The Captive Condition (8 page)

An expert at rolling dozens of plant species, tobacco, cannabis,
Zornia latifolia,
he had a fresh cigarette ready in no time, funky smelling, exceptionally slow burning, and for the rest of the afternoon he raced up and down a dirt road that twisted through the valley, the molten sunlight softened by swirling pillars of saffron-colored dust. He listened to the hiss and static of a ball game on the radio, nursed his jar of moonshine, and when nature called he pulled over to sprinkle the wilting goldenrod that grew in a ditch.

Feeling like a despised child unable to escape the wrath of his abusive parents, I tucked my legs beneath my chin and fought back tears. By clamping shut my right eye, I could at least pretend that the peals of drunken laughter and the clangor of steel fish would not hurt me. I could also console myself with the dim hope that this awful initiation was almost over, and soon I, too, would be an official member of the Bloated Tick.

Hours later, just before nightfall, I felt the steady thump of distant jungle drums dancing up and down my aching spine, a delirious tropical rhythm, a cannibal chant summoning me back to the land of the living, and though I wanted badly to vanish again into the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness, I forced myself to crack open my good eye and investigate the music's source. Above me, just out of reach, enormous fireflies floated through the purple twilight like corkscrewing constellations, and I tried unsuccessfully to decipher in their ever-changing patterns a hidden meaning and purpose. With some effort I managed to sit up, and it took me a few minutes to realize that the tarp had been rolled away from the bed and that I was now bathed in the sultry evening air. I must have been out cold, though for how long I could not say.

Mad with thirst, desperate for even a single drop of water, I half climbed, half fell out of the bed. My knees buckled as I hit the ground, and I almost collapsed. Clinging to the side of the truck, I gathered what was left of my strength and took a few tentative steps toward the cab, willing my boots to move one at a time. When I finally dared to lift my head, I was startled to find that I was standing not in front of the Gonk's stone cottage but in the middle of a gravel lot. Dozens of cars and pickups were parked behind a tall barbed wire fence—freshly waxed foreign sedans and muddy 4x4s and rusty station wagons long overdue for the demolition derby, their cracked windshields reflecting the garish pink light of a marquee above the town's main drag.

After adjusting my eye patch, I searched the cab for the keys, determined to tear out of there and teach the Gonk a lesson of my own. Instead, I found a few empty mason jars on the seat and dozens of rolling papers scattered on the floor. Not far from the truck stood the old movie palace, a squat two-story structure of soot-covered bricks that might have been a showplace in the days when two-reel, silent comedies were all the rage. Though the building was a mere fifty yards away, to me it might as well have been a mile, and I wasn't sure if I would make it to the entrance without falling down and dry heaving.

At the door of the cabaret, a man in a wine-colored sport coat and black bow tie greeted me with amusement and concern. He pawed at his shaved head with a giant hand weighed down by a half-dozen gold rings. “Good evening, sir. Is everything all right?”

I nodded and reached for the door handle.

“Beg your pardon, sir. Just a moment. This is a private club. If you plan to see tonight's entertainment you must purchase a one-day guest pass. Unless you're a college student. Are you a college student?”

The man belonged inside the gates of a steel mill, crawling inside a boiler tank, not working the door of a small-town cabaret and trying to pass himself off as a sophisticated British butler. He bounced from one foot to the other, drummed his fingers against his legs, scratched his ass. His clothes made the charade all the more obvious and absurd. His cheap dinner jacket was too tight in the shoulders and too short in the arms, his wrinkled black trousers were too long in the legs, his shoes were scuffed and unlaced and sprinkled with mud. At five feet six, he was small of stature but solidly built, a fireplug of a man without a discernible neck, just a head like a granite block resting atop an equally square and thickly muscled torso, a rough-hewn pillar, an immovable, prehistoric monument, a miniature Stonehenge of stability and toughness. His shaved head revealed the jagged scars of his pugnacious past. No doubt the scars worked to his advantage at a place like this.

“Sir, may I make a bold suggestion? For fifty dollars you can purchase a G.O.N.C. card. It's good for a full year.”

“A what?”

