Dastardly Read online

DASTARDLY

  Lorraine Ray

  Copyright 2016 Lorraine Ray

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rodney hugs his beer bottle against his chest. This is his usual drinking posture. You get to know how people like to sit and drink when you sit and drink with them as much as Rod and I have over the years. Rodney likes his beer bottle tucked close to his ribs. It’s as if he thinks somebody’s gonna snatch it away and he has to protect it. Not me; I mean I’m not gonna snatch his beer, because I’ve got my salty sea, my margarita. Number two, or make that three. Okay, I admit it; I’ve lost track. I’m nervous. Tonight I’m planning to tell Rod something hella important.

  I’m observing Rod’s drinking habits while a blue streetcar goes screeching by. Outside on Fourth Avenue. A writer can observe several things simultaneously and note them even when he has something important to say and there’s horrible noise around him. For example, NBA highlights blast from a TV mounted in one high corner, and Doris Day and Rock Hudson yuk-it-up on the other TV in another corner. They’re in some obnoxious 50s fable. Do I think they have enough TVs in this damn bar? Yep, hella TVs. Then something of interest, but not the way it used to be. Someone female and super sexy walks in the door sans a gentleman at her side. Black jacket over a pink strapless dress. Woohoo. And Rod listens, halfheartedly, to the end of my latest terror tale. Yes, he’s seen the same female. This is probably a really bad time for what I’m planning in a minute.

  “Pow! Count Olaf cackles like a fiend and throws off his Santa Claus disguise, soaring into the sky, and this is where things get really exciting, and he does his best damn vampire loop-de-loop up there in the stars.” I say all this while shooting my arm out dramatically and swooping it toward Rod. Got to get his mind back on my story.

  People seated across from us at the horseshoe-shaped bar on a Friday night in January let their eyes linger on me longer than anyone would consider courteous. I wave at them.

  “The count’s black cape flutters in the desert wind,” I continue. My freckled hand twitches and quivers as Rod frowns at it. Jeez, my hand really is freckled. “Below him, the corpses of soldiers sprawl across the parade ground. The corpses of these soldier dudes are littered all over the place just like it’s infested with corpses, you know? A guy that’s dead hangs on a cannon. Blech. One is all crumpled up at the base of a ladder. Ugh. Here and there, there and here. The total number of dead are practically numberless in number…” I finish these last words and close my eyes. My arm still hovers in the air and the other hand fumbles about on the bar until it’s able to convey my sloshy lime green margarita to my lips. I drink copiously. Lovely stuff.

  “Vig,” Rodney sighs, “what you’ve got there is another damn vampire story.” Rodney likes to dis me. He seems to think that’s his purpose in life. I’m not really sure why I put up with it. “I thought you were done sticking vampires in every story. It’s becoming a cliché with you!”

  “Nope. I’m not done with vampires. I have barely begun to write vampires!” I open my eyes and say this, imitating John Paul Jones. My hand rests for a moment on the knee of my black jeans and then I gesture toward a napkin dispenser and some empty glasses. “Imagine a blood-drained body here, another body there. Lots of drained people draped around the fort. I need a word—”

  Rodney rolls his eyes. He teaches English and he’s not very patient with my inadequate vocabulary. “Slaughter. That’s the word you want. Like general mayhem and crap.” Rod tweaks his barstool so he faces me, and the cute girl, I might add, not that I’m offended. She’s somewhere over my shoulder. About five guys swarming her.

  “Yep. That’s useful. Thanks. ‘Everywhere slaughter…um?’”

  Rod sighs. “Reigned? Showed its ugly face?”

  “What? How would slaughter have a face, Rod? Ah, no. I’ll think of something later.”

  “Well,” says Rod, “make it a boffo ending.” Rod puts the beer bottle to his lips and tilts it to the ceiling.

  “Thank you. I shall, douchey.”

  “Get right on it. Write it right away.” Rod barks. Besides chastising me, Rod likes to order me around.

  “I shall.” I hate it when he starts ordering me around about writing though! This shuts me down. I don’t even want to tell him now what I was planning on telling him. It’s a disastrous idea! Tell Rod? What was I thinking? He’s not the right person to tell.

