Ablutions Page 6

  There is an upheaval at the bar motivated by some mysterious money troubles of the owners, who call an emergency daytime meeting and are grim and cryptic as they talk of their finances, and your hands are buzzing at the thought of termination and as the meeting progresses you do not follow along but scramble to think of another occupation you might fall back on, only there is no other occupation except that of laborer or cashier and you cannot return to either as you have been spoiled by barbacking, which leaves your days free and for which you are paid illegally in cash and during which time you can drink all the Jameson you like, and so you decide you will not search out further employment but apply for every existing brand of credit card and then borrow cash advances from each company that agrees to do business with you. You could survive a year if you are careful with your spending, and you think of short trips to Big Sur and San Francisco and cheap hotels and coach train travel. You could even bring a backpack and sleep on the beach like a dirty hippie, or maybe actually become a dirty hippie, and you imagine yourself with a beard and a dog and a walking staff and you laugh out loud and the meeting comes to a halt and you apologize and the owners carry on, and now you are listening and this is what you hear them say:

  No one is to be terminated (your freewheeling plans are dashed over rocks) but there will be cutbacks, and all employees will have to reel things in until the money troubles recede. This means: The bartenders and barbacks will cease handing out any complimentary drinks, no matter the customer or amount of time or money they have spent at the bar. The employees are aghast at this and begin naming certain customers, saying, You don't mean so-and-so, and We can't be expected to charge such-and-such, and the owners reiterate: Every person pays every dollar for every drink. The decree sinks in and the employees are quiet as they imagine the many horrible conversations they will soon have to have, because to deny the regulars their alcohol would be like turning away hungry bums at a soup kitchen, and you think of their pushed-in faces as you tell them this new rule and again interrupt the meeting with your laughter and you are warned—once again and you're out.

  Further rulings: Simon will no longer be manager and his extra pay will hereafter be forfeit. No one says anything to this but wonders why the news of his wage cut was not left to implication. Simon is not in attendance, having been earlier informed of his demotion and spared the public humiliation.

  "Is he all right?" you ask.

  "He is golfing."

  "Who will be the manager now?"

  The room comes to attention and the owner and his wife look at each other nervously. They say there is someone they want you all to meet and they call out a name and a golden-tanned young man, dirty blond hair and green-eyed and good-looking to the point of prettiness, enters from the backroom office and stands before the group. This is Lancer; he will be the new manager. He makes the rounds, shaking hands and proffering small compliments (to you he says it is his understanding that you "know how to have some fun"). He is younger than you by a decade and younger than some of the bartenders by two, which means he was still in high school when you began working at the bar and that he was ten years old when the others signed on at the bar's opening. Having no ambition to ascend even to bartender, much less to the position of manager, you are not bothered by this turn of events, but the others in the room are transparently wounded and they stand and shout out and one tips his chair and quits on the spot and the owners raise their arms in a call for peace and for a moment you think there will be violence against them (you will not take part but neither will you play diplomat) and also against Lancer, who has backed himself into the corner and looks uneasy and unnerved (and dramatic and handsome).

  There is no violence. The employees drift out the door, ignoring the beckoning voices of the owners and returning to their cars and homes to speak with their wives or girlfriends of the many years sacrificed in the darkness of the bar, all to be passed over for youth, beauty, and inexperience—all for nothing. The owners retire to the office where they will drink away their guilt and you are left alone with Lancer. He is upset about his reception and says he will not take the job but return to his unemployment insurance and his acting and scriptwriting and you are impressed with his manner of communicating this, which is something like a one-way radio and wholly for his own theatrical benefit, and you know there is nothing you can say to this person that will affect him in any way and so you only pat his arm and offer him a drink and he answers this by looking at his watch. You walk over to fix yourself a drink and Lancer sees this and says, fine, let's have the one drink and then I'll go and tell the owners to find somebody else, and you bring over two shots of Jameson and he chokes on his and you shiver down the long length of your spine and he asks what the drink was and you tell him the brand and he says no, I mean what type of alcohol, and here you fall platonically in love with Lancer and shout the answer in his face: "Irish whiskey!"

  Discuss Brent the unhappy doorman. He is unhappy because: He would rather not be a doorman and because his pigeon-toed bowling-pin-shaped girlfriend leaves him once a month to sleep with his closest friends, whom he dislikes, and who dislike him. He is also unhappy because he suffers from an intestinal disorder whose symptoms are too dire to describe but that he describes often, in precise detail—the malady makes his job of standing in a fixed public location dangerous bordering on torturous. His primary shattering dream is to be a boxer or wrestler or cage fighter—any type of recognized tough, but this will not be realized because Brent is five feet two inches tall and despite his constantly working out and injecting growth hormones he will never attain the desired stature of the truly intimidating violence professional. His secondary shattering dream is to produce cable television shows and during his first two years at the bar this is all he ever speaks of (he is not yet the unhappy doorman but the optimistic, superior doorman). At one point he is close to having a show made into a pilot and he tells you about the many meetings and lunches he attends and he begins using conspicuous Hollywood phrases like spec and soft-scripting and postproduction, and when he speaks of these things he is animated and gleeful and he says that when he receives his first check he will kiss it like a sweetheart, his ticket out of the bar and a lifetime of dirty ID cards, graceless fistfights, smoke-stinking T-shirts, and cymbal-crashing hangovers.

