Cialis, Verdi, Gin, Jag [excerpt] – Adam Johnson

September 14, 2022

I was on a commercial jet a mere twelve hours from the moment I embedded a hammer into someone’s head, and others would deal with the evidence, for cash. I guess this is how time works. We had seats all near and close. Braden, my grandson, had stayed back with his grandparents on the other side. It was to be a real getaway for the grown-ups, and I took the liberty of putting a couple of bottles of champagne on my credit card on the plane. I made a $200 phone call to the Russians holding matches. Everything was a go, so I reclined my seat all the way three inches back and watched one-half of The Last King of Scotland in the headrest of the seat in front of me. A short, unremarkable flight, though I did get a whiff of Isabelle’s hair when I leaned forward on pretense of asking Walter if he was watching The Last King of Scotland. I scared the living daylights out of a stewardess when we departed the cabin and I handed her a thousand dollars for the trouble of the drink-cart. “My pleasure. Nothing sinister. Just happy to be aboard! Sorry! I talk like Wagner wrote his music! Do you have any balloons? Of course not! Chalk it up to the champagne!”
It was a Friday morning. We had all day Saturday and Sunday to look forward to, with an early morning return flight come Monday. Isabelle looked delectable as all get out. I looked like a pale, hideous muck who had wasted every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year. I had. No bones about it. When it came down to it, I had stared blankly into every stanza of life.
First things first, the hotel check-in, making friends at the desk, sizing up the joint, you know the drill. The Three Seasons is a pretty spectacular place. Lots of brass and crystals, old-fashioned wallpapers and deep, rich carpet runners and plush chairs and bell-hop customs out of a Dickens novel and everyone’s hands out for a tip, or at least a raised brow, if you please, sir. Champagne in the room before dinner. Who am I kidding – four bottles, it’s fine. A faint hint of the soapy-eye showed itself on account of the bubbly. A fabulous soak in the sanitized tub with floating puffs and a scented gel. A couple of hours spent there. And then the first night, I took them to an Italian eatery mid-town, not a bad place, nothing to write home about. White-washed walls, some noodles, red wine, a bowl of mints in the W.C. I wound up and took a great big piss at x marks the spot, and gave myself a short-arm inspection at the urinal. Everything good? You’re a tired old dog ain’t you? “Yes” from my penis in brail (STD from Alma).
I made my way into paying the bill. It wasn’t so hard. Nobody was like lightning for their wallet, let me just put it that way. Everyone thanked me, but the only words I heard came from the mouth of my bombshell daughter-in-law on a wave of peppermint breath wet as a giant leaf in the Amazon. I sent them all away in cabs, and I made my way below ground in the direction of Brooklyn. I thought I would relive a scene from one of the old novelists in some dive, but that New York City is a thing of ancient history. Every bar had one hundred televisions, every person on a stool had a phone in their face or at their ear, plastic was everywhere, and nobody would take a dip in words with me, the man with the big bills and the modest bearing who looked around all lively like. I made for the toilet and lost my seat. Three young jerks dressed down to shit moved in and overtook my station, and I just walked out, defeated by modern times. But on the way to soused! All smiles on account of that. On my way, where? Nobody knows. Once you put that coal-cart into motion, there’s no stopping it until the earth’s surface, and there was no stopping me, come hell or high water, or a thousand televisions in the next bar, bring it on, as long as I have the luck of funds and you’ve got the hooch, bring it on. It was early yet. Let all of New York City bring it on. Let the whole roaring, red-eyed metropolis bring it on, in all its might. Pub after tavern, bar after dive, drink after stinking drink, clear booze, brown liquids on ice and no ice, neat, a monstrous glass of cheap red wine and a 100-pound whore with needle marks and a lipstick smear looking for a nymphokick, move on, the next place a hole in the wall and the owner giving me a break on the price of a basket of peanuts and the same 100-pound whore only this time she’s white-skinned and has an Adam’s apple and hey, move on, drunk as a skunk in a trunk with an intravenous drip of dark rye and still moving on, a bar fight in one, an alley fight near another, blood, guts, tears, and the laughter of the ancients and the occasional jukebox aficionado standing in a suit with a martini, olives, a toothpick at his lip, and I again, move on, finally, no not finally, for it was only the beginning as I moved along, walking, wrenching, cursing a crunching