Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

He takes me to the bar, and we lean against it. The señoritas in their lively dresses line the walls, somewhat like umbrellas at a funeral. .

“You got a name?”

“What on earth would I do with something like that?”

The tall black bartender, wearing a white shirt of arctic crispness, delivers me a drink with those gentle hands of his.

“It’s the beautiful New York señorita,” he says — he’s supposedly from Limón, but he’s got no accent. “Did you know you got out of here last night with a tab still hanging, bunny?”

Behind him is a window fixed with black wrought iron. The building floats in a cypress swamp, a mossy branch and waxy ivy visible in the green effulgence of the little neon sign outside. .

“A hundred and fifty?” he says. “Gin tonic and two beers? Does it register?”

“Oh.” Last night I’d been angry at him, can’t remember why, but justice had cried out that I stiff his suave black ass. .

“A hundred and fifty. Are you on it?”

“Right, sure, sorry, honey, sorry.” I pay him out of my purse.

“Hey, it’s not a dilemma.” Now that he has his money, it’s not a dilemma. “Are you fixed all right? Do you need a little help this week?”

“She’s with me, dude,” the G.I. says.

“Then I’m happy. She’s in very good hands.”

The G.I. ignores him, wooing me. “Do you know what’s the biggest cause of divorce? Marriage,” he fucking opines.

After a while he loses interest in me and drifts away. .

And then I see another one come in. I’ve been waiting for him. You know who.

Here he is.

And I say here he is, he’s on a roll, he’s wired for a win, he’s tuned to every known vibration.

Oh, those familiar eyeglasses giving him the faceless face of Clark Kent!. . But take them off and he is by no means Superman. The way he holds himself there’s no mistaking him. Does he have a bit of a tan?

Isn’t it him? Or maybe it is. It is. It isn’t. But it’s him . .

No, I’m wrong. The accent is all wrong. But he does converse in English. Unbelievable striking fucking similarity, knock you right out, it’s the glasses. .

Those are actually the glasses, not a similar pair, but actually the Englishman’s glasses on this stranger’s face.

He’s stolen them off the corpse or out of a prison laundry or bought them from a torturer . .

“Por favor? Si?” He lets me look through them — but they aren’t the same glasses at all. It isn’t at all the kind of view you get through the real glasses, these don’t make things more distant and crisp but fat, grotesque and not exactly substantial . . Through these eyes every object is a cloud.

Just to tease him, I pretend I can’t speak English. He's forced to make ridiculous signatures in the air with his hands. He has to be a regular monkey, getting his dirty ideas across.

He offers to take me to dinner, but he’s a cheap bastard . .

In no time he and I are eating tacos chinos, that’s what they call egg rolls down here, with my friend Esmeralda in a Chinese restaurant and talking to a beggar-boy who’s just handed us a well-written letter from his mom. “Estimados Señores,” this letter begins, and goes on to say she’s raising a large number of children, well whose fault is that, and delivers a little lecture on the subject of her income versus her obligations. Honey, don’t you know you’ve got one of the world's most negotiable instruments right there between your legs?

If you’d made them pay you wouldn’t be home arthritically copying out these tearful communications for your bastard children to read to people a great deal more fortunate and quite a bit smarter than you. . Just the same, we slip him a twenty and I figure, Let the miniaturized sociopath eat my egg roll, even in my line of work I’ve never been so desperate as to take anything quite like this in my mouth. None of the Chinks in this establishment has ever been to China, I’m prepared to insist this is true.

Before this little monkey eats, he counts his money and turns in his change for bills. The egg rolls just sit there in front of him, getting cold. Now we see he’s got a wad of cash in those little shorts of his bigger than my purse would hold — this kid has thousands. Don’t ask me how he fits it in his pockets, it's a miracle his pants don’t plummet to his ankles when he walks. “Ho, Malo,” I say, “bueno!”

But I’m being too familiar. “Don’t call me Malo,” he says.

“Is this crippled duck still here?” I ask Esmeralda, putting my hand on the customer’s thigh.

The customer wants to do it with two women. He doesn't have much money. He’s a cheap bastard.

It’s uncanny how this mind-blown welder — for that’s what he is, a welder from Miami with an overseas contract, gone nuts — brings to mind the Englishman, and I wonder what became of my friend from London, and how bad it hurt. . But you know who this lint-collector really reminds me of? Humphrey Bogart. There’s something sideways and not altogether repellent about his glance, and something Bogart-like in the pain of his wince.

A clear reminiscence of Humphrey Bogart seems to inform the modes and styles and even the gestures tonight. . Whatsisname, the long black bartender without a trace of an accent, shaking drinks . .

And Esmeralda, the red-dressed high-class prostitute — she might have stepped out from behind a potted palm in a Hollywood lounge, 1953 . . Who knows where they get it; after all, the movie houses are showing, Spanish-dubbed, whatever’s current Stateside. Maybe they watch a lot of Humphrey Bogart on TV.

Maybe the air of this place just seizes and holds as long as it can that pre-Castro Havanan tang, or possibly it drifted down here years ago and got lost not unlike so many of us, hey. .

He’s been spilling his pay out behind him for days, all he’s got is about 1,800—I’d want two grand for me alone. He keeps saying, “Let’s do it three ways, c’mon, tres — tu, yo, una otra, Señorita comprende, si?”

Esmeralda, or whatever her name is, isn’t interested.

He wants me to find another, offering me 1,500 colones. I cost a lot more than that, I’m a rarity, without a drop of Indian blood. . I’m white as dice. .

We go down to one of the sleazier spots, next door to a massage parlor, looking for a second girl. In the dark he looks just like the Englishman. I start weeping, I’m the sentimental sort . . So we dicker, and like every North American, he’s heartbroken to talk of money and love together.

The only one I can foozle into it cheaply enough to make it worth my while is Mona Lisa, who has a little difficulty with opiates and also alcohol, anything, for that matter, that will chemically alter her outlook and produce fog inside her head. .

I always think of her as Mona Lisa because she has a secretive, beautiful smile that says, “It’s over — why are we still here?” She keeps scratching her nose and falling asleep.

Next door they have rooms. The three of us go out together. In the kitchen a chubby fellow cleans a pistol while he talks to the radio. No . . There’s a woman sitting against the wall by the radio.

“Hello, people,” the North American tells them.

He has to pay three hundred for the bed.

He doesn’t mind, he’s got plenty, he’s been holding out on us. And he pays the two of us, like an absolute dildo, in advance. We all undress. Good old Mona Lisa, scratching her nose, falls back beside me on the bed. “Tonight I’m lopsided,” she tells me.

And the naked welder kneels above us. Maybe he’ll kill us. Maybe this is the maniac we’ve all been waiting for.

In this near-dark he’s quite handsome. “Muy lindo,” I say to Mona Lisa, and she agrees. . But he’s a miserable sissy, as limp and useless between his legs as a long wet hair. The night is cool, yet the sweat breaks out on him. Mona Lisa doesn't go in for a lot of English, and I keep on pretending I don’t speak it, either. . He’s reduced to a savage state, naked, signalling with his hands. By all kinds of ridiculous gestures and in great embarrassment he tries to get one of us to fellate him. We don’t know what he’s talking about. Hon, you shouldn't have paid up front. . He tries to ignore his failure, he tries to fake it, he tries to laugh it off, he tries to explain himself. He’s getting humiliated just like the other one, I can smell him boiling in a swirl of the same emotions that vaporized the Britisher. .