  But now his Hollywood banter tapers off and in a few months this talk of miniplots and antiplots and greenlights is a thing of the past and it is understood that his deal has fallen through. He begins to drink on the job and is always motioning for you to bring him secret shots of vodka and he does not care to hear about how busy you are and grows frantic if you leave his glass empty for too long and by last call he is belligerent and unnecessarily forceful in clearing out the bar and as soon as the customers have gone he rushes to the bathroom to suffer under his intestinal condition, the effects of which you can hear, and you hurry over to the jukebox cash in hand to drown out the sound of his sickness.

  Lancer does not return to unemployment insurance but takes up his post at the bar, steeled by a pay raise and the belief he will soon move on to bigger and better things. His reception among the customers and employees, Simon in particular, is at first chilly, but he is not concerned; his agent sees great things in his future which he parrots for you and the bartenders, most of whom are actors or ex-actors themselves who have heard similar chatter from their own agents and ex-agents, and they explain to him that these are lies perpetrated by all agents everywhere, and that bolstering a client's ego through deceit is the agent's primary function. Lancer chalks this talk up to sour grapes. "I'm sympathetic," he says. "How would you feel after fifteen years of failure?"

  "Ask me in five years," you say. But you agree with his agent—Lancer is out of place at the bar, and he probably will move on to bigger and better things. His features are too fine, his heart too clean, unblemished by envy and gluttony and self-hatred, to stand in such a room as this for very long. And just as he hopes to leave the bar and surro
und himself with similarly scenic people, you and the others also want to see him go, that you might forget such a set of teeth ever existed, and that you could continue on without the constant reminder of what was missing from your genetic makeup.

  Lancer has been at the bar six months and is now more or less an accepted member of the staff. He is teased but only playfully and his orders, previously ignored, are now followed if not to the letter then at least close to the letter. Even Simon has warmed to him after Lancer got him an audition with his agency. But one person remains critical of him, and that is Brent the unhappy doorman, who at the start of their relationship acted the part of the condescending Hollywood elder, one who had dealt with the big boys and lived to tell the tale, but as his own life falls apart he no longer hides his jealousy and becomes overtly nasty. He hopes to rally the employees against Lancer but this campaign has a reverse effect, the group feeling being that anyone who can arouse such disfavor from a person like Brent must not be all bad. And so it is with something resembling sadness that the bar says goodbye to Lancer during his tenth month of employment—he has sold his movie script and is taking his parents on a Hawaiian vacation before settling into a life of wealth and flashbulbs. The employees are gathered around him at the end of his last night when Brent walks up and asks what the cause of celebration is. When Lancer turns and tells him, Brent winces and sputters that the script will be put on a shelf and forgotten and that he will be back tending bar within a year—shocking behavior, even for someone as miserable as Brent, and the group is struck dumb by so blatant a display of bitterness. Brent too is quiet. He seems startled by his own declaration, and before anyone can gather their wits to chastise him he pretends he had only been joking and that he is actually glad for Lancer and he extends his hand and Lancer takes it up and Brent asks what the script sold for and Lancer names a number in the mid six figures and Brent once again winces and says he does not believe it and Lancer drops a copy of Variety on the bar for him to check the amount. Finding that the article corresponds with Lancer's price, Brent staggers backward, breathing heavily, then rushes for the exit, grabbing a barstool on his way out and kicking the door open with his boot. As the door swings closed, you and the others in the group, your necks identically craned, can see him hoist the stool over his head and smash it to bits on the sidewalk.

  Discuss the very tall man, whom you see or think you see as you drive up Echo Park Avenue one night on your way home from work. The moon is full and low and shadows fall in such a way that you glimpse from the corner of your eye the silhouette of a man as tall as a single-story building. He is leaning against the wall of a convenience store and you see his wide hat and dark clothing and know he could cross the street to your car in two long strides and you think of him following you home and crawling through your front door on his hands and knees. You begin to dream of him hiding outside your house and your greatest fear is to think of him looking in a window when you are home alone. His hat would slowly come into view through the darkness and trees and bushes and you would lock eyes with him and he would show his teeth and point to the front door.

  Ignacio does not drink, but like the others is in attendance every night. He is a Spanish expatriate in his mid-fifties, a mechanic living in the comfort of his ailing aunt's guesthouse. For reasons that remain obscure he is heavily medicated. He suffers from dizzy spells and sometimes leans against the bar for support and his eyes bulge from their sockets and he once passed a hand over his face and told you, "I am not a handsome man." This was only a piece of another throwaway bar story whose plot you no longer remember, but each time you greet Ignacio you are reminded of this proclamation. It was a magnificent thing to say and you admire him for his self-knowledge.

