The Price of the Ticket Read online

  “That’s more like it,” Antoine said, watching Pauley’s eyes. The dime disappeared as he spoke, the silver dollar took its place. “The big one’s just a fuckin illusion.” The dime reappeared, replacing the silver dollar. “The little guy’s the truth a the matter.”

  Pauley dropped his left shoulder as if he were about to throw a punch. Antoine flinched. The silver dollar fell out of his fist, into the palm of Pauley’s waiting left hand.

  “Try it on some other chump,” Pauley said. He flicked the coin into the air and turned away as Antoine caught it.

  Horseknocker had been watching from the bar. “The Ant crawling on you?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “You should have kept that Ike.”

  “I don’t take charity.”

  Horseknocker turned back to the bar. “Pauley, baby. Came by the shop, nobody home. What’s happening?”

  “Horse,” Pauley sighed. “It was the fall of 1973.” He shifted a stool next to Horseknocker, but didn’t sit down. “In the fall of 1973, I turned down a job in Alberta, baling hay.”

  Horseknocker cocked an eye at Pauley. “Yeah?” he said warily. “That’s outside the city limits, ain’t it?”

  “Canada.”

  Horseknocker shrugged. “That’s where you went wrong.”

  The cocked eye was extremely bloodshot, pouched, too bright, suggesting that the mechanism served by it had not been turned off for a few days. The voice was low, weary. So Horse was in The Gyre smoothing his come-down. So far so logical, but it looked like he wasn’t so far down or up that a couple of beers before a couple of coffees wouldn’t put him where Pauley could use him. Pauley craved some of that medicine himself.

  “Alberta’s where I went wrong, all right.” He resigned himself to the stool and signaled the bartender. “It’s been downhill ever since.”

  “Hey,” said Horseknocker, “have you tried whistling?”

  “No. How you doing?”

  “Without,” Horseknocker said morosely, indicating an empty glass in front of him. He smiled drowsily. He hadn’t been doing completely without. “But the Lord will provide. I read that in the Bhagavad-Gita.”

  A guy to the left of Horseknocker spoke up. “There’s a novelization of that movie?”

  Horseknocker nodded heavily. “Charleton Heston played Shiva. How could you forget, Max?”

  “I remember it well,” Max said, as if warming to the memory. “In the unauthorized biography, Scratching the Beard of Moses, it is written that Heston was so invigorated by the role that he wrote the novelization in between takes on the set of Planet of the Apes, a film about the triumph of Republicanism after the fall of Harold Stassen. Anthony Quinn played Scopes. Said it gave him perspective, which he could use in his painting.”

  “The single austerity I can see about the medium of film,” chimed in a guy to Pauley’s right, staring at the top of a brimming glass, “is that it must take place in real time.”

  The bartender came up. Pauley jerked a thumb at Horseknocker’s empty glass. “Two more of those.”

  “Which in itself,” the guy on the right continued, “wouldn’t be much of a problem, except that you’ve got to adjust the crystal frequency of your mind to that of–not so much the director per se, but that of the group effort that characterizes the medium. The resulting bicameral hegemony is not … unlike.…” He held a tall, fluted glass of very dark beer at arm’s length between his eyes and the screen of the television set, which flickered soundlessly on a shelf above the far end of the bar. He squinted. “Let’s say, a wind chime dipped in molasses.”

  The three men to this man’s left stared at him for a long moment, while he carefully poured half his pint down his throat. The bartender reappeared, set two beers before Pauley and Horseknocker, and went away again.

  Pauley took a first taste from his glass. If he hadn’t set foot in this bar in three or four months, he hadn’t been inside a movie theater in over a year. He sated his need for popular entertainment by watching the undulations of the tattoos on Celeste’s back, which consisted of a painstakingly detailed tableau of highlights from the entire production run of the original Star Trek. For this reason, Pauley and Celeste often made love with a light on, or a candle. He would select a detail by touching it, and she would narrate the episode as they consummated their domesticity.

  Horseknocker, on the other hand, seemed to have a contrary opinion, as usual. “Listen, Jingles, wait a minute, motherfucker,” he began, “Take The Godfather for instance.”

