A Firing Offense

SEVEN




THE THREE OF us were in the front seat of my Dodge and heading downtown. McGinnes had slithered into Mr. Liquor and had emerged, mercifully, with only a six of domestic that we were now trying to kill before we reached the club.

“Drink up,” McGinnes explained, as Lee elbowed my ribs. “The way the prices are in these places now, you’ve got to catch a buzz before you go in.”

I started to push a tape into the deck, but Tom T. was on HFS and launching into a propulsive set that was kicked off by Camper Van Beethoven’s reggae-fueled “One of These Days.” I let that ride.

We cut down Cathedral into the park, then took Pennsylvania Avenue across town. As we passed the White House, McGinnes reached across Lee and blasted the horn on the steering wheel, raising his beer to toast the protesters squatting in Lafayette Park.

In the area of the National Theater I hung a left and drove around the block a couple of times looking for a space. Between the revitalized Willard and the Shops there was plenty of nighttime congestion in this area now. I ignored McGinnes’ repeated shouts, over the wailing sax solo in the Cure’s “A Night Like This,” to park illegally, and eventually found a spot.

Lee and I crossed the street and looked back to see McGinnes standing in the middle of the road, his head fully tilted back, his small belly protruding, as he shotgunned the remainder of his beer. A carload of kids honked as they drove by, and McGinnes held out his empty so that they could see the label, then met us on the sidewalk.

There was no midweek line on the polished stone steps of the Corps. A pumped-up guy in a muscle shirt with a blond mass of hair that had been plastered up to resemble a slab of cake opened the door and blocked our way. The thud of heavy bass came out with him.

“Five dollars,” he said coldly, with a fashionably down-under accent. I had loosened my tie and was wearing black pleated trousers with a blue oxford. Lee, of course, looked fine, but when the doorman got a look at McGinnes, polyestered to the nines and swaying on the steps with unfocused eyes, he seemed to regret asking us in.

“We’re with the band, mate, ” McGinnes said.

“There is no band, mate. Five dollars.”

We paid the cover and entered. I noticed the doorman signal another muscleboy next to the bar, pointing in particular to McGinnes, who was already pushing through the crowd to get to one of the several bars around the dance floor. The DJ was blasting some anonymous House music, and the air was very warm and damp.

Little had been done to the club since it had been converted from an old bank, a stately blend of marble and brass. As a child, I had come here with my grandfather, stepping on the shiny floor with deliberate force to produce a cavernous echo that would raise the heads of the elderly, wool-suited tellers. Now it was one of those trendy “new wave” clubs that had sprouted up in this part of town, and in Adams Morgan and around Dupont Circle, but was in fact less new wave than seventies disco.

We had seen this coming in the early eighties, when Devo had a Top Forty novelty hit with “Whip It,” when major labels began scrambling to sign any groups wearing skinny ties and funny haircuts. About this time the Angry Young Men, originals like Costello and Graham Parker, were eclipsed by no-talent fops like Duran Duran and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. We began to realize that those early years, of the punk and new wave emergence, of rediscovering ska and dance music, of separation and alienation from all the youth movements that came before us, were over.

The result was clubs like the Corps (an utterly false play on the term hardcore), where Reagan youth, wealthy AU and GW students, and gold-chained, coke-carrying sons of diplomats came to party. These “struggling” students got their forty dollar “punk” haircuts, paid the seven dollar cover, drank five dollar, sugar-filled, lime-necked beers, and danced to the new wave beat.

I looked at them on the dance floor, enshrouded by the smoke of dry ice, while New Order pumped through the speakers. They were perfectly coiffed, with their predominately black with-a-touch-of-white uniforms, fashionably bored looks on their blankly androgynous faces. I turned to the bar for a beer.

When I caught her eye, a woman stepped into a light that was spotted up, which accentuated her thick, white makeup and black hair. She had a tight cocaine smile and lifeless eyes. It seemed a struggle for her to unglue her lips.

“What can I get you?” she asked, wiping in front of me with a bar rag.

“I’ll take a Bud.”

She produced one and uncapped it with an opener that was attached to the cooler with fishing line. She reached for a glass but replaced it as I waved it away. I grabbed the beer by the neck, had a long pull, and bent over the bar. She leaned her ear in towards my mouth.

