by John Nichols
Joe had never really sorted out the complexities. He knew only that unless Eloy could sell high and fast, the land would be auctioned off among a variety of creditors maneuvering demoniacally to grab it whole, leaving Eloy broke and homeless into the bargain. Ideally, the old man hoped for a rich hippie who might care for the land while providing Eloy with enough cash to pay off his tangled web of debts and survive on until he died. Unfortunately, Eloy owed outright at least forty-five Gs. And he hoped for another twenty grand to see him through his final years. But few who might have had sympathy for his land could command that kind of cash. And cash was what Eloy needed fast, if he were to have even an outside shot at turning the place over to a caretaker with half a soul, instead of to the commercial institutions intent upon its instant pizzafication.
Joe had dreams of being that caretaker with a soul. Sometimes, thinking about owning that land, he had tingled with an excitement that left him almost faint. He had rich fantasies of going out and possessing the land. He would quarter it, walk all over it, smell it, touch the bark of his trees, ladle up a cup of water from his well, lie in the back field’s brown grass soaking up the solar bennies refracting down through his own little patch of pristine atmosphere! At three o’clock in the morning after the closing he had plans to tackle Heidi in the exact center of the little back field beneath the pungent nighttime sparkle of high mesa stars and drill her like a mad wildcatter on the oil-rich flatlands of Odessa! Their precious land, their Future, their shot at a Real Start, their commitment to a Time, to a Place, and to a Way of Life. Roots! he would think, tickled crimson by the concept. At last they had decided on Roots!
“Shazaam!”
Joe tried to calm his terror by gleefully flexing his biceps as he crossed the street, pretending to feel more athletic, young, and hopeful than he had in ages. Look at me, everybody: life is a bowl of cherries! He even imitated a prance like a high-energy syndicated stud on the old Kentucky Blue eager for action. After all, at thirty-eight he still weighed 170, same as in his college playing days in the late fifties and early sixties, when he had lettered in football, hockey, and track. Granted, a few infirmities had forged irritating toeholds: asthma, varicose veins, impacted wisdom teeth, arthritic knees (ruptured menisca, shorn ligaments), and a collapsing mitral valve which created a systolic click contributing to a fibrillation-prone ticker that often really kayoed him with frightening tachycardia attacks.
But tonight—ah, tonight he would be a pistol in search of a celebration to mark the beginning of Joe and Heidi Miniver’s existence as real live grown-ups in the Actual World. After all, he had made the commitment, he had taken the risk to grab their future in the form of Eloy Irribarren’s little piece of earthen nirvana. By this time next week, if nothing went wrong, they’d be close to sitting pretty. And the summer would lie before them like a wide, golden welcome mat, gleaming with promise. Badly in need of R&R from a collapsing marriage, Peter Roth had plans (once their dope deal had gone down) to stay on, drinking Wild Turkey bourbon, fly casting for trout, and helping to build the Minivers’ spectacular adobe and beer-can solar-heated castle.
If everything went all right.…
Joe had a spasm. Apprehension had him gasping faintly, but he couldn’t remember if he had just taken an Aminodur for his asthma, or not. Terrified of ODing, he opted against a pill now. Other people popped pills like candy, they had no qualms about swallowing two Valiums, a Percodan, and a handful of aspirin, then tooting a couple of lines while downing a few drinks and smoking a pack of cigarettes. Then they popped a little Sominex to help them drift off. Joe, on the other hand, had never been able to take three aspirin for a bad headache, fearing the third pill might tip the scales, dumping him into insanity, or maybe death.
Back in the Manhattan sixties, Heidi had tried luring him up to Millbrook, where they could have dropped acid under controlled circumstances with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Joe had looked at her aghast until she quit asking. Why, his first joint had been a major, and almost fatal, experience! Eventually, of course, he had learned to smoke. But Heidi always scored the grass: Joe had never had a stomach for illegal machinations. If one undercover police agent and ten thousand junkie freaks pushing weed had been patrolling Saint Mark’s Place looking to unload their wares, inevitably Joe would have propositioned the narc for a lid of Colombian two-toke. Hence, he was in the curious position, in modern America, of never having scored anything heavier than a bottle of five-hundred-milligram penicillin pills—for an abscessed tooth three years ago!
