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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Mayfly Glimmer Before Last Call
POE BALLANTINE’s latest book is 501 Minutes to Christ (Hawthorne Books). He lives in Chadron, Nebraska, where he is a school custodian. He says, “It feels good to be back in education.”
Jackie was nineteen, a cocktail waitress in Niagara Falls, New York. She worked in a bar on the other side of town and would come into our place with the other waitresses after her shift was up. Jackie was something else, the way she shook her hair. She had a face that you immediately liked and wanted to examine closely and maybe figure out what it was that made it so nice. I’d invariably flub her order, come up a drink short, forget to put amaretto in her slammer, grenadine in her sunrise. I failed her because I wanted to please her. She tipped me anyway — she made her living on tips, couldn’t not tip me — but tipped me with disdain, as if I were a leper on a pleasure cruise hanging out by the shuffleboard courts selling fake Hawaiian jewelry.
One night Jackie got together with Timmy the Handsome Bartender, who was her age and came from a wealthy family and was a severe, chemically dependent alcoholic (whereas I was simply trying to keep myself in the darkness for long periods of time so I couldn’t see the crystallization of ruin all around). They had some psychedelic mushrooms and were going out to Grand Island, the river bar that stayed open till 4 a.m., but they were too drunk to drive and wanted me to be their chauffeur. I was in good shape — only twelve or thirteen mixed drinks and a few shots under my belt — and was a practiced and accomplished drunk driver. They gave me a few of the mushrooms, mushrooms for the chauffeur. They were some type of Brazilian mushrooms. Orange-colored, powerful mushrooms. I hadn’t had anything like them since the early seventies, when the last of the Clearlight and Orange Barrel and Yellow Sunshine had faded into the tie-dyed sunset. These mushrooms went straight up into my pituitary gland, then down into my cerebrospinal fluid, then back up through the lateral geniculate nucleus of my hypothalamus, then into the area where giggling and the smell of violets are controlled.
We all sat in the front seat, and, as I drove like an arrow down the black highway, my glamorous young companions climbed over one another like golden-retriever puppies rolling in a field of clover. I was in charge of the radio and other nonsexual, butler duties, but I had my thoughts. I thought, Is my shirt on inside out? while an old Spinners song made its way around in my head. But I drove dead on down the broken white line.
Until finally, Jackie, in the middle of frolicking with Timmy the Handsome Bartender, gave me a glance of recognition, or perhaps even appreciation, like an eight-year-old might give to her benevolent new millionaire stepfather — a pouting, soft, forgiving glance. I couldn’t get a drink order right, but what was that compared to having good hand-eye coordination while on hallucinogens and after drinking all night? And I thought, I hope the hood doesn’t come flying off this car.
At the river bar I was feeling so good and strange and wild that I tried to call my girl, who was like Venus — not the goddess of love and beauty, but the planet: nine hundred degrees in the shade, with poisonous clouds and no life. But I loved her or needed her or was trying to change her or was paying dues for a crime in a past life, or she was like the alcohol, just another drug called self-destruction. I leaned into the phone at 2 a.m., finger pressed in one ear, barely hearing the ringing on the other end; then someone answered. The bar was so loud and rollicking I couldn’t hear who it was. Was it a man’s voice? I said a few things, happy loving Brazilian things, but the conversation was like it always was with her: broken in the dark, like a mad mistreated dog. And I wasn’t even sure it was her. And then, because I couldn’t hear and didn’t know who I was talking to anyway, and because she did cruel things as a rule to teach me the horrors of romance (yet I kept going back), I simply hung up. Maybe she was saying, I love you and I miss you, or perhaps, Fester in the hell of my affection. Or maybe it was the guy in her bed, Frank the bartender or Eddie the old lover, telling me to stuff an onion roll. Whoever it was, I hung up the phone and wandered around for a while in a slump, the ceiling shadows drooping like crepe at a funeral, the patio lights leaving warped white neon tracks down the tar black river that flowed all around outside the windows of the magic island bar.
Jackie and Timmy were out on the floor, dancing to the extended dance remix, music thumping so loud you could not perceive yourself hallucinating, the kind of music Jack Kerouac longed to hear in a bar in the fifties. Well, here it is, Jack. I cannot perceive myself hallucinating. Is my life improved? And so I shot some pool with a woman named Michelle, who liked me right away. I grazed her neck with my cheek and spoke rough cat whispers in her ear while we described the attitude of two shipwrecked passengers on the Indian Ocean with a single stick of wood between us. She had a kid at home and big hollow violet eyes, and the board was slipping out from under her and she was grabbing hard, giving me her neck. Maybe I could save her. And I was thinking, Maybe she could save me. We could give each other something anyway: vodka and tonic, shot of cinnamon schnapps, wink of eyelid, brush of cheek, warm kindness of empty words in the mayfly glimmer before last call. Six ball in the corner pocket.
When the bar closed at ten minutes of four, I said good night to Michelle and drove Jackie and Timmy out into the wilderness. We parked in the darkness among the trees. There was a long fingery lake, the trees around it shaggy and hulking as giants. It was so dark we stumbled and laughed and Timmy cried, Werewolves! and Jackie shrieked and we all laughed again. We found a little dip in the landscape where we could sit along the lake, and passed slow luxurious cigarettes and a bottle of cherry aquavit among us. The water shone as orange as a glacier of frozen tangerine mix, and there were caps and gleams and frosts of tangerine on the leaves and on the backs of my hands and chips of it in Timmy’s handsome hair, and the clouds were slightly orange, like the breath of Siamese dragons. How did these trees get so tall? I wondered. Trees of the monster forest along Tangerine Lagoon. This was certainly better than being in a bar.
Then the clouds rolled in, huge and luminiferous, moving the wrong speed and in the wrong direction, and I said, Those are stratocumulus. . . . No, they’re altocumulus. . . . No, they’re nimbus, and Jackie laughed. Her eyes glittered at me. What was so funny about clouds, I didn’t know. But I finally remembered the last line of that Spinners song, and we all saw a UFO, the only UFO — or, to be more accurate, the only object definitely not terrestrial — that I have ever witnessed. It was orange and crystal-tiny and moved with impossible courteous playful quickness. We held our breaths. We could not all have hallucinated a UFO, but if you are a UFO and want to keep yourself a secret, appear before people on orange Brazilian mushrooms.
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