He pointed to the marquee. He must have thought I was crazy or dimwitted or both, and at that moment maybe my sanity
had
slipped just a bit, my mind inching closer to the precipice. As I wobbled on my heels outside the door, with that deep bass thrumming in my ears and the neon light dousing me in the hues of a smutty inferno, I repeated with wonderment and dread that peculiar word on the marquee like some salacious epithet, as if by doing so I could turn a blind eye to the terrible fact that a great mystery had been solved only to be replaced by the aggravating mundanity of existence.

G.O.N.C.

Gentlemen of Normandy College

For just $50 you can enjoy all the privileges of preferred membership

Ask for details at the door

I showed the man my expired college ID and absently handed him cash. “Gonc,” I whispered, “Gonc, Gonc…”

Through a tragedy of chipped and tarnished teeth, the doorman said, “Sir, are you sure you're okay? What the hell happened to your eye? Someone skull-fuck you? Oh, the crime rate in this damned town. Listen, if you need any assistance just ask for me, Little Morty.”

Taking long and reckless strides down a dimly lit corridor, I careened into a red velvet curtain that opened to a vast, smoke-filled room where a dozen aging G.O.N.C.s concentrated on a mirrored catwalk that jutted like a magnificent, crystal harpoon into the center of the club. The locker-room stench of perspiring men and the boudoir odors of painted and powered harlots slithered through the room, and somewhere in the shadows the Gonk sat at his regular table, enjoying a legal drink and waiting for the show to begin.

Running my tongue over leathery lips, I lowered my head and hurried to the bar at the back of the cabaret, where I ordered a tall glass of ice water, but before I could take that gratifying first sip the music stopped and the room went suddenly dark. From out of the toxic cloud of sweaty flesh, I heard a hushed murmur, a whistle, a familiar cackle. Caught in the collective grip of sexual hysteria, suffering from the contagion of lust, the men leaned forward in their chairs, a strange tableau of sinister faces, their mouths twisted with a freakish fantasy, a dangerous desire, their anticipation bordering on torment. In every direction I turned, I saw a sick genetic stew of unknown origin about to burst its dam and inundate the world, and within seconds the shouts and screams had reached a maddening crescendo. The place had become a tinderbox full of misdemeanors, and all it would take to light the fuse and turn it into a pandemonium of fistfights and squad cars was one soused and stinking working-class stiff stupid enough to storm the stage and slobber over a dancer. I considered searching for an emergency exit but was startled by a voice that spoke to us from the loudspeakers.

“Gentlemen, please turn your attention to the main stage and give a warm welcome to tonight's featured performer—the Lorelei!”

Enthusiastic applause, whistles, anguished howls of longing. A beam of indigo light penetrated a cloud of dry ice rising like a mist from the floor and found in the middle of the catwalk the svelte figure of a young woman, by far the most curvaceous of the cabaret's under-equipped dancers, an unusually nubile nymph uprooted from some ethnic slum and one that added much-needed novelty to this menagerie of rather commonplace, workaday girls. The music started up again, a low-down dirty blues, and the woman, naked except for a G-string, a garter on her left thigh, and a pair of black stilettos strapped to her feet, began her routine. With her sinewy limbs wrapped tightly around a pole, she did not dance or swing but seemed rather to float on the rippling waves of light, graceful as the fish tattooed to her wrists and arms and shoulders. The intricate creatures, both vivid and dreamlike, appeared to pass right through the woman's body as though she were an apparition, a puff of smoke, a mirage. This was no ordinary woman. By her caustic smile I could tell this was a
bad
woman, a sensationally
wicked
woman, positively villainous, a filthy phantasm, and the longer I sat and watched her, the more I became convinced that she wasn't an erotic dancer at all but an evil magician, and I hoped she wouldn't pause in her act to call on me—“I need a volunteer from the audience to assist me with my next trick”—because at that point no magician in the world had the power to make that irksome and capricious magic wand between my legs vanish into thin air.

