Gator was safely back in his hotel room at Holiday Inn Express and Suites in Longmont Colorado. For breakfast he had selected a turkey patty and a blueberry muffin and then he poured not quite hot water over a bag of herbal tea. On his way back to his room, he grabbed a banana. According to his doctor, Gator wasn’t supposed to drink any coffee for a while because of his weakened organs. Gator was still pondering if it had been the cup of coffee that had made him so ill. He felt caffeine traumatized. On second hand, maybe he was just lightly bruised by caffeine. He might need to tone down the drama. Maybe his doctor was Mormon.
As for the food, theoretically Gator was an egg eating vegetarian and he usually punished his sweet tooth by abstaining from sugar. This way he kept that gaunt look about him. But the stay in the hospital had deregulated him and Kim, the breakfast bar attendant who would make him an egg white omelet, wasn’t working that morning. Gator didn’t want to make a fuss. Truth be told, he still wasn’t feeling much like his old self yet.
Besides, he had a task to tackle and that was to find Moses’ notebooks. Gator wasn’t sure where he wanted to start but he thought a meditation with his charoite crystal was a good opening move. Gator settled on the floor, surrounded by life size cardboard cutouts of humans, and placed his banana next to him on the carpet. He activated his meditation music and set a timer on his phone. Then he reached into his shirt and pulled out a leather pouch. He extracted a medicine bottle with a pharmacy sticker on it and popped a pill.
Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply. He felt his lungs expand as the hotel air was sucked up through his nostrils. He noted the bleach tinged odor entering his skull and he exhaled through his mouth. After ten breaths the pill started working, and it was working really well with the bleach smell. Gator felt himself float off the floor.
“O mighty Creator,” Gator prayed, “I give thanks to you. Help me to help Moses. Show me the way to the missing notebooks. I feel your power and inspiration. I recognize that you also sent F.Scott Fitzgerald to cross my path. I am humbled.”
Then Gator’s mind reminded him of the all encompassing presence of his big sister. He was now tripping back in 1964 and his sister had just beaten the crap out of him because he had borrowed her hula hoop to lasso the neighbour’s pair of Dobbermans and that had been the end of the hula hoop.
His eyes still closed, Gator frowned. This was not the association he wanted to make on the quest to find Moses’ notebooks. Why was he thinking of Shirley?
Gator concentrated hard on channeling a vision of the future. He then heard Shirley’s voice and she was hopping mad. She was in an altercation with Buck Rogers. Something had been badly organized.
This reminded Gator that he was supposed to be picked up that afternoon for a session with Buck Rogers. He was also invited later that week for Christmas dinner at the ranch. Buck claimed that he had been transported from the past to the future. This was one of Buck’s trauma induced delusions that Gator was treating. The future was now.
Gator opened his eyes and reached into his pouch. He checked the date on the medicine bottle. It read 2064. So it hadn’t yet expired.
Outback and way off the grid, Lolly was reading another one of Keith Kumasen Abbott’s lost manuscripts. He was using the black out curtains in the cabin for cover and had left his phone in the secret safety box that a survivalist buddy of his had built. Lolly drove a 1978 Chevrolet Scottsdale that he managed to keep in good running order. With that extra muffler on the truck and, when he wanted to, Lolly could disappear. Lolly settled down to another adventure with Keith.
This Music Can Be Heard In Your Area Only by Keith Kumasen Abbott
The Music
“So I was putting the money and receipts in the safe and she was in the cubby hole taking five. She took this chain she had around her motorcycle jacket. It went around the waist.”
I wasn’t even sure who Jimmy T. was talking about, I had glimpsed a new waitress in leathers but only once. Blond, pale, mini skirt, torn stockings. “Just you were down on the floor?”
“Yeah. And she looped the chain around the tube shelves up high, the metal ones and I had the safe open in the floor and she turned around, looking over her shoulder. She hung there, that jacket riding up. Everything riding up. And she started making this sound.”
I leaned out, looked around the edge of the booth to peek in the two doorways. Someone was mopping the floor in the kitchen. I tapped the bindle against the table top. Jimmy was staring at the busted miniature jukebox on the wall beside us. A slot for the nickel, dime or quarter.
– This music can be heard in your area only –
“So…what was the sound?”
“If she hadn’t made that noise, I think I could have forgotten it. Maybe.”
