I look at him expecting to see something wrong. Like, I don’t know, blotches on his skin maybe. Something, but I don’t see even a pimple. He looks like he did the last time I saw him. Still built like a brick shithouse, his hands balled loosely into fists the size of boxing gloves. But I guess his hands are no match for what he’s dealing with now.
Why do you think we come here?
This, I say again, raising my glass.
Matt laughs, smacks me on the shoulder, and I wobble on my stool, slopping beer on the floor. Kind of pisses me off. I don’t have the money to waste beer like that. I mean, coming here, this is a treat for me. Matt continues laughing, laugh lines etching out from around those sad, bloodshot eyes of his.
I’ll get Matt his next one, Dennis says.
He shakes an empty Budweiser bottle, and Gail reaches below the bar and gets him another one, dripping ice. Dennis got a DWI a few weeks back, third one I think, driver’s license suspended for good this time. I told him he’s going to end up like me. But he doesn’t know I’m homeless and I’m not about to tell him. We’re all equals here. Me, letting him know I’m homeless, would change that. I’m a guy in a bar with other guys in a bar. Kind of nice to be seen that way.
Dennis gets around now on a two-speed bicycle and carries newspaper clippings of the September 11th terrorist attacks that he reads obsessively. He can’t get over how guys armed only with box cutters took over three planes. Had he been on board . . . His voice drifts and the rest of us don’t pay attention. Dennis couldn’t bust a grape.
Well, after tonight no more beer and cigarettes, Matt says, exhaling a plume of smoke that lingers in the air, then stretches into thin gray fingers sucked up by a ceiling fan. I’m getting treatment. But I ain’t going to do that chemo thing.
What’re you going to do instead? I ask.
I got some buddies in LA. There’re things you can do with oxygen, herbal remedies. Natural things. I’m leaving for there tomorrow. See what they can do for me. If I go out, it won’t be under no chemo. No way.
There ain’t nothing you can do about it, except pray, John says.
Thanks man, Matt says and squeezes the back of John’s neck.
John shrugs him off and asks Gail for a shot of Jack and a beer.
You’ll be all right, John tells Matt.
I first met John here one night when he asked me if I knew who had won the previous night’s Chiefs game. I told him I didn’t follow football. I was reading a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle someone had left on the bar and handed him the sports page. How about basketball? he said. I shook my head. I don’t follow that either. I went back to reading the paper. He flicked a finger in my face.
Hey! I said.
I’m talking to you. Don’t you have a TV?
No, actually, I don’t.
Jesus, what kind of person doesn’t have a TV?
Until recently, John had been seeing the daytime bartender, Bonnie. He would stop by at noon during her shift and have lunch with her. When he got off work, he came back and waited until she punched out. Then they would go to his place for pizza and Netflix. Bonnie had nothing better going on. The way Gail tells it, Bonnie chewed John up and spit him out in no time flat and took up with another guy, a real estate agent. John installs kitchen cabinets, drives a pickup. Real Estate Man doesn’t work with his hands. He takes Bonnie to restaurants. I mean downtown restaurants. He takes her to the theater and they’ve enrolled in a tango dance class together. John doesn’t have it in him to offer Bonnie the two-step.
Why do you come here? Matt asks John.
Because, John says and raises his glass.
Fair enough, Matt says.
He blows at the foam on his beer.
We all die sometime. I just wasn’t expecting to now, he says.
You’re not dead yet, Matt, I say.
I suppose this’d kill me as well.
Don’t I know it, I say.
We all get our ticket punched, don’t we?
I couldn’t argue with that. Matt stands and walks stiff-legged to a popcorn machine.
I’ll pray for him, Gail says. She smells of the soap she uses to wash the glasses. During the day, she’s a cashier at the Best Buy in Oakland. Just the other week, she told me, a gal who had worked there five years was laid off.
I sip my beer, watch her turn the lights down, and stare at myself in the mirror behind the bar. I see only the dim, circular outline of my head, my face obscured by the shadows curtaining the mirror. I should get back to my alley, but it’s nice here. I live light. When I first hit the streets, I had a shopping cart, but it got so I was acting like I still had a home. I collected stuff, like everybody does, unnecessary stuff, clothes and blankets—more than I could possibly use. And I had to pack it up every time I left my camp so no one would steal it. The cart became a weight like so much else in life. So I walked away from it as I did my apartment when I thought all I had to do was move, stop drinking, get right, and I’d be OK and would get everything back I’d lost, but by then all the helium had leaked out of the balloon, so to speak, and there was no renewal on the horizon. I’ve been in detox programs. Moving to escape your problems is what you call a geographic. At least that’s what alcohol counselors have told me. I don’t know why everything has to have a name. It’s kind of a judgment. You did a geographic, like that’s bad. Man, I only wanted to get away, call it what you want. These days, I spend a few nights in shelters when it gets cold, but most don’t let you in if you smell of alcohol so I go back to my alley. I guess that’s kind of doing a geographic too. This stuff gets in your head. I wish I could just stay here at the Comeback.
Do you think Matt’ll make it? John asks, leaning over to me.
I look at him over by the popcorn machine. At the patchy beard on his face and at the faded blue work shirt cut off at the sleeves and at the loose threads stuck to his arm. I can’t see Bonnie ever having dreamed long-buried dreams with John as I presume she does now with Real Estate Man. I see Real Estate Man put his hands on her waist. He holds her on the dance floor turning her in ever-widening circles, making those dreams seem possible.
I don’t know if he will or not, John, I say.
I don’t either, Dennis says.
Matt sits back down holding a bowlful of popcorn.
Want some popcorn?
No, thanks.
You got a wife? Matt asks me.
