Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

IVAN GOLDMAN is a columnist for The Ring magazine and a Fulbright Scholar. His work has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and other publications. Kirkus Reviews called his Where the Money Is: A Novel of Las Vegas, “an impressive debut . . . a stylish, twisty first novel.”

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The Barfighter

The Permanent Press

Contents

MAY 1984Chapter 1: ANGER CLASS................................11Chapter 2: CANNIBALS..................................19Chapter 3: A NATURAL..................................25Chapter 4: REYNOLDS...................................29SEPTEMBER 1965Chapter 5: NO PITY....................................36Chapter 6: NINE FINGERS...............................44Chapter 7: KESEY......................................55FEBRUARY 1984Chapter 8: COUNTY.....................................66Chapter 9: BEST FRIENDS...............................83Chapter 10: EDDIE.....................................90AUGUST 1984Chapter 11: LORRAINE'S EARS...........................96MAY 1985Chapter 12: VEGAS.....................................106Chapter 13: THE CUBAN.................................120Chapter 14: GOONS.....................................131Chapter 15: OLD HICKORY...............................138AUGUST 1985Chapter 16: ROAD TO PARIS.............................152Chapter 17: POWELL....................................166NOVEMBER 1965Chapter 18: NAKED PRESIDENTS..........................182Chapter 19: VALAITAS..................................189Chapter 20: THE HUN...................................197OCTOBER 1985Chapter 21: TRANSFORMING THE MIND.....................202Chapter 22: PHILYAW...................................214Chapter 23: THE TONIGHT SHOW..........................220Chapter 24: COMMON COLD...............................233Chapter 25: QUICK O'BRIEN.............................244

Chapter One

Barfighters were a minority species in Cheskis's anger management class. Rather than fight each other, most violent men find it safer and more gratifying to assault their wives and children. Class members tiptoed around the facts. Nothing was as serious as the cops made it sound or they were framed altogether. Just now, for example, Muhammad ended his story with another "I swear to you." The phrase ended his sentences like a Canadian "ey." Muhammad was some kind of Pakistani feather merchant, a chubby little man with only a few strands of hair around his head, all of them long and out of place. He'd had a street altercation with a blood enemy that led to the enemy's car windows getting smashed with a club. Muhammad contended the enemy had followed him, broken his own windows, and called police. When he told this sad tale he was terribly convincing. Muhammad could probably borrow money from the most hardened cynic. But Cheskis and doubtless everyone else in the class knew he was a lying sack of shit.

Cheskis often wondered whether the patient Lorraine, their class instructor, had seen the files and knew the precise nature of the deeds that planted pupils in her class. If so, she never gave it away. She never challenged them when they interpreted events like a roomful of verbal cubists. Lorraine was more concerned with their future than their past. Cheskis suspected she was a rare individual, someone truly capable of controlling her own anger. If only she could convey her secret. But few of the class members cared to know it, even though anger had scarred them irretrievably.

Lorraine was in her thirties and slender, like a volleyballer. Slight chest, chin a tad weak, no wedding ring. Her light brown hair was nearly shoulder length and would have looked more attractive, Cheskis concluded, either shorter or longer. She usually wore crisp jeans and blouses and no makeup. Lorraine's voice still had a youthful bell-like quality, which Cheskis found fetching. She smiled most of the time, but not nervously or insincerely. Though inescapably pretty, she still struck him as someone suffering from a mild case of wallfloweritis.

Now the buck passed from Muhammad to Sybil, whose evil mother had stolen Sybil's daughter out of spite. Sybil once mentioned that at some point in their relationship she'd approached her mother's door with an ax but never quite explained what led up to it, where the ax came from, or what happened after she reached the door. Her stories skipped around, creating mysteries. Most of her circular soliloquies evolved back to her mother's scabrous intentions. "She and my aunt (pronounced ohnt) turned Chiquita against me. Everybody in the church knew it."

Sybil was Cheskis's only female classmate. Before she started showing up, some of them used to reveal secrets abut themselves, perhaps not the ones that wrenched their hearts in the night, yet digging down far enough to share at least some honest pain with their lost, angry brethren. But Sybil's stream-of-consciousness rants, largely devoid of logical threads, upset the class chemistry and chased away those flashes of candor that might have shed light on the rages that put everyone there. Lorraine hadn't figured out yet how to deal with her. Sybil was fortyish and tubby and dressed as though she were eighteen and slim. Her skin was pure Africa, almost blue. She pronounced English with the precision of Elizabeth Taylor, drove to class in a late-model Mercedes, and was missing two or three upper teeth along the left side of her mouth. Nothing about her made sense. Cheskis was forced to think about Sybil more than he'd like. She was a considerably disordered cog in what was advertised as a mathematically precise universe. Cheskis fought hard to be patient with her. To be angered by a classmate in his anger management class was more irony than he could stand.

Angry people popped in and out of class until they completed thirty-five sessions within the allotted time or met with some misfortune, perhaps getting arrested again for a new angry act that would surely send them to jail this time, or so they'd been warned by the criminal justice system. On some nights enrollees announced it was their thirty-fifth session, but usually when someone disappeared you never knew why. There was an endless stream of replacements, always plenty of fresh doughboys to dump into the trench of their dishonored regiment. Cheskis figured there was enough anger in the world to keep the class going until the end of time.

Usually about a dozen people showed up, meeting every Wednesday night in a seedy, backwater office complex. There was no sign on the door and not a single window in the poorly lighted room, which was no bigger than a one-car garage. The place was about as cheerful as last night's dishes and its hole-in-the-ozone atmosphere was further oppressed by a generalized, palpable shame. Class members were ashamed of their anger, ashamed of getting caught by the cops, or both. And they felt sorry for themselves. Cheskis too. Every night thousands of people all over the world ended up in bar fights, but he was one of the unlucky few arrested for it. Such emotions inspired no camaraderie. Members of the class pushed their chairs back along the wall in a circle to get as far away from the others as possible.

During a fortuitous break in Sybil's monologue, Lorraine, always on the alert for such opportunities, jumped in to steer the discussion back on course. "Is anger," she asked, "ever helpful? Can it have positive benefits?" Sybil, as always, raised her hand. everyone else, as always, didn't. "What do you think, Marvin?"

Marvin, who wore lots of blue, signifying his status as a Crip gangster in good standing, viewed class proceedings as though he were on a promontory looking down on a distant, inconsequential piece of ground. He projected enormous physical power just sitting there, like an...