I could kill myself sometimes. I am cast adrift in California and though I may appear to be easily confused, I know exactly what I’m doing. Through the filter, removed. One angle black and white fuzzy with no sound. I am talking to myself on a wet sidewalk tainted with yellow then red of traffic lights in a strange city and I’m not wearing a watch but I imagine it’s been less than an hour since I left the hotel room. I have just had my cock effectively gobbled by a stranger and I am feeling no pain and now I am aware of blue neon behind me, the fading signature of a ghost.

fourteen.

I LEAVE THE PARADISE SPA and walk up Geary to Jones. Enter the bar called Mao’s that is empty but not. The walls are painted with black and white murals of old world film actors. Charlie Chaplin. Fatty Arbuckle. Laurel and Hardy. They stare and stare and I feel surrounded. I go to the bar and an old guy with silver hair and little round eyeglasses comes over, puts a napkin in front of me. The empty barstools to my left and right are too perfectly aligned and a little creepy. I ask for ice water and two shots of whiskey but I am really tempted to demand a glass of hydrogen peroxide because my mouth feels wrong. It feels like it’s full of fucking cigarette ash. I suck down the water in a long furious swallow, drooling. The bartender has a lazy brown eye that wanders around loose as a marble while the other stares straight through me.

That’s gonna be eight dollars, he says.

I give him a twenty and tell him to go ahead and bring another shot.

Long day? he says.

Endless, I say.

The bartender shrugs and glances up at one of the overhead televisions. There are seven of them, I notice. On two screens are the same silent baseball game, the Dodgers and Braves. Three of the others are running old movies. Bette Davis howling and bug-eyed and completely nuts on the left. Jimmy Stewart peeping at his freaky neighbors to the right. And Laurence Olivier tediously dying straight ahead. The last two screens are gray and blank.

Are you Mao? I say.

Professionally speaking, yes, the bartender says.

Interesting name for a bar.

It’s all about mind control, he says. Propaganda, baby. The customers come in here like suicidal sheep and the televisions mesmerize them. The old movies make people melancholy and therefore thirsty. The baseball keeps them sedated. Think about it. Television and advertising and the power of mass hypnosis were completely unrealized before Mao and Hitler showed us a thing or two. Of course, it would be financial suicide to name a bar after Hitler.

I stare at him and he laughs, low and rasping.

The place is kind of empty, I say.

Yeah, he says. What the fuck do I know?

What about soft porn, I say.

Nah. He waves a hand. Don’t want the wrong element in here.

I shrug and swallow the first whiskey.

Pull up a stool, boy. You might as well stay a while.

I sit down and take slow, cautious sips of the second whiskey. I would hate to get drunk. I grin to myself and look up at the Dodgers game and see that the Braves are methodically destroying them. The players on the Dodger bench are serene, peaceful. The camera moves in on one young black player, a rookie who wears silver wraparound sunglasses even though it’s a night game. He stares out at the field as if he’s sitting in church and his face is frozen, cut from stone. The camera lingers and now I detect the faint twitch of artery or muscle below his jaw.

You said that the customers are suicidal, I say. The sheep.

The bartender nods. Yeah.

What do you mean by that, exactly.

Huh, he says. I’m not a goddamn psychologist and wouldn’t want to be. But it seems to me that anybody comes into a bar and sits by himself and sinks five or six cocktails one after another and never says boo to another soul well he’s got a gun to his head. He’s just taking his time about it.

I regard my own row of drinks.

Don’t take offense, he says.

I wouldn’t.

The bartender grins. Like I said previously. I don’t know shit.

You ever think about it, Mao?

Pull my own plug?

Yeah.

Once or twice a day, in the morning especially.

The morning?

What the hell. I’m sixty-four years old. I got arthritis. I try to jerk off and all I get is a fucking cramp in my neck. Thinking about suicide is the next best thing.

Right.

You want another? says Mao.

I shake my head.

Well, then. When are you going to eat a bullet?

The third whiskey sits before me, untouched. My stomach is gurgling for lack of food and the bartender is a madman. I think he should have called this place The Faustus. I think my skull is full of black ice. Mao begins to wipe down the bar with a rancid yellow towel. The stink of mildew. That lazy eye drifts by, unfocused. The fucking thing is making me seasick and I try to ignore it.

Were you ever married? I say.

Mao jabs one finger at the lazy eye. No, he says.

I shiver, unsurprised. That eye would be hard to deal with.

You? he says.

A long time ago, yeah. But she killed herself. Blew herself to bits.

Mao looks up. You serious?

Yes.

Then I apologize to you. That was some insensitive shit to say.

I tell him not to worry about it. I tell him that it was a long time ago, another lifetime. Mao nods and murmurs and graciously tilts his head to the left so that I don’t have to face the lazy eye. I tell him she was very brave, my wife. That she killed herself only out of the desire to sidestep a slow death. I am tempted to tell him that I don’t have arthritis, that I spend a lot more time daydreaming about various gruesome ways to kill myself than I do actually bothering to masturbate. I’m not quite sure if this is true, however. And while it has a nice ring to it, I don’t think such a confession would exactly put a smile on Mao’s face. Anyway. I am trying to cut back on these incidents of drive-by intimacy. I stand up and tell him thanks and realize I am a trifle unsteady. I am wobbling. The third whiskey remains untouched and I ask him to please raise a toast to the next suicide that walks through the door.

Outside and yes, noticeably drunk. I have no sense of direction, no sense of time. I am wobbling on a street corner in downtown San Francisco. Vision is unreliable and after six, seven blocks, I am fast approaching blackout but not yet illiterate and the street signs that loom fuzzy black and white along my periphery identify this corner as 6th and Mission and danger is everywhere. Don’t laugh but I think I’m being followed. I hear footsteps, echoes. I take a few steps and I hear the scrape of leather against stone behind me. I stop walking and the echo is gone and I know this is the paranoia of bad movies.

The nostrils twitch and I smell feces.

Cut away to handheld camera, delirium tremens.

I swing left and right now full circle and find the shitter, a runaway white girl sixteen maybe seventeen, a poor little crackhead crouched in blue doorway with bright yellow miniskirt bunched around her waist, leaving a wet black steaming coil of shit on someone’s stoop.

Daffy.

This could be a clip from 20/20. Lost children etc.

Probably her condition should trouble me, it should offend me or move me somehow. But I am too drunk and blind and preoccupied with my own problems to care about the public health and anyway it’s not my doorway. The girl has to poop somewhere and even now her lips curl into a yellow snarl because I am staring at her. From her point of view, I am a stupid drunk middle-aged pervert and I’m staring at her, I’m invading her personal space. And if I breathe a word to her, if I offer to help this girl or give her money or a word of advice she will surely bite me.