Jack Steele 5900 words
240 Regency Drive
Marstons Mills, MA 02648
508-280-8645
The Pest
by
Jack Steele
Brief bio: I am a writer who has earned a living, more or less, as a construction worker, warehouseman, small town reporter, farm equipment salesman, internet bookseller and freshman comp teacher. A Texan living in New England with my wife of thirty years, I return to Texas about once a year for enchiladas and a Whataburger. My stories have appeared in The Madison Review, The Chattahoochie Review, 34th Parallel and Black Heart Magazine. I am a past winner (1978) of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in fiction.
The Pest
Now that the kids are old enough to be left at home by themselves, Clair comes down to the store on Friday nights to help me close up. She brings a bottle of whiskey with her and a dozen or so fresh tamales, and after we’ve locked up and turned down the lights, we sit at the window, watch the traffic go by and try to relax.
Which isn’t always easy to do. If we had any sense, we’d stop after discussing what’s selling or not selling in the store, or whether we can afford this or that latest household necessity, and life would be a lot less complicated. We could go home to bed with our minds full of small talk and our bellies full of bourbon and tamales, and we’d get a good night’s sleep.
Sometimes it’s like that, maybe even usually, but there are still nights when we get more loaded than we really need to and talk about our kids, our parents, our old friends, including our old dead friends. We get “personal,” as Clair puts it, teasing me about my tendency to get squeamish when the conversation turns to infidelity, alcoholism, terminal illness and the like, all those depressing soap opera things that nevertheless, I know, tend to happen sooner or later to all of us. I’ve tried to make a distinction. I’ve told Clair I don’t mind getting “serious,” even about those soap opera things, but she gets her back up at that, as if I’m implying that her natural tendency is towards the more common, mass appeal “personal,” and perhaps I am. Clair doesn’t miss much, and lucky for me, she’s good-natured, since she rarely makes a serious issue out of my condescension, perhaps because over the years I’ve learned to be more and more subtle about it. Or maybe I just don’t take it as seriously as I used to. Maybe I’m not quite as insufferable as I once was. For the most part I’ve learned to keep it to myself when I think she’s slipped into being “personal.” Rarely these days does she look at me with mock concern and ask, “I’m not being too personal am I?”
But that little marital game, which continues in other ways and no doubt will never end, is a small price to pay, practically nothing, for a sympathetic ear when you need one, and Clair is always there. She’s even there when she’s not there, which is what I should have told Billy when he asked me what it was like to be married. I rehearsed what I was going to say to her about him almost from the moment I heard about the accident, but I kept most of it back until about two weeks after his funeral. Until what seemed like the right time, which for me is usually a Friday night about when the ice has almost all melted in my second drink and I’m about to help myself to my first tamale.
“I guess you’ve been wondering what happened with Lucy,” I said.
“Yes. I’m curious, but only if you want to tell me.”
“She said that Billy thought she was a virgin the first time he visited her.”
“Is that what it’s called? A visit?”
“No. They say ‘date.’”
“How could he possibly have thought that?”
“He couldn’t have. I’m sure he didn’t.”
“So why did she say it? Or think so?”
“She didn’t really know him. That’s why.”
“And that bothers you?”
I shrugged, and we watched the cars for a minute or two, and then she said, “Listen, would it make you feel better if a hundred people had shown up for the funeral? If Lucy had tried to jump into the grave with the coffin? If Jerry Lee Lewis had come in person and played something or other.”
“ ‘Great Balls of Fire.’”
Or anything else, I thought, but I just liked saying “Great Balls of Fire,” because it was a big joke in high school, and Billy still thought it was funny to the day he died and called it “My Balls are on Fire.”
“Okay, ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ and People magazine had covered it?”
I put a little more ice in my glass and poured a little more bourbon, in preparation for telling her everything. I took my time so much she got impatient.
“Would it?”
*****
Billy was killed in one of those senseless accidents that happen to other people all the time. Either he ran a stop sign, or the other guy did, I forget which, but it was Billy, since he was the one on the motorcycle, who wound up with a broken neck and a crushed skull, and they told me he probably wasn’t conscious long enough to have given it much thought, never mind been in pain.
