PERSONAL WORSTS: "A SAVAGE CHRISTMAS eve, 1967"
BY DELL FRANKLIN
Marshak and I were in the Vegas Room in a rundown section of Long Beach out near Pacific Coast Highway. The Vegas Room was a gloomy lounge with booths, tables, piano bar, dance floor. Near the front door was a plastic Christmas tree with the usual dime-store decorations. The joint was dark enough nobody could get a good look at you, in case somebody was lucky enough to get laid. Marshak and I had not gotten laid since our discharges from 3 year army hitches overseas a few months apart and several months back. Because we were oldest and best friends before enlisting, we decided to be room-mates. Earlier that evening, while sipping Johnny Walker Ten High and cans of Bud in our second story 2-bedroom rat-trap overlooking a rat-hole beer bar called the Hull. I had read portions of my novel to Marshak and he chortled and nodded, claiming “some parts of it were good.”
But now the bastard was turning on me, like he always did after a few drinks if I agitated him properly.
“Why'd you buy another piece of crap typewriter when you already have two?” he asked. “You only need one, not three.”
“Because I might lose my temper and bash it to smithereens with my ball bat or toss it out the window,” I explained. “This way, when I calm down, I have a reserve when I get inspired again.”
“Why don't you just destroy all three when you blow up and quit trying to write the great American novel and become a human being in the process?”
“Why don't you go fuck yourself, asshole.”
“You're the asshole, buying beat-up, five dollar used typewriters that gum up and stick. Besides, you should write short stuff, you're too immature, too self-absorbed, too inexperienced, too out of touch with reality to write a novel. Not only that, but you're calling it THE WOMAN HATER. That automatically eliminates half the readership in the country. What agent or publishing house is gonna even look at a piece of shit with a title like that?”
Marshak actually owned a bachelor's degree in marine biology, while I'd been kicked off my college baseball team for attacking the coach and was afterwards labeled a psycho and seen a once promising career as a big leaguer like my father go down the drain, as scouts once interested in me backed off. This was our first experience as room-mates. Both of us, as jocks, had boozed it up in high school, but the army had turned us into foul-mouthed alcoholics and unleashed us on the public.
“I'm also getting damn sick and tired of listening to you curse and rage and beat on your typewriters while I'm trying to study.” Marshak went on, as we sat in our booth, him chain smoking Camel non-filters while I puffed a cheap stogie. Marshak was now studying for his masters at Long Beach State on the GI bill, his only source of income. The Vegas Room was filling up. Everybody pressing for jubilant spirits on Christmas Eve. Couples, mostly. A few stray 30ish women and men. Marshak was short, stocky, his thuggish looks belying his intellectual capacity—he read and understood Nietzsche, could discourse on any subject, specializing in sports and politics with a zeal curbed by objectivity and logic. “Everybody in that apartment building gives us dirty looks when they see us during the day. Why should I get dirty looks because you're mentally unhinged?”
“There's nothing in that whole goddam apartment building but lowlifes. So who gives a shit what they think of us? And the lunatic next door, Art, he's twice as crazy and loud as we are.”
Art was ex career Navy and drove diesel trucks cross country. Alcoholic speed freak homosexual. Bald, stringy, sallow, concave, downright repulsive. Sometimes, when Marshak and I were having titanic shouting matches, he knocked on the door, and sometimes he knocked on the door to invite us over for drinks when he was plastered, and when he was plastered his feminine hormones surged and he took on the mannerisms of a flouncy, flamboyant coquette.
“Art wanted us to join him on a Christmas Eve nightclub tour of Ocean boulevard tonight,” Marshak said. “You should've gone with him. You might find new exciting material for The Woman Hater, carrying on with gays.”
“He's trying to lure you into a gay bar, Marshak. He wants to get you drunk and get in your pants. He's afraid of me.”
“Bullshit. The guy can sniff out a straight guy who can't get laid a mile away. He figures we're desperate, and if we get drunk enough we'll throw him around like those young sailors do. He knows no woman in her right mind'll take us home.”
“At least in the army we could afford hookers.”
“Right.” Marshak puffed his Camel, looking around at the patrons with mounting distaste and disgust. “This place is the pits. Reminds me of that alternative name you had for your novel...”
