Nick Kocz’s short stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Hobart (online), Mid-American Review, and The Normal School. He is an Associate Editor for Keyhole and is completing a novel.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald
Drinking on La Rue Delambre

“This tough talk is not really characteristic of me— it's the influence of All The Sad Young Men Without Women...”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Ernest Hemingway, December 1927

You are Scott Fitzgerald and this phantasmagoria into which you’ve entered bears little resemblance to actual life. Ernie’s a silver pug with tobacco–stained teeth and black hangdog eyes, a reprehensible shedder who leaves behind strands of fur on your carpet, on your brocaded divan, and on the flouncy velvet pillows upon which Zelda, your wife, once rested her head. He has been known to leap upon you with unfathomable affection, but more often he frightens you with a menacing growl. An acclaimed master of sparse, evocative dialogue, in person he’s not much of a speaker.

When you ask if he wants to go out for a drink, he barks, “Rr–rhat?”

But he’s excited, for nothing perks the ears of this pooch as much as the prospect of a stiff drink. He’s panting, his pink tongue hanging from his mouth and exuding a bad case of doggie breath. Despite being forever linked in the annals of American Literature, you haven’t spent much quality time with him lately. And for good reason: he’s a self–serving lout. Disparaging you to your mutual publisher in 1949, he wrote, “But what a lovely writer Scott was, within his ignorance and lack of education, and his adoration of the rich. He should have been a spaniel.”

Now, in what must be a case of divine retribution, Ernie’s the dog—and you, his master.

You fetch that old Princeton sweater you’ve held on to as a reminder of your golden–boy youth and clasp a leash on Ernie’s studded collar. He runs to the door, woofing. He’s excited, wagging his short tail, and within minutes he’s dragging you across the bright–lights–big–city boulevards that appeal to those who aspire to your alcohol–sozzled brilliance. The brisk autumn chill pinkens your cheeks and you’re startled to see your breath hovering before you, a rare sign of hale hardiness issuing from your tubercular lungs.

All is right tonight on La Rue Delambre. Chestnuts roast in the antiquated carts of Parisian street vendors. Dramatic changes have taken place since you first prowled these bars.

Neon martini glasses now flash from the surrounding barroom windows. Ernie barks giddily. In this shared booze pursuit, you run your fingers through the coarse hairs behind his ears.

“Rrr–ruff!”

You step into the bar that advertises the most expensive Happy Hour prices. The lighting is dim and purple, requiring time for your eyes to adjust, but what strikes you immediately are the women. Your wife is off cavorting with a French aviator, renewing an on–again/off–again affair that vexes you. Though Zelda’s a whack job, you miss her. You are lonely, and vulnerable to misbehavior. Women’s fashions have become much more revealing. In your day, it was risqué for women to display an unclothed shoulder. Now, the women wear satin camisoles. Just staring at them heats your pulse. But men’s fashions have also changed. You feel out of place in this sea of black denim and tee shirts. When did white flannels and wingtips go out of style?

The bartender sports two shiny nose studs and a shoulder–length black ponytail, but luckily some things never change: he leans over the zinc bar and asks, “What’s your poison?”

To which you respond, “Bring me a pitcher of your most expensive pale ale, barkeep.”

When the beer comes, Ernie plunges his head into the glass pitcher. Pale ale sloshes over the bar and onto the floor, creating slippery conditions. You grab hold of a stool, steadying yourself. While Ernie guzzles mightily, a crowd forms around him, the air thickening with their cigarette smoke. People shake his paw and slap him on the back, all of them wanting to be his buddy. It’s the Spuds McKenzie phenomenon in action, everyone loving the dog that can drink responsibly. Whenever he pulls his snout from the pitcher, someone high–fives him. Manly consumption of alcohol has long been one of his primary skills. Though he slurps two–thirds of the pitcher, he’s not even tipsy. Suds lodge in the fine fur around his nose, which he lashes with his ridiculously long pink tongue.

“Va–roofy roofie woof woof woof!”

Excitement is in the air. Because all roads lead back to memories of your youth, you are reminded of your Princeton days. Though alcohol was forbidden on campus, you were no stranger to the saloons along Nassau Street. On weekends, you fled to Trenton for the night clubs and burlesque shows. Your empty glasses were stacked in front of you on cloth–covered tables, your natty evening gloves spread on your lap. You and your classmates were a bunch of undergraduates trying out first cigars and exchanging glances with the townie girls at the other side of the bar. You remember the Oh–Oh–Oh Flamingoes! drinking songs, the tall pitchers of flat, lifeless pale ale that you gulped as fast as you could, and the cries of astonishment from all who witnessed your drinking acumen.

“Dude,” Mister Ponytail says, bar towel in hand. Beads of perspiration roll onto his nose studs, glistening them. You can not understand this new generation of the younger generation, what with their passion for tattoos and piercings. “You need a refill?”

Ernie is twirling on his hind legs, pirouetting, amusing a complement of new friends with his doggie tricks. None of them are paying any attention to you.

“Want to see something funny?” you ask the bartender.

“Sure,” he says, laying down the towel. His eyes narrow upon you. “What’cha got?”