“And now you can’t. You told your wife?”
“No. No.”
“Maybe you ought to. She understands stuff like that. I mean, by now. She knows. She worked here. She knows the scene.”
Jimmy took the bindle out of my hand and he opened and tapped the paper until some rocks fell out on the formica. He looked at his reflection in the chrome of the miniature jukebox. “I wasn’t gonna allow myself to do that anymore. Imagine, you know, fantasize someone else.” Now he was talking more to his reflection than to me. “That’s the one really the only good thing I got out of therapy. No fantasizing during sex for three years now. But if we do it, I will. I won’t be able to help myself. And then I’m back where I started.”
Hanging at Gigi’s
Jimmy left the restaurant to drop the bindle off at a friend’s house. He was shaken up. Women were no small thing in Jimmy’s life. When I first met him, he was safe in a cushy job at a private school in Santa Barbara, teaching the kids of the upper crust how to throw a pot. He had a kind wife and a bright kid and an income from a modest but growing career in ceramics. He bagged them for a randy little senior who yarded him off to New Mexico and screwed his brains out on an adobe roof until she got bored and fobbed him off on a girlfriend. It took a month, tops.
Jimmy was Italian and his blood ran that way. Like, splat. Face first into passion and tragedy. I can joke about it because Jimmy joked about it. If anything he was more honest than I was, more honest about everything. Knew everyone and everything, too. Jimmy was a guy who you could talk to about who was doing the horizontal bop with who, about his old buddy Robert Arneson’s latest sculpture at the DeYoung museum or how much he got off on really expensive Milanese slingbacks. Whatever your jones or hangups, Jimmy was there riding shotgun with you. He hung with the scum and skied with the Rockafellers. Jimmy had more friends than Mother Theresa. But this was serious, his second wife and kids meant a lot to him.
When Jimmy said he didn’t feel like going home, we agreed to meet back at Gigi’s and talk things over. Our coke dealer’s place was in the middle of what used to be middle class Oakland. This was about 1985 and the end of the good times 80’s. Only we didn’t know that then. It was still a real neighbourhood, meaning that everyone knew your business but minded their own.
As for Gigi, well hard to paint Gigi. She was a mix of career and commerce. She was still a gawky kid at age thirty, really kind of scratchy cracked voice. She was always saying “Gwaad, gag me with a spoon, why dontcha.” Stuff like that. And she was still kinda starry eyed about her ambitions. Her master plan was to maintain her mortgage with her graphic design money and build a client list. And at the same time pay off a lot up in Oregon with her toot profits, sell the Oakland place and retire at thirty-five. With alimony from her ex, she converted an old barn beside her Oakland house into a studio. That was her day job. Locals were used to seeing advertising clients coming and going at all hours so when Gigi drifted further into product, no big change.
Her studio was where Jimmy and me were often parked at the layout table, looking at our reflections and tapping glass. For us, it was like back in the old days. Gossiping about art who was hot, new scandals. Except our kids were mostly taking care of themselves, our wives understood our old careers. I still don’t know what we were doing there, except devoting our after hours to challenging the notion we were too close to old. Never saying it that way, of course, but saying it by having time to kill. Time to get silly.
Delton
That afternoon Gigi had to run so she turned us over to Delton Conger. He rented the basement of her house and acted as a protection. Delton was a special events set up guy for the University of California at Berkeley. He appreciated Gigi since she was good for reduced rent and wholesale flake. Basically Delton was around most afternoons because of seniority and gross feather bedding. If asked, he said, “I got a beeper, if they need me to earn my money.” Delton liked his blow crusty and his jazz low - Wes Montgomery and George Benson and Stanley Turrentine. He packed a nine and he didn’t make any trouble for anyone. Easy to get along with, nice and easy, he used to say. And if everything did not stay mellow, then his voice would get lower and he’d say, “Now, let’s be rational.” And that was all that was needed. So while Delton and us were easing into the evening on a one on one with a Martell back Jimmy T got to telling his story again.
“Hey now, I’ve seen that young Justine,” Delton agreed. “Yeah, once I was picking up some of this and that with someone from the restaurant.” Delton sipped his Martell’s real slow and we waited for his judgement. He shrugged and said, “She looked at me like I was ten inches of trouble and she’d like some of both.”
