Later at night

Smiley lifted his beer and drained half of it.

“Tell you what right now,” he belched and drained the rest of it, then poured another from the pitcher, “it’s got nothing to do with the oil in the ocean, or global warming, which is bullshit, just like Y2K or 2012 or the bible—”

Red interrupted him, “You’re saying the oil in the ocean is bullshit.”

“No, goddamnit! I’m saying the other three are. Fuck, Red.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Red said back, “and fuck your mother.”

“You’d like to have fucked my mother.”

Red shook his head at the pitcher, “It’s true. I’ve never met such a beautiful woman since.”

They cracked their mugs together over the table. Some beer sloshed over the side onto Red’s smokes. He shook them dry and set them by his corner of the table. Jan called from behind the bar, “You old fucks better be behaving over there! I’ll clean the fuckin’ floor with all you.”

“Lover!” Smiley called to her.

She laughed and lit up, then ran her towel across the bar, even though there was no one there and she’d wiped it down five minutes ago. I watch Jan, but she watches me, too. Red snapped his fingers in my face, “Yoo-hoo, get your pecker outta Jan’s poop-hole. Dirty old fuck.”

I looked back to the two of them. Red took a drink of his Coors and tomato juice. How he managed to drink that shit, I have no idea. I was in a somber mood, but I didn’t want to be quiet around Smiley or Red, especially Red. So I asked Smiley, “What’s it’s?”

He looked bewildered. Red sat there with a half-smile, his poker face when he wanted to be in the know when he really wasn’t, but he kept the smile half-cocked for the answer, to rub it in hard. Smiley wrinkled his eyebrows, “It’s what?”

“What’s got nothing to do with the ocean and 2012 and shit? What’s the subject?”

Red’s smile became full. He shook his head and sighed, raised his beer to his lips like he knew more than God, and sipped like an asshole. I half-assed wanted to call him on it, but I wasn’t in the mood. I only called Red on his bullshit when I was on, which was about sixty percent of the time that we were together. The other forty percent of the time I wasn’t in the mood to run the dozens with Red, because during that time there was usually a third person there to deal with him. Yeah, 60/40 sounds about right. I guess it was our way of having balance, and that’s an important thing to have if you’re going to know somebody for 55 years like I’ve known Red. Smiley came into our circle with Len, but Len’s been in the ground since ’86. We don’t talk about him, not that we don’t have fond memories of him, because we do, but when you have to end a man’s life to preserve your own after damned near 30 years of knowing him, you pipe down. Sharon, well, Sharon had it coming to her. Crazy cunt almost put us all in prison.

I’ve been on this new blood pressure medication, as well as new heart meds. Nitroglycerine. Pills. Nitroglycerine pills. After the last heart attack—I’ve had three—my blood vessels developed a bit of a problem with expansion. Still funny to me how without that little white pill I take every morning, I wouldn’t wake up to see another. Tempting at times, too.

Needless to say, the smoking had to stop. I know other people bitch about second hand smoke, but I don’t know what I’d do without it. I mean, if you can’t eat pussy, then at least you can look at it, right? Or maybe that’s a bad analogy. I’d imagine staring at a pussy and not being able to eat it would be torture. I’ll just say that second hand smoke is a lot better than second hand pussy, what?—or maybe Red’s right. Maybe I am a dirty old fuck.

Point is, the medication does me funny. Bouts of fatigue then hyper-tension, which plays hell with my excretory system. I’m still about a decade away from shitting in my pants, but some days I’d be grateful for it. My prostate held up fine, which is fortunate. My colon is also fine. I’ve never been attracted much to sugars and sweets, and milk has always made me gag, so that’s a good reason why I’ve survived the heart trouble. The bad heart’s just bad luck. But like I said earlier, balance is important.

“The subject is the end of the world,” Smiley said, satisfied with his answer, “every thirty-thousand years or so, the Earth just shrugs her shoulders and starts over. We’re just now seeing the beginning of that, her menstrual cycle, as it were.”

