 |
 |
Baker Lawley
REGULARS
It’s the first night the college kids are back in town, which means Elvis Davis stands on the pool table in here and delivers his Fountain of Youth speech, but I look at Oki instead. She is not charmed by the rant or phased by the jackhammer noise that comes from across the street and interrupts Elvis and keeps him from expressing what he wants to. Her face is a perfect oval and her hair is black and straight until it curves up at her shoulders. From where I sit, her eyes look closed from the way she stares down at her cigarettes.
“There they go,” Elvis points and says. Out the door of our bar we see the college kids walk by in uniform—polo shirts and short dresses and hormones. “Chock full of ignorance and confidence, show up dumb and leave even dumber. It’s the damn Fountain of Youth out there, braindead rejuvenates that’ll—”
But the rattletrap racket of the jackhammer firing across the street comes in the door again and Elvis grabs his head, wagging it so his long gray ponytail whips back and forth across his back. “That noise, it pockmarks my skull,” he says like he’s in a play, and we all grumble out a little laugh at him. “Phil, I need you to give me a beer on a loan. Out of cash.”
I lean towards Oki, who sits across the corner from me at the bar near the door. The way her lips pout as she lights her cigarette are the most beautiful thing. “Poor Elvis, carrying the burden of that name,” I say. “People don’t even name their dog Elvis.” Her smile does more than any drink in the whole bar could.
Then we hear the jackhammer again and look out the door. It’s the University tearing down the old Madison Mansion across the street. Meant to have it done by the time the fall semester started, and they did, almost. Only the foundation still has to come out, so they’re working in two shifts, under spotlights in the evening.
Phil, who owns our bar, is no businessman—we’ve got a low black ceiling and black plywood walls covered in old Polaroid pictures of us, and the smell in here is a mix of piss and Cheerios. Our bar is named The Faux Pas Lounge but we all say it Fox Pass whether we know better or not. Phil runs this place as a degenerate nonprofit because what else is there to do in town but have a drink.
But still, he says no to Elvis’s beer on credit, just to rile him up.
“Make him earn it,” says Blankenship. Blankenship has his index finger raised in the air like he does when he wants to make a point. He is looking for something to write about for his column in The Daily Oxymoron, what we call the town newspaper because what news is there around here. Blankenship has a hard time with his topics, living in an Airstream parked in the garage at his grandmother’s house. He can’t interview anybody because he wears flower shirts and a Panama hat every day. So, we end up in the newspaper a lot, which is pretty good for us crusty men and the few women that bother with us here.
“He should fucking paint a picture for it,” says Oki, who high-fives Blankenship and shoots Elvis the middle finger.
That’s why, when I try to put Oki Fujita into words—a pistol, a beautiful foul-mouth genius, a perfect bright full moon lighting up the night, a badass swan in a flock of buzzards—it’s a miserable failure. We’re around the same age, in between the college kids and the old guard like Elvis, but I squeaked out of high school and was lucky to get a job painting buildings for the University and Oki grew up in Tokyo then went to Harvard for a Ph.D. She is a chemical engineer, and she gets in the Daily Oxymoron for real reasons, some experiment she did, some award she won, some magazine that wrote about her project. The photos of her from the paper, where she looks so different in a lab coat or a suit, are tacked up on the plywood here and there around the bar. Then she comes in here and embarrasses folks with things she says.
I can’t put her into words because then whatever magic spell brings her here with us lowlifes would be broken and she’d be gone.
Elvis starts to get down off the pool table, which is hard because he’s about as limber as a two-by-four, when the jackhammer sounds and he falls to the sticky floor, laying still like he’s been shot dead. The last thing Elvis needs is another beer, but that’s true most times you say it. I hear the crane across the street start up and look out the door.
The mansion now is just a pile of puzzle pieces behind a chain link fence. I almost can’t remember it sometimes, but it was like a picture, an old-time Plantation home, white columns on the front porch and brick walls, here in what used to be the edge of town. Reuben Madison died in an upstairs bedroom praising the virtues of slavery, which maybe seemed like a good idea at the time. The house was about a hundred and sixty years old, came down in about that many seconds, two Caterpillar backhoes clawing at it.
