Patrick deWitt - Ablutions

Junior cups his head. He is angry with you for your tentative role in his impending murder but you say nothing because you know there is no solution except for him to walk off into the night and hope the young addict is not brave enough to kill another man. You pull the car over in an alley south of Hollywood Boulevard and Junior gathers his rags and Windex bottles and pulls from his bucket a halved machete blade with a duct tape handle. He secrets this beneath his shirt and says goodbye, and you wave and watch him go. There is nothing you can do for him now.

You are often drinking or drunk but lately are dependent more on beer than whiskey. Your motive is to give aid to your liver, flush the redness from your face and neck, and appease your wife. For a time the campaign is a success: You feel healthier and an unknown energy illuminates your eyes and limbs and your sleep and appetite are restored, but the beer is fattening and you gain ten pounds; the weight sits like a cat on your stomach and your slim profile is blemished. When some happy-hour funnyman asks how far along you are your vanity is wounded and so it is with great relief and enthusiasm that you return to whiskey, but in your hiatus you have lost your tolerance and the whiskey poisons you and after a week everything tastes like milk. The whiskey itself tastes like milk, cola tastes like milk, anything you eat or drink leaves a taste of milk in your mouth. This has happened before and you are not alarmed, it is merely a sign that you have passed into the arena where your body has divorced itself from your mind. The mind is the master, the place where appetites are formed and born; the body is the servant. The mind has proven to be an unfit leader and the body is taking measures to protect itself from the mind's desires. For reasons you don't understand or care to understand this has affected your sense of taste.

While the forces of body and mind battle it out, you comfort yourself with the thought that after all you like the taste of milk and always have, ever since you were a greasy little baby.

Discuss The Teachers, Terese and Terri, who have been regulars for thirteen years, since the bar first opened under the present ownership. They are both over six feet tall and have matching tattoos of worm-ridden apples on their lower backs that they hide from their students and co-workers but display proudly in the bar. They find you sweet but unattractive and so you become one of the girls and they let you in on all their secrets. Between the two of them they have slept with most every doorman who has ever worked at the bar and they tell you which ones have mirrors on their ceilings and which insist on videotaping their sexual encounters. These tapes are traded back and forth and the doormen throw parties where they watch the tapes together and afterward eat barbeque and critique one another's performances. Some take steroids and are suffering the drugs' side effects: Their genitals have shriveled away to nothing and they have grown small breasts, which The Teachers call bitch tits. One doorman has become particularly buxom and is said to wear a sports bra that he made at home from Ace bandages.

The Teachers drink salted margaritas one after the other until they are cross-eyed and you cannot imagine them instructing and caring for young children in the preschool where they work but this is just what they do. They pride themselves on never drinking on the job (you think this is a lie) and they say that if you too would refrain you might see yourself promoted and they remind you how old you are and how long you have been working at the bar and they shake their heads out of pity for your wife. They say you wouldn't be half bad-looking if only you would work out. If you could add, say, thirty pounds of muscle to your upper body, the chest in particular, you would be something of a catch. You thank The Teachers for their stories and advice and you promise to bring your to-be-born child to their preschool and they say they would be happy to have him/her but they hope you will hold off procreating until you have been promoted, and until you have given some thought to what they have said about your weight. "A father should have some muscle behind him," Terese says.

"You don't look like a father to me," Terri tells you.

They hold up their hands for two more margaritas.

Discuss Monty and Madge, a pair of drifter types made strange and unknowable by a lifetime of vodka and cold shoulders. Monty is thirty years old and unwashed, his glasses Scotch-taped, his burgundy corduroy dress coat dirty at its cuffs; he gives off the unmistakable psychic odor of a man who has lived in institutions and by-the-hour motels. He is eager to talk but his conversations are limited to the subjects of alcohol and movies, his obsessions and apparent motives for carrying on. He drinks double vodka tonics from the well and becomes animated when describing a stunt or special effect from the latest Hollywood blockbuster. When he insists you see these movies you tell him you do not like the genre and he asks what other kinds there are and you say there are the slow ones and foreign ones and your personal favorites, the sad ones, and he blinks and says that there are two types of people: Those who want to cry, and those who are crying already and want to stop.

Madge has never said a word to you or (as far as you know) to Monty and you believe she is presently insane. A light-skinned mulatto, she resides beneath a ratty gray beehive hairdo and behind a pair of neon-green gas-station sunglasses. Her face is heavily rouged, her lipstick smeared over tiny gray teeth; she is perhaps twenty years older than Monty and the exact nature of their relationship remains clouded. He orders her drinks (well bloody marys) and always pays and she accepts the drink in her hand but has not once thanked him and in fact has never looked in his direction. She drinks slowly but steadily and Monty anticipates each drink's completion so that she is never left wanting or thirsty. She chainsmokes unfiltered Lucky Strikes and her fingers are stained an unladylike yellow-brown.

When happy hour is over and prices double it is time to go and Monty taps Madge's shoulder and without moving her neck she stands and turns and walks out the door. Madge embarrasses Monty and he apologizes each time they visit. "She's just a shy girl is all," he explains. "Time's been hard on her." Then he settles the bill, and here is the most curious thing about Monty: He is a good tipper. If he saved the tips from a single happy hour he could buy himself a nice secondhand coat. A week's worth would get him a new pair of eyeglasses. But he enjoys the pageantry of public drinking and appreciates your remembering his name and interests, and when he reaches for his wallet you want to refuse his money but can see how much the gesture means to him and so you only thank him and stuff the cash in the tip jar.

You are alone in the bar with Monty and Madge when a man walks in and sits on the stool nearest the television. He is of medium height, brown-haired, muscular and tanned, the archetypal Southern Californian in shorts and a frayed T-shirt advertising a marlin-fishing tournament in Baja. There is a baseball game on and you peg him for a sports fan when you see how intently he watches the screen, but then he is interested in the commercials too, and when you walk over to take his order he jumps at the sound of your voice. He turns his washed-out blue eyes to you and you see he is simple or crazy or drunk or on drugs. He looks to Monty and Madge (Monty waves, Madge makes a wet, farting noise with her mouth) and back at you. The game has resumed and he points to the screen.

"How much do these baseball players make?" he asks.

It seems an innocent-enough question on its surface but the fact that he is unaware each player is paid a different salary worries you as it reveals the man's separation from reality. Anyway you do not believe he is interested in the actual answer and so you say, "Plenty more than you or me," and he grins crookedly. He flattens several crumpled bills on the bar and asks what he can get for six dollars and you pour him a vodka tonic that he drains in a gulp. He does not tip but pulls more bills from his pocket and likewise flattens these and asks what he can get for ten dollars. You make him a double vodka tonic and again he does not tip. He drains the glass and asks what he can get for twenty dollars and you are becoming frustrated and tell him for that much he could buy the whole bar a round, but the man is confused and then offended by your joke, and his eyes flash and he stares at your chest and says, "Why would I buy you all drinks when I don't even know you? When I don't even know your names? Why in the fuck would I give you a goddamn thing?" His fists are clenched and he has stood and kicked aside his stool and it looks as if he wants to jump over the bar when Monty calls out from across the room: "Just give him a drink on my tab. Give him whatever he wants."