"Ben, the Gray Man"
by
Timothy Stillman
He watched them, did Ben, the gray man. He sat at the rickety table with the patch work green table cloth over it. Always in darkness, in this place, where the ocean merchants met and took themselves into their whores and never gained one piece of land or hope or memory. Always losing. Receding. In the dark mirrors where the dark men and their dreams swirled round as though in a recital that was to give men schematics and dreadings, but even those were lost.
Ben with his shot glass of rye, and the night that had left him only this corner of the room with the bar too far away and the floorboards too sagging and too recondite of last year's favors and how the price would go up this year and the next to come.
And Ben too easy and too conciliatory, as though he were the devil with a clenched fist in his pocket and too much insurance riding those withered shoulders. Other defenses and other nights like the coin gold circles of the prey's catamounts. The prey who got lost in the shuffle and distinguished no one in this place at the water front and the waves silently symbolically hitting against the stanchions of the pier.
The noise read desperation and the drinks went back too fast and there was nothing but the terribly salubrious illustrations of these pursuers and the pursued who would never attract anything in the ghostly light like candle glow. And all sea hands and holding to detrimental. Holding to nothing attained but the broken glass mirror behind the bar and the dusty bottles in front of it. Tagged there and stacked there for all the glasses that were the lives of the salt tasters who came here.
Ben watched the dark visage and it seemed as though a hawk had settled here, one of immense and vague proportions. Where the midnights ticked along and hands held those bought hands when everything was dime store fake. And it couldn't be any other way. Not ever again. If even before it had been. Ben with his perpetual drink because he owned this place, unbeknownst to the customers surrounding him. They thought him not an enigma, a no one past the old toboggan pulled down on his forehead and denting his long thin ears a little. He was always one of those too old men, too gristled and not there in any real sense of the word.
And this not there man was generous, didn't water down his drinks of red and gold and green dreams that were anointed with only the dimmest sensations of what there had been in detriment, what there had been in a more base desire that had been on low boil for such a long time, that keeping it as such was something of a miracle, and needed to be taken into account.
All wood, this place. The booths and the bar stools without covers. The bar itself and the ceiling of open beams. And the night surrounding as though it were the hawk itself. Out there in patent medicines that held the spines too stiffly or broke the crap game at the tables too noisily. A truncheon was this place and was Ben with his red flannel underwear showing out from his shirt unbuttoned three buttons down from where it should have been.
And it was a dance. And it was pain. There was not an interest in money or sex or spiritual forging as much as there was the deep needful desire to have the thing of the ocean out there, to have the moment come when the eyes of the bought could look younger in your own than they really did. When there was something more than the gathering round the old pot bellied stove this whip crackle cold winter evening. And arms that held you could do more than hold you up when the game was over.
Ben had bought these people. Their ratty clothes too thin and worn with too many holes in them and their bearded or beardless faces that hid the brains that cried out little spokes that Ben took and circled them round with. Made them into sailors who never took to the ocean, but were only about to, in this warp wood bar. And they knew it, deep inside, they knew what was the turnkey and what was the cell. But cells feel good after a while and there is night and no one can see you and what you do privately even if there is someone else with you.
In the cots, the mattresses in the back room where the particulars didn't matter in style or comb or depth or insolence and if the drug were something other than alcohol or tobacco, that was all right too, for this was the insurance Ben had on his shoulders, in those eyes that seemed as gray as his face and stubble and hands, all the leathering of him.
All the places of him that said there was winter in every corner of this place, front room, john, back room with the mattresses. Soiled and rippled and the ripped air had begun to feel better after a time. Something that would not be solipsistic or let them forget when their forearms tired of leaning on the bar and supporting their glasses or their chins, as an arm has to go somewhere and drift it around the bought for the night. Might as well. It wasn't expensive.
And nobody cried anymore. Here in this place where Ben knew the solemnity of each man. Where there was nothing more than the dock lights sodium and cold and full of glare coming in the dirtied windows and the bird specked windows. All of it pushed around as though the very air had been stirred in a cauldron, and there were these great leaps of shadows everywhere in this building. As though this huddling had come into a vector of the hawk's great beak, the envisaged, powerful, vague hawk that was owned by this man.
In place of the towering sugary sea monster that would rise one day from out of all that dark depth and hugely sway this bar where the men took their nights, after their fruitless days of caulking fishing boats and lording their pennies from one to the other day job, such as it was.
To take the stairs to the apartment where Ben lived and where he climbed to every three a.m. from the darker circle of this bar, to where his bare bunk lay and where he, after drinking rye all the night long, surrendered to his dreams of what seemed to be nothing more than the desire of laughter.