  The hands on a neon clock grind out the last minutes until midnight. When am I going to say it? I know I want to say it. I came out tonight to say it!

  Balls at the pool table clack and the vintage Doris Day movie ends with her singing in a pink negligee. Smokers flee the bar for the confines of an outdoor patio. No doubt they are sharing a few snide remarks about us, the two weird, inked patrons, who are not Empress Bar regulars and who remain on our stools, engrossed in our conversation. The blonde dude, me, somebody probably says, told a ridiculous tale about a vampire dressed as Santa battling soldiers at a western fort on Christmas Eve.

  I’m happy these patrons leave. It’s a prime moment when I sense an opening and turn toward Rod. I’m gonna struggle with admitting what’s been on his mind all night. “Sorry you didn’t like that story. Um, well, there’s something new I wanted to tell you anyway. Something besides a story.”

  “Good. No more vampires please.”

  “Yeah. So there’s this new thing, um, which I wanted to tell you about. It’s something new for me cuz I never thought it would happen. You might be the person who can advise me…I don’t know how to say it. Prepare for a shock.” The minute I finish speaking I regret it. What I’m planning to say would probably be better left inside my head, or maybe I should say left inside my heart, but anyway it should probably remain my own business. I don’t have the right kind of relationship with Rod, or anyone for that matter, to discuss such a thing, and what does it mean to know I don’t have the right kind of relationship with anyone for this? Clearly it means I’m a fucking failure; at least in the Interpersonal Relationship Department, Floor 3B, Room 9. I know I don’t have the kind of friendship in which I can openly blab about love with Rod. So what am I doing?

  “Go ahead, bro,” says Rod. “I’m listening.” Rodney’s puffy face, which resembles a perturbed otter, turns to me and he tries putting his hands in the pockets of his bright orange Chubbie shorts. When they wouldn’t fit, he brings them back to the bar and adjusts the cocktail napkin. He senses I’m going to say something hella weird, and he’s right. “Hit me with it.”

  “Oh, crap. I don’t know… it’s pretty damn…I don’t know…horrible or something. Blech.” I shiver and the creepy clown head on the front of my T-shirt winks and grimaces. Okay, I’m overplaying it, but it’s partially true that what I’m feeling is revulsion, but I don’t know why. The other part, strangely enough, has to be fascination. Or anticipation. Or rapture. What’s gonna be his take on this business? What will Rodney think?

  “Have you murdered someone?”

  “No. Um, okay. Here goes. Marsha, Marsha happens to be crushing on me. Uh, she loves me.” It makes me feel so fucking strange to hear those words coming out of my mouth! Have I said them before about other women? Sure, I guess. The minute I say them I want to take them back, but at the same time it sounds marvelous to hear them aloud. And I guess I have told people that a person loved me, but if I have, I can’t remember a fucking thing about it. It’s a strange thing to do, but being drunk is making it easier.

  Rodney draws back from me and raises his bushy brows in horror. “Whaaaat? Marsha? Loves who? Are you delusional again? Did you get some peyote from that girl with the greenhouse job?”

  That peyote crap once more! He’s obsessed with this greenhouse girl I once hooked up with. I sweep a section of my long blonde hair behind one ear. Tonight I’m
sporting skull rings and hunks of turquoise on my fingers. The turquoise rings are a new thing. Rather fun. I direct my gray eyes at my friend. Rod has mentioned this girl from the greenhouse who was into drugs so many times I’m fed up with it. The truth is Rodney’s always trying to horn in on my girlfriends! “I wish you’d drop the fascination with the girl from the greenhouse. And I don’t plan to give you her number, by the way. And if I told you that she asked me to do anything indecent with a plant, I regret it, and it was a dirty lie. No such thing happened. What I said was ‘I think Marsha loves me.’ She just happens to practically love me. Practically. I know it’s astonishing, but she’s gone mad. For little old me. She’s obsessed with me. And I thought you’d say I was crazy.” I finish my margarita quickly after I offer this for his consideration. The more times I mention Marsha loving me, the better I feel.

