(Note: Yes, this was once a stand alone short for those five or six people who recognize it–LA)

“Elbows With Fishes”

-1-

Holly More first got drunk at the reasonably late age of eighteen. On a late summer Saturday night in 1977, he dropped in on a pair of college classmates who shared a shithole studio apartment at the base of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The roomies extolled the virtues of “Bokay” apple wine, which sold for sixty-nine cents a bottle. Ritzy nectars such as Boone’s Farm, T.J. Swann and, Allah-forbid, Lancer’s were too fancy-pants pricewise for students who earned $2.10 an hour at Work Study jobs. That left MD 20/20, Night Train, Thunderbird and Bokay. Since the first three were what the Pioneer Square bums drank, the guys went with the Bokay. Holly later found out that Bokay was the wine of last resort amongst the Pioneer Square bums.

“Elbows with fishes,” said one of the guys, named Brandon, as a toast. It was an in-joke taken from an Anthropology prof who always went to great pains to remind his students that all peoples share humble origins. “We’re all just fishes with elbows.” Brandon liked the soul of the phrase better the other way around. It was just something he said–His catchphrase, same sort of thing as his roomie Jerry’s annoying habit of calling other guys “honey” even though in all other words he made his heterosexuality indisputable public knowledge.

The Bokay tasted like gasoline. Holly might have spat it out if that hadn’t been the same moment that the string The Mighty Probe had sent to the Earth hadn’t fixed to his mind and opened a one way link from him to Traveller thirty-two light years away in the direction of Sagettarius. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had rejected the wine. Holly’s DNA made alcoholism a mortal lock. Anyway he kept it down, drank more and “got wasted” as such was marked in the idiom of his society. And although he was not actively aware of the connection, he understood that something wonderful had just happened to him. Holly thought it was the Bokay.

“Holy Jesus, fuckin shit’s awful,” Holly gasped, yet he was already lifting his glass for more.

“You get used to it, honey,” said Jerry.

“Same way the damned get used to hell,” said Brandon. “Elbows with fishes, gentleman. Let’s have some fun.”

And it was fun. Few of life’s pleasures are fun the first time round. Even at last dispensing with one’s virginity is a greater source of worry than it is anything else. But there ain’t nothing like that first hit. Ain’t nothing like watching those legendary doors of perception iris open; ain’t nothing like falling through the looking glass; ain’t nothing like “discovering” a mountain that was already old news to the local Indians back when the world was new.

About three glasses into the night, Holly found himself deeply in love with Farrah Fawcett. He seldom watched television and didn’t know anything about Charlie’s Angels. But he knew beauty when he saw it. And there she was, a radiant goddess in a one piece red bathing suit, smiling like a quasar in what time has judged the greatest cheesecake poster in all human history (“iconic” as said by persons who have no idea what iconic really means). In 1977 that poster was everywhere you found males best described as guys. Couldn’t walk into a wall that didn’t have one. But Holly never paid the poster much mind because Farrah was one of those rare persons too perfect to fantasize about–he figured that his slouchy self esteem would throw up its hands in despair and say “Yeah, right” if he dared to “invite” someone like Farrah Fawcett to his mental theatre. Yet the strengthening Bokay urged Holly to look into it.

There was nothing, or at least little, sexual about this. Although that might prompt the “Yeah, right” response from the reader, it was true. Both Farrah and Holly had amethyst eyes, the sort you find in a Siamese cat. Her paper and print eyes met Holly’s and he fell into a memory. He was very young in the memory; he’d just once again awakened from the dream in which there was no anxiety, no pre-schizophrenic mother making oatmeal in the kitchen, no cramps in his belly caused by an urgent need to pee. Although he had had the dream countless times between ages six and eleven, he could never remember it. But he knew every time it had again happened due to the great emptiness he felt upon its departure and his unhappy return to an existence that was harshly over-lighted, mindlessly noisy and seemingly dedicated to tending to one little pain just to immediately contract another. Something in this woman’s eyes spoke of that dream; he could almost remember… “something from ahead–a memory from tomorrow…”

But fucking Jerry clumsily killed off Holly’s musing. “You’re sweety’s nippin’, honey,” he said, filling Holly’s glass. “I’d do her the favor in a pinch, but I’m partial to brunettes,” he added, motioning at a poster of comely Linda Ronstadt in a cub scout’s uniform. Beside her, Stevie Nicks was lying flat on her stomach atop a corvette.

