My drinking graduated from recreation to career that first August I spent without a permanent address. It was scary, those times I didn't crash at some party or stay up all night, knowing there was nowhere to go home to, even if I wanted to. But you get used to it. A couple of years after that, you could find me spending most of the spring and all summer "living off on the land," as I called it. Without the expense of a room somewhere, I didn't have to hold down some shitty job all the time. I never lasted long at those crappy little gigs anyway, but who cared?
It's not that I was asocial. I enjoyed drinking in bars. About the time I changed my mailing address to the back seat of my car, I got pretty good at hustling pool. The fact that I looked worse all the time only helped. Down in the East Bottoms, everyone was happy to lift a few bills off some guy who'd been sleeping in his clothes for a while. A lot of the guys—gals, too—thought I was in my forties, though I was only a few months shy of my 29th birthday.
After a while though, the hustling didn't go so well. I began to lose my edge. You can't be too obvious when setting some sucker up, try to clean him out on the first bet. You have to bleed them out slowly. This got harder and harder, since even the beer I'd sip when playing—a diversion solely for the benefit of my opponent, I told myself—the beer started blindsiding me occasionally. I'd wake up missing a night, or a few days, sometimes beat up, always broke. A couple of times I woke up in County Hospital. One morning I came to at the municipal farm, with no memory of what I did to get there. And I couldn't seem to hold on to my custom cue, which made it hard to get a living shooting stick.
What really convinced me things had changed, though, was my increasingly weird sense of humor, and a strange indifference to my surroundings, both of which I noticed the night old man Bertelli earned his nickname. It was the evening of my 29th birthday. I was down at Bertelli's bar, shooting for stakes. There were two twenties on the table, which for me by then was high stakes, plus we were playing on my quarter. Bertelli's joint is an open room with a long, old-fashioned wood bar down one side and four eight-foot slate tables. It's not a big place. Given the clientele Bertelli gets, he doesn't want too many people in there at once anyway.
I'm chalking my stick, watching my opponent get on a serious run, my back to the bar, when I hear this shout. I turn to see this druggy-looking greaser walking in the front door with a gun in his hand. This asshole at the other end of the bar catches sight of him, pulls out his own piece, and these guys set to bang-ing away at each other. Great big handguns, BANG-BANG, BLAM-BLAM, BANG-BANG. Everybody's hitting the floor, it's asses and elbows everywhere, ducking and rolling and scurrying, getting the sweet sorry fuck out of Dodge. I mean, it got wild in a hurry. People are jumping through windows without opening them, running into the shitters, cowering under the slate tables waiting for a chance to run. Up at the bar it's World War III, goddamn beer bottles blowing up, chunks of wood jumping into the air. This is just like on TV, I think, which was pretty cool. I'd been missing my cop shows. My car, like most of them, didn't have a TV in the back seat.
And there I was watching these guys, in full view of both of them, only a few feet out of the line of fire. It dawns on me I'm the only guy in the place still standing, gawking like Curious George. No one shoots me. Maybe they think I'm the referee, or the UN observer or something. I'm holding my stick in front of me, nub on the floor, both hands around the shaft, thinking, if one of these guys comes after me, I'll whack him with the big end. Like that was a viable option.
An ex-Marine combat veteran told me one time there should never be a second place in a gunfight. Sometimes there's no first place, either. The guy down at my end of the bar, he's been hit a couple of times, he's hurting, definitely hurting. He ducks down behind the counter, just wants to hide. The other guy, the one that walked in the door, he's also hit, also more than once. But he's focussed, very tenacious. Slumping onto the counter, he braces himself, then slams in another clip and starts firing again. And he's smart. He starts shooting low into the other end of the bar, down where Bertelli keeps the reserve liquor. Who says you have to see someone to kill them? I can't see the bottles, but I can hear the glass breaking, the booze splashing, and man-oh-man can I ever smell all that hooch. What I can see are his slugs coming through the wood, hitting the guy at my end, hitting him again, spinning him around. He's screaming, writhing. He's trying to crawl. His fingernails pull back off his fingers as he digs them into the hardwood floor. But he can't get away from the bullets. Three or four more slugs and he's shaking like a dog trying to pass a peach pit.
I'm watching this when I hear a crash and look down the bar. The other guy's fallen over, taking three bar stools and a bunch of beers with him. He rolls over slowly on the floor. Blood sprays out of his back like a fountain.
"Son of a bitch," I say. I've never seen anything like it. A moment later, neither of these guys is moving. "Tie for third," I call out, to nobody in particular. Hell, I think, there's nobody left in here but me and our two bronze medalists.
Then I hear whimpering behind the bar. It's Bertelli, praying the rosary in this tiny, terrified voice, cutting a deal with God. What a pussy, I think. The bastard's probably shit his pants. Then he stands up, holding up one hand with the other. He's missing his little finger and ring finger, and the middle one's dangling by a strip of skin. He puts his good hand over the spot. Blood runs down his arm.
And you know what I do? I don't walk over to ask how he is, see if he's shot anywhere else. I turn and check on those two twenties, making sure the guy I'm playing is long gone out the window. I snatch up the bills.
"Cool," I say. "I was losing anyway." Real John Wayne. I walk over to the bar. There's one lone Bud still standing, full and proud and icy cold, sweat beading on its smooth, brown shoulders. Just like me, it's untouched by all the devastation. Bertelli had just twisted off its cap and set it on the bar when the excitement started. I pick it up and raise it in a toast.
"For all you do, Bertelli, this Bud's on you. Put it on my tab." I walk down the bar, stepping over the dead greaser, catching myself as I slip in his blood, and saunter out the door, laughing my ass off. I can't stop laughing. You know why? You know what I find so goddamn funny?
Fingers Bertelli never gave anyone so much as a nickel's worth of credit in his life.