T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

I was operating on this level of unhope when we pushed through the door of the bar I’d been looking for, only to find that this was a different place altogether. Strangers, clots of them, stared up at us — strangers who didn’t give a shit if I lived or died or ever again experienced love in all my fruitless wandering years on earth. Candles glowed ’on rough-hewn tables, smoke rose like mustard gas from a hundred cigarettes, the jukebox rattled with slash-’em/tear-’em rock and roll. I saw long noses, drawn canine faces, earrings, nose rings, blue hair, orange hair. No one was smiling.

“Uh, listen,” I said, taking Gesh by the arm, “I don’t think this is the right place.”

Gesh didn’t look overconcerned. He merely shrugged, and was about to advance on the bar when a muscular voice cut through the jukebox frenzy to shout out our names: “Gesh! Felix! How the fuck you doing?”

It was Rudy. Chinless, noseless, skin the color of ripe grapefruit. He was standing at the bar with a guy so short and deformed he could have been a chimpanzee dressed up for the occasion. “Hey!” Rudy shouted, ushering us forward, “I’d like you to meet my friend Raul.”

Raul was about four and a half feet tall, and there was something seriously wrong with his shoulders and torso. His shoulders were massive — big as a linebacker’s — and swelled out in a lump at the base of his head. He had no neck, and his chest and abdomen were foreshortened, so that he looked as if he’d been compressed vertically. I shook his hand and nodded at the crazed glint in his black eyes.

“And this,” Rudy was saying, “is Jones.” I now saw that Raul was flanked by a guy about thirty, a cool character with short hair combed straight up and back and wearing a tie the width of a tape measure. He nodded, and then took my hand perfunctorily. “My friends call me Bud,” he said.

“Hey, what you drinking?” Rudy shouted, and then asked where all the women were. “What,” he said, “did you strike out? Yeah?” He handed me an Irish coffee. “Don’t worry about it, man — me and Raul and Jonesie are on our way to this place where there’s some real action — right, Raul? — and you guys are welcome to come along if you want.”

Jones? Where had I heard that name before? Farmer Jones, Casey Jones, BoJo Jones. I beat on the brat , screamed the jukebox, I beat on the brat,/With a baseball bat. “Why not?” I said.

Outside, the fog had thickened. Cars vanished, parking meters were invisible at a range of ten feet, the light from storefronts was so diffuse it could have been spread with a butter knife. The five of us scraped out the door and shuffled down an alley, then crossed a street I didn’t recognize. Someone lit a joint and handed it to me. We walked on, our voices pitched low. Nobody said much.

If I was disoriented earlier, I was totally lost now — at first I thought we were headed in the direction of Chinatown, but with the fog and the various turnings I was no longer sure. “A block more,” Rudy said as we swung into a street as softly lit as a watercolor. I saw red neon off to my left, a sign winking on and off, but the fog was so dense I couldn’t make out the lettering. Then Jones’s voice, disembodied, was speaking somewhere behind me: “This is my street, man — see you tomorrow, Rude.”

“Hey Jonesie”—Raul’s voice—“what’s the matter? No lead in your pencil?”

“Tired, man. Hey, good to meet you,” Jones said, just a shadow now. “Ciao.”

We walked on. I glanced up and saw that the streetlights were truncated, dissolved in cloud, earth and sky become one. “You know, that Jones is a real pussy,” Raul said, and Rudy sniggered. I realized at that moment that I liked Rudy about as much as I liked snakes or trunk murderers, and that I liked his hunchbacked friend even less. And Jones — Jones was one of ten thousand people you meet casually and will never lay eyes on again, but still there was something about him that unsettled me. It was the name, I guess. Or the cool, faintly ironic look of appraisal he’d given me as we were introduced.

Suddenly I felt very weary of the whole business. Everything — Rudy and Raul, the dream of the summer camp, the fog, the hour, the city, my own lust-ridden, drugged and exhausted body — was shit. I wanted to go home to bed, but I didn’t. I kept walking, listening to the mesmeric scrape of our footsteps on the wet pavement. Halfway down the block, as if to let me know he was still there and functioning, however minimally, Gesh pressed something into my hand. It was the stub of the joint we’d been smoking, cold and long dead. I flung it away. A moment later we reached the end of the block and crowded into the doorway of what looked to be a deserted storefront. Raul knocked.

“Yeah?” came a voice from within.

“It’s me, Raul. I brought some friends.”

There was the sound of a bolt sliding back. Fog closed in on us like the breath of a beast. “What is this place, anyway?” Gesh said.

The door opened on a dimly lit interior: bare linoleum floor, bare white fluorescent tubes, two graffiti-scrawled folding chairs leaning forlornly against the back wall. We shuffled in, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. I had no idea what to expect — neither Rudy nor Raul would say anything other than “It’s a trip,” and “You’re really going to dig this”—and found myself suppressing an urge to whistle as Raul closed the door behind us.

Inside, to the left of the door and invisible from the street, stood a makeshift desk — a slab of plywood set across the seats of four folding chairs. A man in suspenders and a dirty Toms & Jerry T-shirt was easing himself down behind the desk as we entered. He said nothing, merely glanced up at us without interest. A calendar hung crookedly on the wall behind him, open for some obscure and aggravating reason to November. The man’s face was inflamed with some genetic skin disorder, corrugated with angry red lumps as if he’d blundered into a beehive, and strands of lank hair descended from his balding crown to his shoulders. A cigar box, a copy of The Wall Street Journal and a nightstick lay on the desk before him as if they’d been designed to complement one another. I’d expected a party, an after-hours club, a sleazy apartment with a couple of girls. But this? What was this?

The man — host, proprietor, whatever he was — looked bored. He pushed the hair out of his face and gestured at the blank wall that ran half the length of the room — plasterboard, painted white and already gray with grime, a cheap addition. I was puzzled. Storage room? Office? Then I noticed the holes. Holes punched at random in the flat smooth plasterboard face. There must have been ten or twelve of them, none higher than waist-level and all about two and a half inches in diameter.

“Ten bucks a pop,” the man said.

Enlightenment came more quickly to Gesh than me. “You mean … you mean we stick our … and somebody …?” It was as if he’d asked the waiter at Ma Maison what the silverware was for. The man behind the desk simply stared at him. “Shit,” Gesh laughed, “and we don’t even know who’s back there, right? Be it man or beast.”

We all swiveled our heads, even the proprietor, to contemplate the silent inanimate face of the wall.

“Who gives a shit?” Raul said, his eyes pools of oil. “What you going to do, go home and jerk off?”

I was stunned. This was crude, this was obscene, the ultimate in depravity, moral turpitude and plain bad taste. Talk about the zipless fuck, this was real anonymity, cold and soulless as an execution. I was repelled. But as I watched Raul, Rudy and Gesh count out their money, I began to see the perverse allure of it too. Dear Mom, don’t try to find me or anything but I’m writing to tell you I’m all right and I’ve got a steady job and plenty to eat. I stepped up to the desk and gave Tom-&-Jerry a ten-dollar bill.