“'In Abysmal Plight.'”
People in the Vegas Room were staring at us. We dressed in old clothes and sneakers and needed haircuts and were loud, always loud, because we were always pissed off. The few single women sat together, facing away from us, no doubt discouraging us from asking them to dance to such favorites as “Funny Valentine,” “Scotch and Soda,” and various peppy syrupy Christmas songs crooned by the piano player, a white dude around 50 in a suit and tie with carnation in his lapel. He looked like he'd been funneled through every disastrous romantic, drug and booze experience a man could survive in one lifetime, and yet here he was, buoying this wretched cast of around 50 or 60. Now he launched into “White Christmas.”
“I hate this song almost as much as I hate fucking Christmas,” Marshak sneered, as the waitress plopped down another round of beers on our table. Because it was Christmas Eve, and she was doing an excellent job of concealing her loathing of us with polite smiles and chirpy thank yous, we tipped her as well s we could, considering we were poor, myself struggling away for a hundred bucks a week as a stockboy and delivery man in Dad's store in Compton and driving a jalopy that sounded like a tank. “I hate to say it, but we were better off in the fucking army.”
“We hated the fucking army, Marshak.”
“We hate everything.”
Two couples in the booth next door gaped at us, appalled. The women were upset, nudging their beaus. All of them smoking and occasionally dancing.
“Why shouldn't we hate everything, Marshak. The country's going to hell. It's like the last days of the Roman Empire. The blacks are burning down their cities. The war's bullshit, guys coming home in body bags, and these fucking degenerate drug-addled draft dodging-hippies, getting all the pussy, they make me wanna puke, talkin' all this altruistic peace and love crap, like civilization is ever going to change and stop being a bunch of murderous depraved savage barbarians killing each other off!”
One of the men in the booth beside us, dressed in a polyester outlet store suit, stood. “For God's sake it's Christmas Eve for crying out loud!” he exclaimed. “You're depressing everybody with your talk. Give it a rest, ey? We been listening to you two for an hour now, and we can't take it any longer. Christ, I'll buy you a round if you just change the subject and have mercy.”
“Sorry,” Marshak said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Hey. I was in the army in Korea,” he said. “You'll adjust. I know it's tough. Give it time. Things are good.”
He rejoined his crew. Signaled the waitress to give us another round. When it came, we raised our beers and swilled. Marshak and I, with our puny funds, bought their booth a round to make amends. They raised their glasses cautiously. Then the waitress brought us shots of bourbon from a 50ish woman who sat with a man at a table. We raised our shot glasses to her and swilled. She came over, dressed like a ranch woman, except for her Santa cap.
“You look so sad, so unhappy,” she said. “Please be happy.'
“We're trying, ma'am. Thanks for the drinks.”
“Yeh, thanks a lot, ma'am.”
“Why you so sad, boys? It's Christmas Eve. A time to rejoice. You should be happy.”
We couldn't think of anything to say.
“You wanna wear my Santa cap?” she asked, eyes oozing sympathy. “It might cheer you up.”
We shook our heads.
“One of you handsome boys like to dance with me. I'm Ruby.”
“We can't dance, ma'am,” I said. “We're stumble-bums.”
Now her husband was present, in a western suit, bolo tie, white hair, false teeth, Santa cap. “Now now, Ruby, leave these boys alone, honey.”
“But honey pie, they look so sad. It just breaks my heart when I see somebody so sad on Christmas Eve. Maybe the poor things got nowhere to go. I just wanna cry, I surely do.”
“Now now.” he led the fretful woman away.
Marshak lit a Camel and wafted the smoke into the dense haze hovering over everything, like a bleak fog. “This place is ghastly,” he confessed. “We're better off in that horrible goddam Hull. At least in the Hull there's no pretense of happiness—they know it's all hopeless bullshit.”
“Maybe we should get out of here,” I said. “We're like a fucking pestilence, Marshak.”
“This music is making me deranged,” he contended. “Why don't they play something different? Why doesn't that hack play 'The Girl From Ipenema?'”
“Why don't you go up to the piano bar and ask that poor broken down hack to play your tune, asshole?”