  “No, Horseknocker, you take The Godfather,” the other responded with unexpected energy. “You, who often attend three or four movies a week, mostly Hollywood features, and have at least as ‘informed’ a populist doggerel as that one-celled critic currently fobbing off grade-school solipsism as thoughtful analysis in the self-proclaimed entertainment supplement of the Chronicle.” He turned and pointed a vehement forefinger across Pauley’s face at Horseknocker. “What both of you as viewers are practicing is not criticism, it’s consumerism. And your so-called critical apparatus consists of overlaying so-called reality with so-called movies like they’re stencils: if they match up, you call one art, the other real, and both of them ‘good’: your ultimate critical appraisal. But quite aside from what ‘criticism’ should be, all you’re wasting your brain on is Entertainment–the happy-talk schedule to which the Chronicle devotes an entire 64-page section of itself to, in pink, the color of puffery, every Sunday, fifty-two Sundays a year, and completely paid for by the very industry which it purports to be appraising, so you won’t miss it.” He took a sip of beer. “Don’t get me started.”

  A short silence ensued. All sampled their drinks, then picked at their coasters. Okay, seemed to be the consensus, we won’t get you started.

  After a while Max, the guy to Horseknocker’s left, announced, “I believe it was the writer Cynthia Ozick who said, ‘Frankly, I’m not entertained by entertainment’.”

  “Hey,” said the guy on the right, “a thinking man’s woman, there’s damned few of either. Where’d you see that?”

  Max and Horseknocker had been waiting, trying not to betray their fervent hope for any variation on this response, and they pounced in unison: “The Chronicle pink section.”

  Jingles recoiled, then shook his head. “Back to Planet of the Apes,” he muttered in disgust.

  “Speaking of which.…” Pauley began.

  Jingles interrupted him. “They take food stamps in this bar?”

  “No,” Max volunteered, “but the grocery down the block does.”

  “Right back.” Jingles covered the mouth of his beer glass with a coaster and left.

  Pauley’s mind dwelled on business. “Speaking of apes.…” he began again.

  “Hey,” said the guy to the left, “Jingles is a barfly, but he’s not a ape.” He said it just like that, “a ape.”

  “He was referring to me,” Horseknocker said.

  “Oh,” said Max. “Now we’re talking Simian Dude, 2000 A.D.”

  Pauley frowned. “You on welfare, too?”

  “Unemployment,” Max said into the mouth of his whiskey glass.

  “Is there some kind of correlation between idleness and vocabulary, like there is between cultural awareness and drinking?”

  “Christ,” said Max, “it’s the same deal.”

  Now Horseknocker frowned. “Did you forget bullshit, or just break it down a little?”

  Max sniffed. “It does smell like methane in here.”

  Horseknocker loudly passed wind.

  “Horseknocker,” said Max, “you are one belligerent asshole.”

  “Film buff,” Horseknocker corrected him. “I musta sat through that movie nine times. I’m still suffering from the popcorn.”

  “Firm bluff,” the other muttered.

  Losing the thread of this discourse, Pauley fell to brooding on his recent calamity. An all-too-familiar malaise had begun to creep over his mind, like a front of weather o
ver a sunrise. Sunset, sailor, stay hopeful. A mere half-dozen of the thin props of his existence had conspired to bend, fracture or snap this afternoon, and he moodily enumerated them in the surface of the beer that stood in its glass between his two hands on the bar. The letter from the Franchise Tax Board was no joke. It was going to cost him money, maybe even an audit. Worse, it was probably going to take quite a bit of time to get it straightened out–not a chunk of time, either, but an infuriating attrition of his minutes and hours. The usual number of month’s-end type bills were spiked on a nail on the post above his “desk.” The telephone bill, electricity, various hardware and lumber accounts, saw sharpening, rent. As determined by routine, this stuff was supposed to be dealt with by the end of the week. The Franchise Tax Board had given him ten days to respond oh, about two months ago.

  He turned and scanned the barroom. No sign of Antoine. Just a thought, though, he thought. He turned back to the bar. Just a thought.

