His high forehead and sunken black marbles for eyes give the rest of him, which isn’t much, the illusion of gravitas.
He slinks and contorts like water as if to ceaselessly dazzle a mirror unseen but to him. Passing women lift their chins, droop their eyelids and spy him through a squint. There is something about him, both magnetic and repulsive, that pierces them. Something taboo. Perhaps something false.
The grifter slouches into a kind of practiced repose and periodically scavenges his lady’s plate for stray beans and clumps of sticky rice that tumble from her burrito. She puts three fat fingers to her lips, an attempt at modesty, and chews and chews. The rouge on her cheeks, clownishly thick, cracks and a wet flap of tortilla falls into her lap. He looks at it, at her, then at me, and sinks even lower, thumbing the cleft on his chin that lends him an unearned perspicacity.
His pomaded mop, Vantablack in the dim light of the joint, is coiffed with the utmost care, over and back in a flamboyant sweep; he pats it like you would a hot electric range. But his shirt is too big—there’s a gap between neck and collar, which is yellowed with sweat and tired. It is second-hand, one of two on loan from a former employer, who, on an nth-generation facsimile, in the box labeled “Reason for termination,” recorded without emotion, “repeated indiscretions and tardiness.” His gal licks her plate, blows him a kiss and splits.
He turns, motherless again, and stands transfixed before a high-definition aerial shot of some sprawling Asian megalopolis, the camera slowly descending into a blinking cacophony of black glass and steel plunging out of fog. It cuts, retreats, and the loop repeats. He watches it again and returns, smirking with adolescent mirth. An eyebrow asks, You gonna drink this? He wants to be surrounded by beauty. Forbidden beauty. At home, on his nightstand, is a single book: “How to Achieve Multiple Orgasms.”
At closing time, desperate for a piece of ass, he’ll charm you into playing “banker,” and craftily withdraw funds for one last round. And you’ll oblige, desperate for a piece yourself. The lights go up. His shoes are untied and he reeks of a cheap chemical spray. In the foyer he strikes a kind of decadent pose, simultaneously priggish and artless (elbow out, thumb through a belt loop, foot turned out like a gangly ballerina), and leans into a window. Not to see, but be seen—his reflection, primped to taste, complies.
For his face is the ticket, to bed or bar and all the people in between. People going places.
Image: Leiter, Saul. The Kiss. 1952.
Impolitic 