not a handsome man but with a twinkle in one eye and tragedy in the other, Charles animates the lull, displaces the tedium, dilutes the repetition. He can be jester or king, brimful and full time at either. Maybe that’s what she sees.

Charles sets a standard in his stride from the urban stage to this, the perfect stage, the beautiful wilderness, the fertile innocence. He walks on and regales the night with Bligh and Carton, McPhisto and LeGare—with all the men he can’t be but whose conviction he can ape from eight to eleven. In time he revises the scripts to better address the place. Improvisation ends the same every time, in tears: “Because it all ends in tears, every time. That’s what the man says. Didn’t he? Doesn’t it?” The man is Jack Kerouac; Charles uses his lines too, because they would have been asshole buddies if given the chance. “Oh, God, I love it, I do,” is his encore. He never says what he loves. His audience would agree to the antecedent on a secret ballot if they had paper and pens and could keep a secret. They cannot; nevermind. They’d be wrong anyway, just as they’re wrong on him, all wrong—it isn’t receptive women he loves. No, it’s something more, something less he loves. He can’t say what, cannot correct the common presumption, even when he digs deep for a different sensibility and comes up rumbling, “Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold, unseasonable holiday …”

Charles is intimate with Dylan Thomas too, with whom he can hold a cocktail crowd at bay and in wonder at the roly poly man whose roly poly tongue trills lightly down the syllables. Charles can silence them, dominate them, lead them down to Dingle, from where he looks up and calls: “When I was a windy boy and a bit/And the black spit of the chapel fold, (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women) …” The power is his. It requires those whose paths cross his at the moment to listen.

To say Charles lives for sex isn’t fair to him or his game; more credit is due both. Suspension is his opiate and disbelief never withers so profoundly for Charles the stud as it does for Charles’ playing Everyman, lost in Mexico, dabbling in excess. But what’s a woman to think? He’s so articulate, so quick, so compelling with a bedside manner to ease all doubt, explaining away what might look crass and casual on the surface, but in reality can make you well. “We are here. Are we not? The time is now. Never again, shall we …” Or some such would flow mellifluously in perfect syncopation from the silky tongue to the soft fingertips settling gently in the zone of Eros.

He loves, he says, simply loves, in public as well as in private. On earth as it is in heaven, he says.

“They are us. We are them,” he announces one night beside a couple from the north, mid-fifties, neat and quiet. “Look at this. He loves his wife. She loves him,” he announces like a game show host at the top of the hour, as if double jeopardy or the lightning round is upon us. “Forgive me,” he says to them. “But am I right?” They affirm. “Thank you. You have children, yes?” They affirm. “You see, they have produced something. They share trust and comfort. They know who they will bed down with tonight. They have no exhilarating delusions. What’s the difference? We’re comfortable. We trust each other. Given a variable here, a doubt there, we know who we might bed down with. The difference is that we live in a fantasy. We share a dream. We seek the physical. They, on the other hand, have a future based on a different substance. Perhaps they’re the bigger fools, but they generate what we cannot.” A few diners stare at the oddball. A few carry on their chitchat and eat their beans. The few who know smile or shake their heads or whisper to those who don’t know. Charles assumes an audience. “They plan to go home in a few days. Am I right?” The couple nod, yes, he is right. Charles nods and yells at Pancho to bring these lovely people a drink, yes, a drink, on him. Yes, yes. A drink is what they deserve as if they’ve won the game. Charles then drifts, looking here and there for another lucky winner, drifting to the fringe and out.

Down the street to check the action, lest something be missed, or maybe to down a few quickly in private to keep his obtrusive thirst to himself, he drifts out, drifts along and drifts back for another drink, another insight. He sits with the couple from the north or someone else for a drink and a chat as happily as he would with a recent divorcée, as if he really does care for more than the sweet reward. Charles likes the tourists and never calls them tourists; they’re travelers, too, another faction passing through. He hones his skill, charming the pants off average couples and recent divorcées. He makes them feel good, because he is good, a friend far from home. And his shirt is clean, pressed and nearly white with light starch.

He’s sober then, early on, before the liquor gangs up. Later on his date can care for him if she will please step forward and identify herself. Former dates observe with a laugh, except for Rhonda, who sometimes steps forward or stands in if the first date leaves, or stands by like a homely lass who can’t get a date of her own.

