Beer.
Created | Updated Dec 19, 2007
What he wanted was a beer. He was sitting at a picnic table staring out at the Pacific Ocean. All he wanted was a beer and Irene had gone to get beer but she was taking her time and dammit he wanted a beer. He’d lit the fire because someone had left a load of driftwood in the fireplace and he had a nice fire going. He even had the tent up but all he wanted was a beer. Laughter floated up from the beach below him, the sound sharp against the dull moan of the surf. All he wanted was a beer.
Some woman had put up her tent at the site next door, and now she was cleaning up a lot of crap people had left. She held up a half burned sweater that looked like the eighties to him.
“Filthy slobs,” she said.
“You got any beer?” he asked. She shook her head.
“Got any dope?” She shook her head again.
“You want to sit by the fire? My wife will be back soon.” She was one ugly hag. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea. “My wife went to get beer. You on vacation or what?”
“I was helping my son-in-law with his marijuana up the hill there. I stayed up there all summer to watch the damn stuff and he tells me to leave and says I got free rent all summer. Bastard.”
“You’re lucky. There’s a lot of dead people up there no one will ever find.”
“Tell me.” The woman lit a cigarette.
“Smoking’s bad.” he said.
“Tell me.” she said again.
“I’m Mike,” he said, “my wife is Irene. She went to get beer.”
“I’m Sonia.”
“Sonia. Glad to meet you.”
It was getting dark. A woman came up the beach path carrying a sleeping child and a tupperware container. She turned to climb the steps to the parking area. A thin, pale man stepped up to the fire.
“Can I join you?”
“Got any beer?”
“I don’t. Sorry.”
“No problem. My wife went to get beer. Is that a guitar? I didn’t get your name.”
“John.”
“John. Glad to meet you. This is Sonia.”
“Glad to meet you.”
“You got any dope?”
“Sorry.”
“See I knew that. That was obvious. You know that? No one would ever think you had any dope. Well wait a minute. No one would think you’d share it if you had.”
Mike had intense blue eyes. Behind them lurked the bewildered intelligence of a born loser.
“No offense or nothing.” he said.
“None taken,” said John. “So Mike, what do you do for a living?”
“Nothing. My last job I got fired for blackmail. What do you do?”
“I just graduated from law school. Did you say blackmail?”
“What law school?” Sonia asked.
“Yale.”
“Yale? You went to Yale?”
“Yes. Yale. Yale and Oxford.” He did not add that he was a Rhodes Scholar. What would it mean to them?
A woman with the face of a long suffering madonna materialized out of the near dark.
“Mike, I got the beer. I got burritos.”
Mike stood up. “This is my wife Irene. Irene, that’s John and that’s Sonia. Me and Irene are going to get the beer out of the van. Be right back.”
“Blackmail?” John said to Sonia.
“That’s what he said.”
Three girls showed up with two six packs.
“Hi. We met Mike and Irene. They told us to come over. We have some beer anyone want a beer?”
“Hi. I’m John and yes I’d like a beer.
The girls were Canadians on a road trip. Lindsay, Samantha and Jane.
“Is that a guitar?” asked Lindsay.
John got out his guitar. It was beautiful and expensive. He’d bought it in the hopes he’d get to know people and perhaps make a few friends. He’d been practicing a lot since he took his boards.
Mike and Irene showed up carrying an ice chest between them. Mike had two camp chairs on his arm. He set them up so that he and Irene could preside over the assembly. He popped a can and handed it to Irene, then he opened one for himself.
“Beer anyone?”
“So Mike,” said Sonia, “how did you get fired for blackmail?”
Mike’s blue gaze locked onto Sonia.
“I worked in a gas station up in Oregon. You know you can’t pump your own gas in Oregon. Well there was a Cheep Treets Chicken next to the station so I’d go over there to get lunch or whatever and I got to know the manager. There wasn’t nothing going on there. Irene knows that but we got to be friends and that. One day I went over there and she came out of the back stoned out of her mind. I said I wanted a double chicken soft taco and fries and I said if you don’t charge me nothing I won’t tell your boss you’re smoking on the job. I was kidding, see? I wouldn’t of done that. She took it wrong and she told her boss and he told my boss and I was out the next day. Couldn’t find work anywhere after that. That’s when Irene and I decided to marry. See she has good insurance. She has a good job.”
“And he needs a lot of medical care,” said Irene. “Like this year he fell out of that tree - right? And you went off the road that time, then you got blood poisoning.”
“And the overdose,” Mike added.
“That was last year. Christmas last year.”
“So I need that medical insurance. Irene and I been together three four years, but we got married for the insurance.”
“So Irene, what do you do?” Sonia asked.
“I’m a claw machine technician,” she said.
“What in the world is that?” John asked.
“Claw machines. You know. Like in the entrance of stores and family restaurants. Claw machines.”
“I know, said Jane, “I know what they are. You pick up a teddy bear with the claw and you win it.”
“Right. Now they’ve made me trainer for the area so I’m on the road a lot and Mike comes along. Right now I’ve got to train someone up at Hagersville tomorrow. Going there and back in one day.”
“Not me,” said Mike. I’m not sitting in the damn car for three hours to sit around that armpit all day.”
He didn’t have his license, lost his CDL too.
“You gonna play something?” Mike asked John. John was only too glad.
“I’m not very good yet,” he said modestly, and he was right. He played a chord or two and warbled the words of some dreary folk song. When he paused there were a few polite words.
