El cumpeaños de Jose-Luis

El cumpleaños de Jose-Luis

Johnny took the job driving Las Copitas because he had nothing better to do. They were a four-piece girl group, two guitars, bass, and drums. They played straight-ahead power-pop stuff, and they were cute. They drank like men, knew every coke dealer in every town, and they paid pretty good. It would be ten shows through southern Spain, and the food would be astounding. They all spoke English, and Johnny had a crush on Pilar, the drummer. There was really, really nothing better to do.

They left Madrid Saturday morning, and the first three shows, Ciudad Real, Albacete, and Córdoba had gone great. Tuesday night was Sevilla. The promoter got them a huge paella for dinner, the crowd was rabid, and there was cocaine everywhere. When the girls left for an after-hours bar, at about 3am, Johnny thought it prudent to sleep in the van with the equipment in the club’s parking lot. There, he might get the ringing out of his ears. He wasn’t quite ready for sleep, so he decided to take a walk to La Plaza de España nearby. There was a famous fountain there that he had never seen. He cracked open a big bottle of Mahou, and both the beer and the night were crisp and cool.

As he neared the huge fountain in the center of the plaza, he could hear a man singing. Closer still, he saw it was a man splashing around, laughing, falling down drunk in the fountain. He thought he recognized the voice.

“Jose-Luis?” he called out.

It couldn’t be. What the hell would he be doing in a fountain in Sevilla? The man stopped singing and splashing, and sure enough, it was Jose-Luis, Johnny’s downstairs neighbor from Madrid. He had helped fix the toilet in Johnny’s apartment when Johnny would have had no idea what to ask for in the hardware store. Jose-Luis was short and muscular, dark-skinned and in his early sixties. Right now, his thick, graying hair was plastered down over his eyes, which looked like bloodshot cocktail onions. He tried to focus them on Johnny.

“¡Juanito!” he cried in jubilant recognition. “¡Es mi cumpleaños!”

He awkwardly waded a few steps forward and fell, his head smacking the stone lip of the fountain. It sounded like a rifle shot, but he hopped back up, howling laughter.

“Happy birthday,” Johnny said. He held out the beer. “Ven conmigo Jose. Tengo una cerveza.” He sounded as though he was trying to coax a foaming dog into a cage.

Jose-Luis tumbled obediently out of the fountain, staggered to Johnny and threw his arms around him. Johnny gave him the beer, and Jose-Luis leapt onto Johnny’s back, yelling, “¡Andele, caballito!” Jose-Luis weighed about a hundred-fifty pounds and was sopping wet, but Johnny carried him piggyback all the way to the van, Jose whooping, “¡Andele, hijo! ¡Andele, hijo!” and guzzling beer the whole time. In the van, they talked and drank beer and smoked cigarettes. After awhile, Jose-Luis passed out, snoring, smiling, drooling, angelic as the day of his birth. Johnny dropped off soon afterwards.

The van felt like a sauna when Johnny awoke. He looked at his watch, and it was ten-thirty. The girls would be there soon. He used the back of his hand to tap Jose-Luis’s cheek. There was no response. He shook Jose by the collar, but the man’s head just lolled about. This was no good. He put a finger under Jose-Luis’s jaw, and there was no question about it; the old man was cold and dead. Johnny lit a cigarette and begged himself not to panic, but his mind raced. He thought about calling the police, but he had been living in Spain for two years, and he was entirely illegal. He would be deported, or far worse, as there was a large purple welt on Jose-Luis’s forehead. It would sure look like murder when the Guardia Civil arrived. A Spanish inquisition was not what Johnny had signed up for. Not with this hangover. He was sweaty and panting, already raped in a Spanish jail.

He got out of the van and went behind the nightclub. There were some trash barrels and bottle bins in the tall weeds. He ran back and grabbed Jose-Luis under the shoulders and began to drag him around the building. What a party, Johnny thought, he weighs twice as much as he did last night. Oh, no! Did anybody see us coming back?

He laid the corpse behind the garbage cans.

When Johnny emerged, the girls were loitering around the van. He fiddled with his fly as though he had been taking a piss. Paloma, the bassist, said, “Oh, I should go too,” and started past him.

Johnny snagged her elbow and thought fast.

“No, no, I saw a big rat back there. You can go at a truck stop. We need gas anyways.” His hands shook badly as they all got into the van. He could barely get the key in the ignition and then couldn’t find the gears.

When they were a few kilometers outside of town and on the highway, Paloma called from the back, “¿Que es esa? ¿Es tuya Johnny?”

Johnny looked over his shoulder. Paloma was holding up one of Jose-Luis’s sodden work boots between two fingers, grimacing as though it was a dead animal.

“I thought it was Cristina’s,” said Johnny, referring to the singer, the smallest and cutest of the band. “Just get rid of it.”

“Ha-ha,” said Cristina.

Pilar, in the front passenger seat, rolled down the window, and with a “bleah,” Paloma chucked the wet boot out onto the highway. In the side mirror, Johnny watched it tumble along, come to rest, and shrink into a speck.

After that, there was nothing but a constantly diminishing reflection.

They drove several kilometers in silence. Finally, Cristina piped up, “Hey, let’s get some cognac at the truck stop. And put on some fucking music. It’s like somebody died in here.”

Three-Finger Schnupp

Three-Finger Schnupp

Billy Schnupp crossed and re-crossed his hands over the kitchen table.

“You’re not going to do it,” Maggie said. She stared at the percolator on the stove.

“Well, why the hell not?”

His argument was not convincing himself either.

“Because you know it’s stupid, and it goes against...”

“God?”

“Yes. And because you know better.”

The baby began to fuss.

“No. It goes against opposing batters, and I’ll be the winner.” He twisted his wedding band. “You and me will be the goddamn winners.”

