Scorpion Bowl by Joseph Demes
Murray sits at his barstool at his usual spot at the very end of the bar, where he watches the women in mermaid suits swimming in the blue behind the glass and bottles of the backbar, and thinks about what kind of mollusks he would want to wear wrapped around his waist in lieu of a clamshell bikini. He comes here every night and watches them: either alone, or with his coworkers, the same men who grew up in this town with him and stayed for the same reasons that cause most people to stay in the towns they grew up in, and puts back beer after beer after beer. He watches the way they kick their legs together in their slip-on tail suits and wants to swim like that too. He’s wanted to be a mermaid since the Sip N’ Dip started putting this show on thirtyish years ago.
“Ever dream of being a mermaid?” one of his coworkers turns and asks him. The red neon of the backbar gives his coworker’s face this hard etched look like the woodwork of the ceiling, like the faces of the tiki mugs on the backbar, and Murray doesn’t know how to answer. The organist starts playing the same semi-deep bass key over and over again and he feels like he’s going to throw up until she does her best falsetto and out comes the word “Flash.”
“AaAaah,” scream all the men at the bar. They tilt back in their seats, throw their hands up and wiggle their fingers as they all say, in a unified falsetto, “Savior of the universe!”
Immediately they’re back to the hunched poses they were previously in, like it never happened. They stare straight ahead at the tank the same way they stare straight ahead and comment on the AM radio chatter while locked in rush hour traffic in the cabin space of each others’ cars, straight ahead to keep their eyes away from the sight of each other’s and their own members while changing at their lockers. Most of them have known each other since high school. They all stare straight ahead and watch the mermaids swim together, all drinking their beers in a syncopated motion which, Murray believes, most of the group would immediately compare to the timing of an engine’s pistons going up and down, bottle to mouth and back to bar.
His coworker is looking directly at him again, hand pointed out all Dickens’s-ghost-of-Christmas-yet-to-come towards something, his pointer finger can-caning in time with the bass line and then Murray notices the line of sight his coworker’s finger is directing him to take: to the printer paper sign on the backbar: EVER DREAMED OF BEING A SIP N’ DIP MERMAID! in big writing next to a knockoff Sailor Jerry drawing of a mermaid.
“Em-you-are-are-maid. Get it?” His coworker chucks the side of his gut with the bottom of a fist and laughs hard.
“That would make me a Murrman” Murray says, and takes a sip of beer to keep from hating himself because that’s exactly what he’s imagined his stage name to be. It’s corny but he wants it. Except right now he hates how elementary school his punning is and how it’s all right there, how there’s nothing wrong with what he wants and yet he can’t say it.
“AhAaah” scream the men at the bar. “He’ll save every one of us!” Each strikes a pose, gesturing towards Murray, and then go back to their beers. Murray vows, starting tomorrow, that he’s going to cut back on the drinking and the visits to Sip N’ Dip. He’s not liking this, whatever this is.
The backbar window thumps in a monster movie kind of way and the group of eleven non-regulars down the row cheer and hold their napkins aloft, and the mermaid currently in the tank swims up and out of sight.
Part of the routine is that the mermaids blow bubbles at the patrons — elaborate and simple combinations. There are your baseline concentric patterns: bulls-eye rings, cartoonish cardiovascular shapes, spirals, fractals, double helixes, the Golden Spiral. Then you have your real fancy-dancy razzle-dazzle shit: small fish that jet across the water, chased by a larger fish who, in turn, is chased by an even larger fish, etc. etc. blahblahblah; seahorses that bounce and float in irregular conga line patterns; galleons that schoon and fire bubble cannons which explode against the glass and make all the more stuporous patrons jump and hiccup; starfish which somehow retain actual suction to the glass and stay there for seconds before popping violently, making the sound it just made now: something behind a door, something unseen and hungry.