“Because going up there and seeing those mopes'll put me over the edge, asshole. I can't take much more of this miserable goddam Vegas Room.”
Two women from the booth on the other side of us marched to the bar, and seconds later one of the bartenders was at our table, asking us with grinding teeth to please leave, because everybody in the place was fed up with our loud, ugly, repugnant talk. So we left, draining our beers.
*******
On our way to the Hull, we picked up a pint of Ten High. At a storefront on PCH, where many of the businesses were boarded up, two slinky, attractive women popped out and accosted us. One was oriental, probably Japanese, the other blond and built, and had a German accent. They were aggressive, charming, and literally dragged us through a door and into a hot spacious room, where some sort of religious revival was going on. The girls each had us by the hand, and we were overwhelmed as they pulled us through a crush of folks, sweaty and singing. At second glance the place seemed a lunatic asylum unsupervised. The howling and wolf calls were terrifying.
Up front, on a raised area behind a counter, was this huge sweaty German guy with crazed blue eyes, long blond goatee, dressed in a shabby pin-striped suit. He shook our hands with an enormous paw and the two women disappeared. Then the big German tried to browbeat us into some evangelical nonsense. His face came at us like a big hump-nosed fright mask, hair askew. He wanted us to join the club and accept Jesus as our savior. We edged away. He called us anti Christs.
“You haff no foundation!” he bellowed. “You are fish-eye loo-sers!” We backed away from his booming voice, which carried over the hellish din of Holy rollers. “You haff no spine, you are weaklings without Christ. You will neffer find a woman! You will neffer find peace and happiness. You will burn in hell!”
We thrashed through the crowd and scurried back onto the sidewalk and down the last few blocks to find refuge in the Hull, perhaps the most decrepit bar in all of Long Beach. A horseshoe in a hut. Filled with rat-nosed, pot-bellied, fish-scale white alkies on their last legs. No Christmas decorations here. We stood, ordering drafts from the shrill, harridan barmaid, Maggie. It was that time of night, around midnight, when they were all on the verge of fighting each other on the grassy patch that separated our apartment building from the Hull. Often, around eleven, Marshak and I stood at our window and listened to their garbled arguing, and came down for a beer to observe the fights—usually harmless slo-motion tussles.
Buck and Barney (who occasionally counseled Marshak and I on the treachery of women) were the usual brawlers, though often Casey, Hank and O.B. got in on it. All these men had weathered horrendous childhoods and worse lives and ended up here, in the Hull, after careers as oil workers on Signal hill, slugging it down, mutilated and emaciated of body, scorched of mind and soul, bitter, angry, rancid, spoiling for any kind of confrontation that would lead to fisticuffs, which never seemed to do any damage, and, most likely, were forgotten immediately as they returned to their stools for a few more, until Maggie flushed their asses into the street and sent them to their dumpy boarding houses and tenement garrets.
Soon, like clockwork, Buck and Barney were engaged on the grassy patch, swinging, missing, falling down, rolling around and grappling, huffing and puffing, wheezing and gasping for breath as their faces flushed from red to purple and members of the crew who had emptied out of the bar began pulling them to their feet.
“That was one of the worst fights I've ever seen,” Marshak remarked, as we stood in the cold night, mugs in hand, traffic slashing down PCH. “Christmas Eve deserves better than this.”
“What a dismal night. Let's get the fuck out'a here.”
We trekked up to the room and found some Bud half quarts to share with our bottle and stood by the window watching Hull regulars mill around in blind staggers as they wished the world Merry Christmases. Marshak and I had nothing better to do now than talk. Soon we were arguing over who knows what. Politics. Sports. Literature. Marshak indicated that as an aspiring writer I was pompous, judgmental, limited, an ignorant know-it-all, but what gnawed at me incessantly was that we both knew everybody, including my father, felt I should be playing in the major leagues by now at 24, instead of toiling at a menial job I hated and writing crap. The sense of disappointment and failure was crushing, and I constantly flagellated between vicious rage and mawkish self pity while faced with the long, tortured march to become a real writer, in mine or anybody's eyes.
