The Alibi Club by Jaco van Schalkwyk

Author:Jaco van Schalkwyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: In 1998 a young South African arrives in Brooklyn, New York. He becomes a
ISBN: 978-1-4152-0602-7
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2014-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

2002

1

NEW YORK IS DRIPPING WITH DISTRUST, cooked all the way through. Suspicion seeps into its marrow. Terrorism ripens on the sidewalks. Cops in riot gear and automatic weapons now search the places we used to slip through unnoticed. We are being sorted by quality control.

Inside The Alibi, cheap booze stews the fruit of an unending memorial service. Preserved humans suckle on the syrup of ABC News and CNN. Families of the Victims. Nine-Eleven – phrases read by crystal tongues, all glazed with tragedy and horror. Sounds like bullshit. Tastes synthetic. Inside The Alibi, aggression attracts violence. Someone drops some blood. Different blood bubbles from a nose. Outside, xenophobia waits for paranoia and the police. In the newspapers we read about the resilience of New Yorkers.

In The Alibi, New Yorkers are getting crippled drunk, stuffed with hate. There are po-po’s on every corner. Po-po’s are police. They orbit our block, in second gear, each with a spotlight mounted on a side mirror. They’re looking for something; it might as well be us. Publishers cough up hastily compiled hack-jobs on Islam, sickly propaganda for reading or burning. The American flag appears in every window. Immigrants hang three or four flags, displaying theirs extra-prominently. I become used to the sound of yelping, of pool cues cracking on skin. Owen considers closing the pool table permanently. Weeknights end with the DTs – the detectives from the 88th Precinct – marking bloodstains with numbers and chalk. Bruises stand around forlorn, stuck to an arm or a neck. Inspection up against the wall. Always the same questions. Who, what and where. Blood all the way into the street. Mounds of vomit to wash away. Pitchers of water and pitchers of bleach. Perhaps it’ll rain tonight. The blood of thugs runs down the back seat of Tony Rookard’s car. Ian Galway, The Alibi’s other bouncer, makes sure he comes to work on his motorcycle.

All across town, with the emergency services overstretched by civil unrest in the form of bar fights, doormen and bartenders play paramedic-paramedic. Decades’ worth of compressed diversity unravels in outbreaks of violence. Anything with a respiratory system wants to fight. In the newspapers we read about the unity and civility of New Yorkers. Maybe on the Upper West Side. In The Alibi, civility takes a different form: sit, sip some vodka through a straw, help to wipe down Tony’s back seat with a shy hand. Just focus on keeping the funnels in the basement secret. One funnel will shut down a bar. The Alibi has two. They’re top secret. Poured through them, Evan Williams becomes Jack Daniel’s; Georgi turns into Absolut and Stolichnaya. The floor of Owen’s basement office is covered with Evan and Georgi’s slowpoke self-pourers, tossed aside. New Yorkers are too thirsty to wait for their liquor. Nobody knows The Alibi’s cheating on the booze. Tommy calls it alchemy. I promise Owen I’ll never tell. We piss on the steps leading to the basement, protecting what we serve. Cops don’t like the smell of dead urine.

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