Four Kinds of Rain by Robert Ward Page B

Ray, he met his crew at Elmer’s bar on South Bond Street, at the bad end of the Key Highway. He’d been by the place a thousand times and always felt a shudder of distaste and, face it, fear. The joint had been a biker hangout in the fifties and sixties, then turned into a kind of hippie/doper bar in the seventies and eighties, and now had devolved into something too sleazy to name. Bob looked around at the cobalt blue concrete walls, the ancient pool tables with their ripped-out pockets, and filthy, stained-glass windows, relics of the hippie thing, Bob guessed. The grill was at the end of the bar and, judging from the smell, Bob thought that maybe they were serving roasted rat. The bartender was a transvestite redneck named Mary Poppins who sported tattoos on both his/her muscular arms. Bob found himself staring at the hissing snakes and other demons that moved like shadows when Mary flexed.
    “You looking for Wade?” Mary said.
    “Yeah,” Bob said.
    “Inna back.” Mary pointed and the snake looked as though it might strike at Bob’s face.
    He sat in a worm-eaten booth next to Ray, who had come to the party dressed in his usual black shirt and black Levi’s. Across the table from them was the big safe expert, Cas Jankowski. Cas wore a red shirt with black penguins on it. He ate a monstrous triple burger with double fries and worked on his second schooner of beer. His massive body had a serious triple layer of fat, but one look at his enormous wrists convinced Bob that he was nobody to fuck with.
    Sitting next to him was a ferrety-looking guy named Tony Hoy. Tony was a diminutive half-Chinese man who wore an open shirt so he could show off his curly chest hairs. Around his neck he wore a thick gold chain with a pendant hanging off it.
    “Ray tells me you’re a head doctor,” Tony said.
    “That’s right,” Bob said. “I—”
    “So tell me something, Doc,” Tony interrupted. “Why is everything so fucking lame?”
    “Why don’t you tell me,” Bob said.
    Hoy looked at Jankowski and the big man smirked.
    “All right, I will,” Tony said. “No matter where you look, things are less than they used to fucking be.”
    “Take the NFL,” Cas said, absorbing another fry. “Few years ago when the Ravens won the Super Bowl, that was exciting, but since then there has been a … falling off.”
    “The team’s rebuilding,” Bob said. “I think they’re going to win the Super Bowl again.”
    “Really?” Tony said.
    Ray was working on a mayonnaise salad sandwich with a shrimp hiding somewhere in it. He looked at Bob and laughed without making a sound.
    “But I’m not talking about building or rebuilding,” Tony said. “I’m talking about, you know … bad shit. The feeling that the world is slipping by, the kind of thing where even if say Johnny fucking Unitas came back to Baltimore tomorrow, it wouldn’t amount to shit.”
    This was met with a general stunned silence. In Baltimore, Johnny Unitas was a secular saint and it was generally agreed if God ever did come back, he would have number nineteen on his back and be wearing black high-tops.
    “That’s a very harsh thing to say,” Ray said, shaking his head. “Very, very harsh.”
    “Tell me one thing’s as good as it used to be,” Tony said.
    “Pussy,” Bob said, trying to keep the party upbeat. “Pussy’s still good.”
    “But not as good as before,” Tony said. “When I was a young man it was a great mystery, right? Now pussy is, like, on the Internet. You can do a Google search for pussy and come up with ten million sites. You can click a key for it, just like Domino’s.”
    “But wouldn’t that be, like, a good thing?” Bob said.
    “No way,” Tony said. “Supply and demand. When there’s that much going around, where’s the mystique? Now you get e-mails with girls doing horses. Nah, there’s a relaxation of standards. I think it’s the decline of the fucking West.”
    “Well, there’s a lot of truth to what you boys