Being Jesus and Other Tales of Failure
Last Night
Corvin Thomas
Plant was in the ground. He wasn't the last but he was mine, my victim. The others killed themselves. I killed Plant because I couldn't kill myself. He died for me. He became my drug Christ, my addiction crucifix. Plant died for my smack so that I might live to learn his suffering. I never did. But I drank a lot trying. I even tried to get fired. But that didn't work either.
I was hired with reservations. The boss knew I was a drinker. It's how I lost my last job. There were too many public displays to ignore, too many stories. I liked the reputation. I fostered it, played the working drunk, bought a lot of rounds. Until I was an unemployed drunk, which still didn't stop me. I just moved.
Not long after running through the poppy fields with Plant, I was dancing with mister termination again.
"You want to explain yourself," Mac asked. He sat with the other Mac. Two Macs, little boss, big boss, good guys compared to the peacock, my old boss. Big Mac knew the peacock, hated him and hired me to spite the bird, I gathered. Little Mac, or Supermac, was the brain, a recovering boozehound with a Memphis past. He knew computers and bad behavior, hated Elvis.
They didn't look stupid looking at me, just a couple of middle-aged men competing in hair loss and bellies who wanted to know what the fuck.
Of course, I couldn't tell them.
There was nothing innocent about showing your ass to someone who cuts you off, refuses to serve you another drop. There was nothing innocent about wrestling with the refusing man. There was nothing innocent about the threatening phone calls made from somewhere you can't remember.
Colson called the morning after.
"Charlie's pretty pissed," he said.
I was drenched before the next line.
"And he's going to call your boss."
For ten years I'd been a reporter, most of them drunk. I lived in little towns with big tolerance for the fall downs, the pass outs, the pissing in corners. I'd been locked up for public drunkenness, run over in parking lots, smacked in the face with pancakes. I'd been thrown out for throwing up, bounced for breaking bottles, eighty-sixed for doing dirty things in the toilet. They cut me off but they never cut me down. No one ever called my boss and I always paid by tab.
"I don't think I've ever seen Charlie this mad, man," Colson absolved himself by calling in the tip and dipping. It was his fault, this guilt, if guilt had a mother on crack.
The bar opened at noon and we were on our way. I remembered that much. It was my day off. Colson and a couple of his knuckleheads were throwing back, bitching about dishwashing, laughing about the shit sandwich Treble left on my doorstep the day before. He'd actually pooped on two slices of white bread, placed a pickle by the open face steamer and laid it out nice in a Styrofoam box.
Happy hour was a blur, people, places, faces and feces unboxed. There was talk, talk about getting more drugs, talk about guns, talk about a suicide that was made to look like a suicide but wasn't. Colson said it was the only thing interesting that happened at the party and everyone laughed. Even though he was serious. And that's when I laughed.
The car, the car shook. Colson was tug-of-warring with someone on the other side of his door, trying to rip him off. He showed his little gun.
"I got one of them, too, motherfucker!" the black guy backed off holding his underwear.
We drove away, no score. I didn't care. I didn't care about any of it. I'd be back in the same neighborhood doing a story on the same guy lying dead on the same spot, shot in the head by somebody else. I'd have the inside on the twin sins of empathy and apathy. I never tried to rise above. I never tried to be better. We were all in it together, all victims, buying and selling, surviving. I hated sounding like a hippy. I hated the condescending dead pusher jokes even more, unless they came from a pusher.
I wish I could blame my boozing on the imbalance, the idiots who report on the lives of the idiot savants, the upwardly mobile climbing the crooked spine of misfortune and loss and the guilt that comes with playing reporter, my guilt, anyway.
Selling out works up a thirst, though. And I sold out a long time ago.
"Television man," the knuckleheads greeted me back in the bar, dropping smiles when they saw the empty hands. The nickname was obvious. I didn't like it but it's what I did for a living. I was a man on television. I could just as easily have been "knock-on-the-door-of-a-mother-whose-little-girl-was-just-raped-and-mutilated-man" or "warning-people-about-bad-weather-man." It was all the same thing. I just happened to go to a cheap school, followed the breadcrumbs and learned how to put words with moving pictures. A drunk could do it. And I did. My friends just happened to chase other career opportunities with other nicknames.
Chicken boy and dishwater Dave worked for Charlie. Charlie owned a burrito joint, simple work with simple pay for the simple minded and lazy. It was popular with the girls because the boys from their favorite bands rolled their tortillas. The boys liked it because of the free beer, the endless after hours tap that primed practice.
Chicken boy looked like a chicken and worked over the poultry vat. Dishwater Dave was a chronic booze abuser who drank dishwater to prove it. But the restaurant made money. And Charlie was opening another, pasta.
Without drugs, we smoked weed, drank more, swallowed worms. Funds were fading with the sun and the bar stopped taking credit after too many nights like this. Someone said something and we were driving, rolling in Treble's truck, spitting at the sky until we were inside somewhere unfamiliar.
Noise, loud noise, there was a lot of noise.
"Hell, no!" It was a mantra.
Steam, faces in steam, mouths dripping noodles in a moving fun room, it was too bright, too many glasses breaking.
"Hell, no!" sounded like hello but no one was serving.
Pushing, pushing us back, pushing my back, someone had hands on me so I did the song and dance routine. Trays rattled, plates broke, bodies backed away from falling chairs, I was swinging at air, trying to fix my focus on a face.
"I am the television man," I wobbled arms akimbo. "And the television man wants drinks for his friends."
Cheers and chants, "television man, television man," I could hear them. It was a joke. I knew it was a joke. But I didn't know where we were performing, who was throwing us out.
"I don't give a fuck who you are," somebody said, a smear, a flash of face. "Get his ass out of here!"
"Your dick," I said, "in my ass."
Dropping my drawers, I simulated the receiving end of anal intercourse, the old butt fuck pantomime.
"Oh! Ouch, ouch!" I had my hands on a wall. "Not so hard."
I could feel the laughter inside and the rush of hands carrying me up and away.
Someone's room, Colson's place, everyone was wearing hats when I came to. Colson was talking on the phone with an Asian accent, hanging up, redialing. Bottles, there were always too many empty bottles on the tables and floors when the night fades to black and there is no more, no more.
What I couldn't recall, Colson filled in. Charlie made his call and it didn't look good. I needed the job. I needed to show it a little more respect. It was easy money and I abused it like a sobered up wife beater, hung over with sorry. It didn't demand much. And despite a moral conduct clause in the contract, a reporter's private life was given the benefit of the doubt as long as no one blew the whistle. I'd been lucky. I was pushing it. I knew it. I knew I needed to back off. I knew I probably wouldn't.
"This man said we have a serious public relations problem," Mac said. He knew the score. I wasn't busted for soliciting blowjobs in the park. I wasn't caught with my hands down a kid's shorts. I was a drunk. Mac knew that. He just needed to hear a story, something that soft-soaped the situation so he could call off the dogs of damage control and get back to worrying about his own job.
"Just a few boys getting too loud," I told him, revising the black out with a story about friends on the town who got a little too rowdy with one of their employers.
"It was all in fun," I said.
I tossed off the asshole pantomime as an exaggeration, a misinterpretation. His word against mine, it was a gamble.
The Macs huddled. I waited. They bought it.
"Three days suspension," Mac ruled, "without pay."
Supermac wasn't smiling but he wanted to. He knew bullshit when he smelled it.
There was a day game at the ballpark. I bought a ticket and sat alone. The beer man was a very handsome man. And the sun was bright for the first few innings.