Twelve Shots

She sat him down over twelve shots of whiskey.

“Each drink,” she said, “is a new subject.” She smiled, and they took the first shot. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked. He shrugged. “How about jobs?” So they talked about what they did all day, how they hated their boss, how they needed raises and all of the normal conversation. It didn’t last long.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s take another.” They clinked the glasses together and took the second shot down, this one smoother than the first. “That warmed me up,” she said, and told him that summer was her favorite season. He told her his was fall, but summer was nice, too. She spoke about past memories of summer camp. He was a boyscout.

They took the third shot. “You know,” he said, “my parents are divorced.” “You know,” she smiled, “after 35 years, mine are not.” They laughed but she felt terrible, like she made a joke about his life. She touched her hand to his wrist and said she had a very lonely, unhappy childhood. He understood why, though he admitted maybe he did not understand how. She thought hard and told him she always felt alone even if she wasn’t. “This,” he said solemnly, “I understand especially.”

He motioned to the fourth shot, and smiled. They raised the drinks at each other and tipped their chins back, letting the smooth whiskey burn down their throats. “What now?” he asked. “Why are we out here tonight?” she asked him. “Is this a date?” “No,” he said. “But it could be if you want it to be.” She frowned and smiled, then frowned again and looked at her empty drink. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she mumbled. “I didn’t really eat dinner.” “It’s okay,” he said, and this time touched her hand with his: “Do you think this is a date?” She turned to him, squinting. “I’d rather not say.” “Not say,” he asked, “why not say?” “Because I’d rather not know. Not yet anyway.” “Fair enough,” he agreed, “but then we may have completed that subject.”

“Okay,” she agreed and took the next shot and waited as he, surprised, took his a moment later. “Would you mind if I played something on the jukebox?” she asked, and stood up. He sat on his bar stool alone and watched as she walked, all hips, to the jukebox across the room. Her ankles seemed to tug at her shoes as she walked, dragging spiky heels across the hardwood planks. She took a few minutes to choose music, and eventually settled on a popular Rolling Stones song. He walked over to her with the last set of glasses, her two hands placed wide-set on the jukebox, her hips swaying softly. “I think that was a subject onto itself.”

They took the last drink down and he brushed hair out of her eyes, his fingers lightly dragging against her cheek like her heels on the floor.

An American Aquarium Drinker

The group and the prayer and the behavior modification stop working eventually and then you will revert, you know this ahead of time, so you do what you always do when you’re lectured about drinking so much: you pour yourself a tall glass with one ice cube and stir it around with your finger before transferring it into a Dixie cup and then you leave, you walk out, into the piss-pour parts of the city late at night because everyone else is drunk like you, tongue-tied like you, frustrated like you, alone or very well could be like you, but before you get to the end of your drink your foot catches in a grate, your knees buckle and your wrists flap again the rough sidewalk and you’ve got yourself a fine set of cuts and a bloodied chin and what’s left of the drink is puddled around your ass like you’ve gone and pissed yourself, so you sit there, licking ribbons of blood off your hands like a wounded cat and wait for the rye to dry and the pain to subside and you imagine how nice, how really goddamn nice it would be for the sun to come out in this black dead of night, just this once while the rest of the big city sleeps, so you could make your way uptown and dig out your keys and get back for one more dose and the dizzy spell of those goodnight dreams.

Your Pussy Has Left New York

“Are you kidding?” she asks, but doesn’t expect an answer. She’s leaning against the bar, her long arms draped over it, her fingers dipping in beer spills.

Wagner is silent. He isn’t kidding, clearly.

“She left, and she’s not coming back!” she exclaims.

Wagner nods. “I know. It’s too late.” He moves closer to me, in the middle. I move closer to her. She looks at herself in the mirror. We all look at ourselves in the big mirror behind the bar, continuing conversation through glass.

“What am I supposed to do?” Wagner asks.

“What are you supposed to do?” she repeats. She turns away from the mirror and at the crowd of men gathered to her right. “What is he supposed to do?”

The men perk up at the sight of a friendly, intoxicated blonde. “What is he supposed to do?”

The ringleader motions for the group to stand up. They circle us like vultures. I notice wedding bands. I sip my whiskey, neat, and shift away from Wagner, who is fingering his cellphone and staring at me in the mirror.

She sits up straight. “He dated this girl for years. And he’s here from Florida. And she left, she went back home, and he let her go.”

“Where’d she go?” asked one of the married men.

“Home,” she answers.

“The Lower East Side,” adds Wagner.