My store, rooted in the tradition of sixties era record stores, still has wall to wall posters, and when Billy got killed, since he was kind of a store character, I considered it appropriate to honor him by putting his picture up with some of his heroes. I had a snapshot that Clair had taken of him sitting on his motorcycle, a BMW 550, in his black leather jacket, holding his helmet (which he apparently had stuck up his ass the day he had his accident) under his arm, and I had it enlarged as much as I could without making it too fuzzy. I put it up in a prominent place near the cash register, between posters of Brando and the Grateful Dead, both a fashion sacrifice on my part, The Wild One poster already too ubiquitous to not be corny, and the same for the Dead, who I never much cared for anyway.
Clair thought he was creepy, and I got bored and irritated with him pretty fast, but we eventually got used to having him around, or immune to it. He’d show up almost every night and stand at the counter with his helmet under his arm and the collar up on his leather jacket. His round, prematurely wrinkled little face made him look like an eighty year old woman or a very ugly baby. He talked loud and in a near falsetto about whatever crossed his mind, and what seemed to cross it most often were the most bloody and bizarre tabloid stories of the day. Although when pressed he declared himself an old-fashioned socialist and vaguely claimed Iroquois blood, he rarely made that clear to anyone, and what he liked to talk about the most had no obvious connection to politics of any kind. His point, always, but you had to know him to know this, was no big news flash: the human race was hopelessly insane and corrupt. You might say, he probably would say, he was a Henry Miller sort of moralist.
The tabloid bits weren’t really stories. They were more like one-liners: the service station attendant who became so impatient with a customer that he doused him with gasoline and set him on fire; the guy who cut his house in two with a chain saw when he found out his wife was suing for divorce; and the couple who tried to break their six week old baby from crying by putting him in a hot skillet. That’s a representative enough sample, but he had a million of them, and he delivered them, for the benefit of anyone who happened to be in the store, one right after the other, the next one hitting you before you had a chance to close your mouth. Not obviously Henry Miller at all. More like the Henny Youngman of white trash misery, as Clair actually called him, and while we have fairly hip and indulgent customers, there were nights I’m sure when he drove people out of the store.
But Billy was all talk. All show and no go when it came to violence. One afternoon in my backyard he shot a bird off a telephone wire with a BB gun, and I think he was more surprised than the bird, which dropped like a rock. It was such a freak thing that for a moment I had the crazy notion that the bird had just happened to die, coincidentally, the instant Billy pulled the trigger. But it was obvious from his face, as we stood over the bird lying on its side in the gravel alley, that Billy had no doubt in his mind that he’d killed it, and that he regretted it. He made me promise not to tell Clair, explaining that he was sure it would upset her. I promised, but I told her anyway, and as I expected from a woman who’d taken me on my first deer hunt, she laughed and said she thought that Billy’s concern was “sweet.”
Most of the women I saw him with reacted that way, indulgently, to Billy’s courtly, old-fashioned attitude towards them, but almost none of them took him seriously from a romantic standpoint. Bad luck with women would have been an improvement for Billy, at least until about six months before he died. That was about the time he announced that he was living with a Mexican woman named Lucy.
He was a frequent customer of a certain whorehouse in Nuevo Laredo, and as I knew only too well, it was like him to pick one spot where he was tolerated and wear it out. He went to the whorehouse so often, he said, that Lucy started asking him for help when she had a problem. As a rule, money solved anything that came up, but he told me that he also drove her around town a lot and even helped her girlfriends now and then move a refrigerator or start a car. That sort of thing. One time he even babysat for one of her friends.
All of which was easy to believe. Most people thought he was generous to a fault, even a sucker. At his job at the state employment agency he was always getting involved with the job seekers he interviewed, especially the chronically unemployed. He’d loan them money, buy them a meal, and even put them up for a night or two. That didn’t go over too well with his supervisors, if and when it got back to them, and he was always in trouble, but he couldn’t say no. If it hadn’t been a government job, he’d have probably been looking for work himself.
Generous to a fault, that was the consensus, but I got that from mutual friends. He never talked much about his generosity. As a rule his conversation was limited to those tabloid one-liners and his taste in music. I knew about the good deeds for the unemployed because I knew people who worked with him, state jobs being a common refuge for ex-hippies who hang out in record stores. I knew something was up, then, when he told me, uncharacteristically, about the good deeds for Lucy, and at about the same time, stopped coming to the store as often. I didn’t see him as much, and when he did show up, he wasn’t himself. The one-liners stopped, and one night he actually asked me what it was like to be married.