  The truck business was going to hurt. He’d shelled out $600 for the Toyota, a bargain so far as a used pickup went, unless it turned out to be junk. And junk was exactly what it was going to turn out to be. The dweeb with the funny haircut had shown him bills from a gas station detailing a blown head gasket and a warped cylinder head, both replaced. The replacement head had been a used one, but it had been surfaced true before installation. He himself had seen telltale wrench marks here and there on the engine, and new gasket cement around the thermostat. So the moment Pauley saw the temperature gauge pinned he knew that something far worse was up, probably something fatal. He’d perched on a guardrail and waited for himself and the engine to cool off enough to study the dipstick. A thousand or so people passed by. No one stopped. Admittedly, there was no room to stop safely. Pauley would and did have a time of it just getting across the ramp in order to walk to the nearest exit, a quarter of a mile away at South Van Ness.

  Finally, amid the stench of scalded kefir, he had pulled the dipstick, still blistering to the touch. On the last two inches of its tip the truth was told. The oil was no longer strictly oil, and there was too much of it. Neither an opaque ebony as if old, nor a translucent amber as if new, the oil was a bubbly yellow froth–a sure sign that water had invaded the crankcase. It’s a symptom entirely analogous to the discovery of wastes leaking from a perforated intestine into the abdominal cavity, there to mix with the blood, and as potentially fatal. It’s expensive or impossible to repair. Unremedied, in the short run, there’s no way to keep coolant in the engine; in the not-so-long run, the condition brings on the ruin of all moving parts.

  Walking back to civilization on a twelve-inch curb between the guardrail and oncoming traffic, he drifted into a bucolic nostalgia. The unchaste automotive belligerence, a flattened hubcap, a corroded muffler clamp, the acrid tang of internal combustion on the blustery air–these had brought him to the reminiscence concerning Alberta, Canada. He had turned down a job baling hay on a mountain ranch in favor of weeks of camping, walking and hitchhiking in the blue Canadian Rockies. The rancher had sixteen hundred acres, fifty horses, one beautiful daughter, and wanted a son. Pauley was seventeen years old at the time, and those mountains really were blue. Had he chosen wrong? Would it be fair to call a memory the psychological equivalent of a dipstick in the abdominal cavity? How about calling it a bayonet?

  A waft of gear lube and spilled beer brought him to present tense. Over these odors a voice was saying, “Transmission? Serviceable and cheap? Transmission, serviceable and cheap?”

  “What year is it?” Horseknocker asked automatically, staring at the back bar without apparent interest in the question.

  “2244,” said Max. “World War Seven is nearly over and we’re having two-headed chicken again for lunch.”

  Horseknocker turned to look. When he saw who was advertising a transmission, serviceable and cheap, he abruptly turned back to the bar, saying, “Oh fuck oh dear oh no not you: Winston, get away from me man with whatever it is and forget it.” But the vendor was on him like a magnet on a refrigerator.

  “It’s a good tranny, man, I know you,” Winston said, talking very fast. “Don’t you drive a Ford? Ain’t it up on blocks? Cause the tranny’s out of it, right? You can’t afford to pass this up, man. This is a good transmission.”

  Horseknocker did indeed own an old Econoline, quite a bit newer than the one Pauley had recently cashiered. But to say he “drove” it was inaccurate. Horseknocker’s Econoline had been up on blocks in a garage on Duboce Street for almost a year. The transmission was out of it, but so was the engine: Horseknocker had sold both and spent the money to round out his deep collection of jazz and bebop classics. But, it was true, if the garage door was open he was often to be seen there, listening to music behind the wheel of his Econoline, because he lived in it.

  Pauley closed his eyes for a moment, then glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, Winston was carrying a wooden ammunition box full of transmission parts.

