Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son - Stories

"Was any of that stuff you said, was any of it real?"

"The park is real," he said.

"The beer is real," I said.

"And the cops, and the helmet. I really do have a motorscooter," he said, and assuring me of this seemed to make him feel better.

When I've told others about this man, they've asked me, "Did he make a pass at you?" Yes, he did. But why is that outcome to this encounter obvious to everyone, when it wasn't at all obvious to me, the person who actually met and spoke with him?

Later, when he dropped me off in front of the apartment building where my friends lived, he paused a minute, watching me cross the street, and then left, accelerating swiftly.

I cupped my hands around my mouth like a megaphone. "Maury!" I called, "Carol!" Whenever I came to Seattle, I had to stand out here on the sidewalk and shout up toward their fourth-floor window, because the front entrance was always locked.

"Go away. Get out of here," a lady's voice called from a window on the ground floor, the window of the manager's apartment.

"But my friends live here," I said.

"You can't yell in the streets like that," she said.

She came closer to the window. She had chiselled features, wet eyes, and tendons standing out in her neck. Fanatically religious utterances seemed to quiver on her lips.

"I beg your pardon," I said, "is that a German accent you have there?"

"Don't give me that," she said. "Oh, the lies. You're all so. friendly."

"It isn't Polish, I hope."

I stepped back into the street. "Maury!" I screamed. I whistled loudly.

"This is it. That's the finish."

"But they live right up there!"

"I'm going to call the cops. Do you want me to call the cops?"

"Jesus Christ. You bitch," I said.

"I didn't think so. The friendly burglar runs away," she cried after me.

I imagined jamming her into a roaring fireplace. The screams. Her face caught fire and burned.

The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.

The street I stood on rolled down a long hill toward First and Second Avenue, the lowest part of town. My feet carried me away down the hill. I danced on my despair. I trembled outside a tavern called Kelly's, nothing but a joint, its in-sides swimming in a cheesy light. Peeking inside I thought, If I have to go in there and drink with those old men.

Right across the street was a hospital. In a radius of only a few blocks, there were four or five. Two men in pajamas stood looking out a window of this one, on the third floor. One of the men was talking. I could almost trace their steps back to the rooms from which they'd wandered tonight with everything they stood for disrupted by their maladies.

Two people, two hospital patients up out of their beds after supper, find each other wandering the halls, and they stand for a while in a little lounge that smells of cigarette butts, looking out over the parking lot. These two, this man and this man, they don't have their health. Their solitudes are fearful. And then they find one another.

But do you think one is ever going to visit the other one's grave?

I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds.

There was one woman in the place. She was drunker than I was. We danced, and she told me she was in the army.

"I'm locked out of my friends'," I told her.

"Don't worry about a thing like that," she said, and kissed my cheek.

I held her close. She was short, just the right size for me. I drew her closer.

Among the men around us, somebody cleared his throat. The bass's rhythm travelled the floorboards, but I doubt it reached them.

"Let me kiss you," I pleaded. Her lips tasted cheap. "Let me go home with you," I said. She kissed me sweetly.

She'd outlined her eyes in black. I loved her eyes. "My husband's at home,"' she said. "We can't go there."

"Maybe we could get a motel room."

"It depends on how much money you have."

"Not enough. Not enough," I admitted.

"I'll have to take you home."

She kissed me.

"What about your husband?"

She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks. I don't remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called "Misty Blue"; probably "Misty Blue" was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in my hands.

"I can't let you get away," I told her.

"I could take you home. You could sleep on the couch. Then later on I could come out."

"While your husband's in the next room?"

"He'll be asleep. I could say you're my cousin."

We pressed ourselves together gently and furiously. "I want to love you, baby," she said.

"Oh, God. But I don't know, with your husband there."

"Love me," she begged. She wept onto my chest.

"How long have you been married?" I asked.

"Since Friday."

"Friday?"

"They gave me four days' leave."

"You mean the day before yesterday was your wedding day?"

"I could tell him you're my brother," she suggested.

First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.

It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.

I was after a seventeen-year-old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn't her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way.

I was in love with her, too. But she was still in love with a man who'd recently gone to prison.

I looked in all the worst locations, the Vietnam Bar and so on.

The bartender said, "Do you want a drink?"

"He doesn't have money to drink." I did, but not enough to drink for the whole two hours.

I tried inside the Jim jam Club. Indians from Klamath or Kootenai or up higher-British Columbia, Saskatchewan-sat in a row along the bar like little icons, or fat little dolls, things mis-

treated at the hands of a child. She wasn't there.

A guy, a slit-eyed, black-eyed Nez Perce, nearly elbowed me off the stool as he leaned over ordering a glass of the least expensive port wine. I said, "Hey, wasn't I shooting pool in here with you yesterday?"

"No, I don't think so."

"And you said if I'd rack you'd get change in a minute and pay me back?"

"I wasn't here yesterday. I wasn't in town."

"And then you never paid me the quarter? You owe me a quarter, man."

"I gave you that quarter. I put the quarter right by your hand. Two dimes and a nickel."

"Somebody's gonna get fucked up over this."

"Not me. I paid you that quarter. Probably it fell on the floor."

"Do you know when that's it ? Do you know when it's the end?"

"Eddie, Eddie," the Indian said to the bartender, "did you find any dimes and nickels down here on the floor yesterday? Did you sweep up? Did you sweep anything like that, maybe two dimes and a nickel?"

"Probably. I usually do. Who cares?"

"See?" the guy said to me.

"You make me so tired," I said, "I can hardly move my fingers. All of you."

"Hey, I wouldn't fuck you around over a quarter."

"All of you, every last one."

"Do you want a quarter? It's bullshit. Here."

"Fuck it. Just die," I said, pushing off.

"Take the quarter," he said, very loudly, now that he could see I wouldn't touch it.