You plunk your face into Ernie’s beer pitcher, certain that this feat will again thrust you into the center of this party’s merriment, but soon there’s the realization that you’re physiologically disadvantaged. Unlike a dog’s muzzle, a man’s face is not well–suited for the demands of a typical pilsner pitcher. The pitcher does not detach when you lift your head. You’re stuck. Cool beer fizzes up your nostrils and trickles down your collar.

“That’s just wrong,” the bartender says, but you’re unsure if he’s complaining about the spillage or the fact that you’ve got your head buried up your pitcher.

The crowd that applauded your dog’s exploits turns mean. Someone runs to fetch the bouncer. You’re gasping for breath. There is no way to remove this thing from your head. People are laughing at you, admittedly not an uncommon experience, but still, it stings.

Your dog howls unsympathetically. In 1928, Ernie was short of cash when news of his father’s shotgun suicide reached him. You were the first person he called and immediately you wired money to the nearest train station so that he could be with his family in that time of tragedy.

“Help me,” you gasp, unsure if he can hear you through the glass.

Ernie’s ears twitch, attentive to your muffled pleas. “The test of a first–rate intelligence,” you wrote in your most influential essay, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Whatever his faults, he is a dog with a disciplined respect for duty. He springs to his paws and lunges at you, thudding his snout into the chest of your crimson Princeton sweater. The two of you topple over a stool and onto the terrazzo floor. It is the most brutal thing he has done to you since he eviscerated you in the pages of Esquire in 1936. Maybe you lose consciousness for a moment because, when you get up, the bar seems brighter and louder than you remember.

You want to scream at him—Bad Boy! Heel! —but then it hits you: no longer are you face–deep in a beer pitcher. The pitcher lies on the floor, cracked in at least three places. You brace yourself against the zinc bar, your dignity restored.

“Hey asshole,” the bartender yells. He snatches his towel and snaps it at your wrist, grazing it. “That broken pitcher’s going to cost you an extra twenty bucks.”

“That’s Mister Asshole to you,” you say, thumping your chest. You’ve still got your pride and, thank God, a whole wad of cash to back it up. You fling some of it at him. Perhaps you should justify your eccentricities by re–affirming that the rich are very different from schmoes like him. But, hey, it’s best to be gracious at moments like this.

Two hotties are eying you from suede chairs at their corner table, one brunette and the other with Zelda’s dark honey–blonde hair cut flapper–short. They’re dressed like aspiring parvenus, girls from the other side of the river most likely, appareled in solid colors like how they must think well–off people of their generation dress, their faces done up with Maybelline, burnished steel hoops hanging from their ear lobes, the brunette in black spandex tights and a purple crushed velvet jacket with wide lapels over a white knit top. Purple is also the color of the blonde’s babydoll dress, spaghetti straps looping over her tan shoulders, her arms loosely concealed by a slight, almost–translucent black sweater.

“Good evening,” you say to these unchaperoned ladies. “I’m the greatest novelist who ever lived.”

You detect disbelief in the girls’ faces.

One of the girls takes a drag from her cigarette. “Funny, you don’t look like J. K. Rowling.”

You have no idea what to make of this comment, but you persist, undaunted. Ernie is uncharacteristically shy after you introduce him. All he can do is let his tongue hang from his mouth. No doubt he’s thinking up something macho or witty to say but it’s embarrassing, this prolonged silence of waiting for him to speak. He bends over and licks himself.

Raising their plucked eyebrows, the girls gasp. “That’s nasty.”

“Shall I recite some Keats?” you ask, eager to rescue the situation by drawing the girls’ attention away from Ernie.

The girls giggle. “Who’s Keats?”

“Who’s Keats?” To you, this generation that was born so many decades after your fatal 1940 heart attack seems so vapid, resistant to any art form that can’t be accessed on an iPod or Gameboy. “Why, only the greatest of the English Romantic poets. That’s who!”

The girls exchange glances. The blonde is drinking a pale frothy cocktail from a glass that’s shaped like a lava lamp. It’s the kind of fruity drink that might be called a pineappletini. Her face is both pink and gold, glazed over with a tanning salon tan, her skin glowing bright and perfect. She is more beautiful than any girl you’ve met since Zelda, and you hope that she’s interested in you. She shifts her glass from one hand to the other. “You guys are gay, aren’t you?”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay. Right?” the brunette quickly adds.

Ernie growls. He does not take kindly to questions about his manhood. Soon after meeting him in 1925, Zelda pegged him as “a pansy with hair on his chest.” This was at the Dingo Bar, where you were celebrating yet again the unbearably ecstatic reviews being written about your new book, The Great Gatsby. You had a reputation as an extravagant tipper. Two garçons rushed about in wine–stained white aprons trying to impress you with the service they lavished upon your table, but, when they overheard Zelda’s accusation, they refused to refill Ernie’s glass with the champagne you purchased. To this day, Ernie has not forgiven her.

“You’ve got a mean dog,” the blonde says.

“We’re not gay.”

