emily brungo
The Hollywood Social Club, Walnut Street, Pittsburgh, PA (circa 1964)
Jerry is the waiter, red jacket, black
tie. He put three kids through college on tips.
Rufus and Bibsy at their usual
table. They order two Manhattans: rocks,
cherries. Her ridiculously large pearl-
cluster ring clanks each time she sips, each time
she brings the glass to her Rosa-Rosa
Estee Lauder’d lips. He’s in a blue suit
to match his eyes. She’s wrapped in gold, her mink
stole. Sinatra croons swingin’ Reprise tunes,
dinner’s the same. Roquefort dressed salads,
two baked potatoes. Buttered, sour cream.
Vegetable of the day (tonight: peas).
New York, New York strip steaks. His rare. Hers well.
He says to her, “There you go, ruining
another perfectly good piece of beef.”
Import Night at The Cage (Murray Ave, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
“Plato wasn’t esoteric,” I say to the table.
The girl to my left nods in agreement and unfolds her full, cherry-tinted lips into a smile, but I wonder if these three kids can see right through me and I know I have no idea what I just said. I’m three-quarters of the way to thoroughly drunk. I say something about existentialism and that gets them going, spouting Philosophy 101 drivel.
But I’m an armchair philosopher, a self-educated man, I’ve read Tolstoy—Shakespeare—hell, I’m the only person I know who’s read Ulysses. I’m a man of the world: like that weekend in Mexico in ’95 at the La Rosa Negra Cigar Bar with the really harsh tequila and the hooker in the back room on the plastic-covered mattress who let me eat the worm out of her navel, or that time I hitchhiked from Pittsburgh to Toronto to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame the day of the SATs.
I was expelled from high school in ’86 for cutting class and wearing ripped jeans and tank tops; my adolescent tufts of underarm hair deemed offensive by the administrative powers that be. My six-year-old son goes to Catholic school like that. Plus a mohawk. The nuns don’t seem to mind. That is, until he starts cutting class and refuting the existence of God, quoting Nietzsche. But now he comes home and tells me Bible stories about the Ark, and Eden, and how Judas betrayed Jesus—like how I betrayed my wife last weekend, on the filthy futon in the apartment of the tattooed waitress who works here, the one with the long, purple dreadlocks and silver chain extending from her right ear to her nose.
The young girl at my table says, “ I went to Catholic school, too.” I think of her in a schoolgirl uniform. Plaid. Plaid. Plaid. Knee socks. I think her name is Natalie. She can’t be more than 19. She’s drinking some obscure Dutch beer I’ve never heard of. I imagine her rouged lips leaving crimson smears around the base of my cock and momentarily forget that I’m 37. I have to stop. I’m leaving after this beer.
Jesus, if I had gone to college, maybe then I’d have some idea of what I’ve been saying for the last two hours. I somehow successfully argue the presence of Marxist themes in the music of Britney Spears to the nodding heads of my table, but I hear the kids in the booth behind me snicker. I look at them: a girl in a thrift shop fur-collared coat, the boy wearing black plastic framed glasses and a faggy scarf. Pretentious film kid fucks; I pray to God my son never gets like that. The girl in the coat, to the boy in the scarf, she yips: “How can you call yourself a film student if you’ve never seen Citizen Kane?” This girl would hate me. I haven’t seen it, either. But I just work at the bookstore where these pompous assholes buy bullshit titles like Avant Garde Minimalism in German Expressionist Cinema of the 1930s.
Suddenly I feel encumbered by my leather jacket and my ponytail. My sideburns have grown tight on my temples. I probably could’ve been a doctor by now. Or an accountant. Or one of those medical supply salesmen, at least. Ok, just one last cigarette. Then I’m gone. I swear. It crosses my mind that I should apologize to my wife. No, not for screwing waitresses or spending late nights at bars or even for insisting we listen to shitty modern rock. I should apologize because now there are two of us—my son and me. “The acorn fucking falls, and never far enough,” I remember my mother saying the day I was expelled from school. And my dad, who always smelled like menthol cigarettes and the mills—at the table it’s my turn to speak. I’ve lost the conversation so I put my had on Natalie’s knee and say, “Hey there Catholic ssschool girl, how boutanudder beer?”
