lickhaven

[The third part of Jenny’s narrative, introducing Reb. But first, a brief note.}

“Harvard Fires Star Business Professor for Faking Her Findings on Honesty”

Is this a great world or what?

*   *   *   *

Along Market Street, on the edge of gloaming, the expletives of traffic race behind and past her, filling her ears with mechanical mutter. Near City Hall, Market Street’s lanes have been narrowed, shoved aside for some massive underground construction in a deep – chasmly deep – channel with a scattering of trash along the bottom.

What’s down there? She should know, but she bypasses the local news. She knows that when things happen in Philly they often vanish without a trace.

She reaches 8th Street, once the busiest commercial intersection in the United States, a devil’s crossroad where three behemothic department stores clashed swords. One has morphed into boutiquy iterations of the 19th century, retaining its fused iron store fronts. One remains, a bought-over remnant of its former self. One is a hole in the ground surrounded by parking lots, planned as a mini-Disneyland before Mickey said “No.”

Jenny is aware of the corner’s commercial past because it is part of history. She is aware of more history than most people believe exists. At the corner she hears screams for help: sonic ghosts, the choked voices of dead commerce. She closes her mental ears and pops spicy Indian snacks into her mouth, one by one or a few at a time. To herself she sings

If I were a carpenter

and you were a plumber

would you marry me anyway

would you be my kids’ mummer?

Another of her compulsive parodies – musical Tourettes.

A SEPTA transit bus rounds the opposite corner too tightly and clips a bollard, shearing off the passenger-side front wheel as cleanly as a knife through holiday frosting. The bus swings, hesitates, leaps the curb, halts, embarrassed. The passengers exit slowly, gesticulating without apparent rancor. Another absurdity in the growing chaos around Jenny. The whole world is fucked the fuck up. She tenses, waiting… for the scene to make a comment, assign blame.

It doesn’t this time, but the wracked tightness in her shoulders won’t give way.

Behind her, a Black man with a massive beard holds high a book – the Bible, the New Testament – and rants like a vacuum cleaner with a clogged hose. His voice rises, ratchets, fibrillates, hangs. 

She walks back west along Market St., then down into the dank concourse beneath 15th St., past its decaying post-trendy shops. Near the subway entrance three short, swarthy musicians in fringed Andean castoffs, two men and a woman, play the Pan pipes, guitar and hand drum that the Incas thumped and tooted while sacrificing children. The concrete floor responds with haves of appreciation in time to a lost land devoured by Spanish gilded lust, undulations absorbed by the Market St. subway as it rumbles down the line.

The musical trio push to sound spirited, but theirs is a tired spirit that would prefer to curl up in a doorway and be left alone. But Jenny stops to listen; you don’t often hear tuneful South American history fighting the echo of a subway. Their sign says “CD $5.” She buys a CD, shoves it into the back pocket of her jeans and stands outside the fence of the subway platform. She wraps her hands around the upright iron bars, a monkey on display. Here, without paying a fare, she can watch the people waiting for transportation or revelation, imbibe the screech of trains that make as much or as little sense as music displaced hundreds of years, thousands of miles.

Twirling mirrored balls spray torrents of colored light. She thought they’d flickered out with disco. Or is it back again? John Travolta slowed down for Pulp Fiction, a 78 dancing at 33 1-3, but maybe just because he was an old man.

On her fourth vodka martini, a side-slide from her Wild Turkey standard,she shambles onto the dance floor, tries to go fluid, but springs a leak. Dancing for Jenny is nearly always a mistake, one she makes only when blindly potted. The lights – or her eyes – are swirling too fast. No one dances with her but she is not dancing alone. She is part of the communal isolation, the sea of vacantly reduced inhibition. Turning slower than the music, then faster, out of time, out of space but not out of alcohol, she careens into a tall form in a wide-brimmed hat. 

“Scuse,” she hiccups.

“S’alright.”

“Gesuntheit.”

“Comes out loose.”

She blinks in owlish confusion, then bellows comprehension. Christ, I’m a fuckin idiot, but her idiocy bellows louder, leaning against a table, lurching it into its inebriated guests who alternately josh and whine disapproval, unaware of the difference.

