First thing we do is we kill the fifth of SoCo.
“What’s it a fifth of?” Frankie asks me.
“A barrel? Hell if I know,” I reply.
We put a record on Frankie’s ancient hi-fi with enormous wood-paneled speakers, “Wild Honey” by the Beach Boys, and jump up and down on the couch. The hi-fi has a shiny steel-plated 8-track attached to it but Frankie won't play it, not even for me; she’s ripped too many of the cassettes. The only one she has pristine is her “Saturday Night Fever,” still in the plastic.
While we bounce we pass the SoCo back and forth; it doesn’t last long.
“I Was Made To Love Her” comes on, and we sing along. My shirt rides up and I catch Frankie stealing looks at me. If she just looked I wouldn’t notice anything, but she looks away and back, away and back, the little dyke bitch. One of these days I’ll get too drunk or and we’ll wind up pretending to forget something. Or not, either way.
We trade off vocals on “My little baby loves me!” “My baby needs me!” “Yeah yeah yeah!” and I adjourn to the bar-shower. Our shower has been a bar for a few months now. It’s mostly well-brands; we’re finishing the SoCo together because it’s a name-brand and this fatboy who’s obsessed with Frankie bought it for us. We keep the mixers and juices in the fridge. Arrows in black sharpie are drawn on the drywall around our apartment showing the way to “Le Bar,” “Bar-Shower” or “Last Bar For 500 Yards.” The arrows started out as a joke, it’s a four-room apartment, but they get more functional as the evening wears on, or sets in. I can’t remember the last time I had a bath. It wasn’t here, anyway. Frankie took a bath with the gin once; just empty bottles of course: a photo-op.
I grab a bottle of some vodka I bought at an Armenian convenience store for $3. It has writing all over the label in Russian or Armenian or whatever. It’s half-empty so I go to the kitchen fridge and get what’s left of the fruit punch. I hold them over the sink and try to pour it into the vodka bottle, spilling plenty, and then I jam some ice cubes down into it and shake it all up. “Darlin” starts up in the other room and I look out the window over the sink. The freeway runs by it and I try to see into the cars but the glare from the sun is too much. I pull up my shirt and hold it there a minute, seeing if I can cause a few accidents.
When I come back into the living room Frankie is drawing a monster on the wall with an orange marker. We’re going to catch hell from the landlord if she can ever find a way to get in here; we changed the locks and guard it like a fortress. Because of what we’ve done to the floors alone we’ll never get our deposit back.
“Don’t make the monster so ugly,” I say. “We’re gonna have to look at it, you know.”
“Okay,” says Frankie, always accommodating, “I’ll make it a nice monster.”
“Too late, it’s already ugly. What’s it look so scared for?”
“It’s afraid of the dark.”
I hand her the bottle; she swallows wrong and coughs.
“Shit burns!” she manages.
“It’s shitty vodka.”
“Not that, the nasty chemical punch in it!”
“Stop coughing, I love this part,” I said; the record plays “I’d love just once to see you…I’d love just once to see you…I’d love just once to see you in the nude.”
We laugh. She’s coughs and laughs, so I smack her between the shoulder blades. She gives a deep pneumatic cough and straightens up, catching her breath.
“That got it.”
“’Here Comes The Night.’”
“Wha? It’s only three.”
I stop, make my face a mask, and point at the hi-fi.
“The song.”
She laughs and pretends to crumple sideways to the floor. The second she hits she bounces back up.
“Ewww, it smells gross down there.”
“Wear socks.”
“I do. Otherwise I’d stick.”
“It’s like the La Brea tar pits in here,” I say. “I leave things in this room and never see them again.”
Frankie jumps up onto the couch.
“Gimme the vodka,” she says, “and put in a movie.”
“VCR’s busted,” I say. “The inside’s all sticky.”
“Your boyfriend probably fucked it.”
I grab a little rubber kid’s toy sitting next to me and wing it at her face. Dead on target. It leaves a flush mark on her cheek. For a millisecond she’s just looking at me with her eyes wide open, then she slaps her hand to it and turns away from me. “How She Boogalooed It” is playing. I offer her the vodka but she’s still looking away. I prod her in the calf with the bottle and she gropes for it, gets it, and drinks. The song ends, “S.O.C.K.I.T. to me.”
We sit there through “Mama Says,” which speeds up and repeats the same lyrics and makes me feel a little manic. I light two cigarettes at the same time and offer Frankie one, like the guy in “Now, Voyager.” It always cracks her up, but she’s not looking. She takes it, drags, and rubs the mark with the heel of her hand. The record ends and the machine automatically lifts the needle. The speakers are still turned all the way up and the record’s still spinning so there’s faint static like it’s coming from a long way away. I lean against the wall next to Frankie’s monster and she finishes the bottle.
“Bartendress,” I say, “another round?”
She pretends not to hear. Her face is still turned away. She’s looking at a spot where the sunlight crawls far enough into the room to climb up the drywall, and smoking my cigarette.