Memphis

 

You know, Juju, I went into Bluff City Bar and that little hard-ass, Britt, was bartending. You remember her, the steely-eyed ninety-eight pounder who seems like she would just as soon stick a six-inch knife in your spine and twist it as pour you a drink.
 

So I’m sitting there, and you know there’s a window behind the curve of the bar, and there’s a girl sitting there with a glass of red wine. I couldn’t really see her face because of the light coming through the window behind her, but she kept looking at the floor and the ceiling and then around the room but never at me or anyone in particular, like that one guy in a band who never makes eye contact in any photo.

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I went to the jukebox to play some Beatles and got to look at her for longer than you would normally look at someone, because I knew she wasn’t going to look at me. She had a long, thin nose and green eyes with a brown, slightly weathered face that would not have looked out of place in a Mediterranean city 2,000 years ago.

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I played some songs and returned to my seat. If you ever want to pick up a pretty girl at a bar, you don’t try to pick her up. You leave her alone to wonder why you’re not trying to pick her up and hope for an intervening occurrence, something that may erupt naturally to cause a connection. If it doesn’t happen, so be it. It wasn’t meant to be, and you still have your dignity intact.

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Anyway, just then there was an annoying clamor behind me. A small group of waiters, clapping their hands and singing Happy Birthday, stood around an aging group of chubby women all beaming from the attention. There’s not a sadder event than the obligatory birthday cheeriness of the waiters performing this embarrassingly insincere task. They finished with a rousing cheer and then all abruptly turned from the clapping women, the gaiety gone, the masquerade over, the false joy now replaced with an awkward silence in the room.

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I grimaced and looked back to the girl at the bar, who seemed momentarily roused from her reverie. She looked from the women and down the bar, and our eyes briefly met. I nodded, and she gave a half smile and looked away.

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Britt strode down the bar, glared at me, and asked without waiting for an answer, “Why are you in here every day lately?”

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“The friendly bartender,” I said, but I don’t think she heard me. I bet the waiters had not dared ask her to help them sing. False gaiety couldn’t be squeezed out of that little pit bull.

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She wiped the bar with a towel pulled from her back pocket and put a bar napkin in front of a tall, dark-haired man with bushy eyebrows over thick, black-framed glasses. She never asked him what he wanted but only looked at him and waited.

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“Maker’s Mark, no ice,” he said evenly.

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“Okay, Doctor Masterson.” Britt grabbed a glass.

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“Are you a doctor?” the girl at the end of the bar spoke for the first time.

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He turned his head slowly and said casually, with a quiet cockiness, “I am not a doctor. I don’t give shots or treat colds or viruses or give checkups with syrupy advice and stern admonitions. I, young lady,” he paused to sip his drink, “am a neurosurgeon. I save lives. I help people walk again.”

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“Kind of like Jesus except without the humbleness?” I asked.

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“Exactly,” he turned to me, not missing a beat, and smiled.

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“Can I buy the Savior a drink?” I asked Britt, who was leaning against the back of the bar watching. “And the lady at the end.” I knew an intervening occurrence when I saw one.

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Britt scowled, poured the neurosurgeon another Maker’s Mark and went to the girl.

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He looked at me, nodded and took a long swallow. “Hey Doc, you got people around your car out there.” The girl at the end of the bar pointed out the window.

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“Is that a Ferrari?” Britt asked.

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“Yeah, a Ferrari California,” said the doctor without looking up.

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“Where you live at in Mississippi?” Britt saw the tag on the Ferrari.

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“South Mississippi, near the Gulf Coast.”

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“That car must be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” said the girl at the end of the bar as she turned back from the window.

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“Two hundred,” said the doctor. “That’s a month of surgeries sitting out there.”

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“What are you doing in Memphis?” I asked.

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He took a long sip, drained the glass, held it up for Britt and then put it on the bar as she approached. He pulled a pen from his pocket and clicked it as he reached for a bar napkin. He wrote on the napkin, and pushed it towards me. I leaned over and read, “I have multiple myeloma.”

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I looked at him and shrugged. He pulled the napkin back, wrote something, and pushed it again to me. There was an added word underlined, “Cancer.”

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I looked from the napkin to his face. “I was getting a four million dollar life insurance policy with my wife as a beneficiary. I had to undergo an extensive medical exam to qualify. They found it then. It was caught early. I didn’t even have any symptoms.”

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“So that’s a good thing, huh? They caught it early.”