But tonight Peter Roth was arriving in town accompanied by five pounds of pure cocaine he had somehow materialized thanks to Joe’s twelve thousand clams. And Joe’s share of the potential loot, providing he did not die of some myocardial infarction triggered by his shot-nerves arrhythmia in the interim, would be close to $60,000—the asking price of Eloy Irribarren’s land!
Joe gulped, shivered, and inhaled deeply. Forging exuberance to prove he was not scared stiff, he took the stairs leading up to the bar two at a time, wanting to call out hysterically as he did so:
Look, Ma—no hands!
* * *
BEHIND A DESK at the top of the stairs sat Nancy Ryan. She accepted Joe’s five dollars and stamped his wrist with fluorescent ink. “Hi ho, Nancy,” Joe piped a trifle too nonchalantly. “How they hangin’?” For over a year, now, he had harbored enough of a low-key secret letch for her to make him self-conscious in her presence.
“Hi ho yourself.” Nancy gave him a lazy glance—she always seemed stoned—and smiled. Her teeth flashed ultra-white, and her eyes—her entire face—lit up as if by magic. Her black hair, cut short, shone iridescently—the metaphor that applied was “like raven feathers.” Her glowing eyes were dark, large, hypnotizing. When happy, they conveyed an inordinate luster. A nose like any other nose, lips like any other lips, and a chin like any other chin completed her features. Yet the radiance that face could project had always intrigued Joe. If tired, or merely disinterested, Nancy lost it all, becoming just another everyday, middle-American once-upon-a-prom-girl in her mid-thirties. Joe had never understood how somebody so outwardly ordinary could be that provocative.
In response to Joe’s somewhat manic grin, she added, “What kind of a canary did you just swallow?”
“Big one. Maybe—” Joe pantomimed patting a full belly. But the pat reminded his stomach that it was queasy. “I made an offer on that land today. If nothing goes wrong with the deal, I hope I can entice you and, if you’re still on speaking terms, Randall over with all the beer you can drink to help us build the palatial manse this summer. Do leave Sasha at home, though.”
Sasha was the nasty little monkey perched on Nancy’s shoulder, no doubt an added tout for the Hanuman Follies. Whenever Joe’s eight-year-old daughter, Heather, happened to be at Nancy’s house playing with her son, Bradley, the monkey attacked her. Joe’s eleven-year-old, Michael, had threatened to murder Sasha with his BB gun ever since the bald little gnome (Sasha) had pissed in some Kool-Aid Michael had been drinking, and then stolen his (Michael’s) baseball mitt and hung it way out of reach in the highest branch of an enormous cottonwood tree, where it remained to this day, two and a half years later, a perpetual reminder of simian perfidy to Michael whenever he biked past the Ryan house in the Perry Kahn Subdivision #4.
Joe and Heidi had emphatically nixed their son’s drastic solution to Sasha’s delinquencies. After all, Nancy Ryan and Randall Tucker (from whom she had recently split) were members of the Simian Foundation, the group sponsoring this evening’s shindig: that is, they worshiped a monkey god.
Nancy fluttered her sexy eyes. “What will it cost you, eventually? The land.”
“Oh come on,” Joe joshed uncomfortably. “You’re the secretary of the SF, and you know as well as I do that Nikita Smatterling has repeatedly approached Eloy Irribarren about buying his land for the foundation’s mini-ashram and monkey temple.”
Dropping her head back, Nancy viewed Joe bemusedly.
“I was just curious,” she murmured. “What brings you to the Hanuman Follies, by the way? I never knew you had a spiritual bent.”
“Oh, you know…” Joe’s eyes wandered past Nancy to tables where monkey gizmos—Hanuman T-shirts, rubber monkey masks, Curious George children’s books, cheerful little stuffed animals, records of the soundtrack from King Kong, and other assorted simianalia—were on sale. “It always pays to know what the opposition is up to,” he joked lamely.
Actually, he had come to rendezvous with Tribby Gordon and Ralph Kapansky, his cohorts in crime. They had planned, officially, a Sunday meeting up in Tribby’s airplane to test and cut and package the coke, but Joe feared no one had taken that plan seriously. Everybody except himself was so blasé: they acted as if the adventure were a routine transaction—aboveboard, boring, even trite. Joe, on the other hand, had staggered through the last two weeks almost paralyzed by visions of holocaust. In prison for life, he saw himself raped nightly by burly ex–Hell’s Angels covered with grotesque tattoos who poked homemade switchblades into his buttocks as they cornholed him. Meanwhile, outside the impregnable slammer, Heidi abandoned the kids and ran away with a Princetonian geek who feathered his hair and wore white turtleneck jerseys and Bostonian loafers. Michael immediately turned to a life of pornography and crime, beginning as the prey of Times Square chickenhawks, and ending up as the leader of a Mafia-type cult that did cow mutilations for hire for rich hippie voodoo freaks. Heather would either become a gutter rat who loved gang-bangs, or a Massachusetts cod-catching Moonie fisherperson slated to die in a shooting war with Gloucester rednecks.
