Quinn
I slam the fifty down above the left corner pocket of the black Dynamo right in the face of the guy drawing back to take a shot. “Fifty bucks for next. Here’s another twenty says you miss that shot.”
Quinn leans like a dark totem in the corner. She is slumped over & smoking & the smoke is everywhere all around her. She has on the wobbly table in front of her: Empties. Shot glasses & pint glasses. She is holding a pint in the hand that isn’t stove-piping the Pall Mall & it’s half full & she lifts it to her tortured lips & downs it & slams it back to the table scattering ashes from the heap of butts in the ashtray.
The guy w my fifty in his face, the mark, doesn’t belong here. He & his friend don’t belong here. They look like they thought about what to wear. Their jeans have holes. The kind of jeans you buy w a hole already in them. Jeans that are washed a lot to make them look like they have been worn a lot. Their shirts are tight (a red one & a blue one…) so we can see they are fit. Nautilus or something. I’m wearing my army surplus coat, the one w the rip in the shoulder & my father’s name on the right front pocket. Quinn is wearing her black turtleneck the one w the rip in the elbow & the one that otherwise covers every inch of her torso & our jeans are torn w holes in them because we wear them every day & I keep catching my toe in the hole of mine. Each day I put them on & they rip a little more & the hole keeps getting wider & wider & we are, all of us, in The Monte Carlo, so small & caliginous & final it has the dimensions of a casket. I could throw a pint glass from one end to the other. Eventually I will, a full one & finally be asked to leave for good & I will. Most of us are here every morning when they open @ 6am & we are, most of us, here when they close @ 2am. & we stay beyond that because there is after-hours too. The door to the Monte Carlo, it seems, only swings one way. We have lost the idea how to leave. But for now… it’s a Friday night & we get people that don’t belong: Red & Blue Shirt. They are like tourists during summertime in a seaside casino, except this isn’t Monaco, it’s 14th St. & it isn’t summertime, it’s February in Downtown Sacramento. Red Shirt rakes a shot off the opposite corner & whispers: fuck.
“Don’t worry about that. That’s a freebie. You & your buddy here wanna play me & my girl there? That’s Quinn. Say hi Quinn.” Quinn raises the hand with the smoldering Pall Mall & somehow manages to unfurl her middle finger & drop the pointer & ring. Then gets up & with the urgency of a glacier, zig-zags over to the juke-box & leans into it with her right hand & hangs her head into the neon.
“That’s your girlfriend?”
“I don’t know? Are you my girlfriend Quinn!?” I yell across the Monte Carlo to Quinn’s backside as she hovers over the Jupiter Majesty 120 dropping coins into it like a wishing well. She walks from the jukebox to the bar & then back to the table armed with two more pints & she lights a Pall Mall as Van Morrison infiltrates the Stygian chasm of the Monte Carlo, all the way from Dublin, as it were, & mingles w the voices & laughter & lighters & glasses & pool balls & cries & stories & smoke & excuses & coughs & interruptions & asides & fakes &
all-around bullshit.
“If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…”
“Get the fuck outta here” says Red Shirt, who has yet to make a shot he meant to.
The night I met Quinn she was running the table @ The Monte Carlo & she beat me three times in a row. After beating me for the third time she reached out & put her hand around behind my head & pulled my face into hers. She pushed my lips apart with her tongue & blew smoke into my mouth & then took my bottom lip in her teeth & bit down so hard I started bleeding. Later that night she started a fight w Linda in the Ladies room & broke her nose (@ least that’s the way it looked, even though Linda stayed & drank w blood dried to her face & shirt) & came home w me & took her clothes off & went into my bedroom & crawled into my bed & passed out & when I woke up the next day she was already gone.
Later on when I snuck out of Sacramento as the sun came up & left everything I owned in the apt on 26th St & the rest in a crawlspace under the foyer stairs, I would think about the neighbourhoods lined w trees & the restaurants & bars mixed in. The way the lights played out over the streets @ night & the headlights of the cars would catch me blind & speeding along & my eyes like skating rinks & my distended pupils tenebrous stones & I would be listening to a song by Elliot Smith in my head or Gillian Welch, thinking nothing can stop me. I would taste the river, like everybody did, whether they knew it or not & feel something resting on my chest & right behind my forehead & I was full of ghosts & falling so fast into an Abyss, the one that you know about, that all I smelled was the river & the trees & the Cimmerian denizens with whom I had become entwined.
That night I went to the Monte Carlo & ordered a beer & found Quinn passed out in the back by the Jupiter.
“Hey Quinn”
She lifts one eyelid.
“Wanna come over?”
Quinn liked to fight & play pool & fuck & she was funny & mean & we ran a hustle @ The Monte Carlo for a month or so & we made a lot of money & drank & got high on it & she mostly lived w me then over on 11th St. I still see her: tall & lanky w no tits to speak of & long brown hair that was always fucked up & knotted & fingers like grape vines & nails chipped & gnawed to nothing but blood & when she kissed me I felt it in my elbows & my hips & it was perfect until it wasn’t because it didn’t last, because nothing lasts…Ask the Arawaks.
Her real name was Meredith Seaward & she was born in Venus, TX. Her father, her real father, not her step-father, although him too, had been in & out of prison her whole life & she found him once when she was eight & he was home briefly between bits, slumped over in his closet, his belt dangling from his arm.