sound inside my kneecap but thankful that I could destroy my conscious mind at a place for social gathering and backed by the full force and effect of the 21st Amendment as I moved and moved along, straying down god only knows streets, a mumbling son of a bitch peddling mosaic folk art and I ask him where a guy can get a drink, and he points me along and I nickel up with him for his trouble and compliment his wares, and I reach the place, a tiny run-down piece of shit brick building with neon lights where a guy could make a play for five dollars and I get inside and rope off an area around one of only six stools at the abbreviated bar and drink three glasses of gin, cheap gin, firewater that burned the esophagus, four fingers of gin in each cup because hey, I had better get them in before moving on, the next place, the next season in the night, a bum in rags making a riffle of me as I shoot past in the versicolor specter, like a flying blowtorch, until I reach the next joint, claps and cheering, a Yankees crowd and the game all over the place, and Hey baby, can I buy you a drink? to an obviously married and much younger woman and I’m run out of the place out the back at the hands of a couple assholes in white jerseys and pig-shave hairstyles and I blow a fuse and kick up a fuss and spurt obscenities and NYC epithets and put on a full-out barmy stick, but they only laugh and call me an old man, an ugly old man, and I find myself curbside again, the world spinning, the cabs rushing by, the sidewalks filled with colorful arrangements of passersby and vendors closing shop, and I realize that hey, I am not the only person on earth who happens to be moving along, and it puts me in a good humor, so good that I nearly grab and bite the maracas of another woman clearly spoken for, and thank god I didn’t because it would have been a pummeling from her pugilist man-friend or husband, but before I can even reflect on the problem of the lost teeth I’d suffer I am again in a place where the taps run and I am just one of the boys bellying up, checking out the game and then one for the road, a plastic cup holding a sugar-laid margarita that I scoop up and drain like a savage in the desert, and just as I am about to buy myself a bag of chips and salted jerky at a corner store, my cell phone rings, the number unknown but the area code mine, and I answer it and a Russian voice tells me that it is done, and he doesn’t talk more than an oyster and is gone, hangs up, and I have the peace of mind of knowing that my secret mirror will always enjoy that adjective as my son’s home burns to the ground 1,197 miles away, and I hop scotch the sidewalk past the corner store and find myself a little rinky-dink out-of-the-way Irishman’s bar called Mc-something, and the bartender has thick Irish mitts so he’s all authentic and I compliment his brogue and he thanks me but he really thanks me for the money, and he looks me up and down and asks me if I like jazz and he begins to laugh and tells me he’s only joking, and a couple of his floperoo consorts give a chuckle but they’re only doing it in good faith, they assure me, and to show the good faith they order me a black-and-tan and offer me a hand-me-down hat from behind the register that says “Mc-something” and we all laugh and I don the hat and down the black-and-tan and readjust my penis in my pants but make it look like an itch, and god-damn if I wasn’t then moving on, a sixth bar not at all like Mc-something, not this bar, this bar’s got style, man, and god damn me if I ever move on from this one, a little Georgian belle who gives me a fake name and calls me Sparky or Bubby or Chico, I don’t remember, but it was a pet name she has for anyone down and out in a suit, like me, and wouldn’t I like to put her on the floorboards, she asks, and I admit I would but she only laughs and puts the chill on and is whisked out on the arm of a big black buck that could lynch me with his orca penis, so I wipe my brow and I can’t believe how loud this one bitch is in the weirdest costume jewelry talking to herself with a shiny thing on her ear, and there’s a huge photograph in black and white of a group of wild horses in a field plastered across the whole back wall of the place, or did I imagine that? I can’t remember, but I do know the place had bump man, the place had bump and funk, and it was so dark and cool that I stayed there for all of an hour, long enough to swallow all the air, long enough for a sex change, long enough to make it with somebody, anybody, but I’m so ugly that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance, and so I just drowned myself while the vamp bartender took no pity on me all the way up until the point where I again moved on, this time a place with a meat-show, dancing girls, expensive girls, brass poles and a leeching male audience sucking on watered down drinks, and I’m not in a mood to just look, where’s the sense in that, so I take a