Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

My father takes a long, admiring look at her seated behind. “Farrah and Ray,” my father says. “I like how that sounds.” For a moment, he looks like Billy Dee Williams. The smile is the same, that same slick look.

“I like how it sounds, too,” Farrah says. She actually slides on her barstool and leans toward him, leans so close it looks as if she might kiss him.

“Farrah and Ray,” I say. “That sounds like a Vegas act.”

“It does !” she squeals.

MY FATHER and Farrah get drunk while I play an electronic trivia game with the Goiter. He knows more than I gave him credit for, but he’s losing to me because he bets all his bonus points whenever he gets a chance. The Goiter and I are on our tenth game when Ray Bivens Jr. taps me on the shoulder. I look over to see him standing very straight and tall, trying not to look drunk.

“You don’t love me,” he says sloppily. “You don’t under stand me.”

“ You don’t understand you,” I say.

Farrah is still at the bar, and though she’s not saying anything, her face goes through a series of exaggerated expressions as if it were she responding to someone’s questions. I plunk three quarters in the game machine. “Your go,” I say to the Goiter.

“Does anybody understand themselves?” he says to me softly, and for a second he looks perfectly lucid. Then he says it louder, for the benefit of the whole bar, with a gravity only the drunk can muster. “Does anybody, I say, under stand themselves?”

The men at the bar look at him and decide it’s one of their many jokes, and laugh, though my father is staring straight at me, straight through me as though I were nothing but a clear glass of whiskey into which he could see the past and future.

I grip my father’s elbow and try to speak with him one on one. “I’m sorry about what I said at the March.”

“No you ain’t.”

“Yes,” I say, “I am. But you’ve got to tell me how to understand you.” I feel silly saying it, but he’s drunk, and so is everybody else but me.

He lurches back then leans in forward again. “Tell you? I can’t tell you.” He drums each word out on the counter, “That’s. Not. What. It’s. Α — bout. I can tell you about Paris, but you won’t know ’less you been there. You simply under- stand. Or you don’t.” He raises an eyebrow in clairvoyant drunkenness before continuing. “You either take me, or you don’t .” He throws his hands up, smiling as though he’s finally solved some grand equation in a few simple steps.

“Please,” I say, giving up on him. I beckon the Goiter for another game of electronic trivia, but he shakes his head and smiles solemnly, a smile that says he’s more weary for me than for himself.

“Let me tell you something,” Ray Bivens Jr. says, practically spitting in my face, “Lupita understands me. That woman,” he says, suddenly sounding drunk again, “ understands . She’s It.”

Farrah, suddenly sober, smacks him on the shoulder and says, “What about me? What the fuck about me?”

ANOTHER HOUR later he says, all cool, “Gimme the keys. Farrah and I are going for a ride.”

I’ve had many 7 Ups and I’ve twice asked my father if we could go, told him that we either had to find a motel outside the city or plan on driving back soon. But now he’s asking for the keys at nearly three a.m., the car all the way over in Arlington, and even the Metro has stopped running.

“Sir,” I say. “We need to drive back.”

“I said, Spurgeon, dear son, that Farrah and I are going for a ride. Now give me the keys, dear son.”

A ride means they’re going to her place, wherever that is. Him going to her place means I have to find my own place to stay. Giving him the keys not only means he’ll be driving illegally, which I no longer care about, but that the car will end up on the other side of the country, stripped for parts.

“No,” I say. “It’s Mama’s car.”

“Mama’s car,” he mimics.

“Sir.”

“Maaaamaaa’s caaaaar!”

I leave the bar. I’m walking for a good minute before I hear him coming after me. I speed up but don’t run. I don’t even know how I’m going to get back to the car, but I pick a direction and walk purposefully. I hear the click click click of what are surely Farrah’s heels, hear her voice screaming something that doesn’t make sense, hear his footfalls close in on me, but all I see are the streetlights glowing amber, and the puffs of smoke my breath makes in the October air. All I feel is that someone has spun me around as if for inspection, and that’s when I see his face — handsome, hard-edged, not the least bit sloppy from liquor.

Sure. He’s hit me before, but this is hard. Not the back of the hand, not with a belt, but punching. A punch meant for my face, but lands on my shoulder, like he’s congratulating me, then another hit, this one all knuckles, and my jaw pops open, automatically, like the trunk of a car. I try to close my mouth, try to call time out, but he’s ramming into me, not with his fists, but with his head. I try to pry him from where his head butts, inside my stomach, right under my windpipe, but he stays that way, leaning into me, tucked as if fighting against a strong wind, both of us wobbling together like lovers. Finally, I push him away, and wipe what feels like yogurt running from my nose into the raw cut of my lip. I start to lick my lips, thinking that it’s all over, when he rushes straight at me and rams me into something that topples over with a toyish metal clank. Sheaves of weekly newspapers fan the ground like spilled cards from a deck. I kick him anywhere my foot will land, shouting at him, so strangely mad that I’m happy, until I finally kick at air, hard, and trip myself. I don’t know how long I’m down, how long my eyes are closed, but he’s now holding me like a rag doll. “What the hell are you talking about?” he says as if to shake the answer out of me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I only now realize what I’ve been screaming the whole time. “Wind-o!” I yell at him. “You and your goddamn ‘wind-o’! There was never any ‘wind-o’! And you don’t know shit about birds! Arriba! Arriba! ” I say mockingly.

When he grabs my collar, almost lifting me from the ground, I feel as though I’m floating upward, then I feel some part of me drowning. I remember something, something I know will kill my father. My father dodged the draft. They weren’t going to get this nigger, was his view of Vietnam. It was the one thing I’d respected him for, and yet somehow I said it, “You didn’t know fucking Huey P. Newton. You never even went to Vietnam!”

That does it. I had turned into something ugly, and of all the millions of words I’ve ever spoken to him in all my life, this is the one that blows him to pieces.

“Vietnam?” he says, once, as if making sure I’d said the word.

I’m quiet. He says the word again, “Vietnam,” and his eyes somehow look sightless.

I try to pull him back, begging in the only way you can beg without words. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but a torrent of people, fresh from the March, it seems, has been loosed from a nearby restaurant. They slap one another’s backs, smelling of Brut and Old Spice, musk-scented African oils and sweat. I go to put my hand on his shoulder, but already my father has gone.

RAY BIVENS JR. left with the car and Farrah left with someone else. The birds are gone. My blazer is gone. After I have a scotch, the bartender says, “Look. I can float you the drinks, but who’s going to pay for that, youngblood?” He points to one of the bar’s smashed windowpanes.