“Had a dyke sociology major come by once to borrow a book,” Brandon chimed in. “Called us chauvinistic swine–you know, the typical hairy-pit patter, after she got a load of the posters. Told her these girls posed for these of their own free will and for a pretty penny to boot, no doubt. Told her I thought that none of them were dumb enough to think that they were agreeing to do something that was going to hang in the fucking Lourve.”

Holly had wanted to punch Jerry for the interruption, but he wasn’t a fighter. And just prior to taking the tipping point swallow of wine, after which such things didn’t matter anymore, he wondered what in hell possessed him to drop in on these guys. When Holly was five, his father did the old “going to the store for a pack of butts” routine and hadn’t been seen (or missed) since. Holly grew up without a male presence in his life, which had been far from unusual in the neighborhood he grew up. Maybe he didn’t hate men as much as he always felt uncomfortable around them–even “guys” like these two, who were men in only the technical sense. Holly wasn’t gay–far from, but his only real friends were female. The best friend he’d have for life often told him “You’re a lesbian trapped inside a man’s body.” He used to think that was a joke, but in time he had to wonder.

As life needs death to give it meaning, Saturday Night needs the same from Sunday Morning.

-2-

Holly woke the next morning still seated in a beanbag chair which had begun to spin sometime after midnight. There was this nasty dampness which spread from the crotch of his jeans to his lap. He’d either peed his pants for the first time since he was a baby or had vomited pure alcohol on himself in his sleep. Holly found the vomit theory the least disgusting of the two, so he went with it, even though he did not need to urinate.

Few things are more forgiving than a healthy eighteen-year-old body. Alas, few things need forgiveness more than Bokay fortified apple wine–as well as the decision to willingly imbibe it. It’s called intoxication for a sound reason. Regardless, Holly’s eighteen-yearishness had already shrugged off most of the poison whilst he slept, and he’d be rid of the lingering after effects much the same way the summer sun dismisses fog well before noon. Yet there was something else, a purity of pain which clung to his mind and stayed on longer, a hushed indescribable sadness; a prophecy unveiled.

A grotesque yellow light shone through holes in the drawn shades. It made everything it touched ugly and infected. Jerry was snoring face down on a rescue sofa held together by stains and stenches. Brandon was either dead or passed out in a lawn chair across the room. So moveless had Brandon been that an unsmoked cigarette which had ashed from tip to filter was in his hand. The ash curled slightly forward at the top, yet held steady. They say in baseball you’ll see something in every game that you’ve never seen before. The same can be said about the world of drunkenness: Although Holly never smoked (which placed him in a tiny minority), he remembered that ashed cigarette for life, and not once did the trick ever repeat itself.

And that ruthless yellow light peered into Holly’s memory of the night before. That was, and always would be, the worst part. Even after years of experience tantamount to worldliness accumulated in his being, he never got over a drunk’s tendency for the astonishingly casual spilling of dark secrets. On that first Saturday Night, he had spoken freely of his mother’s suicide to guys whose names he had a hard time keeping straight–an off-limits topic he steadfastly avoided sharing with the few people he’d loved for life. What felt like freedom, had in fact been a cheap escape, fool’s gold put to words and music. And those tears he had shed were just a part of the act; tears that were dishonest and shameful accomplices in a naked grasp for attention. In time Holly came to embrace Fitzgerald’s definition of dissipation: “the act of turning something into nothing.”

Holly rose and tied the windbreaker he had worn the night before around his waist to conceal the stain. Before going, he approached the Farrah Fawcett poster that had almost revealed the only secret worth knowing just a few hours before. She remained every inch smiling perfection–so flawless that it somehow detracted from her perfection. Yet her eyes still spoke to him, this time not of was and when, but of a strangely attractive disquiet within; a certain philosophy that had patiently waited until conditions were met. Holly understood. Despite the gray ugliness of the morning he liked the way Bokay made him feel.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he whispered, gently tapping Farrah’s forehead. “Elbows with fishes.”

And at a point much farther away than the wildest rovings of the foot-freest of angels, someone listened and understood.

End Chapter Three