quick seat to grab my breath and I realize there’s a fellow to my flank who’s all geezed up and he’s talking to himself, how he’d had a bad run of things, how his father had been an expert on Thomas Aquinas and drove a Cadillac, how his grandfather carved furniture out of wood by hand, and how his great-grandfather had made a million bucks on hats, the C.G. Roosevelt Hat Co., Long Island, NY, and how his best friend, a real bingo-boy, had been killed by a taxicab on the day Dinkins was defeated, how he cried at times about King Kong (his best friend’s sobriquet (sobriquet – my words)), how he was tired of food handed out in a paper bag, tired of snoring bunkmates, tired of his cardboard sign begging for money and God bless you, how life was hard with one lung, and of a sudden hot-diggity-dog, he yells, looking me dead to rights, “This is the spot!” and I ask him what spot, and he says “this is the spot where the Devil sucked my dick!” and he resumes his composure and mumbles something about his father being an expert on Thomas Aquinas, and I take off my wedding band, which I was still wearing and make a gift of it to him, and he asks why, and I tell him as a token of gratitude for his candor, and I’m out of the place, free of the gold ring, free of the killjoy memento when I cross the threshold to a final bar, a low-down honky-tonk, where I plant my flag in a booth and howl for pudding, I say, oh is that right, no pudding on tap? then make it a baker’s dozen of cheap, light beer and a late-night food menu – these provided, I ordered a stuffed cheeseburger, rare, extra onions, and here is my debit card but keep the tab open, do I get the card back or do you keep it and what time do you close, oh no shit, that late, and how about that music, who picked it? all the while saying to myself, “walk home, you dumb idiot.”
Slurred speech, bloodshot and watery eyes, an overwhelming odor of an alcoholic beverage on my breath and clothing, evidence of all six clues on the horizontal gaze nystagmus test, failure at walking a straight line, using my arms to balance, failing to count my steps aloud, failing to keep my foot raised, hopping around on one foot, mixing up numbers, one-thousand one, one-thousand-eleventeen, failing to follow instructions, polite and cooperative, failing to live an honest life, damn, I was lit up, and I returned to the hotel, dirtied, abused by the world and hundreds of dollars annexed from my billfold by the disease of alcohol, a forgotten cab ride, severe judgment and grimacing by another hotel guest in the elevator lift right down to the button on my fly, I crashed face down on a king bed with a trillion times ten thread count and a backboard screwed to the wall studs, my pants partly wet from piss, a widescreen high definition fuck-flick in the background on a low volume, I hurled into sleep as off a cliff.
We met for breakfast (people on trips are always inclined to put food into their bodies as a group). It was modest intake for me – I could feel the bile leaping up from my ulcer-lined stomach. In addition, I had slept on my neck wrong, and I had to sit there in the loud café like a puppet with pancakes. I could not spend the day with them. It was absolute torture to be in close physical proximity to Isabelle and not grab and grab and grab. I faked jet lag, a head cold. I returned to my room. The kids went off to see Broadway, skipping along down the great white way, and whatever else, they had a map. I took a huge liquor shit in the shower. After that, I watched The View. During The View, I shit the bed and then hid the sheets in a ceiling tile in the bathroom. Those are the facts, set plainly before you.
The Three Seasons is a nice place. It’s not up-beat like some of those modern slugs popping up all over the city, but it has class, always has. They’ll send anything to your room. Hell, they almost sent Chopin himself when I made the request, drunk again, at noon. I wouldn’t last until dinner time. Walter had telephoned from the base of the statue of liberty, had sent a photograph via cell phone to cell phone messaging of he and Bella hugging at the feet of lady liberty and it turned me the color of blue ice. The kids had split up. Walter and Isabelle had taken Saturday to themselves to explore the city. Meanwhile, I explored my asshole in the mirror and waited for a call from my Russian confidante. Not having received one, I called him and got the skinny. The townhome was gone, kaput. He had a mule do a drive by and confirm that the rubble was rubble, smoldering in ash, yellow tape up from tree to tree, fire inspector on site. Everything Walter and Isabelle owned was gone. And so was my mirror. And my Dragon’s Chair, damn I wished I could have salvaged it somehow, but there was such a rush of things at the turn of events brought on by Scott Schultz, dead now, R.I.P., sincerely and affectionately yours, the man who held the hammer (this last part in cursive).
