Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas Read online

  Whats their economic base? asks Ann Louise. I dont think theres very much there.

  And you say, Mr. Diamond doesnt strike me as a man on the prowl for a foreign market play. He looks more like a biker, like a … like some kind of wild … musician or something. Try as you might, you cannot say the word musician without thinking of your father-but that is a separate issue.

  Ann Louise smiles indulgently. She is on the verge of responding, when a wave of noisy excitement rolls over the establishment. The crowd starts to mill, individuals pivoting first one way and then the next, as if a famous movie star were about to enter the room naked, but nobody is sure through which door. The looks on some faces, however, suggest they expect an armed terrorist instead of a celebrity. Obviously, a rumor is loose in the room, running amok, goosing people, biting their ankles. The hubbub mounts, then, in an ever softening smorzando, peels away like sonar panty hose when an elderly man, a senior vice-president at Merrill Lynch, climbs precariously atop a table and croaks the announcement, in a hoarse old voice, that the Nikkei has opened sharply lower, yet not as low as many had feared, and that it shows signs of stabilizing.

  There are scattered cheers, there is cautious applause. Then everyone begins to speculate at once. Your meal arrives, and you are ready to masticate your initial hesitant forkful of meat, only to have your jaw muscles lock when you overhear someone at an adjacent table remark, Ill tell you why I think the Nikkeis holding. I think its because of Dr. Yamaguchi.

  SIX-TEN P.M.

  By the time you have finished eating, there have been two more flashes from Tokyo. The earlier of these has the Japanese index pissing off a pier. News of this downward trajectory is greeted with resignation if not fatalism at the Bull&Bear. A subsequent report that the Nikkei has turned upward again is met, depending upon an individuals temperament, either with optimism or disbelief.

  Not knowing how to react, you order a glass of port, just to keep some sugar in your tank, and repositioning your chair, join Ann Louise in her scrutiny of Larry Diamond. Is that what happens to brokers who get the ax? you ask. Am I going to end up a bum like that in a few more years?

  It is a rhetorical question, but Phil responds. Larry was some kind of genius, he says quietly. Ann Louise nods, looks at you, and smiles.

  Well, excu-uuu-se me! you say to yourself. But you regard the genius with a bit more care. What did he intend when he said the fun was just beginning? For that matter, what did Sol mean when he said the fun had stopped? As far as you are concerned, the real fun stopped back in the eighties. Before your time. In those days, somebody in your position could earn major money. Jumbo money. You read about it, dreamed about it, all through college. How typical of your luck that when you finally arrived in a position to poach your golden eggs, the goose had a hysterectomy. Seems as though the day you got your license, Americas economy started to unravel. Well, if it can unravel it can reravel. Right? No, you vaguely recall you heard somewhere that unravel and ravel mean the same damn thing. In that case, you dont have a Chinamans chance. Or, to be more precise, a Filipinas chance. Ah, but, Gwen, that wont do, either. If you refuse to acknowledge your race, how can you blame your misfortunes on it?

  Rather drunkenly, you contemplate the bad sign under which, you are sure, you were brought forth. Although self-pity usually annoys you, you are mainlining a veterinary-sized syringe of it when it registers on you that Larry Diamond has left his station at the bar and is shuffling toward your table. How disgusting, you think. He even walks like a derelict.

  Hows it going, Larry? asks Phil.

  Mr. Diamond, I presume, gushes Ann Louise. Suddenly, she is as bright as the tip of her little cigar.

  Mr. Diamond ignores them both. He just stands there for a while, shuffling in place, looking as loose as the collar around the neck of eternity. Then, he says to you, Ill wager you and I have something in common.

  Oh, I doubt that, you say. I havent been canned-yet.

  His grin is alarming in that it is simultaneously violent and generous, antagonistic and admiring. His red eyes, which resemble Spanish peanuts, dance demoniacally as they look you up and down.

  I didnt come over here to talk shop, he says. Then, still grinning, he nods toward the spot where your dinner plate recently sat. I ate asparagus, too, he confides. Do you realize that for the next five hours, our urine is going to smell exactly alike?

  SIXTHIRTY P.M.

