a yawn. “Well, that’s nice. Who’s your friend?” She tips her skeleton head at me and her eyes are dancing now.
I toss off my extinguished drink, the tip of my nose thoroughly scorched. “I’m Edgar,” I falter.
Mishearing me, she unwittingly assigns me a new nickname. “Deadwood!” she cries, flipping back her stole in a blast of bug spray and cedar oil, moths flapping all around her head.
“I’m a friend of Mountain’s through college,” I explain, feeling for a blister. “Sit down, please, Mrs. Moses.”
“What kind of name is that, Deadwood? Are you a camp counselor?”
“It’s not really my—oh, never mind,” I say, wondering as she creaks into a chair, her eyes a frosted and moribund vacancy, how she could be related to the vital and venerable man sitting across from me. Her teeth are caked with lipstick and her hair is a whorl of mad licks, as if coiffed by the tongue of a cat.
“What are you boys doing here?” she asks, laying her chin on the back of an emaciated hand. “You like older women?”
“Ah, just drivin’ around, Ma,” says Mountain, slitty-eyed and finding sudden interest in the plumes of smoke rising from his cigarette.
“It’s my birthday,” I explain, gulping the last bit of residual syrup from my shot glass.
“No!” she says, regarding me with wonder. “We must dance.”
“No, Mrs. Moses,” I reply firmly, afraid she was going to say something like that. “Thank you, but I don’t dance.”
“Of course you do.” She swats the air.
“No, really I don’t.”
“No, we must.” She totters to her feet and extends a hand. “It’s your birthday.”
“I don’t dance,” I repeat.
“Come.”
It’s plain I won’t win. You can’t argue with the dead. The pickled hag that is somehow Mountain’s mother leads me to the black hole of a dance floor and we stride through the dingy, necrotic vapor with all the geezers nodding off into their diluted Smirnoffs. We don’t dance as much as we simply prop each other up. I have no concept of where to put my feet. I can feel her nipples and her hipbones jutting through her dress. She moans in my ear, “How old are you, honey, sixteen?”
“Forty-three,” I reply, my hand on her very palpable spine.
She cackles hotly into my ear.
Mountain watches us wistfully, hand in his hair.
“New York, New York” is finally over. You know I used to like that song. They must have played the long version. Mrs. Moses throws an arm around my waist and drags me back to her son. My plan if she asks me to dance again is to feign an epileptic seizure.
“I want you to meet Mel,” she wheezes, wiping a snake of hair from her eyes.
“We gotta go, Ma,” says Mountain.
“You can meet Mel, first,” she gurgles. “He’s right over here.”
Mel is poised on a stool at the bar, drumming his knee with three fingers. He’s a skinny guy about fifty with a barrel chest, big horn-rims, and a haircut like a Muppet. Everyone smiles and nods around except Mountain. Mrs. Moses is doing that blurry thing with her teeth and wagging her skull around airily, as if she is having the time of her life. “Mel is a contractor,” she says.
“So this is your son,” booms Mel cheerfully. “You’re a strapping one, aren’t you?” He’s trying to touch Mountain, slap his shoulder or grip his hand, but Mountain keeps his distance. “This your son too?”
Mrs. Moses tips her head in pride. “No, this is Deadwood, Mountain’s good friend from college.”
“Deadwood,” says Mel, pleased. “You must be a poker player.”
“We’re gonna go, Ma,” says Mountain.
“Don’t run off so soon. Stay for a drink.”
Mel is already signaling the bartender.
Mountain turns and, without another word, walks off. “Nice to meet you, Mel,” I call. “You too, Mrs. Moses.”
She waves as if from the prow of a ship, the SS DEATH, I think.
I catch up with Mountain and we break from that mummy rag of a curtain, cigarette smoke dangling from our clothes. Fresh air never felt so good. My nose still feels like it’s on fire.
“Thought she’d be here,” he says, and then adds with a sigh, “well, at least she’s still alive.”
“Forget it, man,” I say.
“Oh, I forgot it a long time ago,” he says, shoving hands down into his pockets. “Well, come on Deadwood, let’s go finish your birthday party.”
3.
AFTER FLAMING ASSHOLE NUMBER FIVE, WE’RE AT TINA’S in La Mesa, a yuppie joint with chrome bar stools, and the women are looking good. They smell like Dunkin’ Donuts and have that Ingrid Bergman aura of gauze all around them. I love women as much as Mountain, but I am much less discriminating. I will sleep with them all, single mothers, anorexics, divorcées, tollbooth operators, and overweight chicks who like Kenny Loggins.
By asshole number seven I’m ready for the Red Coat Inn, a popular nightclub attached to a bowling alley. Good bands play there, even the Cascades, one of the few San Diego bands to actually have a Billboard Top 100 hit. Remember “Rhythm of the Rain,” with all the dingle-bells? Tonight on stage is a solid April Wine impersonation. Mountain grabs a booth and I head for the bar. The place is packed with stunning, fluffy-headed disco nymphs and I’m rearin’ to go. But first I’ve gotta pee. A shock passes through me as I catch my reflection in the mirror. I’ve got a good eye for fashion, but this poor red-nosed fop in the mirror looks like a male hooker. He looks like the sort of Binaca-blasting Beau Brummel I loathe. I’m shaken. At all times I seem to be two conflicting entities, one who despises, and the other the very thing I despise. I wash my long hands in the sink, plump up the curls in my hair, and decide that I don’t look that bad. Besides, if I dressed any other way, women would pay no attention to me. I don’t have Mountain’s visceral John Wayne appeal.
On the way back, a button-nosed blonde in a silver cocktail dress smiles at me. She’s dancing with a sperm whale in a green Bee Gee suit. I bet I could steal her. I wish I could dance but even drunk I have no more familiarity with the rite than a chimp operating a Ferris wheel. I’m dance-handicapped. I have Dancing Deficit Disorder. I’ll have to try and talk to her later. I wedge to the bar, lay down my I D, and order up two flaming assholes. No point in changing the drinks this late in the game.
As I negotiate the flaming drinks back across the crowded floor, I am jostled and then knocked completely down. The liquor hits the floor and two puddles of cool, liquid blue flames burst up and ripple across the parquet in front of my eyes. I try to rise but a wave of humanity bangs me back from the other side.
