T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

He was referring to the dogs.

“Goddammit,” he muttered, and there was real vehemence in his tone. “Stinking hairy bastards.” Then he grabbed Gesh’s hand and his face erupted in a grin. “Gesh!” he boomed. “How the fuck are you?”

Gesh said he had no complaints, and then nodded at me. “Rudy,” he said, “Felix.” I opted for the soul shake, but Rudy came straight on and twisted my hand around as if it were a salami on a string. Then he turned abruptly, padded to the safe and began spinning the tumblers. “So,” he shouted over his shoulder, “you hear anything from Ziggy?”

Gesh responded to this — no, he hadn’t heard from Ziggy but someone had told him he was waiting tables in Lahaina — while I studied Rudy. Aside from one or two of the pus-eyed reprobates clutching bottles in doorways off Mission Street, Rudy was the oddest, unhealthiest, most unsavory-looking character I’d laid eyes on in years. He was barefoot, wearing a torn pair of Jockey shorts and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a NUKE THE WHALES button appended to the shoulder; his bare legs were hairless, the skin more yellow than white. His hair was plaited in tight cornrows that alternated with furrows of pink scalp as if his head were the blueprint for a maze, he was chinless and skinny as a concentration camp survivor, his nose was shoved up into his face and his eyes were too big for their sockets, stretching the lids like beer bellies poking out from beneath shrunken T-shirts.

When the safe swung open, I saw pharmaceutical scales, bags of mannitol and cocaine, plastic tear-sheets of Mandrax stacked like corrugated cardboard, a big food-storage Baggie full of twenties wound tight as pencils and secured with rubber bands. Rudy extracted a miniature medicine vial from the safe, and then fished around in one of the milk baskets for a bag of pot and a package of cigarette papers. For the next half hour we sat cross-legged on the floor beneath posters of John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and deposited various substances in our oral and nasal cavities while we shammed the roles of host and guest. The conversation consisted of ejaculations like “Um, yeah, that’s good,” and a continuing exchange between Rudy and Gesh that invariably began with one or the other of them saying “What do you hear from X lately?” After a while they seemed to run out of mutual acquaintances and a paralyzing silence fell over the room. This was the signal for Gesh and me to rise and lay out half our weekend’s allowance — painstakingly hoarded against our eight-dollars-per-diem salary — for two grams of coke and fifteen Quaaludes. Then we wished Rudy well and went out to tear the town apart.

It was six o’clock. We drove to North Beach, parked, and ambled down the street in a blaze of neon. I was feeling good, the pavement clicking beneath my heels, windows struck with light, people on the street, music in the air. After the months of exile, after the countless deadening hours that weighed on us like some wasting disease, this was exhilarating, a rush, and even the clash of traffic and the stink of exhaust gladdened my heart. I’d been around the world with Magellan, eaten my own shoes and seen the worst, and now I was home again. When Gesh said, “Let’s have a cocktail,” I was already dancing in the street.

The first place we stepped into featured thundering rock and roll and naked women grunting in a mud pit. We had two stingers and one quack apiece, and perked ourselves up in the men’s room with a line of coke. I stood with my back to the bar, propped on my elbows, and watched the artificial mud cling to the nipples and moisten the crevices of the wrestling women. My teeth were on edge, and I found myself leaning into Gesh and shouting nonstop over the music as the coke worked on the verbal centers of my brain. This was good, I thought, this was what I wanted: excitement, cheap and loud. I felt expansive, generous, witty and invulnerable.

