Wine Hour

Shoving my jeans in the Amtrak compartment's tiny sink, water spitting from the faucet and splashing onto the carpet, I rinsed the one pant leg and hung the sodden denim on the towel rack.  I washed out my underwear, and while the sink drained, a kid rode along the slushy highway on his bicycle.  The townspeople seemed oblivious to the train parked across their snowy field, unaware of the old man now sponging off his crotch.  Only train passengers and carnival workers lived in metal rooms parked at the edges of towns.  Maybe my jeans would dry before Seattle.  

Seeing myself in the mirror over the sink, I wasn't cringing.  Why should I?  The facts were simple and small.  A man with a half-paralyzed bladder slides into a booth, pretends he's normal, and he's not.  Wastewater from the bodily plant discharged, without permit, into the surrounding environment.  Denim environment decontaminated through water-solvent rinse, and evaporative phase now underway.  Plant visitors could see the results drying on the wall.  The shame was invisible...the voodoo power of urine...smelly psycho-emotional essence...the angry yellow.  The trick: remember that what went bursting forth at the coiffed and carefree in the lounge car...was only a metabolic byproduct.  My trousers would dry quickly in the Amtrak air.  I bent over to turn up the heater, and stretched out on the bed.   

Whomp, things tilting, Starlight moving and me waking from a dreamless doze.  The sun was lower.  A vast lake, much of it frozen, stretched toward distant white mountains.  We ran along its banks, Upper Klamath Lake, according to the route guide.  The Starlight folded itself around curves, rear cars visible as it arced, overhanging its tracks to project my window into the winter mountains.  The lake was mine, all its white flatness, distant blueness, ice ripples in your face, coldness palpable.  When the lake receded, I worked myself into fresh trousers.  Almost 3 p.m.  Wine tasting.  

A middlebrow experience, but if you're looking for what passes for action aboard the Coast Starlight on a given afternoon, this is it.  The wine tasting.  People gather in the glassy dome lounge and grab a few cubes of pepper jack while the bartender announces the vintages, sounding half mystified himself.  And then everyone goes to work on the merlot.  It's the idea of doing this while the natural spectacle unfurls that makes the thing extraordinary.  If the Starlight is on time the second day, wine hour occurs south of Portland in the farm flatlands of the Willamette Valley.  Fortunately, on this day we were hours behind, and on the verge of a cliffhanging ride down the snowy Cascades.  Stumbling into the lounge, I found the last empty seat.  Now all eight armchairs were full, and the one next to me was the fullest.

"Well done, mate.  Plopped yourself nicely, didn't you?"

He was large and British, red-faced as something out of Dickens, talking too loud and leaning too far over my chair.  I stared out the window.  

"Those ladies want to dance," the Brit said, placing a hand on my chair, "but we haven't the music and I'm too bloody old."  He burst into expansive laughter, turned to the old woman beside him and then to me.

I folded my arms and shut my eyes.  We were slowing past the few shiny metal roofs and smoking chimneys that comprise Chelmut, Oregon.  The station was barely a shed.  A young couple with skis wandered away from the train.  The remoteness, the snow piled high and not a moving car in sight, the great silver liner sliding into town with skiers...perhaps it was like this in Switzerland.

"Up on your pins, man, and show us how.  You're a sight better than I am with that stick, as the Duchess said to the Vicar."  

I slouched lower, lolling my head to one side.  Something hit the back of the chair, and my eyes opened reflexively.  The Brit, gasping and laughing, had his lummox hand just behind my head.  He gazed about the car, seeking others to pull into his orb.

"Portland come up quickly, does it?"  He leaned over me.  "I reckon it's rather big."  

"Not big enough," I said.

"I admire your guts, man.  I've watched you making your way about."

Side impact.  "Thank you," I said.  Tearlets oozed into my eyes.  So much coarseness and kindness in one go.  Impossible to know how to proceed.  

"See this?"  The Brit dangled his hand before my eyes as though to hypnotize me.  "This bit, here.  Palsy."

Better take the foot off the conversational brake.  "It looks puffy," I said.

"Paralysis, mate."

"You had a stroke."

"Of bad luck, mate."

The tracks ran straight, the snow ran deep.  I thought of telling the old Brit about reforestation, how it turns the wilds into one gigantic Christmas tree lot.  But there was no sense in encouraging him.  

"Bit sparse, Portland.  Isn't it, mate?"

"Portland is miles away," I said.  

"London comes at you all chockablock.  Not like this.  Fancy a top up?"  He grabbed my glass.  

I tried to grab it back, reaching across with my left hand, but the gesture was futile.  This guy needed to learn American laws.  Like the Extrovert Limitation Act of 1998 and the Lummox Travel Ban of 1995.  He could be doing some serious time.  The train lurched over several logs or maybe an entire Chevrolet.  When the track calmed, I remained agitated.  The Brit tried to pass me the glass.  I kept my hand on my lap, glaring into the distance.  

