I was twenty years old or so; I had a job tending bar by night, and by day I assiduously ignored my professors. Who were dusty old mediocrities, befuddled by rap music and hopelessly stumbling through brackens of meaningless analysis. Who were like boys stretching their poor, long-suffering peckers out along wooden rulers. Who believed everything they read. As I say, I had a job, and I often worked shifts beginning at ten o'clock at night and finishing at dawn, serving greasy coffee and flabby burgers and ill-advised secret nightcaps to the young people who had emerged from the nightclubs with no one to fuck. I was, as a rule, drunk myself by the time the bars closed and the shouting arrived. I had a blue plastic cup (designed in Stockholm) of ice and vodka, baptised with tonic water, which I kept squirreled away behind the bar. This cup frequently escaped me, turning up at the end of the shift or the following week, hiding, warm and dusty, behind a box of straws. Which was all right. We had stacks of Scandinavian cups, we had a machine devoted to making ice cubes, there was always more vodka where that had come from.
There was a kid in the kitchen then named Bertram, and he could drink. He knew how to really get serious about drinking, how to get the job done, and he didn't do drugs. He was stupid, but he wasn't a tiresome dickhead, and everyone liked him. Everyone liked him even more when he got tight and flung himself off the back porch of the restaurant, behind the kitchen, where we went to sit on upended pickle-buckets and smoke cigarettes, and injured himself, twice.
Bertram was cooking, and that meant he wasn't supposed to come out of the kitchen, even if he wasn't busy, because short-order cooks are unsavoury and poorly groomed. Also, the kitchen staff at this particular restaurant was obliged to wear bright orange coveralls of the type worn by syphillitic convicts shuffling from bus to delousing station and chained together at the neck, which served to reinforce the paying customers' suspicions that here was a man who did not belong. He came out to the front and he stood between the draft taps and the beer fridge. He was broad, he was a broad man. He pulled a plastic cup off the stack and sniffed it; I watched him do it. I was busy, I had a full bar, we were all busy, the girls were trotting around with the glassy eyes waitresses have when they're trying to remember too many things; but he came out, and I noticed. Everyone noticed, because he looked like an escaped rapist.
The bar printer spat out an order for three large cokes and a piece of cheesecake. Bertram sniffed the cup and he made a face. He looked at me, and then he flicked the cup at me, and I flinched and put my arm in front of my face, and the cup bounced off my arm and fell behind the bar.
'These cups stink,' he said.
He took another cup from the stack, and he sniffed it. It didn't smell good. He tossed it at me. I got the cokes.
'What do you want?' I said, and I went back down the bar to plate the cheesecake. You put a little piece of cheesecake on a great big plate; that was what you did. First you squirted chocolate sauce on the plate, which was a big round glass plate, and then you cut the cake, and then you thumped the piece of cake down on its side in the chocolate sauce, and then you dusted icing sugar over everything. I thought it looked cheap. It was cheap. What did I think this was? This was a restaurant where you could walk in off the street and order a hamburger weighing as much as a healthy baby. It had rated only one magot in the previous year's Macaque Guide. Bertram found a cup he could live with and filled it with ice water.
'Bertram,' one of the waitresses said to him, 'why aren't you in the kitchen? Get out of my way, please.' She was getting her own drinks. I watched her do it. She put ice in the glasses and reached for the soda gun, and when her eyes came up I caught them, and I set the cake beside the tray of drinks I had made for her. She rolled her eyes and took the drinks. 'Bertram,' she said, and he moved out of her way again. Then I felt like I was good at my job, and I took a long drink.
'James!' someone angry called from the kitchen. That was the girl who was working in the kitchen with Bertram. James, that was his name. He was still standing there, looking at me, not drinking his water.
'Well?' I said. But I knew what he wanted. He wanted beers.
'Hey,' he said, like I was being difficult. 'How about, you know, a refreshment. For the kitchen. A little, you know, a little something special. Good times, good friends. Eh? You know, 'It's going to be a Lone Star Light kind of night.' But I don't want any of that light shit. You know what I want.'
'James!'
'Get out of here,' I said.
'Hey,' he said, pointing his finger at me, lowering his chin, 'hey. That's no way to talk. Okay? For me.'
'Get out of here,' I said. 'Where's my burger? I'm waiting on a burger. Get the fuck back to the kitchen, fatass.'
'I'm all brawn,' he said, turning and walking back to the kitchen, not in a hurry, not worried. 'Pure brawn.'
I took him the beer, and I took one for the girl who was working in the kitchen with him, too, the dishwasher, but she didn't want it. She looked like we disgusted her. I drank with Bertram for a minute. The place was busy, but I didn't feel it. I felt fine. There was no urgency. The job would get done. I went back down to the bar and made myself another drink. I talked with some guys who always came in on Saturdays. They were older than I was, and taller, and cleverer, but they worked on assembly lines, making minivans, and they were very unhappy about that, and I liked them fine. They were bitter, but being bitter had made them funny. They had university educations, and they were throwing them away, and the knowledge that out of sheer laziness they were wasting their lives had made them sympathetic. Women liked them, and bartenders. But the skin on their faces was getting thick, and the hair on their heads was getting thin, and they had no children, and this wasn't glamourous, they weren't committing epic debauches, they didn't play in a rock and roll band, and so I spiked their coffees without being asked, and they didn't complain.
