Drowning Tucson (12 page)

So what’s on your mind, Manny? Vinnie shook salt into his beer to keep the bubbles down. He looked up at Manny and smiled.

What’s on my mind? he wanted to say. You’re on my mind. He sipped his drink and said I’m a little tipsy Vinnie, but I just felt like talking, like getting to know you. Sometimes you see someone and they look like a person with things to say. You look like that to me. I see you around the base all the time and you know—shit, Manny thought, you’re rambling. Making an ass of yourself. But Vinnie still looked interested, so Manny started over. Remember last night at the Loveboat?

The couch dance. Sure. Why?

Well, after you left—

Yeah, I heard.

Was that disgust that came across his face? Curiosity? Pity? Manny couldn’t tell. The whole thing was going down wrong. It was all too awkward. He decided to take a different approach. His hand drifted across the table, stopping just short of Vinnie’s. Look, Vinnie. Something’s been happening to me. I have these mixed-up feelings. I need someone to listen.

I’m listening. He put his hand on top of Manny’s, patted it, drew his own away again.

Manny stuttered, choked up. He couldn’t think of what he had intended to say. On the hood of his car, he had worked it all out. And now, with the man he’d been thinking about so often in front of him, Manny was blowing it. Like a first date. He fumbled for words. Looking at Vinnie confused him. He was definitely still drunk.

Before he could check himself, Manny leaned across the booth. Vinnie sat back. Manny leaned in further, smelling his cologne. His face was so close Manny could see his pores, the place between his eyebrows where several fine stray hairs had grown in, the mole beneath his left eye. He needed to be closer though. He moved forward and tried to kiss Vinnie’s lips, but Vinnie turned his head. Without thinking he tried again, but Vinnie leaned a little to the side and Manny’s kiss landed on his neck. Then Vinnie lightly pushed Manny’s head away.

I think you misunderstood me, Manny. And Vinnie was on his feet, pulling a ten out of his wallet, flattening it on the table. He patted Manny on the shoulder as if Manny were a little kid and walked out the door.

Stunned, Manny stared at the drink in front of him. He wasn’t sure how that whole scene had just come about. Jesus, I just tried to kiss a fucking first sergeant, and now I’m sitting here with my drink and Vinnie’s half-empty glass still sloshing in front of me. Then he looked down at his clothes. His pants were stained with dirt and sweat. The bars on his uniform hung like loose teeth. He looked like shit. Sloppy and unprofessional.

No wonder he’d just been rejected. He probably looked like some two-bit piece of rough-trade ass, coming at Vinnie like that. How embarrassing. Any decent person would’ve walked away at the sight of me. I just fucked up the whole thing and now I’m alone again. The sting of rejection crept up Manny’s throat like acid. Where do I belong if I can’t go home and Vinnie won’t talk to me? First a kid stands me up and now him. He put on his jacket and walked out to his car, expecting to find a note from Vinnie telling him to try again later, he’d just done it wrong. But the windshield was empty. Only the moon reflecting off it. Manny felt tears again. In the passenger seat the bottle of Crown beckoned. He got in and lifted it from the seat. Just yesterday he’d been
a completely different man. A captain in the Air Force, for christsakes. Look at you now, sitting in your car three sheets to the wind like a pan-syass wino. He drank the Crown until it felt like the skin was burning off his throat. A fucking wino.

He needed to find a place where people were still drinking balls-to-the-wall at this hour. He drove south. Into a part of town he had rarely been to because there was never a reason to go. Everyone warned against going to the south side. It had the highest murder rate in the city, but he had never been there at night, alone and drunk, so he went, even though his vision was getting blurry and he had to close one eye to see better. This part of the city was swarming with nightlife. 6th Avenue bars and hotels and restaurants. But they were different from the ones he frequented. Their signs were missing letters, the sidewalks in front were littered with glass, the stench of beer and vomit and piss wafted by each time the wind blew.

He parked his car and stepped out. As he walked down the sidewalk, he heard glass crunching beneath his shoes and ignored the drunks passed out in doorways and curled up in the front yards of the most wretched homes he had ever seen in his life, bars on every window, the paint peeling to reveal paint peeling and more paint peeling beneath that, and taverns and boarded-up businesses everywhere—a huge pink adobe building that must have been a pharmacy many years before because Manny could just barely make out the sun-bleached remnants of the Rx painted on the wall—and lowriders cruised by playing music, the smell of marijuana seeping from their windows. How long Manny walked he had no idea. He could feel the burden in his chest and yet he could only keep walking, taking in the images of poverty and madness, smelling death and decay and a million unthinkable scents, hearing gunshots and sirens and wails and barking, seeing graffiti and the burned-out skeletons of cars and bums scavenging in the street for aluminum cans and looking for coins that had been accidentally dropped. What he saw terrified him in ways he had never been before, yet the place in his chest below his heart and above his stomach seemed to relish the wasted south side of the city. It throbbed and pulsed and grew within him, uncoiling itself like a snake.