Than the desire of canting his legs as though they had turned into those of a horse and galloping out into the ceaseless dominance where he could prove and turn his whips loose on the riders who rode him unwittingly. To say to them all, I've bested you--the man you thought didn't have any sense, the man you thought grew here on the Northern Coast like a wind blown raw meat frozen flower, out of time and out of luck, but time has suckered the lot of you too.
Destroyed you. Taken your youth and your possibilities. Forced you to forge yourself on the land in these forms. And the real trick. The most wonderful marvelous trick is these are not your forms at all.
But turning in his bed at night, feeling the bugs crawling along side him, or sitting at the table with the little candle glow of fog light circling round and round on him through the oblong window behind, Ben knew he had cheated himself in cheating them, so he would never win at this game either.
He listened to the words around him. The sly words and drunken tired words. The words that had no texture or form or belief behind them. As though they were empty paper air slogans that were hopscotched from one person to another, interchangeable, slogans and persons. The windows had drafts, from their cracks and their poor installation and the ceiling had rents in it and winter blew in, and the words blew out as though they were ghost children looking for home.
And given up on anything but trying to remove this layer of cells from this person's face and transferring that layer to another's, then taking that nose and giving it to another and replacing it with someone else's while shaping it oh so subtly.
And the glans did not stand and the ruse did not dictate and the rude fire of the heater came and went, there as the dark milky shadows on the ocean came through a vastness never to be numbered and fell dying out there. All of it sleek and handsome and with the answers, none to be found in it though, not by these men in this
A frame tavern with the lighted ancient beer sign out front on the gable, of a picture of a man with a fifties crew cut, holding a mug of beer and laughing, for good times. For something that was different than the terrible taste and the cutting aroma and the smiles that were nothing more than beheading the beginning of everything.
As eyes tired, from the cigarette fog bank, to the churches certain men tried to make out of each other, and Ben heard the feints and the dares. The bravado and the desolation. The lies and the damned lies. All of it as adobe, as though of adobe huts out in the wilderness of sexuality that was filled with bed spurs and flannel underwear with too much coarseness in it. Too much pain wounds that seemed to be the only thing left of any value in that sheath of what once had been or what had been wished once to be.
But the bellies were too full and too heavy. And the phone lines were too tangled as the jukebox played songs from its oddly bright luminescent green and gold pot of gold colors over in the far corner, across from Ben.
Memories of the fifties and sixties. Songs to break your heart and make you remember lives of movie and TV stars from then and pretend they were your own. No one remembered and mouths strangled on each other. For dreams that became the dreamer as fish, quietly baking on a hot pink coral reef under a sun that had been dim for ages, the only color, glowing, from the pink reef.
And mariners around you and the ocean was of crudely formed glass with dazzles never and with breaks and little volcanoes of mica chips on it and in it. Where there was not a judgment, just the flat expressionless air thick as mucus around you and hot, lord, hot in this stifle sweat close place. Unlike outside, where the winters set in in October and didn't leave sometimes till April or May.
Harpoons and nets and various swords and guns displayed in the appropriate place in this bar that hadn't a name. And Ben felt he had been shipwrecked on that reef, on the underpinnings of it for so long, that he had had to have company, more than the biting fleas and the sand dollars that poisoned his hands until he finally convinced himself to stop touching those things, and to make others do so in his place.
But he was still alone there, still bankrupt in all other ways besides monetarily. The kegs weren't enough. Nor the cheap beer or rye or whiskey. Nor was the making out on the stools or in the two booths with their respective little lap tables between them. Fallen through the cracks as the desertion began, and all shadows, as two broke away, and two or three more.
There to follow the lighted dudgeon in themselves away from the bar, not touching, not looking at each other, tilted away from each other if anything, heavy or scrawny or young remembered or young never to be remembered again. The wet circles of their mugs and beer cans still sopping the little wood bar, and the bartender using his cloth to smooth them down, and so momentarily dry them off.
To the rooms then, in the back, the bought and the buyers, pennies on the dollar; it didn't matter--an unconscious jokey bid for personality and dignity--who switched side in that caste system every so often, to remember how it felt, to place themselves in opposite worlds at the same time, and the silence from the men as they went to the back room, through the small wooden broken hinged door, and Ben found his eyes trailing them as though he was their puppy. But, no, man, not him--he was a hawk!
Still and all, as though he wished to go back there too, to find something more than a blazing star in his stomach the thirst of which could not be quenched. Had never been, but this was a noe show, in both sides of the phrase. A show without beginning or ending, as though everyone was an actor, all cudgeled by television and movies in the afternoon when the day jobs were finished and they had to go somewhere before the bar opened always on the dot at seven p.m. Ben could only bring himself to torture them for so long.
Sometimes the shadows stood at the doorway, closed or opened or partially so, and they fumbled at each other, as though they were picking lint from the other's clothing, like they could find somewhere in that mass of smelly beery old clothes a phoenix that would rise gracefully from the ground in the fire of the star blazing in a stomach of memory at least, and ascend to the sky--golden phoenix, free and fresh and clear and never to be sidelined again.
