Made to Break (12 page)

“Drinks are on me,” I told my little he-she as I rattled my glass of ice.

“Don't go!” it said. “Cammy don't want nothing but you!”

“Worry not, my sweet,” I said, sounding like some dickweed Marlow, and bolted.

“You've got to help me,” I told Alex.

“Easy now, mate, easy.”

The bastard was sporting a boutonniere, of all things, a carnation garishly red. He adjusted this now with stoned aplomb and stepped back to take me in. Between the X and my terror, my peepers had gone Marty Feldman. From every little cranny nodules of color grotesquely pulsed, and the odor of booze, goddamn, the joint was packed with the stuff to the gills, manhattans and martinis and margaritas and woo woos, and wallbangers and grey hounds and midoris and macs—booze and more booze wherever I turned—and the gut-deep bass and calliope of synths, no horn or string could shape such sound, like the syncopated wailings of alien babies and alien dogs, and the cigarettes and cigars, the perfume and dope and hair spray and mints jostled with the stench of so many wet wool coats—well, stab me in my eyes, the works made me zany, I was itches and sweat, a guy built to spill, no shit, and Alex had not a hint or clue. From a fancy silver case dense with glyptics and birds he selected a smoke and tapped it out and lit it. Then he sat there inhaling the thing like a man who loves cheese, very sauve, very dramatic, his watery eyes aglimmer through the fuzz.

“What's the problem, mate?” he said.

“I am in deep doo-doo, man, as in up to my neck.”

“You said that.”

“I mean
serious
.” It took everything I had to keep from looking at Cammy the Man. “This thing,” I said. “It's after me.”

Alex puffed out a line of smoke-rings and surveyed the room. “I see a lot of blokes doing their best to snare a little piece running round here. Where's these things?”

“It's not a thing, Alex. It's a ghoul.”

“Now it's a ghoul.”

“No,” I said. “Not a ghoul. A dude.” Alex kept up with the fancy inhalations and watery stare. “In drag,” I said.

“Now we're getting somewhere.” This was all so extremely amusing to him, just another whacked-out night in the city.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don't look now.” Cammy had been staring at me, licking her filthy hungry chops as she wriggled and spun. “The tiny thing with the black wig,” I said. “With the halter top with sequins?”

“You've got to be kidding,” Alex said, his eyes grown noticeably wetter. “If that's a bloke, I am Sherilyn Fenn.”

By now my horror had all but caved to anger. I was near ready to slap this guy. “I'm telling you, man,” I practically wheezed.

Alex laid his hand on my shoulder and drew me near. “AJ,” he said. “What are you on?”

“Nothing,” I said, and studied my feet.

“Nothing, eh? How come nothing's never got my orbs looking like a set of mum's best chiner saucers then?”

“Just a little X is all,” I said. “Hardly any.”

“A bit of the X, he says.” At this point the room was whirling. Alex narrowed his eyes. The guy reminded me of James Bond, early Connery even, say from
Dr. No
. “Here's what I'd do if I were you,” he said, patronizing as hell. “Go right back over to that little honey and tell her you're in love. Then take her back home and give her a shank on the kitchen table.” He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me round. “Look at her,” he said. “She's a bloody beauty, mate. Forget you're tripping and step to it.”

“That bloody beauty, as you call it,” I said, snatching him up by the collar, “has got a cock the size of your kangaroo-spanking arm.” Malapropos,
really
, Cammy now decided to shimmy her way over. “Are you going to help me out,” I said, “or what?”

“Sure, mate,” Alex said, baffled. “Sure.”

“I don't care what you say just so long as you say it.”

Cammy rubbed my ass. “When you come back, sugar?” she said. “I miss you.”

“Cammy. I want you to meet my good friend, Alex.”

“He handsome, too,” she said.

“Hello, love,” Alex said in that exceptionally Aussie way of his. He extended his fancy case but Cammy waved him off. “Listen,” Alex said. “Do you think I could keep your beau for just another minute or two? We've been discussing a bit of business here, and we're just about concluded.”

“I'm sorry,” I said to Cammy. “I almost forgot about that drink.”