He could see himself passed out in his vomit on the floor of an abandoned house with his finger hooked in the handle of a wine jug. He’d get rolled a few times, but eventually the cholos would figure out he was a waste of time and move on to someone else. The Tucson police, if they got bored, might drive him out to the desert and beat him with their nightsticks and flashlights and blackjacks and lead gloves. I’d deserve it, Manny thought. I’ve let my family down, probably lost my job, and made an ass of myself to a first sergeant. If he mentions it to my superiors, they’ll have to fire me. Don’t tell, Vinnie.

Manny stepped into the first bar he saw with English signs in the window and pushed past men who turned to look at him but made no path. He pounded the bar until the bartender came up and asked him what the fuck you want. Crown, a double straight up, make it two, and the bartender nodded and retrieved two Dixie cups from beneath the bar and filled them both to the top with Crown and told him you better hurry up if you don’t want it to soak through the cup and then you’ve pissed away your money, and Manny did them one after the other and found a stool and sat down, resting his head on his arms until he felt someone put an arm around his shoulder and offer to buy him a shot, and he said sure and looked up and saw a man standing next to him in a leather vest with a threadbare T-shirt beneath, and when the man smiled it showed rotting teeth with wads of chew wedged between each one and the man said yeah, I aint seen you in here before, my name’s Leonard. Manny told him his name and asked the bartender for another double shot of Crown and Leonard looked at the bartender and then at Manny and back to the bartender and nodded and the bartender poured Manny the drink and Leonard said you’re a little pricey, huh, and Manny nodded, just keep the drinks coming, please, trying to blur everything out, but the Crown was not hitting him fast enough. The tattoos on Leonard’s arms were too clear.