For thirty minutes I gazed into the violet light of this erotic aquarium and watched with almost scientific interest as Lorelei's fish swam around the shining brass pole, swift as a school of mackerel in the deepest sea, slow as whiskered catfish in a lazy river. Some of the men bounded toward the stage, drawn to her gratuitous beauty, the extravagance of her bare flesh, and they competed with one another to stuff crisp dollar bills into her swelling garter only to be beaten back by the doorman. The woman made no effort to disguise her cupidity. Even her eyes were a greedy green, the color of cold, hard cash.

After taking in this sad spectacle, I motioned to the bartender. Although I much preferred hallucinogens to alcohol, I decided, like any good working stiff, to order multiple mugs of flat beer until I approached that state of bliss commonly known as the blackout, my way of coming to terms with my decision to quit college once and for all and embrace my new identity. Instead of another obnoxious, mollycoddled college kid who came looking for a summer job, I saw myself working indefinitely at the Bloated Tick, gradually turning into a middle-aged grunt with creaking knees and thinning hair. I often wondered how my coworkers coped with the prospect of having to do hard physical labor for the rest of their lives, but they didn't seem to worry much about the future or about the consequences of their actions. They behaved as though they'd never known punishment or guilt or abject poverty, and I saw great power in this.

I gulped my beer and with each new round belched in exultation, but after the fifth foamy mug, when my vision started to blur and my chin sank lower and lower until it rested comfortably against the polished wood of the bar, I began to ponder a matter of great importance. Was it worth shelling out an entire fifty dollars to become a member of this club? Like an endless loop of hard-core smut playing in my head, I tried to memorize every clinical close-up, every theatrical gasp, every lubricious pose and acrobatic contortion, and even though it may have been another illusion conjured up by the lovely and beguiling Lorelei, I understood that in some odd way I'd been a member of this club all along.

I badly needed Morgan Fey that night, and as I stumbled in a drunken stupor from the cabaret and through the ashen twilight of the alley, I hoped she might see me and rush to my aid. An ardent smoker, Morgan sometimes appeared behind the bistro during her irregular cigarette breaks. Instead, I saw perched on the stoop outside the kitchen door a black muskrat licking its long claws. It regarded me with brazen indifference and then, dragging its belly through a debris field of broken beer bottles and cigarette butts, waddled lazily toward the patio, where Professor Martin Kingsley, a victim of ignorance, waited for a woman to share a meal with him followed by a bit of kissing and cuddling in his car before the drive home. Out of shame and embarrassment I hurried away before he could see me, and I veered along the sidewalk in a direction I hoped would lead me back to my apartment. Thoughts of college made me miserable, but I was made more miserable still by the thought of returning to the empty row house that seemed with each passing day to sink deeper and deeper into the mudflats.

Having walked the streets of Normandy Falls many times before, I felt confident I knew the way back home—all I had to do was keep going east, or maybe it was south, definitely not back to the square—but now my good eye was giving me trouble. The world looked faceted, fragmented, sharp cornered like one of Morgan's Cubist paintings,
Drunk Descending a Staircase,
and while I jerked and careened along monochromatic lanes painted by Duchamp and stomped through masses of wet newspaper that soaked up the rural defilement, I didn't realize until it was too late that I'd crossed the arch bridge and was now on the wrong side of the river.

In the neighborhood of Victorian-era homes, I kicked piles of plastic toys out of my path and pushed my way between rows of thick shrubs; I dragged my feet through flowerbeds, crushing freshly planted chrysanthemums, thrilling at the mindless destruction, the hilarious havoc. Taking pride in my own marginal coordination, I managed to scale a chain-link fence and crept across a quadrupled landscape until I hit a clothesline and fell flat on my back. Dazed by the blow, my brains cudgeled by a flagon of flat beer, I struggled to my feet and rubbed my neck to make sure my head hadn't been severed from my torso and was now rolling around like—I squinted in the dark—like a
beach ball
? An odd thing to see in this working-class neighborhood where few people had been to an ocean or had the pleasure of walking along a sweeping breadth of white sand beach. I gave the ball a gentle tap with my foot and watched with childish delight as it sailed through the air and landed with a soft plop in a swimming pool. Another surprise. A couple more steps and I would have fallen into the water, split my skull open against the concrete ledge, drowned.