I had Marshak cornered and my hands around his neck. In his eyes was recognition I was on the verge of strangling him as we cursed and shouted. I was halted by furious pounding on the door, which shook the room. I dashed to the door and ripped it open, and there stood our neighbor Art, toting a fifth of Jack Daniels. Clammy and frightened in his wife-beater T shirt and pajama bottoms.
“For God's sake!” he squealed. “I thought somebody was getting KILLED in here!”
I pointed to Marshak, who was still in the corner. “I'm gonna kill that miserable wretch if he doesn't stop goading me, Art!”
“But Day'll,” he said soothingly, touching my shoulder. “He is yer friend, yer brother. Ah know, deep down in mah heart, y'all love each other like brothers.”
“Art, don't make me puke.”
Art placed the bottle on the lone card table in front of the ratty sofa. We only had two glasses, so I used my badly crusted, stained coffee cup that had served me in the army and never been washed out of superstition, and poured three ample shots. Marshak played some Sinatra on our scratchy stereo, because Art liked romantic, sentimental songs. We settled in, all three smoking nonstop, Art holding court, standing over us, hyper as a parakeet, as Marshak and I sat apart on the sofa.
“You boys, yer mah frenz. Y'all know ah feel so good knowin' y'all live next door, y'all know if I git in any kind-a trouble y'all'll come to mah rescue, like good sons, like m'own sons who won't talk to me cuz ah'm a queer.”
As always, he became sloppy and saccharine, talking about how he missed and loved his beloved Texas, and the Longhorn and Cowboy football teams. He loved the flag, and America, was a proud veteran, and knew we were this way also. He especially loved Christmas, missed his family in Texas and admitted as he teared up that he was lonely and oh so thankful he found us tonight, because, after all, Christmas was a time for family, to be shared with family, and we were like family because we were his best friends, and just because he was an ugly old queer nobody wanted anything to do with, it didn't mean he was after us in that way, because he wasn't, not one bit, and we knew that, and told him so, and toasted our friendship, and the bottle went down, and well into the wee hours Art invited us over for breakfast the next day so we could watch the football game on his TV, since we didn't have one, and this seemed a good idea, and we agreed, toasting again, though there was a possibility we would be blessed by being so hungover we'd sleep through Christmas day.
Marshak and I were in the Vegas Room in a rundown section of Long Beach out near Pacific Coast Highway. The Vegas Room was a gloomy lounge with booths, tables, piano bar, dance floor. Near the front door was a plastic Christmas tree with the usual dime-store decorations. The joint was dark enough nobody could get a good look at you, in case somebody was lucky enough to get laid. Marshak and I had not gotten laid since our discharges from 3 year army hitches overseas a few months apart and several months back. Because we were oldest and best friends before enlisting, we decided to be room-mates. Earlier that evening, while sipping Johnny Walker Ten High and cans of Bud in our second story 2-bedroom rat-trap overlooking a rat-hole beer bar called the Hull. I had read portions of my novel to Marshak and he chortled and nodded, claiming “some parts of it were good.”
But now the bastard was turning on me, like he always did after a few drinks if I agitated him properly.
“Why'd you buy another piece of crap typewriter when you already have two?” he asked. “You only need one, not three.”
“Because I might lose my temper and bash it to smithereens with my ball bat or toss it out the window,” I explained. “This way, when I calm down, I have a reserve when I get inspired again.”
“Why don't you just destroy all three when you blow up and quit trying to write the great American novel and become a human being in the process?”
“Why don't you go fuck yourself, asshole.”
“You're the asshole, buying beat-up, five dollar used typewriters that gum up and stick. Besides, you should write short stuff, you're too immature, too self-absorbed, too inexperienced, too out of touch with reality to write a novel. Not only that, but you're calling it THE WOMAN HATER. That automatically eliminates half the readership in the country. What agent or publishing house is gonna even look at a piece of shit with a title like that?”
Marshak actually owned a bachelor's degree in marine biology, while I'd been kicked off my college baseball team for attacking the coach and was afterwards labeled a psycho and seen a once promising career as a big leaguer like my father go down the drain, as scouts once interested in me backed off. This was our first experience as room-mates. Both of us, as jocks, had boozed it up in high school, but the army had turned us into foul-mouthed alcoholics and unleashed us on the public.