What a waste, Tony Drury thinks.

“Lucky you,” Charles murmurs as if in response, salivating at Heidi. Way drunk, rheumy as a hound and just as sad, his eyes like windows on a warehouse, Charles wobbles on an upper cut from the demon. He catches himself but falls down when the demon connects. Then the date or Rhonda grunts and helps him up while former dates wax nostalgic over the well-worn script.

But that’s later in the evening.

Sober, Charles masters the ceremony with aplomb, his outsized orbs taking a room in a single roll. Then comes the voice to draw a crowd nigh with presence and timing. A few watch until the ruddy bloom wilts, until his lips lay thick as liver at room temperature, hardly grasping the fag slunked between them much less the inflection of a thespian of advanced skills.

His belly hangs over his belt once he belts a few, and the only line at the ready is the pitiable one: “I’m an exactor. Exactor. Eggs Zactor. I’ll tell you tomorrow what that means. Of course, by then, it will be what that meant. It will mean what it meant. Or maybe it won’t mean anything. Maybe it will only … not mean … oh, something, what it meant …”

But he isn’t pop-eyed, fat, slovenly, red-nosed, flushed and slurring when he isn’t drunk; he is the spark that runs the engine then. Or he can be. He can embrace the spirit of the crowd around him and capture the essence it longs for. He can be the used-to-be of it, come down to it from the very pinnacle of the best of it. Later in the evening, reduced to reruns, he plays to an audience unrapt and yawning; this is where we came in.

His absence lets that crowd recast itself. Rhonda’s part gets bigger then, from bit female to lonely siren, crooning her blues to the blue horizon, telling the thin air what ails her. Charles encouraged a few men to pursue her, praising her voluptuous attributes for the good of the community. He could have played a Marine Corps recruiter as successfully, except with Tony Drury. Tony doesn’t need to see the world, but on a sneaky suspicion downloads Rhonda to his hard disk late one night easy as she downloads him. On a crooked walk home, drunk and wanting, they move into each other like shadows dissolving to a greater darkness.

Because Rhonda with all her willfulness has needs and no guilt and wants to scratch the itch a woman needs to scratch. She doesn’t want to get it on like a man, or not like Tony Drury anyway, but she seeks something to fill an empty space. Voluptuous, yes, Tony Drury affirms straight away. Rhonda untethered rules the sky. He expected as much and gives her the opportunity for further expression. This too is great fun but a certain threat, since Rhonda is mental and worse. Her mere presence can undo the happily ever after already in place. Because before you know it, it can be you she sings and mumbles over.

Not that her lyric is a bad place to reside; what man wouldn’t want a Rhonda on his trail, assuming of course the mentality is merely superficial? Her song begins harmlessly but grows hauntingly personal. She pines for the love that can be true, can be you but is not. He only wants to keep things pleasant in a stagger and a stumble down to the gross physical. She bounces too much for a long-legged woman with a scissors lock on his hips while singing off the cuff to a tune about two people in love in an alley in a little town in an undeveloped nation. She rhapsodizes, Dreary Drury gets laid, but he never paid. And now he’s waylaid … Tony … bo-oy …

Tony does not appreciate the glib handle but forgives it in light of the terrific action, humping it up in an alley in Mexico with a whole heap of woman who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about underpants down in the dirt or condom wrappers sticking to her sweater or spilled drinks or ash burns or anything. Rhonda can splice wires or arc electrons with abandon. He likes the action but misses her breasts, because a man supporting the weight of such a healthy woman needs both hands, even with a wall to lean on, and he’s not ready for down on the ground, not yet, but he does want her breasts, so he eases her on down to her own two feet, where a modern woman should stand, he says. She giggles and says she loves it when he recognizes the need for feminine independence. He says he loves it too but looks worried because the in-out requires a squat now with her standing; it cramps his hips. Nevermind, he kisses her cheek, unbuttons her blouse, unhooks her bra and reveals her breasts, because you can’t count on a next time, because a presumptuous man is a man soon fooled. She watches him complete the physical. Terrific breasts, he says, putting them away. She tells him he’s a pooch but lets him go again at her place naked and prone, until she snoozes. He rolls off and says he can’t stay. “I’m not ready yet.” He tucks her in and departs. Outside he feels relieved and relieves himself and loves the outdoors and Mexico.

