My Life in Heavy Metal (8 page)

I don't want to worry about what anyone else thinks of me, because that's not the point. It's that I'm worried about what
I
think of me, what's become of me, why am I spending these precious years I'd always dreamed would involve a good man and a marriage and a little kid or two, why am I spending these years mooning over some smoothie from the Kingdom of Cheese?

This red Tercel tears into the lot, which is weird, because Brisby drives a red Tercel, and then Brisby himself lunges out of the car, still in his prisoner's outfit, and heads for the club, looking strangely pissed off, his little plastic chain dragging on the ground behind him. He must have forgotten something, keys or wallet. He's always forgetting
something. A minute later he comes out again and I duck behind this pillar thing, but I can hear him crossing the lot and just the imagined sight of him, his goofy walk, his mouth pinched at the corners, the disappointment in his eyes, that alone is enough to start me blubbering. By the time he reaches me, I've collapsed into his arms and I'm sobbing, Sorry. I'm sorry. It's not my fault I fell for Computer Boy. I didn't mean to. But he's cute and he likes me and I'm not getting any younger, Bris. I'm thirty-fucking-three years old, you know? And besides, besides, you weren't there. You were supposed to save me. You were supposed to keep me from doing something stupid. What was I supposed to do without you there?

I'm not sure how much of this is intelligible, though, because my head is buried in his chest and the words are coming out all snotty. Brisby puts his arms around me and tells me it's okay,
shhh,
it's okay, and strokes my hair. I was just worried about you, he says. That's all. You had a lot to drink.

Then he lets me cry until I'm all done crying.

Maybe we could get some coffee, he says finally. Okay?

And it's such a sweet gesture, so much what I want. Just to sit there and sober up and shoot the shit with Brisby. What about Christine? I say. Won't she be waiting up?

Brisby looks down for a sec, shakes his head. Don't worry about it.

Is everything cool? I say.

And now I can see him struggling to keep
his
game face on. He reaches down and jerks at the plastic chain around his ankle. What a stupid costume, he says. I should have come as Unsightly Grout Fungus, like I originally planned.

The stripes make you look taller, I say.

I guess. It wasn't my idea.

He's still got his arms around me, loose, but not too loose, and I keep thinking how this should be awkward, the way our bodies are touching, because we're such pals. Then Brisby does this wonderful thing. He takes his thumb and forefinger and gently lifts my chin and presses his lips to my forehead and keeps them there for a minute, breathing through his nose. And I don't know what this means exactly; Brisby's holding me and there being nothing awkward about it, him holding me and saying
shhhh,
his breath flowing into my hair, the two of us on our way to get coffee, to talk, but not talking yet, just standing there in this empty parking lot, swaying, and that's all.

The Don had hit a slump. You could see it in his step. “Like a hurdy-gurdy man,” said Peck, the Bitter Bartender. “Like a guy who works as a fucking monkey keeper.” Peck did a little jig behind the counter. No one paid attention. “What'd he ever do?” Peck said. “You tell me.”

It wasn't that bad, though really, it was.

The Don's whole thing was fluidity. He'd glide into the bar at ten on the nose, flip a cig from his palm onto his bottom lip and let it rest there a moment while, with his other hand, he drew a pewter lighter from his cape, snicked the flame to the business end and breathed in, nice and slow. Then he'd exhale and scratch the whiskers that ran along his jaw. He looked slightly blue and debonair, like a man on top of things, with a line of people waiting for answers only he could supply.

I loved The Don, loved his sophistication, his belief in sophistication, the part of him that seemed unflappable. He ordered Cuba Libres as a rule, whiskey sours if he'd had a bum day on the board-walk. He knew how to dance, every step you could think of, and he knew how to behave around women. Or acted as if he did, which seemed to me the same thing in those days.

“Who's the action?” he'd say.

And I'd tell him: the sullen blond screwed to her stool after a tangle with her boyfriend, the pair of nurses drinking off their shift, a sandaled tourist gazing wistfully into her Manhattan.

“Who wants to be in my mouth?” The Don would say. “Who wants to be in The Don's mouth?”

“The blond?”

