T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

We were reacting to this, tugging at our beards and fumbling for the necks of our beer bottles, when a short lilting whistle — the tinkle of a door chime, one note up and one down — penetrated the miasma of castrato “baby-baby” emanating from the jukebox. Slowly, like turtles cooking in the sun, we rotated our heads in the direction of the bar. Mr. Silverhair had pushed himself up from the barstool and stood smoothing his locks for a moment, and then, without a backward glance, strode purposefully out the door. Our heads swiveled back to Chinowa, who at the first fluttering note had straightened up as if she’d been slapped, dropping the cuestick to the floor with a clatter. Now she snatched her purse from a stool at the bar and hurried out the door, the clack-clack-clack of her heels echoing like gunshots in the sudden dramatic silence between songs.

“She wasn’t worth a shit anyway,” Gesh said, cramming the nether end of a three-pound super-chicken burrito into his mouth. We were outside, on the street, holding take-out burritos the size of skeins of yarn. “Yeah,” I said, wiping guacamole from my face and fighting to talk, chew and maintain my balance all at the same time, “and besides, it’s too early to get pinned down for the night yet.” It was nine o’clock. Gesh examined his watch carefully, as if it could not only tell him the time but plot the progress of every available female in town to boot. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, we got to get to these clubs, man, and start dancing.”

It was a noble sentiment, nobly expressed. Unfortunately, as he formed the syllables of the final word, a word that connotes motion and grace, he lost his balance and staggered back against the window of a Chinese herbalist’s shop. The shop was dark, the window resilient. The burrito, however, was not so resilient. It dropped from his hand and split open like a rotten banana. On his shoes. The shoes, and the cuffs of both pant legs, were smeared with a méeAlange of salsa, chicken, green chilis, sour cream, beans, onions, guacamole and rice. Gesh merely stared down at his feet, as he’d stared a moment earlier at his watch, a look of dim incomprehension creasing his features. He could have been the village idiot, puzzling over his intertwined shoelaces. A motorcycle snarled down the street, someone shouted from a second-story window. Finally Gesh waved his hand in a vague gesture of dismissal and said “Fuck it,” his voice thick with retardation.

The events of the remainder of that evening — and especially their sequence — were never quite clear to me. But I can say with assurance that we drifted in and out of a number of clubs that featured heavy metal, new wave disco, punk, blues, blue-grass, reggae and bossa nova, and that we lurched across various congested dance floors with various women and made lewd, drunken proposals to all of them. Our breath was foul, our legs unsteady. We slammed into doorposts, stepped on people’s feet, were twice refused service. At one point, I recall, Gesh took umbrage at the appearance of a massive, iron-pumping, head-cracking bouncer at a tidy little club in which everyone was neatly dressed and behaving himself. “Fucker looks like a neutered cat,” Gesh growled, jabbing his finger in the direction of a young giant who lounged watchfully in the corner, his arms folded against a chest so muscle-inflated he might have been wearing a lifejacket.

Suddenly I was sober. “Are you crazy?” I said. “That guy’s arms alone are bigger than my entire body.”

Gesh’s eyes were glazed, his face hard. In the candlelight, the scar that split his eyebrow had a dull sheen to it, like the white of a hard-boiled egg. For answer, he merely shrugged. I knew Gesh well enough to appreciate his volatility — I had only to think of his confrontations with Vogelsang, his impatience with Dowst, the rage that consumed him when the pump broke down or the Jeep failed to start — and I could see that something had set him off, could see that he was looking for trouble. “Come on,” I said, “this place isn’t for us. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Gesh’s gaze was fixed on the bouncer. For his part, the bouncer merely stood there, his eyes sweeping the room contemptuously. In front, elevated above a mass of straight-backed chairs and glossy cocktail tables, a folksinger perched on a stool and did early-sixties stuff about harmony and the brotherhood of man. “Cabbagehead,” Gesh muttered, still glaring at the bouncer. “Sink licker.” I tried to restrain him, but he brushed me aside. I watched as he made his way to the bar, ordered a triple créeGme de menthe — it came in a big water glass — cakewalked past the bouncer like a harmless high-spirited fraternity guy out on a date, then spun round and neatly upended the glass on the bouncer’s head.

“Sorry,” Gesh said with a sick grin.

For one stunned second the bouncer held himself in check — Is this guy serious? Should I be angry? — before hurling himself forward like a steel wrecker’s ball. I remember thinking, as the viscous green slop congealed the bouncer’s hair and startled his shirt, that Gesh had erred irretrievably, that we’d shortly be confronted by the police, and that I’d once again find myself digging deep for bail money. But Gesh surprised me. Stoned, drunk, and perverse as he was, he’d planned his move well—“Just counting coup,” he later explained — and at the moment of truth, with exquisite timing, jammed a glossy cocktail table into the behemoth’s knees. Reeking of mint, the big man took a fall, spewing drinks and crushing glass, wood and Lucite beneath him. The diversion gave Gesh — and me — time to dodge out the door, duck round the corner and stumble the length of a three-block alley like handicapped sprinters trying out for the Special Olympics. We finally pulled up behind an overflowing dumpster to catch our breath and erupt in nervous, triumphant, moronic giggles. This was silly, juvenile, undignified and ultimately unfulfilling, the sort of thing you did when you were sixteen. It was all that, but somehow it was hilarious, too.

In mid-laugh, as if it were a natural extension of the joke, Gesh suddenly doubled over to evacuate the contents of his stomach. I listened to his wet heaving gasps — the dying throes of a hero with a sword twisted in his gut — and began to feel queasy myself. “The smug son of a bitch,” he choked, and then gagged again. When he was finished, he straightened up, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and said, “What next?”

It was one-fifteen. We’d gone through the cocaine and all but six of the Quaaludes. The night had turned cold, and a dank insidious fog had begun to feather its way through the streets, smoothing angles, blurring distinctions. We headed away from Broadway, looking for a place I knew — or thought I knew — where we could have a nightcap.

I was feeling enervated, as if I’d been walking forever, part of a commando raid in Bataan that didn’t quite come off, a misguided explorer hoofing it back to civilization. The night had been a disappointment, there was no doubt about it. We’d left the apartment in high spirits, needful, aching with desire, and we’d struck out. Bombed. Wound up empty-handed and addle-brained, with a bad taste in our mouths. The amazing thing is that we’d expected anything different — this was the way it always was and always would be, world without consummation, amen.

In a way, it was like fishing. Once a year, having forgotten how insufferable it is, I would go fishing. A day would come when I would awaken to think of hooks, lines, sinkers, the mysteries of the deep, and then of broiled halibut or rock cod in black bean sauce. Like Ishmael too long ashore, I would hurry down to the marina, snuffing the salt air. Then I’d fork over thirty-five bucks to the charter-boat captain, stand in a knot of drunken sportsmen and vomit over the rail for six hours. Fish? By the end of the day I couldn’t imagine that that pounding pitching hell of an ocean was anything but the lifeless desert it seemed.