I get to the bar a few minutes early to procure a table before Alicia shows up. As usual on a Monday, the bar is dead. For a while, Doc Filth and I were coming here every Monday to get drunk and write poetry. We played a writing game, where one of us would write a word for the other to use in a poem, and then the next person would have to select one of the words from their poem for the other player.
While, occasionally, I could come up with something that could be polished off and revised, not everything was gold, as the poem, “Lemurs” proved:
I’ve asked and asked and asked/And no one really can remember what/A damn lemur is/I think they are those/Monkey-things/Or maybe cats/With long banded tails/I don’t know,/I've had a couple cats in my day/The little bastards wake me up in the morning/And they are bastards/Because who has ever seen a cat/Get married?/Not me/Hell, they didn't even know who their father is/That kind of thing is acceptable for cats
And of course, one of my personal favorites, “Cloneborg:”
“I am Clonborg 1113"/“Thundercleese does not live here!!!”/“I know... I don’t want to be destroyed”/If those aren’t words to live by,/I don’t know what is/Each day, I struggle along/Hoping to not be blown up/By robots wielding nuclear weapons
It makes a person wonder why no magazines have snapped up my work.
The table at the back of the bar is open, so I toss my leather jacket in the chipped green bench and return to the bar to get myself a drink. Zombie, the manager, is behind the bar tonight. There was a rumor going around at one point that the owner had him constructed from the pieces of dead bar managers to create a super manager. They say that every so often, you can see an upgrade in Zombie, where a new arm or facial feature has been grafted on, or a time-faded tattoo peaking out from under a shirt sleeve that had not been present the night before. I slap a fiver down on the bar and he makes me a more than double-Rum and Coke and I reclaim my seat.
She shows up around 11, sauntering in, dressed in a long sleeve, grey T-shirt and faded blue jeans ripped out on the right knee. Her shoulder-length chestnut hair is pulled back in a pony tail that bounces on the back of her neck as she strides through the bar and floats gracefully into the seat across from me. “Hey, Rubin,” she says. “I was afraid you wouldn’t show.”
“A beautiful girl and a bar together? Are you kidding? These are about my two favorite things in the world!”
She giggles. “How was your day at work?”
“Not bad,” I say with a shrug. “I think they are going to fire me soon."
Her eyes widen. “What?” She leans in close. “What are you talking about? I thought they loved you there.” Her eyes are big and watery green. I’ve always had a thing for green eyes.
I look down at the melting ice in my glass, devoid of all sustenance. “They did love me; now something is up and they want to get rid of me. More important, though, my glass is empty, and you don’t have one at all. What do you want? It’s on me.”
“Oh...” she says, sounding a little surprised. “I’ll have... I’ll have an Amaretto sour.”
I get a round of drinks and return to the table, with Alicia begging to know what happened with my impending termination. “Well, I got a complaint from a customer who was upset that I did my job to the letter. Normally, this rolls like water off a duck, but for some reason, they are making a big deal about it. My manager talked it down to a warning, and nothing happened.”
“That’s lucky.”
“No,” I say gravely, like I’m the confused protagonist in some overacted spy film. “Something is up, it never ends this easy. They have more up their sleeve to nail me with, I just have to wait and see what it is. They’re a very underhanded company to work for. Don’t ever turn your back on them.”
“You sound like the confused protagonist in some overacted spy film,” she says with a sly, narrow-eyed smile.
I sip my drink and nod knowingly, looking over her shoulder at the juke. “But enough about work, I hate shop talk.” I point to the box covered in flashing lights and flipping CD cases. “You know," I say. "Rumor is this place has the best juke box in town."
“That's what I've heard,” she says slyly. “I’d need to know what ‘good music’ is first.”
“Guns N Roses, Social Distortion, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan...”
“I love Social Distortion! And Guns N Roses—my friends and I used to jump around in my living room and have pretend concerts to G’N’R. I was always Axl. We used to do that with them, Poison, Def Leppard...”
“Can I just tell you that you are the woman of my dreams?” I interject. “I used to put on my Def Leppard tapes and do concerts in my kitchen before my parents got home from work. I’d jump around, I’d talk to the crowd, showboat, everything, all for the benefit of my dogs and cats.” I grab her hand and lean close over the table. “Let’s get married.”
Instead, we put six songs in the juke. Guns N Roses starts playing "Think About You" as we sit back down.
“You were right,” Alicia says. “This place does have the best juke I’ve seen around here.”
“If you're a self-obsessed hipster, it's the place to be.”