Murray can, at best, blow a large ring and somersault through it; he practices doing so at the YMCA, trying to out swim his own breath’s shape as he flip-turns at the end of each lane. He’s gotten it down where he can time his feet to tap against the tile just as the bubbles burst on the wall’s surface. He can do this all day, even in his sixties. He swims some laps with his feet tucked together, pumping his legs for momentum, concentrating on thinking of his two legs acting as one unit. He’s got this body shaped like a teardrop, which he hates — he used to not have a gut, even if it’s a gut that’s not a sad, flabby gut but a keg-gut, solid and protecting something that has required years of patience and care — but really nice legs, calves solid like basketballs and quads that don’t balloon out too much on the top from the muscle, quads that would slip just fine into any of the handmade tails that the women wear when they swim. He is, he believes, as attractive as can be at his age, which is not the kind of attractive that groups of people want to see swimming behind glass and blowing shitty bubbles while they rail back a Scorpion Bowl.
There’s foam in the bottom of Murray’s bottle like the residue of the tide and as Murray raises his hand for another bottle of High Life all his coworkers and the regulars begin to dance and sing the praise of Flash Gordon. Even the bartender is pouring with flourish. It’s like a fucking Disney musical number here, the Small World ride but in a tiki bar and set to Queen.
The song returns to its baseline and everyone is back to where they were. The bartender pops the top of the bottle and tries to slide the beer across the countertop to Murray. It gets a few feet and spills everywhere, a high tide of lager. Murray’s coworkers go “Oh” and “Ayy” and “I’m drinking here.” Murray really just wants a beer and to get off this ride.
Someone who sounds far off asks someone else to clarify what they mean by the phrase “Flash Gordon approaching.” The organist is really getting into it; she’s got the sound clips from the show synced into her performance with pedalboards and has got multiple keyboards playing on loops to get all the instruments.
“It’s dramatic as fuck in here,” one of the younger guys in the group of eleven says out loud, and the rest agree in various combinations of a curse word, an affirmation, and synonyms for the word ‘friend.’ They are all wearing puffy vests; they are out-of-towners. And as soon as a new swimmer comes in, Murray knows they are going to play the game.
All taxonomy of out-of-towner younger types — bachelor parties, corporate types on a golf holiday, frat boys spring breaking — have this thing they do: they write numbers down on napkins, and when a swimmer blows a particularly impressive bubble they hold up their score. After a few passes, they write down the number of the man sitting to the far end of what’s stage right for the swimmer, and flash the numbers one by one until they reach the man, who always waves sheepishly. The swimmer waves back, always, and continues her routine. The man always asks the bartender, in all seriousness, to please pass along his number, and the bartender always promises to.
The swimmers know this game. They are all married; they work shifts as nurses, or bartend at any number of places, or wait tables; their husbands are all deployed. Many have children. They play along because hopefully the tips will be better. The staff is sure to get these women to their cars safely after close. They walk quickly and efficiently like it’s cold out no matter the weather. The women have husbands on their second and third deployments; they are nurses or bartenders somewhere else. They have poor diets and don’t get much sleep at night, because they do their sleeping during the day. Sleeping during the day is not like real sleep.
Murray thinks about this when he envies them in the tank, and makes sure to tip consistently high. He knows all their names; he’s asked whenever they’ve been behind the stick and makes a point to remember, ask questions about their families, about their lives. Usually if it’s one of the women working the bar, the out-of-towners don’t play the game. Tonight it’s another man, so they will.
“Gordon’s alive!” scream the men, jumping up from their stools and landing on their knees on top of the bar, both fists clutched to their chests. They backflip into their stools and are back to drinking.
Murray looks at his beer, looks around, looks back at his beer, sighs, and drinks, and drinks.
This place is not real to the out-of-towners. This is not a town, not a city, not a state; these are not people whose lives they tumble through. They say “Gimme” in lieu of “May I have” or even “Can I get,” which is better than nothing, which is still shit. They are here for a time and then they leave, and then this place evaporates out of their minds.