“Home,” she repeats. “But then she’s moving. This is it. She’s moving back to California.”

“Oh god,” moans Wagner, and I can’t tell if it’s the crowd, or the booze, or the thought of Los Angeles.

“Wagner! You’ve got to call her!”

The crowd of men agrees, sipping their beers and nodding enthusiastically.

“You’ve got to call her or else.”

“Or else what?” asks Wagner.

“Or else she’s gone. She’s practically gone already. This is it!”

The men offer suggestions, like witty text messages and come hither smiley face emoticons that would convince her via SMS to felate him. Wagner just fingers his cellphone, passing it from hand to hand, staring at himself in the mirror.

“You’re going to wait too long and that’s going to be it.”

“And then what?” asks a married man.

“And then your pussy has left New York.” She excuses herself to use the bathroom. The men slink away, back to their beers and conversations and boring, married lives.

Wagner looks at me in the mirror. I take his phone and text her for him. And then I go back to my whiskey, neat.

We Won’t Be Hungry

The bed was perfect, the sheets tucked exactingly into the navy blue bed frame. He sits at the desk with a ziplock bag of grass and a neat folded paper. Why is the door locking? And when we all sit together, draped over the bed in our gray shifts and pale sweaters, blowing wind at the corners of the hotel room, our lungs expand and collapse and when someone uses the bathroom we can all hear them piss into that gorgeous white industrial toilet. We clutch our feet together. We take turns at the bedside table and clean up neat little expensive rows, our fingers tracing over the invisible dust of whoever was in this room last. We won’t be hungry. Tender noise in the window. The traffic lights in Tribeca turn red like a parade or a funeral procession. There is someone in the bathroom. There is someone at the door. Why is the door locking? Our ribcages rise and fall as we inhale, exhale, laying on the bed with our warm hands outstretched. Bring us water when you’re done. Clean up the remains of the desk, of the squat bedside table when you’re through. Jaws clenched, chins up, eyes closed. Don’t mess up the perfect sheets and whatever happens don’t lock the door.

Under the West Side Highway

In the summer, the city smells like dead fish, even more so now than before. The trees, especially the hirsute ones uptown, are to blame. It gets colder—just like it always did—in the fall, except now when the trees shed leaves, they develop a fine coating of hair. In the spring, the thin strands molt off the branches and trunks and the street cleaners sweep the streets like a barbershop floor. By June, there are a few stray hairs left in the city. Most of them end up in the Hudson where the scaly fish choke on them and drift under the West Side Highway. The hookers have since vacated Tenth Avenue.

Little girls and hungry rats.

The neighborhood was full of blonde braids and balloon animals on leashes. Little girls sat on stoops throwing pieces of bread at the sidewalks below. One by one and one by one, the little girls tore uneven pieces off loaves of challah and dark seeded rye. They tossed pieces until the rats grew full and scurried away into the gutters, leaving the sidewalks strewn with uneaten bread and pale, yellow leaves. Soon, the little girls were called in for lunch. It began to rain. The bread became bloated and the sidewalks turned spongy. The city smelled like yeast. Later, the rats emerged from the gutters, their eyes shining bright. The little girls were sent to bed without supper.

The Delivery Boys Have All Gone Missing

New York was homogenized, cleaned out by Giuliani and his karma police. We were bequeathed the expensive shreds of what was left. This was all in the last will and testament to Manhattan, articulated in the free pamphlets piled high next to subway ticket machines. The fine print about credit cards and one speed bicycles and bomb-sniffing dogs is in there. It reads like poetry if you are, and you should be, a lawyer. It reads like an admissible villanelle. But no one reads the fine print, and no one notices the delivery boys have all gone missing. The hard boiled detectives are all sleeping in. Old cigarette smoke is bottled and sold on side street bodegas. Skyscrapers buckle in the deadening wind while handymen fix New York from the gutter on up. We take what was left for us and try and remember to leave a suitable tip if the delivery boys ever return.

Her back to my back, to his back, to the mirror.

The rain was forgiving, in the sense that it eventually dried up and faded into a lukewarm sunset. The fat girl’s t-shirt, however, was not. It buckled under her shoulder blades and the lines that filled out her back. Her hair hung limp to the side in a ponytail, little wisps of brown hedging down her neck. The bartender was a playwright in disguise. The fat girl wouldn’t be able to fit into a disguise. I wondered what he wrote about her. We made eye contact just once in the mirror and went on ignoring each other, eying the fat girl for note taking and the like—her back to my back, to his back, to the mirror.