"Mate, it's bubbly."  He maneuvered the glass under my nose like smelling salts.  Effervescence rose up my nostrils.

I folded my arms, as best a quadriplegic can.  He muttered to the bartender.

"Sir."  The bartender handed me the glass.  I took it and said nothing.

The Starlight was creeping along a single track as low clouds thinned to reveal a widening canyon.  On the near slopes, conical firs massed in snowy array.  Each was so Christmas-tree perfect in its white symmetry, the replanted effect was unnatural, like a gigantic Macy's window display.  I wondered how trees could find purchase on such cliffs.  The slopes flared into a gorge, rounded and wide.  A stream sparkled thousands of feet below, headwaters of the Willamette River.  Over this spectacle of the Cascades, the Brit kept talking.  It was mate this, and mate that.   

Wisps of fog rose up the canyon, Oregon's version of Valhalla with concrete snow sheds protecting the train from avalanches.  The tracks pierced rocky cliffs to enter dark tunnels.  Across the enormous chasm a distant outcropping of black rock, maybe lava, stuck through the snow.   

"Medical condition makes you a teetotaler, does it?"

I sighed.  "My doctor has advised me to maintain silence."

"Bloody doctors.  Mine wouldn't know has arse...."

This should be the most civilized of salons, national park splendor outside, champagne and quiet elegance inside.  But sadly, the dregs of the Coast Starlight were drawn to me or me to them.  Nothing seemed to faze this man.  

"...said to stay off the drink on account of the medication.  Sod it, Doc, I said, put me off drink, and you put me off the planet."  

"You'd probably like another," I said.  This popped out of my mouth like a burp, the wisdom more a feeling than a thought.

He chortled, slapped my shoulder and held his glass aloft.   The bartender was at his side in seconds.

"Mid-air refueling, mate."  He studied the bartender's sparkling stream.  "It's tanker cars, isn't it?  You're our bloody tanker car.  Watering us down.  Fueling us up.  Not as fast as the Bristol Express, but a sight jollier."  The Brit downed his glass, laughing at a passing tree or his reflection in the window.  The bartender poured him another.  I feigned a sip of my own glass, mindful of balance and bladder.  A potted plant would be handy.  

"Drink up, mate."  

"I will soon.  Won't you have another?"

"Trying to inundate me, mate?  I know your sort.  Shanghaied and pressed.  Your bubbles are going flat."
 
To play along, I took another sip.  He watched closely.  I took another.  There was probably some Chinese proverb about this, fighting fire with fire, getting a souse soused.  I raised my glass in mock toast.  He gestured for me to drink up, downing his glass.  The bartender poured him another.  I felt obliged to show progress and sipped some more, the stuff shooting into my veins. 

"What do you do for a living?"  To keep him drinking, keep him talking.  

"Living, mate?  This is living.  Butler."  He offered his hand.

"Bendix," I said.

"No, my profession.  Butler.  In service, mate.  Gentleman's gentleman, they call it in American films.  Retired now.  Worked for bankers, actors."  He absently flung his glass-bearing arm toward the bartender.  "Done his job plenty, haven't I?  Worked in pubs.  London Transport.  After the war, crying need for bus conductors, there was.  I didn't last.  Insulted a bloke."

Trying not to chortle, I inhaled, then sneezed, champagne.  He brightened and leaned over me.

"Wasn't all that amusing, mate.  But it gets better.  Want to know what I said to the bloke?  He was queuing for the bus and had this little dog under one arm.  I told him 'no,' he couldn't take his dog on the bus.  I already had a dog on board, you see, for a blind lady.  Two dogs get in a scrap, don't they?  Come on, mate."  He took the bottle from the bartender and poured foam into my glass.  "I was shooing him away with his little chihuahua dog, and he hoisted the middle digit.  I said take his hairless mutt and insert it in his arse.  He wrote down my badge number, sent in a letter."

The track I'd spotted thousands of feet down the slope was ours, a leg of a giant switchback.  The train emerged from another tunnel and entered a snowshed that framed the forested chasm through open arches, stalactites hanging in storybook curtains.  We went into a complete turn, the length of the Coast Starlight curving around the lounge car.

"Bloody sacked, mate.  Next thing, I'm in the Grosvenor Hotel kitchen.  One thing led to another."

Soon, we were coming out of the snow.  It was hard to say how we'd gotten here.  One thing led to another.

"Good God, man," he bellowed at the bartender.  "The train is late and the drink is absent." 

With the moment expanding all around me, I raised my glass in salute to the glorious ride, to him, to us.  The bartender handed him another bottle.  He poured.  I took a gulp, began to cough and a cascade of abnormal neurology sent my diaphragm into spasms along with my hand.  Champagne sloshed on my pants. 