“Joe Martinson still work here?” I asked.

“He’s working the upstairs bar,” she said, too loudly.

“How much for the beer?”

She held up three fingers. I tossed four on the bar and made my way around the dance floor to the regally wide marble staircase leading to a balcony that surrounded the entire club. Young coeds with loose coat-of-arms sweaters passed me as I walked up, descending the stairs slowly and unemotionally like drugged debutantes.

I found Martinson behind a barely lit bar in the corner, doing what was probably a placebo shooter with three cute college-age girls. They laid down a ten and walked away. I stepped up to the bar.

I’d got to know Joe Martinson when he was a bartender at a wild, short-lived, tiny dance bar near Chinatown aptly called the Crawlspace. At the time his trademark was cotton oxford shirts, the sleeves of which he tore off and fashioned as headbands. The bar was always sweatsoaked and to capacity with drunks, and opened at about the time that slam-dancing had a brief run of popularity in D.C. The slamming eventually closed it down, when some Potomac preppies came in for “the experience,” walked out with bloody noses, and sued the owners. But for one hot, lunatic summer, that had been the place to go.

“Nick,” he said, and shook my hand. He was wearing black pants with a tuxedo shirt and a black bow tie. Though working out had heavied him up in the chest and shoulder department, he looked less tough than in his earlier, wiry incarnation. “What are you doing here?”

“I should be asking you that, Joe.”

“A bar is a bar,” he said, “and anyway, that scene is over with. I wouldn’t fit in if it were happening.”

“Yeah, but this place?”

“If I remember right, you were some kind of art major in college, Nick. I’ve seen your ads in the Post, and let me tell you, you cut out pictures of television sets very artistically.” We laughed uneasily.

“How about a shot,” I said, “and pour one for yourself.”

“Sure, Nick,” he said, and looked at me as if I didn’t need one. I looked over the railing to one of the bars near the dance floor. McGinnes was standing very close to a girl twenty years his junior, talking to her with his mouth very nearly on her ear. Her companion, a pretty young blond boy with a wedge haircut wearing a white mock turtleneck, was standing on the other side of her gripping a beer bottle, angry but timid nonetheless.

Joe Martinson pushed a shot glass towards me and picked up his own. I looked in my glass and then up at him.

“Bourbon,” he said.

“Rail?”

He frowned an of-course-not and said, “Grand-Dad.”

We did the shots, and I finished my beer before placing the glass back on the bar. A couple walked by me, whispered to each other, and chuckled. Martinson slid a fresh Bud in front of me and I took it by the neck.

They were playing some Pet Shop Boys now and the dance floor was packing up. Lee was with a group of friends at one corner of the floor, pointing up at me and smiling. I raised my beer to them, and one of them laughed and said something to Lee, who winked at me, then turned back to her friends.

I fished the photographs out of my jacket pocket and put the graduation picture on the bar, pushing it towards Joe Martinson.

“You recognize this guy?” I asked.

“No,” he said without thought.

“How about this one?” I placed the doctored, bald-pated photo of Jimmy Broda on the bar. He looked it over and shook his head.

“I don’t know him. What’s his story?”

“A runaway I’m trying to locate. I think he’s hanging with skinheads. Thought you might have seen him.”

“Not in this place. They don’t even let those guys through the door anymore, after they came in one night and pushed some gays around. That was one time I took the side of the bouncers here.”

“Where would they hang out?”

“Depending on who’s playing, either the Snake Pit or maybe the Knight’s Work on Eleventh, in Southeast. But they’ve pretty much stopped going to the Knight’s Work—the Marines down there were kicking the living shit out of those guys on a regular basis.”

“You know any names, people I should be talking to?”

“Not a one, Nick.”

I put the photos in my jacket and looked back over the railing at the floor below. I noticed some movement from the right side of the room. A bouncer was pushing through the crowd, heading for the main bar. The DJ had begun spinning the twelve-inch version of Big Audio Dynamite’s “Hollywood Boulevard.”

I looked to the center of the bar. McGinnes had his hands on the blond boy’s chest, bunching up his turtleneck and breathing right up in the kid’s face. Martinson yelled something to my back as I moved towards the steps.