“Nurse with the big ass. Nurse with the big ass. Remember, Pancho: Not the prettiest. The sexiest. It's a mystery,” he'd tell me. “But she's the one wants in. Look at how she holds the bottle, okay? That bottle's like my cock, okay? Not as thick as my cock, okay? But same idea.”

I'd gaze at the plump nurse, marooned over her Heineken, and try to envision her in some ridiculous posture of abandon.

“Come on,” he'd say. “It's obvious.”

But now the problem was the Romanians. They wanted The Don to marry some cousin of theirs, for immigration purposes, he said. She was a quivery thing, no bigger than a matchstick, with a hat that looked like a tasseled lamp shade. They hustled her into the bar one time, handling her like a package they very much wanted to be rid of. The Don ducked out the back.

These men had returned a few times, bladelike in leather blazers. They ordered drinks and tried to look composed, pressing the heels of their hands against the bar, checking the clock, joking back and forth. Then they smashed their glasses on the ground and threw money at Peck.

“Fucking Romas,” Peck said. “Fucking Roma tomatoes.” Though not too loud. The owner was Romanian too.

“Busboy,” Peck said. “Get your lazy ass over here. Bring your girlfriend, broom.”

That was me. I was the busboy.

Obviously, this arrangement was cramping The Don's style, cutting his action, knocking his buzz. “What kind of plan is that?” he said. “Tracking me as if I were a common criminal.”

“You are,” Peck said.

“They really smashed their glasses?”

“Smasharoo,” Peck said. “Smasharino.”

The Don took a pull on his Cuba Libre. Brown dripped from his mustache. “You think this is going to rattle me? You think that?”

Peck finished watering the vodka, and fingered the nipple. Sometimes, after hours, I'd catch him absently sucking on one; not for the booze, just for the sensation. He had sores like cherry gum-drops around his mouth. His listening skills were zilch. He'd become bartender because his predecessor had stabbed Scoonie, one of the regulars. Before that, Peck had been the busboy.

“You think I'm rattled?” The Don said again.

“Like a jig's dice,” Peck said. “Yeah.”

“Put a fin on that?”

“Make it a deuce.”

The Don winced quickly and scissored an oniony twenty onto the bar. He produced an eel-skin pouch embossed with the letters DVP—Peck claimed The Don had lifted this from a Vermont state senator on a gimlet tour of the area. He placed a shaving mirror on the bar and whisked his mustache with a dainty comb, like he was
flicking off crumbs. He dipped his pinkie in a tin of beeswax and smoothed down each felty eyebrow, his movements crisp, somehow superstitious.

“It's how you look in profile,” he told his reflection. “Just who you are, that thing you have; sex all over you. What can she do? What choice does she have, Don? She wants in the mouth. Let her in, Don. Let her in.”

So sailed The Don, under his own wind, away from Peck and toward his intended, a sunstruck midwesterner with a froth of ginger hair. She wore a sundress and a lavender bra whose straps hugged the balls of her shoulders like a holster. What The Don called a real
Minerva.
He bowed before taking a seat, and smiled. (Peck especially hated The Don's teeth; Peck whose teeth looked like dried lemon seeds.)

They talked for a while, The Don mostly, asking questions in that way he had, his eyelids droopy with some shared sorrow, his mouth producing soft puffs of empathy. He lit her menthol 100s and told her about how this joint used to be owned by Meyer Lansky, how there's a dent in the backroom where the great man himself kicked in the plaster after a visit from the IRS.

Except that the Romanians had him spooked. Every time the door swung open he lost his place, the spell of seduction drifting up and leaving his hands behind, jittery as rabbits. He came to the bar for a third drink. Behind him, we could see Minerva stand abruptly and zip her purse.

Peck grinned his ghastly grin. “Here's a hint,” he said. “You lose.”

The Don assumed a look of monumental boredom. “Sappho's delight,” he said, watching her lovely can swish away. “Isle of Lesbos.”

“What're you saying? She's a dyke?” Peck laughed, a sound like tin being scraped. He sniffed The Don's twenty. “Plus ten and a half for the drinks, Casanova.”

The door swung open and The Don, busy resculpting his hair, froze in the pose of a man with shampoo in his eyes. In walked Balanchine, one of the part-time drunks.

