The Nirvana Blues

by John Nichols

  Back in bed, as best he could, Joe related the garbled message. Nancy said, “Oh golly, I’ll be right back, don’t go away.” Joe lay there, semidumbfounded by her composure while she chatted pleasantly on the living-room phone for five minutes. When she returned, he said, “How can you even begin to unravel that mess?”

  Laughing, she snuggled in beneath him. “It’s easy. You just don’t panic. These things happen all the time. They’ll be on their way again before noon.”

  Dawn glimmered faintly outside the window. Roosters crowed, a car started up. Heather would awaken shortly, rolling out of bed to perform her morning rituals. After taking a leak, she’d head for the kitchen, open the fridge, score a few swallows of OJ, then pad sleepily into the master bedroom and climb into the big double bed, snuggling down between her mom and dad for an extra hour of delicious shut-eye.

  Only, where was Daddy this A.M.? Up so early, collecting garbage?

  Touching his cheek, Joe was startled to encounter tears.

  Nancy spoke cozily, her words a smidgen slurred. “Is anything the matter?”

  “No, I’m okay. That lovemaking was wonderful.”

  The Doberman wafted silently into the room. Joe only realized it was there when the dog’s velvety jowls brushed against his feet. He said, “Hey, what’s with the mutt?”

  “That’s okay. He’s friendly.”

  “He’s licking my feet.”

  “He does that sometimes.”

  Joe rested on top of her while the Doberman slobbered over his feet. After it had run down that particular fawning course, the animal circled to the bedside, sat down, and stared at Joe: he returned the compliment. A plaintive note was struck by the dog’s eyes: restless, sad, a trifle lost. Was that a slight squeak from its throat? Leaning forward, the dog laid its head on the bed, black nose only inches from Nancy’s face.

  “What is this dog’s name, anyway?”

  “Bozo.”

  Joe raised his eyes from Bozo to her night table. Beside the clock-radio, a Kleenex box, cigarettes and an ashtray, a prescription bottle of Valiums, and a John Cheever novel, Bullit Park, stood another photograph of the jolly plump guru.

  “Who’s the guy in all these photographs?”

  “Baba Ram Bang.”

  “The guy in the U-Haul with Wilkerson Busbee, Fluff Dimaggio, Iréné Papawhatsits, the Unfugs, and their daughter Om?”

  “One and the same.” Sleepily, she drawled, “I want a cigarette. Would you light one for me, please?”

  Joe reached over the dog’s head for cigarettes and a pack of matches. Sticking a weed in his mouth, he lit it, and, without inhaling, blew out a great cloud of smoke. “Okay, it’s lit.…”

  “Just touch it to my mouth and let me have a drag. But don’t move. I love having you against me.”

  Nancy tilted her head up a little. Joe placed the cigarette at her lips. She sucked on it hungrily, making the tip glow brightly. “Thanks, pal.…” Dropping her head onto the comforter again, she released the smoke. “Oh, that’s so heavenly.” The dog whimpered, coughed, complained throatily, and departed.

  Joe held the cigarette, anticipating her demand for another drag. Wide awake and growing antsy, he asked, “Am I crushing you?”

  “Not at all. I love it.”

  The parakeet flew in, circled the room twice, and alighted on the clock radio. Chirping once, it fluttered onto Joe’s shoulder. The tiny fibrillating heart sent tremors of miniature vitality down through the bird’s teeny-weeny feet. A minuscule doot of hot shit splashed onto Joe’s cool shoulder, and the parakeet was gone again.

  “What’s the bird’s name?” he cooed into her ear.

  “Cheepy.…”

  Cheepy and Bozo and Sasha: holy fuckin’ mackerel!

  Joe sweated, held there against his will, molded around her feverish and delectable body. The real world beckoned. He had to leave, jump up and run away like a thief, and face the music at home. And learn what had happened to Peter. And cook Sunday breakfast for the kids. And give Heidi an explanation—the truth? No! He would lie through his teeth!