“No drink,” she said. “Just dance.” She licked her filthy chops and took my hands, pulling me toward the floor. “Come dance me, sugar. Come.”

“Just give me two shakes of the old lamb's tail,” I said.

Cammy must've been as high as the rest, else she would've seen me for the fool I was. Her face assumed a corny pout. “You make me so sad,” she said.

“I promise you, love,” said Alex. “I'll have your chap back in a New York minute.” He put his hand on my shoulder and headed toward the bar. “We'll just be right over here,” he said, and smiled yellowly. We eased away at a steady pace until Cammy had returned to the floor. Then we broke into a trot.

“The least you could do,” Alex said, seeing I'd already forgotten him in my rush toward the exit, “is offer the bloke who saved your arse a drink.”

I handed him a fiver. “I don't want to take any chances,” I said.

And now the coat check girl was giving me grief. It turns out I'd lost the ticket for my leather.

“Last time I gave a coat back without a ticket,” she said, “I nearly got canned.”

She had a web of tribal-style ink creeping from beneath the collar of her vintage coat, some Channel cut with a damask print. She worried her hands on the counter before her, smoothing out a piece of invisible cloth.

If I hung around too long, Alex's slippery doings might go to waste. My little fiend could materialize anytime now,
slurp, slurp
.

“Maybe I could tell you what it looks like,” I said. The girl paged through a magazine. “I can tell you what's in it,” I said. “Whatever you want.” She kept up with this dumb act until pretty soon a sleek Cleopatra-type gal approached. Of course she had
her
ticket. The check girl disappeared behind a rack and returned a minute later with a leopard fur coat. “Don't you remember me giving it to you?” I said.

“You give me a ticket,” she said, “I get your jacket.
Capiche
?”

If the word
capiche
was bad enough from the mouth of a guy, it was ten times worse from the mouth of some poseur of a girl making six bucks an hour. “But what,” I said, “if I never find my ticket?”

The girl shrugged. “What if?”

I wanted my coat, but out even more. Cammy hadn't surfaced. I gave the room a final sweep, then checked my pockets. Turns out the fiver I'd slapped on Alex was the last of its kind. All told, I had some matches with a phone-sex girl, a smattering of lint balls, and $2.50 in change, pennies included. That at least would get me a pack of smokes. If nothing else I could hunker down against some warehouse to wait for the return of Bruno and Co.

Gillian the Peachy Puff girl appeared like a nicotine angel. She laid a hand across my wrist as I began to count my change.

“Stop it, AJ,” she said. “Before I get embarrassed.” I always
did like her cutesy hat and those creamy thighs jacked up on stilettos. She handed me a pack of Camel Lights. “It'll be our little secret,” she said, and I could've married the girl on the spot.

“I'll tell you all about it over coffee someday,” I said.

Her smile hadn't budged. “If it's anything like the rest of your stories, I'll be getting off cheap.”

“It's better,” I said.

“You watch out,” she said.

Sweet, sweet girl! She pecked me on the cheek and wobbled through the crowd. I tore out a smoke and clottered past a couple of bouncers, a gang of jeans-and-leather tough boys, two dykes creaming uglies in the photo booth. Some girl I'd dumped because of her shit-for-breath squealed my way, but I rolled through, faker of oblivion. The doorway was there, the night cheered me on.

Cattycorner from me a Dashiell Hammett lamp sprayed its glow onto the cab beneath it, a Luxor it looked like through rain, beige and purple as it was. Cars and bikes lined both sides of the street, north to south, and yet for the life of me, I couldn't spot a single crummy soul. No way I was going to stand around waiting for Cammy to show her darling face. Fifteen minutes: if Bruno hadn't appeared by then, I'd split like a banana.

