The other night I was walkin' down the street.
I was getting' kinda hungry, I decided to get me somethin' to eat.
Now I passed up all the chain franchise joints on Hamburger Row
And stopped at a little greasy spoon place I always eat at called..."Eat"
Sit and gulp. Get you one of those greasy hamburgers all peppered up,
Lay you up in the hospital for ten days.
"God dammit kid, are you gonna play that fuckin' song again? Christ Roscoe, unplug the fuckin' juke box before I jam a foot up the kid's ass."
"Calm down, Mr. Benson. They're his quarters."
"Jeezus, Roscoe, whose side are you on? He's played the same fuckin' song all night long."
The pale blonde-haired kid wearing torn dungarees and a blue denim work shirt sat as still as a vulture, transfixed as the song pumped out of the old Wurlitzer for the twenty-seventh time that evening. Evening, hell, it was long after midnight and even the hookers out on Seventh Avenue had thrown in the towel, most of them heading downtown to an all-night club in the village or trading quick love with cab drivers in the back seat of a parked taxi, to get home to the suburbs.
Roscoe looked down the length of the neon-lit, empty bar at the office supply salesman passed out by the waitress station. The guy had held court there until almost one o'clock, waiting for Gina to wipe up the last of her tables and toss the trash in the dumpster out back. He'd passed out while she was changing out of a uniform which would never have a lemony fresh scent again. She gave him a little peck on his balding pate before scurrying out the door. His loss, her gain. Roscoe wondered how the guy could sleep with the music shredding his eardrums.
The remainder of the regular customers had long since headed to homes Roscoe never had the means to imagine, much less inhabit: uptown, downtown, Jersey, Connecticut. They were just places on a map to him. Roscoe's world was encased in ancient oak and smoke-tinted window panes. His kitchen fed him and his patrons, his toothbrush had a special place in the men's room. All of the comforts of home were enclosed in these four walls. He was as much a fixture here as the flickering neon beer signs and the heavily padded bar stools.
So I ordered me up a couple of them grease bombs.
Waitress brought 'em over, lifted up the bun, checked 'em out, damn, no ketchup.
So I nudged the guy sittin' next to me at the counter
I said, "hey partner how about passing the ketchup over?"
Suddenly this little, bitty green hand holding a ketchup bottle came into view.
And I freaked, cause the guy sittin' next to me was a Martian!
Jack Benson lived three blocks north and one block east of his regular bar stool. He called it the "upper west side" but it missed the "fashionable" section by at least four blocks. Rents were modest and climbing but it would take another decade for his building to begin to attract the overflow from the real upper west side.
Some nights he would come into Roscoe's bar and drink like the world was going to end in twenty minutes and he wanted to meet his maker fully loaded. Other nights his pace would slow as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Half his thoughts were here and the other half on some planet at the far end of the galaxy, thinking about the women he could have loved. On those nights, Jack nursed his beer until the cocktail napkin was dry and the peanuts started to mold.
Tonight, however, was a world ender. Roscoe had been pouring him Johnny Walker shots and filling a frosty cold beer mug since about 9:30. The pace had been furious, but with the thinning clientele, as the evening progressed it had not been a problem to keep his glass fresh and always filled.
"Another round, Roscoe. I can still feel my toes and I ain't going home to the missus until I'm certain I won't feel her favorite glass vase crash off my head."
"Are you sure, Mr. Benson? You've had quite a bit more than usual this evening. Maybe you should go home or at least get something to eat."
The blonde kid dug deep into his jeans' pocket and checked his diminishing roll of greenbacks. "Buy him another round on me. And get us a couple of burgers, will ya?" He tossed a twenty on the bar as Roscoe disappeared into the kitchen.
Now in 28 years of eatin' hamburgers I ain't never run into no Martian.
Not at 2:30 in the morning and certainly not at a fine scarfing establishment like "Eat"
Well he was sittin' over there with a bunch of colored sticks on his plate
And I looked over at him and I said, "What you eatin' there boy? Crayons?"
He said, "Why no, they're Martian cigarettes. Here try one."
Jack put his head down on the bar and thought about Camille. Ah, once lovely Camille, now just another New York City housewife in a flowered house dress and worn pink cotton slippers with a cigarette drooping out of the right side of her nicotine-stained lips. A woman who would spend the extra dollar for stainless steel hair curlers but not one cent on a weight-loss program. If someone wanted a slovenly, overweight woman in thrift store clothes for a beer commercial, Jack would sign her up in a heartbeat.