Madison’s mansion had been a bar for the past decade, The Paw, the wildest of the college kid places, where some nights they would jump out of Reuben’s old bedroom window and slide down the columns like firehouse poles.
Oki rubs her cigarette in the ashtray until it’s smashed into a tiny tree stump. She says, “Do it, Phil. Make Elvis paint. Make the beer worth something.”
So Phil waddles out from behind the bar to the corner up front and begins plucking Polaroids off the wall where they were stapled to the plywood. The whole wall is covered in Polaroids—he tosses them onto the pool table where the bar folk look at them for the first time in years. It’s some Christmas, somebody in a Santa suit and them in his lap, Santa smoking three cigarettes at once, Santa pretending to choke Blankenship. Maybe pretending—it’s hard to remember details. When he finishes, Phil flourishes his fat arm at the blank black plywood he’s cleared.
“OK,” Phil says. “Paint me.”
Elvis looks up at the black wall space. Outside, the crane lifts a slab of concrete with its jaws. The arm pivots around over the dump truck, then the jaws open and the concrete drops in, cracks and clatters and spouts gray dust in the air, and inside The Fox Pass Lounge the floor shakes a touch.
“Alright. You bet,” says Elvis. A few college kids glance inside The Fox Pass Lounge as they pass, at the whoops and hollers that make for the pandemonium Elvis’ answer inspires in the place, at Elvis flopping around trying to get off the floor.
Phil can only find a wide paint roller and a bucket of white he’d used in the bathrooms a few years back. Elvis dips the roller in the bucket and stirs, staring at the black space.
“I thought you’d mailed it in,” says Randy, who teaches Economics. “Quit even trying, just coasting through your teaching.”
“The beauty of tenure,” says Oki. She’s up for tenure this year, so she’s worked up, comes in swearing and drinks hard and talks about all the time she’s spending working on her file.
“Look where tenure got me,” Elvis says. “Painting a mural for a bar tab.”
“Yeah!” says Harry. “To tenure!” We bust up at that. Harry is a plumber in town for Brow Underwood, a slumlord of a realty company that rents to the college kids. Harry does the best he can with the shitholes they rent. Brown Underwear, what we call his employer, gets on to him if he has to spend any money to fix things. If there was such a thing as a tenured plumber, Harry would be it. He has been telling Phil for twenty years that the pipes in here are held together with rat hair and chewing gum, that it must be holy water in the toilets, a miracle there’s no leaks. Not that you could tell by the smell.
Phil asks Elvis if he wants his beer on credit now or after the job.
“Now,” says Elvis. He cracks it open and raises the can to the wall. “To Inspiration.”
We all raise a drink to it, too, and we watch. There would be nothing wrong with a crude half-ass job in exchange for the Natural Light, but Elvis does not paint crude, even considering the tools. We watch him use the edges and slide the roller and smear it this way and that, holding it still from rolling at key strokes, until it snaps clear to our eyes what we see, Phil’s face in profile, a dead reckoning six feet tall with shading and wrinkles and a big ugly pug nose. When we suddenly make it out, we start cheering for Elvis as he paints the chin down near the floor, like we are fans at a ballgame.
It was years back when I was painting a wall in Vaughn Hall that I met Elvis, me new on the job and not knowing what I was doing. He sat down on a hallway bench and watched me roll, white as I recall.
He says, “You got good touch, there.” He was new in town, just middle-aged then, had his New York City accent still. It was years until I found out that Elvis had been famous when they hired him in Art, that if you went to a museum you might see something by him, but I haven’t known him to paint any pictures the whole time we’ve been coming here.
But something happens when Elvis paints Phil on the wall. When he finishes, he stares at the floor and doesn’t want the other beer Phil says he earned. He looks at the roller and the bucket, like he was reading a book, then he says goodnight.
The next day there is a sign up on the chain link fence across the way showing what they’re putting in there in place of the Madison house. A strip mall, with a hair salon and tanning booths and a coffee shop. Elvis comes back with a toolbox full of paint and brushes.