Murry has never done this himself, meaning has never been the eleventh man; seeing it performed each time crystalizes a kind of shame he cannot articulate, at least not to his friends, all of whom themselves have been that same man in one way or another. It’s like indigestion in the way that it emerges, then passes, and recurs on a daily basis, the constant discomfort — which is all it is, wishing that one had been better than one actually has been. Murray sees no way out of it except to keep his head down and work work work, keep reminding himself that he’s been lucky for what he’s been given and what he’s gotten, that it’s smarter to ask a little under than to try and negotiate for more. He lets his dream be a dream and nothing more because someone else probably deserves that sliver of timing and chance to fall their way, and not his.
The new swimmer drops in. Her hair is black, but not shiny or too deep a shade like the other swimmers, who wear wigs during their routines, wigs with colors like soda syrups. Her turns are smooth and without flair; her tail and accouterment is swampy, a brackish green that does not shimmer, studded with fake (are they? Murray wonders) barnacles and strands of weeds. She avoids eye contact, or she does not bother making eye contact; it is as if they are not there, watching her.
She spits out a snaked string of bubbles that squirm eel-like from one end of the bar to the other, and in a wave the group brings up their scorecards; the eleventh man at the very last seat at the end opposite Murray nods to the bass and peels the label from his bottle.
It’s not like any of his friends don’t know what drag is, nor does Murray think they would judge it. But these are men who own shirts that say “My Balls For President” and touch each other with force to show affection. They act and dress and work and live like Murray, and he them; they’ve done this for years and while they don’t find anything right with the way the world is, they are still, by all appearances, the men they’ve always been. They are — save for Murray (or so Murray thinks (does Murray really know?)) — comfortable with how they appear. And Murray doesn’t know how to make new, younger friends, when it’s the young who might accept him more but also are all the more ready to leave for other cities.
The swimmer continues to stick to the basic end of shapes, and the men continue to wait for something more elaborate to finally flash the number of the eleventh man.
“Just a man with a man’s courage,” sings the organist. She’s been there since the bar opened, since the last piano player no-showed. Every night she plays, and plays. “You know he’s nothing but a man.” She usually sticks to the classic drinking songs: “Sweet Caroline,” “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Piano Man” — easy, uncomplicated, very slurrable.
It is not so much that Murray believes they have shown behavior that would make them think they would object to the thing he desires. He just can’t imagine them coming out on a Wednesday to watch him swim. He can’t imagine them not wanting to, per se, but he can’t imagine seeing them behind the three thick panes of glass, their arms going wild like those inflatable wavy arm guys they have at car dealerships, the ones with a child’s drawing of a smile, a smile which sits on a face like the setting sun on the horizon, a chariot on which death rides, total oblivion. It cares not for you. Buy the Kia, it screams, you’re going to perish anyway.
Finally, she starts swimming towards the far end of the pool, towards Murray’s corner of the bar. She swims in these long loops, and when she gets to the end she does a perfect flip turn and makes her posture like a ship’s figurehead, and the group of men know she’s got the grand finale going and start scribbling the eleventh man’s number on their napkins.
Murray knows what’s coming, and finishes his beer. The swimmer lets a tremendous shape erupt, a shape like nothing any of the patrons have ever seen before. Who knew something thin like a bubble could have such leviathan bulk, could move predatorily the way this one does? It sees the patrons and lunges toward them; the tank creaks like an attic as the rest of this thing’s body dissolves against the glass, as if dissolving into it. The water swells and churns. The swimmer treads in place. The men cheer. And as the piano player reaches the end of the song, and Murray’s coworkers are somersaulting and pirouetting and the whole bar is swelling with this finale, both Murray and the eleventh man put their hands up in the air at the same time to get someone’s attention.
The swimmer exits the tank quickly, with one push of her fin, and as Murray gets his beer and sucks up the foam in the top of the neck he thinks about the hangover he’s going to have tomorrow, how it’s going to wake him up early in the night, every inch of him aching and pulsing and wanting anything but this, the way it wants anything but this after every night at the Sip N’ Dip, and he says to himself that he’ll feel better after he drags himself to the gym before work and gets in the pool, how good it will feel to enter the water and push air from his lungs and swim from one wall to the next, back and forth like that, how he could do that forever if someone just let him.
Joseph Demes is a writer, and an editor for Funny Looking Dog Quarterly and Long Day Press. He lives in Chicago.