He respects her after that, because she never mentions it, never brings it up, even in passing, as if it were utterly forgettable. In time he hungers again and wonders when he can stand in again, because her needs don’t go away as often as Charles does. Nobody else walks her home, he thinks, because she needs drama and the others only sit and watch. Charles is her dream. Living it makes her wacky, makes her murmur and sometimes speak of happiness. On a barstool with a drink and a smoke she mumbles, “In two years I’ll be fifty.”

Charles keeps time with her because she doesn’t cling, and he doesn’t mind if she gets it in the alley in a pinch. In the meantime, friends can screw every few days or new moon or after each period or if the bus is late. “Isn’t it amazing how things work out?” Charles asks one morning after an evening with Kirsten McGrew, whose friends call her Trixie, whose detractors call her Trixie McScrew, whose husband, Joey, is two weeks late returning from the world above. Charles doesn’t mind—”Sixty years old, and he calls himself Joey.” Kirsten laughed and laughed, because Charles can deliver the fun and Joey is late and the night gets later until the crowd thins down to tab A, slot B, and she laaaughs all the way to slurring time. Charles wallows, licks, tongues, humps, slurs, swoons and searches the wee hours for one-liners to keep her going. Because even with his dick in the dirt Charles can make you laugh. They struggle for just one more at sunrise when Joey comes home and Charles grabs his stuff and throws himself clean into the next room and onto the sofa and into the deathlike sleep of the pitifully drunk. He snores as Joey walks in. He wakes in a daze with utter embarrassment and asks, “What are you doing here?” Joey insists that he lives here. Charles looks around and says, “Oh, gosh.”

He stops for coffee and a splash on his way home since it is Tuesday and he passes that way. His arrival in rumpled clothing is like the cock crowing. Not that Charles needs the old gang to know that, yes, he has inserted his greater self between the legs of last night’s date. No, his need is already filled. He’s merely a social animal seeking succor.

“I mean the way it works out in life with maturity and development and dealing in the truth. I think men who have names for their dicks are really strange,” he blares through the fog, running his basso profundo up on the shoals of remorse. He plows the pain with vigor for a brand new day in the never never hills. Some moan. A few drift. Some dabble in solid food. Charles orders it black, “Yes, and could I have just a thimble of Cointreau on the side.” He waits happily for the bolt that will bring him back, bring him up, bring him on.

He sips it, slurps it, groans ovations to it, makes all gone of it and asks for more of it. He looks around, laughs and croaks, “Before I got as mature as I am now, they called mine the twenty-seven-incher.” Some say Charles defaults to smut in compensation for failure. Drawing a few dying laughs he bowls down the quietude, shattering the peace like ninepins. “For awhile they called it Hebrew National.” He squeezes a chuckle from the convalescent crowd, then pounds his lines to tedium. From former dick names he goes to peculiarities of former wives to yesterday’s excellent shit, down to firmness, taper, natural grease and a sense of closure so satisfying that he can’t help but feel a certain patriotic gratitude for the often maligned organisms of Mexico. Some walk away. Charles likes that; he says audience control can take many forms, if an actor is dynamic.

Two blocks down Trixie McScrew shuffles sleepily from her boudoir to hug her husband. She ignores his headshake and tells him he missed a real humdinger. “Oh, him,” she says, shooing the invisible fly. “He slept on the couch. We were sooo toasted.” Joey looks the other way, because, well, you have to get along in a small town.

Charles coaches Trixie psychically from down the street, guiding her through the method of being hopelessly hungover and in no shape for cootchy coo. “You must bathe at once,” he mumbles, but then he jumps up, ducks out and looks down the sleepy street. “The joke’s on us,” he says, his voice plowing the gravel. “Drinking hard and calling it fun.” He ducks back in. “Or worse, fulfillment. No more for me, no sir. None for me today, I’m clearing my mind. I’m sticking to the cheap and tawdry. Now that’s living. Look at me already, fresh as a god … damn … daisy!” He wheezes and turns back out for a deep clearing of glottal debris and comes back in to explain, “It’s a joke, I tell you. A gob o’ this, a pile o’ that. Dust by the handful. Boy oh boy.” He makes a fist and casts it aside as if flinging the dust, or maybe he won’t punch someone. He stares off intensely and says, “Isn’t it queer, with the holes and pegs? This one we want. This one we don’t. This one stinks just right. This one smells like shit.” He pummels it pointless. A few more drift out and then a few more until it’s empty barstools between the two of them.