We watch the fall come in slow through the open door, the days getting more perfect and the nights cozy in shirtsleeves. Elvis takes down Polaroids as he moves down the wall, painting the regulars as he goes. He takes some feature he chooses—a hook nose or a pot belly or a Charlie Brown-sized head—and makes it the main thing you see in the mural.
We give him hell and call him names, but while Elvis is working he drinks his beer and doesn’t say much. Phil feels like he has to start in with the advertising so we’ll all keep coming.
“Don’t you love this bar?” Phil says when he advertises, the only advertising he does, drunk and to us who are already here and always here and don’t have much choice otherwise. “Where else can you get great art for a can of Natural Light? We got it all covered—PVC pipes for plumbing and Shakespeare and the Law of Inertia. Where else can you learn about opera and whether oil-based or water-based paint is better, all in the same night?”
“Oil-base,” I say.
“Amen,” says Elvis.
Oki says, “Oil-base polymers kick fucking ass.”
Then one night Elvis takes a break and sits at the bar. He says, “I had nearly forgotten what it was like to be painting.”
“Shoot,” I say, “all you had to do was ask. I could tell you all about it, and we wouldn’t have to suffer through this.” I motion at the mural. Elvis painted me with ears the size of hubcaps, which is true, mostly, though I don’t see any need in reminding me about them while I have a drink.
But Oki laughs and punches me in the arm when I say this and my heart melts so I feel better about it. “Yeah, motherfucker,” she says.
Elvis paints Oki that night for five or six hours, and she’s perfectly accurate, a painting like a mirror, except she is floating there on the wall, defying gravity.
When he’s done, Oki orders a shot of whiskey, which she sips. Blankenship is arguing with Pete and Harry about something, and Elvis goes to the pisser for a long time. Oki and me are sitting on either stool at the corner of the bar near the door.
It’s late and out there on the sidewalk I see the college kids walking by. They holler and squeal and shake hands or hug each other. Some wobble, too drunk, others strut so hard they might as well be peacocks.
“Are you still writing your book?” I ask Oki.
“Yeah, shit,” she says and finishes the shot. “Have to. For the committee.”
“Will they print it when you finish?” I ask.
“I mean the tenure committee. The shitheads don’t publish anything—I just have to get it done to make my case look better for tenure.”
“Oh,” I say and I feel about as dumb as I am. “What’s it about?”
She tells me it’s something about unpredictable chemistry, how with some compounds, no matter how much you forecast and control things, sometimes you get a whole ‘nuther result than you thought. Sometimes you can’t even explain why, she says.
“Like a happy accident?”
She thinks about it for a minute then says, “Sometimes, yeah. Yeah.”
“I’d like to read it,” I say.
“You’re a sweet sonofabitch, you know that? But you wouldn’t, it’s boring, just a coonskin for the wall so I can keep the job.”
I am trying to think of what to say, coming up with nothing, when we hear the riot down the street. Some of the regulars go outside to see what the racket is, but we both stay in.
It’s Blankenship that tells us what happened, a few days later. Some boys picked a fight with a few of the football players from the University over in The Doghouse, one of the college bars down the street. When the cops showed up, a kid assaulted an officer, another kid threw a trash can through a plate glass window, and the dumpster behind Love at First Shot caught on fire. That’s the Daily Oxymoron version, anyhow.
“What didn’t make it in,” Blankenship says, that index finger raised, “is that it was the University cops, not the city, that showed up, instantly, like a movie. And the dumpster fire came out of nowhere. Rumor is the school planted the kid that started the fight, and they lit the fire, too.”
“That’s a stupid thing for a school to do,” says Elvis. “And you’re an idiot for not putting it in the paper.” He walks over and paints Blankenship cross-eyed on the mural.
The University had been third on the list of best party schools last year, and were intent on getting themselves off of it, Blankenship tells us. He says we were ignoramuses for not reading the Daily Oxymoron, there was some things in there worth knowing. Like how the University bought The Paw just so they could demolish it, did we know that? How the University even had a public action plan they released, all their motives wide open, and us inside The Fox Pass Lounge acting like it’s a secret.