Saturday night was even better and worse than Friday. It came on like the culmination of every birth and death since the world burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago. I’m a true cocksucker, which is why I reference the age of the planet.
I gave my three sons and their wives tickets to see some comedy show near the Village – one of those below-street joints that hustles for audiences and makes its money exclusively on “specialty cocktails.” I hadn’t got over my cold, so I told them. An early night with an in-room movie for me, so I told them further. “Maybe I’ll even order some room service.” “You should dad, you deserve it.” My only intent was to annihilate myself out of existence. And I couldn’t do that in the hotel room.
So I hit the streets again, moving along. Moving along, one way or another into the open-aired lunatic asylum, that cobwebby jungle of humanity that buzzed along without a touch of realism. Along the city streets, where the hot asphalt of the day mixed with the effervescent vapors of dusky air, where the people shuffled by in their weekend rat race of materialism and prescription pill addictions, fur coats, an Italian selling ices with syrups, red white and blue, purple, orange, etc., where the businessman and the drunkard or one and the same sat face to face in the clean subway while assault-rifle armed men in blue and black looked meanly even into the faces of babes in strollers. I had to get out of Manhattan. I had to spread, had to expand, as Boris had said. But expand where? And how? An expansion in one would be a constriction in another, in a way. If I were to dance the night away, I would not enjoy my hours in sober reflection. If I were to sit and read, I would not get to look at and smell all the hoopla, all the drunken gash the bar life affords. How stale would be the world if everyone sat around reading Froissart’s Chronicles! I shot up from the Kashmir sheets. Keep your books! Keep your meditations and your yoga, your green teas and your 5K fun-runs, your Johnson Institute Approach, your polar-bear plunges and your game-day tail-gating and your golf tee-times and the thousands of hours you live behind electric screens. Give me death! Give me life! Squeeze me, pull me, shut me up and let me loose to die in the streets raving mad, only give me anything but your usual modes, your canonical lock-step, your unquestioning loyalty to the sons and daughters of repeated amnesia. I had to get out of Manhattan. I had to get out of life.
I started by walking the streets in the direction of the subway. Moving along. Shuffling. Keeping a pace. Ever watchful for a chance to smell the hair of a stranger waiting at the crosswalk (preferably female, though it didn’t matter). I had to find a place worth my mint leaves. I rambled down the steps at Grand Central Station, bought a ticket at the machine, passed through the gate and was whisked away by electricity, stops and turns later, utterly lost, I made my way to the earth’s surface in Crown Heights and dove headlong into the first watering hole, a peachy place packed full of swashbucklers and roustabouts, where the travails of the day were pitched up into the tin ceiling and swallowed whole, where the beer mugs were astir and the tight sugars on staff might even grab you by the belt and give you a jerk if your one-liner is good enough for their tastes or maybe she doesn’t even respond to you, maybe she turns volte-face and you swear under your breath to resolve yourself on mortal revenge while the other apes in the bar hurl doughnuts at your thoughts.
