Gone by noon but a mainstay through the morning, in his inner booth at La Jalisience, cup after cup of coffee, from the fresh to the dregs and over again. Bearded, wearing the sort of Euro worker’s cap which was an affectation on the head of Bertolt Brecht (Swiss bank accounts and the worker-bee drudge-women to make lighter the burden of his personal workers’ paradise). And on the head of Randolph Birkin, primus inter pares in the moth-eaten ranks of Houston Communists, an eccentricity which put the ignorant in mind of an Old Spice salty dog, and the knowledgeable left wondering where, when, and why he had acquired the cap in the first place.
Shiva Purl, the Penthouse guitarist, at an Urban Animal beer fest the night before had announced, a propos of nothing, that she was flirting with the anarchists and Trotskyites. Mary, who was unknown to the Animals and therefore nothing more threatening than pretty fodder tolerated for her friendship with Shiva, misheard what was said and took it to mean that her friend was swiveling her pert and lovely backside left of center, would soon be putting power chords behind the doggy poetry of Ho and Mao, riffing on ‘Meadowlands’ and ‘The International’, which were, might as well face it, killer tunes.
What Shiva had in fact said was that she had been flirting with AN anarchist OR Trotskyite, asking the rhetorical question as to what the difference was and shrugging so that all might know that yes, she knew there was a difference and her question was merely to bold the font that she couldn’t care less what it might be.
-How do you know he is? a friendly Animal asked, attempting to wipe a drib of foam from Shiva’s chin, receiving a rebuke and wiping his paw backhand across his own untidiness instead.
Shiva knew because he had a poster on his wall of some guy who looked like the Tom Courtenay character in ‘Doctor Zhivago’, because he made jokes where the punchlines were ‘imperialist dickhead’ or ‘capitalist motherfucker’, because he had newspapers and slim little books lying about, made from paper that smelled bad, with weird writing like it was done in a mirror, half the letters backwards.
-Yep, sounds like a red, the Animal said, belching with the slow motion grandeur of an old-fashioned bubbler water fountain.
When he skated away to fetch more beers, Shiva quizzed her eyes at Mary and asked her to guess what she thought his day gig was.
-Um, bouncer? Auto mechanic? Moped mechanic?
-He’s a fucking tax attorney!
Mary wasn’t drunk enough to feel any indignation. Montrose was a-glut with the half-ins and half-outs, and most of the garret-dwellers were secret trust fund kids.
-America, she said, love it and leave it.
As a non-sequitur it was brightly accepted by Shiva, who chinked her empty against Mary’s, before pitching it in an overhand perfect-as-Pete windmill to crash and startle in a plastic bin halfway down the porch. She gave herself two points and shadow-boxed around Mary and Mary watched the heads turn, cat-on-sparrow all over Shiva’s fluid hipshake, tight little ass as impressive as her nimble guitar solos.
Associative Mary purred into Shiva’s passing ear:
-Have I told you about the time I made it with Pete Townsend?
Shiva froze mid-glide.
-Whuuuut?! You did Pete Townsend!?
-Yeah, he ate me, banged me, gave me his autograph.
And a Roman candle went off inside the house, and the window pane behind them sparkled and popped with blue embers, humming like a swarm of angry bees, and Shiva’s boyfriend, jealous as Jehovah, swooped in to grab his girl for a beer run down the street, and Shiva, hanging half out the passenger side window of a pick-up yelled that she wanted every juicy detail but Mary ……….. will have vanished by the time they return, will have said yes to the Richard Hell lookalike with the dungeon eyes, giving Shiva one more item to add to her growing list of resentments grudged against her lover.
And so back to Birkin, holding out his cup to the waitress, last coffee before he closes his notebooks, gathers up his pens and cigarettes and heads back out to the metaphorical barricades of the Third Ward.
He is not unaware of the gossipy rockers sitting in the booth he will have to pass on his way to the cashier. Both of the females have been in the audience, been onstage at the club where he conducts his Marxist study and reading group on off-nights. They might make fun but they will also return his nod when he passes, convivial and twinkling, half-drunk on their own sluttish beauty, to which he is not, armoring his soul even as he notes it, entirely immune. The one with the black mane, ah, especially the one with the black mane, elbows on the table, tee-shirt torn for summer comfort, with its revelatory glimpse of her armpit’s scoop, the sinewy slenderness of her upper arm hiding from view the shadowy outline where the curve of her breast begins, the fabric globed and taut, the line of undercurve rising to meet the downslope, the central culmination of nipple under baby blue.
He allows only the briefest of passing sorrows as he reminds himself that the Revolution, when consolidated, will catch these hourglass rockers by surprise, and such beauties as these, the inspiration for how many hard-ons both rewarded with the fickle touch of the goddess or left thrumming in the air like gawking beggars, these beauties might well be drowned in the crossfire. And he will mourn them, silently, in his own way. For now his heart beats to the words of the Great Helmsman: ‘from defeat to defeat to ultimate victory.’