  Winston lived by his wits on the street. Wits in this case meant any faculty that came to hand–chopsticks would do. Winston appropriated anything that wasn’t nailed down, but he rarely “stole.” He often, for example, had such items as cassette tapes, CDs, a booster amp, speakers or a car stereo for sale, usually no more than a single car could use or, more to the point, offer; but Winston was never the guy who actually broke into the car and stole the goods in the first place. Besides, as he liked to say, he could make more with his ass in a single night than he would ever make selling radios or cassettes, and usually get high into the bargain, plus a clean place to sleep–if the experience allowed time for something as mundane as sleep–for, considering his age and style, Winston was still an extraordinarily good-looking man. AIDS had miraculously spared him and his noble African features. The smooth unlined skin, the high cheekbones, the large intelligent eyes, the white even teeth, and the wonderfully fast mind remained intact if singular in their rapacity. Winston was as much at ease sleeping in the bushes behind the Church Street Safeway as he was at the Stanford Court–any place, no one doubted it, an eager pickup would whisk him. Pauley and Horseknocker once watched an immaculate chauffeured Bentley soundlessly deposit Winston at the curb in front of the café they were just leaving, at seven A.M. Aloof from the liveried servant behind the right-hand steering wheel, Winston was freshly bathed, barbered and perfumed, and had enough money in his pocket to buy himself a glass of chamomile tea and a croissant. On the other hand, Pauley once saw him on a wet winter morning, standing in the corner of Dolores Park at 18th and Church, twirling one end of an imaginary moustache, staring as if sightless, completely disoriented, a filthy sleeping bag draped over one shoulder, shoeless, with leaves in his hair–also at seven A.M. Despite his panache, or perhaps because of it, Winston only occasionally recognized Pauley; even so, Pauley occasionally gave Winston the money for a croissant and a mug of chamomile tea, if he asked for it. The deal was square: guys like Winston gave Pauley ambition.

  But it seemed an unamusing irony that Winston was offering to sell Pauley Pauley’s own transmission. Not as ironic, however, or as unamusing as the fact that, as things were developing, Pauley had best buy it back from him.

  Accordingly Pauley waved off Winston’s rigmarole concerning how he had to strip his imaginary van in order to provide his imaginary wife and kids imaginary emergency dental care, a tremendous personal sacrifice chosen after carefully considering other options including dipping into the mutual fund set aside for his son’s college education, etc., etc., and said, “How much?”

  Horseknocker looked on aghast as Pauley grimly gave Winston fifteen dollars for a greasy transmission casing without its cover plate and a box of unlabeled gears and bearings. The purchase made, Pauley kicked the box under his bar stool and ordered another round of beers. Winston disappeared with the fifteen bucks instantly. Horseknocker looked morosely at the heap of parts. It seemed incredible that someone would steal them at all, much less need them for something, much less be capable of putting t
hem back together, much less pay money for them.

  “Jesus Christ, Pauley,” he said. “You could have had my whole van for a hundred bucks. Why give the bread to that thief? Besides, didn’t you just buy a new truck? And another thing, Winston had no idea what year van that transmission came out of. How do you know that tranny’s going to fit into your rig? Can you tell what year a transmission is by looking at a pile of parts?”

  Pauley couldn’t bring himself to explain to Horseknocker how he knew the transmission and its box of parts would fit exactly into his own Econoline. Nor that, as he handed Winston the money, he’d been assailed by a paranoiac awareness of the futility of any attempt to salvage the van. The transmission was only one of many things wrong with it. He dropped his next-to-last twenty onto the bar.

  “Wait.” Jingles had reappeared. He climbed back on his stool, saying, “Wait. Here. First.” He fished a bottle in a brown paper sack out of the pocket of his tweed overcoat and held it beneath the bar to twist off its cap, which was at least as large as a shotglass. He poured an ostentatiously covert shot into the inverted cap, downed it, whisked the coaster off the top of his beer glass and chased it, finishing the beer at a gulp.

  “This round’s on me,” he growled, pocketing the sipping sack with one hand, and laying some cash on the bar with the other. He pushed away Pauley’s twenty. “Crazy pay, baby.” He winked at Pauley. “Since you’re crazy enough to go to work every day, you oughta get some, too.”

  “It’s a mixed up world,” Horseknocker said to his empty beer glass.

  Jingles raised his hand. “Not too often, not too much. Don’t want the working classes to get uppity. But hey,” he twirled a forefinger around his ear and rolled his eyes, “crazy is crazy.”

  “A small recompense seems only fair,” Max agreed sincerely.

  The bar was filling up, and the noise had increased to a din, competing with the music for inaudibility.

  “Jumpin with the lumpen: Yeah!” Jingles yelled. He slapped the bar with the flat of his hand.