Leonard sat down next to him and took a slug of his beer. He watched Manny knock back the shot like Kool-Aid, hoping it would hit him soon so he would not have to spend all his cash on this guy who just kept putting them away, but Leonard did not mind too much because Manny was good-looking and Leonard rubbed Manny’s thigh, slowly
working nearer and nearer to the bulge beneath his slacks, and Manny looked down at the guy’s hand and then just looked away. Leonard wanted to make sure Manny was going to keep allowing him to touch his leg before he bought any more drinks, but Manny completely ignored him. He didn’t care if the guy wanted to rub him through his uniform slacks. He only knew that Leonard kept feeding him shots and he was thankful. Each time his head moved, the lights in the bar smeared, and he couldn’t make out a single person’s face but he didn’t care at all, and another shot in a paper cup came to him and he drank it and teetered back and forth on his stool and fell backwards onto the floor and vomit burbled from his mouth—bile and liquor and his lunch—everywhere, his ribs contracting and heaving. Leonard picked him up and held him steady on the bar and ordered him another shot, hell, he just wasted six goddam shots at least. The voices and laughter in the bar became a throbbing swirling mass of grunts and moans dropping deeper in tone and speed with every shot Manny took until finally it was so low he thought his eardrums would burst and was sure that the sound had come alive and was burrowing its way into his head and Leonard wiped the vomit from Manny’s chin and smiled and kissed him on the lips, yeah, I think you’re almost ready, and Manny managed a nod, unable to discern what Leonard had said but willing to do anything to get out of the bar where the noise and the voices were probing him and threatening to drive him insane and then he was in the air and bumping up and down to the rhythm of Leonard carrying him to a nearby motel with rooms rented by the hour and a desk clerk who never looked his customers in the eyes or asked for identification, because he didn’t want to actually see the human beings capable of what he found in the mornings when he unlocked the doors to be sure the rooms were empty—tomato-sized clots of blood lying at the bottom of the toilet, beds covered in piss and vomit stains, teenaged hookers passed out in the corner of the room with needles hanging from their arms—look, I don’t give a fuck, just give me the cash and walk away—and Leonard paid for two hours because that was all the cash he had left and he carried Manny around to the back of the motel, room 289, and propped him against the wall while he opened the door and almost retched at the
smell of sewage and off-brand Lysol and he didn’t turn on the lights for fear of what he would see, instead he groped his way to the bed and threw Manny down on top of it and brushed aside godknowswhat, and then he pulled Manny’s pants off and tossed them on the floor and told him just take it easy, which wasn’t even necessary because Manny heard nothing, felt nothing, except the gray fist growing in his chest and breathing and sinking and sinking, then rising to the surface again, and it was daylight and the door was about to explode with the pounding of a fist that must have been the size of a pumpkin and a voice yelling YOU MOTHERFUCKER, I’M GONNA KILL YOU WHEN I GET THROUGH THIS DOOR, and Manny looked around and had no idea how he had gotten inside a room that smelled like the bowels of a dumpster and he ran to the bathroom because he felt sick, ignoring the voice, still drunk, his head throbbing and spinning, and he flipped on the light, dry heaved into the toilet, then ran gagging around the hotel room and grabbed his pants and pulled them over his legs, hopping up and down, terrified of what he might be stepping on, refusing to look down, and the pounding on the door got louder, I’M NOT GONNA CALL THE COPS, YOU COCK-SUCKING FUCKBAG, I’M GONNA PUT A BULLET THROUGH YOU IF YOU DON’T GET OUT HERE AND PAY ME FOR STAYIN ALL NIGHT, and Manny opened the door and said fuck you, you twisted fuck, and wiped the burning bile from his chin and ran out into the blinding daylight, staggering and sweating, thinking I need a drink, knowing he should go home, there’s still time, wanting to be back in bed with Stella and his kids tickling him but sensing deep down the impossibility of that, and the impossibility of being able to look at Vinnie without feeling shame after last night, it was far too late, thinking Jesus, I need a drink, and he stumbled through the doors of a bar on some dingy street and the bartender asked him what the hell happened and Manny told him to pour him drinks and keep them coming, I don’t care what it is, and the bartender poured shots of tequila and whiskey and rum and mixed it up over and over again, amused at the sheer volume of alcohol this crazy sonofabitch could drink, and he made Manny shots he had never made before, shots that were not even shots but bastard mixtures of the foulest liquors he could think of, but nothing would put Manny down, he even
summoned the strength to get to the bathroom, and he splashed water on his face and used a towel on a spool to dry, but he would not look in the mirror because the thought of how he probably looked petrified him, and so he tried to scrape off a layer or two of whatever was on his clothes but he was unable to because he could not stand and he collapsed in the bathroom with his head lying on the rim of the urinal and woke in the alley behind some building and it was night and he had no idea what day it was or what had happened, only that he still could not breathe and the pressure was building and building like a tapeworm so long and thick it threatened to burst out both ends, and his wallet and keys were gone so he stopped a man in the alley and said I’ll do anything for a bottle of wine or a drink of something and the man said okay and led him down to the wash that ran under 6th Avenue and into the corrugated steel tunnels that allowed water to pass beneath the bridge, and the man told Manny to get down on his knees, and he did, and in the darkness of the steel tunnel he felt the man rub his cock against his lips and Manny opened his mouth and let the man inside and the man grabbed Manny’s head and pulled it toward him and Manny felt the fist in his chest begin to unclench the deeper the man plunged down his throat and he actually felt relief for the first time since the Loveboat all those years ago, or however long it had been, and his eyes suddenly shot open with a shocking revelation and it enraged and disgusted him so much that all along he had wanted this and he refused to believe it and while the man stood in front of him with his dick in Manny’s mouth, Manny reached up and grabbed hold of the man’s balls and crushed them between his fingers as hard as he could and the man immediately went limp in his mouth and dropped to his knees and Manny stood up and he brought his foot down on the back of the man’s neck and pulled him up by the hair and scraped his face across the corrugated sides of the tunnels, grating his face off in chunks, over and over as the man screamed and kicked until he could scream no more but only gurgle and Manny finally stopped when the man was silent and looked through his pockets and found no money but did find a flask of whiskey and he drank the entire thing in two gulps and walked from beneath the bridge and into the wash and he followed it in a haze and Manny knew one
thing, that he was sinking and breaking under an invisible ocean and he could not breathe and he walked through the wash as his breaths required more work and the pressure was so intense he fell to his knees and lay in the bottom of the wash paralyzed, not knowing where he was, if he was even in the same city or in the same state, and he could only inhale teaspoons of air at a time, mere teaspoons, and he closed his eyes as he felt rain begin to fall and the ground grumbled and in the distance Manny heard the sound of a flashflood breaking over the city …