To change the subject, he asked, “What do you guys hear about the statue?”
The statue, a large and costly marble Hanuman idol commissioned by the Simian Foundation, had recently made its way across the seven seas from India to New York City. Right now (if Chamisaville gossip this past week was to be believed), the Hanuman was on its way west, and slated to arrive in town in time for a planned unveiling on Thursday, a gala event the funds for which were being raised right here, tonight, in the loudly rocking Cinema Bar.
Nancy said, “Apparently, they picked it up in a U-Haul at the docks today and they’re on the way.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Baba Ram Bang, of course. And Iréné Papadraxis. And—”
“Wait a minute. Who is Baba Ram Bang? Who is Iréné Papadraxis?”
“Baba Ram Bang is our guru. You should know that. The leader of the International Simians. He’s this beautiful tubby little old man to whom we all look for spiritual guidance.”
“And this—what’s her name?—Papadipoulis?”
“Papadraxis. Surely you’ve heard of her. She’s a Hungarian refugee and a former fashion model who’s become a very famous magazine writer. She’s doing a book on this whole thing. It’s going to be serialized in New Age and Ms. Nikita has already contracted with a publisher to do a book on the saga of the Hanuman. We’ve actually paid for it with the advance.”
“So she’s riding across country in a U-Haul with a hundred-year-old guru and a marble statue?”
“Plus the photographers, Rama and Shanti Unfug. And their little girl, Om. Surely you know them? They live in that big house next door to Eloy Irribarren’s land.”
“You mean Gail Furphy and Billy Unfug?”
“Recently they changed names. They flew over to India with Nikita last year and photographed the entire progress of the idol. They even came back on the boat with it.”
“Sounds like quite a conglomeration of people in that U-Haul.”
Nancy smiled. On her shoulder, Sasha bared his yellow teeth, in either a grin or a spontaneous death threat, then puckered his lips as if to obscenely kiss Joe, and gave a desultory flog to his little log. He was a ratty, half-bald, jaundiced beast with big eyes, small ears, a long tail, and tiny, wrinkled, very precise hands.
Although his children had visited there often, Joe had never actually been to the Ryan digs. Yet judging from Heather and Michael’s stories, Sasha ruled that roost with imaginative terror. One day, Michael reported, when he lifted the toilet lid to pee, the dripping-wet monkey—who must have been hiding for hours awaiting a sucker—had leaped out at him, cackling, and damn near frightened him to death. Another time (according to Heather) the furry little fiend had eaten an entire box of Bradley’s Crayolas. “And he didn’t even puke!”
“But he shit a rainbow,” Michael felt compelled to add.
“Fluff Dimaggio and Wilkerson Busbee are also with them.” Nancy spoke lazily, oozing soporific sexy vibes.
Joe rolled his eyes dramatically: “Oi vay.” Fluff, a former Seattle junkie refugee from the Boeing factory and currently a born-again Hanuman freak, played bass in Joe’s ragtag rock band whenever they could get a gig. Wilkerson Busbee, another guiding light of the Simian Foundation’s Chamisaville branch, was a successful local hippie entrepreneur, who controlled, among other things, a Winnebago dealership, a log-home-and-plywood-tipi franchise, an herbal tea company, a head shop (Tibet, Ltd.), and the Blue Star Taxi Service.
“They’re planning to drive day and night,” Nancy said. “They should be here by Tuesday.”
“Well, I certainly wish ’em good luck.” Joe waved stupidly back at her as he veered past the monkey paraphernalia into the bar. Sasha grimaced mordantly, then winked and sneered. Nancy cocked her head provocatively and called after him:
“Enjoy yourself!”
