The Poet Chapter 10

 

TEN

 

The drunken asshole sitting next to me in Rooney’s Pub, now named The Tin Whistle, proclaimed to be the world’s biggest heavy metal fan. He’d spent my first few vodkas telling me all about the history of heavy metal, extolling its virtues in between stumbling off to play everything from that bygone era on the flashy, digital juke. Still, it was good to see that the bar hadn’t been completely turned over to the well-coiffed gentrifiers who’d begun trying to price me out of the hood. It was nice to know you could still find the common variety drunk. I just hated how they always gravitated toward me.

            “What do you want to hear now, man?” My new friend said.

            “The change in the cadence of your voice as someone attaches electrodes to your nutsack and then switches them on.”

            He went off to play AC/DC while I took a pull on what had become the end of my third vodka and soda thanks to Carolina either being very late or not showing. “You know,” I called back toward the juke, “I used to think one needed to take an I.Q. test to be able to vote, but now I’m thinking of extending the thought to include playing the jukebox as well.”

            “Politicians don’t give a shit, man,” he said.

            “Politicians sure don’t care,” I said. “Many political and economic theorists seem to think we’re living in an era of inverted totalitarianism. I mean if no one is reading Noam Chomsky what does it matter what he’s writing.”

            “Fucking Muslims,” he said. Then the AC/DC started.

            I hated what the Tin Whistle people had done to my old watering hole. Only the shell of the old pub existed. There were six fucking televisions in the place, all playing some sport. There were small fake fireplaces indented into the walls above black leather booths. The back cocaine-snorting porch had been converted into a beer garden. A fucking beer garden. Thanks to the weather it was still in operation less than a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

            The door to the bar opened. Carolina poked her head in and then back out. I waited. It was a good twenty seconds before she came back. Then she looked like a deer caught in the headlights of some half-drunk suburbanite’s S.U.V. She had the brown raven hair pulled back; she was still rocking those big glasses though. Carolina was still a devotee to air tight jeans, and her tiny zip-up hoodie was pure Hunter College purple. Memories of her sauntering in the joint with her black, spikey hair, wide shirt hanging off her shoulder, flooded me. She sat next to me and looked around wordless and wide-eyed for a few more seconds, taking in the wreckage of memories.

            “What in the shit is this fuckery?” she finally said. She ordered her famous rye neat. I got vodka and soda numero cuatro. “I hate this place now.”

I looked at my watch. She was a solid hour late. “Thanks for not completely standing me up.”

            “Buy a cell phone and you’d know I was stuck on the stupid R train because someone saw something and just had to say something,” she said. “I also forgot how long the ride from Manhattan to this part of Brooklyn is.”

            “Living the high life will do that,” I said.

            The bartender dropped our drinks. Carolina lifted hers and we toasted. “Not even my first sip and you’re already with the insults.” She had a good pull.

            “I can do much better than that.”

            “Don’t I know it.”

            “We haven’t even started in on your novel yet.”

            “Rand.” It came out like a warning.

            My good heavy metal friend came stumbling back. He eyed Carolina like a piece of meat. “What do we have here?”

            “I see the clientele hasn’t changed,” Carolina said.

            Heavy Metal slapped my shoulder. “Yo, man, you didn’t tell me you had a banging chick. I’d be announcing that shit up and down Third Avenue, dude.”

            “I’d expect no less from a fine patriarch such as you,” I said.

            “Seriously, dude.” He started gesturing wildly, pointing down at Carolina.  “I’d be like yo! Yo! Check this shit out!”

            “Am I seriously sitting here listening to this?” Carolina said.

            “Well, you are in the man’s seat,” I said.

Carolina got up from the stool as if it had an infection spread on it. “Talk about your garden variety misogyny. It’s bad enough I have to hear it on the street…and from people running for the highest office in the land.”

            “I love chicks,” Heavy Metal said.

            “I’m sure women fucking loathe you.” Carolina killed half her drink. She gave me one of her piercing glares and nodded at a booth. “Can we go and sit somewhere else before I neuter this guy and pin his balls to the wall?”

            “You don’t want the beer garden?” I asked,

            “Is the beer garden not in patriarchal America?” We got up and hit the booth. Carolina slid into her seat. She took off her hoodie. Underneath was a white peasant shirt with thin straps. She also had a tattoo of a fiery, black sun. “Plus, I heard it’s supposed to get cold.”

            “A vicious rumor.” I sat down across from her. Maybe we had something to say.

            Carolina glared at the little fireplace between us then turned to me. “Are you going to tell me what it is you wanted to talk about, or should I just leave?”

            “For the record you contacted me first,” I said. “So…technically you owe me a reason why you wanted to talk.”

            Carolina breathed hard through her nose. Her lips were cherry red like the old days, and I still loved the way her eyes were like wet marbles. I mean they had that glow. Luminous. She still had that clean smell; like the morning shower ocean breeze-scented body wash just stuck on her in ways the rest of us sweaty beasts had yet to figure out. “Always with the games.” Carolina tried being mad but the small smile broke. “But if you must know, I was feeling a little bit bad about our conversation at Cornelia Street. You don’t often look crushed but when I told you about that book…”

            “I was surprised by your wine choice,” I said. ‘And the current company you keep.”

