he sun slicing its way through the orange, stained and torn
window shade into the high-ceilinged room—which was really
only a half of a room from more glorious days—cast hints
and shadows telling all who would notice that it was long past
noon and no longer the forgiving morning. There was enough light
to dimly illuminate the musty room. The buckled, scuffed linoleum
floor was interrupted in the square expanse of the small space
by a bed, a dresser, a tilting table and a rusty, crusted sink
under which was evidence of countless water leaks and spills.
The bed was rumpled and empty, with the yellow-stained, sheetless
mattress lying bare, a lumped blanket by its side. There was
a faintly recognizable pillow, shrunken by the desperate fluids
of a thousand heads, stuffed between the wall and the top of
the headboardless bed.
The table by the window was covered with a dusty scum, which
was intermittently broken by several empty wine bottles and a
half-filled quart of vodka. There were multiple cigarette burns
on it as well as an ashtray heaped to overflowing with butts.
To one side of the table was a bureau with four drawers, all
partially open. An old and faded seabag could be seen in the
lowest one. The top of this dresser stood in stark contrast to
the rest of the room—it was free of dust. Neatly arranged
on it was a cream-colored bottle of Old Spice, a barely discernible
black and white photo of a poorly-illuminated young woman standing
before a microphone, a battered, small cassette tape player,
yellow and tattered newspaper articles, arranged for posterity
as if they had not been arranged thusly in a hundred other rooms.
Frozen over the sink and reflected in, but not looking into,
the mirror was an old, thin man. It was not apparent whether
he was awake and bracing himself with both hands on it, looking
down into the inviting chasm, or if he was posed in some life-learned
protective stance, waiting to gather his wits and strength to
decide what it was he wanted to do next.
From the back, he was tall and thin. He had narrow shoulders
with spindly arms disappearing in front of him. His head was
lowered, scruffy hair covering most of his nape. A narrow lower
thorax belied what would be so painfully apparent from a side
view.
And profiled, a stricken, almost kindly face seemed to be gazing
over a protuberant belly into the depths of the sink. His spine
and buttocks were devoid of musculature, such that there was
a straight fall line from his neck to the floor. It was an utter
defiance of gravity for his wrinkled trousers to remain on him.
And he did not move. Tenacious spittle was a stalactite from
his gray, stubbled chin. It dangled down, seeking the gravitational
beckoning of the myriad other secretions in and around the sink.
Slowly, George turned at the waist, toward the window. He shuffled
over to it and raised the torn shade, squinting into the sudden
brightness. With an empty gaze, he took in the view before him.
Just below was the top of the faded neon sign blinking—Havana
Club. Across and to both sides were the upper stories of various
buildings. In this catchall part of town, the bottom floors were
shabby hotels, bars, diners and vacant stores and offices. Above
them were the hundreds of rooms, replicas of the one George was
standing in. These served the purposes of the lonely or the destitute
or the half-hour lovers or the fugitives. And above all this
was the bright blueness of the late afternoon Wasatch sky that
was doing its best to neutralize the squalor below.
Dropping the shade, he uttered his first words of the day and,
if it was a normal day for him, probably his last, “I got
through last night’s shift, and now I have forever until
tonight’s.” The stark room offered him no response.
Moving slowly back from the window, George picked up the tape
recorder and set it down on the table, causing the bottles to
clink as they were pushed aside to make room. He sat in a squeaky
chair that rocked on uneven legs. He leaned slightly forward
so his face was about even with the recorder. After a moment,
he pushed the ‘play’ button.
Nothing happened. George waited and after a while he followed
the course of the cord leading from the apparatus to its end
in a wall socket. He slowly turned back and looked intently at
the recorder. He reached over it and grabbed the bottle of vodka
and took a long, burning pull on it, which left him red faced
and exhaling. He placed the bottle on the floor beside the chair
and stared once again at the recorder. Then he pushed the ‘eject’ button.
From the recorder, he pulled a very worn cassette and brought
it close to his eyes. All the tape was on the right side of it.
He paused, to look at the faded title—The Best of Dawn.
George ratcheted his head around to contemplate for a moment
the old Polaroid photo on the dresser and pondered briefly the
paradox of his never being able to keep anything for very long
except this thirty year old tape of a temporarily successful
and now long forgotten musical phenomenon, and the only love
in his loveless life.
After turning the tape around and replacing it in the recorder,
but before pushing the button that always obliterated these intervening
thirty years, George reached down without looking, groped for
and found the vodka bottle. He brought it to about forehead height
and began a series of slow, excruciatingly steady, almost continuous
swallows of the fiery liquid. He lowered the bottle onto his
lap and his clasp on it became desperately white-knuckled as
he pushed the magic ‘play’ button with his other
hand.
He leaned against the chairback and turned his scarred face
with its handsome, scraggly edges and its twitching left eyelid
up towards the peeling, stained ceiling and he saw her again.