* * *
IN THE CROWDED and noisy bar, a band wearing EAT ME T-shirts was playing a song called “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” The lead singer, Jeff Orbison, another Hanuman-nik, did landscaping for the Ragtime Flowershop in town, an operation launched recently by a young Bostonian, Gil Forrester, who had dropped out of law school to seek his fortune in less hyper environs. Last year, in a mountaintop Zen ceremony, Jeff had married Heidi Miniver’s good friend, Suki Terrell, a petite girl with soft walnut-colored hair who had done some time at a Zen retreat near San Francisco called Tassajara. Only a month ago, in need of more space (both inner and outer), Suki had divorced Jeff, and he was floundering, planting boxwoods and marigolds by day, singing and boozing himself into a trenchant stupor every night. After a brief lesbian fling with Gil Forrester’s estranged old lady, Adele, Suki could now be seen around town on the back of Randall Tucker’s motorcycle.
The incestuous interrelationships among his friends and acquaintances never failed to amaze Joe. It seemed as if everybody (except him and Heidi) had at one time or another screwed everybody else. Often Joe hungered longingly for a part in the apparently easy sexual theater they were all engaged in. At other times, finding their nonchalant copulations horrendously tawdry, he was proud of himself and Heidi and their coherent and loving little family with its firm moral and ethical foundation. Not for them the bizarre shenanigans of Chamisaville’s screwing-pool denizens!
Casting a nervous glance around the crowded bar, Joe ascertained that he knew at least half the people there. Starting with Skipper Nuzum, the decadent young securities whiz from Los Angeles—he owned this bar and the movie theater. Skipper was married to an eye-catching lady named Natalie Gandolf; she claimed to have been Cherokee in her previous life and kept a pet llama on their estate. Skipper himself, a large, flabby, sensitive, and educated gangster-poet with pitch-black hair, hangdog eyes, and a raggedy 1890s moustache that appeared always to be caked with molasses and dead flies, had flair. He wore leather vests (his wife, a Sumi vegetarian as well as a monkey disciple, wouldn’t don anything made from animals), magenta silk shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons, and pre-faded flarecuffed jeans above polished J. C. Penney’s work boots.
Tonight, Skipper was seated over at a table with one of his primary henchmen, Cobey Dallas, the Iowa farm boy to whom he leased both the theater and the cantina operations. Next to Cobey sat a lesser flunky—a ticket taker, an all-around troubleshooter and sometime accountant: Roger Petrie. A tiny, effeminate, Harvard-educated economist, Roger drov
e a repainted hearse, and his various uniforms invariably included black, long-sleeved turtleneck jerseys, a slim silver cross on a fragile silver chain, and scads of turquoise bracelets.
Cobey, an alcoholic Tiparillo-smoking entrepreneur, would have denied he had an anthropology master’s from Kansas if anyone asked him. He saw himself as a cross between a Runyonesque Nathan Detroit and P. T. Barnum. A high-strung, inordinately intelligent huckster with aesthetic sensibilities, he perused T. S. Eliot and Richard Eberhart in his spare time and dreamed of somehow becoming a millionaire before he reached thirty. He wore a beret indoors and out, subscribed to The Wall Street Journal, and jogged seven miles a day. Annie, his wife, had a radio talk show—“The Chamisaville Forum”—on which she interviewed local culture heroes three times weekly.
Joe also happened to know that Cobey Dallas was trying hard to raise cash to buy Eloy Irribarren’s land. In between Jeff Orbison, Adele Forrester, and Randall Tucker, Suki Terrell had had a brief secret fling with Cobey, and she had told Heidi that Cobey was embezzling from Skipper Nuzum, in hopes of amassing the bread to buy Eloy’s virginal diminutive spread.
Actually, according to Joe’s pal Tribby Gordon—the lawyer in charge of Cobey’s (though not Skipper’s) affairs (of a financial nature)—Cobey’s accountant, Roger Petrie, was doing the embezzling. “In return,” Tribby told Joe one day out on the Rio Puerco while they cast for trout, “Cobey has promised to deed to Roger the water rights once he gets the land.” And the water rights, according to Tribby, would probably go, if sold to a new motel, hotel, or other business trying to hook up to town water, for at least ten thousand bucks an acre-foot.
Cobey himself made no bones about how he planned to develop that land. On the back acre he would build a Born-Again Laundromat, where Jesus freaks and other spiritual groupies could wash their clothes with vegetarian or herbal soaps, one-hundred-percent pure well water (guaranteed from the fourth aquifer), and completely biodegradable bleaches and other laundering agents.