  His coat and shirt are pressed, his shoes shined, his bald head buffed and bright, and his mustache trimmed to fine points—Ignacio is terrifically vain. He has fashioned a pair of pants from heavy leather and adorned them with patches of his own design: Horseshoes, steer heads, shooting stars, and moonbeams. The pants lace up in the back and you wonder whose job it is to help him tie off the garment. Pointing to the leather, you tell him he is bulletproof and he shakes his head. "Asshole-proof," he says. His laughter is like the barking of a dog.

  He is a world-class inventor of facts and you enjoy watching him improvise scenarios from a distant, fabricated past. To hear him tell it he has bedded numberless insatiable beauties in Europe, Asia, and North America, and physically humiliated any man who dared show him less than the utmost respect. He claims to have been a bullfighter in his youth and once showed you an old blurry snapshot of himself in full matador garb and cape, standing beside a just-killed bull in the center of a large arena, the ecstatic crowd at his back. You were momentarily impressed with the picture but he would not let you hold it and was suspiciously eager to put it away and later you wondered, was it your imagination or did his cape look more like a baby's blanket? And why were those men in the background rushing toward him? And was he wearing tennis shoes? He will never let you see the photo again, though you ask him every time you see him.

  There are certain patrons of the bar whose stories leave you feeling lonely, even bitter, but Ignacio's tales have a luminosity about them and you lean in to catch each word. You know he is a liar but there is something about the stories that seems plausible. He is, or was, open to greatness—there is potential greatness in his eyes—only he was never actually visited by the greatness and so he speaks of what his life would have been like if he had been. He is compulsive about the telling of the stories in that he understands no one believes him and yet he continues to invent and deliver them. Also it seems there is a part of him that listens to his own stories and anticipates their endings, some piece of his being disconnected from its rational core so that he becomes his own rapt audience.

  He paints in his spare time, finishing a canvas or two a year, a meager output for even the most relaxed weekend artist, but in his defense the paintings are exceedingly ambitious, if not in their subject matter then in their size, some of them measuring up to ten feet in length and six feet in height. They are pleasant to look at, if a little redundant—circles within circles within circles—but you get the feeling Ignacio is not interested in the finished product so much as the process of seeing a project through to its end. He brings in photos of the completed paintings (he is always posing at their side) and is careful not to let anyone touch them in case they should smudge the images. He moves down the line of regulars, holding the photos at eye level until the viewer sufficiently praises his efforts, and when there is no one else to show he returns the picture envelope to his coat's breast pocket and levels a stubby finger in your direction. Now, despite his doctor's explicit warnings, he will drink one glass of red house wine, and it will take him near an hour to finish and afterward he will not give up the glass but sniff it and lick at its rim.

  It is after one of these rare picture-sharing evenings that you ask Ignacio if he has ever worked on a smaller scale and he nods in the affirmative but is slow in elaborating and you see that he is inventing something. It takes some time to work it all out but in a moment he calls you back, and this is the story he tells you:

  Early one morning, ten summers past, he was prepping a large canvas in the backyard of his aunt's house. From his work area he could see the happenings on the sidewalk and he noticed a young girl peering through the gates to watch him. She was a beautiful little Hispanic girl, eight or nine years old, and he turned and smiled at her and called for her to come closer, but she was shy and afraid of his deep voice and she ran off. The next morning Ignacio saw she had returned, only this time she passed through the gates and across the property line, and again he greeted her, and again she fled, a routine that continued for a week or more, with the girl getting closer every day until finally she gathered her courage and approached Ignacio to tell him how curious his painting made her, and how much she looked forward to seeing its completion, and she wondered, did he have many other
paintings? And did they sell for a million dollars? And why did he paint only shapes and not "things"? And was he a very famous artist? The girl was full of questions, and Ignacio, touched by her innocence, answered them all and asked in turn about her family and life and religion, and her answers were always forthright and charming, and he was glad to be speaking with her, and she with him, and they became friends.

  Now she came by every day, pulling up a bucket (it came to be called her bucket) to watch the painting's progress and to talk with him about her days. Ignacio learned of a neighborhood boy whom she loved named Eddie, a rough boy with a cowlick who teased her and called her Ladybones because she was underweight. One day Eddie kissed her cheek, and she shrieked with wild joy and slipped from her bucket as she recounted the episode for Ignacio, but later Eddie kicked her in the stomach and she was heartsick and swore off love for a life devoted to art and the church. She became intent and serious about the painting and her eyes were unblinking and her chatter tapered off and months later when the painting was finished she cried because she didn't want her time with Ignacio to end or for the painting to be moved from its blocks. She wanted the painting for her own, and was inconsolable when she discovered Ignacio had a buyer lined up and that it would be shipped to New York City the very next day.