            “…But then I thought to myself,” Carolina continued, undeterred, “screw Rand. I’m a writer, right? I write from life. I don’t need to be apologizing for your fragile little male ego. And I had just as much right to that material as you or anyone else.”

            “As you so eloquently put in your text,” I said. “And it’s fragile cis male ego.”

            “I knew those drunks as well as you did,” she said.

            “I’m sure Colin is at home squirreling away his novel about your tryst from his wife.”

            “For the last and final and absolute time, I did nothing with Colin, nothing.” I was now dealing with angry Carolina. Carolina sans that sly smile. “We flirted a lot yes. I’ll concede to that, even though I don’t owe you an explanation for shit. But mostly we exchanged a few texts about books, like…I…told…you…years ago. I did nothing with anyone.”

            “Benny said the two of you broke the bathroom sink,” I said. “And your grammar is for shit.”

            “That was Jazzy Jim who broke the sink and you know it.” She stood up. I’d blown it already. There’d be no reconciliation. No reunification sex at my place. No toggling in my brain, Carolina? Larissa? No ritual burning of Carolina’s manuscript while she nakedly apologized from my bed and begged me to come back and do that ass-licking thing again. I’d failed to save Killian’s bookstore. Needful Things would close. Carolina opened her bag and handed me a sheet of paper.

            “What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a waiver of liability,” she said. “I want you to sign it so there’s no bullshit between us if I get my book published.”

“You think I’d sue you? Now I’m genuinely hurt.” And I wasn’t lying on that front.

“I’m going to smoke a cigarette.” Carolina killed her drink. “When I come back you are going to do three things. One, you’re signing that form. Two, you’re buying me a drink. And three, you’re getting to your point of this evening Rand.”

“You sat on Colin’s lap once.”

“I’ll knife you, Wyndham.”

            Carolina put on her hoodie and went outside. Watching her walk away was always a pleasure. It also made me realize just how badly I did with the women. I glared at that stupid form and then I got up to get our drinks. The vodka was working on me, so I knew I’d have to get to the point.

            “That chick is totally banging,” Heavy Metal said when I got to the bar. “What is she? Like twenty-one? She like…like…a model?”

            “Worse,” I said, as I walked away with our new drinks. “She’s a writer.”

            “Why haven’t you signed the form yet,” Carolina said, before she even sat back down. She took a generous pull on her drink. She was still a booze hound. Adjunct professorship and prose and Godfrey Whitt had only tamed her so far. “Rand, why are you always screwing around?”

            “Ah, the eternal question,” I said. I took a pull on vodka numero cinco. Then I picked that waiver of liability up, crumpled it into a ball and threw it behind my back. “The eternal answer is I don’t carry around pen…and I’m not going to sue you. Avoid making your main character dashing and intelligent and no one will even know it’s me.”        

“But Godfrey…”

“Speaking of beard-boy…I need a favor from you…well, not really you.”

            “No.”

            “That’s it? Just no? You don’t even know what it is.”

            Carolina had more to drink. She fiddled with a strand of hair that had rebelled from her tightly pulled ponytail. “I already know whom it’s coming from.”

            “I want your boyfriend, and subsequently you, to do a reading with us at Killian Cromier’s bookshop in Brooklyn.”

            “Ha!” Carolina put down her drink and stifled another fake laugh. “That’s rich.”

            “I’m not seeing the humor here, and I’m always looking for the humor.”

“Do you have any clue how much God gets paid to read?”

            “God?” I said. “You call your boyfriend God?”

            That got rid of the smile from her face. “Well…Godfrey…God.” She got quiet. “Ev…everyone calls him that.”

            “So…yes?”

            “I can’t answer for him but probably no.”

            “It’s for a good cause,” I said. “Rent hikes. Gentrification. Save NYC…all of that business.”

            “He does like a good rallying point,” Carolina said. She finished half her drink. “God considers himself the quintessential New Yorker, even though he’s from Maryland and didn’t move here until he was thirty-five.”

            “I’m sure he considers himself a citizen of the world.” I pointed to her magic phone machine. “Can’t you just text him or something and ask?”

            “He doesn’t believe in modern technology. He’s not even on Twitter or Facebook.”

            “A rebel in our midst,” I said. I killed half my vodka.

            “It makes him a better listener, he says.”

            “Huh?”

“Exactly,” she said. “You, Rand, you’re all over Facebook and Twitter now. I remember when you eschewed all of those things. I can only imagine the number of curvaceous seventeen-year-old library patrons you’ve trolled and stalked.”

“Now…”

Carolina finished her drink and handed me her glass. “Get me another?”

“I’m not made of money, you know.”

“I’m hoping you’ll go broke again and have to shuffalo back to Buffalo.”