Billy had turned quiet. The few times he came in, he mostly just looked through the bins, and when he hung out at the counter, he read. Or pretended to. No harangues. Not even any serious discussions about Carl Perkins or Lightin’ Hopkins. Billy liked John D. MacDonald, who, for all I know, was the only author he’d ever read. He’d stand at the counter in front of the dope paraphernalia, which was still legal in those days, and stare at the brown pages of whatever Gold Medal paperback he’d brought along in his hip pocket. “Quiet as a mouse,” I told Clair. She said, “He’s in love,” as if it should be obvious to everyone. “And sooner or later,” she added, “he won’t be able to keep it to himself.” As usual, she was right.
“I’m living with a woman,” he announced one day out of the blue, when it was just me and him in the store, and then, with no prompting, told me the whole story. I already knew that he went to Nuevo Laredo regularly, and why, a detail I’d neglected to mention to Clair. I’d even gone down there with him once, with Clair’s blessing, to “get drunk, eat cabrito and go to a bullfight,” but only half-enthusiastically. I like border towns, and cabrito and bullfights, but I liked Billy only in small doses, and my whorehouse days were way behind me. On that trip, though, he’d dragged me to the whorehouse to introduce me to Lucy. That’s when he told me about the small favors, and added, as if it were an afterthought, that she was “very pretty,” which I knew to be Billy’s ultimate compliment when it came to women, maybe the only one. He’d said it about Clair, and I suspected, just from the way he said it, that he meant it to cover everything. Body and soul.
“I’m living with a woman,” he said, “Lucy. You met her. Remember? I smuggled her across the border.” Attempting modesty, but obviously full of himself, getting her across, he said, was nothing. A piece of cake. On his way back from his frequent trips across the border, long before he ever thought of bringing Lucy back with him, he’d been in the habit of stopping just this side of the last check point at a coffee shop where only a few truckers and border patrolmen hung out, especially late at night. Billy was nothing if not fearlessly gregarious, and he quickly got to know all the regulars. I found that just odd enough to be believable, Billy all over, and I had no doubt that both the truckers and the cops had a lot of fun with him behind his back.
One border patrolman in particular happened to be, like Billy, both a native of New Jersey and an admirer of John D. MacDonald. They hit it off well enough so that whenever the officer was on duty at the checkpoint, Billy would stop and talk for a while about Travis McGhee and whatever else people from New Jersey talk about when they find themselves in South Texas. On one occasion, Billy stopped just long enough to explain that his girlfriend, who had her head buried in his back, had passed out on him, and he had to get her home as quickly as possible. He and his New Jersey pal winked at each other and Billy drove on through.
What surprised me, and everyone else once the story got out, was that she apparently stayed with him, and a lot of cynical speculation about why naturally followed. Perhaps she wanted to marry him to become a citizen, or maybe she had plans to smuggle some of her relatives across. There were a lot of theories, but no one considered the possibility that she was in love with Billy, or even really liked him. No one liked him, at least not for long. A little of Billy went a long way.
Clair and I had long discussions about it, and she insists to this day that I got carried away by a romantic notion about whores, especially Nuevo Laredo whores, since I was bold enough to suggest once that Lucy might be in love, and she knew me well enough to know it was an idea I wouldn’t easily let go of, but she found it hard to understand. It was time, she told me, to shed some of my sentimentality. “I’ve never met her,” Clair said, “and there are always exceptions, but if she’s a whore and she’s living with Billy, it’s a safe bet that she’s all business.”
When she didn’t show up at Billy’s funeral, Clair was more worried about me than proud of being right about Lucy. She knew I was going to brood about it and be hard to live with for a while. She knew I might even invent some crazy explanation. Arrest. Deportation. Rape. Murder. My imagination shouldn’t be allowed to run wild, she decided. Too many personal things might really have happened; therefore, soon after we got home from the funeral, she suggested that I go over to Billy’s to try to find out something. “Get it out of your system,” she said.
I’d never even been to his apartment. We’d had him over to the house a few times, but aside from that, and the trip to Nuevo Laredo, I’d never seen him anywhere except in the store. The address in the phone book turned out to be a garage apartment. It was in one of those neighborhoods where half the yards are well kept by old people and half are let go to weeds and junked cars. Billy’s place was somewhere in between. A lot of time had been spent watering the lawn and the fruit trees, but not much cutting any of it back. I parked in the alley, and when no one answered the door, I let myself in with a key I found over the doorsill.