  At least the weather is nice. Seattles winter rains-which usually follow hard upon the fungus-infected, blackberry-stained, spectacularly mildewed heels of its autumn rains-had petered out the previous week, and with each passing day, the sky seems to be getting lighter and higher, as if the sky has come unmoored and is drifting away from Earth: the Chicken Little syndrome in reverse. It is said that in the crash of 29, the sky was dark with the falling bodies of erstwhile millionaires who had thrown themselves out of windows, but this evening when you look up, not so much as the button off a Brooks Brothers suit lands on your pretty face.

  And, yes, Gwendolyn, you are pretty, a fact that periodically irks you because it can lead to encounters such as the one that has caused you to flee the Bull&Bear. Of course, youve never attracted an admirer quite so vile as Larry Diamond before. After Diamonds perverse remark, which Ann Louise and Phil found surprisingly amusing, you grabbed your purse, arose with as much dignity as you could muster, blushing all the while, and attempted to stalk off to the powder room. He blocked your path. Perhaps he wished to apologize but you didnt give him a chance. Out of my way, Bozo, you said.

  Now, you intended to speak coldly, and with good reason. On the other hand, how much frigidity can be conveyed by a voice that seems to have been designed to incubate baby bluebirds? Yet, Diamond reacted as if you had both slapped his cheek and handed him the key to the treasure. His leer folded faster than a lawn-sprinkling service in Bangladesh, and his wickedly glinting eyes became abruptly sober, suspicious, imploring. Do you mean, he asked softly, Bozo as in tribe or Bozo as in clown?

  You couldnt answer. For some reason, he scared you more now than when he was acting lecherous. You stood there dumbfounded until he seized you roughly by your shoulders and stuck his stubbly face into yours. You had thought, from his appearance, that he would reek, but when you gasped, involuntarily sucking in his aroma, you discovered that he smelled metallic and sugary, rather like a tin of fruit cocktail. Did that reassure you? Not in any way. He was shaking you gently. Bozo tribe or Bozo clown?

  Clown, you blurted, fully expecting him to pay back the insult by causing you bodily harm. However, with a disappointed little smile, he released you instantly and stepped aside so that you might proceed. And proceed you did, on wobbly knees, to the front door and through it to the street. Where now you stand, letting the mild April breeze blow your hair and skirt about, while you watch the sky float off beyond the stars.

  SIX-FORTY P.M.

  Wisely, you elect not to drive your car. You still owe thirty grand on that Porsche, and with your current streak of luck, you definitely could count on bashing it against something inflexible-and collecting a DWI citation into the bargain. The Virginia Inn is within walking distance, but after a thorough survey of your surroundings, you decide that pedestrianism also is out of the question.

  Downtown Seattle has come to resemble the slums of Calcutta, so dense is its population of beggars, vagabonds, hustlers, buskers, maniacs, thugs, winos, addicts, and the physically and mentally impaired. Now that the rains have ceased, they have staggered, crawled, hobbled, or strutted from doorways, overpasses, condemned buildings, sewers, and vacant lots into the finest streets of the city. There they hawk their merchandise, play their accordions, and petition, vocally or via cardboard sign, for alms, alms, alms.

  Some of these wretched creatures are threatening, others merely pitiful. For example, the family sitting in a semicircle in front of a cheese shop: Papa Panhandler, Mama Panhandler, Junior Panhandler, and Baby Panhandler, festooned in rags, twinkling with snot, squa
tting there weathered and sore, yet hopeful; waiting for the Good Samaritan (church-sponsored or governmental) who, they firmly believe, will show up sooner or later to sponge their brows and buy them a color TV. In your favor, Gwendolyn, you entertain a flicker of compassion. Largely, however, it is bewilderment you feel. Whats the matter with these people? you ask yourself. How did they let themselves get in this fix? Where are their tidy cottages, where are their cute farms? Where, oh where, has all the money gone?

  The money. The lovely money. Q-Jo contends that it is your grasping for material wealth that has caused twenty-three gray hairs (she counted them) to sprout on your black Filipina crown-but you know it isnt so: it is the Welsh blood from your mothers side of the family that is to blame. Anyway, there is no grasping on your part, no vulgar greed. Rather, it is a biological drive. Thats right. Pushing thirty, you hear the clock ticking. Only it is not babies you want to make, its cash. You long to swell up with a pregnancy of moola and expel silver dollars like a slot machine.