Across the street, the strip mall is going up fast, and every day there are plumbers and electricians in there like ants, steel beams hoisted up on cranes, concrete poured. We keep the door shut these days, because dust and Quikrete are always blowing in.
But Oki opens it when she goes outside after Blankenship shuts up, and holds it open and looks up and down the street. “Look you dumb shits, it’s not about the school. Look out here—nobody else is here, nobody’s left but us.”
Her arm straight out like a battering ram holding the door, her hair in the breeze trembles, and I am ready to believe her.
It isn’t long before we’re all back inside and going more like regular, when Blankenship tells us that they’re also thinking about firing the football coach.
“In the tradition of journalistic integrity,” he says, “who wants to get their name in the paper?” We laugh while he gets out his reporter’s notebook, for his opinion column. “Any thoughts on the coach’s maybe getting fired?”
“Fire him, then shoot him,” Oki says.
“Then bury him on University Avenue so we trample on his grave forever,” says Elvis.
“Do y’all even follow football?” asks Blankenship, but they both get their name in the Daily Oxymoron anyway, the next day.
Elvis doesn’t say much else that night or over the next few. He paints, sits and broods and drinks his beer, then paints more. He hasn’t paid for a beer all fall now.
But he’s quit painting us, and is now putting decorations in between us, some new ideas coming to him that we can’t make much sense of. He has floating eyeballs with their bloody nerves behind them like comet tails. A crow. A Santa Claus, a plate of barbeque ribs with a loaf of white bread, a wrench torquing on a moon.
About the wrench and the moon, we have a good night of it a couple of weeks later. Phil thinks it’s about plumbers and how dumb they are, which Harry ain’t. Harry thinks it’s a conspiracy, that Elvis hates NASA.
“Maybe it’s about working late at night,” I say.
“God,” says Oki. “That’s every damn night for me. Fucking tenure committee bullshit.”
“When do they decide?” asks Phil. “We’re getting champagne.”
“Don’t. I turn it in next week, then we have a meeting two weeks later,” she says.
I say, “It’s gonna be fine, ain’t it?”
“Ain’t ain’t a word,” she says, lighting a cigarette and spinning around to put her back to the bar and stare at the moon and wrench on the mural. “Maybe it’s about trying to fix something that can’t be fixed. Or maybe it’s about using the wrong kind of tool for a job. Maybe it’s about jack shit.”
“Shoulda painted it in the shitter, then,” says Phil.
But on goes Elvis. The more we say, the less we hear from him. He drinks a beer for every six-inch square he paints, and it’s a long wall. There are little ghosts between our faces, like the one they say guards the library, still on duty all this time after the Civil War. There is Winnie the Pooh and Che Guevara, racing by in a Trans Am. The car is like the one Angie left here in and smashed herself to bits in out on River Road eleven years ago now. There is Mose Tillman, the blues player who grew up here a long time ago, the first person from the state to make a music record.
And Elvis adds architecture, too—the governor’s mansion, with a black and white image of the old governor, perfect comb marks in his Brylcreem. The ghost of the Madison house, and of Love at First Shot and The Doghouse. The Bell Tower from campus, a famous sight, except he’s got clotheslines full of laundry coming off it, bras and jockstraps, shirts and ties, painter’s white coveralls, all the outfits you see around town. A tweed jacket, even, though Randy says those should be drycleaned, technically.
Across the street at the strip mall, the roof is going on, bricks are being mortared across the face, and Elvis puts the strip mall on the mural, too, with a tombstone store and a retirement home for circus animals for its businesses.
I talk about the strip mall to Oki one Friday night. I tell her how we could have ourselves a nice time over there, get a mocha espresso latte cappuccino, then get all caffeinated while we sit in a tanning booth and get our hair done up big. “Then we’ll come across the street for a nightcap at The Fox Pass Lounge and nobody would even recognize us.” She laughs and nods but doesn’t say much.
“Sorry,” she says. “I have my tenure meeting on Monday, is all.”
So we sit around the corner from each other near the door. Blankenship plays pool against Harry, but they are both so awful that they keep scratching and knocking in any ball they can, sick of playing the game that won’t end. Elvis paints the football stadium, dotting in the faces of the thousands of people that come to town to watch. Folks down the bar are listening to Phil advertise.