The stairs were a blur. I was on the dance floor, the strobe light stylizing the rapidly scattering partners as it synchronized its patterns with the song’s drum machine.

I was vaguely aware of large bodies converging from the left and right, and as the crowd parted, I saw the redfaced blond boy, unhurt and on his ass. McGinnes had turned back to the bar to resume his drinking.

A big guy with something like an ax handle in his upraised fist brushed by me and moved for McGinnes’ back. I swept him with my right foot, and he went down to his knees, dropping the weapon as he fell.

I was grabbed almost immediately from behind in a bear hug. McGinnes had turned and realized what was happening, an apologetic look on his drunken face, accompained by a slightly sad grin that told me what was inevitably going to go down next. Nevertheless, even as he sensed another bouncer approaching him from behind, McGinnes futilely lunged for the steroid boy whose arms were around me.

McGinnes was dropped with a kidney-shot before he could get near me. The one I had tripped was up and walking towards me, a tight sneer on his chiseled, Aryan face.

I thought, as he took a wide stance and drew back his fist, how easy it would have been to drop him with a front kick square in the balls. But in those few protracted seconds I had decided that there was no way out of the club that night without being pummeled, that I might as well take it, and that McGinnes and me, we had it coming.

The lousy prick went for my nose, but I turned my head and went with the punch, catching it high on the cheekbone. The sound of the blow must have sickened the man holding me, and I was released. Then I was pushed from behind with the momentum of a wave, pushed as if my feet were off the floor. McGinnes was being moved similarly, covering his sides and face with his arms from the potshots that the bouncers were taking as they pushed him forward. Many in the crowd were yelling and laughing, the first sign of spontaneous joy on their faces that I had seen all night.

McGinnes was shoved out the door first. He tripped down the steps and fell to one knee on the sidewalk. I kept my balance as someone gave me a final push, walked down the steps, and helped McGinnes up. He mumbled, “I’m sorry, man,” and I could see that he really was, and that he was in some pain.

His pants were ripped at the knee, exposing a clean scrape beginning to redden with blood. I said calmly, “Let’s just walk,” and we did, crossing the street like two gentlemen to the occasional jeers of the spilled-out bar crowd behind us.

Lee was leaning against my car, fist up to her mouth and tears in her eyes as we approached her. “I can drive,” I said, and indeed the events of the last few minutes and the cool night air had made me feel somewhere near sober. We slid into the front seat with Lee in the middle. I turned the ignition key and drove slowly down the block.

I headed east. McGinnes found a beer under the seat, cracked it, muttered “Jesus Christ,” drank, and passed the can. Lee handed me the can after having some herself. We drove in silence for a few blocks. McGinnes, whose right ear appeared to be larger than his left, chuckled as he turned his head my way.

“Well,” he said, “we showed ’em.”

“That we did, Johnny.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, “you sonofabitches really showed them.”

She was laughing through her tears and we joined her, a release that had McGinnes alternately coughing, spitting out the window, and laughing some more. He cried, “Irish bar!” as if there were no other choice.

Lee kissed him on the cheek and then me on my mouth. I continued driving east.


WE PARKED ON THE corner of North Capitol and F, in front of Kildare’s, McGinnes’ favorite pub. He almost exclusively drank there now, though at one time his bar had been Matt Kane’s on Thirteenth and Mass, until Kane died and McGinnes began complaining about the place being full of “wine drinkers and ghosts.”

We entered and crossed a crowded room where a tenor was singing, passed the main bar, and arrived in the back room, where a few tables were empty. A waitress directed us to a four-top. We must have looked like accident victims, though no one here seemed to take notice.

The place was all muted greens and mahogany. A geezer with a long gray beard, his cane hung over the back of his chair, drank dark beer methodically, closing his eyes with each sip. A couple of young Scots sat near us, discussing rugby as they washed down their ham sandwiches with mugs of ale.

“Now this is a bar,” McGinnes said, winking at Lee and smiling to expose some blood seeping from the top of his gums. He signaled a waitress who arrived with a bartray at her side.

“How you doin’, Johnny?” she asked pleasantly with a shockingly thick Irish accent. She was plump with thick calves, but had a lovely, pale freckled face topped by thick, wavy black hair.

