VI

The Waking Dream

The haze fills in with dust and moves on a fitful breeze. The air thickens and smells like rain, cold and soupy. You can push it aside with your hand, but it closes back in on you.

The liquor takes the lumps out. Good liquor runs nine bucks a bottle but better than that is five bucks a split—elegant, slender bottles in pints, numbered like art. You can drink a split and get sincerely drunk instead of embalmed, avoiding those regrets and assorted miseries common to the undead on discovering life’s relentless continuation. Because the stuff has no taste but makes your tongue disappear while the eerie presence flows into the disappearing rest of you, first glowing on your palate, spreading like liniment, gizzard to toes, so you know another swallow can only make it better. Another slug can come on like heat lightning, opening your pores and eyes so nicely that a foolish drinker could think this is it, what the Japanese call kensho.

Pointing out this delusion, then diving into the bottle, another wayward soul introduced himself by way of dropping anchor in that snug harbor for souls adrift. Nobody knows his name, except for the name he earned on the night he arrived. Draining a tumbler of the amber elixir, then coming up for air in a soft, sad voice dissipating like smoke, he compared Centenario Tequila to the moment of insight. Nary a glint eased the clay as he remarked, “It is not kensho. But this will be my drink.” He found a silent opening and filled it. Heads turned. What? What did he say? And what? Did he express an opinion on tequila and its proper ingestion? Does he know what company he keeps? Him? Show us? What?

“Well, what the hey,” Cisco towered over him, reached for the bottle and repoured. “Have another, Kensho.” Kensho didn’t blink. With mock contempt, or maybe it was real, Cisco waited for the newcomer to drink another like the first, so we could see what kind of man or fool he was.

Maybe his name was Frank. He was from New Jersey via Japan. The second drink slumped the clay to a sorry smile and he poured himself a third and one for Cisco, gaining attention if not respect. The scene was unkind and consequential, yet he eased the strain with soft movement and warm eyes. Intentions were familiar: man in a bind, and so were the charges: suspicion of superiority. All charges were dropped when his knees buckled.

He gained sympathy and acceptance, going in mere minutes from newcomer to man with a mission, with a mercy killing on his mind. Something was being drowned. Kensho appeared monkish, with his quiet way, his indifference and somber view, but he appeared so most often socially. A seeker of something else, he seemed self-righteous at first, holier than thou. The alcoholic core frown on that. But he made his point, deferring to every drink and drinker for what it might have to tell him. Pressed for reason on his thirst, his manner, his obtrusive humility, he smiled apologetically and attributed whatever you saw to years of training. He quit and came to Mexico to see if such astounding economy could suit the next phase of his journey. He worked free of the bindings of the prior phase, sorting things out and rethinking a thing or two. He fit in but he didn’t, introducing a passion to the neighborhood far different than passionate thirst.

He laughed at his new name, laughed at himself, at his brand—laughed at nothing at all after a month or so, after a few dozen bottles or so. The guy was a lush, maybe new to the lush life but a natural, holding his sauce with the best of the holders. Pressed for his drinking history, he said, “History?” laughing like he was stoned, but he wasn’t. He was shook up. Consensus was that he had no drinking past but could drink with the hardcore because of his years of training, which became years of constraint, years of pent-up demand.

Kensho meditates more than some people sleep. He can kneel anywhere, settle himself lightly, butt cradled in the arches of his feet, and stay an hour. He likes it, needs it as some people need to bathe or brush their teeth or drink. Cisco puts it, “Fucking A, Kenny, you’d rather sit there doggy-style, kind of, than fuck, I think.”

“Maybe,” Kensho says, preempting in a word his removal from sexual desire, in a word allowing himself down to the gross physical. Or he can get by without. Some of the women call him strange, very strange. This profile came in the beginning, when he defied political category; not macho, not gay, not really straight, sensitive but indifferent. Some of the women watch him askew, like lizards watch bugs, eyes rounding for a proper fix and a PHWEEGAA! Some savor him, covering secret hunger with strange, very strange. Some want him to want them, to see what they see alone at night in the mirror, arching their backs and touching themselves with a softness only a woman can apply. Some fear the miscue, a wrong word, a harsh sound, a turnoff, he’s so shy yet so alert. He shuts them up, doing nothing. They watch his slo-mo movie, each frame a woodblock in posture, presence, low center. Some watch for a wrinkle, a bump, a gawk—for a glitch in his self-control. Some say you don’t need to watch for long, just look at his drinking. Some say no, his drinking is the ultimate in method and intent.