“In this bar, we’ve got everything you could need to know, we’re a walking, talking encyclopedia, but a shitload more fun,” he says.
Then the suit walks in and all the regular stuff goes on as it was but everybody sees him. Mostly because it’s the first time there’s been a tie worn inside The Fox Pass Lounge in anybody’s whole memory. The suit looks up and down the wall at the mural, quick, takes it all in one speed-read, it looks like. Phil keeps on advertising to Janine and Randy down the bar, so Harry goes behind the bar and ask the suit if he can get him anything.
“Just water,” the suit says. He wears glasses and has a beard, is about as old as Blankenship. He has a pin in his lapel of the emblem of the college.
Harry pours him a glass of water in a beer mug and gives it to him.
“Three dollars,” says Harry. He points at the mug. “That’s holy water, there.”
The suit stares back at Harry and doesn’t move for his wallet, and doesn’t smile when Harry tells him, no, just kidding.
“What do you think of our mural?” Harry asks the suit. Harry looks over at it but the suit stares down the bar, looks at Oki for too long a time.
“It’s very nice,” the suit says.
We gradually simmer down the longer the suit stays. It gets late and when the door opens the floodlights from the strip mall that illuminate the brick façade bounce across the street and light up inside The Fox Pass Lounge.
And in through the door comes what seems like an entire sorority, fifty young women in a herd of bright shoes and perfume. It has never been this crowded in The Fox Pass Lounge, the ten or so regulars of us mashed up against the bar or in the corners where we stay.
The sorority doesn’t see us or the mural, though. Their squeals and squawks sound like a barnyard, they sit on the pool table right in the middle of the never-ending game. They make such a racket that we can’t hear each other talk. They can’t wait for the tanning beds and the salon across the street. They have on so much glitter and they are so excited to be alive, they shout “Theta Bar Crawl!” and they all wail, they order liquor shots for the whole bunch from Harry who is still standing behind the bar, trapped.
This is not a thing any of us have ever witnessed in The Fox Pass Lounge. Maybe they used to hit the other bars on The Strip and skipped us, but since we’re all that’s left, here they are, a cursory visit. But none of us like being cursory and we’re all wanting it back the way it was as soon as possible; I can see it on Blankenship’s face where he stands with his warped pool stick like a sentry in the crowd. I slip under the opening and go back to help Harry, set up the little plastic cups in a bunch while Harry tries to fill them all and get this over and them out of here.
The suit is looking at the sorority hard now. That’s what I’m watching and why I miss Oki standing up on the bar and walking to the honeycomb of whiskey shots arranged on the bar. But I do look up in time to see Oki swing her leg back and kick the plastic shot glasses out into the mass of the girls and rain all over them with the whiskey. The sorority makes the exact same high-pitched wail they did a minute ago when they were happy.
“Get out of here, bitches!” says Oki. Her words are slurred a little bit and she’s gotten some of the whiskey in her hair. “This place isn’t for you! Get the fuck to where you belong!”
Somebody in the back of the sorority crowd says to her friend, “Is that Dr. Fujita?” She says it quiet but since the bar is silent otherwise, we all hear it.
But they do like she says, leaving in a quiet parade out the door. Oki occasionally shouts at them. “Go on, bitches! Go get drunk and knocked up and live your boring planned-out fucked-up lives!” The suit follows them out, of course.
Then it’s us regulars there, like always, but not. Oki still stands on top of the bar. Nobody talks or moves or does anything except for Elvis. He goes over to the wall and finds an open space and starts penciling in the sorority, a fly’s eye montage of them, one head in each hexagon, and they look pretty accurate, too.
We watch Elvis go. Phil fake laughs, which he does when he wants to advertise.
“Elvis, don’t paint them girls. They don’t belong on there—why aren’t you yourself on the wall? Why don’t you paint yourself?” Phil asks.
The whole mural looks new, then. I stare at it and look at everything I saw, at the picture of myself over and over, and didn’t even see Elvis wasn’t there. Phil clears his throat.
