The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [21]
“I know her!” I said to Vince.
“Who? Her?” he said, turning around briefly. “Yeah, she’s here every other Friday. She wins about half the time.”
The music started again but not quite so loud. The stage went dark. Flower Cannon stood bent over in the corner putting on a pair of tennis shoes. She straightened up and raised her beer to her mouth and guzzled. Now she wore an old overcoat like a chemist’s smock.
“Show’s over, time to play cards,” Vince said. But Vince seemed much more interested in continuing his monologue than in getting to his favorite pastime. As he talked he worked his eyebrows nonstop; they arched and flattened calisthenically. He seemed to be signaling wildly from somewhere inside himself while he confided in a casual tone.
Suddenly I said, “She shaves her pussy.”
His cigarette stopped just short of his lips. He looked at me, squinting past the smoke. “Yeah, a lot of them do that.”
“She shaves her cunt bare,” I said.
Vomiting up these cruel vulgarities forced the blood into my head. Please remember, I wasn’t drunk, hadn’t had a sip of anything stronger than club soda. I felt happy, there’s no other way of putting it.
I said, “I know her. I’ll probably fuck her one of these days.”
Vince stayed quite still for a couple seconds more. “I doubt that,” he said.
Vince got louder as he drank another round, and then another. I didn’t know what he was saying. I listened while peering mainly at his eyebrows. Every now and then I answered. It was the kind of barroom conversation in which two people talk at cross-purposes until, sometimes anyway, one punches the other one.
My habit when I’ve been humiliated is to go out and buy a book. When I wiped out a small IRA by trading like a crazy roulette addict, I bought a book on stocks. When I played golf in the Virginia suburbs and everybody laughed, I found a book by Gary Player; after some practice I got pretty good, good enough to like these outings with lobbyists. After this incident in a bar I found a book in a small, exotic store: 101 Defenses Against Attack. I see I’m stalling. My friend slugged me. His fist snaked out like the knotted end of a whip and struck my forehead and the bridge of my nose. A polar whiteness exploded in my face. And although I wasn’t out, didn’t sleep, my thoughts all turned to questions, and I tipped over onto the floor. Sat there trying to push myself upright. I’m sure everybody thought I was drunk.
Under my hands the floor felt gritty with what I thought might be sawdust. It took me a little more time to remember what I was doing down there—I was trying to get up. I looked up to see Flower Cannon beside the stage. She’d taken off her black wig. She had her drink tipped up high and she was looking at me sideways. But out of a sort of libertarian barroom tact, I think, neither she nor anybody else seemed to be making very much of this incident. A couple of guys from a neighboring table helped me back onto my chair while I said, “I’m all right, I’m all right.”
Vince himself had disappeared, and a good thing—a person with his criminal history couldn’t afford any more trouble.
As soon as I could stand up straight, I left. On my way out I suddenly felt dizzy and sat down at the bar and asked for some orange juice. I sipped at it no more than a couple of minutes and then made my way out to the bright parking lot, where I realized I hadn’t even stopped off at the men’s room to see to my condition. My hands were filthy where I’d pushed myself up from the floor. Along with the grit of sawdust I found the stains of spilt drinks on my knees where I’d crawled around looking for my senses. I began to realize I had no idea where in the world I was going.
A man approached