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“Well,” he replied and looked back at his glass, “not really. It’s terminal. It’s a death-sentence, cancer.” I didn’t say anything, Juju. I mean really, there’s no good thing you can say in that situation. “I’m on my way to Little Rock for treatment. They have one of the best facilities in America to treat this particular type of cancer. Memphis is on the way, so I always stop in here for some drinks and to visit the irascible Britt.”

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Britt strode by, hesitated and looked at the napkin and then to the doctor. “Sorry,” she said dryly.

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Three guys walked in, sat at the end of the bar between the doctor and the girl and yelled for some beers, but Britt lingered and, I swear, Juju, almost smiled. One of the guys yelled again, but she didn’t even flinch. She was as uncaring as a traffic light. She didn’t care who got there first or how long you waited. She stood there for another minute, listening to us, and then, a scowl back in place, headed toward the three guys who were already peppering the girl at the end of the bar with questions.

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The girl promptly got up and walked to us and stood for a moment between the doctor and me. “Mind if I sit down? Those guys down there are a little much.” We both gestured to the empty stool between us.

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She was a striking woman, though she really had no breasts to speak of. She had a bra on under a shirt with straps, but it was more Band-Aid than bra, not to hold or keep anything from tumbling out but merely to cover because they had to be covered. She had long brown hair with tracings of grey at uneven intervals and calm, sad eyes under arching eyebrows. Her face had a natural smile; not a joyous one but more sardonic.

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And like I said, she was striking, but there was something odd with her body. She was slightly pigeon-toed and leaned forward when she stood. Though slender, there was a beginning of a paunch in the stomach, and her ass was prominent so that, as she leaned forward, it seemed as if the upper and the lower part of her body didn’t match. She stood as a centaur might stand, slightly off kilter.

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She swung her purse around and hung it on a bar hook and sat down. “Hi, I’m Penny,” she extended her hand to both of us. She looked at the napkin for a long moment and then looked at the doctor. He nodded his head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

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He smiled, “It’s not so bad, really. It’s always been about me all my life, and this just insures it will remain like that to the end. It’s kind of funny, though, I’ve driven 200 miles an hour down the interstate, run with bulls in Pamplona, gone skin diving in the Arctic, and parachuted off of a helicopter into the Yukon to hunt for a week, and now,” he looked down at the empty glass and shook his head slightly, “to go in such a pedestrian way.”

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He told more tales of daring, though I think, Juju, you would probably call it stupidity. Apparently, everyone in his family had died early in life so he had decided to live life to its fullest, though to me, there’s a distinction between courting death and living life to its fullest. A big distinction, now that I think of it.

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“What’s your story, Penny?” He turned from himself. “Why is such a beautiful woman sitting morosely in the corner by herself?”

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She hesitated for a moment, glanced at the door and then back at the bar. She took the pen from the doctor who still held it in his hand and wrote on the napkin, “On the Lamb,” and put the pen down on the bar.

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The doctor and I leaned in to look at the napkin, and then we both sat back in our seat and looked at each other quizzically. The doctor then turned to her and said, “Lamb? Like sheep?”

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“Yeah,” she nodded, “like on the run, you know,” she said, looking from him to me and then down at her glass.

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“The doctor adjusted his glasses, “I think you mean ‘On the Lam,’ L-a-m,” and he spelled the word to her.

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“Whatever,” she said with an air of impatience. “Anyway, I’m on the run.”

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The doctor looked to me again and raised his eyebrows. “And why, Ms. Penny, are you on the ‘Lamb’?” he asked, pronouncing the last letter with an emphasis.

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“Ex-husband and ex-boyfriend are both stalking me and threatening to kill each other. And now I have a new boyfriend from Mississippi and he found naked pictures of my exes on my phone, so I just needed to get away from all three of them and sort things out. I came here ‘cause it’s in another part of town, and I don’t think they ever come down here.”

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Well, I was thinking, “Why would a girl keep naked pictures of exes on her phone?” but then I remembered your rationale for that, Juju, and even though it didn’t make sense to me, I did realize that maybe there was another way to look at it.

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I remember you said, “It’s like deleting a memory and a point in time you can’t get back and why would someone do that?”

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“Because there’s a picture of a penis on your phone,” I had said.

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“Hudson, it’s not the point that it’s a penis. It’s a memory. Can’t you understand that?”

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I could never understand women even before Juju’s penis principle, but it didn’t matter, and I had given up a long time ago anyway.