But I move on, because it is sometimes all I can do, and I find a brick building with a broken sign and there is all kinds of drinking ruckus that meets my ears like the plangent ringing of church bells and the mere thought of a pig-iron whiskey and fisticuffs whets my spirit and I enter the place, a dark, dingy unattractive lair filled with decrepit locals abasing one another in the lime light and not a single set of tits in the whole place and I realize, hell, this really is the kind of place for whiskey and fisticuffs and all the sobs of the working man, and hell, I might as well make a perch and feel out the bartender on the whole of his life story and mine, and first things first, the idea supermost in my mind: a whiskey, neat, three fingers, because I am just getting started, “that champagne at the hotel was all piss and vinegar” and a couple of the fat bastards with beer mugs look at me like I’m Donald Trump and they want to nix me, fix me, 86 me, anything it seems, but they return their glazed eyes to the dark wet wood where their elbows rest and leave me unmolested to drink my fill, which I do, perforce, and I do get a good fill of it, even though the bartender is a fucking cocksucker and I know he thinks the same of me, and I leave him a 14 cent tip when the time is ripe because I only want to rouse his rancor on that delirious August night, and I succeed, and move on, leaving him braying like a stupid ass with a towel in his hand and no recourse and fuck him anyway, what did he think anyway, that I would pull out my Michigan roll and gift him a ten-spot for being a fucking cocksucker? and I beat it quick, like I said, moving on, into the tempest known as Brooklyn, again, this time to conquer all, V.V.V., hail Caesar, only stated in the German with a hard K-sound with my hat off to Otto Van B. and the rest of his gang and everyone like him all the way back and forward in history in my beloved Germany and I mount the steps to a columned building with a door-keep in a ridiculous zoot suit who’s a fine-looking fellow, probably Italian or probably African, I don’t remember, but he lets me in and I am dazed immediately by a plastic coronal that some pixie tops my head off with and charges me $20, and I am then bade to enter and the place is golden and velvety and silky and full of reds and purples and dyed hairdos put up in the most fantastic coiffures and the women are either naked and on stage or topless and off stage and walking around like they want to fuck, but of course they only want to fuck if you’ve got the blow, and if not, well hey, I’ll dance around your prick for five minutes, put some plastic bead around your sorry neck and charge you a fee that would put most lawyers to shame, and don’t forget to tip, and don’t forget to buy a drink for the Lady, and don’t you dare touch the Lady, ye hear? and all that jazz, and never mind that the Lady smells like salt or bath salts or bath-fucking or bath-drowning or all of the above and in that order, and I grab a skinny one, put her on my lap and wave a hundred in front of her, and I try to impress her by telling her I am the poet laureate of drunk-driving, but she doesn’t care, won’t hear any of it, not even my bits about Verdi and my Jag, she only cares about the wad in my pocket, and not that wad, the one from the U.S. Treasury is all she cares about, and she secures some notes from me and shoves them up her ass before she moves on, and I order another one-thousand-dollar watered-down drink and piss a little bit in my pants or was that something else, a Cialis gift? and I drink my drink and smile and lean back in the deep rubber booth-seat and pat the couple of hairs on my head like it matters where they fall, and everything is acey-deucey, and shit, this is alright, I think, even though I forgot to take my morning Bayer, and I see the skinny one going up a flight of stairs with some visiting-fireman-bloke who trots anxiously at her heels like a trained poodle after a bone, no pun intended, and nobody ever means it when they say no pun intended, but I do, believe me, I wouldn’t shit all over this reading and writing parade we’re stuck in together, but back to that night, back to that particular club, where the ATM was raided by magnetic strips enough to feed a starving nation, and I couldn’t get a good drunk going, I wanted to but couldn’t because the drinks were barely laced, though it was inspiriting to see all that marvelous clam open up and bite down on the brass poles, but oh well, I had had enough of it for the time being, perhaps I would return later, but for now I had to move on, back out the way I came, past the Afritalian in the black suit and the nighttime sunglasses and down the street, moving and moving along, a fish in a school of rivals, all out to slit each other’s throats and gnash on the bones of the flesh and pretend that everything is just ducky, isn’t it? and, well, it isn’t, I have to tell you, I have known it for a long time, but that’s an entirely irrelevant non-seq., I say to myself, and wouldn’t you like to forget all about the galaxy in which you live and suck down some poison instead? and of course I would, moving on, I wasn’t in the least bushed (tired), and I had my mind set on a place with merriment, a place