Never to let some dotty old man track the staccato glitter of whatever imaginings that had once been theirs, on softer seeming green mountain days of sky unclotted with blood, before their losing lives would have been, and here pretend as such. Before the world knocked them down and gave them up a long time ago.
The sea in the loins, the ocean in the eyes, the hearts that beat on nicotine and sped the brain on liquor, all of it doused here with just a try, just something of soft coiled machinery that would always be the excuse of the spirits, and right on either measure of that term too.
Other relinquishing and other platters of more than salted peanuts at the bar, and the need to find a monster to rise, roaring, raging, standing thirty stories or more, past the bleak stark holding pen where the words could not ride out of the mouths the right way. Where they could not mean what their borrowers had wanted them to mean. Where'd there be some damn justice for a change.
Where there was nothing left but the lack of legacy, for that can be a legacy too. And shadows at the back door, and never pushing more than dick hard on lengths between them for stodgy and laughter that boiled up like black tar from time to time from mouths that had said all the cruel things to others that had been said to them. And Ben, somehow better than they were, because he counted even less than they.
He kept the bottle of rye on his table, one bottle per night, and made his way down through the sandy thick fumey liquid then, for he was a gate keeper to the unknowing who believed, Ben knew, underneath all the tattered remnants of this tattoo or that nose ring they could somehow engender time to stand still.
They could somehow take the centuries ago of their wayward youth and bend them over to this moment, like a great coiled penis snake of a ship built to their own specifications like not one minute of their entire lives had been so. For if there had been no green hills and no tallow sun and no callow youths to run down to the sea in gratitude for being built as strong and wandering and proud and untamed as the foam itself that led out into worlds not begun to imagine, there should have been.
And then there would come a time when one hand of shadow would take one chest of shadow and bring it close to a shadow face and press the side of that face into the darkness that spelled freedom and hope and most of all that spelled hero. Not the block and tackle. Not the procedure which was as adamantly erotic as repairing a ship's sails and sailing mechanisms.
Red and yellow glow of coal in the pot bellied stove. Stirred occasionally by one of the men sitting by it, with a stick, until the heat went out altogether and then they had to pull their pea jackets around them, and then they had to warm themselves with each other, those tributaries with blood too thin and cells too advanced in cancer and other maladies that sailed along in them to give them their final root in a resting place.
Where the old trees grow and the sun sings songs in its yellow black cum piss aftermath and stranded legions can get off their one lacerating pain of an island per person pink coral reef and walk into the sea, or onto the sea and find the star fish and their deadly rays not as enemies but as gentle friends. As friends who need not muster courage or the desire for the day not to visit and reap into one more time.
When eternity is a vessel, like a salt box, like this nameless tavern, and it is all right to be a container of liquor and failed dreams and dreaded sexual encounters that drop weight in the abdomen like ship anchors, five minutes ten, doesn't matter, just let me get through this somehow and then off and running with stumbly legs and heart that just hurts more and more with every breath I take.
But in the world they were trying to enter, some did. All in time would. Their names, or what names they had given themselves or had been given at the end, written on wood crosses over their graves in the churchyard a mile or so up the country gravel road. Then, even, there would not be peace or tranquillity of deed and thought.
There would be no harmony or half hearted singing bits and pieces of the songs from the juke box, where at the moment, the late Jimmy Rogers was singing "Bimbombay" or before him, the late Bobby Darin singing "Beyond the Sea," both about finding harvest home, both about turning that one key in the upcoming tidal wave breasted against and caused by the nameless sea dragon dinosaur of a monster stretching up to the moon, mere feet away from this building, someday, someday, and turning that key and entering a land where there would never be being ever again.
He could hear them now, above the low murmur round the bar and in the booths and at the stove. He could hear the men in the back room, the grunts, the perfunctory sex making, the anger of it that would probably end in fistfights and bloody faces and noses, for it was all of a danger, this place. You never touched anyone in any way without being willing to give up literally parts of your body and pieces of your blood.
The bartender, a burly man with a head the shape of an onion and with an onion's dour expression if it could have one, always had to stop the fights and he did so just as perfunctorily as the way they had started and the way they enticed themselves in not even being interested in fisticuffs.
Tell them to go home, the old man thought. Tell them it's too late at night and there aren't enough arguments in the world to keep it pieced together. That if everyone here would just let go, the world would break and end, falling into bones and splinters and dust as the once Earth blasted away and became nothing at all as it had always been in even a slighter cosmic picture.
Tell them no one is coming to save them, that if a man died on a tree two thousand years ago, he's got his own problems and doesn't need yours. Tell him the multiplication table and how the joists of this table fit together and what can be done to repair the wobbly leg across from where I am sitting. Tell him if that could be fixed, and He can fix anything, can't he?, then the world doesn't have to be blown to flinders.