The rain came down in mantles. The street looked like a mirror or pool. A line of traffic signals, steadily diminishing, cycled through their colors until far away, ten or twelve blocks, they merged into that familiar anonymity of concrete, wire, and fog. I took a breath and stepped out from my niche. The storm came down, thick with the odors not just of rain on concrete and paint and metal and wood, but of rain on scum, as well, breaking through that crust of dog-day vomit, and piss and poop and oil. A garbage truck drew into a phalanx of dumpsters with its tusk-like prongs. Out near the bay a klaxon lowed. At first it felt
good, the cool and the wet. For one slippery moment I seemed to've been blessed with clarity. The world was truly gorgeous! The world had become a special place! But soon I was shivering, and I saw the streets for what they'd been, rows of cars like great sleepy turtles, pigeons huddled along the warehouse sills, all hyper-graffiti and brick. The billboards over the highway, eerie with faces beaming at banks and cars. The strands of mist about them. The endlessly strobing lights.

A white stretch limo inched toward the club. When finally it stopped before me, the last tinted window in a row of tinted windows began to disappear, until Bruno with his chill-blue eyes gazed dopily out.

“Me and Andre,” he said, nervously it seemed, for his loss of words at my new look, or for ditching me, I couldn't tell, “were saying how you'd probably busted a nut or two by now.”

“Wouldn't you and Andre like to know.”

Andre was kicking it regal as a Space Age potentate. A ginormous mirror lay across his lap, covered with a mound of wings. “Hop in, brother,” he said, “and spill your woes.”

We rolled on down to another club, monotonous and droll. We did this three more times before I had Andre's driver leave me at my flat on Clinton Park. The rain had ceased, the sun plodding up the East Bay clouds.

At that time I was living with Lucille and a dude named Roper, George, that is, a fattish plucker of banjoes who worked in the mailroom for a stock-broking firm up on California Street. First thing he did each night when he got home in his thrift-store suit was change it for his tie-dye and spin some Dead or other such crap, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or Joplin, or maybe even Dylan's whiney ass. But always it was LPs, and that's because Roper, aspiring Luddite that he was, had long ago made a point to boycott advancing tech, CDs, too, no doubt. Lover of bongs
packed with green and steins full of lukewarm Guinness, he was, more or less, a grody son of a bitch.

I crept up the stairs and squatted on the throne to empty out my day's worth of living. A rueful song slippery with clarinets and trumpets had seeped in by way of the neighbors. It made me think of
La Dolce Vita
, that scene where Marcello and his old man are sitting drunk with Paparazzo, watching a carpet of balloons follow the clown once he nods their way. The only thing I wanted now was exceeding dreams. But just as I was masking the proof of my deed with a squirt of the trusty freshener, I heard a low giggle, and then a voice in turn. Thinking these to've hatched from the street, I slithered nearer that way and heard them again, a crazy mix of childish giggle and executioner snarl. They, whoever, were in Lucille's room. I stepped softly now, lest the floorboards creak. This guy, whoever, made it
El Numero Cinco
for the girl in two days under a fortnight. I placed my ear to the door.

“Mommy wants Daddy to lick her jam jar,” Lucille said. The man's voice grumbled something I couldn't get. “Come on, Daddy,” she said, her words both vampy and firm, “lick my jam jar.”

“Not this jam jar,” said the man.

Holy holey
, I thought,
it's Roper!
Now I'd never cared what Lucille banged, but this surpassed all bounds. It wasn't so much her shanking eight million dudes that did me in—I'd coped with that plenty—but of her shanking Roper in particular, in secret, no less, after she'd sworn to the world till her face ran blue he was so grotesque she wouldn't kiss him with a taze. The image of Roper's hairy ass jiggling round Lucille, a-pumping and a-groaning like the porker he was, well, it about drove me to the edge.

With my ear to the door, I couldn't help but see the painting
Lucille had hung on the wall beside it. A naked woman lay on a plain, her neck inhumanly bent. And though her face held enough of grief, its grimace revealed some pleasure, too, a thin, canine joy. But it was her eyes that conveyed the bulk of this sense. They'd rolled up in Spartan bliss, half angel, half wolf. Her face, still scarier, showed Lucille's twenty years down the line, the younger in the old, defeated and sad, and the once-f breasts like moribund flowers, and the bulge of stomach, and the veins in the pit behind the knee, and the clefts of her pappy ankles. Roper's voice grumbled on, louder than before.