Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

Chapter 11

An Aside on the Sidecar

ONE AFTERNOON during my work on the preceding chapter, I was cursing my ignorance of the sidecar while Albertine was clipping something from the Times. She stopped her work and said, “What’s bothering you now?”

“Oh, nothing,” I claimed.

“You were muttering under your breath,” she pointed out. “What is it?”

“Ahhh, it’s this damned sidecar problem,” I confessed. “Because I didn’t know how to make a sidecar, the drink that Patti and I concocted in ‘Testing the Hypothesis, Part 1’ bore no resemblance to a sidecar, so I’m not able to use the sidecar in the manner of tea and madeleines to aid me in netting my flitting memories, and the thought keeps nagging at me that if I had known how to make a sidecar, and had made actual sidecars that night, I would be able to sip one now and then during my reconstruction of the story of my mother’s lunch launch, and the occasional sipping of a sidecar might make my reconstruction more vivid, so I was cursing my ignorance.”

“I don’t think I can help you there,” she said. She extended toward me a coupon that she had clipped. It could be exchanged at a shoe store for two passes to a preview of Luis Villanueva’s six-hour one-man show Me Llamo Sancho, an evocation of the personal history, adventures, experiences, and observations of Sancho Panza, famous sidekick. “Want to go?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, heading for my workroom.

“By the way,” she added, as if it were an unimportant afterthought, “what is a sidecar?”

“It’s — well — it’s a cocktail — ”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Damn it!” I said. “I still don’t know what a sidecar really is!”

“If you don’t know how to make a sidecar,” she said, in the measured, patient tone probably employed by saints, “how do you know that what you made for Patti wasn’t a sidecar?”

“I don’t,” I admitted.

“Come on,” she said, opening the hall closet and reaching for her coat. “We’re going to go to this shoe store, and then I’ll take you somewhere where you can learn all about sidecars.”

A couple of hours later, we stopped at a bar called the Silver Hound. “Let’s try this,” she said. “It looks interesting, a little out of the ordinary.”

The bar was dark, and it was empty except for the bartender — a tall red-haired woman with tattoos who was wearing a tight black top and a very short gray skirt — and a pale fellow playing a video game.

The pale fellow called out, “Fuck! I fucked the game! I don’t believe it! I fucked the game!” He smacked himself on the forehead, leaned across the bar, accepted a long consolation kiss from the bartender, said, “I gotta go,” and left.

The bartender moseyed on down to our end of the bar and asked, “What would you like?” The long consolation kiss came to my mind, but Albertine must have read it, because she shot me a glance that we both know means, “Don’t you dare.”

I asked, “Can you make a sidecar?”

“Sure,” she said, and she shook up a couple right before our eyes (two parts cognac, one part Cointreau, and one part fresh lemon juice, shaken with ice and poured into chilled cocktail glasses). She said as she poured them, “It’s happy hour, so you can have another round if you want.”

I took a sip. Albertine watched.

“Are you awash in memories?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I guess the drink I made that night really wasn’t anything like a sidecar.”

“Disappointed?”

“No, not really. At least I know — ”

I was distracted by the bartender, who, bored without a barful of barflies, had entered a photo booth at the back of the bar, the kind of booth equipped with a camera that produces a strip of black-and-white pictures. She hadn’t closed the curtain fully, and through the narrow opening I could see her making faces, as people are inspired to do inside those booths, while three flashes went off. Then, just before the fourth and final flash, she stood up and lifted her skirt.

I turned toward Albertine to see what her reaction to this photographic flashing was, but she hadn’t seemed to notice it.

“Maybe you should try to reconstruct the drink you did make,” she suggested.

Had I actually seen what I thought I saw in the photo booth, or was it just the effect of a sidecar on a guy with a vivid imagination?

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

The bartender emerged from the booth, skirt in place, and waited until the strip of pictures dropped from a slot on the side and landed in a hemispherical metal cup. She plucked the strip from the cup, began waving it in the air to dry it, and sashayed back behind the bar. She stuck the strip of pictures into the frame of a mirror there, where, I noticed now, there were others, strips of grinning faces, patrons mugging for the camera after they’d pickled themselves sufficiently to become inspired to mug for a camera and discovered that, thanks to the foresight or experience of the proprietors of the Silver Hound, there was in the back of the room a camera for which to mug.

“Want another round?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, and when she had shaken the drinks and began pouring them I added, “and I’d like to see those pictures.”

She pulled the strip from the mirror and held it out for us to see. “The last one’s a little naughty,” she said, girlishly, as if she might start giggling.

Albertine and I bent over the strip and examined it closely. The first three pictures were like the others stuck around the mirror, but the last little image showed her from waist to mid-thigh, naked. It was a black-and-white picture, of course, but the tone of the grayness of her pubic hair allows me to report with certainty that it matched the red of the hair on her head.

“Yes, it