She went to the earthen jar and pulled up their bread knife. She clattered it onto the table.

“Then do it.”

Billy sighed. “Dr. Carroll said he will.”

“A degenerate gambler.”

“He brought you, me and Em into the world.”

“Degenerate.” She wished that the coffee would hurry.

Billy frowned at his hands and at the knife.

“Honey, this pitch is gonna work.”

“According to?”

“Yeah, yeah... Teddy.”

“Oh, yes, our dear Edward Devins, the drunken, irresponsible cheat.”

“That was only once.”

He looked again at his hands on the table. He examined the true blade of the knife, comparing its edge to that of a scalpel. He used both hands to rub his forehead. The percolator began to pop. She wiped her hands on her apron, and he could feel her gaze. He could feel her gaze upon the knife.

“Do you think either one of them would stick by you if it didn’t work? They wouldn’t need you anymore, so why don’t you cut out the middlemen? Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“It would be for you and Em.”

“Then do it. Do it for me.”

As only a woman can, in one motion she banged down a cup of coffee without a spill, snatched the bread knife, and shoved the handle into his palm.

“Make us all rich,” she said.

“I don’t get you. I’ve got a way to do it, the curveball to beat all, the curve, and you don’t want me to do it.” He looked at his hands. “I don’t need it so much. I don’t even want it so much.” He poked the knife hard into the Formica, and the steel blade bounced, startling him. “It’s only a fuckin’ finger. What difference does it make?”

She sat down with her own cup of coffee, smoothing her apron as she did. Her fingers splashed over her thighs in a manner that neither he nor she noticed.

“Billy, it matters to me.”

Poisons

Here is a piece of "flash fiction."

Poisons

“Honey,” she sang from the kitchen, “Don’t forget to take your iodine tablet and your warfarin. I packed your nitroglycerine pills in your briefcase. You left them on the dresser again.”

So much poison for one man to be taking, I thought, as she ate the ground-up glass that I had been putting in her oatmeal each morning.

Mirth Bubbles

Here is a haiku for Spring:

Mirth Bubbles

Mirth bubbles along.
Listen. Taste the fresh water
passing into time.

apple apple apple

apple apple apple

Did you hear your mom

when she left for work?

apple

We’ll have to talk

when she gets home.

apple apple

Let’s sit at the table

and read the news.

apple apple apple

Those racist clowns;

they’ll never learn.

apple apple apple

How can you stand me?

I smell like blecch.

apple apple

Let’s get you one

and touch your hair,

ap-ple

and rue the day

it won’t be sticky.

Lavapiés, ca. 1980

 

Lavapiés, ca. 1980

            “Lavapiés, foot-wash... wash-feet,” mused Roland. He figured it must have to do with some ancient Catholic ritual. Didn’t they have one day during the year when everybody washed their feet?

Lavapiés was a large, sloping plaza, bordered at the top by a loopy grin of a cobblestone thoroughfare, diagonally intersected by another, straighter cobblestone artery, both leading to the bottom of the grade, creating an uneven hourglass.

Roland imagined where there might once have been a cistern for the actual washing of feet. He pegged it for where the low, whitewashed, stone building now stood, where they dried and shredded the tobacco that was then rolled into “Payasos,” the harsh Spanish cigarettes that came in the ridiculous blood-red packet with a cartoon drawing of a clown holding a toy balloon.

The sagging, disenchanted buildings surrounding Lavapiés had stood guard for centuries, over plagues, poverty, and Revolution-era street fighting. It was still a rough neighborhood, earthy and poor.

On Sundays, after church, the arteries and the rest of the plaza were lined with hundreds of canopied tables for el rastro, Madrid’s flea market. Thousands of people clogged the plaza, throbbing past the tables, picking through piles of old clothes, books, kitchenware, clocks, lamps, stamp collections, military ribbons, religious statues, hand tools, vinyl records, bootlegged American cigarettes, anything that a person might buy.

At 4pm, the crowd spilled into the many bars and cafeterias, which lined the streets nearby, laughing and talking boisterously, cheering televised futbol matches, smoking, and drinking wine and beer. They also ordered plate after plate of gambas, grilled, whole prawns, coated with coarse salt. Families and friends ritually tear off the prawns’ heads, peel off the shells and tails, gulp down the flesh, and repeat this process until nightfall, when most of the patrons return to their homes, leaving behind ankle-deep piles of orange-pink carcasses and hundreds of thousands of crustacean heads bearing twice as many gloss black, stunned eyes.

Roland was alone, standing at the bar. The only other customers were two young lovers at a table in the corner, holding hands, their knees touching, their feet swallowed up in pink, translucent, pungent petals.

“Lavapiés,” Roland thought. “Wash your feet.”

He swirled the remainder of what he decided would be his last glass of beer at this locale. Even near the bottom, the beer stayed cold and lively. He looked at his own feet and at the hundreds of beadlike eyes gaping up at him. He tried to think of a philosophical metaphor for the heads and bodies crushed under his shoes, and he laughed out loud when he could not. He drained his beer and said, “Buenas noches, muchachos,” to the bartender and the oblivious couple.

He started his trudge up the cobblestones to a windowless bar that he knew, where they played flamenco music on the phonograph and the waiter would speak to him in a very entertaining version of English. There, he could sit down and have a civilized glass of whiskey.

From somewhere off the side of the plaza, shielded by darkness, a woman shrieked, “¡Puta morro!” followed by the unmistakable sound of a bottle shattering.

“Yes,” thought Roland, “A civilized glass of whiskey.”

Apostrophe

 Happy Valentime's Day, 2014

Apostrophe

She wrote me a note:
do you know what i think?
i think
        your crazy

Dear Crazy,
Do you know what I think?
I think.
       You're Everything