I went for the drinks while Carolina whipped out her phone so she could see what had happened to the world in the five minutes since she’d had her last smoke. “For the record I don’t even know what trolling means,” I said, when I sat back down. It was as pure and honest a lie as ever had slipped out my mouth. On my worst days I’d trolled entire female high school swim teams. “And, remember, I’m still the guy without a cell phone. Take that Godfrey Whitt.”

“I’ll ask him,” Carolina said.

“Your benevolence knows no bounds,” I said.

“But don’t expect anything.”

“When have I ever.”

The woman saw her new rye and went to town. “You’re corrupting me.”

“You asked for it,” I said. “I’m sure you can just ask God for absolution. At the very least I’m sure he has migraine medicine and a clean commode.”

“You’re getting drunken Rand nasty.”

“I’m a pleasurable drunk.”

“For the most part,” she said. “But you have those moments.”

“I’m a pacifist,” I said.

“With a history of head-butting and wall punching.”

“Are you talking about your wall? I apologized for that. But for the record, no one should have to listen to Could You Be Loved over and over again through thin plaster.”

“He played it twice,” Carolina said.

“It felt over and over,” I said.

“Because you were drunk. At least you didn’t have to apologize to my neighbor over and over again for what some drunk asshole did.”

“I tapped that wall.”

“Toxic masculinity, Rand…look it up.”

“Now who’s getting drunk and nasty?” I had some vodka. I had to shake off this conversation. I leaned in. “Look, there’s something in this reading for you too.”

“I can’t imagine what,” Carolina said.

“Fidel wants to publish your book,” I said. “Sight unseen.”

“Who in the hell is Fidel?”

“He’s my publisher and editor,” I said. “He thinks the idea of having my book and your book on this same press is kooky, for lack of a better word.”

“This is the guy who can’t even publish your book on time, right?” Carolina looked at me. It was a look of pity. “It’s a nice offer, Rand. But obviously, I already have God’s people looking at it now. And with his connections I have a good shot of getting the book out there, and, not to sound pompous, on maybe something bigger than a small press that no one knows.”

“Stop calling him God, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fine,” she said. “Godfrey.”

“What happened to your indie rock aesthetic?” I asked. “Your punky hair and those big shoulder baring shirts that you used to wear?”

“I got rid of them the minute you opened a Facebook and Twitter account,” she said. “Or I grew the fuck up.”

I drank some vodka down. I needed to chill or it would be numero seis, and history and circumstance had proven to me that no bartender would pour me numero seis. “You mean to tell me that a novel that you wrote, about my bar, with me as a central character, is being looked at by the sycophants of the number three best seller in America, and might possibly have a chance at hitting the big time too.”

“Need I fetch the crumpled waiver of liability off the floor?” Carolina sipped her drink. She looked at the fireplace not me. “And he’s number two on the best seller list come this Sunday.”

“Number two is shit.” I stood. I wobbled. I might’ve smacked into a table of well-coiffed gentrifiers. The bartender looked up at me from her pint glass washing duty “Any jack-off can be number two on the best seller list.”

“Rand, sit down,” Carolina said. “For lack of a better phrase, you’re making an ass out of yourself.”

“Can you ask him about the reading or not?”

She shrugged again. “I already told you I’d ask.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Sadly, you haven’t,” Carolina said.

We stopped and glared at each other. “Can you just let me know in like a couple of days,” I finally said.

“I doubt it.” Carolina finished her drink. “We’ve got classes. And then God…sorry, Godfrey and I are heading upstate for Thanksgiving. He’s got a cabin in Orange County.”

“That’s not upstate. That’s like fifty miles away. All you Gotham big shots with your douche bag agents and two-thousand-page novels think that crossing the GW suddenly means you’re upstate.”

“Right,” Carolina said. She stood. She wobbled a bit. We were face to face like the long worn enemy combatants we’d always been. “I forgot…Buffalo is more upstate. Right, Rand. Shuffalo off to Buffalo.”

“Hey,” Bartender shouted. “You two.”

“You can’t use that against me twice in one evening,” I said.

“I just did, rummy,” Carolina said. She stormed away.

“Yeah,” I shouted after her. “Well, I’m a rummy who has a librarian job again and a book coming sometime before the next Crusades get fought…and I got a reading next week…you know, which, if you and Godfrey weren’t upstate, I’d invite you to…or maybe I’ll just go ahead and sue you instead!”

Carolina turned and gave me the finger. Then she went out the door.

“Banging,” Heavy Metal shouted back to me.

I shook my glass at the bartender. “One for the road?”

“Not on my watch, rummy,” she said.

I drank down the last half of an abandoned pint of beer left at the bar then raised my arms up like I was king, as I headed out. And I was the king. King of the bar. King of Carolina. King of poetry. King of Brooklyn. King of New York. King of the whole goddamned world. That is, until I tripped through the door of the bar and landed on the pavement, inches away from having my face implanted in a fresh pile of dog shit, looking helplessly up the street at Carolina, until she crossed Bay Ridge Parkway and vanished from my view.