"Fluids all about," said the Englishman.  "We'll be ejected soon.  Don't fancy lying in the snow." 

I dabbed at my pants with a napkin, thinking that only a single letter separated champagne that was swilled from that which was spilled.  And spastic could be drastic.  Uh oh, bladder conditions were racing, body divesting itself of alcoholic holdings...drink blurring the difference between filling and filled...and I would soon feel something too warm and wet down the front of my trousers...the urine smell arriving like a bad hospital memory.  These swiveling armchairs were impossibly low and inclined to turn.

"Up on your pins, mate."  The Brit rose and yanked my paralyzed arm.   His gut swelled through a tight buttoned white shirt, and I was toppling toward this belly.  Just as the Starlight lurched and flung me over my center of gravity.  The Brit hooked a sausage arm through mine and dragged me between the chairs.  "Don't spew, mate, not here."

"I have to pee badly.  Hurry "

He punched the electric door, stepped between cars and waited for the door to slide behind us.  "This will do, mate.  No one is about."  He indicated a gap near the shifting floor...with seconds before my urine burst...the toilet way down the hall.  "Here, before you piss yourself.  Haul out the trouser snake and point him there." 

So unreal watching my yellow stream disappear between the clanging metal parts.  Would it freeze outside?  Would it hit someone in the lower level of the car?  I zipped up.

"Winters, I used to piss in the snow.  Don't know why.  Could have pissed in the pub, couldn't I?  But you need to leave your mark, don't you, mate?  I recollect a bloke who...."  

I shoved the Englishman's shoulder...don't know why.  His shoulder proved to be surprisingly soft.  Don't know why.  Maybe he was talking too much.  Or maybe I wasn't talking enough.  Or maybe he was just there, and I hadn't pushed anyone like this, mano a mano, since I couldn't remember when.  Since I'd been shot, of course, when I'd lost the ability, or seemed to.  But I'd only lost the nerve.

"Blimey, that was deliberate.  Bloody hell."  He feigned a shove at me.  I watched with alcoholic detachment, thinking, yes, he might push back.  And so what?  I would fall against the rubber wall, maybe lose my balance over the bouncing coupling.  Maybe fall down.  And then I would get up.  Cut, perhaps, maybe bruised...like a bruiser.  I stood there leering at him, all insolence and intoxication.

"Right cunt, you are."  He was having trouble balancing over the jiggling floor plates, moving like a walrus on stilts. 

The cold was getting to me, mountain air swirling through the bouncing gaps in the floor.  The Brit was getting to me too, but less now.  The electric door from the sleeping car whooshed open.  A woman, hands in cardigan, gave me a look of are-you-coming-or-going.  I stood my ground, for what did it matter?  Not a trace of pee on the floor.  And hardly a smell.  I let her squeeze by me.  The butler gestured for her to pass.  Her presence had a mildly sobering effect.  I stared at the floor...rubbed my chin...looked up at the butler.

"Doing a spot of Hamlet, are we, in between fisticuffs?"  He pressed the switch plate on the lounge door.  The door opened.  I wasn't going anywhere.  Elderly passengers in the lounge stared at us, we at them, and the door shut. 

"What are you doing, mate?  Having another slash?"

I shook my head.  "Have to lie down."  

"Here, mate?  This isn't a bloody infirmary."

"What is it then?  One cripple, one guy with a stroke."

"This bloke is going bloody maudlin.  Mind you, he's fit enough to take a swing at me."

Punching him had punched me through some barrier.  There were two things.  This I'll-be-nice-and-don't-shoot-me-again thing...cowering out of the way and safe.  And this pugilistic-cripple-with-his-fists-up thing...balance wavering and fierce or maybe pathetic.   It was hard to say.  God  bless us everyone.  Who said that?  Tiny Tim.  God bless everyone who kicks butts.  I said that.  This made me burst out laughing.

"Bloody demented, he is.  Here, mate." 

He grabbed my arm.  I wrenched myself away.  Better when I was pushing him.  Time for something else.  I stood there waiting.  The next thing was unclear, but I had the mindless certainty of an adolescent.  Cripple on steroids.  One thing led to the next.  Maybe I would have some more champagne...no, let things sober up.  The cork was out, and something had been building up in the accumulation of days.  The fact that I was an adult man and I had endured and I had power and I knew things. 

And one thing I knew...this guy was lonely and old...so be kind to him.  And get away.  Falstaff had his uses.  And then it was time to be king.

"I have to go pee again," I said.  "This time in a toilet."  I limped down the hallway.

"Don't understand you, mate.  Oh, I know I take the piss." 

"That's what I'm taking."  I shut the lavatory door in his face.  I opened the door.  "You're a good guy," I said, shutting the door again.  The airplane-style toilet whooshed, and several minutes went by.  I heard him wandering down the hall, muttering bloody hell.