“Meg,” he said, gesturing around the table, “I want you to meet my friends, Nick and Lee.”

She pulled out a wet bar rag and lightly dabbed around my eye. “You boys had some fun tonight. Better wash that up in the WC.”

“Thanks, Meg,” I said.

“What will you be having, then?”

McGinnes said, “Is Carmelita in the kitchen tonight?”

“She’s just got off. Getting changed now.”

“Tell her I’m out here, Megan. And give us four Harps and four ‘Jamies.’”

“Carmelita’s already drinkin’ a shift beer.”

“Then send out three Harps,” McGinnes said, “and four whiskeys.”

I got up and made my way to the stairs that led to the toilets. At the sink I ran some cold water into my cupped hands. Someone in the stall behind me expelled unashamedly as I splashed water onto my face. In the mirror I saw that I had been slightly marked and was a little swollen, but it had all been relatively bloodless. My hair was wild and I dampened it, moving it around into some semblance of uniformity.

When I returned to the party, Carmelita, a girlfriend of McGinnes’, with whom I had partied once before, was seated at the table. She smiled when I kissed her on the cheek.

Carmelita was wearing a plaid skirt, pumps, and a crisp white blouse, though she had worked in the kitchen all evening. Her hair, highlighted by a reddish rinse, was set off by her deep red lipstick. Like many other working immigrants in this city, she had an admirably fierce pride in how she looked when not on shift.

She and Lee were talking when McGinnes interrupted, and we raised our glasses without a toast, drinking down the smooth Jamison’s whiskey. The amber lager was a fine complement, and we had another round of both.

We left Megan five on twenty and exited Kildare’s. McGinnes told us to wait on the sidewalk, entered a smaller bar next door that had off-sale, and emerged with two sixes of longnecks under his arm. He smiled obtusely as he goose-stepped towards us and said, “Let’s get going.”

He and Carmelita climbed into the backseat of my car, cracked some beers, and handed one up to Lee, whose leg was against mine.

“Where we going?” I asked into the rearview.

“Head on up to Mount Pleasant,” McGinnes slurred. “Carmelita lives that way. And we can drop in on Mr. Malone, see how his date’s going.”

“Come on, Johnny…”

“Do it, Jim,” he ordered, “and put on some Irish.”

I slid some Pogues into the deck, Boys from County Hell, and turned up the volume. McGinnes was trying to sing along to the group’s wild, punked-up bastardization of Irish music, but mostly he and Carmelita were fitfully laughing and making out.

Lee passed me the bottle and told me what a great night she was having. I laughed at that but agreed and gave her a long kiss, mightily struggling to stay within the lines of my lane, as Shane McGowan shouted at an ear-numbing volume through my ravaged speakers.


WE PULLED UP TO Malone’s rowhouse on Harvard Street, a darkish block dimly lit by old-style D.C. lampposts. This was a real neighborhood, a mix of Latins, blacks, and pioneer whites. There was just enough of a violent undercurrent here to keep the aspiring-to-hipness young professionals away and on the fringe of their beloved Adams Morgan, which had become an artificially eclectic mess of condos, “interesting” ethnic restaurants, Eurotrash discos, and parking lots.

When Malone opened the door of his basement apartment and saw the four of us on his steps, beers in hand with swollen faces and ripped clothing, like some escaped group of mentally ill Christmas carolers, a look of exasperation clouded his face. McGinnes put a shoulder to the door and a beer in Malone’s hand, and we all stepped in.

In my Connecticut Avenue days I would often pick Malone up here on my way to work. We’d sit in his living room, trading bong hits and listening to Miles or Weather Report until it was time to go in. Though he’d upgraded his audio and video equipment since then, the apartment was still decorated primarily in variations of red.

Malone wore a silk kimono over pressed jeans and soft leather slippers. His date, who had changed her hairstyle since the afternoon, was standing by the kitchen door and staring in disbelief. McGinnes was already by the stereo, moving the dial off WDCU and undoubtedly searching for something more offensive.

“Just make yourself at home, Mick,” Malone said sarcastically, and McGinnes thanked him.