That morning, I had been drunk. I had worked the previous night, Friday night, and we had finished late. We had had beers at the bar with our ties off, the sun had come up, the Italian woman who made the cakes had come in, had rolled her eyes, had gone upstairs to make the cakes. We had gone out to sit on the patio and drink our beers out of plastic cups, to wear our sunglasses and crack weary wise. There had been that friendly flirtation and defocused shop-talk, there had been inside jokes. I don't remember the talk. We had felt good and had stayed on the patio too long. The morning staff had begun to arrive, and we had begun to depart with the curious steadiness of the exhausted, the only middle-drunk. Home, and to bed, but not I.
I felt good, in the clear sun. I went down the street; I stopped at a big convenience store next to a fish and chip shop, and I bought a package of Amphora. It was a big disorganized place that sold back issues of spank magazines and pipes and porcelain Virgins and postcards, owned by Iraqi brothers. I kept on going down the street, to the liquor store, which had just opened, and I went in and I filled a basket. I remember it; there was a bottle of Dry Sack and a bottle of Stolichnaya, a bottle of J&B and three bottles of Fin du Monde, which was a beer out of Quebec that came in big bottles with champagne corks. I took the basket up to the counter. The sun was coming in fresh, and the staff didn't have their game faces on yet; I smiled. The man didn't ask for identification; that was probably the tie, tugged down and tucked into my shirt. He rang it up; I paid; he put the bottles into paper bags and then he put them into a big paper bag, and when he handed it to me, I dropped it on the floor. We were all very embarrassed. The staff excavated two unbroken bottles and I turned on my heel and fetched replacements from the shelves. I reached for my wallet, but they hurried me out and didn't make me pay. I walked home with the big bag of liquor, grinning and wondering whether they had guessed I was drunk.
We lived in a real dump, I guess. There was a mold out of The Quatermass Xperiment eating the ceiling over the stairs that led up to our apartment on the second floor. There were maggots eating twenty pounds of russet potatoes someone had secreted in a closet in the kitchen and making that smell that smells like maggots. There were twenty-five million red and black Japanese tree beetles on the north wall of the house, that made the red bricks moil. There was a fattish, pencil-toothed, gangrenous man who was meant to be the caretaker, there was an elephantine furnace in the basement which consumed small children, there were cats living in the eaves. Our roommates had gone home for the summer and my girlfriend and I had moved up to the attic, which had new windows and new carpet and fresh paint and its own private furnace (in one of the eaves, with the cats), having been intended for the daughter of the landlord and her erstwhile betrothed.
My girlfriend of the time was sleeping. I got a big mug out of the kitchen and my pipe and a book, which was either Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus or something equally unpleasant—something to do with foreign policy or Chinese history, I think, but I can't remember. I thought I was a real smarty-pants. I probably still do. I climbed out the window of the room with the broken television and the discomfort machine disguised as a chesterfield, and climbed up the fire escape to sit in the sun. I drank the yeasty beer out of the big mug and set the champagne corks beside me and smoked my pipe and read, and the sun felt fine and I felt fine, and the beer defeated me handily, and I fell asleep in the sun and woke up with my book on my face and a sunburned forehead.
Whereupon I groggled to bed.
But that was the morning, and this was the following night, and when we finished I felt poorly. Nobody wanted to stay for the sun, and we left just before dawn, and I took three bottles of Grölsch, which is conveniently resealable and comes in generous servings, and I walked down to the river.
The air was indifferent warm, but the river was cold. I walked east along the river. I sat on the bank of grass where the park ended and a stretch of tangle began. The sun threatened. The air was gunmetal blue. Down by the water, the paved walk gave way to a muddy track beneath the brush. I was thinking vaguely about how one might go about killing oneself, if one were so inclined, and I heard a small sob. I looked around. It wasn't me; I felt fine. I was an engine of carelessness, I was not sobbing. I looked harder. The light grew bluer. I stood slowly and I heard it again, twice, two sobs, and I took a few steps bent over and quiet towards the bush, and there was a person in the bush, down the hill, sitting in the dirt, thirty feet away, in the brambles, in the sort of low, pocket-shaped clearing that is home to broken glass and torn sweatshirts, old tires, menacing scraps of fabric, cans with holes punched in the sides. This person was sitting in the dirt with her hands on her face and the hood of a red windbreaker pulled over her head, crying. And I stood there until it was light, standing bent over and not moving, staring at her, and she was crying, hard and tight and dry, and when it was light I went quietly away.