LITMIR.BIZ

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      “How did you know?”

      “Enough of this gay banter,” he says, glancing at his watch. “We’ve only got six hours.”

      Mountain drives his father’s El Camino. His father and mother are divorced. He doesn’t talk much about his mom. Father, I gather, is the uncommunicative intellectual type who spends his evenings with vodka on the rocks under the reading lamp.

      We argue about what place to go. Mountain likes crummy working-class bars where he can find fights. I like more-upscale places with the possibility of women. Mountain doesn’t go for bar women. He finds his girlfriends in grocery stores, dormitories, at beaches or ball games, anywhere he can exhibit his dimples, apple cheeks, and charming, gosh-golly befuddlement in good, clean, and wholesome light. Come to think of it, I have never seen him with a girl when he was drunk. We compromise by hitting alternate bars.

      “No fights too early, Mountain,” I warn him at bar number one, a cement hole in Mission Beach called Murph’s, where a sprinkle of semibikers have gathered like moose around the mossy pool table. Mountain and I really stick out here, me in a floral pirate blouse, green cuffed bell-bottoms so tight you can see the breath mints in my pockets, platform shoes, glistening hair coiled artificially, eyes bloodshot from the vanity of hard contact lenses, a draping of gold at the neck—and Mountain arrayed like a senile father in a sixties sitcom. “All right? I don’t want to get blood all over this new shirt.”

      “You’re not fighting,” he grumbles.

      “Yes, but the guy will fall on me after you punch him,” I return. “Do you remember the last time? That shirt cost me twenty bucks.” I point a finger. My hands are so long they alarm me sometimes. “You see that donkey-headed guy down there by the dartboard?”

      Mountain glowers down the way past a medium-hot blonde staring at him, who looks as if she’d enjoy a physical contest with Mountain, or failing that, between her boyfriend and this stranger who pleases her eye. “I see him,” he intones, his ears pricking. “Looks like a Burt to me.”

      “He’s not staring at you.”

      Mountain rolls his shoulders and cracks a malevolent grin. “Yes, he is.”

      “No, he has a walleye. Strabismus, it’s a muscular disorder.”

      “Maybe I can knock it back into place for him.”

      “You don’t want to pick fights with the handicapped.”

      “I don’t like people named Burt,” he says.

      At Murph’s, even if it’s a biker haven, my incredible string begins. From here on out, regardless of the tavern we select, I am served for my free birthday drink a flaming asshole. I try not to take it personally. Don’t ask me what’s in a flaming asshole (floor wax?). All I know is that I present my ID and I am served this syrupy concoction on fire. Mountain thinks it’s funny, but he has one with me since we are brothers. You have to drink them quickly to keep from burning your face off. Even tossed back with expert quickness, these little pots of fire still crackle off the bottoms of your mustache hairs.

      “Why don’t they call them Phantom of the Operas?” Mountain wonders aloud, licking his lips as if to feel if they are still there.

      “They should serve them with extinguishers,” I agree.

      Bar two on Seventieth Street is a bona fide disco with the mirror ball spinning over an acre of dance floor. I hate discos as much as the next guy, but where else are you going to find so many gorgeous chicks? I stand at the headland of the bay of dandies, admiring the tide. Mountain is bored, however, even if he knows how to dance—there isn’t the vaguest prospect of a fight—so we finish our drinks and head east down El Cajon Boulevard to a backwater part of town, littered and forgotten, as if a glacier pushed through a trailer park and came to rest here.

      Mountain parks along the curb in front of a small closed grocery with salamis hanging in the window. Next door is a neon dive called The Mambo Lounge. The place has obviously been here for at least two wars, though this is the first I’ve noticed it. I follow Mountain through a gray curtain drenched in smoke and perfume, past a cigarette machine and into a purulent, velvet darkness, petite coin-sized tables arranged around a dance floor that looks like a bottomless pit. Mountain swivels his head as if he expects to recognize someone.

      “Where are we?” I say. “Morocco, 1953?”

      “About right,” he says, pointing toward an open table by the dance floor. An expiring couple draped over one another follows the wheezy inflections of a Tony Bennett song. The waitress, about forty, in black Danish S/M lace, sidles up with her tray. “See your IDs, boys?”

      Mountain mutters, “How old do you gotta be to drink here, fifty?”

      “Only twenty-one,” she drawls, dropping the cards on the table. “What’ll you boys have?”

      “It’s my birthday,” I announce.

      “Oh oh,” she says, and here come the liquid minibonfires.

      “The place looks like a convalescent hospital,” I remark. “What time does the bingo start?”

      Mountain rolls his big shoulders and plucks at the knot on his tie. He’s still looking around as if he expects to recognize someone. The drinks arrive. Mountain lifts his glass. “To the great state of ecstasy.”

      We toss them back, eyes clenched against the inferno.

      I brush at my lapel. “Is my shirt on fire?”

      “Siss-KWAH!” Mountain says to the waitress, who is staring at him with less-than-professional curiosity. “Two more, dear.” He seems suddenly content here. I don’t know why. The patrons are too old to fight.

      The moment the waitress is out of earshot Mountain cocks his jaw and belches. He’s a gifted belcher, able to articulate phrases such as “Buick Riviera” or “George Washington Carver.” Through eructation this evening, with a few drinks under his belt, he’s ambitious and tries: “The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”

      I congratulate him, even if he did run out of gas on the last syllable.

      He drops his head in modesty and begins an impression of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach, which consists of little but the word “Alabama” mumbled over and over. Then he cries suddenly, grimacing in pain, clutching an imaginary wheel. “Action photo!”

      “What is it?”

      “Kamikaze pilot spill hot coffee in lap.”

      “Here’s one,” I say, left hand behind my head, right arm extended. “Shot putter with loose toupee.”

      “Forgot my chute,” he says, arms flailing.

      “Watch out for those Girl Scouts!”

      “Marilyn Monroe!” he says, lifting the tails of his jacket and clapping his eyelids.

      “Forgot to shave your legs!”

      “So, big fella,” he says, shoving at imaginary goldilocks with the heel of his hand. “What’s new in the development of thought and the analysis of ideas?”

      My coaster is stuck to my arm and I finally manage to shake it free. “Why is there no practical philosophical application to the problem of happiness?”

      “What’s the problem?”

      “Happiness.”

      “Life is sad,” he says, his gaze swinging over my shoulder as someone enters the door. “Have another drink.”

      “Would that I had one.”

      He fiddles with his cuff links. “Where is that dame?”

      “Probably reloading the balls in the bingo machine,” I say, fluffing the curls on my perm. “So what are your plans

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