I should call and tell them. It’s getting late. I’m certainly not going to go out by myself to celebrate my twenty-first. What could be sadder than that? Sitting on a park bench with an inflatable doll?
I switch on Mountain’s little black-and-white TV. A pretty face introduces her potbellied guests, who are proud to be unemployed. They brag of their affairs. America mocks her heroes, embraces her slobs. I switch over to the news: G M is on strike. There’s another oil embargo, long lines at the gas stations. A serial killer named Johnny Jumpup or something like that has popped up and if I’m not mistaken the journalists are thrilled.
I hate the 1970s. It’s the pimp rococo decade, dull-eyed complacency, endless consumption, and softheaded children in clown clothing finding an excuse to give each other gonorrhea in the park. The previous generation represented ideals such as love, equality, landing on the moon, and civil rights. My generation represents teen pregnancy, disco music, Sun Myung Moon, escalating crime rates, big gas-guzzling cars with wheel covers and chrome that falls off and doors that don’t close and all the people who make them out on strike and scratching their venereal sores. America is dying and no one cares.
I stick my head into the fridge. Along with many cartons of leftover Chinese food, I find a half-gallon carton of Tropicana, sniff cautiously, and sip. Carton in hand, I stare out the window. I wonder how many serial killers, glorified extortionists, and environmental criminals they have in India. But what’s this, headlights in the driveway? My heart soars. It’s Mountain Moses.
Mountain strolls in showing that big gap between his two front teeth. He’s dressed in tie and suit jacket and slacks. Everyone at school says he looks like Silly Stallone, but with those big chimp ears, that twinkle in his blue eyes, that bent honker, those pin-striped pleated slacks, and that faint excuse for a mustache, tonight he looks like a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Mountain, I’ve decided all at once, is the best friend I could ever have.
“Well, looka who’s here,” I say, turning off the television.
“Where is everyone?” he says, looking about with a tug at the sleeves of his jacket.
“You’re looking at them,” I say. “Where were you, at a costume party? You look like the maitre d’ on Leave It to Beaver.”
He glances at his wing tips, then holds out his arms, hands backward, as if he’s about to leap from a thirty-meter board. “Had to go to her parents’ house for dinner. Croquettes. No beaver. Begged off dessert to make it for your birthday.”
I smile and swirl my carton of Tropicana. “What did you get me?”
“I’m going to get you drunk,” he says in a John Wayne voice, hooking his finger at the air.
“How did you know?”
“Enough of this gay banter,” he says, glancing at his watch. “We’ve only got six hours.”
Mountain drives his father’s El Camino. His father and mother are divorced. He doesn’t talk much about his mom. Father, I gather, is the uncommunicative intellectual type who spends his evenings with vodka on the rocks under the reading lamp.
We argue about what place to go. Mountain likes crummy working-class bars where he can find fights. I like more-upscale places with the possibility of women. Mountain doesn’t go for bar women. He finds his girlfriends in grocery stores, dormitories, at beaches or ball games, anywhere he can exhibit his dimples, apple cheeks, and charming, gosh-golly befuddlement in good, clean, and wholesome light. Come to think of it, I have never seen him with a girl when he was drunk. We compromise by hitting alternate bars.
“No fights too early, Mountain,” I warn him at bar number one, a cement hole in Mission Beach called Murph’s, where a sprinkle of semibikers have gathered like moose around the mossy pool table. Mountain and I really stick out here, me in a floral pirate blouse, green cuffed bell-bottoms so tight you can see the breath mints in my pockets, platform shoes, glistening hair coiled artificially, eyes bloodshot from the vanity of hard contact lenses, a draping of gold at the neck—and Mountain arrayed like a senile father in a sixties sitcom. “All right? I don’t want to get blood all over this new shirt.”
“You’re not fighting,” he grumbles.
“Yes, but the guy will fall on me after you punch him,” I return. “Do you remember the last time? That shirt cost me twenty bucks.” I point a finger. My hands are so long they alarm me sometimes. “You see that donkey-headed guy down there by the dartboard?”
Mountain glowers down the way past a medium-hot blonde staring at him, who looks as if she’d enjoy a physical contest with Mountain, or failing that, between her boyfriend and this stranger who pleases her eye. “I see him,” he intones, his ears pricking. “Looks like a Burt to me.”
“He’s not staring at you.”
Mountain rolls his shoulders and cracks a malevolent grin. “Yes, he is.”
“No, he has a walleye. Strabismus, it’s a muscular disorder.”
“Maybe I can knock it back into place for him.”
“You don’t want to pick fights with the handicapped.”
“I don’t like people named Burt,” he says.
At Murph’s, even if it’s a biker haven, my incredible string begins. From here on out, regardless of the tavern we select, I am served for my free birthday drink a flaming asshole. I try not to take it personally. Don’t ask me what’s in a flaming asshole (floor wax?). All I know is that I present my ID and I am served this syrupy concoction on fire. Mountain thinks it’s funny, but he has one with me since we are brothers. You have to drink them quickly to keep from burning your face off. Even tossed back with expert quickness, these little pots of fire still crackle off the bottoms of your mustache hairs.
“Why don’t they call them Phantom of the Operas?” Mountain wonders aloud, licking his lips as if to feel if they are still there.
“They should serve them with extinguishers,” I agree.
Bar two on Seventieth Street is a bona fide disco with the mirror ball spinning over an acre of dance floor. I hate discos as much as the next guy, but where else are you going to find so many gorgeous chicks? I stand at the headland of the bay of dandies, admiring the tide. Mountain is bored, however, even if he knows how to dance—there isn’t the vaguest prospect of a fight—so we finish our drinks and head east down El Cajon Boulevard to a backwater part of town, littered and forgotten, as if a glacier pushed through a trailer park and came to rest here.
Mountain parks along the curb in front of a small closed grocery with salamis hanging in the window. Next door is a neon dive called The Mambo Lounge. The place has obviously been here for at least two wars, though this is the first I’ve noticed it. I follow Mountain through a gray curtain drenched in smoke and perfume, past a cigarette machine and into a purulent, velvet darkness, petite coin-sized tables arranged around a dance floor that looks like a bottomless pit. Mountain swivels his head as if he expects to recognize someone.
“Where are we?” I say. “Morocco, 1953?”
“About right,” he says, pointing toward an open table by the dance floor. An expiring couple draped over one another follows the wheezy inflections of a Tony Bennett song. The waitress, about forty, in black Danish S/M lace, sidles up with her tray. “See your IDs, boys?”
Mountain