Once, a few years ago, he'd brought home a sheet of plywood and placed it as a divider between their beds to avoid a view of her bloated body and mud-caked face when the alarm clock tore him out of his comatose sleep. She paid the building's super twenty dollars, from his wallet, to take it out to the trash. The last civil words she said to him were over ten years ago. 'You' was still in her vocabulary, but 'thank' had been replaced with 'fuck'.
Camille stole his heart thirty-seven years ago on a dark, empty beach in South Florida. She was a mystery date a former 'good' friend had arranged. He sat alone, waiting on a blanket watching the flicker of an orange-scented candle the friend told him to burn. She found him on the beach as the sun dropped low in the sky and disappeared from view behind empty high rise buildings waiting for their winter guests. She took a glowing yellow hibiscus flower from her hair and tucked it behind his right ear. As their first kiss came to an end, Jack knew he would be with this woman forever.
They spent every night of their first summer on the secluded beach. The sand was cool at night and the constant lapping of the waves would often lull the two lovers to sleep on layers of flowered beach towels. They would strip naked as soon as the moon rose above the horizon and rush into the surf. They became dolphins, bopping up and down, caressing, rolling, touching, flowing with the tide, in and out, climaxing as the largest waves pulled the beach back into the sea.
He would lie next to her in the shallows and softly run his fingers up and down the hills and valleys of her back. Stopping here and there to caress the special places which he knew would make her moan and shudder with pleasure. Her long brown hair spreading over her tanned shoulders was his vision of a Roman goddess. He wanted to dress her in a long white flowing robe and golden sandals to complete the image.
However, thirty-seven years of marriage and hard living had taken its toll. Camille got pregnant three times but each one was a miscarriage. Each time she failed, a little bit of her spirit and beauty faded away. Her smiling face turned upside down to a permanent frown as her constantly inflating jowls pulled her cheeks toward her chin. There was no joy, no laughter.
The happiest moments vanished with each piece of sad news from her doctors. Diabetes led to liver problems that she did her best to drink away with beer. The weight she fought to keep at bay soon got the best of her thanks to a neighborhood bakery where she had a chair with her name embossed on it and a never-ending supply of fresh pastries. Her cigarette smoking went from the occasional butt in the late afternoon to chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. The windows in their apartment let in less sunlight than a pair of polarized sunglasses.
A glass of gin, a twist of lemon, and a handful of ice cubes became her afternoon and sometimes evening companions when Jack stayed away from the apartment late into the night. And the home-cooked meals she took pleasure in creating soon gave way to reservations in neighborhood restaurants which quickly became TV dinners when Jack began to bitch and moan about the credit card bills.
The Roman goddess had transformed into Medusa and his heart was turning to stone.
Jack had done fairly well for himself, having started as a warehouse supervisor and moving up through the ranks to eventually land the title of East coast regional sales manager. While Camille grew plump and frumpy, seeming not to care about her deteriorating attractiveness, Jack did his best to hide his age. But even the hair dye and snappy wardrobe was no match for the rigors of constant travel and pressures of performance. As his hairline shrunk and his waistline expanded, Jack poured his sorrows down a bar sink and cursed his own mediocrity. His job had become more of a routine than a challenge and boredom became his closest companion. He dreaded going home at night without stopping first to cloud his vision, it was the best he could do to avoid the nightmare of Camille.
Jack looked at the kid, now seated two stools down from him at the bar. "Must be working on the new Trump building," he thought to himself. Every bar and diner in the neighborhood was usually filled with construction workers wearing cement-dusted dungarees, blue work shirts, and those tan over the ankle boots with the rawhide laces and rolled black leather tops. The kid was one of them but probably hadn't figured out how to get the day's labor from under his fingernails yet.
Roscoe shuffled out of the kitchen and grabbed a fresh pair of mugs from the cooler. He filled them both just below the brim but not overflowing. He would never waste a drop of beer. With a satisfied smile on his face, he wiped a small puddle off the bar before setting one down by the kid and one in front of Jack.
"Chaser for you kid?" He asked while he poured one for Jack and sat it just off to the right side of Jack's mug.
"No thanks. Just the beer."
"You know, they say every bartender is a philosopher, and every philosopher is a drunk. But not me, nah, none of that fancy inside-your-head analysis for me. I'm just like this towel. It soaks up everything it touches, good or bad, hot and cold, stale, fresh or frozen, and it holds it all until someone rings it out dry. That's what's gonna happen with me some day when I'm done pouring drinks for folks like Mr. Benson and Rip Van Winkle over there. I'm going to get all the lies and all the tears rung out of me so there'll be nothing left but a dry, empty, rag. And I'm gonna leave all of it here on the floor and walk out the door and lock it behind me for the last time as I drop the key in the sewer. I'll pack up and move to some town with a bar just like this and I'll sit in a booth and stuff quarters into a jukebox and listen to sad country singers moan about the lonely lives they're forced to live. And every time a song ends, I'll down another bottle of beer and yell, 'Bullshit!' at the jukebox." He grinned and tossed the towel in the bar sink. The smell of cooking meat and the sizzle of grease called Roscoe back into the kitchen.