“Zas funny,” her vocal cords skewed.

“Why don’t we, um, sit down?” asks the hat.

“Why doan we?” 

They sit.

“Ya know, today, tonight, I brought, I bought a CD of some Souf ‘merican shit. Ya know, the mountain thing with the pipes?”

“Plumbing music?”

Jenny explodes again. Under the giddy warmth, this demon of moron humor assaults her nerves. “It’s, it’s…. see,” she lines up the table cutlery so the tops descend in steps, Pan pipettes, “they go like this, diff’rent newts. Notes? Uh…”

“I get it.”

“Good.”

The hand of the hat reaches across the table. No face in the brim’s fuzzy shadow. “You want to, um, do something?”

“I’m dune somethin. Gettin drunk. Tha’s dune somethin.”

“I meant something else.”

“So… what’s else? Where?”

“My place.”

“You got a place? S’good t’have a place. More people should have a place.”

“Come on. Let’s go.”

“Pfoof. Done wanna go. Wanna stay an get drunk, drunker.”

“C’mon.” The hand grasps her wrist and pulls.

“Say.” Her wrist resists.

“C’mon.”

“I done wanna c’mon. Wanna stay here.”

“There’s a nice bed at my place, nice soft bed, soft music, soft pillows, more wine.”

“Martini.”

“Martinis. Whatever you want.”

“Wanna stay here.”

The hand yanks harder. Jenny lumbers half upright and leans across the table.

“I wanted suck yer cock I’d fuckin get up an crawl over table an suck yer cock. But I done wanna suck yer cock. I wanna finish my drink, get nother drink, finish that, maybe nother, an you try stop me I fuckin RIP YOUR BALLS OFF,” a blast that breaks through the pulsating house-beat rhythm.

“Shit.”

“Yeah, shit eat shit drink piss climb a pole an fuck a monkey mister fuckin hat fuck a goddam fuckin monkey,” as she slams back into her seat.

The hat departs.

Is it worms in your meal, Mona Lisa,

Or is it something else that makes you fart?

“Pissant sometime little fucker. Fokker. Airplane.”

Her head slumps toward her arms on the table but misses, whacking her forehead. Something about skateboards. Skateboards? What? She blinks upright. In an instant the wooze is gone and she sees herself in a crystal internal mirror. “Holy fucking Christ, lookit me. There’s no fucking excuse. There is none.” Upright, staring straight ahead, she cries great crocodile tears.

“Can’t be that bad,” says the voice of the man who sits across, where the hat had sat. This one wears no hat, only a tightly curled ginger mass of hair tying into itself like a Brillo pad.

“Can be. Is. Where you come from?” 

“Moseying.”

“‘Can’t be that bad,’ that’s a lousy, shitful pickup line. Watchin movies.”

“Name the movie.”

She can’t. It makes her hiccup.

“You were singing, what was that?”

“Sing ta myself. Don’t sing you, don’t sing t’nobody else.”

“Forget it.”

“Hey.”

“Hey?”

“You lettin that go, not sayin ‘What the fuck?’”

“No.”

They sit together, no talk, then,

“Let me get you another drink.”

Jenny snickers. “You got hands, you could do that. Don’t wanna drink. Yet. I want… f’I fuckin knew what I wanted, I wooden be here drunk, gettin smashed,” the loose shaggle of drink taking hold again.

 “Why are you getting smashed?”

Jenny thinks about it. “Because… don’t want to get anything else. It’s, uh, kinda negative thing, what’s left over ’cause there’s nothin else, good way be angry bout everything. It all shits. Maybe lesser of two weevils. Know that joke?”

“No.”

“Yeah, can’t remember. It’s a joke.” She looks at the almost empty martini glass. “No more.”

“I think you’re interesting.”

“Lines gettin worse. ‘What’s my sign?’”

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop sign.”

Jenny relaxes a little because for now it’s all right. Not forever. “We gonna fuck your place or mine?”

On the way to her place, Reb (that’s his moniker) holds her arm as she slews and totters.

“Don’t you think th’universe should be a better place?” she asks, shaking his arm for emphasis.

“Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it what?”

“Better?”

