blues shouter coming through the bar’s speakers. The door closed, and the laughter died.
Weiner looked over at Constantine. “Hope you don’t mind me staying with you. I would of been a fifth wheel in that group.”
“I don’t mind,” Constantine said.
Weiner looked around the room, touched his beret. “You want another drink?”
“Yeah,” Constantine said. “One more.”
Chapter 13
Constantine and Weiner killed another round, then got up to leave. Constantine paid the tab and pinned a damp ten under his rocks glass for the busboy. The busboy chin-nodded Constantine as he walked with Weiner from the room.
On the landing, Constantine stepped aside as the big cop walked toward the head. The cop gave him a jittery, unfocused look on the pass. Constantine did not look him in the eye.
Constantine dropped quarters into the cigarette machine that stood on the landing, took his Marlboros from the long slot that ran along the bottom of the machine. He grabbed a blue book of D.C. Vending matches off the top of the machine and stuffed them into his jeans, pushing on the front door. He caught the toe of his shoe on the sidewalk as he walked out, stumbled, and stopped clumsily next to Weiner, who was standing on the edge of the street.
“You all right?” Weiner said.
“Yeah,” Constantine said, realizing then that he was irreparably drunk. “Where we goin’?”
“Across town for a quick stop,” Weiner said, motioning for a cab that was approaching from two blocks away.
“I don’t need any more to drink.”
“Neither do I,” Weiner said, as the cab stopped at the curb. “Come on.”
A soft-spoken young Arab drove them into Northwest. Constantine stared out the window, tried to focus on the buildings. At a stoplight, he saw a shadow of a man walk into the blackness of a storefront, his head down, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. Constantine looked at his watch, tried to focus on it in the darkness of the backseat. He could see only that the hour hand tilted to the right of midnight.
At Weiner’s direction, the cab stopped on a corner of 9th Street. Weiner paid the man-Constantine did not know how the man had arrived at a figure, as there was no meter in the cab-and the two of them got out.
Constantine could see some club action on F Street, the lettered block that ran to 9th. A group of kids stood halfway down the block, most of them smoking, leaning against the gated front of a shoe store. They wore flannel shirts, all of them; it looked to Constantine as if the boots they wore on their feet were the same style as those he had worn in the marines. One of them yelled something at him, and the rest of them laughed. Constantine wished he were with them-he wanted to laugh too. Weiner tugged on Constantine’s shirt, and Constantine followed Weiner down the block.
They crossed to the east side of 9th, walked a half block down, to a group of businesses lit by yellow blinking globes. Constantine recognized these businesses as porno shops. Somewhere in this area Constantine and his friends had come one night as teenagers to check out the strip clubs, the tail end of an already dead downtown burlesque scene. His first experience had been at the Gold Rush, then at the Silver Slipper, where he had eagerly sat at the table nearest the stage as an aging transvestite lisped the introduction-“Welcome to the fabulous… fabulous… Silver Slipper”-and where he had been promptly thrown out after refusing to buy the minimum amount of watered-down drinks. Later that evening he had paid for some head in a place called Benny’s Rebel Room, twenty- five dollars for a sensationless squirt. He supposed that these places, like most of the places he had known as a youth, were gone.
Weiner entered a door under a white sign that read FUN PALACE. Constantine followed. Inside, the fluorescent light and cigarette smoke burned his eyes. Two dour Salvadorans stood behind the counter, casually examining their new customers. Constantine walked behind Weiner past the product aisles, through a corridor lined on both sides with books and magazines, to an area where men stood silently, waiting to enter curtained booths alternately marked RED SYSTEM and BLUE SYSTEM.
Weiner took a spot behind a man wearing a red, black, and green knit cap on his head, and folded his hands below his waist. Constantine stood at the back of another two-man line, next to Weiner.
“What’s the system?” Constantine said to Weiner.
“I don’t know,” Weiner said. “You got quarters?”
“Yeah,” Constantine said, reaching into his pocket. “I think I got some quarters.”
Weiner’s number came up first. Constantine watched him throw back the curtain on a blue-system booth and slip inside. A little while later a dead-eyed man walked out of a red-system booth, and Constantine took his place.
In the booth, Constantine dropped two quarters into the slot next to a television set in the wall. Dried, tear- like lines of jism ran down the screen of the television.
The quarters dropped and a picture came on the set: group action on a waterbed set to wah-wah pedaled, cheesy background music, three women and a man, the usual cluster-fuck. One of the women, a terribly skinny coke whore, moved aggressively, her mouth self-consciously frozen in an O. Watching the acne on her back, Constantine felt a brief wave of nausea. He could smell the alcohol coming through his own pores, and the stench of cigarette smoke on his clothes and in his hair. The film loop ended as quickly as it had begun, and Constantine walked unsteadily from the booth.
He bumped into a man who was pushing by to get in the booth. Neither he nor the man acknowledged the contact. Constantine moved to the product wall, saw some blunt rubber instruments called “butt plugs,” scanned the wall further, saw some sealed replicas of penises redundantly labeled COCKS, and further still, COCKS, WITH BALLS! Finally he studied a group of suspended rubber penises that had been arranged by size, culminating in a three-foot member capped on both ends by fist-sized heads. Constantine wondered passively, what could anyone do with that? A case of one’s eyes, he decided, exceeding one’s stomach. He plucked a latex vagina off the wall and held it absently in his hand.
“Constantine,” Weiner said, behind his back, “come over here.”
Constantine replaced the vagina on a metal hanger and moved over to the magazine section, where Weiner held a cellophane-wrapped publication in his hand.
Weiner handed Constantine the magazine. “See anything funny about this?”
Constantine looked at the title of the mag: A Man and a Woman. His first thought was that the magazine was oddly named, as only one person stood posing on the cover. But his eyes traveled down, past the wig and lipstick and the perky brown breasts, down to the crotch, where he suddenly understood. This was a man- and a woman.
“Who do you suppose,” Constantine said, “gets off on this?”
“Other he-shes, I guess,” Weiner said, with a shrug. “How was your flick?”
“A daisy chain,” Constantine said, “on a bed.”
Weiner said, “Same as mine. I thought for a minute, you know, that the red system had different movies from the blue.”
“Can we go now?”
Weiner touched his beret. “Sure, let’s go.”
Weiner stopped at the front counter before leaving the shop. He called one of the clerks over with a curl of his finger. The clerk got off his stool and walked tiredly to the counter.
“Quandes el difference,” Weiner asked, “donde el systemo rojo y el systemo azur?”
The clerk looked back at his coworker, shook his head slowly, leaned over the counter, and stared at Weiner. It was a while before Weiner realized that the man was not going to speak.
“Thank you,” Weiner said to the clerks. “You gentlemen have a nice evening.”
Constantine drifted in and out of consciousness as the cab drove north on Georgia Avenue, the damp air from the open window blowing pleasantly against his face. He awoke several times to Weiner’s voice, to the sudden stop