“So you're a hipster, eh?” she asks with a cocked eyebrow.
“I hope not!” I cry, holding my left forearm across my chest to deflect her words. “I come here because the drinks are cheap, and this is where all my friends hang out.”
“Why don’t you convince them to go somewhere else?”
I chuckle. “We tried that a few months ago. We found this great bar near my house that no one knew about. It had cheap drinks, free pool, everything! The night we tried to start the mass exodus there, Doc Filth went out to smoke pot with some drug dealer and locked the guy’s keys in his car.”
“Oh no!” she cries, jumping back in the booth and putting her hand over her mouth.
“Yeah, it was a bad scene all around. First, this guy overheard my roommate, Kurt Vance, say he was in a band, so he claimed to be some band’s manager and wanted to take Kurt’s band under his wing. He started making all these deals, and was asking us where we lived, and our phone number, shit like that.”
In the speaker over my head, Social Distortion starts playing "Story of my Life." A couple college kids with shaggy hair and bomber jackets come in and Zombie shuffles over to take their orders.
Alicia leans across the table, largely ignoring her drink. “What happened?”
“I was quick to give a fake number, and tell him that we’d call and meet up with him somewhere. That got him to back off some. Then his girlfriend came over, and her lips were all scabby and burned from a crack pipe, and she bought us all beer.”
“Anything else happen?”
“Not really, that was when Doc Filth went out to smoke and locked the guy out of his car. Filth was insisting we needed to give this guy a ride wherever he needed. At first, the guy was saying it was no big deal, because he lived right around the corner, and had spare keys there, but then told us that he may not have them there, and may need a ride somewhere to pick something up, but he wouldn't say what it was. He went back to his house to see if his keys were there, and that's when we took off.” I mark the end of the story with a long sip.
“That’s frightening,” she says, giving an exaggerated shudder. “How do you know he was a drug dealer?”
“He came up to us the same way every random drug dealer has ever come up to me. He tried to ingratiate himself with us, telling us stories and dropping names he thought we would have heard and been impressed by, and then got someone alone to offer him drugs.”
"Whose name did he drop?” she asks, lips twisting up in an amused smirk.
“Boys 2 Men,” I say, looking her over, trying to find the cracks in her armor. “He told us he used to hang with the guys with Boys 2 Men back in Philly."
"Boys 2 Men."
"Yeah, it must have been the first name he could come up with that he knew a bunch of dumb white-boys would recognize. We must have given off the image of raging drug abusers. It comes with the territory of looking like a scumbag. Those people can smell their own.”
“You’re not a scumbag!” she protests.
“I’m certainly not the most clean-cut person in the world.” I pull out my ratty clothes as a display. Actually, I dressed up for the occasion, wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and khaki pants, not the Dead Kennedys shirt I sported yesterday.
“You look fine,” Alicia says. “You need to give yourself more credit. Not that I’m really one to talk about beating myself down. I say the same thing about myself all the time,” she says, looking down over her own wardrobe, which appears to be straight from the Gap, or Abercrombie & Fitch, or Banana Republic, or one of those other stores that blasts the hallway of the mall with perfume. While the juke starts playing Johnny Cash's rendition of "Rusty Cage, she gives her clothing such a look of distaste that I almost think she stole them from a homeless person. “Really though, you look fine.”
I smile. “Let’s save our self-esteem issues for a later date,” I tell her. “There is plenty of time, and I can go on for hours, if you like.” I sip at my drink, which is nearly half-gone. Zombie smacks the light-switch over the telephone and the lights dim throughout the bar, casting her in shadow. “So ask me a question, anything you want to know about me. Anything at all that doesn’t have to do with work.”
She smiles, leans back and gazes at the wall above my head. “Hmmm... All right, you said you were out on the west coast last summer. Were you living there?”
“No, I wanted to stay out there, but I was just visiting friends.” I suck the last bit of rum off my ice cubes. Not much more I can do with this. “I love it out there. My dream is to move out to California and make a movie.”
“Then why did you come back?”
My laugh is so dry that it catches on the back of my throat and rolls out onto the table in a dusty pile. “I came back, left the one place I’ve enjoyed being in for the worst reason possible.”
“And what’s that?”
I sink back in my seat and sigh. “I came back because I thought I was in love.”
“This sounds like it’s a good story.”
“Yeah, the story of Rubin Valentine getting trod on by a heartless back stabber. My own, personal Lilith. It’s the greatest story ever told. I could be in a movie or something.” My eyes narrow. “One quick question before I tell you another word.”
