DRUNK, I'M HEMMINGWAY

(con't from front page)
the street. The houses were high, the street was dark, the sky was bloody, the trees were green.
        We turned to the right, walking along a smooth street with houses on both sides. Some of the houses were big. Others were small. We came onto Duval and followed it along until it brought us back in front of my place.
        “Do you know where the hell you’re going?” I said.
        “Not really, Walt. Not really. I thought I did.”
        “That’s absolutely wonderful.”
        “Tight, Walt. been tight for days.”
        “Four days! What brought that on?”
        “Can’t remember. Tell you anything I could remember.”
        “Maybe a drink will clear your head.”
        Rob rubbed his forehead. “Don’t know when it started, but here I am.”
        “Go on. Tell me about it.”
        “Don’t remember. Called you a fool. Remember that perfectly.”
        “I’m the one who called you a fool. Anything else?”
        “Not sure. Possible.”
        “Go on. Tell me.”
        “Maybe a drink might help,” Bill said.
        We set out along Front Street, earnestly this time.
        When we arrived at the corner bar, it was quite empty, except for the proprietor sitting near the door.
        “I wish people would come earlier,” the proprietor said.
        We went in. A neighborhood poule was behind the bar. I caught her eye, and she came over and wanted to know what we would drink.
        “Pernod.”
        “That’s not good for little girls.”
        “Little girls, my ass. You smart-mouthed hooker. We’re writers,.”
        She grinned, she was missing her front teeth. At one time or another I had probably considered certain injuries as a subject of merriment. This one was hysterical.
        “What the hell happened to you?” Rob asked.
        She nodded toward the proprietor sitting near the door.
        “Damn shame.”
        “What happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it.”
        “Oh, surrrre,” Rob giggled.
        “I laugh about it too, sometimes,” she grinned knowingly.
        After we stopped cackling hysterically, “A pernod for me, too,” Rob said.
        “Going to a party?” she asked.
        “Maybe,” Rob said, “if I can get a goddamn drink around this place.”
        The pernod was not good and we had a worse cognac to take the taste out of our mouth. Then we had a couple of beers, European-style, lukewarm, then a couple more.
        “Damn,” Rob said. “What a box to sweat in!”
        “It’s hot.”
        “Damn hot.”
        “Take off your sweater.”
        “That’s a good idea.”
        I drank a beer, standing in the doorway and getting the cool breath of wind. A taxi came down the street and stopped in front of the bar. A crowd of young men, some in V-necks and some in tank-tops, got out. The proprietor sitting by the door looked at me and smirked.
        They came in. I could see all their perfectly coifed, blow-dried hair in the light from the door. As they went in, under the light I saw Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren labels, wavy hair, clown makeup, pouting, gesturing, talking.
        One of them saw the woman behind the bar and said: “I do declare. A real live Lewinsky. I’m going to ask her for a hummer.”
        The tall dark one said: “That’s cheating, you tramp.”
        The wavy blond one answered: “Don’t worry, dear.”
        I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know you should be tolerant, but they’re always so neat and in shape, with perfect hair. I wanted to pull down their flawlessly-tailored trousers and batter their dongs like a speed-bag.
        Instead, I walked down the street and had a beer at the Seven-Eleven.
        “What do you know about the lady behind the bar, Walt?” Rob had followed.
        “I don’t even know her name,” I said. “Why?”
        “She’s a remarkably attractive woman.”
        “She is?”
        “There’s a certain quality about her.”
        “You sound like you like her.”
        “I do. I should wonder if I were in love with her.”
        “She’s a drunk,” I said. “She’s in love with Big Dick, and she’s going to marry one some day.”
        “I didn’t ask you to insult her.”
        “Oh, go to hell.”
        “Take it back.”
        “Sure, anything. Don’t go to hell,” I said. “Go to Hoboken.”
        “Would you like to go to Hoboken, Walt?” Rob asked.
        “No.”
        “Why not?”
        “I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the weirdoes you want right here in Key West.”
        “They’re not real weirdoes.”
        “They look awfully real to me.” I felt sorry for him. He needed rehab badly.
        “I can’t stand it,” he moaned, “my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”
        “That’s because you’re a pathetic, bullshitting drunk, Rob.”
        “Listen, Walt,” he leaned forward and looked me in the eye. “Do you want to know something?”
        “No.”
        “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it.”
        “No.”
        “Do you know that in about thirty more years we’ll be dead?”
        “I needed you to remind me?”
        “I’m serious.”
        “You’re a mush-brained twit on a jag, Rob.”