  The clock said 6:11 A.M. Joe’s left leg had gone to sleep. He shifted. Nancy gurgled, responding happily. She flexed first the left, then the right buttock. Oh no, not again! Hard as rock, with a barely perceptible thrust, he plunged once more into her smoldering goo. She yodeled, “God I love it!” and squirmed.

  Suddenly, a change in the electric nature of the air they breathed made Joe look up. Bradley stood in the doorway, wearing only a pair of jockey briefs, holding Sasha’s hand. The parakeet was perched on his head. Bozo sat forlornly beside the kid. All four of these beasties stared perplexedly at Joe Miniver as he hauled, in no uncertain terms, Nancy Ryan’s ashes.

  Bradley piped, “What are you doing, Mr. Miniver?”

  All Joe could think to respond was, “Please go away. Can’t you see I’m touching your mother?”

  TIPPED OFF BY CHILD, VICE SQUAD BUSTS DEVIATE ADULTERER! ABANDONED WIFE ALERTS DRUG AGENTS TO BOLLIXED DOPE DEAL! MINIVER EXECUTED AT DAWN!

  2

  SUNDAY

  Nine in the third place means:

  The spokes burst out of the wagon wheels.

  Man and wife roll their eyes.

  An hour later, freshly scrubbed and tingling, his body humming from fatigue, apprehension, and a half-dozen other sensations that he thought had atrophied for lack of being tapped over the past decade, Joe steered his red-and-gold VW bus with the cracked windshield, taped-over side window, 190,000-mile track record in life, and advertising logo—MINIVER TRUCKING: WE HAUL EVERYTHING FROM SOUP TO HAY—onto the Chamisaville plaza.

  Several years back the plaza had been a pastoral park. Shaded by enormous cottonwood and Chinese elm trees, with a few flagstone walks, lilac bushes and flower gardens and old-fashioned benches, it had also been home to a Chamber of Commerce tourist information booth and a concrete pillbox housing the Chamisaville Police Department, whose roof constituted the fiesta bandstand. Then some CETA, SCUM, DARVAC, and other government-program funds had wound up hovering above the town coffers, offering to drop if the city fathers voted to renovate their park system. So naturally the town council decided to modernize the plaza.

  Presto!—a gaggle of bulldozers, backhoes, water pumps, concrete mixers, bricklayers, carpenters, tree cutters, plumbers, and other assorted construction riffraff promptly descended upon the plaza. First, they knocked down almost anything that had leaves or looked quaint or was functional. Then they set to gouging, plowing, slicing, shoring, destroying, and battering the area with a truly joyous vengeance. When they finished, four trees remained standing in a solid brick-and-concrete mass of cantilevered ramps, cattywampused nooks, and reticulated crannies so cute and arty that the plaza now looked like the result of a brawl between the pioneering architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the tacky film mogul, Walt Disney. Dandified, black wrought-iron benches littered the brickyard, their backrests consisting of a Technicolor enamel depicting Howard Johnsonian revolutionary war soldiers and Victorian milkmaids. The town police pillbox still housed the cops, but it was topped by a circular gazebo and mollusc roof reminiscent of a thatched Polynesian hut. The Chamber of Commerce information booth had been reconstructed to approximate what the Taj Mahal might have resembled had it been built originally as an outhouse. Several ten-foot-high concrete pyramids with steep steps leading to their summits were closer to being antitank obstructions than children’s play environments. A goldfish pond and fountain in the heart of the paved-over park had recently been filled in and planted (almost weekly) with petunias, because the original eighteen goldfish had survived less than twenty-four hours before they were eagerly devoured by starving Indians and gaga hippies blissfully zonked on twenty hits of Piccadilly acid.