“I like it,” Red said. He drank his beer, consistent like menstruation, I’d imagine, but definitely identical in hue. After raising two daughters in between two wives and a few lady friends, a man gets to know all aspects, patterns—yes, and colors—and nuances of the women around him. Any and all gradations become routine after enough time with anybody.

BbSmiley, more than happy with Red’s opaque concurrence, shrugged confidently, “And right now she’s only dreading the oncoming of cramps. You watch, or they’ll watch, about 500 years down the road, shit will go down.”

“Speaking of going down,” Red said, then Jan walked past us to set the day-board out front. Smiley looked at me and laughed. I must have rolled my eyes without noticing. Involuntary tics of disgust occurred in my face decades ago when it came to Red. Jan walked back to the bar and winked at me. Smiley scratched his ear, “Why don’t you just ask her out, Francis?”

“You forgotten how old we are? Ask her out. Jesus, Smiley.”

“Oh, horseshit,” Red said, “that don’t make a difference.”

“Doesn’t,” Smiley said. I nodded a thank-you to him. He winked. Red blew up. He pressed his palms into the edge of the table and pushed his chair back on two legs:

“Here we fucking go. Both you motherfuckers knew what I meant, right?”

“Doesn’t excuse bad grammar, Red.” Smiley said quickly.

“Have to piss.” I got up and walked toward the head. Jan looked over my shoulder at the two arguing at my table. She smiled at me. I shrugged, “Women.” She laughed and lit another. I pissed, then combed my hair in the mirror. Still had the hair. Not jet black like it used to be, but it was there. Never got the jowls like Red, or Smiley’s gullet. My grandsons call him turkey neck, which back in my day meant a hard-on, so it’s extra sweet to hear. Like the saying goes, from the mouths of babes. I also think cutting out the smokes 20 years ago helped out in the skin department. But damn it to Hell, how I still missed a cigarette with my coffee in the morning, which became that Folgers half-caff stuff. Doc said more than one cup of caffeine a day was a no-no. Sometimes at mid-day, I’d have Jan brew me a pot of decaf, which still has trace amounts of caffeine. A man can’t give it all away to the fear of dying. I unwrapped and chewed a piece of spearmint gum, then flushed it. Back in the bar Red and Smiley were still going at it. Red’s chair was back on four legs. I sat at the bar. Jan put her hand over mine, “How are you Frank?”

She was the only person alive allowed to call me Frank. You ask anyone in the neighborhood and they’ll tell you. Someone called me Frank by mistake back in the day, they were politely and gravely corrected. Same person called me Frank twice, that meant their ass. Either in the hospital or at the dentist’s, or both. Call it a-boy-named-sue complex in reverse, but my father’s name was Francis, and I wore his name like a badge. Frank sounded more macho, that was for damn sure, but it lacked style, and it lacked respect. If somebody wanted to really meet their maker or have to crawl back from his doorstep, all they had to do was call me Frankie. But with Jan, Frank flew with me because there was a history there, and maybe still a chance for the spark to become a four-alarm burner, not to be corny about it. But when she called me Frank it just plain turned me on, if you want the gospel truth.

“I’m good, babe. And you? You still getting by on what this joint pays you?”

She squeezed my arm, “You know I am.”

I smiled at her. Jan always made me smile, from the first day Henry brought her home. I was too young for Korea, then too old for Vietnam. I had ten years on Henry. My poor mother, she wanted a son and daughter, but she was happy to settle for two boys before she wasn’t able to have children anymore. I don’t talk about her much because I just don’t. After she was taken, my father turned to stone. He’d run the south side of the city, and he’s still famous here. But what the cops, the DAs, the reporters and the civilians couldn’t see was a loving father and a dedicated husband. Not that they were wrong about his other side, because they weren’t. But they never got him, never got one single charge to stick. And the myth that he’d died in his bed one morning with a smile on his face was true, because the maid called me first. Just like with Elvis Presley, who I actually knew personally through my father. Many nights in Vegas during vacation were spent with him. My father loved and admired Presley, but I always thought he was kind of fruity. I never told the old man that, and at Presley’s funeral, I sat with my father and he whispered to me about exactly why drugs were bad, though he himself was hooked on triplicate prescriptions after partaking part-time for too long. And like Presley, my father’s room was swept clean of all drugs before the call to the county was made and the media flooded in. Precincts, medical centers, courthouses and clerk offices have more rats than prison or the street, that I promise you.