  “Yeah, well, you thought right. You’re crazy. She doesn’t love you.” Rod looks down from the barstool at his deck shoes without socks. He’s paddling them in the air like an idiot. “I’m not surprised if you’re going crazy and if you’re fixated on Marsha. She’s been looking hot recently to me, too.”

  This news! Stunning me—and horrifying me. I now wish I was dead. I wish I hadn’t mentioned anything about Marsha. These are not facts I care to hear. When had Rodney noticed Marsha and why is he claiming the love attraction is flowing from me to her? “Okay, uh, let me tell you the whole thing happens to be fucking awkward for me. And I thought why not toss it about, bounce it off the wall, with my oldest friend. I should have known you’d be a douche about it. I’m not asking for your opinion of Marsha. I’m telling you she’s in love with me, not the other way around, and for what it’s worth I’ve got to be a gentleman and stop this madness, and I don’t know how to nip it in the bud. She’s got to stop caring for someone like me; I’d be terrible for her!”

  “And I don’t know how to tell you this—” Rod begins.

  “Yeah?”

  “—except to come right out with the fucking truth. You, sir, are correct. You are the most fucking obnoxious tool I’ve ever known. Everybody knows it for a fact. Jeez. And you lie. And you’re not good-looking. If Marsha humors you at all, it’s because you’ve got one good quality which is you’re a reliable babysitter for Bailey. She appreciates you for being a good, reliable babysitter. That’s it. There isn’t anything else. Everybody knows you’re a tool. Marsha especially.”

  A crowd reappears at the other side of the horseshoe bar. They shout and laugh at some dude’s late show. I can’t even recognize the host. I pull myself up on my barstool. “Everybody knows no such thing as my being an obnoxious tool who’s unattractive to women. I play regularly with many Little Miss Hotnesses. Witness that delectable young female who was drooling over me only a half hour ago. I know you were jealous.” I smirk, hopefully triumphantly, but that is very hard to manage when you’ve had three margaritas. Women do approach me more than Rod. That’s why Rod is giving me a hard time and trying to horn in on my girlfriends.

  Rodney snorts. “Well, the Little Miss Hotness you are referring to who just came by to talk to you, looked about fifty-two and had varicose veins. On her arms.”

  “Oh.”

  “Arms which also happened to have a lot of needle tracks and scabs dotting the veins.” Rodney says this while gesturing on his own arm and with his eyebrows rising with further disbelief that I didn’t notice anything about the woman. “She was hideous. That, my friend, is putting it kindly. I think she’s a regular here, so we might not be able to come back for a while now that she wants you so badly.”

  “You thought she wanted me. She seemed to like you better. And besides, obnoxious, my old dummy, is the personality trait which happens to be the most sought after personality by persons of the female persuasion. Speaking of personalities. Which I was.”

  “Ho ho!”

  “Speaking of personalities.” A vague unease alerts me to the fact that I might be repeating myself. I’m gonna have to go home soon; the bar bill is rising too quickly. This place is not as cheap as Rodney advertised and I’m slurring my words. It’s definitely time to leave and something about that bothers me. Did I ask to go home with Rodney? Did I come to Rodney’s house and walk to this damn expensive bar where I spilled my heart (I mean Marsha’s heart) and was humiliated? Yes, on reflection, I realize I had.

  “Pah! Women like obnoxious men? That’s your idea?” Rod dismisses my theory and finishes his beer. He signs to the bartender for another round for both of us. I think about cutting off this last drink, but then I give in to temptation.

  “Well, you may go ‘pah’ all you like, but let me tell you confidentially as a man of the world, women, women, also are so into these ear gauges and my little dragons,” I say, touching one of the fancy wooden dragons dangling from the hole of my ear gauge. I can feel the dragon begin waggling as though it’s a rocking horse.

  “Unbelievable,” says Rodney, raising his eyebrows.

  “Dragons, man. The tassels can’t get enough of em. You know? They like em and therefore they like me. It’s all those dumb fantasy books they read as kids.”

  “What the—”

  “And thrones and games and crap. That stuff, too. Dragons are like a key, a key to a woman’s bedroom and her heart, you know? You have to pretend to love dragons. Is that margarita mine?” I ask a passing waitress.