  This is not to say that the plaza was finished—not by a long shot. During Joe’s three years in Chamisaville, the construction snafus from one end of town to the other had defied at least his imagination. Without exception, from January to De
cember, all of the boomtown’s main arteries and public gathering places were clogged by road crews, asphalt cutters, jackhammer drillers, backhoe operators, sewage technicians, bewildered hardhats manning bilge pumps, and befuddled macadam engineers slopping down hot mixes. You couldn’t travel one hundred feet in Chamisaville without hitting a detour sign. Roads freshly paved in June were dug up in July, resurfaced in August, and chopped to smithereens in September. Getting from place A to place B in the rustic burg invariably entailed zigzagging through a veritable minefield of construction boondoggles so impenetrable and uncircumnavigable as to try the sanity of even the hardiest maze runner. What puzzled Joe was that Chamisaville had a very limited number of roads to maintain. Yet the variations on the excavation, sewage and waterline, pothole-patrol, widening, deepening, curbing, grading, regrading, and degrading themes that could be played by a relatively finite bunch of dedicated state and local highway sadists were infinite.

  Hence, when Joe steered onto the plaza, he had to run a slalom course between festering wheelbarrows, blinker barricades, smudge pots, sump pumps, and signs announcing that his tax dollars were at work for a better America, before coasting to a stop at a meter in front of the Evergreen Drugstore next door to the Prince of Whales Café. Caught without a nickel, Joe warily canvassed the area to see if the cops’ meter reader, Vaughn Tallyrand, was lurking nearby, hiding—as he often did—behind one of the portal garbage cans, which had been decorated, by local artists, with Picasso-esque and Braquian grotesqueries (during a beautification program sponsored by the Friends of Chamisa Valley) twenty-seven months ago.

  Vaughn Tallyrand was the only meter reader in America who would distribute one-dollar fines at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Last Christmas—talk about injustice!—at 11:00 A.M. Joe had scored a parking violation when he left his car for thirty seconds to fetch the holiday papers.

  But Vaughn, thank God, was nowhere in sight. Only a few folks stirred on the plaza. An ancient and venerated artist, Judson Babbitt III, was feeding bread crumbs to the pigeons. Dressed in a Persian-pink warm-up suit and beige Adidas, Suki Terrell, ex-wife of Jeff Orbison (of EAT ME and Ragtime Flowers fame), was jogging across the brickyard alongside Cobey Dallas; he looked resplendent in a midnight-blue running outfit and lime-green Adidas.

  Joe locked up (he had been ripped off in Chamisaville—to the tune of several spare tires, all his tools twice, his scissors jack once, his checkbook thrice, and his groceries a half-dozen times—much more often than he had ever been burglarized in New York). He locked up, and entered the drugstore, where he purchased a Rocky Mountain News, an Albuquerque Journal, and a Capital City Reporter from the store’s new owner, Lon Kennedy, a former Caribbean tour organizer for an Atlanta, Georgia, travel agency. Helpless in the morning before his “hit” of news, Joe was not, in this respect, a typical Chamisaville resident. Most folks he knew actually bragged that they never read the paper anymore.

  Joe said “hi” to Scott Harrison; the lawyer looked devastating in a purple-and-green warm-up suit and lavender Adidas. He replied: “Hey there, lover boy!” Hurriedly, Joe slunk next door to the Prince of Whales Café for some caffeinated stroking before heading off to face the disasters certain to plague his day.

  Immersed in the Sunday morning blues, Ralph Kapansky slouched at a front table, his back up against the jukebox, a cup of cold coffee hooked in his left index finger, his nose buried in the Sunday comics. His graying hair was ruffled, his eyes were pouched and puffy, his lips were set in a mournful snarl. He wore a gardenia-and-mauve warm-up suit and burgundy Adidas. At his feet, bloated, shaggy Rimpoche busily scratched at fleas.

  Joe whacked his friend on the back, adopting a W. C. Fields drawl as he asked, “Ralph, m’boy, what’s happening around the globe?” Then he dropped a quarter in the jukebox and punched out a Dolly Parton, a Merle Haggard, and a Theodore Bikel tune.

  Glumly, Ralph said, “They flattened Beirut, they drowned Bangladesh, they kidnapped an Italian, they gave the Nobel Prize to a Nazi, and the Yankees already clinched the pennant three and a half months before the end of the season.”

  “But how come you look so horrible?”

  “They called me to repair a goddam helicopter at one P.M. Then I was up all night doing a ménage à trois.”

  The jukebox rattled and wheezed in response to Joe’s quarter.

