The door came toppling down. Bonnie screamed and ran for the bedroom, knocking over a glass of strawberry wine.
Jebets, scarlet with fury, a wood chip in his hair, lunged past me. “Come back here, you dumb little bitch.”
“I’m not going with you!” she cried.
I stared at the gun and shook it a couple of times. Then I watched the spreading wine stain in the carpet.
“Get your clothes, slut!” he shouted at her. “Where are your goddamn clothes?”
She began to sob.
I dropped the gun into the couch and found a cigarette.
“Let me get dressed,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“Do you want a beer?” I said to Jebets.
He shot me a furious, exasperated, and yet somehow sheepish glare. It was the only time we would ever share a particle of sympathy for each other, all made possible by Bonnie and her genius for scenes. “Yeah,” he said, his jaw muscles squirming like garter snakes.
“In the refrigerator,” I said. “Help yourself.”
Jebets stomped into the kitchen, yanked open the little icebox, ripped the cap off a bottle, and took a couple of angry swigs.
Bonnie dawdled. Jebets finally hauled her out by the arm, dragging her across the broken threshold, the sheet still wrapped around her.
Not long after this, Bonnie and Steve would have a child. While she was pregnant she would drink, smoke, and take many drugs, including methamphetamine and LSD. The child would not only turn out to be healthy and normal, but intelligent and beautiful. Jebets would divorce Bonnie after three years, develop a serious methamphetamine problem, chain smoke those awful Trues, spend all his free time at the topless bars, and then one day, frightened by a sudden starboard glimpse of that towering, dark archipelago called Death, he would steer down hard and straighten his course, quit the drugs, remarry a decent woman, and find some time for his twelve-year-old child. But it would be too late. He would die of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two.
Bonnie didn’t last long either. She disappeared shortly after the divorce, leaving her child behind. The last time I saw her was late at night in Mission Beach. I was returning from a long walk and she was standing by herself under a lamp by the seawall at Rockaway Court. A white fur coat was thrown around her neck and she wore beige Capri slacks that bulged at the hips. She stared at me forlornly. It was wintertime again. All along the boardwalk the cottages were dark. I thought she would follow me or call to me as I walked wordlessly away, but when I turned back around I was all alone under the stars.
Failure of a Man Named Love
IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT, CLOSING TIME AT THE SHIMMY JOY, the downtown Third Street, Niagara Falls, New York, singles nightclub where I worked as a bartender four nights a week. I was drunk as usual, telling myself one of these days pretty soon (before it was too late) it would be time to quit. The bouncers waded through the mob, bellowing threats, throwing stools up on tabletops. A few customers clung to the counter, pleading for one last drink. I glanced at the door, hoping Charlene would show.
It was the dead, deep winter of 1983. Niagara Falls was in bad shape, its people moving out, its lakes and river poisoned by manufacturing, unemployment around twenty-five percent. Much of the automobile industry, the lifeblood of Western New York, was crippled or shut down. Niagara Falls was the home of Love Canal, the environmental disaster of the decade, a housing development built on top of a chemical dump site, now fenced off and posted, the windows boarded up, a ghost town sinking amid dead trees in a quagmire of toxic waste.
With unemployment, the number of bars in Niagara Falls had doubled in the last two years. Many people had also turned to selling drugs to make a living. Cocaine was the drug of choice. Third Street even had its own pusher, a likeable mush-mouthed loser named Weasel, who made his nightly bar-to-bar rounds in a trench coat lined with glittering packets of “product.” Weasel liked to wrap up his evenings at the Shimmy Joy, where the late crowds were best. Unless he had sold out, he usually enjoyed an entourage of devoted tail-wiggling shiny-lipped females. Tonight he arrived with three. In 1983 there was no need to waste your time reading How to Pick Up Attractive Women; all you needed for shallow virile success was gold neck jewelry and one or two packets of Weasel’s Witless Whoopee Powder (guaranteed to cure shyness, rancor, and unpopularity for as long as twenty minutes). I glanced at the door, hoping Charlene would show. Weasel waved at me, mush-mouthed a greeting (“Yo, bro... [unintelligible]”) and, though the bar was closed, I poured him a drink, Amaretto on the rocks.
I had come to Niagara Falls the year before to cook in the restaurant of a friend, who moved to Washington D.C. three weeks after his restaurant failed. I had just turned twenty-eight. Charlene, an engineer at Harrison Radiator in Buffalo, who’d been laid off and was now waiting tables, was twenty-four. She was not a very nice girl. I was no Mahatma Gandhi myself. When I first began to date Charlene, the people who knew her warned me. “Won’t work.” “Wrong girl.” “You’ll be sorry.” But there were many things to like about her: her unpretentiousness, her aloofness, a certain reckless sang-froid. With diamond black eyes and long dark hair, she was lithe and brainy, small breasted and tall. She had read and admired Jude the Obscure. She had an engineering degree from SUNY Buffalo. A hearty Czechoslovakian girl, she could drink all night and was great in bed. Unfortunately she slept around. And to teach her a lesson, so did I. Though I was on the verge of straightening out my life, etc., Charlene seemed unaffected by her barren and dissolute existence. Each time she found out I had been with another woman, all she wanted to know was, “Is she prettier than me?”
I counted my tips: fifty, a good night. Charlene didn’t show. To hell with her, I thought. I convinced myself I would get rid of her soon, straighten out my life, etc., and drove to an after-hours place. I must’ve known two thousand people in NFNY. If I didn’t know their names, I knew what they drank. Being a bartender at a popular nightclub is like being captain of the high school football team. Everyone knows your name. They wave and smile and want to be seen with you, want to buy you a drink. I hit three after-hours places (hoping, despite myself, to find Charlene) before I finally ran into Oz, who invited me over to his house on Grand Island.
Oz was a third-owner of the Shimmy Joy. Once he’d had a good-paying job with GM, now he had a better-paying position with the Colombian Drug Cartel. He wore a purple kimono and glided along like a phantom on wheels. He was a big-time coke dealer, but he’d broken the cardinal rule and gotten himself hooked on the product. He smoked cocaine. We called it freebasing. There was no word yet for crack. Oz cooked it up in the kitchen and brought it into the living room on an engraved stainless steel platter: big, amorphous, soapy yellow chunks. It was a secret art. He was the only one who knew how to do it—except I’d watched him from around the corner, and I knew how to do it too.
We gathered around the wet bar in the corner of the living room in the dark leather-furnished, wood-smelling home with the television always on. Oz inspected his equipment: a large glass pipe with a globe-shaped chamber, a dozen dime-sized brass screens, a box of Q-tips, and a bottle of Bacardi 151. There were five of us, the so-called elect, including Kirsten, a comely college student, and Wondra, a sexy cocktail waitress, both regulars along the strip of bars on Third Street. Oz called the women who were attracted to his drugs “cocaine harlots.” They didn’t seem to mind. He was always good for a couple of grand. He lit a candle. His rings glittered. The sleeves of his kimono rustled like a surplice as he dipped a Q-tip into the rum.
The first inhaled hit of volatilized cocaine is the best: it launches you through the roof of the sky. There is no greater high. It makes an orgasm seem like a stubbed toe. You love, with the power of God, all things: house plants, bumblebees, lint balls, even the cat shit in the sandbox beneath the sink. I thought of Charlene