“I'm also getting damn sick and tired of listening to you curse and rage and beat on your typewriters while I'm trying to study.” Marshak went on, as we sat in our booth, him chain smoking Camel non-filters while I puffed a cheap stogie. Marshak was now studying for his masters at Long Beach State on the GI bill, his only source of income. The Vegas Room was filling up. Everybody pressing for jubilant spirits on Christmas Eve. Couples, mostly. A few stray 30ish women and men. Marshak was short, stocky, his thuggish looks belying his intellectual capacity—he read and understood Nietzsche, could discourse on any subject, specializing in sports and politics with a zeal curbed by objectivity and logic. “Everybody in that apartment building gives us dirty looks when they see us during the day. Why should I get dirty looks because you're mentally unhinged?”
“There's nothing in that whole goddam apartment building but lowlifes. So who gives a shit what they think of us? And the lunatic next door, Art, he's twice as crazy and loud as we are.”
Art was ex career Navy and drove diesel trucks cross country. Alcoholic speed freak homosexual. Bald, stringy, sallow, concave, downright repulsive. Sometimes, when Marshak and I were having titanic shouting matches, he knocked on the door, and sometimes he knocked on the door to invite us over for drinks when he was plastered, and when he was plastered his feminine hormones surged and he took on the mannerisms of a flouncy, flamboyant coquette.
“Art wanted us to join him on a Christmas Eve nightclub tour of Ocean boulevard tonight,” Marshak said. “You should've gone with him. You might find new exciting material for The Woman Hater, carrying on with gays.”
“He's trying to lure you into a gay bar, Marshak. He wants to get you drunk and get in your pants. He's afraid of me.”
“Bullshit. The guy can sniff out a straight guy who can't get laid a mile away. He figures we're desperate, and if we get drunk enough we'll throw him around like those young sailors do. He knows no woman in her right mind'll take us home.”
“At least in the army we could afford hookers.”
“Right.” Marshak puffed his Camel, looking around at the patrons with mounting distaste and disgust. “This place is the pits. Reminds me of that alternative name you had for your novel...”
“'In Abysmal Plight.'”
People in the Vegas Room were staring at us. We dressed in old clothes and sneakers and needed haircuts and were loud, always loud, because we were always pissed off. The few single women sat together, facing away from us, no doubt discouraging us from asking them to dance to such favorites as “Funny Valentine,” “Scotch and Soda,” and various peppy syrupy Christmas songs crooned by the piano player, a white dude around 50 in a suit and tie with carnation in his lapel. He looked like he'd been funneled through every disastrous romantic, drug and booze experience a man could survive in one lifetime, and yet here he was, buoying this wretched cast of around 50 or 60. Now he launched into “White Christmas.”
“I hate this song almost as much as I hate fucking Christmas,” Marshak sneered, as the waitress plopped down another round of beers on our table. Because it was Christmas Eve, and she was doing an excellent job of concealing her loathing of us with polite smiles and chirpy thank yous, we tipped her as well s we could, considering we were poor, myself struggling away for a hundred bucks a week as a stockboy and delivery man in Dad's store in Compton and driving a jalopy that sounded like a tank. “I hate to say it, but we were better off in the fucking army.”
“We hated the fucking army, Marshak.”
“We hate everything.”
Two couples in the booth next door gaped at us, appalled. The women were upset, nudging their beaus. All of them smoking and occasionally dancing.
“Why shouldn't we hate everything, Marshak. The country's going to hell. It's like the last days of the Roman Empire. The blacks are burning down their cities. The war's bullshit, guys coming home in body bags, and these fucking degenerate drug-addled draft dodging-hippies, getting all the pussy, they make me wanna puke, talkin' all this altruistic peace and love crap, like civilization is ever going to change and stop being a bunch of murderous depraved savage barbarians killing each other off!”
One of the men in the booth beside us, dressed in a polyester outlet store suit, stood. “For God's sake it's Christmas Eve for crying out loud!” he exclaimed. “You're depressing everybody with your talk. Give it a rest, ey? We been listening to you two for an hour now, and we can't take it any longer. Christ, I'll buy you a round if you just change the subject and have mercy.”