“C’mon Elvis, you need to join on in with us. That’s the best part of this place, all you mechanics and professors and lowlifes, we’re all one in this shithole. Isn’t that right?” he asks us.
But nobody answers. Oki gets down off the bar, slow and unsteady. The wall is glaring at us. I think about painting it all back to black and tacking up the Polaroids again like it never happened. Elvis keeps drawing in the sorority with paint pens, though.
“I know,” says Phil, and he stands down off his barstool. “This sorry bunch is the wrong audience for this work of art. This thing needs to get noticed. I’m calling the newspaper.”
“The paper’s here,” Blankenship says. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the mural. “That is not news.”
“Like hell it isn’t. Human interest story,” Phil says.
“No humans are interested in us,” says Oki. She almost falls as she gets off the bar.
But Phil goes on, declares he’s going to open The Fox Pass Lounge early next Friday for an art gallery night, serve wine and cheese, that he’d look up and learn what was good and serve that. Harry and Blankenship and most everybody are jeering at Phil, telling him it’s a terrible idea.
“Don’t you see, I’m trying to get it noticed, to make sure this thing gets saved for us for good.”
That’s when Oki walks outside and shuts the door. I take a minute then follow her out. She’s sitting against the wall on the sidewalk, lit up by the floodlights across the way so there’s no shadow of her at all. Up and down University Avenue it’s totally deserted. I sit down beside her.
“Oh, God,” she says. She takes a long drag from her cigarette. “What just happened in there? Who am I tonight?”
“That’s alright. We could use more spice of life in there, truth be told.”
She smokes some more. “This tenure thing, it feels so god damn permanent, it’s pressing down all the time. And it’s what I’m supposed to want, tenure.”
Her face is lit so well I can see her black eyes sparkling like a clear night sky, her lips pouting the smallest angle. I try to memorize it.
“Permanent would be OK,” I say. “Then maybe you and me could—”
But I stop, and she puts the cigarette between her lips and smiles and looks at me by only moving her eyes. “Marty, Marty, Marty, you are too god damn sweet for this world,” she says. The cigarette bobs up and down while she says this and I memorize that, too, to keep from thinking about her answer or my question. I memorize how, in the background, I can see the real Bell Tower lit with spotlights, like a stake driven up through the dirt, somebody hammering it too far from underground.
Then she is not there for the whole week. Elvis is, painting for hours, not even drinking anymore. He paints Vaughn Hall, where the Art department is, but on the mural it’s a burnt-out shell, Armageddon upon it, the rubble tumbling out of the building and dribbling away, gradually turning into a line of perfect circles. He’s painted the single-engine airplanes that fly over the stadium on game days, with banners trailing that advertise Spring Break trips or some sheriff to vote for. Elvis’s banners say “Death from Above” and “Don’t Drink and Think.” He has one buzzing the stadium and one coming straight down at Vaughn Hall. He has the ghost of P. T. Vaughn, the old state senator they named it for a hundred years ago, rising up like a genie out of the rubble.
He paints new features on us. I have a third eye on my forehead. Blankenship’s gotten a pirate hat and a parrot, and there’s a scar across Oki’s forehead with knobs coming out of her neck. Phil has a hatch that opens from the top of his head—and out pops a baby rattle, a trombone, and a pink orb covered in volcano mouths and dripping with goo.
“At least change Oki back,” says Phil, before the reception starts. “That one’s pure mean.” He has Dixie cups and ten bottles of purple wine on the pool table, saltine crackers and cheddar cheese slices. We’ve given up on Elvis after a shoving match the other night over the things he was painting. Maybe that was it—the strip mall had just opened up across the street and there was foot traffic again, but it wasn’t what we were used to. Then there was what Phil said, that the rent had gone up on the place that day, too. After being the same for twenty years. Doubled. It was the University muscling us out, we thought.
And now we’re sitting at the bar, stewing, mad at the world, and Blankenship shows up.
“I got a call from somebody irate over at the Chemistry department,” he says. “Bad news, folks. Oki didn’t get tenure.”
