Thunder Sandwich #24

IN THE BELLY OF NAKED NAKED NAKED

I was about ready to turn myself in for therapy before I met Nick. You couldn't ask for a more unlikely healer. The first time I saw him was in the Saloon on Upper Grant in San Francisco. There was a certain time of day the sun would come in the window there and you'd see how dusty all the bottles of booze were; hard core drinkers would move out of the light, down to the end of the bar; you'd notice how pasty the bartender's face was. And the cockroaches would come out from hiding.

Nick is sitting at the bar with a crowd around him. It's so quiet I almost do a U-turn when I walk in the door. He has four or five cockroaches captured under shot glasses. Somebody says Why don't you kill the fuckers? Nick studies each one carefully, like he's reading some how-to manual. First the cockroach is all frantic, trying to climb the walls of the glass, black feelers waving like mad. Then it slows down, circles a little, stops; there's nothing moving under the shot glass but twitching feelers. Somebody says Those feelers are like whiskers on a cat, it's trying to figure a way out. And somebody else says It's praying.

What Nick does next is turn over the shot glass; he does this with every roach and the same thing happens every time. First the roach doesn't move, it's like it's still covered with glass. Somebody says Freedom is a terrible burden. Then it skitters across the bar, Nick scoops it up with thumb and forefinger, puts it into his mouth.

And he doesn't gulp it down like bad medicine. He lets it sit there on his tongue, sticks that tongue out at the crowd so they can see it's not a trick, not some shell game. Then he takes a sip of beer and it's over.

Nick claims twenty victories in that tough guy competition that was such a big deal for a while. I wouldn't argue with him about it. Nobody would. But you can guess his style from his face; he can't be a dancer with a face like he's got. Maybe he's lost as many as he's won. Has to be a face fighter with that mug, someone keeps coming at you like Joe Frazier or Gene Fullmer. Someone that says Go ahead, take your best shot, I'll be here.

When you're drinking with him, you notice he has a hard time getting the words out. His hands are always moving when he's talking, moving across his chest back and forth; it looks like he's trying to pull the words out of his body. You don't like watching him struggle to get the words out, it's painful to see; it's like seeing a baby pound its fists when it's hurting and doesn't know why. Nick knows what he wants to say, and you get the feeling he'd use those hands to tear the damn words out if he could, reach in there under a rib where they're lodged with all that red meat he eats, tear those words out and slap you with them. Or massage you.

I don't want to give the impression he's a bully, because he's not. He has that smile some people read like a Roberto Duran smile just before he hits you with a good overhand right or hooks you to the belly, right after he's caught you and you're shaking your head it didn't hurt, that smile says wait till you see what I've got for you now.

Okay I've seen him slap guys, but he's never come close to a fight. There's always the temptation to finish a sentence for him when you see him having a hard time; you think you know what's coming next, so you go ahead and say it for him. You don't make friends with Nick by finishing his sentences or telling him what he means. First he'll hit you with that Sonny Liston glare, and then he'll call you a name he never has any trouble getting out. Like I say, I've seen him slap guys, not hard, just a wake up to let you know you're insulting him.

Yeah I know this sounds pretty uncivilized. But before I met Nick, I was beginning to feel like it was not okay to be me. There didn't seem to be anyone left in San Francisco I could talk to. We'd all come here to get away from something else--this was the one place you could be yourself. Then we got worse than what we'd run away from.

Nick had quite a few writer friends, dinosaurs mostly, guys that were never going to make it as angel headed hipsters or yuppies or new agers. Writers had an itch for the real thing, had an itch for it because most of them spend all their time in little rooms making up shit and feeling persecuted. Maybe that's why Artie Rimbaud gave it up to run guns; maybe that's why Kerouac loved Cassady so much.

One of Nick's heroes was Greg Haugen, because he'd made it from the tough guy competitions to world champion. And he'd done it on guts alone. He had some skills, but they were mostly defensive skills. Couldn't punch at all, but you couldn't hurt him. He was from up in Washington state, just like Nick.

Writers in the Saloon would get drunk and think maybe they'd get the call like Greg Haugen did; maybe they'd see Ferlinghetti in the street and he'd ask them over for wine and pasta, publish their collected poems. What they saw those drunken afternoons was Gregory Corso standing in the door looking for a handout. He'd been thrown out of most North Beach bars and was beginning to look a little like Pete Rose staring in the windows at Cooperstown, the way he'd plant his Neanderthal mug on the glass and look in there.

When the words wouldn't come fast enough for Nick, he'd sometimes hold himself while he was talking, kind of make a straight jacket of his arms. Sometimes this would shut him up totally; sometimes he'd start ranting non-stop, about as non-stop as he could get anyway. I don't think Nick really hated anybody. You can't go around making people feel good about themselves when you're caught up hating. But he did have a thing for a certain kind of San Francisco woman. He called them Burlap Berthas, and he'd point them out in the street when they walked by the window. Nick said they were just looking for an excuse to hate men, admitted they didn't need to look hard, said every hater had it easy like that. The idea, according to Nick, was to make yourself unfuckable. They did a good job. Dressed up in clothes that looked like burlap bags, cut their hair short as a Nazi, wore ugly-ass shoes, talked about how it was wrong to look at them and want to fuck them, when they didn't have to worry about that at all.

