The Book of Joe

plastered. As the time drags on and I listen to Wayne tell highly embellished tales of his travails in Hollywood, my prickly sense of expo-sure begins to wane, and I start to relax. Wayne wields his outsider status like a weapon, a neat trick that simultaneously empowers and insulates him, and I drunkenly vow to internalize this strategy for the duration of my stay in the Falls. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I realize that being in knocking distance of heaven’s door gives Wayne a certain reckless courage that I don’t possess, but I am nevertheless resolved to have a go at it.
    “This place,” Wayne says, “is right out of Springsteen.” He nods his head and sings a line. “Just sitting back trying to re-capture a little of the glory ... ”
    I finish it for him. “Time slips away, leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days.”
    Wayne smiles. “Like Sammy always said, there’s a Springsteen song for every occasion.”
    “I remember.”
    “People are staring at us,” Wayne observes with a grin.
    I kill another shot of vodka. “Fuck ’em,” I say, or actually the booze does.
    “Fuck ’em,” Wayne repeats, lifting his glass in a toast and taking another baby sip from it.
    Drinking always leads me to form dramatic resolutions in the area of personality modification, behavioral adjustments that seem obvious and easy without the weighty hindrance of sobriety. At this moment, I resolve to stay enveloped in a
    protective leather pocket of cool, ironic detachment, like Wayne, ready to unflinchingly handle whatever demons from my past lie in wait for me. I am absolutely confident that I can pull it off. Which makes it all the more surprising when I’m suddenly snatched by a pair of powerful hands and yanked violently out of my chair. As I stumble, I catch a punch in the ear that spins me around and knocks me onto my ass. I look up to find an older, bloated version of Sean Tallon standing over me, his face contorted with crimson rage, his fists clenched in front of him. “Hey, Sean,” I say, getting uncertainly to my feet. “How’ve you been?” I’m working under the assumption that it will be too incongruous for him to hit me, once engaged in conversation. Obviously, I don’t know shit about fighting, because it’s the conversation that is incongruous. He hits me again, this time with a roundhouse punch that sails through my girlishly awkward, flailing block and glances painfully off the outside of my eye socket, simultaneously disproving my ill-conceived theory and sending me flying back into my table.
    “Hey, dickhead,” Sean says, advancing on me. “I’ve been waiting for you to show your sorry little ass around here again.”
    The delivery of dead-on one-liners is rare in the non-scripted world. Usually, they occur to you only afterward, at which point, of course, they’re completely worthless. Consequently, I always feel an almost religious compunction to seize those opportunities where the serendipitous confluence of circumstance and wit occur, regardless of the outcome, which will almost always be bad. So I say, “You always did have a thing for little asses,” and Sean kicks me in the stomach. As I fall back onto my table, I am rewarded for my verbal acuity by Wayne’s snorting, appreciative guffaw and somewhat comforted by the knowledge that Sean was already beating me up before I impugned his sexuality.
    By now we are the main attraction, my second public flogging in one day. Sean theatrically hoists a chair above his head, and with horror I see that he fully intends to bring it crashing down on me as I lie splayed out on the table. I wonder crazily if it will fly apart on contact, the way furniture always seems to do in the movies. My body involuntarily contracts into a fetal position, my eyes clamped shut, absolutely pathetic. There is a loud splintering sound, which I presume to be my bones yielding to the chair, but after a moment I realize that there is no pain and I open my eyes. Sean is doubled over on the floor, his arms folded into his belly, the chair lying broken on the floor a few feet from him.
    Standing between him and my sorry little ass, with his hand pointed commandingly at Sean, is my brother, Brad. “That’s enough, Sean,” he says in a low voice. “This isn’t the time.”
    Sean slowly gets to his feet, rubbing the area just over his left rib cage and looking at Brad in disbelief. “You fucking hit me, Goff ?”
    “Just lay