The brunette laughs. Her perfume suggests gardenias, the scent of which seizes you with a pang of remembrance for the breezy night many moons ago when you pinned an example of that flower in Zelda’s hair while sitting beneath a vine–covered trellis in a Montgomery garden. You were young and in love and you can never forget that you were once young and in love. Now, your attention is both here in this dim, smoke–ridden bar on bar on La Rue Delambre and back beneath that trellis staring into Zelda’s eyes, beating against a current of longing, seeing both worlds for what they are: dreams that can never be recaptured.

The brunette surprises you with a suggestive wink. Tilting her chin towards her blonde friend, she lowers her voice to a whisper that you can barely hear in the din of this establishment. “Someone’s gaydar is not working properly.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” the blonde says. She has long, slender fingers that taper to fine pink points at their nails and she wags the longest at Ernie, scolding him. “He doesn’t have rabies, does he?”

And then, “Can one of you dudes buy me another drink?”

So you find yourself buying drinks for these two thirsty and petite members of the new generation of the younger generation. The girls dig you; you have the gift of gab, a sparkling eloquence that is so crucial in establishing relationships with the opposite sex. You tell them about your freshman try–out for the Princeton football team that was going so splendidly, you returning punts and zigzagging up the gridiron until—horrors!—you twisted an ankle, sidelining your chance to make the team. They listen intently, giggling at all the right places, aflutter with your every boast.

“But why didn’t you try out again the next year?” the blonde asks, reaching across the table to touch your hand with her splendidly long fingers. “You know, when your ankle healed?”

You look into her gold–flecked blue eyes, eyes that are not so dissimilar to Zelda’s, and sigh. “Some things never heal.”

Ernie, who prides himself on the accuracy of his built–in bullshit detector, howls. The girls, however, pay him no attention. They take pity on you.

The blonde shudders. “You are so right.”

An alcohol–induced sadness falls over the brunette’s face, the type of maudlin sadness that you know so well from personal experience. She sinks back into her suede chair and cradles her elbows in either hand, caressing the crushed velvet sleeves of her purple jacket. “You poor, poor man. I too once had something that broke.”

The way she says it, batting her eyes at you, you know that it’s time to make your move.

“Look at all this money in my pocket,” you say, dumping wads of currency onto the table. Henry Kissinger be damned, but it’s your belief that a conspicuous flash of cash is the ultimate aphrodisiac. You finger one of the hundred–dollar bills, massaging it until it is stiff and straight. The girls titter, their cheeks blushing beneath their layers of Maybelline. Pleasure animates their eyes and you feel suddenly audacious yet purposeful in a way that you haven’t felt for many years. “Go ahead: touch it.”

And touch the girls do. The blonde lets her fingers traipse over the engraved portrait of Benjamin Franklin, while the brunette turns her attention to you, tousling her hair and whispering in your ear. The ear is the most sensitive organ, registering the heat of her breath and the urgency of her pleas to see more... more... more. You suggest that maybe it would be a good idea to get moving and the girls signal their assent with swift nods. The victor belongs to the spoils, which is not so regrettable when the spoils are as willing as these two women. Ernie, who has no moral prohibition against accepting your cast–offs, wags his tail.

“Shall we catch a cab to my apartment?” you ask.

As they’re gathering their coats, Ernie decides it’s time to make his move. He jumps on the blonde’s leg and starts humping. No, you tell him. THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO MOUNT THEM! In the throes of passion, Ernie fails to obey your command. The women are aghast. The one who is not being assaulted, the brunette, hurls ole’ Ernie off her friend’s stained leg. Ernie lands with a thump on one of the suede chairs. You look up and notice that people have gathered around your table, curious gawkers responding to the disturbance. Ernie appears lifeless, his pink tongue handing from his mouth, but then he jerks to attention, a sad blue clarity coming over his eyes. His nose looks cold and dry, like a shriveled piece of black rubber. He hops off the chair, tail lowered between his legs, and slinks away through the thick crowd.

“You okay?” you ask the blonde, who is smoothing out the wrinkles in her purple babydoll dress. Traces of Ernie’s silver fur have been shed onto it and when she runs her hand over the moist slick that Ernie deposited on her knee, she grimaces.

“Come on,” the brunette says, grabbing the blonde’s arm and pulling her through the crowd. “We’re leaving.”

You call after them, begging in vain for their phone numbers. Neither of the girls so much as turns around. They walk out of the bar, leaving you alone at their table with no idea when you will again experience the scent of gardenias or sit so close to a blonde with plucked eyebrows. People take to the dance floor in front of you, grinding into each other as a fog machine billows puffy knee–level clouds around them. Can’t anyone simply Charleston anymore? You take a cocktail napkin and wipe the lipstick off the rims of the lava lamp glasses, emptying the pineappletinis into your mouth, and gag on the sugary bite.

Hours later, you find Ernie cowering in the empty recesses of the bar’s back room. When he sees you, he has this big–eyed mournful look. He crouches up on his hind legs, lowers his front paws, and whimpers. Of course he’s an uncouth cad but you don’t chide him out—he is, after all, one of the burdens you’ll carry with you through the ages. You tell him there’ll be other girls and soon you’re back at the zinc bar, barking it up with all the other sad young men without women.