“You know John,” Mike said, “no offense or nothing but that could be a woman. The way you sing that could be a woman.” John may not have heard. His head was bent low over the guitar as he struggled to place his fingers. He began to sing again. The Canadian girls were laughing about a madman who had followed them out of Ray’s Food Place screaming insults at them, calling them whores. They were slender, lovely and self assured. Two blonde, one Asian.
Mike started telling dirty jokes. Sonia and the Canadians contributed their own. When Mike pushed the envelope with a story involving both black people and gays, John snapped “That’s unacceptable!” He was angry because his music had not been appreciated.
“How about dead baby jokes?” Jane suggested.
There are hundreds of dead baby jokes.
When the fire began to die, Mike and Sonia went down to the beach to gather driftwood. Mike had had six beers. “So Sonia do you have a man?” he asked. They were walking up the beach path with loads of driftwood.
“There aren’t any,” Sonia answered. Mike was mulling this answer when they met three young men darkly dressed in hooded sweat shirts and black jeans. One carried a guitar.
“You want some beer?” Mike asked them. They were from a logging town far into the mountains. “No one’s ever heard of it,” the guitarist said. There was no room at the fire so they leaned against the fence that ran along the low cliff top. Behind them the beach fires glimmered and the surf glowed dimly. The tide was out. The guitarist’s name was Clyde. When he started to play there was no more talk. The people around the fire became shadows of themselves as they listened to Clyde’s guitar.
“You could record that,” John said, “you could record that just as it is. You could record that.”
“Is that Bon Jovi?” Mike asked.
“That’s mine. We don’t cover.”
“Except the end,” said Mike. “The ending was gay. You know that? Those last few chords were way gay. You know?”
“Play some more,” said Samantha.
“We’d like to do a CD,” said Clyde, “but we have to work around our drummer. He’s not too sharp.” Clyde was thin and colorless, his hair a dirty yellow.
“You could record on your own. Just you. The way you played just now.” John said.
“The woods are closed,” said one of the others, “there’s no work right now. There’s no money.”
“Something might happen,” said Clyde. He didn’t believe it.
Mike’s eyes were getting wavery.
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said to John. He stepped carefully around the fire and sat down close beside John. “There’s a couple of chords I want you to play.”
“What chords?”
“Hell I don’t know their names.” Mike made a grab for John’s guitar and John repressed a frantic effort to grab it back.
“See?” said Mike, “See like this, well kinda like this and then here.” His heavy fingers fumbled the strings and John’s teeth were grinding audibly. “You play these two chords OK? There’s something I want to sing. I made it up. You play the chords. I’m too screwed up to play them.”
“You’re right you are too screwed up,” said John. He snatched the guitar away from Mike. “You’re too screwed up. You said it yourself. Wait 'til the morning then you can play it. Right now you’re too messed up.” Protectively he set the guitar in its case and closed it firmly. Mike said “Irene, throw me a beer.”
“Come and get it,” said Irene. Mike came close to falling but he made it back to the camp chair. He wasn’t happy.
“I don’t appreciate that, Irene,” he said. Irene said nothing.
“Did you hear what I said? I said I don’t appreciate you making a fool of me. Did you hear that?” Irene said nothing. Mike leaned toward her and grabbed her chin and shouted “I did not appreciate that Irene!”
The Canadian girls all stood up. “We have to make an early start tomorrow,” said Jane.
“We want to be in L.A. for a party tomorrow night,” said Lindsay.
“Long drive,” said Samantha, “I think we have a beer left. Oh I guess not.”
The Canadian girls disappeared into the night. Mike said nothing. His head seemed to be floating independent from his neck.
“Bed time for me too,” John said. He was on his way to visit a friend in Portland before he started a job helping refugees with their legal problems.
Sonia awoke at first light and crawled out of her tent. The Canadian girls were gone already. John’s tent was zipped up tightly. As she walked toward the beach path she could see Mike and Irene lying in each others’ arms half out of their tent. They were wrapped in what looked like a brand new cream colored down comforter. On the beach the three loggers sprawled in the sand by a silvered Doug Fir trunk, a hundred years escaped from some log raft on its way to San Francisco.
Sonia walked along the border of the waves, enjoying the feel of the wet sand receding from under her bare feet. Shed crab shells littered the high tide line. Far ahead of her in the sea mist two dogs ran in and out of the waves, fetching a piece of driftwood. She could not see who threw it. When she reached a promontory of tumbled rock she turned back to face the day. Her tent, her car, her seventy three dollars. She would stop this once for coffee at the place just north on 101. She would ask about working there. Not likely. The parking lot was always nearly empty. But she would find a job, a room to rent. One day she knew there’d be no jobs for her. She hoped she’d be dead by then.
The three loggers had not stirred. She could see that sand had accumulated in the folds of their dark clothing. She noticed that Clyde did not have his guitar. She hoped he’d locked it in his car. Back at the grassy little campground she could see that John had folded his tent and stolen away.
Irene must have left for Hagersville. Only Mike sat at the picnic table, eating last night’s cold burrito and drinking a beer. He was chewing slowly and staring out at the ocean.
He turned to look at her and say, “Might rain later today.”
She stuffed her sleeping bag into its sack and took down the tent and rolled it neatly. As she walked away she freed up an arm so she could wave at Mike, but he had turned his gaze back to the horizon.