“Sorry,” Marshak said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Hey. I was in the army in Korea,” he said. “You'll adjust. I know it's tough. Give it time. Things are good.”
He rejoined his crew. Signaled the waitress to give us another round. When it came, we raised our beers and swilled. Marshak and I, with our puny funds, bought their booth a round to make amends. They raised their glasses cautiously. Then the waitress brought us shots of bourbon from a 50ish woman who sat with a man at a table. We raised our shot glasses to her and swilled. She came over, dressed like a ranch woman, except for her Santa cap.
“You look so sad, so unhappy,” she said. “Please be happy.'
“We're trying, ma'am. Thanks for the drinks.”
“Yeh, thanks a lot, ma'am.”
“Why you so sad, boys? It's Christmas Eve. A time to rejoice. You should be happy.”
We couldn't think of anything to say.
“You wanna wear my Santa cap?” she asked, eyes oozing sympathy. “It might cheer you up.”
We shook our heads.
“One of you handsome boys like to dance with me. I'm Ruby.”
“We can't dance, ma'am,” I said. “We're stumble-bums.”
Now her husband was present, in a western suit, bolo tie, white hair, false teeth, Santa cap. “Now now, Ruby, leave these boys alone, honey.”
“But honey pie, they look so sad. It just breaks my heart when I see somebody so sad on Christmas Eve. Maybe the poor things got nowhere to go. I just wanna cry, I surely do.”
“Now now.” he led the fretful woman away.
Marshak lit a Camel and wafted the smoke into the dense haze hovering over everything, like a bleak fog. “This place is ghastly,” he confessed. “We're better off in that horrible goddam Hull. At least in the Hull there's no pretense of happiness—they know it's all hopeless bullshit.”
“Maybe we should get out of here,” I said. “We're like a fucking pestilence, Marshak.”
“This music is making me deranged,” he contended. “Why don't they play something different? Why doesn't that hack play 'The Girl From Ipenema?'”
“Why don't you go up to the piano bar and ask that poor broken down hack to play your tune, asshole?”
“Because going up there and seeing those mopes'll put me over the edge, asshole. I can't take much more of this miserable goddam Vegas Room.”
Two women from the booth on the other side of us marched to the bar, and seconds later one of the bartenders was at our table, asking us with grinding teeth to please leave, because everybody in the place was fed up with our loud, ugly, repugnant talk. So we left, draining our beers.
*******
On our way to the Hull, we picked up a pint of Ten High. At a storefront on PCH, where many of the businesses were boarded up, two slinky, attractive women popped out and accosted us. One was oriental, probably Japanese, the other blond and built, and had a German accent. They were aggressive, charming, and literally dragged us through a door and into a hot spacious room, where some sort of religious revival was going on. The girls each had us by the hand, and we were overwhelmed as they pulled us through a crush of folks, sweaty and singing. At second glance the place seemed a lunatic asylum unsupervised. The howling and wolf calls were terrifying.
Up front, on a raised area behind a counter, was this huge sweaty German guy with crazed blue eyes, long blond goatee, dressed in a shabby pin-striped suit. He shook our hands with an enormous paw and the two women disappeared. Then the big German tried to browbeat us into some evangelical nonsense. His face came at us like a big hump-nosed fright mask, hair askew. He wanted us to join the club and accept Jesus as our savior. We edged away. He called us anti Christs.
“You haff no foundation!” he bellowed. “You are fish-eye loo-sers!” We backed away from his booming voice, which carried over the hellish din of Holy rollers. “You haff no spine, you are weaklings without Christ. You will neffer find a woman! You will neffer find peace and happiness. You will burn in hell!”
We thrashed through the crowd and scurried back onto the sidewalk and down the last few blocks to find refuge in the Hull, perhaps the most decrepit bar in all of Long Beach. A horseshoe in a hut. Filled with rat-nosed, pot-bellied, fish-scale white alkies on their last legs. No Christmas decorations here. We stood, ordering drafts from the shrill, harridan barmaid, Maggie. It was that time of night, around midnight, when they were all on the verge of fighting each other on the grassy patch that separated our apartment building from the Hull. Often, around eleven, Marshak and I stood at our window and listened to their garbled arguing, and came down for a beer to observe the fights—usually harmless slo-motion tussles.