She moved to Denver when she was sixteen w a boy she’d met @ church. She had lived in Denver & Arizona & National City & Fremont & Conover, NC. She had been an accountant & worked in a factory making polyester. She was locked up in Willanoochee, GA for stabbing a furniture maker in the eye w a butter knife. She had been locked up everywhere for drunk-in-public & intent-to-cause-harm & wielding-a-weapon & vagrancy. For the past five years she moved around & blew in & outta places & drank & made money playing pool. She had just arrived in Sacramento the night I met her. She had her things @ the women’s shelter down by the river.
The last game we played together before she disappeared, it was just us. Nobody would play us anymore & the room was full on a Tuesday night & Quinn was distracted & agitated & intractably sober & her beer sat there like an electronic eye & she looked up @ me from the felt & said, “You know what I hate? Fucking liars. This place?…” she swept her cue in an arc around the room, “…is sick w ‘em.” I guess she was talking about The Monte Carlo.
When Quinn breaks its a put-on. Its a fake. She glances the stick off the cue & it barely connects w the triangle of balls & they weakly disperse like an old man taking a piss, then she staggers back to her chair & lights a Pall Mall.
“Nice break” laughs Red Shirt.
& the mark moves around the side of the table to smash the stick into the cue. The seven drops accidentally into the corner pocket.
“Uh-oh Quinn”
The five blasts off the end & caroms away missing the corner.
I take the stick from Quinn & move towards the left side of the table wedged in against the ruined left wall of The Monte Carlo.
“Quinn..we outta beer?”
Quinn drinks hers & finishes mine & disappears to get two more.
“ten in the side…twelve in the corner…nine in the corner….”
I miss the nine.
Quinn told me once that the last job she had was @ a place called The Tumbleweed Lounge in Marana, AZ. She said during a lunch shift the owner trapped her back by the walk-in & forced her down onto her knees. She put a ball point pen deep into his thigh & then stood up & stuck her thumb so far into his eye she drew blood. The guy vanished silently into his office & Quinn walked back out onto the floor & finished up her tables & when she was done w her shift she sat @ the counter & had a slice of lemon meringue pie & a cup of coffee. Then stood up & dropped her apron & order book on the counter & walked out into the lethal Arizona air & headed to the bus station. She had her back to me in bed & I could see every rung of her vertebrae & her breathing was long & hypnotic & in the rhythm of her breath she whispered: fuck work.
Turns out the other guy has a little game or a little bit of luck coming to him from the karmic wheel & he goes to work & sinks the four & the five & the two.
“Wow. You’re almost good…for a cocksucker.”
Quinn starts coughing & spills her beer.
“You know what? You have a big mouth…”
Blue Shirt, despite his luck, looks frustrated, maybe w the game…or maybe it’s something else entirely?
It’s dangerous running a hustle. It requires finesse, a surreptitious meanness. I keep up the talk & the insults, just enough to vex & antagonize, but not too much. Not so much as to cross the line. & you have to know where the line is. Just how much shit is in the mark’s past. What kind of shit is in their future & what they are dealing with the very evening you have deigned to steal from them, to lull them in the drab simulacrum of their life & steal…money, yes, but something else. You are removing the false sense of How Things Are that is perceived by those who don’t know the taste of the river & the bile & jarring sense of death here in The Monte Carlo & right outside the door on 14th St, & that has to happen suddenly & unexpectedly & in the final moments, otherwise the game is forgotten & things get physical.
Blue Shirt makes the one in the side & then his little run of luck runs out & he misses the six in the corner.
Quinn takes the stick from me chalking it slowly & moves around to the opposite edge of the table. She goes back over to her beer & finishes it & then w the Pall Mall in her mouth she leans into the felt & drops the nine in the side. Then she starts talking while moving around the table, only looking @ the felt, talking only now to the sunless shadows of The Monte Carlo.
“I knew this woman, her boyfriend couldn’t fuck her unless he tied her up. She was worried maybe something was wrong with him…hmmmmm?”
The thirteen slams down into the corner.
“The tumbleweed is a dead Russian Thistle. Very lovely…but hazardous, y’know like the song?…”
Fourteen softly between the eight & the three into the side…softly.
“That’s right… the tumbleweed is a dead, technically it’s dead, Russian Thistle…they go on though. They have a whole different life. Different than the one they had as a thistle while they were still alive…”
Fifteen angled into the side.
“They keep on drinking…taking in water, stealing water from crops…”
Eleven across the green to the corner
“They blow right through the city there in Denver. Denver is fucked up. A lot of dope. Kids on the street. Kids falling out…”
Nine in the side
“… I spent some time there in Denver, I don’t shoot dope though. I knew this kid Jeremy & he fell out right there in front of the record store…what’s the name of it? The famous one…? Fuck it. Those kids? Nobody wants em around. “
The eight is hidden behind the six. Opposite end of the table in the corner.
Quinn walks over to where I’m sitting. Takes the fresh pint I bought her & drinks it all @ once. She bends over & puts her tongue in my mouth & pats my face roughly & smiles @ me.
“Once when I was working for the Highway Dept in Arizona…there was this big storm & there were so many tumbleweeds they were all piled up on each other ten to twenty high all over the highway & the cars couldn’t get through & nobody could get home from work & everybody was honking their horns & screaming & we were out there in our orange vests & canvas gloves & hard hats pulling those tumbleweeds apart, trying to get them unstuck & outta the way so the regular people could go home & eat dinner…it was a huge fucking mess. Those folks were agitated, laying on their horns yelling @ us like we had something to do w it. They really wanted to get home…y’know?”
Its a long shot. Way over on the other side of the table. The eight is hidden behind the six
Quinn hits the scuffed white ball low w the stick & puts a spin on it & it glides slowly like a phantom across the table & jumps lightly off the opposite rail & banks across & nudges the six & the eight…