Denis Johnson: The Stars at Noon

A woman watching the elections for CBS, who’d run up north to the war a couple of times and only gotten rained on, was disappointed. “When I get back I’ll see more action out front of La Guardia while I’m looking for a cab.”

“You have to hustle,” a man who obviously didn’t like her said. “It’s around. It’s up there. But it’s elusive — last week in Eslita they called an air strike down on some Contras a quarter mile from where I was standing. I got there in ten minutes with leaves in my fucking teeth, literally, from smashing along through the miserable brambles, and all I shot were holes in the ground. Meantime the bastards I’d been with had Contras up the ass — they’d got themselves ambushed exactly where I’d been standing.”

I knew him, he’d lived down here for years, he really did work. He turned up here in front of a whiskey glass every third week, the rest of the time he slept in the jungle with the BLI, the elite — I doubted that — crack Brigada de Simon Bolivar, up in Matagalpa.

“There’s no war. There are no Contras, there’s no Matagalpa.”

“No Honduras.”

“I’d been so close, I almost expected to find I had some shots of the shit. .”

Each one who did not have a vagina had a beard. All had cans of film bulging in their snap-flap pockets. They all drank as if they were just getting up to leave, but they never — I didn’t blame them, believe me — got up and left unless forced.

“You have to hustle.”

“Beirut.”

“Right.”

“You want bang-bang in Beirut, pull the film out of your pocket, wave it around . .”

“Makes you thirsty just breathing the air.”

“Gutters running with blood . .”

“Lovely stuff.”

“No such luck down here.”

“The last man to get shot down here shot himself.”

“We’ll have to buy guns. We’re going to have to shoot somebody ourselves.”

“Arf-arf!”

“Moo! Moo!”

We began to snort and laugh. Smoke curled out of our ears. Our claws whined against the glass tabletop. .

Word was the beer workers had gone on strike. We argued about whether a trip to the breweries would be worth anything at all.

Beer, along with meat, and toiletries, and cigarets, would soon be scarce. Beans were also in short supply. For months there’d been no milk. There were no replacements for burned-out bulbs or broken car parts.

When, in only minutes, I’d grown tired of us, I changed tables and sat down across from a possible European, a slack-witted Swede, I would have guessed, who was trying to negate this impression by wearing glasses.

By the time we'd introduced ourselves, his accent fairly placed him. I said, “And you’re English?”

“Right you are. London, currently. And where are you from?”

“Here and there and yonder. What about yourself?”

“I—” He was a game sort. “Didn’t we just do that one?"

I didn’t answer.

Things got slow. I slipped off my heels and concentrated on cooling off, feet first.

Did he think I didn’t see the glance pass between him and the barkeep?

I raised my glass to the martini expert. “Miguel. Alfonso. She’s a little wet.”

He didn’t hear me.

“Smell the bamboo in here?” I asked the four-eyed Londoner.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Not quite a refreshing odor, is it?”

I said, “You have the kind of good manners that eventually get you killed.”

Smiling neutrally, as if the music had perhaps mangled my words, he said, “Oh, my.”

While Tweedledee and partner started a version of “Yesterday” in phonetically memorized English, I calculated that if I had the time right, this smelly lounge would be open another forty-five minutes. Long enough to get at least fractionally swacked before drifting into a taxi. Such was the scope of my thinking as I signalled for more and more booze. “Drier, hombre. Gin, si, vermouth, no,” I told the waiter.

My companion made himself cozy, folding his hands around his drink. “What brought you here?”

“I came on a plane.”

He was embarrassed by my attitude and stared down into his glass.

“Yes. But I was wondering as to your motives,” he began again.

He was what they call a pleasant enough man, meaning a giant nonentity. . His features were pudding-like and ghostly, and in the center of this not-quite visage rested a pair of spectacles of the variety sported by Clark Kent and other such eunuchs. . Except for the glasses, you couldn’t remember his face even while staring straight into it.

“I can tell you my motives exactly. Have you ever had breakfast at the Sixty-third Street Y just off Broadway? New York?”

He shook his head.

“Well then, have you ever trapped something under a box? Brought a shoebox down over some little animal?”

He really wasn’t listening.

“I wanted to know,” I told him, “the exact dimensions of Hell.”

He stirred his drink and wouldn’t look anywhere but at his ice. “Are you for sale?”

So he’d heard all about me.

“I’m Press,” I said.

“We’re all Press,” he said.

This was the only part that ever turned me on. “Then we’re all for sale.” I started to get warm between my legs.

He was smiling down at the table and appeared to be on the brink of vomiting. I felt sorry for him. He had to beg, he had to pay. Why do they always get you feeling sorry?

Because in truth there was nothing about him more lasting or substantial than your own glance reflected briefly in a window. You knew if he took those silly glasses off he’d disappear entirely from sight and mind, it would be as if he’d never existed, the waiter would clean his place without any comment and his hotel room would be rented out to some other stranger with a blank space in his passport where there was supposed to be a photo . .

Merely to confuse him I told him the truth: “I came here to be a contact person for Eyes for Peace up north in Matagalpa. In the town of Aswalil.”

“Oh, really,” he said, “Aswalil, that’s one of the rougher spots, I understand.”

“In a sense,” I said.

“Well, is it? I mean what made you decide to leave, for instance?”

“What made me think I’d last in the Girl Scouts any longer than I lasted — two and a half days?” One more drink and I was out of here. The guy was deeply homosexual, in all likelihood a castrato of some sort. “It’s not the Contras, honey, it’s the garbage. Breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, eating fruit that drips all over you with your feet in the dirt.”

“Oh. I see,” he said without assurance.

“Not that Manhattan was any better,” I admitted, “I mean, riding through life with a parking ticket clamped between my teeth. .”

“Ah,” he said, “I, uh—” et cetera.

Finally, after having held off all day, the rain started outside.

Nowhere on Earth is there an automatic carwash quite as zany as one of these storms. We could hear it through the closed windows, moving sideways against every structure like an assault of razors.

“And you are here for what,” I asked in order to appear polite.

"With the Watts people,” he said. “I say with, but of course I mean alone.”

“The Watts people. The oil company.”

“Right. In a charitable cause, I suppose you might say.”

“Please don’t go into detail, babe.”

“Well, how many companies, at this moment, would consider investing here?”

“Not many, I’d imagine.” Not enough to form a bowling league, or hadn’t Watts Petroleum heard?

“Right you are again.” He was happy with himself. “All right, of course it’s all in the name of profit, but it has, let’s say, humanitarian overtones, the mere idea of throwing business their way.”