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But the doctor weighed right in. “Why, Ms. Penny, would a beautiful woman with a new boyfriend not delete naked pictures of exes off her phone?” He raised the bushy eyebrows malevolently, “Unless,” he added with a tune of conspiracy, “you wanted the new boyfriend to find them. Maybe you intentionally wanted to destroy the new relationship because you didn’t feel worthy, or, you still can’t let go of the other exes, and to delete the pictures of them naked would be to delete them.” My head popped up. Shit, that’s kinda what you had said, Juju.

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She clasped her hands, looked to the floor and said quietly, “I think I have a love disorder.”

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The doctor and I exchanged looks again and then he slapped his leg, leaned back on his stool and howled. “A love disorder? Hell, you’re a woman. A love disorder?” and he dissolved in laughter.

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Penny looked at him fiercely at first and then, with a despondent turn of her head, raised a hand against her cheek to stop a tear and then turned away and looked at the door. I touched her on the shoulder and she looked back slowly, eyes glistening.

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“Don’t worry,” I said, “he’s just a doctor. They don’t care about people.”

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“I thought to be a doctor you had to care about people.”

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Now I broke into laughter. “Are you kidding me? Don’t you see them on billboards and TV, always with some blurb about how they want to serve us or serve the community like they were policemen or teachers or fireman? They’re just a bunch of high IQ Republicans who could give a fuck about anyone but themselves as they sit in their gated mansions with their Ferraris and Hummers and Russian wives plotting how to make more money. They inflate prices, recommend unnecessary procedures they can bill the government for and prescribe medications based on the Caribbean vacations, fine-dining restaurants and sexual favors the pharmaceutical salespeople provide.” Well, normally I don’t talk that much, Juju, but the idea that doctors care was just laughable.

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“So I gather you don’t like doctors?” the doctor asked in a menacing tone.

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“I don’t,” I said. “But you’re not a doctor, you’re a neurosurgeon.” He gazed at me for a long time, like maybe he was trying to see if I was serious or mocking him. I thought he might even come at me, but I knew better. Neurosurgeons make money with their hands and hands are too important-even if you’ve been drinking Maker’s Marks and have cancer-to risk on some stupid shithead in a bar.

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He turned slowly to Britt, who was propped against the bar watching. He pulled his wallet out, drew a hundred dollar bill from it and flipped it on the bar. “This is for my tab and for a drink for everyone at the bar. Except for him.” He pointed at me. “He sounds like a lawyer to me.” He took another hundred dollar bill and threw it on top of the other. “And that is for the fair Britt. May she always keep that beautiful smile and effervescent personality.” With that, he rose and walked to the door, stumbled slightly as he waved to the three guys at the end of the bar, and was gone. Britt glowered at him, and I thought I heard her mumble “prick” under her breath as she picked the two bills up and began pouring drinks. Even a hundred dollar tip couldn’t mollify her.

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“So what do you do, Penny?” Her head turned slowly from the door, and she faced me. She said something, but the roar of the Ferrari drowned it out. The car jolted and screeched as everyone turned to watch.

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“What did you say?” I asked.

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“I teach circus acts,” she said, way too loud now that the automobile noise was gone.

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“Hey, I used to be in a circus,” one of the guys from the end of the bar said.

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“Where?” she asked.

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“Well, actually, I worked in a circus school in Seattle.”

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“Really?” said Penny, drawing the word out. She turned to me, put up a solitary finger, and said, “Just a minute.” She picked up her drink from the bar and headed to the three guys. As she walked to them, centaur-like, they began yelling at her, and she began to simulate a slow dance as she walked towards them, her arms high above her head so that I saw white shades of deodorant under both arms.

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I looked around the bar. There was an elderly couple, deep wrinkles under white hair, sitting at a table, both on the same side, with drinks in front of them saying nothing and staring straight ahead. I looked down the bar at two young couples, all with their heads down, not speaking, as they stared into the lighted smart phones held in their hands. Eight small plates smeared with remnants of cake and half-filled cups of coffee were in front of eight empty chairs, another year noted, the birthday ladies had departed for their afternoon naps. I turned back to Penny, now deep in conversation, a guy’s arm wrapped around her waist and waving one of her deodorant-decorated arms around as she laughed a little too loud. Juju, I tell you, it’s a depressing place when Britt is the least depressing person in the bar.

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Chapter 2

 

I thought I would go see Anna, the Polish bartender that works at the Peabody. I walked down Main Street, dodging the hustlers, past the empty street cars and boarded-up buildings. The downtown is probably not how you remember it, Juju, but it’s close. It’s gone from dangerous, forlorn and bleak to just forlorn and bleak. You remember when the Peabody was like Fort Apache, and we literally had to sprint from there to the Rendezvous?