But I ramble. Like I said, the medication does me funny, or maybe it’s just my age making me more open about the past. God knows I’ve spent more than one lifetime keeping my mouth shut, which is a lost art. 2011 these days, hell, even I have a cell phone. I rarely use it. Just one on the cheap, no tricks. I bought my oldest granddaughter an iPhone for her birthday. I almost shit Tiffany cufflinks when I discovered the phone was 600 dollars. She sat next to me and showed me all of the gadgets on there, the apps.

“Good God, Abby,” I said. “When do you actually get out and live?”

She laughed and kissed my cheek, “You’re such a dork, grampa. Get with the times.”

That was a few years back. Every year they upgrade the goddamn things and kill the old ones. I know because now I’ve bought her three of them. Soon they’re going to come out with one that talks to you when you’re bored, an anticipate-my-mood app. Jan and I paused and looked over at the table. They were debating whether or not man could have existed in the same atmosphere as the dinosaurs. I sighed. Jan pulled her stool next to her behind the bar and sat. She didn’t have to work there, or anywhere for that matter, but she liked the job. And she knew I liked her there. She was pushing 63, but she was still beautiful. I thought she was, anyway. Red only liked the ones with big, giant tits. Smiley didn’t talk about women much. Red and I reckoned if we had to be married to Marie we’d try to forget them, too. If Smiley’s ass sitting in the bar from coffee until sundown every day wasn’t an indication that he hated his wife, then his complete and utter disgust at the mention of her name gave it away dead-bang.

“You seem uneasy, Frank. You alright?”

“I’m fine, babe. One of those days.” My heart raced in my chest, like it did when I was a kid, a teenager. Jan has this vein that runs down the side of her neck–that drives me crazy. I watch it every time she talks, peripherally, I think.

She squeezed my hand. I placed my other over hers, “I was thinking maybe tonight, I could make you dinner, you know, nothing fancy. I mean, if you’re available and up for it.”

Her eyes fixed themselves on my forehead, then I felt the drop of sweat dive into my eyebrow. She smiled and tapped our hands, “I’d like that. What time?”

“I’ll send the car to your place at 7?”

“Frank, I work until 8 tonight.”

“Take off early. I’ll get someone in here. Maybe I can have Max come in early.”

“Good luck.”

“Hand me the phone.”

I dialed Max, and told him I needed him to start at 5. He hesitated, then agreed. I didn’t ask for favors unless I truly needed one, which was rare. But, and not to sound like a badass, if I needed something, I told people, I didn’t ask—one of the many dictums my father passed along to me.

I gave her the phone.

“Done.”

She smiled. I turned to walk back to the guys.

“Hey, Frank?”

“Yes?”

“Why now?”

“Because you’ve been with what’s-his-face for the last 6 years.”

The phone rang. She gave me a look like she would have dumped that melon in a heartbeat, but that’s not my style. Back at the table I blended in, or I thought I had. Red saw a hole around my head through the bullshit of their argument, “Jan going to come over and give you some pee-hole?” He gave me his patented cigarette-in-the-center-of-his-grin face while he lighted it. He knew the score with me and Jan, but he was wiseguy to the core. Smiley shook his head in repulsion. Breaking the barrier of 70 hadn’t slowed them down in regard to their mental stasis, though I’m sure Red’s pecker was close to permasoft, and Smiley’s had been MIA since ’90, when Marie’s plumbing was turned off. Not to theorize on their johnsons, just not omitting a part of old age that isn’t a myth. They say When in Rome. Well, in the Rome of senior citizenship, the women get fat and ugly, and in my case, the ones who are young and worth a lay are only interested in my money. Some men might think, yeah, boo fuckin’ hoo, but after sex with young whores, essentially, it gets old. Let’s face it, I can’t ask Sara-private-school-outfit-tight-pussy what she was doing when Kennedy was picked off.