I feel my blood drain out my heels. Phil jumps down off his stool, Harry smacks his fist on the bar. There’s a grumbling roar wanting to know what happened, how it could happen, all that.
“Chemistry loved her—that’s why they called me, wanted it in the paper. Conspiracy from the higher-ups, the Dean saying she was a questionable public representative of the University.”
“It was that suit the other night,” says Harry.
Elvis has found his paint roller, and he gets the bucket of white paint that started this all and starts making little up and down moves with it on the wall behind Oki’s picture, until we see he’s made a set of perfect feathery wings for her.
Whether it’s that she’s dead and an angel or free as a bird, I can’t tell.
So we’re foaming at the mouth when they start showing up. At first it doesn’t seem real, the suits showing themselves. But these are different suits than the one the other night. These wear actual tweed, they have beards and glasses. They look like Elvis or Randy might, if they cared. “The Faux Pas Lounge!” these suits say. “I’ve heard so many stories about this place.”
It’s big news, they tell each other. Elvis Davis’s first work in two decades. It’s very artsy for Elvis to do it in The Faux Pas Lounge. It’s very counterculture, they keep saying. They tell each other that Dean So and So is coming, and Joe Schmoe from the Board of Directors.
Harry goes up and stands next to two professors. They’re both tilting their heads and crinkling their eyebrows, looking at the mural.
“That’s me,” Harry says, pointing at his picture on the wall, where he’s shooting flames out of his pecker. “You like it?”
“Well,” one says, but stops there.
A little while later, the other suits, dark blue with strangling ties and shiny shoes, show up. They have red noses and fancy watches and walk in like The Fox Pass Lounge is one of their vacation homes. One suit heads straight over and pats Elvis on the back, even as he paints. “Quite interesting work, Dr. Davis.” He hasn’t even looked at the wall. “Glad to see that you’re painting again. This is very good for the University.”
Elvis doesn’t say anything. He just keeps painting a face.
Blankenship stands up and crosses over to the suit then. “You see this Heart of Darkness reference, Dr. Brown? Fascinating stuff, especially when you notice that this head here is Coach Flynn, on the stake. You were there representing the Board at the press conference, as I recall, when he was fired.” The suit makes a face like he’s about to get mugged, then Blankenship pulls out a notepad. “Could I get a quote about the mural? I’m with the paper. How about a photo there with Coach Flynn’s head?”
And then we are all on them. On another stake is the dog head of the mascot and we point that out. We show them the centaur sex tattoo on Randy and the wings on Oki and the racist governor. We touch the paint with our bare fingers while they all stand back a few feet like this is a museum.
Randy and Melissa start playing pool right over the crackers and cheese. Phil starts trying to advertise to a suit, saying, “One night in here will teach somebody more than any class they will ever take at your school.”
Then Harry points out the two airplanes buzzing the stadium and the Art building.
The old guy in the pressed dark suit, who has a shock of white hair and looks like he owns the moon, looks closely for a minute, then calls over another suit—we see it’s the one from the other night. They whisper in each other’s ears, business, nodding yes, yes, yes.
“Despicable,” says the suit from the other night. He for some reason goes to the toilet to make a call and while he’s in there he uses it and the plumbing chooses that moment not to cooperate. The building might as well be one of us. Vile stuff comes out as it overflows, lilypads of black algae, squiggles of hair, thick smelly gelatin. The bar clears out of the strange professors and suits when the guy comes out, his shoes and pants legs soaked, ruined.
* * *
The next time I see Oki, it’s Friday morning. Somebody spraypainted all over the hallway walls in Nolen Hall during the night. QUESTION EVERYTHING!! it says. Also there is a penis and a Mercedes-Benz symbol. I’m painting it all back to white with a roller, just getting started, when she comes down the hall. She is wearing a white lab coat and has on safety glasses and I hardly recognize her.“Hey Marty,” she says. “Guess you heard the news.” I have never heard her voice so quiet. For a minute I’m embarrassed that she sees me in my white painter’s coveralls.
“Yeah. Who do I need to kill?” I say. She smiles but doesn’t laugh.
“It’s okay. I’ll be okay.” We both look at the graffiti for a moment. “Kids,” she says.
