IN THE VEIN IN THE VEINI was hesitating in front of the Holiday Lounge, a place I had been a thousand times. I took out my cash and counted it again. Twenty-seven dollars—five cents a day for 540 days. I started to walk away but thought, Fuck it, turned around, and walked right into the Holiday Lounge.
I had forgotten how stale the air was, like tuberculosis, like the air on a Greyhound bus. Everything else was familiar: the drop ceiling like a vast Mondrian; the mural fragment of a waterfall, showing a pair of female legs dipping into a green pool; the Tiffany lamps dangling over the bar, with yellow tinsel garlanded between them; the portrait of a crying clown; the painting of a stag; the curving red-velvet wall, rubbed raw in spots, behind the small stage. I strode straight for the end of the bar and found myself a seat. There were maybe eight customers in the whole place: an old man in his late seventies, arthritic and trembling; two tittering Bolivians; a black queer on a recon mission.… A chubby girl was dancing on stage. Norman was behind bar.
“Remember me?”
Norman squinted behind his bifocals. “Steve?”
“No, Tony.”
“Did you move away?”
“I moved to Holmesburg, Norman, for eighteen months!”
“What did you do, mug somebody?”
“Possession.”
Norman looked skeptical. “How long did you serve?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Only eighteen months?”
The guy next to me leaned over: “Hey, I was in Nam for eleven months. I’d rather go to jail for eighteen months than go to Nam for even a fuckin’ day.”
The vet looked a little too young to be a Vietnam vet. His face was smooth, his eyes smiling. Maybe they had sent him in as the NVA tanks were rolling into Saigon. “Both of you guys are losers,” Norman said. Then, to me, finally: “What would you like?”
“A Bud and a double Stoli.”
The chubby girl wasn’t so chubby after all. Her thighs were chubby but not her breasts. She had dyed-black hair, black lips, and black nails, a Gothic chick. Her bra and panties were still on and she was prancing around not doing much, someone you’d see at the beach. I tilted my Bud toward my lips but managed to miss them, spilling beer on my shirt. The vet laughed. “It’s a two-dog night tonight. The other one ain’t so hot either.”
“She’s all right,” I said.
“No, she’s not.” The vet laughed.
The other one, a very tall blonde, was making her round collecting tips. She was wearing a countrified outfit, plaid top and bottom, all ranchy and homey. She had a kind, bewildered face, a face to wake up next to. She was rubbing her ass against the old man’s knee. She wiggled and wiggled while Grandpa trembled, before saying coquettishly, “Stop digging!”
The vet whispered, “Whores, the whole lot of them.”
Two days before I was released, Lady Di died. We were sitting in the day room watching it on TV, all seven of us except Fila Khiem, a Cambodian punk we called Pol Pot Belly, who was napping in his cell. Hank, a burly blond guy with a greasy goatee, a shit surgeon in a previous life, stood up and solemnly said, “The world has just lost a beloved slut, ladies and jism, but it will soon gain another one.” Everyone burst out laughing. Mitch leaned his fat frame into me, slapped his tree-trunk thigh, and said, “Sheeiiiiit!”
“Give this jailbird a beer and a shot on me,” the vet said to Norman.
We clanked bottles. The vet rolled up his shirt sleeves. “Check this out.” I saw a slight, almost imperceptible discoloration of the skin on the inside of his right elbow. “Shrapnel,” the vet explained. “You know, in many ways I’m glad I went to Nam. Once you’ve been shot at, once you know that your life can end—just like that!—before you even had a chance to do anything, there is this whole new other dimension to your life. Some experiences mark you as a—”
“Excuse me,” I cut the vet short, “I have to make a phone call.”
“Asshole,” I muttered as I walked to the pay phone near the men’s room to call my mother. “Mom?”
“Tony?”
“I’m out, Mom.”
“You’re out?!”
“I told you last week I’d be out on Tuesday.”
“Jesus!”
“I’m in a bar having a beer.”