  “No,” she says, turning sharply away when I lunge at her drinks tray. Not a smart move. I could have upset all those drinks and been forced to pay for them. What am I doing?

  “Who thinks crap like that? Dragons in your ear gauges attract women who read fantasy?” Rod asks. “I mean besides a crazy fucker like you. I don’t even want to listen to you, but what’s making you think Marsha loves you? You’ve known each other for years. People don’t just suddenly reconsider each other like that.”

  “Ah! Now you want to know! What makes me think Marsha has developed a soft spot for me, you ask so inquisitively that it is fucking driving me crazy so shut up already and I’ll give you the answer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Very well. I knew you’d be interested eventually. I’ve been working it out all afternoon. I shall deliver the goods.” I feel happy to discuss the signs of love I’ve detected. These things have been bothering me and I want to get them off my chest, even with someone who is as big a douche as Rod.

  “Okay. Proceed, dumbass.”

  “The answer, my friend, happens to be subtle. Subtle. For many moons she’s been giving me things. Lots of things. Buying me drinks, for example.” I smile smugly.

  “Because you’re a drunk! And you never have enough to pay your bar bill! And she doesn’t want to get banned from her favorite places!”

  I frown. Ignoring this and continuing makes me the better man like the fucking superior man that I am possibly becoming. “And giving me a blanket when I said I was cold in my apartment. I only mentioned it in passing and she gave me a blanket.”

  “Uh…are you, are you talking about the Christmas blanket?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sheesh. She gave everyone blankets this year for Christmas for fuck’s sake! Every good friend she knew got a fancy-ass Pendleton blanket this Christmas! I went with her to the department store and helped her pick them out. We talked about it for weeks before we decided on Pendleton blankets. Yours was nothing special, douchebag. She had me pick yours myself. It was on sale at Hillards. Black Friday special. Ta-de-da. I was with her, with her when she bought it.”

  I consider this horrid fact for more than a whole, horrid moment. I hadn’t known that Marsha and Rod ever did anything together, especially buying Christmas presents. This news bothers me strangely. If I’m trying to get rid of Marsha, should this bug me? No, frankly, no. What else had I wanted to tell Rod? This blanket thing rattles me so badly I can’t remember the other incidents I thought prove Marsha loves me. “Um, well, baking me a cake for my last birthday! She had them put my name and twenty-seven on it, too
. That’s a case in point. That’s important. And she never did it before.” I point a finger at Rod and grin. “And I’ve got you there.”

  “I got one of those cakes! Every year she does that for me and about five other people, including other men,” says Rod. “I’m only surprised she never gave you one earlier.”

  Shit! I plow ahead. “It’s these creepy little things that she does for me. That’s what. That’s what she’s been doing and together they all add up to big creepiness which is telling me she’s obsessed with me, in love with me.”

  Rodney smirks. “Cweepy? I think I know what, or I should say who, is cweepy here.”

  I may be drunker than I think. “And,” I continue, “I detected her emotional interest and connection with me using my writer’s detective senses, and my ability to notice and record small details,” I burp, “of every situation like a fucking detective of details. Perhaps you have never realized that every emotion that passes in front of me happens to be fodder for the grist mill, my friend…”

  Rodney groans. “Fodder? For the grist mill? Why are you even thinking of a career in writing? You are the stup...”

  “Wait. Is that it? Is that what I meant? I think I got my obsolete sayings mixed up.” I slide my phone out of my back pocket. I begin swiping and cursing.

  “Dah? Ya thinks?”

  The bartender, snatching away the empties and the wet napkins, delivers Rodney’s beer and our tab. “Your margarita’s up next,” he says to me. “We’re a little behind on the barware. Soon as there’s a clean glass.” Tap, tap on the bar in front of me.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Well,” I continue to Rod, swiping and typing quickly on the screen of my phone, “I was always slightly lame at those idiom things. It’s a failing. You see, I do recognize my failings.”

  “Barely.”

  “I seem to get a kick out of getting idioms wrong. I’m googling that immed-jetly. Grist for the mill. Let me see….Sermon of Calvin Dumbass, 1585: “There is no lykelihoode that those thinges will bring gryst to the mill.’” I read my phone’s screen in a singsong English accent.