where a fellow could have a high time and forget all about Vlad Putin and the Ayatollah and all of the Kim’s, and I found one, at long last, a new building with an all-glass front and a black podium for the valets in front, who were on the dash, and I walk in the place and realize (it was not evident from without), that I am the oldest motherfucker in the entire building, everyone is 30 or less and that’s a big difference compared to 61, and shit, I say, I’m from out of town so I can do whatever the hell I want and I push my way to the bar and shoulder myself between two young bucks who deftly pull away from my presence and I am finally assisted by a well-dressed woman in all black, tucked in shirt and tie, who asks what I’ll have and I say “a Rum Rickey” and she says “What the fuck?” and I explain the whole business of one ice cube, one jigger rum and one teaspoonful of lime juice and she rolls her eyes because she has better things to do, like pour local craft beers from the taps and check her phone, and I think to myself “another 14 cent tip” and she is gone for an eternity and my spirit wanes, morale is low, and she comes back with my cocktail and demands a number of dollars, which I produce, and I put my back to her after paying (with a 20-dollar tip to boot), scanning the room for hard bodies, something to set my eyes on and enjoy, perhaps a big bright pony tail to rape when the time is right, and I find one, a tall brunette brown houri with a middle-back trail of straight fibers locked together near the neck with a silver clasp, and I go right on up to it and sniff like a hound, only discreetly, and nobody is the wiser that I have sucked in the hot air-juice and digested it fully and stamped the memory, and then all of a sudden a man standing near her grabs me by the coat collar and says “What the fuck?” just like the bartender, only much more male, and I am being run out of the place and video recorded on over 50 cell phones all raised in the air and directed at my stupid, worried face, and I haven’t even finished my 15-dollar and 20-dollar tip Rum Rickey, which I yell at the tops of my lungs, but nobody seems to care, they only care about recording life, not living it, and I am shoved to the sidewalk and kicked once in the ribs and they’re not new ribs, they’re old ribs mind you, and the pain is strong and immediate and I am looked at like the pariah that I know is me only the people looking on have no fucking clue just how horrible and evil I really am, they only know that I smelled a woman without consent, but that’s enough for them to hate me, and I crawl to my knees and then to my feet and trust me when I say it that I then moved on, pissed, humiliated, yelling Fuck You Charley to all and sundry, hell-bent on exonerating my ego by the administration of drinking and screwing, any piece of ass, I didn’t care, a toothless bitch would do, and I stumble along the streets, a walking scream, until the paint on the buildings looks a little more worn, the cracks in the walk become a little more frequent, and the people begin to look a little less urban homogenous, yeah, this is the place, and I pull the big aluminum handle on a metal door toward the dark night and let myself in to the Forty-leven, I’ll never forget the place as long as I live, it was like a picture out of Factotum, that shit-stained fruit salad of beverage-brawling, and I hit the bottle, shot by shot like an old soldier, one for Brooklyn, one for the Bronx, one for The Drunk with Short Legs, I think that is what it’s called, and I’m doing these stupid toasts to myself and the city and to Hank and Henri and the former is really a Henry too, and I’m really laying it on thick, just one of the boys boasting, and I realize that I am finally at that point where the alcohol has worked its magic and I am me only I don’t want to be me, I want to be more, and with that I continue to drink the stuff, shot after bloody shot, a beer mixed in one time or three times and I’m pretty confident that I’m still wearing pants and I’m certain I’ve pissed myself, pants or no pants, and the bartender knows how to make a silver fizz, a side car, an orange blossom, a sazerac, a whiskey smash, a planters punch, and the old son-of-a-gun even told me he’d make me a hot gin sling if the temp. outside were colder, may the lord bless and keep him, may the lord make his face shine down upon him and be gracious unto him, and I leave the place, moving along, in a blackout state, I end up in The Bronx, where I am crawling in the dead of the night on a street corner on hands and knees, right on up to this big pimp with a white lacquered cane, I attempt from a distance to lick his testicles but he has no clue where my razzberry hiss is pointed, and I ask him, “Have you ever seen a good, thorough stabbing?” and he hits me with the cane, and then a fist, a fist, and lights out. I awake in Bronx-Lebanon hooked up to machines, in all kinds of pain and pressure. The nurse hands me a mirror. I am even uglier than before, even more despicable, me. And she says, “Is there anyone we can contact for you?” But that last part was only a dream. I never made it to the Bronx. I never saw a pimp. I never made a substantial step or any other minimal actus reus toward licking balls.