At 5 a.m. the other two owners of the Shimmy Joy arrived. The glass pipe, its walls caked with alkaloid snowflakes, its smoldering brass screens dripping with Babylonian dreams, floated from hand to hand, jolting and frying medulla oblongatas and greedily scorching one pair of already scorched and scarlet lungs after the next. We babbled in exhaustive refrains like overcaffeinated housewives at a high school reunion: “...you know, I’ve always wanted to tell you what a great person I think you are ...” As the sun blossomed in the curtains the sense of fellowship began to drain. The conversation waned. I caught my waxy, inebriated image in the mirror. Oz yanked down the shades and glided into the kitchen to cook up some more.
I stumbled back to work at 5 p.m. like something dragged up from a lake: no sleep, not even time for a shower. I felt as if I’d traveled around the sun, like a bag of charcoal with legs. I had to get drunk to make it through. The customers broke in waves against the bar. I spilled drinks, dropped glasses, gave the wrong change. The owners didn’t care. They were freebasing over at Oz’s. About eleven o’clock, Charlene coasted imperially through the door and down through the crowd, nudging into the only open space at the end of the bar, the plastic buttons of the cigarette machine glowing red and green behind her. I was too wrecked to go down and say hello. I didn’t feel like listening to her anyway. She flared her nostrils at me.
Eventually she made her way down to my end and leaned into me for a kiss. I took in her scent, peanuts and ashes and Cherry Sucrets. As long as I was incapacitated and uninterested in being with her, as long as I could put into doubt her ability to attract, she would remain at the bar.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
I fixed her a drink, vodka and iced tea, with lemon. “Where were you last night?” I said.
“Oh,” she answered aloofly. “I went swimming.”
“Where?”
“At Gene’s,” she said. Gene was a bartender, who lived in a complex with an indoor pool. “There was a party there,” she said. “What about you?”
“I went to Oz’s.”
She set her hand on her hip. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I did. Four thirty in the morning. You were probably in the pool, drunk in your bikini.”
She wrinkled her face as if she’d just swallowed the lemon wedge in her drink. “Who all was there?”
“I have to get back to work,” I said, shoving away. “I’ll talk to you later.”
When the Shimmy Joy closed at two, I was embalmed, a flat EEG, not enough energy to pull on the cigarette dangling from my lips. Charlene lingered, closely monitoring all the women who smiled at or talked to me. I told her as she left that I would see her tomorrow, which meant that she would disappear for a week. If I really wanted to see her tomorrow I would’ve said, “It’s over between us, Charlene. I’ve started seeing someone else.”
I didn’t see Charlene for nine days. But I called her up twice and listened to the telephone ring. I imagined her apartment, crossword puzzle books on the couch, doilies draped over the television, empty Diet Coke cans, the portrait of Mother Cabrini on the wall above the dining room table. Two friends told me they had seen her several nights “swimming” at Gene’s. On Friday, after work, the one night I could usually count on her to show (at least for a few minutes to make sure I was still miserable), she was nowhere to be found. I found revenge in the form of a meaningless liaison named Gina Bonaventure, a Niagara University psychology major with a weakness for bartenders and whoopee powder.
The next night Charlene strolled into the Shimmy Joy late, drunk with her girlfriend, Pamela, who worked in a pharmacy. Pamela was broad shouldered with short bangs and big gums, and she dressed for her nights out barhopping as if she were stepping up to the podium to accept her Oscar for Best Actress. Charlene sidled up to the end of the bar. We kissed. I smelled Scotch in her hair.
“I’m toasted,” she said.
“Congratulations.”
“Don’t be snotty.”
“Been so long since I’ve seen you I almost forgot what you looked like. What are you having?”
“Two vodka and teas.”
“I’ll have a greyhound,” sniffed Pamela, regally raising her chin.
Charlene rummaged through her purse for a cigarette. “I heard you went out with Gina.”
I filled glasses with ice. “I heard you went swimming.”
She tossed her head. “Once.”
Pamela scowled at me. Like many of Charlene’s close drinking companions, Pamela disliked me.
Eager customers were beginning to lean over the bar through the gaps, holding up their empty glasses.
“I gotta go,” I said. “You be home later?”
She lit a cigarette and snapped out the flame. “I’ll be home.”
Pamela slashed my image to pieces with her eyelashes. Charlene looked off into an imaginary distance. The two women left before they’d finished their drinks.
Later that night Charlene was not home. I waited in front of her house in my car for an hour, looking up at the dark icy brown windows. Finally I left. I saw her car approaching from the other direction, but I didn’t bother to slow down or wave. I didn’t want to admit that it was over between us, that I had failed (again), that all the people who warned me were right, that my ability to make judgments was unchanged, that I had started over only to repeat every mistake I had ever made, that my life was not a long unlucky streak but a carefully and even beautifully tragic self-made design, that I was like Wayne Newton—maybe a different hotel, but the same show night after night.
Charlene lived in the LaSalle District, only two miles from Love Canal. In 1892 an entrepreneur named William T. Love had tried to construct a canal between the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, but abandoned the project with the arrival of the economic depression of 1893. Eventually the land was sold to a chemical firm named Hooker, who filled the chasm with an estimated 21,000 tons of chemical waste. In 1953, with the old canal packed to the brim, Hooker covered it with dirt and sold it off to the local Board of Education for a buck, not neglecting to include a clause that relieved them from any future liability incurred by the waste. An elementary school was erected on the site and the remaining land was sold to developers. Houses went up and hundreds of families moved in. It wasn’t long before 21,000 tons of noxious chemicals began bubbling up through the ground. Children burned their feet on the lawns, basements filled with strange gases. Miscarriage, birth defect, and cancer rates soared. The 60 Minutes crew raced to the scene and tumbled salivating out of their vans. In August of 1978, the state of New York declared a medical State of Emergency. Five days later, Jimmy Carter declared the Love Canal area a federal emergency. Two hundred thirty-nine families were evacuated; the neighborhood was closed down and sealed off.
I drove down to Love Canal that night. I often strolled these abandoned grounds to think. I felt at home here. No one bothered me. The old toxic ghost town was more silent and peaceful than any graveyard. There wasn’t the faintest sign of life, not a bug or a flower or a bird. My tracks through the virgin green moonlit snow marked the only traces of a living human soul. The mists crept low around the corners of the houses and the cold air reeked faintly of sauerkraut and chloroform. Before the poisons were discovered and the people moved out, this was a neighborhood much like the one I’d grown up in, with its trim little houses, square little lawns. Swing sets. Clotheslines. I passed a sign that said DEAF CHILD AREA. I saw a tricycle covered with snow in a driveway. The wind moaned and the cloudveiled moon shone down through the dead, ice-crusted trees. I listened —children screaming, barbecues blazing, dogs barking, the squeak of swings, laundry rumpling in the breeze. Ghost sounds.
On the way back to the car I decided to leave, to really leave, not only my hopelessly