  “Thank you. Get something right, will ya?” says Rodney, downing his new beer aggressively.

  “Anyway, back to the point, in Marsha I happened to detect some small blurry tearing in both her eyes today.”

  “Rhinitis,” answers Rodney swiftly, placing the new beer on its napkin for a change. He does this when he’s going to tell me something even more smart-ass than usual! “She’s seeing a doctor about it. She wants European cures, not shots or pills. Europeans drink their allergy cures.”

  I stare at Rod. Since when has Rodney known stuff like that about Marsha? For how long has she been sharing health concerns and theories of how to get over allergies? European cures! She’s never mentioned those to me. I find this to be fucking depressing. “No, not an allergy sort of thing, smart ass, or a sneezing sort of thing, but a real emotional outlay of real emotions, a kinda welling up of personal things in those big baby blue eyes of hers when she handed me the money in actual hundred dollar bills across the counter at the middle school like I had to ask for, because Major Tight-Ass Fernandez does not want checks from me ever again, fuck him to hell. He has a deadline of four at the pharmacy tomorrow for me to bring in the cash and hand it to him personally or he was saying his ex-wife would evict me, but maybe he’s punking me; I can never tell.”

  “Probably not. I would think he’s not kidding. From the number of times you’ve been evicted from other apartment complexes, I want to tell you that it would be safe to assume he’s not punking you.”

  “He said this afternoon when I told him I had the money that he texted his ex-wife right then and there and told her to stop the eviction order going through. Oh hell, who cares?” I sigh and put the phone in my back pocket and get out my wallet.

  “Be forewarned. You can’t live with me. I can’t stand you for more than a few hours. Also, I’m very stressed about my teaching assignment this semester and tenure worries are a bitch right now and I can’t take your shit. Be forewarned.”

  “Whatever, dude. Anyway. Honestly I thought that the whole thing would end badly and Marsha would turn on me and rend me or something biblical. Instead I walked into her office and she forked over the fucking dough to me when I wanted it and needed it and in cash consisting of crisp hundred dollar bills, which I carried away in my wallet. ‘How’s a thousand dinero sounding, huh?’ I bragged to myself when I got past the school monitors and was dashing to my car. ‘You had no faith in yourself, dude. What a lame way to treat yourself and have no faith in what you can do.’ I know I’m awesome when I have to do something.”

  “One margarita,” says the bartender dully. The salt-rimmed glass sloshes through the air and lands on a new napkin in front of me.

  “Keep the change.” I hand the bartender fifty-four dollars to cover all our rounds. The annoying evening is rapidly drawing to an annoying close.

  “Oh, thank you kindly, sir,” says the bartender.

  “A thirty cent tip?” Rodney says in disgust, stopping the bartender long enough to glance at the tab. He pulls his wallet out of his jacket. “Here’s a five,” he says to the bartender who takes it with a smile and an “ahem” thrown in my direction.

  “Oh, you’re awesome,” Rod says drolly to me. “Cheap, but awesome.”

  “Yeah, well, raising a couple month’s rent was hella necessary or else I’d have been a homeless fuck squirreling away my sleeping bag under the interstate or burrowing into the bank of an arroyo for some shelter. But those tears which I saw in Marsha’s eyes (I did, dammit) were tears for me. That was no punk. Marsha knows not how to punk. Or Yoda talk. How to punk Marsha knows not. And it never happened before, her bawling like a baby, I mean.”

  “Maybe she was crying to think she was taking the money from Bailey? Have you ever thought of that, you jerk?” Rodney snatches up his new beer again and nearly drains it.

  I turn my face toward Rodney in what I hope is a scathing expression. ‘“Have I ever thought…’ Oh, that hurts me in a very, very sensitive place. You have wounded me…”

  “I hope so. What I said oughta wound you. For Christ’s sake, I thought you liked the kid.” Rodney emphasizes his disgust with me by spreading his arms in disbelief and swatting the air in front of him. This action sends Rod lurching on his barstool and he has to grab the edge of the bar to stay seated. The cute girl glances our way and giggles.