  Alas, the money is going away. It is leaving America as fast as its stubby green legs will carry it. America, who loved it so dearly. It has already left the lazy and the stupid-and now it is leaving you. You are heartsick about it, and youll be damned if you will give Baby Panhandler that five spot you have semi-drunkenly, semi-guiltily pulled from your purse. Hey, folks! Youve got financial problems, too. Have you ever! At least these people dont have Porsche payments and a condo mortgage to worry about.

  Before you reach the taxi stand on the corner, however, you give the five-dollar bill away. You give it to a decrepit old geezer whose beard is like a shock of hazardous asbestos blowing in the wind. The gentleman has a placard around his neck. Grotesquely lettered, the sign reads, MANY THINGS ARE DESTROYING ME. With that, you can identify.

  SIX-FIFTY P.M.

  The cabbie who picks you up sports a Jamaican do, having wasted untold productive hours teasing and rolling his hair until it looks like an infestation of elongated woolly worms. Worse, he smells like your dad. Which is to say, he stinks of freshly burnt marijuana. Jesus! Why you? What is there about you that attracts such people? Well, you suppose that if one is indiscreet enough to rendezvous with Q-Jo Huffington, it is only fitting that ones transport to that rendezvous be weirdness on wheels.

  Briefly, you consider ordering the driver to carry you directly to Belford Dunns, but you realize in time that it is the gin working in your glands that is responsible for this annoying urge. There was a year in which you drank a fair amount of scotch, in hopes that you would develop a nice, low whiskey voice. Alas, you learned that hard liquor arouses you sexually, so you switched, naturally, back to white wine. Better squeaky than horny. Driver!

  Yes, sistah?

  Oh, never mind. In any case, Belford would be otherwise occupied with the location and repatriation of a backsliding primate.

  The cabbie, who, despite his Caribbean accent, speaks better English than the average American fraternity boy, begins to talk to you about Rastafarianism. Just to be polite, you ask him how come Haile Selassie, a modern-day but quite dead Ethiopian emperor, for goodness sake, came to be regarded by the Rastas as their high priest and principal saint? He explains that once upon a time-he thinks it was in the fifties-Jamaica was experiencing a devastating drought. People couldnt remember when they had last seen a raindrop. Then, Selassie flew to Jamaica on a state visit. The instant his plane touched down, there was an unexpected cloudburst. And it rained every second Haile Selassie was in the country. It poured for three straight days. And when his plane took off again, it stopped. There you have it, sistah.

  All you can do is shake your head. Good grief! you think. Guy has a bad vacation, and they found a religion on it! You shake your head some more. The twenty-three gray hairs shake with it.

  Indeed, Gwendolyn, it is a very strange world. And its getting stranger by the minute.

  NINE P.M.

  It is night now, no longer evening but fully night, as in black as, if not precisely dead of. Evening usually has the afternoon hanging on its coattails, has actual flecks of daylight clinging like lint to its lapels, but night is solitary, aloof, uncompromised, extreme. The safe margins of the day, still faintly visible during eventide, have been erased by nights dense gum, obscured by its wash of squid squirtings, pajama sauce, and the blue honey manufactured by moths. Is the night a mask, or is day merely nights prim disguise? Most of us are born in the night, and by night most will die. Night, when tangos play on the nurses radio and rat poison sings its own hot song behind the cellar door. Night, when the long snake feeds, when the black sedan cruises the pleasure districts, when neon flickers Free at Last in a dozen lost languages, and shapes left over from childhood move furtively behind the moon-dizzy boughs of the fir.

  It is the night of the alleged worst day of your life. Have things gotten any better? Not appreciably. While the American eagle flops like a headless chicken in the stock exchanges of the Orient, panicking the traders with a globby shower of blood, you hold your girlish breath, cross your fingers-and watch Q-Jo Huffington devour pork chops as if pork chops were about to follow money down the road out of Dodge.