Nearly everyone watches when Leanne and her man/boy Dwayne saunter in late one day on their weekly sojourn to town for mail call, supplies and a drunk. Known as dos rubios—the blondes—they trace their love to when he was a mere teen, and she only had one tattoo. Now Leanne is forty-one or forty-nine, with carrot legs, a hind end that will fit in your hand, short shorts cut from a doily and wedged so far up she can powder her cheeks in the mirror. Her cause célèbre is tits bigger than her head—mongo casabas requiring two hands each that cost fifteen grand apiece, U.S., back when thirty grand was some real money.

Leanne was a pioneer in big breast surgery, ordering up the de Luxe gargantuan F-cups just after Wayne struck it rich in drug smuggling, just before Wayne got popped by the Federales and sent off to Escondido for a few years, maybe ten or thirty. They were sweethearts since before Wayne had money, because Leanne wasn’t in it for the money, fuck no.

She is a woman of spirit and proved it by tattooing her splendiferous peaks with a map of Acapulco running south to just above her crotch, Escondido, where Wayne does time. Heading farther south to inner thighs, the road leads to Love won’t die. Nobody travels that route now without remembering Wayne.

Beaten by time and wrong boyfriends, leathered by too much sun and a million smokes, Leanne looks ready for the wild frontier, rough and tough enough to set any hombre straight if he thinks he can squeeze those hooters without permission. Why, she’ll beat him down in the goddamn dirt. This is a posture, a reality implant allowing the appearance of heft, firmness and durability.

Leanne butchers her own meat. “I butcher my own meat,” she tells friends or tourists so they can stick that in their pipes and smoke it. No femme fatale prissy priss here. Maybe she needs the feel of it, for validation or revenge. She cuts the heads off chickens mostly, because killing rabbits is so awful. She kills rabbits, because she butchers her own meat. She eat vegetables on her own, because nobody needs meat, and it is a bloody fucking horror show, but if you do, you ought to butcher it yourself, unless you’re a pussy.

Dwayne is twenty-nine, or twenty-three, a surf rat, down and dirty with the tank top, the shaggy blond hair, the yellow pallor, the zits, baby fat, bad diet, baggy jams and his own commitment tattoos—Surf or Die, Outside Atapecahua, Almond Eye, Malabierto—the droopy eyes, the nicotine jag, the empty wallet, old snot rag, beer gut, whiskey voice, flops, oogies, hangnails, the works. Ah, youth; Dwayne can bounce back by noon after drinking all night like it’s nothing. He talks like a surfer too, often saying dude and radical, gnarly and bitchin’, even here in the hills, because the clean break is still in his heart.

Leanne says it’s so weird, first Wayne and now Dwayne, and weirdness is understood. She found Dwayne on a street corner with his mannequin, Carlotta. He picked up Carlotta on his last stop in Brownsville, cheap, on account of she lost a few fingers. “Shitchu know what she’d run retail? Shit. They were gonna fuckin’ throw her away!”

Now he dresses Carlotta in his latest designs, fashion and jewelry. She’s anatomically correct, since he drilled her a couple nice holes and lined them with this Teflon kind of Flubber shit that stays real slicky for awhile but then it doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter since you can’t get in there to clean the glop out unless you stick a hose in there and that could fucking melt her. Fuck that. He leaves the missing fingers unrepaired as a reminder of what brought them together. “Besides, anyone can lose some fingers.”

He points out Carlotta’s youth; you can tell by her nipples. He calls them pert and paints them brown and glues a few pubic hairs on her bikini line. He’s old fashioned that way. He repaints the nipples with more red, because he’s an artist and a humanitarian. Humanity and art are two of Dwayne’s drives, so he removes Carlotta’s metal rod. “You think it was easy?” he sometimes asks. “I could of shattered her whole asshole. She can lean anywhere now. I don’t know, I think it helps her relax. I know I wouldn’t want a pole up my ass all the time like that.” He laughs. “Besides, it didn’t look right.”

