Dear Marla:
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| Credit: Leonid Afremov |
I'd called ahead to reserve a hotel room downtown. I had to park my car a ways away, and as I walked towards the hotel I spotted a man peering out of an alleyway, and his eyes were yellow against his black skin. He was rocking silently back and forth, like a pendulum. I wrapped my coat around tighter and nodded. I suppose one should always be polite to men in dark alleys.
By the time I entered the lobby of the hotel my mind, having been deprived of sleep and other modern inventions, was reduced to a series of staccato thoughts, some of which I remember, all of which seemed rather dramatic, and yet they moved so quickly that they never took hold, darting madly back and forth like a school of barracuda.
The lobby of the hotel was a grand affair with a magnificent chandelier and a rising staircase that led up to the second floor. Half of the chandelier bulbs were gone, and the staircase runners were stained and threadbare.
I decided to skip reception and head straight to the bar. I noted rather dimly that, perhaps owing to the bitter chill of night, or perhaps for other reasons entirely, by the time I pulled up a seat, I was shaking like an old box of bones.
***
The bar sat in the corner of a converted ballroom. Most of the chairs had been upturned and placed upon the tables that were covered in white linens, and the quiet of the place allowed enough room for the voices of those ghosts who had sat there the night before to trickle through the ether, the ghostly smoke of cigarettes and the high-pitched sound of laughter wafting over a brass band warming up for a long night. Somewhere in that bar, reaching out from nights long past, I could hear the sound of a man weeping, and the sound of a woman's voice, gently coaxing him home.
I climbed miserably atop an empty stool and smelled the sour smell of bleach and puke. A dim light filled the gloom and cast shadows upon the hidden spaces, the phantoms of last night's crowd who came here to drink and die a little. There was a half empty beer sitting on the bar and so I took it and toasted to the ghosts that had come before me.
The bartender appeared. She was young, with light brown hair and finely manicured eyebrows, young but worn – worn fingers, worn skin – though she could not have been more than 25. I would later learn her name was Lydia, though for now she was just a bartender who looked irritated that I'd just drank her beer.
“You okay?” she said.
"Sorry?"
“You need a towel or something?” she said, “you look, you know, wet.”
I pressed my hand to my forehead. I was sweating profusely.
Lydia offered my a towel, which I took.
“Its been a strange day,” I said.
“I bet,” she said.
I noticed for the first time that she was pretty. I smiled.
“So,” she said, “are you like, schizo or something?”
“Sorry?”
“You know,” she said, “schizophrenic. Like mental.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I only ask because you were, like, having a whole conversation with yourself when you came in here.”
I wiped my forehead again.
“Do you ever hear voices?” she went on, “That's a pretty good sign. They call it 'auditory hallucinations.' That's when you should get your head examined. You know, a lot of people who got it don’t even know it.”
“Know what?”
“That they’re schizo.”
"I'm not schizophrenic," I said.
Lydia dug into her pants pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit it. She stared at the ceiling and exhaled.
“Its cool,” she said, “I’m not judging you or anything.”
“Judging me?”
“You know, because you’re like, mentally ill.”
I began to feel as if I was stuck behind an inch of tempered glass at the Monkey House.
"You get a lot of mentally ill people here?" I said.
“Sure," said Lydia. "I had a guy come in here two nights ago. Old guy, like 40, one of those guys with floppy tits – you know the type?"
"Yes."
"It starts off normal. He's an insurance man from Hartford, says his job is to figure out when people die. So I'm just tending bar like normal since one of the things you get used to is people telling you all about their boring lives."
"Right."
"But all of a sudden this guy gets to talking about how his wife likes to tie him up, which is when I start paying a bit more attention – I mean I just met this guy and within two minutes he's telling me this! Then he goes on about how the only way he can get aroused is if someone ties him up, and his face gets kind of twisty like he's getting all emotional, and he starts saying that he doesn't want to be tied up anymore, or have hot wax dripped on his nipples, which apparently is what his wife was doing, and so then sure enough, he takes out one of his floppy man-breasts and shows me this cauterized teat."
"Wow."
"Tell me about it. Now, up until then I hadn't felt the least bit sorry for him, but right about the time he put his floppy man-breast back into his shirt he started to cry. It was a soft cry, not much in the way of sound, and I guess I started to feel sorry for him."
"So what did you do?"
"Well, I bought him a round, on the house. Then, when it came time to close up, I asked him whether he would like to be tied up."
"What?"
"Yeah. I did. And you know what, he started crying again. He said, yes, he would like to be tied up, and then he started thanking me. And I told him to shut the fuck up and take off his clothes, which he did. And so he was standing there, right about where you are, wearing only tighty-whities and black pull-up socks, like a manatee with man-boobs.
"And so I led him around to the back of the bar where no one would see him, and I tied each of his arms to the ring in the trap door that leads to the basement, and I tied his legs to two of the struts behind the bar."
"And then?"
"Well, then I left him there. All night."
"Wasn't he angry?"
"Not in the least – he was overjoyed."
"Men are strange beasts."
"Indeed they are," said Lydia. "Well, they're beasts, anyway. Oh, and if you believe the story I just told you then maybe you really do need to get your head examined."
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