This was not exactly what Jimmy T. wanted to hear. It wasn’t a big help in promoting Jimmy’s own fantasy. So Delton went back to inspecting his brandy a swirl or two before he changed the subject. “Justine got a rich daddy and mommy to service that attitude?” he asked.
“Hmmm, I’m not sure about but she’s middle class with sugar frosted flakes. They may be up to their first BMW.”
Delton uh-hmmed. “So you tried replacement therapy?” Delton nodded toward the north side of town. “There’s the Pussycat Theater. It’s cheaper than shrinks.”
“It was a sound, not…just a…it’d have to be the same or better…a picture won’t do.”
Delton always respected how outfront Jimmy was and he once remarked to me, “The man has no choice but to talk it out, got that Stanford education for vocabulary, a blown career for a therapy resume. With those artists for soul mates the man has to have new kinks every day just to keep them happy and interested.”
Delton turned back to Jimmy. “Okay, let’s take it from the top. Did ya tell your wife? Louise would understand, right?”
Jimmy nodded yes to the last part. Then he shook his head, indicating that Delton’s words weren’t the answer. Jimmy chopped a fresh line and regarded Delton for a moment. Delton only looked him in the eyes until Jimmy clearly tried to think about something else.
“I wish whoever brought Justine over here hadn’t done that,” Jimmy said.
“I was thinking that about two seconds after I first caught that young woman’s act,” Delton said and poured another finger of Martell for Jimmy and added soberly, “There are some careless winds around that girl.”
Mental Health
A few days later I stopped by the restaurant early, early for me that is. I had a 8 a.m. blood test at Kaiser. Jimmy T. was across the street at Sally Menadino’s Lounge after his morning produce run. Jimmy liked to rehash the Chronicle’s sport pages with the other neighbourhood salami sellers. Jimmy drew me to one side and started working over the chains, the leathers, the sound.
“Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, buddy, let’s cut the chase. The wife is looking at you funny?”
Jimmy made helpless gestures, “How else is she supposed to look at me? I’m not putting out for her.”
“Okay, preventative maintenance. Have you run one of your waitresses by you so she knows you’re not bonking the hired help?”
“She beat me to it. Came nosing around on Wednesday afternoon when I was picking up the wine on my regular run.”
“Okay pragmatic solution. You think, you know, doing it with the lights or minimize the chances of fantasy or,” I waved at the bar mirror. The phone rang and the bartender grabbed the call. “Take the missus to one motels by the airport with mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors above the headboard. I mean if you got your eyes open at all, no matter where you look it’s just you and just the wife.”
“Jimmy Telaferro!” the bartender announced operatically while aiming the receiver at Jimmy and mouthing your wife.
Jimmy shrugged, “She’s checking up on me.” He put his hand out for the phone and when he got done talking he looked aside and sighed.
“Jimmy, it’s getting so your friends don’t want to talk to you about this endless rerun. This is lust not love, right? Try another angle as the actor said to the bishop. Maybe you should put it to whatshername again?”
“Justine. Justine Williams.”
“She’d go for it, right? Buy an eight nose ball of candy and some Bud, after her next shift tell Justine you need help on a pick up at the Carne Con Carne Motel.”
Jimmy had to laugh. The Carne Court Motel on East 14th was a pitstop for the vice squad. The kind of place where ex priests and district managers for electric companies were found dead of heart attacks with companions for witnesses. "Or borrow a motorcycle jacket and buy a dog chain and ask Louise if she wants to help you with a project at the restaurant around midnight. What’s she gonna say? ‘No, I only do outcalls for my part time lovers?’”
Jimmy didn’t respond. He just sat there under his little straw porkpie hat, resigned and distracted and rubbing his two day old beard. I would have left it with anyone else but the point of being Jimmy’s friend was that you were allowed to go all the way out. So I went. “You Catholics sins good, dontcha? Sin then, don’t burn in some mental hell.”
“Heeey, don’t mess with those,” Jimmy pretended to be insulted, “mental hells are my art form. Besides it’s not our agreement. I can’t perpetuate these fantasies, that’s why we got into therapy in the first place.” Kimmy downed his brandy. “Oh man, if she hadn’t made that noise. Hey!” he announced, “8:52 and my wife’s back checking on me and I’m on my third drink. Have I got a problem?”
“No!” everybody at the bar yelled and they all laughed.