She started to talk to someone else away from the phone. I noticed the new pinball machine. Johnny Mnemonic: Meet the Ultimate Hard Drive. Then: “You want to talk to Uncle Aaron?”
“Sure.”
Uncle Aaron was my mother’s boyfriend. They had been going steady for about three years. “How you doin’, Tone?”
“I’m okay, Uncle Aaron.”
“Good to hear from you, very good to hear from you, kid. Listen: I have a bottle of cognac here; we can shoot the shit later.”
“Sounds good, Uncle Aaron.”
“Listen: You know I’ve been diagnosed with prostate cancer?” He already sounded plastered. “Prostate cancer?”
“Yeah, just a month ago. Listen! You know what I’m saying?! It’s like this: The good Lord is always fuckin’ with you, one way or another; you go to jail for selling rocks, I have prostate cancer.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Aaron.”
“You’re sorry?! I’m so sorry. He fucks with you to wean you away from all this bullshit, you know what I’m saying?”
“I’ve got to go, Uncle Aaron.”
“And you want to know something else: your sister ran off with a Chinaman!”
My mom came back on the phone: “It’s all right, Tony. He’s a biker but only half Chinese. Adopted, I think. I’ll tell you about it when you get home.”
I returned to my seat and saw that the tall blonde was dancing. She had stripped to her panties, baring tan lines and a pair of pancake tits. Many more people had come in: two guys in business suits; an E-Z Park attendant; a house-painting crew … “This one flashes,” the vet advised. She was folded in half and leering at me through her V-shaped legs. Then she flopped down onto her stomach, her ass sticking up and jiggling in a riding motion. This is what I must have looked like to them. “Three inches deep and all that power over us,” the vet opined. “Five inches,” I said. Meaning the asshole. Hankenstein jammed his big toe into me before he enlarged me with a razor. He inverted it into my slot and stroked up. Mitch was sitting on my back, holding me in a half nelson, while two guys, Timothy and Rufus, were sitting on my legs. She dimmed her eyes and stroked herself through her pink panties and, for a nanosecond, pulled the partition aside to give me a glimpse of what they were hallucinating. “She’s winking at you, kid,” the vet triumphantly said, as if he was responsible.
I drained my Bud. “How do you fit four faggots on a bar stool?”
“I don’t know.”
“You turn it upside down.”
“Ha, ha, that’s pretty good, ‘you turn it upside down!’ I got one for you: Why do women wear makeup and perfume?”
“Why?”
“Because they’re ugly and they stink!”
I saw the vet’s sallow face framed by mud, with shit in his mouth, shit in his eyes. “Do you know that in prison you lick your own spoon after every meal?”
“Whoa! Is this a joke?”
“Yeah! And one time this guy, Hankenstein, fucked me with my own spoon!”
It was past midnight when I left the Holiday Lounge. It had apparently rained hard while I was inside. Puddles pitted the street. My face felt tingly. I had to stop twice to throw up.
I took out my money and counted it. I had exactly $1.75 left, enough for bus fare plus 15 cents. The ride to my mother’s house would take at least an hour.
At the bus stop there were only me and some pale kid, maybe twenty, with a red goatee. He was sporting a brown fedora and a muscle-T, to showcase at least a thousand dollars’ worth of ink on his spindly arms. All kinds of bullshit: LA VIDA LOCO, a scorpion, a knife through the heart, a crying clown, four aces.… I looked left, then right, before walking up to him: “Yo, buddy, you got a cigarette?”
He gave me a Camel, but at arm’s length.
“You got a light?”
He pulled out a Zippo lighter.
And this is exactly what happened next: As he came close, I grabbed the hair on both sides of his face, spat out my cigarette, and gave him a full kiss on the lips. He tried to scream, but I bit his nose, hard!, and would not let go until he slackened.
Then I let him go.
The sorry-assed faggot knelt on the ground for about a minute, wide-eyed and breathing through his mouth.
“Now,” I blubbered, “can I kick you in the vein?”