It’s a fucking miracle he made it to the bar in the first place. Randy rolled into Houston right about rush hour time, which, fortunately for him – or so he thought – was happy hour time at Ruckus. This was the dive where August had spent his formative years, studying the character of its inhabitants which would later inform his art—no, not as a fine art painter as his mother had been, but rather as a performer, a performance artist, one august chagrin.
Randy had to see this place. And he needed a drink. The last two Trucker Zooms had gone up his nose at the Louisiana-Texas border; he was headed for a downward spiral that only Southern Comfort and/or cocaine could placate.
Ruckus might not have even entered Randy’s weary mind had Fate not taken a role in this play he was living and brought the traffic to a dead stop right at the Heights/Montrose exit. Randy could feel August’s presence on this section of blacktop.
In the ensuing forgotten minutes and untold miles, Randy made his way off of the interstate to the little side street where Ruckus stood. A couple of times (at least), he had awakened to the insistent honking of a horn behind him; he was asleep at another green light.
There was no memory of parking or going into the bar; Randy suddenly found himself sitting at a picnic table on a crowded enclosed patio, a blessed Southern Comfort in front of him, a model-handsome brown-haired man across the table. It was an unseasonably warm late February evening, not too humid – not like he’d been made to believe by August’s stories; it was pleasant.
For all Randy knew, the man across from him was Paul Bozich. He didn’t have any visible tattoos, but August could have made that part up, too.
“Paul” was very involved in rolling a cigarette. Not by hand, not exactly. He had a pouch of tobacco, rolling papers, a dorky rolling machine. In his hands, the uncool task became very cool indeed, sexy even. He kept all of the components of his craft in a small, brightly colored woven bag, no bigger than 3x5, like something from Guatemala that could be found in the East Village on St. Mark’s Place. The rolling papers were delicate little leaves kept in a rolling paper-size sealed plastic baggie.
Randy’s eyes were trained on what Paul was doing – the delicate moves of masculine fingers – but his mind faded in and out of cognition. How had he gotten here? Where had he come from—and, more importantly, where was he headed?
He remembered the rest stop mirror, the monster-like hue of his skin, the Fu Manchu moustache of dried blood frowning back at him. He cleaned up as best he could. The liquid soap that came out of the dispenser under the mirror was so similar in color and consistency to semen that he had to hold his hand close to his face and smell it. He was relieved to smell lilacs.
Randy pulled his duffel bag out of the back floorboard of the Dart, took it inside, brushed his teeth, changed his clothes, created a new man; not exactly clean, but presentable. Then he climbed behind the wheel, tucked one of Mona’s cigarettes between his lips and continued his journey westward, deeper into the Lone Star State, past oil fields and shopping strips, onward toward the clump of skyscrapers on the horizon.
Paul popped open the rollers with a magician’s flare and presented the cigarette to the world. Randy was his only audience member; he was delighted by the trick. He let out an accidental childlike, “Yay!”
Paul struck a match, inhaled, shook his brunette mane back as he exhaled. He smiled at Randy.
paul: You wanna share?
randy: The cigarette?
Paul held the cigarette out to him.
paul: Yeah, sure, a drag for a drink!
Randy handed his plastic cup across the table.
randy: Sure.
The door to the bar blasted open, out came Siouxsie and the Banshees:
Following the footsteps
Of a rag doll dance;
We are entranced,
Spellbound.
randy giggled: Ooh! I’ve never smoked a filterless before. My tongue tastes funny!
paul smiled and said nonchalantly: Now you have.
Randy took a couple of drags off of the cigarette; Paul took a couple pulls off of the cocktail; they passed them back to their rightful owners, then swapped again, through to the end of both. Randy found it stimulating, erotic even.
His body buzzed, his tongue, his brain. Was it the drive, or was it the cigarette? He couldn’t decide. But he couldn’t ignore the way he was feeling, or rather, the loss of feeling he was experiencing.
The music ebbed and flowed – now Morrissey, now James Brown, now Cocteau Twins. Several people on the patio had one drink in each hand, a sign that happy hour was going on (though not for a top shelf liquor like Southern Comfort). They were art students, bikers, punk rockers, all manner of queers who had gone out of style in New York City several years ago, to be sure.
Randy was amused by the parade. He smoked another cigarette that Paul offered him, bought Paul a drink of his own the next time he went to the bar. The bartender looked like Spider, was Spider. It was all very surreal. New Year’s Eve in August’s poor little brain all over again.
The sun melted into the Mexican restaurant across the street; red, green and white neon lit up the roofline. Palm trees swayed in the pleasant winter breeze.
Joy Division made their pronouncements over the drunk and drugged voices:
An abyss that laughs at creation,
A circus complete with all fools…
Come to find out, “Paul” was actually a drug dealer – “Dealer Dan,” his customers called him. Randy asked if he had cocaine to help him along his way to San Francisco. Dealer Dan didn’t have any on him, but he knew where to get it.
Then things got weird.
Spider came out with a black chick who bore a resemblance to Spider’s best friend Deb. Paul, Spider and Deb had a plan to get Randy the drugs he needed, but they had to drive there, and none of them had a car. Except Randy.
A Jayne Mansfield beauty behind the bar waved them out the front door and into the night. Randy was sure she was the “Megla Maniac” August had told him about. (But hadn’t she committed suicide in her grandmother’s garage the summer before he moved to New York?)
Outside, the sky glowed unnaturally purple and Randy lost the use of his legs. It wasn’t a completely unpleasant experience, only slightly troubling.
Between the four of them, they came up with a plan. Randy was laid out in the back seat of his mother’s car, while Paul, Deb and Spider behind the wheel (the least fucked up because he had been bartending) went on a joy ride all around Houston, laughing about how they’d made The Loop twice. Randy didn’t know what any of their talk meant, it was a language of code words and inside jokes. For his part, Randy was paralyzed by Southern Comfort, or the Trucker Zoom, or whatever it was in those cigarettes that made his lips tingle and the sky turn purple.
He realized that he was potentially being abducted. Surely not. In order to suspend his suspicions he decided to ask Paul outright if there was anything in the cigarettes they had smoked, anything in the special rolling papers, perhaps, that he kept in the baggie. “Not that I mind, of course,” he pictured himself saying, “I just want to know why I can’t sit up or move my legs or fucking talk!”
There was laughter in the front seat, maniacal and twisted. Out the window from his vantage point he could only see streetlights passing by at ungodly, illegal speeds. He hoped they were speeding. Surely they would be pulled over and he would be rescued before they crashed and burned. Or was this how it would end?
He determined that he had to say something, anything, fought against his paralysis until he was exhausted. He fell into a stupor many would call sleep.
When he awoke, long before sunrise, he was in the back seat of the Dodge Dart alone. All of the windows were steamed up with stripes of condensation. He sat up with little effort. His legs worked, at least. His wallet was on the front seat, driver’s license and credit cards loose around it, the cash gone.
He wiped a side window on the brightest side of the car. He was in an unfamiliar gravel parking lot, empty except for him. In front of the car, a line of shrubs marked off the edge of the parking lot; behind him was a long, two-story wooden building with very few windows.
Randy wiped a section of condensation from the back window to get a better look. At the roof there was a small rectangle box sign, lit from within, black letters on a bright white background:
ruby’s r&b
houston, texas
Randy said, “What the fuck?!” The tongue was working again. He stared out the window a long time then rolled back into a ball on the seat and slept it off.