Twenty minutes later, as the effect of the coke waned and the methaqualone began to pour sand in my joints, I waxed philosophical. What was this need, I mused, for chemical oblivion? The world was full of drunks, junkies, kat-chewers and ether-sniffers. Kids stuck their heads in buckets of paint thinner, bears bloated on fermented berries, cats rolled in catnip. And here I was, stoned and getting stoneder, on holiday from my new vocation — itself an indictment — and watching a pair of big-titted women slog around in a tub of artificial mud. Understanding hit me like a truck: I was a degenerate. I was no part-time scholar and contractor on the rebound from the recession, I was a dope fiend and a dope dealer, saboteur of lives and minds, a gutless profit-monger and mammon-worshipper. Jerpbak had been right to single me out and pin me to the wall: I was dangerous, subversive. Suddenly I felt depressed, filled to the neck with sadness like a carafe with bad wine.

I sipped glumly at my drink and watched as one woman straddled the other, pinning an arm behind her back and mounting her rodeo-style. Then Gesh emerged from the men’s room, pushed his way through the crowd at the bar, and slipped me the vial of cocaine. I took it, retired to a stall in the men’s and did two quick toots. Within moments, I felt better. Immeasurably better. I was no archfiend, no blighter of lives or robber baron: I was just a regular guy, out on the town, feeling good, an entrepreneur providing a service for society. That’s all. No harm. I ground my teeth and fluffed my hair in the mirror, the exhilaration returning. I was handsome, healthy, soon-to-be-rich, and I was sowing some oats. Big deal. When I shoved in beside Gesh at the bar, a murmur of appreciation rose from the patrons, and I turned to see that the mounted woman was forcing her antagonist’s face into the mire while simultaneously slapping her flank like a jockey coming off the wire.

The next place had a pool table and smelled of hot grease. Two black dudes in purple pants and a silver-haired character in a suit sat at the bar. A frazzled blonde was shooting pool, the TV was tuned to a sitcom and a web of falsetto voices crooned from the jukebox over a thumping disco beat. Gesh went to the men’s room. I ordered beers and pressed two quarters to the rail of the pool table. The blonde never even glanced up.

When she finished, I racked for eight ball and she broke with a shattering crash that sent a pair of low balls leaping for the pockets. I never even got to shoot. Gesh was next. She ran six and then missed. Gesh came back with a run of five before blowing an easy setup in the corner pocket. She missed. He missed. Then she sank the two remaining balls and made a neat cross-table cut on the eight to win it. “Nice shot,” Gesh said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Tanqueray martini,” she said. “Straight up.”

Gesh introduced himself.

“Chinowa,” she said, extending her hand.

“And this is Felix.”

She turned to me, her mouth a pout of concentration, eyes like ceramics. “Rack ’em up.”

We played her for the next hour or so, alternating games, and she never relinquished the table. She never seemed to lose control, no matter how much she drank, the cuestick flicking cleanly through the nest of her fingers as if it were tapped into her nervous system. Gesh and I, on the other hand, grew progressively weaker as the alcohol, in combination with the methaqualone, began to affect our coordination. She didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed to enjoy humiliating us, neatly cracking down ball after ball, executing tricky bank shots and wicked side-pocket cuts, while we lurched around the table, spilling beer and fumbling for the chalk.

We hung on. I don’t know why — for her sake, I guess. I had begun to develop a deep and abiding appreciation of the way her calves flexed as she leaned over the table, the percussive clack of her heels dancing a cha-cha in my head. My third beer went down like water. I swallowed another Quaalude — for poise — and began to construct a scenario for the evening. Chinowa, who with her strong fingers and sure stick was obviously a bundle of seething erotic appetites, would phone her tall lusty roommate, the four of us would hit a few clubs and then retire to my apartment for foreplay and afterplay. Gesh leaned over a giveaway shot on the eight ball, his eyes dulled, tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth, and I knew he was envisioning a similar scenario. He would beat her with a flick of his wrist, beat her finally and authoritatively, and we could all relax and get out of this dump. As the Fates would have it, however, he miscued, the white ball skewing off impotently to kiss the far cushion and then perversely dribble back to the center of the table. Chinowa’s laugh was sharp and disdainful. She bent over the eight ball and slammed it into the pocket as if she were hitting a punching bag.