Patrick deWitt - Ablutions

Dana is eighteen and gains admittance to the bar with her stepmother's ID card. Her stepmother is fifty-two years old. You are thirty-two. Dana's boyfriend, Joey, is twenty-seven. They sit together and laugh at you as you approach — they are small and brown-skinned and find something comical about your tall and skinny white person. You like them both very much and give them free drinks and they never once tip you but this is not due to any cheapness of heart but a lack of tipping money. Not that they would tip extravagantly if they ever won a large cash prize. They have never been and will never be flashy, money-throwing people, and this is fine with you because their eyes are genuine and they like you and you imagine them doing imitations of you when they are alone, hiccupping, struggling with gravity, and adjusting invisible eyeglasses.

There is a scandal attached to their romance, and this is what it is: Joey had been Dana's gym teacher. Their relationship was uncovered by the high school vice principal, an ambitious man with adult acne, intensely disliked by students and faculty alike. He one night found Dana and Joey holding hands and kissing at the local pizzeria and did not intervene but alerted the news media, who descended on the restaurant with their camera lights blazing and microphones pointed lance-like toward Joey, at that moment entertaining Dana by chugging Bud Light from a frosted glass pitcher. He was humiliated publicly and dispatched "with a flamethrower"; Dana was beaten by her father and suspended indefinitely. The vice principal was promoted and threw himself a party in the cafeteria and nobody, not one person with either professional or personal ties to the man, came.

But now Dana has taken her GED and the unfortunate tale is behind her. She lives alone in Culver City and works two part-time jobs and is happy enough with her life and with Joey but her youth will not allow her true contentment and as the months pass she turns an eye to you. Joey leaves town overnight for an interview at an all-girls Catholic school in San Francisco and Dana arrives alone at the bar, drunk, in a low-cut blouse. She stays after hours and takes off the blouse and her skin is flawless and everything is all over in a matter of three or four minutes and you and she sit side by side staring into the darkness of the back room, the smoke from your cigarettes drawn into the space and disappearing. You think you can hear her crying but you do not want to look over or ask her any questions or try in any way to comfort her and if she got up and ran out the door you would not stop her. "I've never been with a white guy before," she says, extending a chubby baby hand, your pants still gathered at your ankles.

Discuss Ginny with her short brown hair, her pug nose, and her plump red hands like spotted meat left to swell in the desert sun. Her eyes are popped and her pores emit a smell of chili dogs and french fries dipped in mayonnaise and you cannot help but wonder what horrors reside in her large intestine. She actively attends both AA and NA meetings but is always the last to leave the bar and will often stay after hours, by which time you are helplessly drunk and accordingly interested in her large white backside. She follows you into the storage room and will partially disrobe to be fondled and lightly slapped but she always stops you short of achieving anything purposeful and she will never touch you but only be touched. Now she puts her clothes back on and is very red and she leaves the bar with her hair in a mess, smiling in twisted triumph at the thought of your unfulfilled and piggish desires, and you curse her and her teasing ways, for after all she has done this before, to you and others, and you tell yourself this will not under any circumstances happen again. It happens again and again and again and again.

Discuss Danielle. She is fifty-six, with brittle, overdyed burgundy hair and orange lipstick and many sad tattoos whose meanings she hopes to share with you. She is a friendly person but has a greedy little girl's heart and her eyes grow narrow as she drinks and she looks at you as if you were the last piece of cake at the party. Margarita salt is gathered at the corners of her mouth and you sometimes walk with her to the storage room but only if you are extremely drunk. (She is forever buying drinks and placing them before you and calls you a spoilsport if you demur.) There is an honest light in the storage room and you want to smash it out to put Danielle at ease but she does not appear to mind, despite the bad times imprinted on her face and the shadows that dance beneath her bangs and eye sockets as she leans and then lunges toward you. You are backed against the ice machine and the storage room is spilling over and you want to scream and laugh and shout and punch Danielle in her gut but she is working your belt like an angry parent and you know that you have come too far to turn back and so you stare at the bare bulb until it burns out your eyesight black and pulsing.

Discuss the short, overweight Hispanic woman who follows you into the storage room after you winked at her. She is so unattractive you believed this would be harmless but she has misinterpreted the gesture as one of lustful beckoning, and now without even a kiss to share she is on her knees, and though you are well behind in your work duties and have no time for such things you find your hand is reaching up to lock the deadbolt. You try to concentrate so as to expedite the romance and are staring at the labels of the many bottles on the shelves when the woman begins grunting and you assume she is doing something to herself as well as to you and you are looking down to see if this is true when you notice that her hair is so thin she could only be described as balding or partially bald, and your jaw drops at the corpse-gray color of her scalp and the dainty, pink-and-blue veins crisscrossing her head like a roadmap. You manage to finish up and the woman is standing and holding you around your torso. Now you can see her scalp plainly and you want to know if she has recently gone through some cancerous ordeal but cannot think of a way to bring this up without causing offense. You ask if she is all right and the woman looks up at you, the eyes of a stranger. She tells you she misses her boyfriend.

Discuss the alcoholic and narcotics-addicted pharmacist woman who you believe is actually a pre-op transsexual male. She is short and thin with an attractive, heavily made-up face and drugged bedroom eyes. Her short black hair is crunchy from hairspray and her bare shoulders are covered with tiny bumps that you assume are the result of whole-body shaving or waxing. She has a different man with her every night; he is always dark-skinned and hairy and a little unsure and frightened. These are lonely men and they come to hate you when they see that their date has feelings for you, and they ask her to leave for another night spot; when she will not go they leave alone and the woman shrugs and looks at you suggestively. She has asked you many times to walk her to her car or to the ladies' room, and has asked to accompany you to the storage room, but you always say no because there are certain mysteries in the human world that you have never been curious about and here is one of them. But one slow night you are so drunk and so completely uninterested in breathing and living that when another bartender dares you to find out once and for all the gender of this being, you lead her by the hand to the back bar men's room. Her eyes are wide with sex-craving as you walk her into the stall and you embrace her and begin to kiss her and you will know in a moment whether she is male or female when her bare leg touches the cold porcelain of the toilet and she pushes you abruptly back and storms out of the bathroom and toward the front bar. You follow and ask her what's wrong and she is nearly in tears and wants to know if you honestly believed she was the type to be groped beside a toilet? Just what kind of a whore do you think she is? You tell her that that was precisely what you were hoping to find out and she slaps your face and leaves the bar swinging her purse like a mace. There are five or six customers in the room and they are applauding the performance and you wave to them modestly and the bartender's face is set in inquiring stone.