Leanne rolls her eyes. She doesn’t draw the men like she used to, but her bosom is still a terrific novelty. Everyone wants a feel.

Charles asked once for a feel, and after lengthy indignation, sensitivity, sincerity, bartering, assurance and advance payment, she consented. He grasped one gently, lowered his face, turned sideways, shook and listened. She cried foul. No more feels, and she laughed like Dwayne, laughing off the absurdity of it all.

She knows what Charles really wanted, what all the guys really want. Nobody minds her presumption. She’s colorful and playful, sometimes holding still so geographic disputes can be settled on her map.

Leanne’s physical beauty is historic, but her tits will never go away. They precede her in life. If you’re new in town, or you buy her a drink or get lucky, she might move from behind you to the front of you, dragging those melons across your arm. Cisco tried to feel them with his triceps. He said it didn’t work so well, but still it was pretty neat.

On the day dos rubios meet Kensho, Dwayne carries the new boom box Leanne bought him last night when they made up, after they fought. Dead drunk is a weekly ritual of the night before the in-town drunk, so they won’t have to hit town too thirsty. The dead-drunk night is out on the rancho, a more appropriate place for violence since, after all, it is home. Leanne bought the blaster for Dwayne because he tried to choke her but not to death, not really, and he is a sweet guy, he really is. He carries it on his shoulder like the brothers on TV, tuned to the only signal in town—WJZS, StereoRay, StereoRayyy … Dio—Aaava Marii-iiyaa. Radio AM Leòn Guanajuato!

Leanne spots new talent from the door, shuffles over to the bar and hovers behind Kensho, his arm a hare’s breath from her spectacular, nine-inch cleavage. She mews for a couple cold ones, then reaches around for a lime, or a napkin, or the salt, or some Q-tips, embedding his arm in the vortex of heaven—V-neck, no bra, all warm and clammy. “Excuse me,” he says, turning away, no look back. A few men ogle, a few women grin.

Leanne looks offended, because he didn’t wedge his elbow in there. From the middle of the room Dwayne calls over the surf rock blasting in his ear, “What’s he, some kind of fucking monk or something?” Dwayne is open-minded that way, a regular free spirit on the sexual motivation thing.

Turning away boosts Kensho’s stock with the women in witness who long for a man who has to have it but can take it or leave it. But turning away is no accident for Kensho, no effort. A lifetime of discipline makes it easy, makes it natural, makes it compulsive. He turned away from his family and his father’s business, from a modest scholarship and his father’s help, turned away without anger or resentment, but with a slow, soft movement. He turned west and went so far it was called the East, flew to Japan and checked into a school that taught the old ways for modern times. Kensho turned away from the world, down to each hour in the day. He turned to discipline and non-attachment, until the moments came and went with no seams, no friction; with no where else to turn. He reached the center of the universe, the place of perfect posture, in which he and the other stellar bodies followed their infinite curvature. Kensho went away and now returns with marginal success, just like on the outbound leg.

His school showed its students the innate oneness of cleanliness, simplicity and emptiness, and the freedom from chaos and disappointment therein. The school taught acceptance of life in a vacuum and called it practical, no cherries, no nuts.

He sits at the point of departure. He hears the chirp, the gust, the rustle and allows stillness where a pedestrian would merely babble. Everyday life in the secular world does not come easy after training twenty-five years, six days a week, eight hours a day. He rose in the hierarchy of the anachronism, until the day of his greatest non-attachment, when he turned away from that which revolved beneath him. Kensho lived for esoteric pleasures most humans cannot grasp. He reflected, meditated and contemplated, realizing in time that life needs living.

Like all pleasures, these too wanted change. Like most cults, this one was also led by a man given to excess in the reverence of his name. Unlike most cultists, Kensho got the picture and split. Realization and innate oneness took a quarter century.

But if he left the fold, he kept the discipline, for the discipline is him. The way is still pure, and he practices, meeting life in its moments, on the path. Time in its infinite cycle darkens with the new moon, from whence brightening is the great potential. He sits in Heidi’s courtyard, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at dusk, sometimes at midnight. He asks permission to follow the lure of the masonry coolness, the shadows and brooks. Heidi says sure.