  You are seated in a padded plastic booth at the Dog House, a downscale restaurant whose motto is We Never Close, a declaration whose truthfulness is reflected in the weary pantomimes of the waitresses, some who appear to have been on duty around-the-clock since the restaurant opened for business in 1934. For the most part, the Dog House caters to an aging blue-collar clientele, although in the cracked hours after midnight, it is heavily infiltrated by the more extreme elements of the youth culture: by punks and bassers, grungettes and metalheads, thrashers and ninja boys, and by slumming high-school thrill-seekers from Mercer Island, Hunts Point, and other ritzy suburbs. Battle-hardened waitresses keep the kids in line, but you are relieved that the hour is still early and the diners less disturbing than dEclassE. Which is not to imply that you are anything but annoyed to be here.

  When Q-Jo named the Dog House as her dinner destination, you assumed it was a joke, a silly pun relating to the fact that so many people in the Virginia Inn were barking. Yes, barking! There they were, Seattles poets, painters, musicians, and filmmakers; people whom one would guess might be cultured and sophisticated; but were they discussing Gaodel, Escher, or Bach; were they casting a particularly illuminating light upon the stock-market crash, relating it to McLuhanian technology theory or The Fall of the House of Usher? Maybe they were at that. One hardly could account for every nuance of every conversation in the tavern, especially with the recorded music of African-American bluesmen being played at a volume that would have prompted those old Negroes to drop their homemade guitars and run into the forest with their hands over their ears. In fairness, there might have been at any given table intellectual speculation of invigorating quality. All you know is that you failed to hear the words Dow Jones, deutsche mark, or Michel Foucault pass through any lips-but you did hear an inordinate amount of barking.

  And when some bespectacled gallery poof, all certifiably hip beneath his crimson beret, would let loose a little bark, many around him would join in. Then, and this was the oddest part, everybody would beam in a bemused fashion, as if they were delighted yet did not understand in the least the source of their delight. Good grief! Was this some new fad? When you queried Q-Jo about it, she shrugged and said, Oh, Dr. Yamaguchi, and brought up the Dog House.

  Naturally, you kept expecting hidden connections to assert themselves. In time, and quite synchronistically, they would. But for the present, it was a matter of pork chops.

  Gwendolyn, you went ahead and ate without me, you thoughtless bourgeois bitch. Now, you gotta step aside and watch the big dog eat.

  It is something to see, all right. Q-Jo glides into the platter of pork chops like a killer whale nosing into a school of salmon; smoothly but deadly, taking a bite out of first one chop and then another in turn, chop by chop; leaving them maimed, unable to flee; then circling back to finish them off, one
at a time, fat and all; finally sucking every last droplet of gravy from the bones so that what remains is clean and white and polished, like markers in a Chinese board game.

  And when you leave the table to use the telephone, she orders a second platter.

  The bathroom scale does not exist that can instrumentally accommodate the poundage of Q-Jo Huffington. She pegs the needle at its furthest reach and would have to transfer to a commercial scale to determine precisely how far beyond the three-hundred-pound barrier-set by mechanical limitations and public decency-her weight has actually wandered. As for her cholesterol level, it is not in four figures but very nearly. Moreover, she smokes at a ruinous rate cigarettes that she rolls herself from black, coarse, sinister-looking shreds of Indonesian tobacco; smokes them at a pace that leaves you woozy and wondering if differences other than volume exist between her lungs and the tar pits of the Mesozoic.

  One would presume that a woman as sensitive and aware as Q-Jo, a woman whose precognitive abilities are so convincing that they have made a believer of a skeptic as skeptical as you; one would suppose that such a woman-a professional tarot reader, for goodness sake-would take a special interest in nutrition and good health. And she does, as long as it is the health of others. She denies, however, that either altruism or hypocrisy is involved. True, she is a giving person, and eating is one way of getting something back, a way for her to be nourished in return; but there is more to it than that. I smoke and eat so that I dont fly away, she explains, meaning mentally fly away, although you picture her bulk hovering over the city like the Goodyear blimp. When youre on the astral plain as much as I am, you need food and tobacco to bring you back into your body. For me, theyre a grounding device. They are also protection. Apparently, Q-Jo is an emotional sponge, a walking psychic antenna who, even as she rips pork chops asunder, has to struggle to block the unconscious transmissions of fellow Dog House diners from her screen. Obesity affords her a measure of insulation, an extra layer with which to reduce her vulnerability. Tucked away in a sanctuary of fat, her psyche does not feel quite so exposed.