“Shoot.”
“What do you think of horror movies?”
“Jason Voorhees is my dream man.”
“Well, you’re my dream woman, so would you accept me as a proxy, and let’s go to Vegas tonight. Seriously, I’ll wear a hockey mask and everything.” I lean forward, trying to muster the most seductive Elvis/Sid Vicious/Glenn Danzig sneer I can muster.
“I take it the girl I’m about to hear about didn’t think much of Jason.”
“Hated him. What do you think of zombies?”
“The Beyond is the best zombie movie I’ve ever seen.”
I sigh and slump back in my seat. “I’ve been set up, haven’t I? Who sent you here? Doc Filth? Kurt Vance? You aren’t for real. I know you aren’t.”
“Come on, tell me about your heartbreaker.”
I sigh again, deeply, dredging up all the misery of my life and spewing it forth to cover the dusty remnants of my laugh in a stinking, sloppy pile on the rickety table, tilts and slides the goo back in my lap. “I need another drink before I start this one. You ready for another?”
“I think you’re trying to get me drunk,” she says coyly.
“I don’t make anyone do anything. I just suggest they do what they would really like to do.” I get us more drinks and return to the table. “Oh, Zoe, Zoe, Zoe, the light of my life for a real long time. We were together for nearly three years. Three years when I thought I had met the girl I wanted to be with forever, but alas, like all good things, it had to end. We broke up for reasons I don’t really want to get into, because it was mostly my fault... But she was the one doing the cheating, so I’m at least innocent of that.” I stare past her, off into the empty vortex beyond Alicia. Bob Dylan starts singin' "Johnny's in the basement, mixin' up the medicine, I'm on the pavement...." My eyes roll back, wet with nostalgia, and I exhale hard. "We were apart for about a year, and then I just happened to run into her at the mall one day. We got talking, and went out that night. Now, at this point, I had already made plans to move out to Cali. I had some friends staying in L.A., and I was going to crash with them at the end of my adventure and try to ingratiate myself with some of the film people they knew. I already had train tickets and everything, so I couldn’t skip the trip. Zoe and I got back together, and she told me how much she loved me, how much she had missed me, and how much she wanted to be with me again. I fell head over heels for her all over again, and against all good advice, instead of moving west, I got back together with Zoe West.”
Alicia nods in concession. “You’re right, it sounds like a #1 Hollywood movie.” Studying the glass intensely for a moment before picking it up and swishing it around, she then looks at me and says, "It doesn't sound like it has a happy ending, though."
“No one is innocent, and there are no happy endings,” I say, raising an eyebrow and sipping my rum and Coke.
“Except in Hollywood.”
“Except in Hollywood.” I lean in close, doubling over at the memories. “Well, I decided to come back and accept the second chance with the girl of what I thought were my dreams.”
“A girl who didn’t like zombies?”
“I was crazy, I know. Anyway, I go out west, have a blast, miss her like crazy, call her all the time, and after most of the summer on the road, I returned to Parlor City for my true love.”
“Here comes the story’s conflict, I can see it.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty predictable. I’m back for three days, and she dumps me.”
Alicia’s jaw drops open. “Why? What happened?”
I shake my head. “She gave me no reason, just that she couldn’t be with me anymore. So, for the next month, I tried to track her down, tried to get some kind of explanation out of her, but none was forthcoming. Finally, one night, I went to where she worked and begged that she just give me an hour and talk to me. To my shock, she consented. This was when she told me she had been cheating on me again, and couldn’t live with herself, and that was why she broke up with me.”
“What a cunt!” Alicia cries.
I smirk. “Thank you. So what do I do? I’m a good man, or so I thought. Good usually equals stupid. I forgave her and took her back. There is a saying, ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Now if I get fooled a third time, it means I’m just an idiot.”
“I heard the President give an interesting take on that old saying.”
“Yeah, and look how we got ourselves fooled a second time.” I push out another sigh to emphasize the pure stupidity of my actions. “I got back together with her for a third time, but who’s counting? You’d think I would have learned my lesson by then, but no. We are together about a month, and suddenly, she breaks up with me again with no explanation. I found out the truth when I went to her house a couple days later.”
“Oh no.”
“The guy she had been fucking behind my back had proposed to her. She is there with a giant rock on her finger. The whole time, she had been cheating on me behind his back, not the other way around. Now, they are engaged. And poor little Rubin Valentine is left with no love, no money, no West Coast, no nothing.”
