Broken and Lame

There was a very small, cave-like discotheque in the basement of some chic shops down on Oak. Ducking from the coat check through a tunnel to the dance floor was the main salient feature of an evening alone there, apart from whomever might tend to reappear by coincidental rendezvous at the door to the men's or cigarette machine. A guy named Chuck once sat at the back bar for hours smoking and drinking Kirs before I sat across from him another hour staring as he smoked and drank. Finally, as closing drew near, I moved over and took the next vinyl cushion. I suggested we choose an additional wallflower and head back to Chuck's swingin' pad. We cabbed the three of us uptown a ways to a tax office with boudoirs and took the vacant one. Chuck's accountant flatmate spent all non-working hours in her "womb room" socked out on Darvocets or Tylenol 4's. The other guy felt excluded as he had predicted he would and left early on. At one point I inserted several ice cubes into Chuck's anus and gave them time to melt before going home.

He had me back for Chicken Andaluz which we forevermore joked was "On the Loose." He had been a man long enough to accumulate vases and dust on books. I would meet him at his job in a massive, stony district near the stockyards where he stood aproned and stirred sauces in a precious, signless late-dinner spot and smoked and sipped Kirs in the alley with the bleachy steam from the washing up dumped over cold, rotten grease on asphalt rising all around him. There were places to hang out for hours when he got off work where the level of debauchery seemed so deep as to be safely out of reach for hitting bottom. We could stand there smoking and drinking Kir and just be part of the painting until it was too exhausting and go back to the tax office and spend the rest of the night fucking in sometimes acrobatic positions where ears might be in a vice of two stockinged feet or the pelvis rolled like a fish in the gullet of a snake by my herculean thighs.

Then he moved to his last place, where every surface was covered with newspapers from 1978 for 10 years. For relief on the rent he'd promised to strip every turn-of-the-century wooden rail, board, knob, sill and restore it to a pristine state. It was a decade of heat guns and chemical glop and flecks and twist-rolled peels on floors but only one door and its frame got done. Chuck had progressed to an industrial kitchen at the employee lunchroom of a major downtown bank but had to stay in the park reading and smoking during warmer days or the tearooms at Ward's in the winter due to complaints he might "taint the food" from his famous carousing, and the union helped him stay on the payroll 13 months out of sight that way. I often wondered if I was to blame for leading him on and disappearing and reappearing and leading him further to the point he splintered apart, until he was broken down and lame.

Reptily