Smiley waved a clear patch through the cloud of Red’s smoke. He looked at me through the wreathe, “How’s it going with Jan?”

I shrugged, “Just catching me up to speed on the bar’s business.”

Red laughed, “Is that what they’re calling it now, catching it up to speed?”

I just ignored him. Sometimes he made me mad with his unfiltered sewer, but if a comment like that got under my skin, it usually meant that he saw through my lie, or rather my attempt to avoid the subject. I would’ve told him that it was none of his business, but after seeing someone damned near every day, night, and afternoon for that many years, it was his business. That’s only fair. Privacy was invented for strangers. A huge part about a waning libido is the absence of natural reciprocation, like I was saying earlier. It’s not that the organ just stops. It’s mental in almost every case. The older a man gets, it happens. If 40 sounds old to a 20 year-old, then 70’s like a fuckin’ ghost in the graveyard, but it happens. And the older a man gets, the less he feels the need to discover, and the less attractive that becomes to a hot fireball of sex. But Jan, she had it all. To me she had it all.

Back at my place I sat at the table and waited. I had my eye out the window for the car, and when I saw it pull up, and my driver open her door, she stepped out wearing a knock-out black evening dress, a classic New York beauty. Henry would have been proud of her, but I wondered what he would think knowing that I was having her over for dinner. Henry survived the war, but lost his life over a deal involving our family and another one, or another one that used to be here. After he went, the family went in pieces, the whole family. Out of respect for him, I won’t go into his manner of death, but I will say that it brought on America’s swiftest and most torturous removal of a large group of people and their associates, and I was there with the old man, during every single last breath. It was a pleasure. Out of respect for Henry, I never moved on Jan. She stayed alone, apart from her last fella, a lame duck, really, a worker bee who had the zest of a dishtowel. Enough time had passed now, Henry had been gone for many years, and the fire that burned for Jan was as bright as family, or close enough. I’d always considered her to be my girl, and both of us knew if Henry hadn’t met her first and brought her home, I would have. But you don’t cross those lines, with family or anyone. After Henry went, Jan took off for awhile, then came back and stayed. I took care of her, even when she was living with the last one, or rather, when he moved in with her. I used to lie in bed at night and pray for him to hit her, but he never did. She dumped him, after way too long, and it was another year before I asked her over. I lay here and watch her staring at me through the glass and I have to smile at my shitty timing.

Dinner wasn’t much. Unlike the rest of my family, I didn’t have the gift of cooking, but I tried, and she ate it. Standard Italian dinner, not without its charms, but not like my mother used to do it. We talked on the couch and slow danced to music of our time, mostly we held each other and sipped wine. Another no-no from the doc, past a small glass of red, but we drank two bottles. After we kissed, I went in the bathroom and popped two Viagra—my driver told me it worked like magic, and it did. I moved in and out of Jan like a teenager. The first kiss led us, and it was nothing short of the best moment I’ve ever had. For two old fucks, we went at it like animals, two back-to-back rounds. I was still hard, so I went for a triple, mounted, and it happened again. My chest closed in pain and my limbs froze, I lost my wind and Jan’s shoulder came up and hit me on the face. Next thing I knew I awoke in the room here, the doctor looking at her and Red. Smiley just appeared in view and they hugged. The rest of the family is showing up now, and the doctor is looking at me and talking to them. It’s not good, I won’t leave here alive, but it’s not a concern of mine. The doctor is delivering the news and they’re looking in on me. Abby is starting to bawl, and I can feel myself slipping, crossing over into something I can’t explain. I’m going slow, but I’m going, and it’s easy. I just want them to know that I lived. I lived.