  “Of course. I do like her. She is very sweet and calls me her Uncle Viggy. Bailey is possibly the only nice thing in my life currently.” I surprise myself by saying that aloud to Rodney, because it’s something I barely acknowledge ever. Is it true? Yes, it feels very true to say that.

  “You’re killing me with this crap.”

  “She’s a very nice kid. I don’t want to think of myself stealing from mere infants, whom I have raised to be mere third graders, no matter what. Nor do I want to steal money from Marsha’s fund for her big dream of attending a ‘women only’ writers’ retreat in Boise.”

  “So why don’t you get off your ass and earn some money? Pay Marsha back. How ‘bout a second job, huh?”

  “A second job! Are you crazy? I can’t stand the one I have. No…I think it’s a very smart move of hers to try to get out of here when it’s 110 degrees and the asphalt is fucking melting under your flip-flops. I should live in a swimming pool all summer or go to Boise with her.”

  “Vig, somehow I don’t think she’s gonna invite you. And going on vacation? That’s gonna earn you a lot of money. You feel bad about stuff, but you don’t do anything about it. You are a fucking tool to take their money. And you took the money from her happily, didn’t you? You had no compunctions about robbing Bailey.”

  “Oh, that makes me feel like a twenty ton pile of ripe, stinking shit when I’m already depressed and mortified, frankly, mortified by all the non-results and failures I’ve endured from everything I’ve done recently, so to speak, and I don’t want to think
of her imagining that she was going to attend this grand writers’ retreat when now she isn’t because I took her precious saved-up savings. Ah, crap. The whole thing is crap.”

  “You said ‘I’ and ‘me’ about six fucking times in two sentences. All about you, isn’t it?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Can I ask something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What lie did you tell her to get the money?”

  “Oh, yeah? Moi? Lie?”

  Rodney persists. “Spit it out, douche monster.”

  “I may have mentioned a cough. A persistent cough.”

  “I knew it!” Rodney slams his palm on the bar. “You told her you had pneumonia. You did it again.”

  Oblivious to everything. I must become oblivious to everything. I slurp my margarita eagerly and come up from the salt rim to resume my conversation. “I did have a cough…it’s not my fault if she thought I was only released from the hospital. I’d disappeared with a certain Little Miss Hotness so she hadn’t heard from me…”

  “Oh my God. Don’t tell me this. Please, don’t go on. I can’t stand to hear these stories of your stupid affairs.” Rodney collapses onto his folded arms. His muffled voice repeats, “I can’t stand the way you profit from dishonesty.”

  “Marsha must have misunderstood me when I said I was with a nurse from St. Mary’s Hospital. And now let me consume my Caca Cocktail in peace.”

  “Haaaaa, ha ha. Sheesh.”

  “Rodney? Are you all right?”

  “Oh god. Yeah. Caca Cocktail?” Rodney still speaks from his collapsed position.

  “What? Why do I call it that? I like the amusing alliteration, and you seem to be saying I should feel like shit for what I did. Tequila offers a great gift from the Agave God above: oblivion. You have succeeded in making me feel like a piece of human refuse, but this Caca Cocktail will help me forget.”

  “You deserve it. Oh, you do.” Rodney comes up from his collapsed position on the bar long enough to say this. “I love women and I’ve been with plenty of them, but I never make up crazy lies to fool them. I have too much self-respect and you have none.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe I don’t have any self-respect. Anyway, you know, I’ve always wanted to use that expression, Caca Cocktail, in a novel on the first page or perhaps the second. I haven’t been able to think about how to use it in a vampire novel, but, ah ha! It came. Today. It struck my brain stem and the idea is amazing. And I’m getting more ideas from this marvelous briny sea, this margarita, right now. Let me go ahead and slurp it once more. A big gulp of my Caca Cocktail is warranted.”

  “Not another vampire. No, please, no.” Rodney sucks on his beer until the last dribble disappears.

