T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I took a seat at the end of the bar and glanced significantly at Shirelle, who ignored me. She was exchanging passionate tidbits over the line with some up-country Lothario — Delbert Skaggs’s most recent successor, no doubt — and had neither time nor inclination to see to the needs of her customers. I was annoyed. But even more so when I saw that she was using the public telephone — obviously the only one in the place — which hung from the wall in a disused nook at the nether end of the bar. I dug out a ten-dollar bill, creased it, and laid it on the counter. “Shit,” snorted the old boy from the diner, “and I suppose them beans you fed me and Gerard last Saint Pat’s day was supposed to be something fancy, huh? Chili con carney, Texas style, is what you called it, didn’t you?” Pool balls clicked behind me, one maudlin jukebox tune dissolved in a jangle of trebly guitars and another started up without pause. I slapped the bar and jerked my finger at Shirelle.

I watched as she poured a final dollop of lewdness into the receiver, set it on the bar and came toward me, bosoms heaving beneath the flimsy blouse. She gave me a toothy smile that didn’t show the least hint of recognition — just as well, I thought — and said, “What’ll it be, honey?”

I ordered a Remy with a soda back. She poured herself three fingers of vodka and served me the cognac in a smudged water glass.

“You call them beans? I’d as soon have eat my own socks as that hog swill.”

“Godammit now, McCarey,” George Pete’s crony snarled, “you’re going to get me steamed you keep up like that. Thirty-seven years I put in in that kitchen at Tootses’ in San Jose and I’ll be a bare-assed monkey if I can’t out-chop, out-fry and out-charbroil a sorry scumbag like you any day of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said, as Shirelle set my drink down. “Are you going to be using the phone much longer?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, already leaning back toward the recumbent receiver like a dancer doing a stretching exercise, “just a minute or two more, that’s all.”

I lingered over my drink. Not simply because cognac is meant to be lingered over, but because I had neither the money nor the intent to overindulge: I was there to make a phone call. Period. I thought about nothing, the music droned on without pause, George Pete Turner’s crony waxed passionate on the subject of batter-dipped okra. When my glass had been empty for some minutes, I motioned once again for Shirelle, but she didn’t seem to notice. She was bent over the phone, both hands cradling the mouthpiece, her rear projecting at an angle and twitching idly. I began to develop an intense dislike for her.

I slapped the bar again, more violently than before. This time not only did Shirelle look up, but the two epicures as well. They’d been arguing a fine point of ham-hock preparation — whether to add flat or fresh beer to the stock — and both now desisted to turn and give me a wondering, distracted look. Shirelle again set the receiver down and joggled toward me. “Another?”

I pushed the glass forward. My voice was strung tight. “The phone?” I said.

Her laugh was like a bird of prey, shooting from its perch to swoop down and stun its object with a single explosive thrust. “My God!” she shrieked, “I’m so embarrassed! You know, I just forgot all about you, honey.” She puckered her lips and blew me a sympathetic kiss. “I’ll just be a sec,” and then the phone was stuck to the side of her face again, for all the world like some kind of malignant growth.

I was on my third drink before I finally got to the telephone. I couldn’t seem to find Vogelsang’s number in my wallet, so I had to go through information, losing a fistful of dimes in the process and systematically alienating three or four operators. He wasn’t listed, of course — except under one of his many aliases. The aliases were a joke, like the ads he ran in The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Bang was one of them. I tried it. No listing. With the aid of a fourth cognac, I began to recall others: O. O. Ehrenfurt, Malachi Mortis, Teet Creamburg. Nothing. I was frustrated, angry, nervous — each failure seemed to intensify the crisis, drum at my stomach, raise the ugly specter of Jerpbak from the grave of distilled spirits in which Shirelle had helped bury it. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered a company name he’d used two or three years back — Plumtree’s Potted Meats — and I had the exasperated operator try it. To my surprise and everlasting relief, she did show a listing for Plumtree.

My fingers trembled as I dialed, the words etched in acid on my tongue: I’m quitting, getting out, flying the coop, throwing in the towel. There was a click, the line engaged, and I was suddenly assaulted by a mechanical hiss immediately followed by an ineptly recorded version of “Sweet Georgia Brown” done entirely on Moog Synthesizer and what sounded like an off-key triangle. After a full two minutes of this, Vogelsang’s recorded voice came over the wire:

What is home without

Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

This was succeeded by a rasping evil snicker that suggested nothing so much as a Bluebeard or a Dr. Mengele in the midst of one of his experiments, and then the click that disengaged the line.

None of this had given me much satisfaction. Whereas a moment before I’d been anticipating the release of unburdening myself — of arguing, cursing, demanding explanations for the inexplicable and allowing myself to be soothed by Vogelsang’s crisp, confident tones and professorial diction — I was once again adrift, already two sheets to the wind and utterly paralyzed with indecision. What to do? Buzz into San Francisco and stuff loyalty, camaraderie, responsibility and trust, or creep back to the summer camp like a condemned man waiting for the blade to fall? I didn’t have a clue.

Huddled there in the corner and clutching the receiver as if it were a resuscitory device, I sipped at my drink and glanced forlornly round the room. A blue haze of cigarette smoke blurred the atmosphere and dimmed the feeble flicker of the wall fixtures (which were molded, I noticed, in the shape of steer horns). I could just make out the form of the three Indians, all lined up in a row now, gravely chalking their cues and contemplating the configuration of balls on the table before them as if it held the key to the secrets of the universe. Shirelle had joined the two epicures at the bar and was engaged in a hot debate over the length of time a three-minute egg should be cooked.

I finished my cognac. In combination, and on an empty stomach, the drinks were beginning to have a twofold effect — first, of intensifying my feelings of guilt and disloyalty, and second, of exacerbating the panic I felt over the nasty coincidences that had begun to infest my life. I sat there, half-drunk, warring with myself. I probed an ear for wax, toyed with a coaster that showed a red-nosed man crashing a car through his own bedroom wall, tapped my feet on the brass bar-rail. And then, as I couldn’t decide what to do — I found I was unable either to let go of the receiver or to get up from the barstool — I thought I might as well take things a step at a time and put something on my stomach. When Shirelle turned to pour herself another double vodka, I ordered a beer and two pickled eggs.

I don’t know what it was — the taste of the eggs, the odor of the vinegar or the odd amalgam of egg, vinegar, soda cracker, and beer — but I was suddenly skewered with nostalgia. These eggs, this beer, this depressing disreputable rundown backwater dive — together they recalled other eggs, other beer, other dives. I thought of a college friend who’d spent every waking moment cloistered in a saloon killing piss-yellow pitchers of draft beer and whose only sustenance derived from beer nuts, beef jerky and pickled eggs. Brain food, he called it. He drank up his book money, his date money, his food, rent, gas and clothes money, he grew pale, his flesh turned to butter. I worried about him — until I quit school. The graduation announcement came the following year, his name prominent at the top of the page, summa cum laude. I thought of a girl named Cynthia, who climbed mountains, wore lederhosen over her rippling calves and once let me creep under a table in a dark bar and stick my head between her thighs. I thought of fights, forged ID’s, vomit-streaked Fords. The eggs tasted as if they’d been unearthed in an Etruscan tomb, the beer was flat. I ate mechanically. Faces drifted into my consciousness, epoch by epoch, counters on an abacus. Then I thought of Dwight Dunn.