        “You ought to think about it.”
        “Come on inside and I’ll buy you a beer.”
        We went inside. I had discovered that the best way to get rid of friends was to get them loaded, then slip away when they’re not looking. Rob looked at the bottles in the cooler around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.
        I bought a couple of tall malt liquors.
        “Walt, I want to go to Hoboken.”
        “Listen, Rob, going to another place doesn’t make any difference. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
        “But I’ve never been to Hoboken.”
        “God damn, Rob! I said Hoboken 'cause it sounds like hobo can! As opposed to hobo can't. I could have said any town. Get over it, for Christ sake. This is a good a place as any.”
        “I’m sick of Key West. I don’t like Key West.”
        So there you go. What can you do. Never try to talk sense to a maudlin drunk, especially one who gets his ideas from a sarcastic one.
        Rob wasn’t a bad sort, he came to Key West to drink away his inheritance, then he discovered writing. Being a writer gave meaning to his meanderings and pointless rambles and people started treating him with more respect. If he said something particularly obscure, they didn’t guffaw or try to poke his nose like they did before. They would talk to him, hoping to gain some insight into his indefinable genius, and drink on his tab. He did write a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel. God knows why, but the critics liked it, which was a puzzle, as it lacked a beginning, middle, and end. After that, he started to take himself seriously and became a royal pain in the ass.
        I distrust all drunks and unemployed savants, especially when their stories are truly bizarre; and I was always suspicious that Rob was never the son of a big-time Hollywood agent, and that perhaps he was a drug smuggler, or that maybe his mother ran a bordello, or that he had, maybe, been a democratic fund raiser, but I finally had somebody verify his story with one of the big Hollywood agencies. They not only verified Rob’s story, they wanted to purchase the rights to it.
        Rob was a member, through his father, of one of the most powerful good ol’ boy networks on the west coast. He never had to audition for his speaking parts on Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. At the private school he attended, no one made him conscious that he was a Jew, mainly because it was filled to capacity with an assortment of non-practicing Jews. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, but very lazy and pleasure bent. He dealt with the privilege of wealth by staying stoned until it became painfully obvious that he was a loser with a large bank account which made him a highly attractive marriage prospect. But he was never so out of it that he couldn’t string a number of willing women along with visions of domestic security until they were completely disgusted and frustrated with his behavior and realized he was just pumping them dry because he had a whole stable of prospects who were willing to humiliate themselves in hopes of landing a rich husband. He had made up his mind to go into the family business when his father insisted he enter detox. There he met a waitress coming off an impressive three year bender and during a brief moment of emotional openness, he married her. When he realized what he had done, he was too ashamed to face his friends and left town and moved to the last place on earth anybody would ever recognize him.
        Here, they were a grand couple, the life of all the parties, but as drunken sprees go, she eventually became sick of him and took to pummeling him with objects found in the kitchen. They would argue and accuse one another of all sorts of horrible things, but there was plenty of blame to go around. It was an argument without beginning, middle, or end, much like the plot of his novel.
        He moved out, and in with me, until I locked him out one night when he was exceptionally drunk. The next day I pretended that he’d never been staying with me in the first place. I told him, it was all just one of those wish-fulfillment fantasies and that he should seriously start looking for a place to stay as I wasn’t taking in boarders.
        I sometimes think I shouldn’t have done that because after that he started to doubt himself and became more dependent on me for an accurate perception of reality. The upside, of course, was it was easier to wheedle free drinks out of him; I just had to claim I had paid for the last round, then stare at him like he was loosing his mind. The poule from the corner bar came walking by.
        “Hello, Joe,” she said.
        “Hello,” Rob responded. “Why aren’t you tight?”
        “Hey! Are you joking me or what?”
        “I’m not joking you.” Rob belched. “I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies.”
        “So, are you up for something, because there’s plenty of tourists down by the square.”
        “You got the most class of anybody I ever seen. You got it all.”
        “Thanks, I’ll tell mummy. You got any money?”
        “I’m not joking you,” said Rob.
        “And,” she said slowly, “I’m not joking you.”
        “You don’t not joking me?” he blinked.
        She rubbed her fingers together, the universal symbol for cash, and said to me: “Is he picking up on any of this?”
        “You don’t am joking him?” Rob asked, raising one twisted eyebrow.
        “This is a hell of a weird talk,” she said. “Look, my name is Cocotte. Is this a date or what?”
        I saw Rob looking at her in the way many conches look when they see a large stash of weed or a case of tequila.
        “What do you want to do, Rob?” I asked.
        “Let’s go to my place.”
