~1979
They could tell that my booze was from Jalisco and was good; when the hinges squeaked open all the way and the big Delta Theta Gamma kid held back on the slurs—pinching and rolling one cheek in his breath at the caps: crimped lopsided, the remaining gaps smoothed flush with wax and nylon threads, depressurizing under the teeth of his penknife.
The night was still too young when I found their calling card atop his bookbag. The quilt unmade, the landline telephone uncradled. Typewriter keys weakly slugged it out beneath the floorboards. They were no Einsteins. After crumpling the paper sack from the IGA I had followed the stragglers from College and Q, notching the Datsun into third and hugging the dividing line, taillights smearing across the dashboard, my menthols: his necktie dangling, dark, silvered and limp from the canted rearview mirror. A girl was weeping upon the porch to Dionne Warwick, hissing low on a transistor radio. Walk on by…walk on by. Pupils dilated, nails defrocked, clawing at the seam of her bell bottoms. Become a cheat, kneeling before the threshold with a wrinkled Lincoln and a handful of pennies to canned snare drums, a self-inflicted flame.
Stagger inside, over a pullout couch, a cairn of discarded Coors Banquets. He was down somewhere. They would crush us both if they ever found out. Somewhere beyond the basement stairwell, ringed by little Dutch Boy stickers and Bob Newhart’s distorted hairline. Larry’s snubnose tinkles, beats into my waistline. Stamping hightops. Barbasol-tinted suedes. The bathtub shimmered luminous under fluorescents and the molded lip where plastic began to rise to meet silicone caulk and loose Letterman felt, flannel and shards of Michelob. Rock. Ease off the flaps.
His trench coat, his woolen cardigan, his necklace—Saint Christopher spread-eagled among the cigarette butts on the concrete floor. Eyes damp, misfiring. Shuttering light. The false payload shucks away, coasting dark into a Styrofoam cooler. Hiss, hiss. My lover cries, kicks. Gurgles as a hand grips his earlobe. Underneath, air heels—splits like a tanker hull and rushes with pulverized hops and the last of a rind from a month-old orange into the nostrils. The butt of the downstairs obituarist's Detective Special paws, drags off my waistband. A single stroke of the hammer, the afterburn and shouts and whirling mass overlapping—shorelined—and at last, like a steel baton, a granite boulder under a crowbar—he pivots upwards—tumbles free—damp, retching, bile-anointed, to burrow and
kiss
the crook of my arm.