Tony thinks a rarer bird would be hard to flush. Kensho’s warmth and generosity, and moreover his lesson by simple example are something to see. His mere presence is a state of mind to be shared, no diatribe required. He hardly spoke at the beginning, before the liquor loosened his tongue.

But even drunk he’s different. He doesn’t discuss human behavior because he doesn’t want to. Some consider him mannerly and shy. Some think him cautious and deliberate, socially constipated, unable to cut loose, get down and let it roll. He thinks them inconsequential, insatiable. He lets you know without telling you that you make no difference. He will buy you a drink because you want one. His time is your time. He has all anyone should need. He’s too good to be true but pulls it off with calmness and etiquette, adapted to the ways of humanity on earth. He weakens physically as a result of his remarkable absorption, but this too seems deferential to frail humanity, what he knows by way of experience.

Tony Drury can’t believe that a man sitting in Heidi’s courtyard like another brick can let her orgasm song go in one ear and out the other—on down Canal Street like a little bird or a giant condor. She moans lowly at first, working up to rhythmic gasping, steady and rough as a one-lung engine, up to a stutter near the red line, sobbing at the high end and giving it up. Tony is pleased and relieved in his own right to ring the landlady’s bell; yet this much commotion makes him wonder what difference he makes. Why not bring in a steam piston and hang a banner out the window: Heidi’s Coming! He doesn’t complain, except for pointing out the difficulty this shrill reminder must present to Kensho. “Reminder of what?” she asks.

She doesn’t get it. He ponders another approach, for tact and good taste. “I had a girlfriend once who yelled, ‘I’m coming!’ when she came. I said, ‘You are?’ She didn’t hear me, didn’t see me.”

“Maybe you were being used,” Heidi says.

“Maybe I didn’t mind. Maybe I don’t mind,” Tony says. “I think we might give the guy a break.” She gets up, shuffles to the bathroom and enjoys another relief. He wonders if comprehension is lost on diplomacy. “Maybe it shouldn’t bother me. Maybe Kensho likes it.”

She pulls the door back so they can see eye to eye. “I had a boyfriend once, couldn’t come in me. Had to pull out and whiz on my stomach. Now that was weird. I didn’t make any noise with him.” She reaches back for a flush, cleans herself and shuffles down the hallway.

A short time later Tony asks Kensho if the, you know, noise bothers him.

“What noise?” Kensho asks back. Tony smiles, because he knows that no man meditates into deafness. Kensho smiles back. “We are waking up,” he says.

Tony wonders what the wonder boy is waking up to on a hazy, dry afternoon when he walks in from the street and sees Kensho in the courtyard doing his brick impersonation by the fountain. He heads up to find Heidi on the bed, diagonally, leaving the couch in the parlor to the guest who stays too long. Maybe she also wants a wake up, so they can chase the love yodel down the street and he and she can score another dose of relief, and Kensho won’t mind. He watches her for indications of need, perhaps contemplating, reflecting and meditating, in the end realizing he’s being used. He doesn’t mind. Expendability is like mobility, like freedom in a way, like another loose characteristic of the place and the time, like the dust and shadows stretching slowly toward cocktail hour. All that stuff goes away too.

He takes the couch, because sleep is the best medicine for depression. He’ll feel better waking up, or he’ll leave. Personal resolve is all he needs and will be a good thing to wake up to. Sleep comes easy with resolution at hand.

Or easier without the doubt and indecision. In simple knowing you can swirl among the images of simple being, into the eddy and down the whirlpool, where you can blend with images of what was and might have been. Like a dreamy margarita, frothy and tangy and tasting like the meaning of things, he comes to knowing he would leave, could leave, should leave. Like Kensho but different, Tony Drury never turns away until things go away before him. He’ll fly farther south as he flew far south. He’ll migrate again like a sensible goose to newer times, fewer hunters. Isn’t that what resolution comes to?

He dreams of his flight to Mexico, of the warm feeling below the border when the old jet stops every few miles, like airplanes are trains, and a few people get off, a few more get on. Coming in to Mazatlàn the little runway looks fresh cut through a bog. Steam rolls everywhere, like in a dream. Ah, but this is no dream, he thinks.