        “You don’t have a place.”
        “My ex-wife’s place, I know where she hides the key.”
        “You’re getting damned romantic.”
        We went passed the lighted square, the lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street, then on into the dark, then turned onto another dark street behind Eaton, passed the trees and the standing bus, then turned onto Fleming.
        We went up the steps of a second story duplex. Rob fumbled around, looking for the key. Cocotte and I stood looking at each other.
        “Are you having a lovely evening?” I asked.
        “Oh, priceless, you can only imagine,” she said. “Gays and drunks all night. As far as I’m concerned, they have one thing in common.”
        “What’s that?”
        “Flaccidity.”
        “Never been flaccid,” Rob said from his hands and knees, looking under a terra-cotta pot. “Secret of my success. Never been flaccid. Never been flaccid in public.”
        “How much has he had to drink?” Cocotte asked.
        “Been tight four days.”
        “Walt is a great man,” Rob said, dusting himself off, fumbling with the lock. “Know the secret to his success?”
        “What?” Cocotte said.
        “Never been flaccid in public.”
        “We’ll have to check that out.”
        Rob got the door open. We went in.
        “You’ll be flaccid,” I said, “If your ex-wife catches us here.”
        “Not in public. If I begin to feel flaccid I go off in a corner. I’m like a chimpanzee in a Monkey House that way.”
        “Does anybody know what time it is?” Cocotte asked.
        “Meter running?” I said.
        “Don’t talk to me like that. Rob thinks I have class.”
        Rob turned on the lights and got brandy and soda and glasses.
        “Just a little,” she said. “Don’t try and make me drunk.”
        “We’re too far ahead of you for that.”
        “Here’s how,” she sipped the glass Rob handed her.
        Rob drank his in one swallow and staggered off into the bathroom.
        “Is he really a writer?”
        “We’re all writers,” I said. “When we’re drunk, I’m Hemingway, he’s Fitzgerald. You can be George Eliot.”
        “But he told me he was Fitzgerald,” Cocotte said, perplexed.
        “You know Rob?” I asked.
        “He brought me here before, but he was so drunk I don’t think he’d remember. Offered me a thousand dollars to go with him to Hoboken. Does he have that much?”
        “He has plenty.”
        “I told him I couldn’t do it. He was awfully nice about it. Told him I knew too many people in Hoboken.” Cocotte laughed.
        I had only sipped my brandy and soda, I took a long drink.
        “So he’s on the level?” she asked.
        “He’s the only guy I know who’s as charming drunk as he is sober.”
        “You haven’t been around much, have you?”
        Rob had come out of the bathroom and stood there swaying like a boxer after a tough fifteen rounds.
        “My dear,” Rob said. “I have been around very much. I have been around a very ... much ... a lot.”
        “We’ve all been around,” said Cocotte. “I dare say I’ve seen as much as you.”
        “Don’t think I don’t think that you think so, my dear, but I have seen a lot too.”
        “Of course you have,” Cocotte said. “I was only ragging.”
        “Would you like to see something more?” he asked.
        “Let’s have a look.”
        Rob zipped down his fly and pulled out his piece. It wasn’t flaccid. He stood there, hands on his hips, grinning proudly.
        “You’re certainly all business,” Cocotte said, impressed.
        “Here’s what else I can do,” he said, and began to emit an arched yellow stream. “Not easy.”
        “I say, you have a lovely piece,” Cocotte grinned.
        Encouraged, Rob ran in circles around the living room, shouting, “I’m a fireman, I’m a fireman,” until there was a large darkened ring in the middle of the rug.
        He didn’t put it away. One had to admit, he maintained a healthy attitude. Cocotte wanted to decorate it. Rob stood there, hands on hips, broad smile, king of the world, while Cocotte got some things out of the icebox and created a muppet, using whipped cream, shredded cheese, and olives.
        “Make it talk,” she said.
        Rob’s imagination had not exhausted it’s self with the fireman routine. As he spoke in a distorted squeaky voice, he made it bounce and waggle: “You’re a lovely girl, where did you come from?”
        Cocotte giggled hysterically and rolled on the floor.
        “I say, you are a lovely girl. Where have I been? Where have I been looking all this time? Have we met?”
        Cocotte couldn’t control her laughter and may have peed on the rug, not that it mattered.
        “I think it’s pretty,” Cocotte said. “Can you teach me ventriloquism?”
        Rob looked at me. It was a final look to ask if it were understood. It was understood all right. I got up and walked to the door.
        As I went out into the cool night, I could hear Rob squeaking behind me: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”