Year of the Rhinoceros

Chapter 12: Ladies Night At Scandals — A Mongo Moon Goddess — Laney vs. Manny Eden — Sneaky Shit Theories — Personalities Are Such Fragile Creations

M. B. Neff ~ 171 Chapter 12 Ladies Night At Scandals — A Mongo Moon Goddess — Laney vs. Manny Eden — Sneaky Shit Theories — Personalities Are Such Fragile Creations COME MONDAY, A HUGE CARTOON of Richard Nixon’s face exploded by Xerox from Boyden’s “My Favorite Photo,” appears tacked up on Manny’s inner partition wall. Taped to the edge of the Nixon lips is a white tail that emptied like a river into a word-stuffed cloud floating above the Nixon head. The words slashed in black reading: LIFE IS UNFAIR, SO MAY ST. MACHIAVELLI INSPIRE US ALL. Manny’s immediate impulse to trash the Nixon face is interrupted though; he stops himself in mid thrust, saying: No. Today I will practice free will. Self-restraint for its own sake is proof enough. After a few sips of bad coffee, comes Keat Linderhart. He’d been putting her off all weekend. Of course, the routine OWC closeout would follow, the bureaucratic eat-shit-and-die form letter, but he can’t bring himself to do it—and not because the concept of the action is difficult (Hunsecker and Boyden having provided ample excuse). Rather, it is the fantasized bond that prevents him: their love making, together with his memory of sharing on the Mozartplatz; and also because, despite his armory of new self-deceptions, she still throbs, backstabbed and moon-like in the nearby vicinity of space—though becoming more hideous and sloppy by the hour. He hopes she’ll show at OWC that very day, cawing for attention and inflated to a god-sized Moloch, a scream of grade-b zombie—the kind who gleefully devours shrieking 172 ~ Year of the Rhinoceros babies before demanding with an air of horrendous bitchiness that he do his duty and exonerate her absolutely. Only that would be too easy. As Hunsecker said, she wasn’t a whistleblower by definition. A pity, Manny thinks, I can’t argue with the way the law is written. Nevertheless , he admits to himself that he’d like to cradle her once more, while she yet toasts with her cup of philosophy in the Bavarian wind, while she yet remains precociously moral, brave, and dying like a barbeque coal in the lonely Washington night. Then later, at leisure, he’d retrench and reconsider, perhaps even say to himself: FUCK YOU KEAT LINDERHART FOR EXPECTING WAY TOO MUCH OF ME AND FOR DOSING OUT BLAME BY THE WHINING SHOVEL LOAD! * * * MANNY PLANS A THREE-HOUR SUNBURN lunch in Farragut Park. In advance, he tells Deejah he is going to a doctor’s appointment. She doesn’t flinch, just gives him the usual psycho face. What else? But before he can flee OWC, Becky Bergstein appears in his cubicle looking maligned and paranoid. As foreshadow, she had stomped back and forth from one side of his office entrance to another, casting suspicious glances at him. But once inside she glances uneasily around with big wet eyes. She gasps and scowls at the apparition of the huge Richard Nixon gloating forth from Manny’s wall, but keeps all comment to herself. To Manny’s surprise, he notes as she recovers from the shock of Nixon how drastically her face has thinned, as if a being of sadistic intention had punctured her and sucked her to collapse. With shaking hand, she picks up a yellow sticky pad on Manny’s desk, produces a pen and writes: THE TIME HAS COME 7:00 PM AT SCANDALS CORNER OF 19TH AND M STREETS M. B. Neff ~ 173 She shows him the note for a count of five, crumples it, and leaves. * * * MANNY’S TREK BEGINS AT 5:10 PM. He takes several turns on side streets and lingers on corners to make sure he isn’t being followed. At 5:55 PM he enters the bar and orders a Rob Roy. The place is breathing room only. It’s LADIES NIGHT, and several white tons of hung-and-restless male are slouching needfully against their surrogate wooden mother: the bar rail in Scandals. Within the eye-stinging haze of blue neon that tearfully smudges the length of the club, the males flounder and slip. Already they’ve snorted at least an hour’s worth of Wicked Ale, rail booze, and kamikaze shooter, and are now distending themselves into marauder soft machines, their ambitions clinging like ejaculation to a ceiling of perfect passion...