Carmelita was trying to talk to Malone’s date, who was answering in Spanish but not encouraging the conversation. Malone had a cognac in one hand and now a beer in the other. He shrugged, tapped my bottle with his, and drank.

“Thank you so much for dropping by tonight,” he said. “Will you be staying long?”

“We weren’t interrupting anything,” I said, “were we?”

“Bitch has some big red titties,” he whispered, then looked at me more closely. “Looks like you motherf*ckers got into some shit tonight, boy.”

I rolled my eyes, took a swig, and stumbled backwards. Lee stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. McGinnes had lost patience locating a radio station and was rifling through Carmelita’s purse, finally finding a cassette and slipping it into Malone’s deck.

Latin music blared out of the speakers. Carmelita broke away from Malone’s date, excitedly crossing the room to McGinnes, who was dragging the center table away from the couch and moving it to a corner of the room. Malone mumbled something and followed his date, who now appeared to be spitting mad, into the kitchen.

The four of us began to dance. McGinnes was spinning and dipping Carmelita. Lee touched my cheek, and we kissed as we moved. Malone raised his voice in the kitchen. McGinnes cackled and turned up the volume.

Malone walked back into the room, moving to the beat, and started dancing with Lee and me, a fresh bottle of beer in his hand.

“Where’s your friend?” I shouted.

“She says I ‘did her dog’ by lettin’ you in,” he said, and continued dancing.

Another song began that was harder, faster, and, courtesy of McGinnes, louder. This was one of those horn-driven salsa numbers that stop periodically on the beat for two seconds of silence, then begin again. The repetition was hypnotic.

Carmelita had one palm on her stomach, the other upraised, shaking her shoulders, sliding her feet four steps, then turning ninety degrees and repeating. We all followed, freezing when the music stopped, then yelling out and continuing our line dance as it began again.

Malone’s tongue was out the side of his mouth, concentrating on getting the steps down, then smiling broadly when he had it, yelling, “No wonder you Latins are so happy. The music be so festive and shit!” Carmelita slapped him on the shoulder. Malone explained to McGinnes, “Carmelita be sayin’, ‘Right on time,’” and he rolled his r in imitation of her accent.

The music ended. McGinnes yanked the cassette from the deck, put it in his pocket, and said, “Let’s go.” We gathered our things and stood by the door.

Malone’s date was staring contemptuously from the safety of the kitchen doorway. Malone, who looked genuinely disappointed, said, “Where you goin’? We just beginnin’ to throw down!”

McGinnes and I walked over to Malone and poured the remainders of our beers over the top of his head. His date spun furiously and strode back into the kitchen.

I caught one last look at him before we booked. Beer streamed down the front of his face, falling onto his silk kimono. He still had a bottle in his hand, and he wasn’t moving, just staring at us and trying to look hard. But he was fighting a smile, the deep dimples of his smooth face betraying him, threatening to implode. The four of us left him just like that, and fell like sailors out Malone’s front door.


WE DROPPED MCGINNES AND CARMELITA a couple of blocks from Malone’s, on Seventeenth Street. I watched them walk away beneath the light of a streetlamp, his arm around her shoulder, hers around his waist, until they faded into early morning fog.

That is the last I remember of being in my car. Lee drove us to her place, where she undressed me and got me into her shower, then followed me in.

She washed my back, then reached around and soaped beneath my balls. I took the bar from her and noticed with some relief that I was getting a strong hard-on. I began soaping her entire body, lingering on her hard breasts and the insides of her muscular little thighs. I slipped two, then three fingers inside her with ease. She bit my lip and sucked on my tongue with a deft roll of her own. We moved each other around the shower for several minutes, our bodies sliding together, until she put her hands on my shoulders, her back to the tiles, locked her legs around my waist, and pulled me in, arching her lower back to take it all.

When her breathing became more rapid, and her lips turned cold, I hooked a soapy finger into her a*shole and she straightened against the wall, eyes toward the ceiling. She yelped, then shuddered, and buried her teeth into my shoulder, while I shot off with a spasm that traveled down my legs.

We held each other until the hot water began to expire. She put on her bathrobe and dried me with a large blue towel.

Sitting on the warm radiator, I watched her in the bathroom mirror as she carefully combed my wet hair. Then I was in a deep, dreamless sleep.