My Trip To Port Desespoir

Today I shall be popping up to Port Desespoir to visit the elderly parents and what not. I suppose my mother will want me to take my brother shopping. He usually does not want to go shopping. I have called him up numerous times and he has said things like, "Nah. I got a few hot dogs n' buns here. I'll be set for awhile." Of course, none of this explains why he goes through money so quickly. As I have said before, he does not smoke, but he has a myriad of friends who do so, and these johnnies have a habit of nipping by his apartment on the days I am to visit...and ducking out, or into the broomcloset just as I arrive at his threshhold. When I spy the ash tray, I may speculate whether the mound of cinders indicates that the tray is half empty or half full, but stacked with butts it most definitely is. It is not that I go about town preaching the smokeless Gospel- I mean, we are having the Olympics in smoky old Beijing this year, so some CO is just what the doctor ordered-but he did loose part of his lung last year. The situation with alcohol is very similar. When I visit and we go to the bar to have a cup of tea, I do notice that one of his friends, in a jolly moood, seems to have sprinkled him with beer, or beer-like by-products which leave him with a distinct odor of the hops and a florid face. We duck into the bar for the tea, because he says his place is a mess. I then say, "How many beds do you have?" Now this question is a bit more apt than it appears at first. His place is on the second-floor of an old building. It is up a good number of steps, a good design for those of partial lungs, and it is not all that large. If one stands upon the threshold, one could fill the teapot for tea, gather the bedclothes for laundry, and reach over and grab a kleenex for the road. Small, but charming in an antique manner. Even the doves which light upon the ledges seem quaintly old; heritage birds, one might say. They all seem to be exactly what a bird should be, say, if birds were needed in the "Our Gang" movies, standing around like "mugs" or tough guys, whistling or cooing at the broads like "swabbies" from World War II. Into this miniature set from "The Glass Menagerie" one day last year I visited and counted a second bed. It was hard to miss it, sitting in the middle of the front room/breakfast nook/dining area, stretching from wall to wall. It lay before the TV and reflected the baleful videodrome light from the screen across the ripples of threadbare blankets and worn and ripped afghans. "You have another bed?" I said, trying to make conversation. "Yes. I found it on the street. Someone had thrown it out, and there it was. Free" Free, indeed. A previously owned bed. Just the thing everyone hopes to finds abroad on the city streets early garbage day morn. "The tattoo guy helped me with the box spring." The tattoo guy is the tattoo guy who runs a tattoo parlor on the first floor of the building...the tattoo guy. When first I learned of the tattoo guy, my mother informed me that he was related to someone we had known in some other capacity and thought highly of. She said something, and fortunately my memory of it has let its mortgage on my brain lapse, but it was something about tattoo guys and maybe they don't all just hang around louche bars...or maybe they do. I forget. Anyway, although what she said was intended to be praise, it also contained a number of mythic stereotypes of the most appalling nature dealing with good old tattoo guys and muscle beach tabloids of the 1950s. I could have said something, but did not. The Tattoo Guy Lobby in Port Desespoir has seen fit not to retain my services to represent them, and they may do their own talking. I am serious. This is a substantial interest group in the city. In Port Desespoir I have come across travellers and sailors from all the seven seas and the world's ports, Lascars with eye-patches and small, dexterous Sri Lankans and heathen Chinee, and they have all told me with amazement and admiration that they have never in their peregrinations ever come across a city with as many tattoo parlors as Port Desespoir! Scouts' honor. So the tattoo guy helps him, not only with the mattress but with the box spring. The sight of them moving that up the 30 stairs must have been not for the faint of heart. "I like to watch TV lying in bed.", he said. "Couldn't you have moved the mattress from the bedroom," I motioned towards the cubby-hole which functions as a dormitory, "...and put it out here?" "Then I wouldn't have anywhere to sleep." This was all in August of "aught 7" and it is a new year. Upon interrogation, I determined that he still had the superfluous bed as of March 1 "aught 8". Hmmmm. I am sure it will be a lot easier going down the steps than it was going up. I probably shall not need the help of tattoo guy, nor part-time bartender guy, nor garbage dumpster scavenger guy. However, were I to feel particularly frustrated at sending the bed back down to whence it came, I could use that enormous black guy my brother used to have nightgmares about: stand-on-the-corner-of Howard-and-32d-with-shopping-cart-and-yell-at-the-top-of-your-voice-for-no-particular-reason guy!