The mud-brown river flows swiftly, its bank crumbling near the runway. A boy runs between the two, stutter stooping at full speed. The boy stoops and reaches and stands and runs and stoops and reaches again until he sprawls into the mud. He’s up quick and proud with a rope longer than he is, coiling round his arm, muddy brown. Stepping down the bank to chest-deep, he sinks to rinse clean. Maybe they eat snakes here, but the boy is easy with the snake, and it takes to him. Maybe this boy is Adam, and no one here knows how much can go wrong. Or maybe it’s Tony boy, upstream in a familiar tributary.

Stockwell Pond is a rumor. Nobody knows where it is but Lonnie Millman, and he won’t tell. He’s four years older and smug about the frogs, tadpoles, crawdads, lizards, snakes and snails he can get there; he only says, “Stockwell,” when the younger boys ask where.

Lonnie is goofy with his fish-eye specs, and he rides a rusty old bicycle when kids his age drive cars and wouldn’t be seen on bicycles. He doesn’t even know he’s goofy—nonconformist is the word of the era. Lonnie wants to be a veterinarian. He’s so good with animals that school will be a formality.

Tony Drury and Pauly Werner follow him one Saturday to Stockwell Pond, which is no pond at all but an overgrown ditch off a spillway. They reveal themselves as Lonnie stoops in the center of the bog with his dip net dipping mud minnows into a jar easy as carte blanche at the Walgreen’s Pet Department. Lonnie doesn’t flinch but only says, “Not as many as last week.” He rock-hops over to Tony and Pauly, smiles and stoops again to pull a snake from the water.

Lonnie knows how good he is. The secret is out; so what? Tony and Pauly can’t find the nose on their face. Who cares? The snake entwines fingers on warm vibes from a natural player.

Pauly Werner says, “Lemme hold him.” Lonnie complies, but Pauly jerks. The snake bites him. Pauly shakes his hand and screams, “This is creepy!”

Lonnie takes the snake. “He lost a tooth. He could die from that.” He puts the snake inside his shirt, where it will be more comfortable, dark and warm. Then he rock hops away. Tony and Pauly leave because they brought no nets, bags or jars.

Lonnie stops the bleeding and hand-feeds the snake to recovery. He shows Tony a week later at Stockwell; Tony goes every day for the salamanders, mantises, a hog-nose snake of his own, camel worms, katydids, tree frogs and crawdads big as baby lobsters. Lonnie doesn’t mind, but don’t take Pauly Werner there. Pauly doesn’t get it. Lonnie understands potential.

Tony Drury is sixteen when Stockwell Pond gets paved like the prophecy. Lonnie Millman can’t pass the entrance test for vet school but finds a girl and marries, and everyone agrees: There’s someone out there for everyone—until she shoots him dead and pleads self-defense. He was crazy, she says; the place was infested.

For the first time in thirty years Tony realizes in a cold sweat: Lonnie Millman is gone, and for all that remains of Stockwell Pond, Eden never was.

A gunshot is only a skillet cracking the brick floor.

But I left. I hung around and then left. Tony wakens in the dark to a scent of home, grateful for deliverance to nowhere in the hills and sorry for Lonnie Millman, who could have learned to drink and live beyond material gain on the crumbling muddy banks of the third world. He went away like we all went away, and now we want to come home again. And we can’t, because we’re dead or … He lies still for the knowing, but it’s over. Sleep spirits dangle their legs from the eaves and stare down on him.

The scent is more than dinner-by-Heidi. Her old family recipe is cucumber salad—slice one cucumber longways, squeeze lime over top, sprinkle cayenne over all, serve with large tequila. She can make tortillas and beans for those holiday occasions when you want something extra, if she has a cookbook.

This is different, wafting through the library and into the parlor, filling the courtyard and pulling the dreamer up with a promise that life is good. Kensho cooks tomates, frijoles, tortillas, arroz, chilies, poblanos, cebollas, champiñónes, cilantro, cumin and cayenne. Tony rubs his eyes and waits for the funk to fall off. He listens; movement in the kitchen is soft with no questions, no comments. Pungency wafts in silence.