Peck laughed again. “Would you look at the guy? Like a ghost that just saw another ghost. Like, a bigger ghost.”

It was hard for me to watch this: The Don's poise undone by fear. I felt he should be above fear.

“What happened?” Scoonie said. “You had her going.”

“I told her she smelled smoky and sweet. Like cured bacon.”

“Hint,” Peck said. “Don't compare women to pork.”

“Everybody loves bacon,” The Don said quietly. “Show me who doesn't love bacon.”

“Dumb,” Peck said. “Dumb Don. Ask your boy.”

I was counting lemons, one of many mindless duties Peck delighted in assigning me.

The Don said, “What do you know, Pancho?”

What
did
I know? I was nineteen years old, on the lam from college, a half step from ditching my old life for good. I was sure of very little; only that my parents had failed me somehow. It was a matter of getting far enough away to see things clearly. “Maybe she's kosher or something,” I said. “I myself love bacon.”

The Romanians were scary. They moved like men with concealed weapons, stiff in the wrong places, darker and thinner and somehow meaner than the Russian mobsters up the walk. They spoke a
language that sounded argumentative and drunken, portending crude brands of violence.

Each week a bit more of The Don's sparkle faded. His nose began to twitch; his baritone faltered. Even the tourists who'd arrived in town hoping for foolish entanglement—the moussed, gum-murdering upstaters and shy Canadian divorcées, the slightly grubby au pair girls—began regarding him doubtfully.

The Don knew the only way out of his slump was to keep swinging, to swing until self-belief reattached itself and bore him up. On July Fourth, he hurried in, cape pressed, jawline gleaming. The Chamber of Commerce's dinky fireworks popped and cracked, streaking the front window.

“Tonight,” The Don said. “Tell me about tonight.”

But I didn't have to tell him anything. He spotted her immediately, and his beak dipped hungrily. A cancan girl from the Shuck 'n Jive called Aura. She had these wonderful Chinese eyes and a scalloped mouth. Her nose was no more than an elegant dollop. I liked to linger around her table, breathing the sweet bouquet of her body, flowery lotions and smoke.

“You know her?” I said. This seemed an amazing thing.

The Don settled across from her in profile. “I know,” he said. “I know. I know. Don't mind me, okay? Don't listen. I'm just another soggy love letter from the isle of man. A woman of your beauty. Sure. I've seen you dance. Beautiful. Your hips have real carriage, real slide. But there's something missing. I'm wondering about that.”

Aura looked at The Don like he was up past his bedtime.

“You've heard it all already, okay? So what's the harm? We're just a couple of pretty strangers passing time. Why the smirk? You don't think you're pretty? Okay. I know better than to make a fool of myself. Here's what I'm going to do: order a couple of drinks,
put one in front of you. You do what you want. Dump it on my lap for all I care. You're enough of a knockout to pull it off. But there's still that thing, that missing thing.”

I knew exactly what The Don meant. The same feeling kicked up inside me whenever my folks spoke about my future. It wasn't that they meant any harm, exactly, only that they had in mind a set of professions—estate planning was most often mentioned—whose blankness was the blankness of a prairie. But you see, I was drawn to the beach, the ocean's foamy brink, which smelled of salt and sex and reckless chances.

The Don gathered the drinks in his fingers, moving like in the old days, like corn stalks in a breeze, and slid her across the table. Ice clinked at the lip of the glass then fell back. To witness his execution, the way he carried himself, made me believe a glorious fate awaited me. I had only to watch carefully, to memorize certain moves, to absorb the attitude behind those moves.

He drew a finger down his nose. “Like I said, up to you. We're just talking. Talk talk. Call and response. Just keeping the ecosystem honest. It's all a negotiation anyway, okay? Someone like you can't be forced. All I'm saying is that you might be holding yourself back somehow. I'm enough of a goddamn failure to understand these things.”

Aura looked up, amused now. “That sounds fair.”

“Kapow. Right in the kisser.” The Don tapped his chin in tribute. “What it is, I'm talking about dreams, Aura. Those ideas you have when you're young. With these fingers”—he fanned them under the amber lamping—“I might have been a master gem cutter.”

“Instead of a pickpocket?”