Last night at the bar there were two men, each missing a leg, and wearing a mechanical device that culminated in a shoe. One was sitting at the bar, the other had a table. They looked like that cliché romanticized by Cyberpunk, the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine. Flesh and metal. They probably lost their legs in different wars, one in the Gulf, the other in Vietnam. They were of two different, and contending, generations, united only by wars fought far from home. One looked like a hippie: long, limp hair all the way to his waist. He wore thick glasses, and was sipping on one of those cheap beers that don’t taste like anything, the ones that sell for two bucks at I.C. Ugly’s. The other was a fat man, and wore a baseball cap: someone who probably voted for Romney in the last election. He was having a whiskey.

I.C. Ugly’s always attracts the same kind of people, as though there were a community of losers who had no better way of wasting time than downing domestic beer and watching football games on the immense TV screens placed throughout the bar. The women who come in are all young and beautiful, their bodies covered in tattoos. All but one, who is unattractive and bored, and who does justice to the name of the place.

I like to go when it’s still light out. I sit at the bar and watch men who’ve been drinking for hours go out to smoke. They sit by a small monument to books on a bench engraved with the name of Denis Johnson, one of the writers who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I like to finish my beer, talking to no one, while Neil Young softens the mind, softens the body, renders it submissive. When someone asks me where I’m from, sometimes I tell the truth, at other times I lie, I make up places they’ve never been to, places they’ll never go. They spend most of their lives in this six-block city, withstanding the heat, then the cold, then the heat again. They talk to the waitresses as though they were their sisters, they joke without malice. They all know each other, they all protect one another. In the center of their brains, the little Calvinist machine runs non-stop to produce that variety of thoughts and gestures that preserves the vision of the world they inherited from their parents.

Last night, while I was watching them, I thought of my father, who survived a bad car accident. A 4x4 crashed into his old Ford Escort and tore it to pieces, but my father came out miraculously unharmed.

I’m fine, he said on the phone when I spoke to him.

It’s always been tough for us to talk. Sometimes we stay silent for almost a whole minute on the phone and I can hear my mother whispering in the background, telling him to ask me things, telling him to say this or that. That time my mother wasn’t there and my father was simply silent.

My knee is pretty screwed up, but that’s it, he said at last.

The waitress asked if I wanted another Guinness and I said yes. The TVs were showing football games, old movies, news. There was music playing softly, a Fleetwood Mac song about conjugal problems, a song that two decades ago made these people dance when they were young, made them look one another in the eye while the blood flushed their cheeks, made them feel vulnerable, knowing that something amazing was about to happen. There was something there, in the air, and it wasn’t going to last very long.



See also:
[Selva Almada] [Israel Centeno]