He was back with her in the Saber Club where all these journeys
began and ended and where part of him began and ended. He closed
his eyes and absorbed the voice and the instruments that now
surrounded him from the battered, chipped plastic box.
The music wafted him into the warm little barn with the fine
meals and the armagnac and her. Then, he was holding her in his
arms, they were dancing. Now he was singing one of her songs
as he trotted down the wide corridors of the medical center.
Then, he was diving far to his left to return a difficult tennis
stroke and he managed to turn to see her ecstatic face over the
net as she contemplated her answering move. For a while it became
difficult to hear her music as he became engrossed with the last
few steps to attain the apex of a cloud-rimmed peak, but as he
reached back and extended his hand to hers, her music, once again,
pervaded all.
Then the music from the plastic box ceased, and his mind became
again a roiling, debris-laden spillway.
t was nighttime and black
in the room. Slowly, enough reflected light came in through
the window so its interior could just
be made out. George was standing in the dead center of the
room. Not standing exactly, but sort of shuffling in place.
Only with great difficulty was it apparent that even this
was not true—his place was ever so slightly changing, centimeter
by centimeter. And while he was doing this, almost imperceptibly,
except over a long period of time, he was turning in a nearly
motionless circle.
He was dancing.
In his hand was clutched a dry and long empty bottle. Though
his eyes were closed, in the ten minutes, or so, that it took
him to revolve to the position where the light from outside reflected
off his face, crooked, scar-guided trails of tears could be seen
glistening down each cheek and dropping off to continue their
rivulets in an absorbent pattern on the front of his chest.
he
loud thumping on the door had been going on for five minutes.
“I know you’re in there, George! Get your ass up!”
More crashing blows on the door, “It’s past three.
The joint’s been closed an hour and it’s got to be
cleaned, for Christ’s sake!”
There was a moment or two of expectant silence.
“I can’t do this every night. The john in the women’s
room is plugged again. You got to pull out them tampaxes!”
More crashes, more silence. “Okay, George, if you’re
not downstairs in five minutes, you’re fired! That means
outta this room, too.”
After the banging stopped and the footsteps disappeared down
the echoing, wooden staircase, the door to George’s room
slowly opened and through it edged utter defeat in the form of
an old man moving his limbs in the fashion of a series of spinal
reflexes—stiff, repetitive and without seeming to be related
to anything else. Like a stooped shadow, he moved deliberately
down the rattling steps and into a small room from which he emerged
pushing a mop bucket with a mop in one hand and dragging a large
push broom with the other.
As he entered the large barroom of the Havana Club, a man with
a cigar stuck in the side of his mouth and counting stacks of
coins and bills on the back bar briefly glanced up. “It’s
about time, Georgie, old boy. Do we have to go through this every
damn night?”
As if dismissing George, the heavy-set, grim faced man turned
back to his counting. He was much younger than George, but there
was no hint of deference in his voice.
“We had a hell of a night again, George. Police were here
twice. And you know what kind of fights those were.”
George, with a hollow, straight smile, looked at the back of
the man’s fat neck. It was thinly covered with fine, straight
hair.
“The joint’s a real mess tonight. But I got you. “
The gruff face looked up again at his janitor. His smooth cheekbones
were ringed with creamy cigar smoke. There was something vaguely
appreciative in his successful brown eyes as he said, “You’re
a real lush, but the best clean up man I’ve ever had—ever.”
George turned to face the gymnasium-sized emptiness of the Havana
Club. He could almost see the grinning, bronzed face of the man
picking himself up after tipping over the bar stool that George
was now righting. The tinny cowboy music could still almost be
heard careening off the walls and through the smoke stench that
was here yet, and always would be. He winced slightly at the
pain that must have come from the letting of the blood that,
coagulated now, glued the trodden piece of newspaper to the floor,
the newspaper that tore in George’s hand as he stooped
to pick it up. As always, there were a dozen or so smoldering
stubs of various things smoking on the floor, in empty beer cans,
bottles and glasses, and in the heaped up ashtrays.
The flotsam and jetsam of an evening in the Havana Club washed
up to and around George as he made his way along the scarred,
stained and cigarette-burned bar, past the foulness of the spittoons
and their gelatinous contents, past the syrupy and ash-covered
tables, the thrice filled and twice overturned refuse baskets,
into the bathrooms of ejection and dejection with their lockless
doors, paperless stalls, mirrors that used to be, walls with
bits of hair still stuck to them with smudges of that red body
glue—blood—and completely covered with the loathsome,
crude drawings, scratchings and carvings of the poetically depraved,
with all here overwhelmed by the sweet, sick stench of beer that
had almost made it to urine.
The first hint of predawn was beginning as George bent over
the commode in the women’s room and began the process of
unclogging it.
[END]
© 2004 Art Duff - Contributor's
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