One grey beard muttered into his drink, “Non ha una problema!” He grinned and bought Jimmy a round. This “Have I got a problem? No!” routine was a ritual at Sally’s Lounge but only among the neighborhood Italians. If you had a crisis that could be publicly entertaining, someone bought you a drink.
Fresh Bruises at Molos.
Molo’s had originally been a chop suey place with a barbershop next door. In the 1970’s the restaurant changed into a rib pit dubbed La Original. When that failed some of Jimmy’s hip friends bought the building and they kept its sign but a red “Mother’s” was spray painted graffiti style above La Original by a kid from the California School of Art Design only a few blocks north. Jimmy was hired to manage the joint and except for a few pros to run the grill, he never bothered to dip into any other talent pool than art students.
At Molos everyone knew everyone else, shared apartments and/or slept with everyone else, they doped and owed money to everyone else, they parked their cars in the same no parking zone and had the same outstanding traffic warrants. Like they say, just one big happy family.
So when Justine slid across from me in my booth, I only got to say hello before she corrected my pronunciation.
“Just-IN, like RinTin Tin. Woof.” She praticed panting. Then after a hair toss, she added a little breathily, “Have you seen Jimmy?”
“No. I am waiting for him, too.”
Except for her mirrored shades, she was in her street runaway look, simpatico with other art student fashion statements. A little of her history had come my way from Jimmy’s staff. After only one semester Justine turned terminally hip, dropped classes, outraged about how the art world sucked. I imagined Justine hanging from the tube shelving in Jimmy T.’s cubicle, her hands wrapped up in her dog chain. The image was sleazy enough to merit a u-turn through Jimmy’s fantasy to make sure it wasn’t mine too. But nah, I never really longed for quality time with milk carton kids.
Justine looked out the window and jumped up. “There’s Gigi.”
Two dudes in knitted caps in the booth across from us and even the waitress turned to look and so did I although I had seen Gigi lots of times. Then Justine plopped down. I wondered what the big deal.
“Shit,” one dude said, “her ass ain’t candy.”
“Mine is and you know it,” murmured Justine as she bent over her cherry coke. With her middle finger she lowered her mirrored shades down her nose and hoovered on the straw. I had to smile but then she raised her eyes to check my reaction.
Her whites were bloody. Someone had given her a smack, a good one, and the violet eyeshadow under her left eyebrow was really a fresh bruise.
Verb Refugee
Justine acted like she had something on Jimmy T. but she couldn’t figure out quite what to do with it. Everytime she got near Jimmy her face turned thoughtful, sorting out her options. It was so naive it was like watching pop up menus on a Mac. Justine was in such a rush for something spectacular as a burg refugee she couldn’t match the lowlife credentials of Molo’s regulars. Not in a scene where the morning fry cook was an ex aerospace engineer fresh off a three year tour of duty as a speed freak street guitarist. Talk about commitment to art. He’d sacrificed almost all his teeth and gums while pursuing the perfect blues lick for total strangers.
During a party at some mutual friends who stored Justine’s stuff, she showed me her portfolio after it finally registered that I wrote reviews for art week. “Gigi told me the name of an art rep and where to send my slides but I never heard back.” For a moment in her puzzlement, Justine’s face seemed even younger like the face of some girl at a mall who is about to leave town maybe for good. She wasn’t thinking anything out really, she was sensing a way like a deer standing at the edge of the road.
Late For the Party
The two were dressed like Pacific Gas and Electric guys checking the basement for a gas leak. They blindsided Delton and pistol whipped him. A blackhawk rugger in one ear got his promise to be quiet and then they roped him to a big vent pipe in the bathroom.
Jimmy and me and Gigi and her two year old kid were upstairs with nothing much more than a beer and small talk. Labor Day coming up. I had developed an allergic reaction to cocaine so I was just socializing. Gigi might have been on ludes because she struck me as syrupy around the edges but that only mattered later when she stayed moderately calm. The first PG&E guy, the short guy, had a clipboard and I knew something was wrong. Most meter readers had electronic gizmos. But the tall one followed with a gun and they saw that it was only us four, they looked surprised. We were hoping Delton was alert downstairs. They checked the bathroom before the gave us our instructions.