He washes his face, pops a beer, pulls up a chair and joins the living. Dinner is served in the next little while, and when it’s over Heidi pours cognac. Kensho leads the silence, and it becomes a night to remember for those who live in a town where nothing happens. Here they are letting it happen without jumping in the way and yakking it down. They eat. They drink. They savor a consciousness altered by the simplest means. It seems a milestone. “In town,” Tony says. The other two smile and blink. “They fear losing a single night. I think they fear the time to realize how much has been lost. This is better.”

“You’ve been thinking,” Heidi says.

Kensho pours another little spot. Tony smiles; a few drinks, some chitchat and bedtime shape up peacefully and foreign as a tea dance in your mother’s living room. They sip. They pour. Serenity flows freely with fine cognac. It feels good, staid in a way, marginally stifling, but not bad, until the buzz stiffens up and hints drunk again. It gets aggressive, not exactly hostile but mental, pointless, restless, sexless and dull—like last night. It’s a milestone all right, a deeper notch on a vicious circle.

It begins with an honest question. Heidi gets defensive, calling Tony nosy when he asks Kensho about his money, where it comes from, because he drinks so much but hardly ever pays. Tony says he doesn’t mind. Kensho is the best freeloader you could imagine, with his style and indifference. Tony is only curious about the money and he wants to make a point. Because Kensho has another habit in his monkish kit of habits, of talking around a thing instead of directly at it. Like a politician caught with his pants down, Kensho can come up smiling and talking about honor, virtue, better lives for the people. Tony asks, “Where does your money come from?”

“Where all money comes from,” Kensho says. All tolerant of all ignorance, Kensho views the world as transitory, like a bus station stopover we all spend time in before heading along. Tony likes the idea, except when the bus station stinks on account of the bullshit piling up in drifts and smelling like what turned Kensho ass backwards in the first place. Because Kensho seems to be burdened by something and Tony suspects it’s bullshit and wants to help clear a little bit of it away. Heidi smiles at Kensho’s reference to the universal source of money. Then she chuckles.

Tony doesn’t think it so clever. How long can you fool yourself, loitering through middle-age in the Mexican hills? We all have our private delusions to deal with, he thinks, and if we’re lucky our friends help us spot the bullshit we miss, so we can clean it up, so to speak. Like sponging up the top-drawer sauce with a blissful smile; now that gets to be some bullshit. “Who had it just before you got it?”

“That’s not the kind of question asked here. I think it’s rude.”

Kensho sighs. “I have what I have. It’s enough. What else do I need?”

“What else could you want?”

“I could want as much as anyone.”

“Let’s keep it simple. Suppose you want to take a woman out to dinner, buy a bottle of wine, you know.”

Kensho ponders then reaches for Heidi’s hand. They make eyes. He casually sucks up three more fingers of Heidi’s cognac and says, “I never thought of that.”

“You don’t need to,” Heidi says. “I know women who’d take you out and buy the wine too.”

“Yes?”

“Wait, wait, wait. What if you wanted a slug o’ this thirty-year old sauce after a nice twelve-hour sit or something. This juice takes some dough, you know.”

“I’m grateful for it,” Kensho says. “But if it wasn’t here, I would try to be grateful for that too.”

“No, no, no. Kensho, buddy. I’ve seen you. You like the sauce, and you especially like the good sauce. And I know you understand the spirit of giving and why the world evolved the way it did, with cash dough and all that, so people can buy things from each other and share them with other people. I’m not pressing you to come up with anything. You pay as much rent here as I do. I’m just curious is all.”

Kensho presents his biggest smile, now that Tony has called him a freeloader bordering on the mooch. “I have a resource, I think. I’ve been sharing it with you. It’s not the same as good whiskey, but it took as long to distill, and I pour it freely for you.” He sits back, all done. Heidi shifts and puts Tony in her cross-hairs.

Tony tops off the drinks. “I guess that will have to do for now.”

