William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“You ever feel like the whole world is fixed against you?” I said to the bartender when he brought my second beer.

It was a busy night at the Irish Pub and the bartender didn’t have time to listen. He gave a little laugh and moved on.

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the fellow sitting next to me, the remnants of a scotch in his hand.

“Every time I get close,” I said, “the bastards yank it away like it was one of those joke dollar bills tied to a string.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the man. With a quick tilt of his wrist he drank the last of his scotch.

The Irish Pub was a young bar, women dressed in jeans and high heels, men in Polo shirts, boys and girls together, meeting one another, shouting lies in each other’s ears. On weekends there was a line outside, but this wasn’t a weekend and I wasn’t there to find a date and neither, I could tell, was the man next to me. He was tall and dark, in a gaudily bright short-sleeve shirt and tan pants. His features were all of movie-star strength and quality, his nose was straight and thin, his chin jutting, his eyes deep and black, but the package went together with a peculiar weakness. He should have been the handsomest man in the world, but he wasn’t. And the bartender refilled his glass without even asking.

“What’s your line?” I asked, while still looking straight ahead, the way strangers at a bar talk to one another.

“I’m a dentist,” he said.

I turned my head, looked him up and down, and turned it back again. “I thought you had to have more hair on your forearms to be a dentist.”

He didn’t laugh, he just took a sip from his scotch and swirled it around his mouth.

“I was that close today, dammit,” I said. “And then it happened like it always happens. It was a car accident, right? A pretty ugly one, too, some old lady in her Beemer just runs the red and bam, slams into my guy’s van. Lacerations from the flying glass, multiple contusions, a neck thing, you know, the works. I send him to my doctor and it’s all set, he can’t work, can’t walk or exercise, he’s stuck in a chair on his porch, wracked with pain, his life tragically ruined. Beautiful, no?”

“You’re a lawyer,” said the man as flatly as if he were telling me my fly was unzipped.

“And it set up so sweet,” I said. “Workman’s comp from the employer and then, wham, big bucks compensatory from the old lady and her insurance company. The insurance was maxed out at three hundred thou but we were going for more, much more, punitives because the old lady was half blind and should never have been out on the road, was a collision waiting to happen. She’s a widow, some Wayne witch, rich as sin, so collection’s a breeze. And I got a thirty-three-and-a-third percent contingency fee agreement in my bank vault, if you know what I mean. I had picked out my Mercedes already, maroon with tan leather seats. SL class.”

“The convertible,” said the man, nodding.

“Absolutely. Oh, so beautiful that car, just thinking about it gives me a hard-on.”

I finished my beer and pushed the mug to the edge of the bar and let my head drop. When the bartender came I asked for a shot to go with my refill. I waited till the drinks came and then sucked the top off my beer and waited some more.

“So what happened?” said the man, finally.

I sat there quietly for a moment and then with a quick snatch downed the shot and chased it. “We show up at mandatory arbitration and I give our case, right? Fault’s not even at issue. And my guy’s sitting there, shaking with palsy in a wheelchair, his neck chafed to bleeding from the brace, most pathetic thing you ever saw. I figured they’d offer at least a mil before we even got to telling our story. Then the old lady’s fancy lawyer brings out the videotape.”

I took another swallow of beer and shook my head.

“My guy playing golf over at Valley Forge, neck brace and all. Schmuck couldn’t keep off the links. He gave up work, sex with the wife, playing with the kids, everything, but he couldn’t keep off the links. They brought in his scorecard too. Broke ninety, neck brace and all. I took forty thou and ran. So close to the big score and then, as quick as a two-foot putt, it’s gone.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the man next to me.

“Don’t even try. What do you know about it, a dentist. You got it made. Everyone’s got teeth.”

He took a long swallow from his scotch and then another, draining it. “You’re such a loser, you don’t even know.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You want to hear something? You want to hear the saddest story in the world?”

“Not really,” I said. “I got my own problems.”

“Shut up and buy me a drink and I’ll tell you something that will make your skin crawl.”

I turned to look at him and he was staring at me with a ferocity that was frightening. I shrugged and waved for the bartender and ordered two scotch on the rocks for him and two beers for me. Then I let Grimes tell me his story.

HE FIRST SAW HER AT A PLACEon Sixteenth Street, a dark, aggressively hip bar with a depressed jukebox and serious drinkers. She was sitting alone, dressed in black, not like an artiste, more like a mourner. She was sort of pretty, but not really thin enough, not really young enough, and he wouldn’t have given her a second look except that there was about this woman in black an aura of sadness that bespoke need. Need was about right, he figured, since he was looking for an effortless piece and need often translated into willing cession. He sat down beside her and bought her a drink. Her name, she said, was Jacqueline Shaw.

“She was drinking Martinis,” said Grimes, “which I thought was sexy in a dissolute sort of way.”

“Is this going to be just another lost girl story?” I asked. “Because if that’s all…”

“Shut up and listen,” said Grimes. “You might just learn something.”

After the second drink she started talking about her spiritual quest, how she was seeking a wider understanding of life than that allowed by the five basic senses. He smiled at her revelations, not out of any true interest, but only because he knew that spiritual yearning and sexual freedom were often deliciously entwined. She talked about the voices of the soul and the spirits that speak within each of us and how we need to learn to hear like a child once again to discern what the voices are whispering to us about the ineffable. She spoke of the connectedness of all things and how each of us, in our myriad of guises, was merely a manifestation of the whole. She said she had found her spiritual guide, a woman named Oleanna. Two more drinks and she and Grimes were walking side by side west, toward Rittenhouse Square. She had a place in one of those old apartment buildings on the south side of the park and was taking him there to show him her collection of spiritual artifacts, in which he had feigned interest.

“Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing,” I said.

“And it was something, too,” said Grimes, “but that’s not what really grabbed my interest.”

“No?”

“It was that place, man, that place.”

Her apartment was unbelievably spacious, baronial in size and furnishings, with everything outsized and thick, huge couches, huge wing chairs, a grand piano. There were tapestries everywhere, on the walls, draped over tables, and chandeliers dripping glass, and carpets thick as fairway rough piled one atop the other. Plants in sculpted pots were everywhere, plants with wide veined leaves and plants with bright tiny flowers and hairy phallic plants thick with thorns. It was otherworldly, that place. She put on this music which drifted out from behind the furnishings, a magical white mix of wind harps and fish flutes, drone tubes and moon lutes and water bells. And then in the center of the main room, atop hand-woven Persian rugs in deep blue, beside a fire, she showed him her crystals and sacred beads and fetishes imported from Africa, a man with a lion’s head, a pregnant woman with hooves and beard, a child with a hyena’s grin. She lit a stick of incense and a candle and then another candle and then twenty candles more and with the fire and totems surrounding them they made love and it was as though the power of those tiny statues and the beads and the crystals were funneled by the music, the incense, the flame, right through her body and she collapsed again and again beneath him on the carpet. And he felt the power too, but the power he felt was not of the fire or of the stones or of the fetishes, it was the power of all the wealth in that magical room, the utter power of money.