“Light of my life,” Rhonda says. Joey McGrew appears in the door. Charles closes the distance between himself and the nearest woman. He puts an arm around her. She turns to him.

He whispers softly as she ever hoped for, “Rhubarb rhubarb. Mumbo jumbo.” Their lips touch. She whines like a cat with an itch. “Sing to me,” he whispers, and she does—blues in G with marginal swing.

“You smell like a wo wo woman to me. You smell just like Trixie McScrew.”

Charles’ backs off and speaks softly of honor and tact, glancing downward, then doorward. When the coast clears, he says hormones are the biggest joke of all and no man can be held accountable for their rapacious nature. But he, for one, works to end the female complaint against those who roll off, roll over and snore.

“You are the antidote,” she says. “Hardly the dream date but you do last. You do.”

“I hate being wrong, you know, on love,” he says. “Broken hearts are the worst road kills. How does it make me feel, and for what? Like an executioner at sunrise, that’s what.”

“She’s not that sensitive,” Rhonda says.

Then comes what it all comes down to. “You move it all around but it comes out the same. None of it means squat.” He longs for liberation. Mornings are hell, with the self-consciousness, the hangover, the strained silence, the pitiful husband, the awkward exit. Who can eat?

“But you did enjoy yourself?”

“I’m not happy. I think you of all people know that.”

“I think all people know it, Charles.”

“I’m so unhappy, I’m not feeling well.”

“Why don’t you give yourself a break then?”

“Worse yet, I’ll feel pretty good by noon.” A few people drift in. “I’m a pussy hound and an alcoholic.”

Cisco bellies up and mocks the obvious. “Duh …”

Charles ignores him. “It’s everything I could have hoped for but the price gets too high. I’m sensitive as the next person. You know that. I have a large need. Feed or perish is my evolutionary struggle. I know it’s wrong. But it’s only physical. I mean no harm. I think you perish either way.” He hangs his head. “I think I’m wrong. I think I’m all physical. I think I have no spirit. I think my friends don’t understand. I know I’m difficult, but they can leave the premises. What can I do? Anyway, my drive does not dilute my love. Not for you.”

“How sweet,” Rhonda says. “A sentimental moment, fresh-fucked and hungover. Poor baby.”

“I hope you never doubted me.”

Kensho steps to the bar. “As long as you doubt yourself, you have a spirit.”

“Please,” Heidi says. “Charles has no doubts.”

Charles turns. “I love you, Heidi. You know that.”

“But you love me more, don’t you,” Rhonda says.

Suey says, “He loves perfectly for the moment, like a sex maniac or a dildo.”

Charles turns away and closes the scene softly, “He is neither a maniac nor is he wooden. He plays by method.” He pauses as if to challenge those he loves.

Rhonda says, “He loves but not from the heart. His heart is the hardest part of him. Isn’t that a shame?” She smokes up a cloud and hides in it.

Suey ponders, “I thought your heart was in your chest.” Charles smiles and turns for a rare exit on someone else’s line. Rhonda watches him down the street.

A few days later someone says the new girlfriend must be good.

Someone says it isn’t a woman but a blowup doll who won’t complain. Morning deflation will keep her quiet until he needs to pump her up again.

Some tsk tsk; some ignore the gutter talk. Someone says maybe this one is different, maybe he’s in love and it’s holding his interest.

Rhonda smiles sadly and lights a smoke. “He’s already in love,” she says. “It’s not working out so well.”

Kensho says total immersion often precedes insight.

Lisa Brown is new in town but knows a thing or two about experience and doesn’t mind sharing. She says, “Yes, insight or drowning.”

Nobody says more, so the shrine of distillation becomes meditative, until a pilgrim suggests a small sacrament, just one, to get things going. Melanie Maerz says she’s so excited that Bob and Jane Jenson are arriving tomorrow, because she loves them, because they’re so great. Lisa Brown doesn’t know Bob and Jane but after hearing about them and their unusual lives, she’s certainly looking forward to meeting them. Melanie asks to be corrected if necessary, “But aren’t these tamales to die for?”

Lars Holmgren, who’s been seeing Melanie for the last week or so, says, “Absolutely.”