Kensho drinks his slowly but nonstop as if decanting to the boda bag in his stomach. He sets the empty glass soundlessly on the table. “Twenty years, I had one beer per day, one sake per weekend. Do you know what that kind of discipline can do to you? It can make you strong in all things, until it makes you weak. I think my training was so pure it was a perfect culture for infection. I have another direction now. I include moderation in my moderation for all things. Moderation was different before. It was separate. It kept me in a separate place. I clung to it. My life was modulated on a beat like a metronome. So now for awhile I want to be like you—shit-ass drunk. That’s not moderate, so I’ll try it for awhile. Maybe sometime I can share with you what I have to share. I don’t know that you will always enjoy it, but you might sometimes. In the meantime, if you see me take what I find in my path, it is because I have chosen to see what comes to me and to take it.” He tops off the drinks and drinks again.

“Moderation in moderation,” Tony says. “Taking what comes to you? You’re a mind-fucker, Kenny.” And that’s the end of it. Kensho sits back with another idiotic smile. Heidi gets up and makes tea, fed up with macho bad manners. That’s okay. A little sauce makes decisions unnecessary. A paragon like Kensho makes non-attachment a breeze. Tony can fly out by noon, or by sundown anyway. She leaves the mess and goes up to bed. Tony finishes his drink and would follow to close the deal and maybe squeeze in a farewell screw, for the sentiment of the thing.

But Kensho pours another. “Enough for me,” Tony says. Kensho smiles as if to ask, enough of what? But he doesn’t ask because he doesn’t need to, because the point is already his. Tony would ask how anyone can act like a blithering fucking idiot and charm the women, but that would be obtrusive. So he only accepts defeat and drinks.

Kensho smiles again over another pour, and he and Tony get shit-ass drunk to prove another point. Tony thinks him uniquely alcoholic, to get this drunk with absolutely no chance for peripheral thrills. Kensho sits up straighter as he gets drunker, still and silent and happy as a clam filtering cognac like it’s marsh water.

From the depths of undevelopment, Tony wants to go upstairs and have sexual relations with his ex-girlfriend. But this will not be the night. A long time later Kensho speaks, opening his voice on cat feet. “Good,” he says. “You do good.”

“Mm.” Tony’s voice drags over gravel.

In another hour or so Kensho says, “You can know anything you want to know. You don’t have to ask it. You never have to grow old. Did you know that?”

Tony laughs, because he knows differently. He knows that all-night drunks twenty years ago led to tomorrows with moderate pain. He knows that a young man bounces back, and then he’s not so young and doesn’t bounce at all, and all-night drunks at middle age are like glass on concrete. He knows that daylight and hangovers are real, and a blazing doozy, one for the record books, is in store for him and his generous pal. Yet he also knows that Kensho has taken him beyond point and counterpoint and the whole scoring process, has answered a stupid question with commitment.

Tony knows that Kensho craves the questions and the unstable approach to life. Tony doesn’t think him wrong; just look what he can do, how he can be. No one in town is consistent as Kensho. But something is amiss, not that Kensho grieves over missing a life on Elm Street with 1.7 children and a station wagon. A deeper grief hangs on the perfect student like a perpetual mourning for the ultimate death in the family.

Kensho wants good liquor and sexual amusement. He wants to live on the margins with oddballs. He wants out; he wants in, American style—cowboy style, out on the lone prairie, down-in-the-dirt and upside-down style. He struggles, breaking in, getting down, and in spite of all he’s let go of, he cannot let go of the rock inside. He tries eroding it with liquor and can pour a cabinet load down his hatch and pass out or not pass out, but he cannot rise to the spirit of anarchy, cannot cut loose with a war cry, cannot voice his need. He smiles again sadly like he knows that Tony knows this about him.

In the quiet time before first light, Tony thinks him more honest—honestly confused, birthing with difficulty from the womb of perfect stillness. Here is a man unencumbered by the common lust, a man reaching for encumbrance. The guy has heart but can’t feel it, because he puts the pain elsewhere, inside the rock.

Yet a tear rolls down Kensho’s cheek, as if he reads these thoughts in the eyes across the table, the eyes that see him wanting out, wanting in. Tony wants to help, but Tony can’t help himself.

The fountain man comes near sunrise and goes to work like a good servant. Kensho stands, chair screeching, bones creaking, soul grunting. “Enough,” he moans, floating on air and rubber legs to the parlor, where he lays himself down, closes his eyes and continues.

Tony pours another drink, a day cap, but doesn’t drink it, because after awhile even the posh sauce tastes like shit. So he lumbers up and hits the sack.