THE UGLY WOMAN

Another story from the saga of Mr. Nobody.

Several times I’ve begun an autobiography called, BOTTOMS UP: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A NOBODY. Each time, it dies on the vine. The words run out, the inspiration dies. But, in this Blog, I’m putting in some of those tales from my life. This story is one of many which do not reflect too kindly on me.

I was still drinking at the time, and it was shortly after my first divorce when I still lived in Ohio. At the time, I shared a walkup apartment with a crew of hippies, one of whom had been a student of mine when I taught high school. We are still good friends, Carl and I.

I used to drink sometimes in a dive in the produce district of Dayton where trucks came in to unload produce to be shipped out to retailers around the city. This establishment, The Fruit Market Restaurant, Bar and Grill, was on the main floor of the same building where I worked in a machine shop located on the second floor. An old concrete and grimy building in a grimy section of downtown not too far from the city library. At first the bar was owned by a Greek couple, then a jazz man and his wife from New York City bought it. After the jazz man, it died a seedy death with prostitution going on in the basement.

The men, mostly black, who unloaded the trucks also drank there (the ones who drank) and not many of them drank much because they were too poor to drink. They were paid piecemeal for their work, by the truck. The alley behind the building and the alleys all around were filled with empty bottles of NyQuil and empty wine bottles.

One night I showed up at the Fruit Market late in an evening of drinking elsewhere. I was as they say three sheets to the wind. The place was shadowy, long and thin. To the right, entering from the street, was the long bar and to the left a series of wooden-backed, green-colored booths. Farther back to the right was a tiny piss pot and beyond that the kitchen and to the left a dark room where overflow crowds could find a table if patrons grew numerous enough. Which did not happen until the prostitutes and topless dancing began a few years later. Me and the guys who worked in the building who drank there usually entered from a door in that dark room which opened onto the alley in back.

That night I climbed up on a bar stool halfway back and ordered a good German beer from Cincinnati, a Hudepohl. Sipping, I looked around to see if I knew anybody, and there she was, two stools to my left, the ugliest woman I’d ever seen in my life! Her face was pock marked and from jutting chin to broad, jutting forehead, her faced curved inward, like she’d been struck in the face with the back side of a shovel. Her nose in the middle of this gentle curve was flat and broad. I imagined her nose’s highest peak was level with her chin. She was also nursing a beer.

We struck up a conversation. She’d recently arrived from California, and I was interested in going to California at the time so I had lots of questions. Her voice in the noise of the bar was softly pleasant for one so ugly, I thought. She was drunk too. Soon I decided to try and get her back to my hippy pad. I don’t know why I picked on this ugly woman, but I think my thinking was this. I wanted to get laid, and I had never yet succeeded in picking up a girl in a bar (most scared me with their put on toughness) if you don’t count the prostitutes of San Juan, Puerto Rico where I lost my virginity. I sensed she was available. There was a sadness which made her vulnerable, I think, and I could pick up on that in those days. So, for no more reason than that she was available, easy, and I wanted to score a bar girl, and, additionally, I was drunk and senseless myself, I invited her back to my pad, to my mattress-on-the-floor, hippy pad. Took a little coaxing, but she assented.

In the dark of my walkup apartment, we made love on my mattress on the floor, and it was, for both being drunk, pretty tender. She was wet and open and easy to enter, and I came pretty fast. Afterwards we talked in the dark, and one thing struck through my drunkenness. It was the gentle tenderness of her voice in the darkness. Her’s was the voice of a sweet and young woman, not the voice of a beer-bloated, pock-faced hag. Her voice sounded as beautiful and sad as a morning birdcall. And so I fell in love with the ugly woman with the sad voice. But, of course, in those days, I could find a reason to fall in love with any woman who would fuck me.

Recalling it now, in my old age, all these years later, my sad self and her sad self, meeting there in mutual desperation, I feel sad again and wonder what happened to the woman with the beautiful voice and the caved in face. I know my story which has come along pretty well, but I don’t know hers.

The next day, we got up, ate bacon and eggs in a restaurant, and drove south out of Dayton in thin March sunshine to find a wooded parkland, where we could walk, where she asked to go, through the leafless trees, and we talked some more. She told me her story as we drove.

She said that she had a child at one time out in California and one day she was driving on the freeway with her child in back, and the child opened the door and tumbled out to be killed. The saddest part was that she did not notice right away. Was it drugs or alcohol? I don’t know, but after she told her story, she changed. She walked hard and fast when we entered the woodland, and she began to moan deeply and, it seemed to me, unconsciously. The moan would groan out of her every few minutes as we walked, and I’d look at her downcast face beside me and swear she did not realize that she was moaning. She never really talked to me after she told her story. She was distracted completely.

After the drive back, we returned to my walkup. Carl was there to tell me about a party two nights later somewhere in the partying city of hippies and booze and drugs. I invited my love to go with me, and she hesitated at first, but then told me to call her the next night to make arrangements for the night after that. I drove her home in the evening light and dropped her off at an old two story house in the heart of the city.

I don’t know what my friends thought as I told them I was “in love” with the “ugly woman”, the creature who moaned with pain, the one I thought I could fix. I was always in love or wanting to be in love in those days. I was so lonely and lost, it seems to me. But, no one said anything to me about restraining myself. In those days, everyone seemed to accept everything as representing a spiritual journey. Everything was spiritual, even a group fuck or a divorced older man who was not bad looking, being in love with a fucked up, truly ugly woman. It was pick your poison; what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.

That’s why you could experience so much so quickly in those days. So much was accepted and not judged but leapt into with blind gusto. Of course, we did judge the redneck harshly and often, but, then, he judged us too, didn’t he? Our clothes, our hair and music, and our opposition to his war? Who judged who first, in the first place?

Anyway, when I tried to get hold of her next evening, I kept getting an answering machine, and the more I got the answering machine, the more desperate I became, but I didn’t drive over. I don’t know why I didn’t drive over and knock on her door. Maybe she had asked me not to. As the years went by and I grew more desperately lonely, I would go and knock on doors and get into trouble and have cops show up or phone calls to cops be threatened because of my actions. Yep, pretty scary and not a pretty picture. But I said this story wasn’t flattering to myself, only honest.

Finally, on the day of the party itself, I called once again in the afternoon and a man answered. I imagined it was her father. Was it her husband? Anyhow, already inebriated in preparation to party, I begged him to let me talk to her. I said, “I love her” or, at least, “I want to help her. I really care about her.”

I was in a cold phone booth and a winter/spring drizzle dripped down and ran rivulets down the glass box, and the man said, in a kind voice, not angrily, “If you really care about her, you won’t call here again.”

I sensed not a threat but a serious request. He hung up, and I didn’t.