I saw no sign of Lucy, or of her ever having been there. No clothes. No toiletries. No feminine touches. Not even any leftovers in the refrigerator, which would have been telling, since Billy said he never cooked and claimed to eat nothing but Dairy Queen cheeseburgers, french fries and soft serve cones. He loved Dairy Queens, loved hanging out in them, but always added that he missed good donuts and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
Records were scattered everywhere, both LP’s and 45’s, and I found a couple of motorcycle magazines in the bathroom and a stack of Travis McGhee’s by the bed. Minimum clothes. Drab checked shirts and dark slacks. An old TV with rabbit ears. Even the stereo was old and not particularly good, but that didn’t surprise me. One of Billy’s favorite rants in the store was against stereo buffs, people who, according to Billy, are more interested in sound than music, an opinion I shared, but that I kept to myself because it didn’t sit well with my jazz and classical customers. I’d blown up at him about it, and similar things, more than once, and each time I assumed I’d never see him again. When I lose it, I really lose it and say terrible things that I almost immediately regret. In Billy’s case, of course, I often thought that not seeing him again wouldn’t be all bad. As it happened, though, he stayed away for a while, but not for too long, and when he came back, he acted as if nothing had happened.
I sat down in the only comfortable chair, an arm chair that had probably come from Goodwill. No one had been at the funeral but me and Clair, two of his co-workers, and an uncle who’d flown in from New Jersey. It was a generic ceremony, which was nobody’s fault, but there it was. A preacher who didn’t know him; funereal elevator music. A Jerry Lee Lewis record of anything would have been good, but it wasn’t my place, never mind my duty, to make that happen. Mainly, I’d counted on Lucy’s presence to elevate the occasion. I’d assumed she’d be there. I had it in my head that she was a woman who, even if she didn’t love him, owed him a lot. That alone should have guaranteed her presence, and a certain amount of grief.
I had a certain amount of grief. I might find him annoying much if not most of the time, not to mention bad for business, but I knew he thought I understood him. That’s why he started hanging out at the store in the first place, not just my tolerance, and why he always came back, no matter how much of a horse’s ass I was to him. Whether he was right or not about me understanding him, I don’t know. I know he liked what he liked, and he took no prisoners. I know I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t afford it, for one thing, but I also thought it too limiting. Intellectually. “I’m the dilettante,” I told him more than once. “Like it or leave it.” He did neither. He kept pushing me to make judgments, be more discriminating, until the day he died, but all he ever accomplished was to piss me off.
*****
Lucy could have been anywhere, but the only place I knew to look was Nuevo Laredo, and besides, three days after the funeral, Clair said, “Why don’t you go down there? Find out for sure what the deal was. She may not appreciate it, but just doing something will make you feel better. At least it’s worth a try.” And after a pause, she added, “You know we never saw them together.” “Yes,” I said, “I’m well aware of that.” Of course I’d seen them in the whorehouse together, but I decided to let that detail go. It was hardly relevant to the issue at hand.
All I knew for sure as I walked across the bridge was that I’d buy Lucy a drink, if I could find her, and urge her to talk about him a little. How he was one of a kind. A faithful friend. Generous and kind. Two of his favorite people would give him a sort of eulogy in one of his favorite places, and I’d have done my duty.
Cabrito was something I decided to do on the spur of the moment. Billy liking it didn’t fit with his Dairy Queen cheeseburger diet, but the truth is, he never really said he liked it. It was more the idea of it I think and a way of showing off. He said he knew of a place that was world famous for cabrito, which I doubted (how could anything in Nuevo Laredo be world famous?), and we had to go there, had to, as if it were some sort of moral obligation, like seeing the Parthenon or the Taj Mahal, and on the way there, I learned more than I really wanted to know about cabrito, assuming any of it was true. This was way before google, but Billy had somehow memorized a lot facts. I learned when and how to kill, butcher, cook and eat the tender little things, and this particular place, he said with his usual air of authority, did everything exactly right. Never let anyone tell you, he said, as we were shown to a table, that restaurants hang carcasses up in their windows to prove that they aren’t serving dog. Hanging cabrito is an ancient custom, like a barber’s pole, that goes all the way back to the Aztecs. I smiled to myself. Now you’re an Aztec scholar too, I thought, but I said nothing.