I remember suggesting once that maybe somebody had fucked them so good they wanted to hide whatever it was in them that brought it on. Nick suggested I date one and find out for sure.

I was pretty turned off by Nick when I first started talking with him. It wasn't the roaches, I had one drink and left that day. He'd been to Nam, seen a lot of action, was decorated. Most of the people I knew were marching in the streets while Nick was slicing off gook ears. That's what turned me off to him. He had an ear he kept on him at all times. I have no idea how he preserved the thing, it looked almost laminated. He was fond of reaching for that ear and throwing it on the bar if he thought the conversation was leaning toward intellectual bullshit. It didn't take much for him to think that. Certain words set him off. Dysfunctional. Problematic.

We'd been talking about the war first time I saw him throw down his ear. I thought he was trying to change the conversation because it didn't look like an ear to me. I thought it was pussy lips. You know, like plastic vomit or dog poop or something.

Nick sees me looking at it, says go ahead, pick it up, touch it. I'm half drunk and the guy is scaring me some; I mean he's so fucking intense he makes all these whiny underground poets seem like exactly what they are. I don't want him to know I'm scared, I want to be accepted. Like I say, it looks like pussy lips to me. What I do is pick up the thing and throw it into my mouth. Like I'm tossing back a shot. Nick looks at me like what do we have here. I outcrazied him. We've been friends ever since.

He kept that ear in his pocket, and he'd reach in there and touch it every now and then. I mean he didn't throw it down that much, just when he thought the shit was getting heavy. I know that's what he was doing, touching his ear, because I knew where he kept it. And he'd get a funny look in his eye, like he was drifting away from the talk, the Saloon, North Beach, San Francisco.

It's not like I'd spend a lot of time staring into his eyes; he had so much scar tissue his eyebrows kind of jutted out like awnings or umbrellas, and those killer blues were just laying back in there waiting out the weather. But I wanted to go with him, wherever it was that ear was taking him. Nam? The jungle? His youth? The ring? A simpler time? Who the fuck knows.

I couldn't tell him that, what I said to him this one time was, You remind me of an old woman with rosary beads.

He looks at me like he's computing what I'm saying. Then it's the Duran smile makes the ladies cream in their pants, he gets that smile on his face and says, I used to know a guy over there kept a hole in his pants pocket...he'd be playing with himself all the time... he wrote poetry...we go for R&R his hand is in his pocket...he'd talk to you and his eyes would glaze over...like he'd just been killed...the eyes wax over right after you die...I tell him cut this shit out...go with one of the whores...he says he's making it better...what do you think?

And the women this guy got were unbelievable. They didn't look like what you saw on the street; they looked like what you saw dancing naked around the corner. Hard core bimbos. I think some of us were afraid to talk to them they looked so good. It was like these women didn't exist outside of Big Al's or the Garden of Eden or some other ripoff joint with a barker out front screaming Naked Naked Naked. And in the Saloon, they existed in the Saloon, next to Nick at the bar.

The city had gotten to me so much I wouldn't even admit to myself I preferred trashy women to what you saw scampering around in a suit and tennis shoes, carrying a brief case and headed for the parking garage. Nick helped me get through the bullshit with women, with myself. Before I met him it got so I couldn't even read the Chronicle anymore, except for the sports page. There were so many people making a career of telling you what you had to do to be a man; there were even more telling you what you couldn't do. I remember as a kid my mother was always saying to me Suppose everyone was like you, suppose everyone felt like you do. Seemed like there were a lot of people in San Francisco wanting everybody to be the same, even talk the same. It was scary. Bullshit was thick as confetti from ripped up calendars; every day was New Year's Eve.

Yeah, I know, Nick doesn't sound like the ideal friend. And I hardly ever saw him outside the Saloon. But it felt like none of my friends wanted to see me much anymore. Or else I didn't want to see them. What was therapy anyway but paying a professional for something your friends couldn't do for you? It didn't seem to me shrinks were all that different from prostitutes.

Now I don't know if Nick asked his bimbos to do it or what. If you didn't know him, you might think it was a status thing. Every one of his women would sit there with a hand tucked into his pants, right at the waist. It was hardly even noticeable, but it was there, I saw it. First time I saw it I thought of the movies, some hood with a gun tucked into his pants. It was that time of day when the sun comes in the window at the Saloon. Nick and the woman were sitting with their backs to the bar, letting the sun work them over.

It was so sexy, that gesture, along with the look on her face. Made me wish I knew a woman would do that with me out in public.

Some of those women were pretty sharp too, held up their end of the conversation. They were so easy to be around, the talk didn't change a note when they were there, it was the same old song. And always with a hand gently tucked into Nick's pants, a look that said Yeah I'm fucking it. This animal gives me what I want. I love it.