Lethe Bashar’s Novel of Life

“Nice to meet you,” Lethe said.

 

Louie parted his fat lips in a gay, arresting smile.  His purplish nose, sprouting a network of broken capillaries, was shining radiantly on his face. 

 

“Can I buy you a drink?” 

 

“Sure.” Lethe said, feeling stoned.

 

Louie got up and waddled over to the bar in his Hawaiian swim trunks.  Lethe looked dazed at the sunlight playing on the surface of the water.  The gleaming pool seemed to cast a spell on him.  Everything was happening very slowly.  The glossy surface of the rainbow-painted walls also held him in a trance.  Wherever he looked, he fell into a sleepy daze.  Three or four birds passed overhead with incredible slowness.

 

The dry heat woke Lethe out of his momentary stupor.  Louie returned, grinning, with two Bloody Marys.

 

          “So, are you going to tell me your name?”  He asked.

 

          “Lethe.  It’s Lethe.”

 

          “What kind of name is that?  I’ve never heard it before.”

 

          “My father’s Middle Eastern.  He’s from Iraq.”

 

          Louie held the salty olive on the tip of his tongue.  He rolled it around the inside of his cheek and then broke into the center with his front teeth.  Neither of them said anything for another two minutes.  The continuous warmth of the sun seemed to drain their energy for conversation.

 

          Louie laid back in his deck chair and wiggled his toes.  He was a bubbly man, oddly formed with a round, stout belly.  He had bright, cherry-red skin and long blond tufts of hair that sprouted in isolated parts on his chest, back, and shoulders.  He was not attractive, not in the least.  He was trollish and slovenly.

  

“So tell me where you’re from,” Louie said, adopting a friendly tone.

 

          “I’m from Chicago.  But I came from Arizona.  Actually, San Jose.”

 

          “You better get your story straight.”  Louie tittered.   

         

“I ran away from rehab, which was in Arizona.  Then I lived in San Jose for awhile.  I lived in a half-way house.”

 

          “Rehab?  What kind of rehab?”

 

          “Drug rehab.”

 

          Louie grunted.  “And Vegas?”

 

          “I got bored with living in a halfway house.  Actually, it sucked.  I hated it.”

 

          They talked for nearly two hours in the sun.  More precisely, Lethe talked about himself.  The older man seemed fascinated with whatever Lethe had to tell him.  It was something in the way the older man listened to Lethe, directing his full attention on him.  Louie never mentioned himself, not once.  In the stream of Lethe’s semi-autobiography, the stout, cherry-faced man disappeared, only wanting to hear about Lethe’s adolescent adventures.

 

Lethe felt a glow cast upon him. The older man’s attention provoked his operatic muse and he embellished his collected stories as he went along, making them more outrageous, exciting, and full of fibs.  He told Louie about buying heroin in the projects and walking out to hail a cab with twelve plastic bags of dope stashed in his underwear, all of which were true.  But then he said, “a cop car turned the corner of Chicago and Halstead, and stopped right in the middle of the street, horizontally.  The cab couldn’t drive forward or back, not like the driver would have anyways.  We were trapped.  Losing my cool, I screamed and said I was probably going away for a long time—”

 

 “‘I’m going to prison,’ I said.  ‘I have twelve bags of heroin on me.  I’m fucking screwed!’”

 

“Then the cab driver goes berserk, and he starts screaming at me, ‘Drugs, drugs, you have drugs, get out of my cab, get out of my cab!”  Next thing I know this burly cop is yanking me from the cab and ripping my shirt apart at the neck line.  We’re out in the middle of the street with lights flashing and traffic stopped, and everyone can see me get taken away.”

 

After that, he told Louie he had to spend five years in prison.

 

“What’s it like?”  Louie asked credulously.  “My brother did some time, but I never had to, luckily.”

 

“It wasn’t so bad, you know,” Lethe said.  And here Lethe really had to improvise because the only thing he knew about prison was from the movies.  He said he slept on the floor, which smelled of urine, and his prison-mate was three-hundred pounds, had tattoos all over his back, and read the Bible.  Louie believed him.  The gush of stories kept them both occupied for awhile, and it wasn’t exactly clear who started it.  Whether the cycle got set in motion by Louie’s devoted attention, or whether Lethe’s highly improbable semi-autobiographical tales aroused Louie’s curiosity, which led to questions and more questions.

 

          Louie kept waddling off to the bar to get more Bloody Marys.  Lethe took out his wallet, but Louie refused to let him pay, saying that it was his pleasure.  Whenever Louie said my pleasure he sort of grunted and smiled sheepishly, as if he had something in his head that he wasn’t going to let anyone know about.  Eventually Lethe ran out of stories and the two of them just sat on the pool deck not saying anything.  With the exception of the staff floating around, and Tracy’s shaven head bobbing up every now, they were the only ones outside.

 

The sun beat down on them.  Gobs of sweat dripped off their foreheads.  Louie mopped his face with a POW handkerchief.  Both of them closed their eyes and fell asleep for some time.  Then Lethe woke up and looked around the pool area.  All of a sudden it had gotten dark.  He glanced over to Louie’s sagging, reddened chest.  The older man’s nipples were charred black, or maybe that was just the pigmentation of his skin. 

 

“What are you going to do now?”  Louie asked.

 

“Not sure,” Lethe said.  “What is there to do?”

 

Lethe leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.  Two younger-looking guests came out onto the pool deck.  One of them removed the strings of her bikini while getting into the whirlpool.  The other wore denim shorts and a white t-shirt and looked like a ten year old boy.  The slender, tallish one began wading in the whirlpool and every couple seconds she would kneel down and catch the foam in her mouth. 

 

“She’s a stripper,” Louie said.

 

“I didn’t know they allow girls to go topless here.”

 

“In Vegas, that sort of thing brings in more customers.  It’s good for business.”

 

“And who’s the boy sitting next to her?”

 

“That’s not a boy.  That’s her girlfriend, Sam.”

 

“You’re kidding me.”

 

“No, I’m serious.  Those two are in love.”

 

“But that can’t be natural what they’re doing over there.”

 

“They’re kissing—”

 

“Yeah but two women, I mean come on  . . .”

 

“Welcome to Vegas, kid.  Two women, two men, three women, four men.  One black, one Asian.  What’s the difference?”

 

“I guess . . .”

 

Louie had a wolfish grin on his face, and a couple stray hairs were sticking up behind his ears.

 

“What’s so funny?”  Lethe asked.

 

“Oh nothing, I just had a favor to ask you–”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Would you be interested in finding me some crack?”