  “When I thought of Caca Cocktail,” I explain, wiping my lips on a napkin after gulping an inch of my drink, “I was driving to work. ‘Hold it,’ I say to myself. ‘Pull this ratchet-ass carriage of yours to the side of the road and write that caca thing.’ Think I was barreling through the south side of town on 32nd or something and I listened to myself and I yanked the car to the fucking side of the road. Right there. Turns out I stopped in front of this teeny bungalow and this old lady wearing a mu-mu in her front yard thinks, (and you’ve got to see her the way I did with water flowing out of the hose and a steady stream of glares also flowing at me above her gritted teeth): ‘Motherfucker, stop your car in front of my precious pot of aphid-plagued gladiolas and my beautiful brick fifties southwestern ranch-style tiny bungalow with its large brick barbeque and open car port, will you?’ And I was thinking: ‘If I have to be arrested by this paranoid woman, so be it, but write that caca thing down right now! Use Caca Cocktail somewhere on the first fucking pages of some book of yours, because it’s so damn funny.’ So I wrote that in one of my notebooks.”

  “Aren’t you the most special little thing?” says Rodney in a lilting lisp.

  “Oh shut up,” I say, laughing, “But I had to think more, which is the case when you collect all this interesting crap and write it on slips of paper and in notebooks. So today I thought the way to use Caca Cocktail is have this dude leaving a bar late at night, you know, and texting someone, his girlfriend I decided, about feeling badly about something he did to her, maybe stealing her dough, and he’s going to drink a Caca Cocktail and he says it aloud in the alley and texts it to his girlfriend and this vampire who is lurking above, laughs at the alliterative joke, and leaps from the top of a tall adobe wall and Pow!, you know. He’s sucking his victim’s neck. And after the vampire is done the head of the guy sort of falls by the wayside, plop, rolls to the foot of some cactus because, you see, the vampire sucks his neck until it withers up next to nothing. Kind of all puckered up at the shoulder like the roots of a cactus, if you’ve ever seen them? I don’t know if that is too many cactuses in one scene….”

  “No, no, don’t fret about that. You can’t have too many cactuses. It’s brilliant,” says Rodney. “As an English teacher I can say that what you have there is brilliant.”

  “Yeah, you, compadre, are a person who gets the impact of images immed-jetly, which is why I keep you around. Well, the girlfriend texts back ‘Caca Cocktail, ha ha,’ to the headless body of her boyfriend. The headless body is still holding the phone, see? Boy, the readers will eat it up!”

  “Oh yeah.”

  That stops me. I appraise Rod coolly. “That’s your best comment? ‘Oh yeah?’ What is this now? What’s the problem? You wanted me to talk about, blah, blah, blah, you getting tenure at the junior college and cutting someone else off from a better office? Congratulations. You got the better office nearer the important people in the department and now you’ll have a better chance to get tenure and others will have a worse chance. However you did it, don’t feel guilty about it; don’t beat yourself up about what you did. The point is to learn from your mistakes, and if you walked all over somebody at work to get your fucking better office, as you told me you did, you’ve at least recognized the blatant nature of your own goddamned crappiness. And besides, it’s nothing compared to what I did to Marsha and Bailey. What’s done is done, said the cranky old philosopher who never did anything. On the way here tonight I was thinking, ‘tonight I shall have to drink a Caca Cocktail.’” I down my drink entirely.

  “Sometimes you truly make me sick,” Rodney says.

  “There are times when I doubt I’m as charming as I used to be.” At that, I’m rather amazed to discover my butt sliding off the barstool. And my damn feet hold me upright! Another triumph. And I told Rodney about Marsha, which was a terrible mistake in light of the fact that they are much more intimate than I’ve ever imagined. Bravo! Boy, what a screw-up. In my whole life, I’ve managed a lot of fucking screw-ups. Especially in the romance department.

  “Oh God, have mercy on me. I’m drunk and I’m going home and I remembered I offered you a place to stay tonight. I can’t take that back.” Rod slides off his barstool and stumbles toward the door. “Come on, buddy.” He tries to hug the cute girl, but she just giggles. Besides, the guys around her push him away.

  “Aren’t you a great dude, dude?” say I, following Rodney out and clamping one hand on my friend’s shoulder. We have a nice little dark stroll ahead of us through a few cold desert streets. Rod lives right behind Fourth Avenue. “Dude, why are you always wearing those hella weird shorts in January? I’m pretty sure they’ve gone out of style.”