The café had tables outside. Colored lights were strung around a patio next to a dusty vacant lot with a huge barbecue pit, and tied to a pole near the pit were two little cabritos on the hoof. A man in an apron and a chef’s hat stood over the grill and turned the meat, and I think Billy was so distracted, or enchanted, by the scene that he forgot to look at the menu. Or maybe he didn’t care, since he’d rather have had a cheeseburger anyway, but when the waiter came, he just pointed at something. The menu offered about a dozen different cabrito dishes, cabrito from head to tail, arranged just that way, and Billy chose the first one, “la cabeza.” Head, so that when the waiter put the plate down, Billy and the skull just looked at each other for a minute, and I thought he was going to either gag or laugh at himself, but he did neither. He covered his surprise, or maybe even horror and disgust, by poking the meat around the eyes with his fork and remarking on how tender it was.
So for old times’ sake, sentimentally, alone this time at the “world famous” cabrito café, I ordered “la cabeza,” which actually wasn’t too bad, and I drank a couple of beers to prepare myself for what Billy insisted wasn’t, strictly speaking, a whorehouse. It was, he said, a “fichera bar,” since you had choices. You could just drink, you could buy the girls drinks, you could buy them drinks and dance with them, or you could do all or none of the above and take them to bed. The girls were “ficheras” because in the old days you bought tickets, or “fichas,” for the privilege of dancing with them How he knew all that, how much was true, and how carefully anyone distinguished between “ficheras” and “putas” in Nuevo Laredo, I don’t know. Someone, though, must have forgotten to inform the girls who flocked around me when I got there that they were “ficheras.” They told me immediately that they wanted to “fucky for love,” the quicker the better, I concluded, since they were as lean and aggressive as street urchins.
The place was set up like a saloon in a western movie. Swinging doors, round wooden tables, a bar along the back wall. The girls left me alone once I saw Lucy and made my preference for her clear. She was standing alone at the bar, apparently of a higher caste than the others. She seemed not to notice me until I walked up and stood right next to her.
I knew immediately why Billy liked her. There was nothing shy about her, and she was as over-painted and high-heeled as any woman in the place, but somehow she almost managed to look innocent. Even sweet. Perhaps it was her pudginess, along with a manner that suggested immediate intimacy, as if she’d known me my whole life. It was an act, of course, even Billy had to know that, a routine that might be natural, or might be well-crafted, who knew, but one that, regardless, only a few tequilas would render irresistable. It was impossible not to like her, from the very first moment she placed her hand familiarly on my leg.
Her English was more limited than my Spanish, but by combining the two, often in the same sentence, we made ourselves understood, usually without much trouble. She said she hadn’t seen Billy for a couple of weeks. How was he? “Se murio,” I told her. “Un choque.” When I put my hands up as if on the handlebars of a motorcycle, she teared up and looked away. Then she wiped her eyes with her knuckles and wanted to know all the details. She kept shaking her head and saying, “Pobrecito.” She even moved her hand away from my leg and placed it on my arm.
With that, my mission was fulfilled. I could have gone home, and everyone would have been happy. I’d confirmed not just what I’d suspected, but the best spin on it. So what if he hadn’t rescued her? So what if she’d never lived with him? Or so what if all that had happened and then went sour? The fact remained that she’d cried when she learned of his death. She remembered and liked him. That was enough, and I was planning to leave, was just pouring the last of my beer into the little frosted glass, when she changed my mind. She started to look uncomfortable, impatient with me, as if I were getting the bum’s rush. Perversely, then, I asked her what she cost, she told me, and we went to one of the little rooms behind the bar.
We sat on the bed and talked. I learned that Billy had come down for a date once a week, usually in the middle of the week when things were slow, but he also came on weekends during the day to help her and some of the other girls with little chores or errands. It was all very friendly. Everyone liked him. He’d do anything, no job too difficult or demeaning. The only problem was that he kept wanting to take her across the border. He’d even asked her to marry him, which she said made her laugh, think he was sweet, but also worried her. “A nice boy,” she said, “but too serious.”
She didn’t want to go anywhere. She’d been to California once and didn’t like it, and besides, she did all right just where she was. She always had plenty of money and was able to go home in central Mexico for a couple of months every year. Why should she go somewhere where she didn’t know anyone, always had to be afraid, and didn’t know the language? But every time she turned him down, he sulked. “Too serious,” she said again, frowning. He never got angry at the rejection, never a hint of violence, but his face would turn red and he’d get very quiet.