“Happens every year right before the semester ends. This is my fifth or sixth private part to paint over. They’re all over the dormitories. Guess they get stressed out but how does that help anything?”
“No clue,” Oki says. “Marty?”
“It doesn’t mean you have to leave does it?” I ask. I start painting, too, an overlapping X motion so it only takes one pass.
“Marty,” she says. I keep making X over X and then finally I speak.
“You heard about the lawsuit, right? From the University. The mural was making terroristic threats against the Art department, it says. And other slander. Plus the city inspector padlocked the building after the plumbing exploded, said Phil couldn’t open until he fixed it.”
Oki’s face is the same as it was that night after she hollered at the students, out there in the street, her eyes mirroring something she wasn’t even looking at.
I say, “Phil just shut it down, and that made everybody happy, except for us.”
“I do have to leave,” Oki says. “I got a fellowship out in Berkeley.” I keep painting. “California,” she says. “I got the news the day before the tenure meeting.” I keep painting and painting and not looking at her. When all that is left is QUESTION EVERYT, I stop to refill the roller with white.
“What are you gonna do, about The Fox Pass Lounge?” she asks. “Is there anything we can do?”
I shrug my shoulders and paint over it some more until it’s gone. I step back and look it over, a big blank white wall. “‘Question everything.’ Makes me want to paint, ‘Why?’” I say.
Oki laughs, then keeps laughing. She walks over right beside me and puts her head on my shoulder, and I’m glad I haven’t gotten anything on my white coveralls today. We stand like that for a long time, staring at the wall, looking at where the paint glistens a little bit if the light hits it right, and if not, where it looks just like the rest of the wall, white like nothing happened.
“I love your work,” Oki says. “It’s beautiful.”
On the last night the bar will ever be open, we are all hammered, giving The Fox Pass Lounge an Irish funeral. We’re not even really here, the door locked shut, the keg coolers running off a generator. We don’t exist, according to a lot of laws. Nobody is speaking clearly, though we all stand up and give speeches, telling old stories and pointing to where they happened on the floor. Outside it’s winter and people walk by again, bronzed from the lightbulbs and buzzed from the coffee. We toast Reuben Madison and his failed institution, we damn the Man.
We find the Polaroids that had been taken off the wall and play a game of throwing them like Frisbees onto the pool table, face up meaning drink, face down, no drink. If you are in the photo, two drinks.
Harry falls right off his stool. Blankenship is taking notes for a column he’ll write, an obituary for this place, but he can’t even read his own writing. Oki sits next to me at the bar and we high-five every time there’s a good laugh. It is the saddest I have ever been but I laugh so hard, so hard. She hands me the course catalog for Spring semester with classes circled. I want to take freshman writing, and someday all this will have been research for my book on degenerates.
Early in the night, Elvis is laying in the back corner, painting skeleton feet. As we hoot and holler, he moves up, puts pale white skin on the knees, then wrinkled flesh a little higher. Torn-off shorts with holes, a ragged leather belt. Then a nice ironed shirt with a back bent over and hunched. A gray beard, then by god he paints his own face, undeading himself. We see it and laugh at the high hilarity, drunk like we are, when Elvis paints his own arm going up. Then we watch his own paintbrush painting itself, the last thing it paints being its tip and we see the mirror of it happening.
Oki says, “It looks like a motherfucking miracle.”
And we rush over and hold Elvis above our heads and somehow manage to carry him on a victory lap around the pool table. When the kegs get close to empty, we hurl our glasses to the floor, and when the drinks run out we all leave, looking back at the mural first. They’ll put a restaurant in here, or a t-shirt shop. The city is taking bids. Either way, they’ll paint or drywall or concrete-block over the mural and all we’ll be is ourselves there, a layer or two down, nobody listening like always.
- - - - - -
Baker Lawley received his MFA from the University of Alabama and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, Oyster Boy Review, and The Southeast Review. "Regulars" is part of his short story collection manuscript, The Curtain Puller's Understudy, and he is at work on a novel for young adults about a Civil War reenactment-gone-wrong. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two coonhounds.
Top