Jimmy and me lay down on the hardwood floor and Gigi put her kid on the sofa. When the kid cried, it didn’t help. The guys were edgy and wired. There was a moment when it seemed likely we’d get one a piece in the head. They were threatening Gigi even if she opened the safe in the fireplace hearthstone, badgering her for all the coke and all the money. Gigi never held back but they still smacked her and tossed her around.
Justine walked in just then. I snuck a peak as the short guy told her to lock the door and stand against it but he was exasperated and not jacked up. When he caught me looking, he jumped over and put the muzzle to my left ear. He breathed three times, real slow. The tall one filled up Gigi’s fanny pack with cash and over an ounce worth of bindles. He tossed it to the short guy. Then the tall one grabbed Justine and jerked her arm up behind her back. She cried out. He said they were taking her with them and if we called the heat, they would do her.
They didn’t know that the vent pipe in Delton’s bathroom was disconnected and lifted right out of its fitting. Delton got out of his front window and under the porch just in time to see Justine and the tall one walk by. Delton stayed in hiding until the short guy came hurrying out, carrying Gigi’s fanny pack. As he opened the stolen PG&E van, Delton stepped out and shot him twice. First in the back and then in the chest as he spun around.
The van peeled out and Delton lifted the fanny pack off the dead guy and walked into Gigi’s as cool as could be. Delton ordered Gigi to ditch any paraphernalia and for us to follow him down into his studio. There he handed the pack to me and told me to split. “Out the back door, down the alley. Walk slow.” And he repeated the walk slow part.
I left as Delton was explaining how it was him who got held up, not her, and she and Jimmy and the kid were in the studio the whole time. It wasn’t until I was in the alley, trying to remember the nearest payphone to call a cab, when I realized I was holding a major felony stash with enough money to prove I was a dealer. That’s when my legs started shaking.
Delton later said that Justine split off from the tall one and got into the passenger seat on her own. So we agreed she was late to the party and was supposed to be inside with us when they came through the door. She fucked up and Jimmy and me heard that in her cry of relief. Like she deserved it when the guy ratcheted her arm. And then there was that “do her” remark. Anyone with any brains would know that a dealer was not going to call the police and that “do her” was for Justine like a little French pastry thrown in for the thrill. Not shooting her was hard for Delton when she broke free of the tall one’s arm lock and hopped into the passenger seat. Up until then Delton was holding his fire, thinking she was a hostage and he almost lost his temper.
Secret Jones All Around
But by the time Delton and us got around to rehashing the ripoff a week had passed and everything had turned out so bad. Justine had been found dead in a closet in an abandoned house, dangling from a coat hook. The Molo’s regulars got a glimpse of her appearance at the funeral. Pa Williams was a data computer analyst for Southern Pacific and Ma Williams was a parttime aid for a local museum. They were stunned, guilty and afraid. Justine had been stringing them along that she was still taking art classes and they had been footing her monthly bills.
Gigi moved to Oregon, freaked for the safety of her kid and herself. She’d been inside a bubble, thinking she was surrounded by friends, and pushing product was a lucrative sideline like playing the stock market. We all were inside that bubble really, some of us much longer than her.
So what was I doing over there when I didn’t even snort anymore? I mean you stick with and are stuck with your friends but not so you get killed for their habits. I don’t know what I was thinking of, I couldn’t even blame Jimmy. And a month after Justine died, Jimmy T. got diagnosed with lymphoma and went through chemo followed by radiation. He never returned to Molo’s. The doctor said no way, too much stress, too many brandies and coffees in the a.m.
But before his diagnosis Jimmy and Louise were getting along fine. One afternoon at Sally’s Lounge, Jimmy danced off his bar stool, “Hey, so I don’t need fantasies for sex anymore with my old lady.” And he turned to the other juicers and yelled, “Non ho una problema, no?” And all the other barflies laughed and said, “No, no problem!” And then before anyone else could do it, I set up Jimmy with his favorite cognac. Later when he had a little buzz coming on, he said he wished there was a better end for fantasies. “But the thing is,” Jimmy said, “near as I can figure, there really isn’t one. If they are strong enough, burial is the only way.”
Lolly sighed. He had almost gone to the January 6 insurrection but something had stopped him. Now Trump was coming back for a second term. This might just be Lolly's chance to recoup his losses.
Lolly opened up a pack of hotdogs.
Comments
Post a Comment