Passenger(36)
Amazingly enough, the apartment upstairs is exactly as I’d imagined it—sans the disco balls. Red shag carpeting, mismatched sofas, countless harem pillows, black-light posters and a hookah pipe on a wooden table that is not a table but a spool of industrial wire set on its side. I am rarely invited to the apartment—the brothers live here and it is spoken of by the other employees at The Neighborhood with the sort of reverence typically reserved for the discussion of terminal illnesses—and much of my survey of the apartment is the result of quick glances stolen when the door is opened and shut. I am conscious of blue light bulbs, guitar amplifiers, holiday garland, and low music on an invisible record player. And although I have never feasted my eyes on such a display, I am told, by an animated Timmy Donlon, of the shrine to their dead brother: framed photos set atop a stolen construction barrel behind which, along the wall, hangs Johnny Devine’s clothes. I do not believe this when Timmy Donlon first relays it to me—he is someone I am quick to appraise as a teller of tall tales—but when Tate Jennings, the homosexual busboy, confirms the story one evening, I instantly know it to be true.
“It’s true,” he insists. “I’ve seen it.”
We’re in one of the many strip clubs along Baltimore Street, drinking in the tight, ball-and-socket asses of sequined strippers, doused in blackness interspersed with neon. We drink flat beers that cost five bucks a can and have cashed in a wad of twenties for singles. I have accompanied Tate to the club after a weekend of corrosive confusion has claimed his soul and spirit. A blatant homosexual, he is just as confounded as everyone else at The Neighborhood by his unwavering lust for the female waitress, Olivia Sorenson, with whom he shares a shift. He has asked me to chaperone an evening of strip clubs and prostitutes—both activities accessible along the area known as the Block—in hopes that he will be able to either turn himself off from his lust of Olivia or, if that fails, he’ll at least prepare himself for how to approach her. Because he plans to make love to her. He is set on this from the beginning of the night. He can’t explain it to himself so he is at a loss trying to explain it to me. However, I have little interest in understanding the sexual fancies of Tate Jennings. So we sit at the bar, drinking expensive beer and shelling out singles to the strippers on stage, and when a supple young blonde in a neon green bikini saunters over, decidedly underage, Tate looks at me for encouragement. Despite the sprinkle of herpes so obvious on her lips and the coked out emptiness in her eyes, I bid him good luck; a moment later and the girl leads him over to a small cubicle at the back of the bar where she grinds her hips into his lap. I watch the display in the length of mirror above the bar, feigning ignorance to the whole ordeal. At one point Tate looks like he wants to vomit—in fact, I am almost certain he will—but in the break between songs and after a brief dialogue with the underage stripper (who now has her pendulous breasts flopping out over the cups of her neon bikini), I see Tate begin to unbuckle his belt and unzip his fly while the stripper hocks phlegm into the palm of her right hand.
Afterward, he climbs beside me onto his stool, his face nearly green.
“I don’t know,” he practically wheezes, sounding like a balloon that’s rapidly losing air. “I just don’t know.”
“I don’t know if it’s something you can learn,” I tell him.
He groans and shouts too loudly to the bartender for another expensive beer. “I don’t know,” he repeats after a moment. Then he rushes to the restroom where, presumably, he throws up.
Then, in the cab ride home, Tate says, “Maybe you can get to know her.” He is talking about Olivia, the waitress whom he has a crush on. “Maybe you can feel her out for me.”
I have no qualms about spending time with Olivia Sorenson. She’s energetic and full of life and being around her makes me feel warm and well thought of. We drink together and she is comfortable talking to me about a variety of things, some of them rather sexual in nature, and I am embarrassed into silence at some of her bolder comments. She is a different person away from The Neighborhood, a different woman here alone with me. She drinks heavily at bars and likes hard liquor. Her mouth curves down just slightly, almost in a vague snarl, and I find this to be a curious if not somewhat endearing idiosyncrasy. We’re at Hal’s, her favorite place, where the floors slope to a frown and the street is polluted by loud men in neon clothes who patronize, with much fanfare, the dank-looking strip joint across the street.
A few times I attempt to bring up Tate’s schoolboy crush on her. This goes nowhere. In fact, the first time I mention it I don’t think she even hears me. Like how a mother of many children may grow deaf to their crying. So the next time I mention Tate, I do so more directly, pinning her to a corner so to speak, prepared to not readily let her slide away.
“Tate,” she says, “is gay. He doesn’t love me and he doesn’t want to make love to me. He’s just confused.”
And just like that I agree with her. As if she’s just stated the simplest thing in the world, I agree with her. And of course it makes sense. Of course.
Besides, she is much more interested in me. Not in a romantic way and certainly, as far as I’m aware, not in a sexual way. What interests her is my lack of history—“You have no history, no soul”—and all the tendrils of emptiness that come together to form the empty void that is my past. She is infatuated by my lack of knowledge, though confounded—as am I, to some extent—that I am able to name many of the U.S. presidents, that I know history and math and music and books and movies. She wants to know how I can remember the plot and characters of The Sun Also Rises but cannot ever remember reading it.