Jenny pulls herself loose, almost into the gutter. “You dunno fuckin logic.”

“Well…”

“’F’I ask, ‘Don’t you think…’ wha wassit I ast?”

“Don’t you think the universe should be a better place.”

“’F’I ast that, it means, shoont it be better than it is, right?”

“OK.”

“An you say, ‘Isn’t it’ means isn’t it already better’n it is.”

“Well…”

She latches onto his arm again, “Bertie Russell, Sir Bertrand Russell, philosopher – know him? – s’OK, he’s dead, he had a yacht – thas the story – had a yacht and prob’ly he did, he was a sir, lord, had the yacht and invited friend over, ‘C’mon over, Cedric, see m’yacht.’ Cedric says, ‘OK,’ they get there, atta yacht, Cedric says, ‘Lawd Ruzzell, I thought your yacht was bigger than it is,’ an Bertie says –”

“‘It’s not… bigger than it is.’”

Jenny whoops. “Yuv heard it. Woowee.”

“I just got into it, what you were getting at. That logic.”

“I tole it right? Prob’ly never happened, erpin legend, see, but thas how Bertie would’ve said it, f he did.”

“You told it just right.” 

“You don’t read Bertie Russell. What kinda crap you read?”

“The news, online. Sci fi, like that.”

“You should read Dostoevsky. Everybody should read Dostoevsky, ’specially you.”

“Why especially me?”

“’Sobvious.”

Half a block ahead, a man nearly as drunk as Jenny lurches into the crosswalk against a red light. A small, smug white car bears down, full speed, headed for mayhem, swerves, missing him by centimeters. The man stops, wobbles, walks on.

Jenny squints through the alcoholic fog. “Dint hit him. Ain’t that somethin? Huh. Shoulda hit him, like evthing else when I’m ’round.”

They stand at the foot of the steps to her place.

“You comin up?”

“Sure.”

“No.”

“But we’re –”

“No. Done wanna fuck tonight. My cunt wooden work. Go ‘way.”

Reb looks stricken, his intertwined hair threatening to unimpact. “Damn it to hell.”

“Can’t curse for shit either.”

Reb is half a block gone when Jenny’s key finally agrees to find its lock.

She lives half a block south of Chestnut St. on 21st, in a seldom tidy apartment on the second floor of a rowhouse fronted with rectangular whitish stone. Philadelphia boasts more rowhouses per capita than any other U.S. city (she read that). A sad asphalted area runs from her house to the corner, a one-car-deep parking lot topped by a massive billboard for a legendary antediluvian radio DJ. The remaining houses look lost or disgruntled. How different might the row look if it still extended to the corner? Did it ever?

Jenny wrestles herself out of her t-shirt, opens the shower stall and sticks her head under the muted torrent of cold water. It smashes directly into her brain, driving the alcohol from her neurons with efficient belligerence. 

She towels her hair and stares into the mirror. “Nobody.”

She hits the speed dial on her phone without looking. It holds only one number.

An answering machine picks up on the sixth ring. 

“This is Rachel Ann Melrose, chief assistant to the assistant chief district attorney of the city of Philadelphia. This is also the coolest Black chick you’re likely to meet in your sorry life. Whichever one you’re calling, I’ll answer if I’m in the mood. Or you can make it easy and just shout a message.”

The beep sounds. “You’re going to get your sorry paralegal ass in a sling with that stuff, chocolate chicklet. Crap, did I get blasted tonight. You think I’m an alcoholic? I think I’m an alcoholic. Reb knows I’m an alcoholic. You don’t know Reb. It’s hard to juggle half a conversation and talk like a human being. Be even harder to talk like a pangolin or a pineapple, huh? Two pineapples trading the latest: ‘I got canned.’ ‘I’m King of the Juice.’ I said some funny stuff when I was drunk, wonder what it was. Know why I’m angry? Pissed? When I’m not making funnies? Cuz a mind like mine could have done so much in the world –  could do stuff in the world still – but it got taken away. Still getting taken away, bits and pieces, more took alla time. Taken. Thanks for listening. You do, huh? Listen? Gonna take aspirin, many, many aspirin.” 

Jenny hangs up and looks at a blank spot on the wall.