I stood up, ready to go, satisfied with myself for getting to the bottom of things, but she took my arm. The first time he’d sulked, she said, was on their first ‘date.’ She had told him that she hadn’t had a ‘date’ that night, but he’d misunderstood. He thought she said she was a virgin. She didn’t know him then, and when he started sulking, it scared her. Mostly for him, though, not herself, since the big boys who kept order didn’t have much patience with surly gringos. But he didn’t do anything, and when she saw him later, she made him smile by poking him in the ribs a few times and offering him a stick of gum. “That’s when I knew he was a good boy,” she told me.
I didn’t argue with her. She didn’t give me a chance. She used the story as a segue into informing me that I could be the first that night, just like Billy. It was all very smooth the way she did it, even tasteful. Lucy was good at the social graces, a natural extrovert. She still looked a little sad, and fucking her would be for old times’ sake, a far more authentic tribute to Billy than simply talking to her and having a drink. She didn’t say that, of course, but that’s what she meant, and I thought about it. And while I was thinking, she told me that she knew how to squeeze her vagina, and even demonstrated with her fingers, to make sure I understood.
She was attractive and likeable. I don’t think less of her for suggesting it. She already had her money, so it wasn’t that. I think she was sincere and wanted to make me feel better. One of those people who seamlessly, and without planning it, blend self-interest and doing good. What bothered me was the virgin story, or her interpretation of it. It seemed obvious to me that Billy had simply been disappointed. Either it was just natural post-coital depression, or it wasn’t the fuck he’d wanted, or he’d disappointed himself by coming too soon, or a combination of all of the above, and who knows what else. Who knows how many reasons there are for being depressed after fucking a whore? Even a nice whore like Lucy. The real question for me was why he’d gone back, or it had been until the story about the gum sank in. That had to be it. Her concern. The peace offering. It touched him. He had a soft heart and was always a sucker for an apology. He thought she understood him.
*****
The style of many of the houses near the center of Nuevo Laredo is North American. They have yards and front porches instead of walls, and as I walked back towards the center of town, I heard Mexican voices from the porches and saw the glow of cigarettes. It wasn’t late, but the shoeshine boys in the dimly lit plaza were already asleep on their stone benches, using their boxes for pillows. I rented a room in the hotel where Billy and I had stayed the night we had cabrito, again letting sentiment guide me, then went to an American style bar, no women there to distract me. I thought about what I would tell Clair, or rather how I would tell it, since I always told her everything sooner or later, and I drank until I got precariously close to not being able to walk the two blocks back to the hotel.
I made it, though, without incident, and approached the bed cautiously. At least I was sober enough to remember carelessly falling on it earlier and nearly cracking my spine. It was no more than a thin mattress over plywood. The door latched with a hook, no real lock, but what can you expect for fifty cents? I quickly went under, despite the so-called mattress, but not for long enough. When I opened my eyes, it was still dark. I had a terrible headache and nothing to take for it. I felt dry as a bone but had no water. I felt exactly the same as I had the night Billy and I had shared what might even have been the same room.
That time, though, the time with Billy, a trumpet woke me up, followed by the noise of a crowd, as if the whole town had suddenly invaded the hallway. I remember getting out of bed to see what was happening, and when I opened the door, the hallway was indeed full of people. It was Sunday morning, and I think they were all going to mass, but I didn’t ask. They were all running around as if they had a bus to catch. Men were buttoning their shirts; children were chasing each other around in their underwear, women were in bathrobes. Way down at the far end of the hall, the sun shining in over his shoulder, stood the man with the trumpet.
This time, I lay in bed for a long time, needing to pee in the worst way, thinking of the trumpet. Finally, I got up and looked down the hallway. It was empty of course. And dark, far too dark to look for a bathroom. I might get myself killed trying to open doors, but then I remembered that such a place would surely have a pot to piss in, and what a relief that was. What a relief everything was. Just like before, I’d eaten cabrito, gotten drunk, not fucked anybody, and come back here to sleep. I lay back down and closed my eyes, not feeling half bad, almost not minding the headache. The trumpet would have been nice, but even drunk, I knew that was unlikely. It wasn’t Sunday, but no matter. Billy could rest in peace now, and so could I. All I had to do was lie there for a while, until the first sign of light, and then go find some aspirin and a bottle of water.
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