Then the world doesn't have to be ended so there could be nothing because the blood sickness of not being able to rush, not being able to exhume before death comes knocking and make some sense of it before that fatal rap tap tap, and you can hold onto something, believe in something, if only that dead man on a tree could fix this table leg, then the world would stop being rickety itself.
It would no longer have the need of blowing itself apart because the sad, cold endless lonely of the sex angry smell is enough to gag any thoughts of happiness you would ever care to have.
It didn't matter to anyone here, the crowd here--with a surprising infusing of new young meat, more than you would think--elusive dreaming moths drawn to a pestilence of flame; to be killed piece by piece, by their own songs--pounced on, quivering so-- from seven to three each night, including Sundays, for Sunday especially was when a man needed drinking the most, that the old man owned this place, that he made virtually nothing on it, that his joke was a pointless conceited one, and they really had the joke on him, strangling him, instead of the other way round. And the fights started. The stupid unmeant jealousies.
The stupid hurts that one wanted to inflict and the other wanted to as well and they tried but it was no go in the Noe Show, which was perhaps what he should call this bar. As the bartender sighed and wearily got off his high stool behind the bar and strolled like on a casual walk in the park to the back room. The other customers up front, staring into their glasses, vaguely ashamed at what was happening, and the same things that would happen to them too, soon, listening for the fists to hit flesh and flesh to hit the walls of cheap wood paneling as they stopped talking to hear back there, to extend their wits in one choppy wave that was above the lugubriousness of their drunken bellies and minds. To test the wind and hope for a conclusion of one sort or other that would not come. But it was just mumble, fist slamming, and cursing blood.
The laughter of some of the men at the bar and in the booths, nervously so, when the bartender threw some of the men out of the sex room. Men thrown out in various stages of undress into the wintry night. But tomorrow night they would be back, drunken cogs in a wheel that the gray old man had stolen from them such a long time ago, had lit up with the lace texture circular light of the light house and the cheery carnival colors of the juke box.
As well as the cold surgeon's lights of the vapor lamps, mixed together with the inability to sail the ocean out there, so they tried to sail their own and others' in here, in coalition to the sounds of the john being flushed often because beer especially goes through the system fast. The system that keeps working when the owner doesn't want it to.
That keeps dumbly working until it can take no more of the abuse and then quietly closes down before the sea monster some day arises and produces a massive mountain slab of green black foam huge and close and filled with the spring green fish that substitute for the blades of grass of what used to be, there growing like friendly moss on the mountain waves.
Surrounding a door that is distinct and clear and gold pure like the phoenix that eats at dreams, while the hawk eats at any slight integrity that might be left, a grain or two on a far distant shore.
Blades of grass fish that form thick and tender and young surrounding that door in the front of that mountain of monster ordinated promise, all the glass waters of the world stove up for this, all the water of all the world come to give the out, the entry way, the last miracle you could remember dreaming when you drank your final beer that night before it all happened for real and true.
And provided you with the key to open the door into all the oceans and seas and lakes and streams there ever were or will be, as you fumble the lock and key, fumble badly, slowly, jerkily like in an old silent movie, as the mountain wave waits as long as it can, all that water, vast miles of it, cut into strands on top.
All that water at the top, like knife blades folding closer and closer down to you and you can't get the door open and you have to. You've been practicing for this minute your entire life. A second more. A half second. The key falls out of the lock completely and you bend down, on all that sand and grit, as best you can on sore legs and hurt back for it, and the wave descends, the mountain of green gold knives slashes down at you and the grass of green summer becomes millions of miles of water thrust downward with its cobra mouths eating at you, digging their own knives in you along with all the others. Thrust through and through. Screaming.
The gray old man drank another shot. Then poured himself another. And another man walked blearily, dazzedly, half dressed, of the back room--given up, forgotten, not minding what was done to him ever again--with the bartender in his filthy once white apron walking behind him, smiling.
Appearances after all-- here in the stasis that was a part of the framework of everything that no one will admit is the true core of all reality--and the men in the bar laugh a bit, cheer a bit, but the noise is as gray as the old man and as gray as they are too.
They've seen all this nothing a million times before. The day you realize, far too late, you are hooked in sickness on nothing, is the day hell opens up and mouths have to drink to deluge it, to make it forget what it is. But hell never forgets.
The old man toasted the once stevedore with the barrel chest and the hard muscles now a simply huge load of fat and more fat underneath, attempting to fumble closed his pants and half off shirt, as the bartender shoved him out the door.
To all of us, the gray man said to himself, no one else, downing his rye, knowing he had never had any control over any of this, for this had always been, for all of them, the fate that was meant to be. As the hawk so decreed.