“Poor little Rubin Valentine,” Alicia coos.
“So, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m down on love at this point.”
She raises her eyebrows with the ever-subtle hint of sarcasm. “What about taking me out and wanting me to marry you?”
“What can I say?” I ask. “You’ve turned me around.” I crack my knuckles over the table. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Hmm?”
“I’ve told you the Great Valentine Tragedy, now it’s your turn to confess some dark part of your life. Make it something juicy.”
“Oh, I’ve been the perfect angel,” she says, looking away with a smile on her lips. “I’ve never done anything wrong in my life.” It occurs to me just now that she isn’t wearing a hint of makeup. There's no lipstick, no eyeshadow, no rouge, no nothing.
“And I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Good.” She again looks up over my head. “Let’s see, what do you want to hear? I’ve had a rather sordid past... Nothing quite as dramatic as your story...”
“Stupid, not dramatic,” I correct.
“Your words,” she says. “Your words.” She stares over my head thoughtfully. “Well, we’ll keep this on the level of relationships that were bad for us. You’re right, I’m not all Goody Two Shoes. A couple years back, I was chained to a drug dealer. I’ve been trying to put that behind me for quite a while.”
“Chained?” I ask, interest piqued.
“Well, at that time, I called it ‘in love with,’ and he called me ‘convenience,’ but I was living with a drug dealer. I was 19 years old, and he made a living selling E to ravers. He was what you would expect him to be: cold, callus, intoxicated. He kept me around, but would fuck anyone who came along. I knew about it, but I pretended to be clueless for almost two years.”
Well now, these aren’t the stories I expected to hear from her at all. I’m left speechless for a few seconds. “Damn,” I say with a half-hearted whistle. “What made you change your tune?”
“The point when he wanted me to deal for him,” she says, pausing for a few seconds, her eyes focusing on her drink before she slowly brings it to her lips and takes a sip. “He sent me off to a party one night at a club he had been banned from. He wanted me to sell for him, since he couldn’t do it himself. There was a roadblock set up outside, and people were getting busted left and right, so I was pretty freaked out. I made a bunch of sales, but then decided I needed to get out before anything happened. I still had almost 50 pills hidden in one of my bra cups, and almost $1000 in the other. I got caught in the roadblock, and go figure, I was acting suspicious. So they searched my car. Luckily, everything was on my body, so they didn’t find a thing, and let me go. When I got home and told Jack what happened, he was just furious that I didn’t stay the whole night and sell more. I decided then that I couldn’t take it anymore, and I wasn’t going to risk my ass for someone who didn’t give a damn about me in the least.” She stares down at the table for a few seconds, and then brings her drink down to the half way point.
“That was probably for the best,” I say, never being able to come up with the right words for the situation. “Was it around here? If so, I probably know of him through Doc Filth. He’s in with all of those people.”
“No, I was in Syracuse when I lived with him.” She painfully brings her eyes up to mine. “You want to know what the worst part was? It was after we broke up.”
“What happened, did he follow you?”
“No, not in the least. When I told him I was moving out, he didn’t say a word, just sat there on the couch. I was prepared to have a big talk with him, maybe even give him a second chance, but he said nothing. I moved out, and learned a week later that he already had some new girl staying with him, as if I had never been there. In three years, I’ve spoken to him once, and that was only because I tracked him down when I was feeling nostalgic, thinking maybe after some time he would have missed me. The conversation lasted about five minutes, and he made it quite obvious that he couldn’t care less. This was a guy I talked about marrying, and I was forgotten like nothing at all. That was the worst part.”
“You sound like you still miss him.”
I think her sigh is more an attempt to repress a sob, and possibly tears. “I think so, but in the end, the person I miss is a person that I invented, so there isn’t much I can do.”
I throw back the rest of my drink. “I have an idea, a great idea, now that we know each other’s relationship nightmares.”
“And what is that idea?”
“Well,” I say, sucking on an ice cube. “I have a wonderful collection of horror movies back at my place. Why don’t we go back there and watch one?”
She narrows her eyes and shakes her head slightly in disappointment. “Rubin,” she says with a sigh. “I need to be frank here. I like you, but I’m not the type of girl who fucks on the first date anymore, so don’t be getting your hopes raised.”
“And I’ve never been that kind of guy, so we’re in luck,” I tell her, pushing the glass away from me and bouncing my leg at high speed on the dirty floor. “I am, however, the type of guy who would go home to watch Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part 6 on a first date, and I’m hoping that you are that type of girl.”
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