Buck and Barney (who occasionally counseled Marshak and I on the treachery of women) were the usual brawlers, though often Casey, Hank and O.B. got in on it. All these men had weathered horrendous childhoods and worse lives and ended up here, in the Hull, after careers as oil workers on Signal hill, slugging it down, mutilated and emaciated of body, scorched of mind and soul, bitter, angry, rancid, spoiling for any kind of confrontation that would lead to fisticuffs, which never seemed to do any damage, and, most likely, were forgotten immediately as they returned to their stools for a few more, until Maggie flushed their asses into the street and sent them to their dumpy boarding houses and tenement garrets.
Soon, like clockwork, Buck and Barney were engaged on the grassy patch, swinging, missing, falling down, rolling around and grappling, huffing and puffing, wheezing and gasping for breath as their faces flushed from red to purple and members of the crew who had emptied out of the bar began pulling them to their feet.
“That was one of the worst fights I've ever seen,” Marshak remarked, as we stood in the cold night, mugs in hand, traffic slashing down PCH. “Christmas Eve deserves better than this.”
“What a dismal night. Let's get the fuck out'a here.”
We trekked up to the room and found some Bud half quarts to share with our bottle and stood by the window watching Hull regulars mill around in blind staggers as they wished the world Merry Christmases. Marshak and I had nothing better to do now than talk. Soon we were arguing over who knows what. Politics. Sports. Literature. Marshak indicated that as an aspiring writer I was pompous, judgmental, limited, an ignorant know-it-all, but what gnawed at me incessantly was that we both knew everybody, including my father, felt I should be playing in the major leagues by now at 24, instead of toiling at a menial job I hated and writing crap. The sense of disappointment and failure was crushing, and I constantly flagellated between vicious rage and mawkish self pity while faced with the long, tortured march to become a real writer, in mine or anybody's eyes.
I had Marshak cornered and my hands around his neck. In his eyes was recognition I was on the verge of strangling him as we cursed and shouted. I was halted by furious pounding on the door, which shook the room. I dashed to the door and ripped it open, and there stood our neighbor Art, toting a fifth of Jack Daniels. Clammy and frightened in his wife-beater T shirt and pajama bottoms.
“For God's sake!” he squealed. “I thought somebody was getting KILLED in here!”
I pointed to Marshak, who was still in the corner. “I'm gonna kill that miserable wretch if he doesn't stop goading me, Art!”
“But Day'll,” he said soothingly, touching my shoulder. “He is yer friend, yer brother. Ah know, deep down in mah heart, y'all love each other like brothers.”
“Art, don't make me puke.”
Art placed the bottle on the lone card table in front of the ratty sofa. We only had two glasses, so I used my badly crusted, stained coffee cup that had served me in the army and never been washed out of superstition, and poured three ample shots. Marshak played some Sinatra on our scratchy stereo, because Art liked romantic, sentimental songs. We settled in, all three smoking nonstop, Art holding court, standing over us, hyper as a parakeet, as Marshak and I sat apart on the sofa.
“You boys, yer mah frenz. Y'all know ah feel so good knowin' y'all live next door, y'all know if I git in any kind-a trouble y'all'll come to mah rescue, like good sons, like m'own sons who won't talk to me cuz ah'm a queer.”
As always, he became sloppy and saccharine, talking about how he missed and loved his beloved Texas, and the Longhorn and Cowboy football teams. He loved the flag, and America, was a proud veteran, and knew we were this way also. He especially loved Christmas, missed his family in Texas and admitted as he teared up that he was lonely and oh so thankful he found us tonight, because, after all, Christmas was a time for family, to be shared with family, and we were like family because we were his best friends, and just because he was an ugly old queer nobody wanted anything to do with, it didn't mean he was after us in that way, because he wasn't, not one bit, and we knew that, and told him so, and toasted our friendship, and the bottle went down, and well into the wee hours Art invited us over for breakfast the next day so we could watch the football game on his TV, since we didn't have one, and this seemed a good idea, and we agreed, toasting again, though there was a possibility we would be blessed by being so hungover we'd sleep through Christmas day.