Jack looked at the blonde kid and smiled.
"Got yourself a pretty young chippy to go home to son?"
"Yeah, but she's a long way from here."
"Jersey?"
"No, much further than that."
"Huh. Working on the Trump Plaza building?"
"No, why do you ask?"
"Well you're dressed in the right outfit and you look like one of them crazy dudes who climb all over the girders forty stories up in the air. But I thought they were all Indians or Mexicans or something."
"No. I'm just a tourist. I figured these clothes would help me fit in better, you know a bit less conspicuous."
"I gotcha. Less of a target for muggers, eh?"
"Yeah. Less of a target for anyone."
Roscoe brought the burgers and a bottle of ketchup. He slid the kid's twenty off the bar and went to make change while Jack and his neighbor ate in silence. The neon lights in the jukebox glowed, but it was now silent, as the music came to an end.
"One more for the long trip home, Roscoe. How about you kid?"
"No thanks. It's a fast trip for me from here." He turned to stare at Jack, "You certainly drink a lot, trying to forget someone?"
"Perceptive chap, aren't you? Yeah, the sow I live with, Camille. If you saw her, you'd be matching drinks with me. Say a prayer your wife never slides down the ugly stick like mine did."
"I've never seen a woman who was too ugly to be cured by getting drunk. Perhaps you need something stronger. Perhaps you need a different woman."
"No shit, partner. Why do you think I spend my nights here?"
"You haven't found the right tools to cloud your mind?"
"Another good guess. I could shoot her like a horse with a broken leg, but there are laws against it. So I drink whiskey and beer. Better than nothing." Jack tossed down the shot and washed it deep with a long pull on his beer. The kid saluted him with his own mug and emptied the glass.
Roscoe began to wipe up the crumbs and wasted alcohol as the kid slid off the stool and headed for the door. Jack washed down the last of his chips with the beer and placed another twenty on the bar. The old wooden door closed with a whoosh behind the kid. Jack spun around and stepped off the stool.
"Keep the change, Roscoe. See you tomorrow."
"Night Mr. Benson. Say hello to the missus for me."
"I'll say several things to her but none of them will sound like 'hello'."
As he turned to leave there was a loud clap of thunder, causing the windows to shake and the door to rattle against the old wood frame. The street outside the tavern lit up brighter than the Hudson River illuminated by Macy's fireworks. The neon bar signs flickered for a moment and went black. At the end of the bar, Roscoe dumped a glass of cold water on the sleeping salesman's head. Jack pushed out onto the street and turned in the direction of his home. The blonde kid was no where in sight. Funny how he had made it to the corner and disappeared in the few seconds it took Jack to follow him out the door. The bar was dead center in the middle of the block. "Maybe the kid needed some late night exercise, a quick jog around the block," Jack muttered to himself. He reached into his pocket to check on his house keys. His pocket-worn wallet slipped out with the keys and tumbled to the sidewalk.
He would have missed them completely if he hadn't dropped his wallet on the sidewalk. There they were, five violet-colored joints, their ends neatly tucked in place lying at his feet. He picked one up and scanned the street for cops. Just to be safe, he grabbed the other four and stuffed them in his coat pocket. Jack had smoked in high school but hadn't had a hit in several decades. He passed the thin hand-rolled joint under his nose and pretended it was a fine Cuban cigar. Biting off an end and once more checking the street for the law, he lit it and pulled the smoke deep into his lungs.
The sweet taste, similar to chocolate mocha ice cream but with leanings toward mint and a faint tinge of raspberries tickled his tongue. Jack inhaled again and blew out a small cloud of pale green smoke into the musty night sky. He leaned against the cool, brick wall of the bar and watched the cottony clouds float across the glow of the full moon. Sighing, he took another toke and thought about a beach in Florida and a girl he used to love. And as the haze rolled over his conscious mind he wondered, and hoped, maybe tomorrow would be a better day.
Well, about a half hour later he looked over at me and smiled.
Them ol' Martians ain't got but two teeth in their head.
And he said, "How do you feel?"
And I said, "Well, I feel so good...yeah I do."
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