Joshua Mohr - All This Life

“You,” she says, aghast.

“You,” he says back, smiling.

Kathleen stares in his young face, thinks about her old one. She thinks about how he and his ilk are running Kat out of San Francisco, pricing out all the oddballs. She wonders if he shouted “You’re evicted!” when he came.

He makes a couple hyperbolic puckering sounds, waiting for that smooch.

Kathleen sits up and places her feet on the floor, her back turned to him. “Oh, my head,” she says. “How much did we drink?”

“How much did you drink,” he says. “I only had a couple beers. You were already cross-eyed when I got there.”

“Did I call the shop or something?”

“Dumb luck,” he says. Kathleen hears the bed creak, the guy standing up. He walks around and he’s naked, though not completely naked: He’s wearing his amphibian shoes. If he wore those during sex, Kathleen might have to kill herself. “I stopped in the bar for a quick pint, and there you were,” he says. “Lucky, huh?”

This might turn out to be a good thing , she thinks. And she means it. That urge to run to the refrigerator for a morning beer and soon after tossing shots down her throat, washing away what she’s learned this morning— sex with a webbed-foot techie! — instead of muffling her woes with liquor she should go to a meeting. Call Deb. Tell her the truth.

“Sorry to be rude,” he says, fumbling on his desk with a pair of aviator sunglasses, putting them on his face, “but I need to check my email.”

“Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

“These are my computer.”

“Of course,” she says. She’s heard of this wearable Google computer, has seen a few around the Mission. There are stories, lovely legends, of people getting their asses kicked just for donning them — for what they represent, for how they’re dismantling every bit of the strangeness that made San Francisco extraordinary in the name of face computers.

“I need to go,” she says.

“Send email to Lindsay,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“Oh.”

“Glass, send a message to Lindsay Johnson,” he says to the sunglasses.

Kathleen hates to ask this next question, doesn’t want to admit to him that she had blacked out long before they got here, but she needs to know if calling a cab is in order: “What neighborhood are we in?”

“Mission. Those new luxury condos on 20th Street.”

“Of course.”

Kathleen can’t help but wonder why he would have sex with her. Yes, she’s mortified at spending a night with him, but he should be, too. He’s young and rich and attractive, and she’s none of those things. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

That desire to go to a meeting wilts. She doesn’t want to stand up in front of all those people and admit that she threw three years away. Doesn’t want to confide in them. Doesn’t want to do anything that will require processing or analyzing. Doesn’t want to confront the shame that’s thinning out her blood, right along with the booze.

“Mind if I snag a beer on my way out?” she asks.

He is raising his voice: “Lindsay Johnson. Not Lindsay Miller. Glass, send a message to Johnson. Johnson.”

If she were to draw a caricature of their night together, she wouldn’t need to exaggerate anything. Him with his frog-feet and sunglasses, her with the bourbon and blackout.

“Can I have the beer?”

“Johnson! Johnson! Johnson! Johnson!”

He actually stomps one of his webbed feet, a techie tantrum. He never put on clothes and Kathleen appreciates that about the young man. He’s comfortable in his own skin, and she admires that, is jealous. She might find him ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see something to respect here. He’s freshly tattooed and in a new condo and he’s nude in front of a one-night stand screaming at his sunglasses, and he doesn’t have one ounce of bashfulness. She’s a drunken dinosaur who needs to turn off her twitchy mind. It’s obvious who’s enjoying a better life, and the beer beckons.

“I’ll see myself out,” she says, dressing and leaving his room, walking down the hall into the kitchen. This place is ridiculously nice. Everything brand-new. State-of-the-art. Pretty soon, the whole city will be a wearable computer.

She opens the fridge and there are two beers. She takes out both bottles. She thinks about drinking one now to get this sad party started, then thinks better of it. The most important thing is getting out of here. She tucks the beers in her purse and approaches the front door.

He’s still yelling at his sunglasses: “Johnson! Johnson!”

SHE AND THEbeers make their way down Valencia Street, in the opposite direction from her apartment. She’s walking up to 24th, so she can slip inside what used to be her favorite bar before she got sober.

If she’s going on a run, it might as well start in style, at a place she has fond memories of.

Of course, there really aren’t any memories, in the traditional sense. Kathleen wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about a certain night or day; she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a precise story. No, all these memories are melted like old mixed drinks, ice diluting everything to an unrecognizable cocktail. Yet despite all that, Kathleen holds this place in a broken regard, and she walks with purpose, which isn’t easy considering her headache.

“Why don’t you imbibe?”

These are the beers talking.

Yes, when you’re a relapsed alcoholic on the lam from your life, beers talk to you.

She nods at the beers’ solid suggestion.

She opens one and drinks most of it in a sip. Then she sets the empty bottle next to a parking meter for the homeless to collect — not that there are any of those left in the neighborhood, but in case one finagles her way back into the Mission before being deported.

She takes her cell phone from her purse. She has eleven texts from Deb and three missed calls. These will not be returned this morning. No, that’s the last thing she can stomach. Deb will speak with reason, she’ll be practical, and this isn’t a morning for pragmatism. This is a morning for a bender.

She powers off her phone and tucks it away, burying it in the bottom.

Drinking with a hangover has always had one of two outcomes for Kathleen: Sometimes she can’t get drunk the next day, no matter how hard she cocktails. She is impervious to spirits, so much swimming in her already that her system can’t take any of it in. Other times, though, she gets wasted incredibly fast and this morning is proving to be in the latter subdivision.

A lone beer and she is cooked.

The one-night stand is gone. The headache is gone. The word cunt is gone. All that stretches out before her on the morning street is good times.

She turns on 24th Street, passes the BART station and McDonald’s. It’s socked-in, but there’s not any wind. The sky is the color of raw shrimp.

At last she’s here. It has been three years since she’s been inside the bar’s black walls. In fact, the whole place is pitch, even the floors. Many a night, Kat had been so wasted here that she rested her head on the bar, staring down at the black floor like it was going to swallow her, but it never did. The bar knew better than to eat its clientele.

The room even allows its customers to stargaze, bits of smashed mirrors pocking the ceiling. Everyone gets to pretend to look through a telescope, spying a better world.

As if the bartender expects Kathleen to walk in, he peeks up from his newspaper and says, “Did you hear they’re tearing down the Elbo Room?”

He’s an old-timer, somewhere in his sixties. Kat has talked to him many times, shut this place down with him, speaking in tongues. He owns the place and wears a shirt that says Spank me, it’s my birthday. Legend has it that this bar burned down in the early aughts, and he rebuilt it, making it look exactly the same.