  “What are you doing, Joseph?” Ralph seemed genuinely alarmed. “Playing honky-tonk music on Sunday morning?”

  “You looked sad. I wanna cheer you up.”

  Ralph assessed him perplexedly. “Sunday is a classical-music day, idiot. Where are your New York roots? And what are you doing up at this hour anyway on a holiday? We’re not supposed to meet until twelve. Did the stuff come in with your friend on the bus last night?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Who’s paying me to think?”

  “Nothing came in on the bus,” Joe said. “Not my pal, not the dope, nothing.”

  “What happened?”

  “If I knew would I be sitting here griping to you?”

  “I dunno, would you?”

  “Oh Jesus.” Briefly, Joe took stock of his surroundings. Only two other people were dining in the café at this hour. One was Diana Clayman’s Apache friend with the pitted face, Angel Guts. Actually, Joe happened to know the man had no Indian blood. You could forget the black hair and slightly Oriental features, the eagle-feathered hat and porcupine-quill neck choker. Angel Guts was a Polish kid named Orville Jablonski from the Lower East Side of New York City. He had, at one point—way back in the mid-sixties—been investigated by the FBI for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Richard Nixon. This happened during his stint as a member of the RAT newspaper collective before it went entirely feminist. Nothing had come of the investigation, though. And by the time he drifted into Chamisaville last year, Angel Guts had his Apache genealogy down pat, just another East Coast pusher posing as a Native American, who, Joe had heard, often worked as a runner for Ray Verboten. He was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, staring straight into space, an untouched coffee at his side. The kid would sit that way—inscrutable, mysterious, hostile—forever.

  The other dreg was a shadowy nameless little fart commonly referred to as Nick Danger. Bearded, belligerent, and preposterously antisocial, Nick was perpetually incognito’d behind and underneath a green Tyrolean hat, a brown Naugahyde trenchcoat, and one-way Acapulco sunglasses. The man carried a battered beige suitcase wherever he crept, and never spoke to a soul. He inhabited room 7 in the decrepit Dynamite Shrine motel and seemed to spend all his waking hours wandering aimlessly about town looking sinister.

  Ralph said, “So did you call him up or anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Hey man, lighten up on the third degree, already. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “No I didn’t. You asked if the stuff came in last night.”

  Darlene Johnson, the World’s Greatest Waitress, landed beside Joe, asking, “What are you so cheerful about this morning?”

  “There’s a law says I gotta walk around with a shit-eating grin on my face twenty-four hours a day? Come on, Darlene, gimme a break. I had a rough night last night.”

  Darlene said, “Did you hear about the Hanuman?”

  “What about it?”

  “Apparently their U-Haul was involved in a six-car crash in a New York tunnel. The statue was shattered and Baba Ram Bang is in a coma in the intensive-care ward of a big metropolitan hospital. Little Om, the Unfugs’ daughter, went through the windshield, and a team of neurosurgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital are trying to sew her hand back on to her arm. It’s horrible.”

  Joe said, “Not only that, but I heard Wilkerson Busbee has to undergo ninety days of rabies shots because he was bit by a rat that fell down through a tunnel vent under the Hudson River.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Joe—you’re kidding?”

  But
he liked Darlene. Formerly, she had been a paleontologist connected to the Field Museum of Natural History. In Chamisaville she was always turning up as the chairperson of committees to save things, to Save the Whales, to Save the Farmer’s Market, to save the Historical Old Roybal Home (though never the old Roybals). A tall lady in her late twenties whose physical appearance was often called “rawboned,” Darlene had long arms, big expressive hands, and a startlingly powerful face, like Abraham Lincoln.

  Joe ordered a fried egg, over easy, two link sausages, one piece of toast, a cup of Sanka, and a small orange juice. Actually, what he said was: “Darlene, gimme a cyclops, OE, side order of squeal—that’s link piggies not patties—a small Florida sunshine, one toasted wheat, and a cuppa ersatz Joe.”

  She tapped him playfully atop his head with her pencil. “I bet you think you’re funny.”

  “Who’s funnier?” Joe called after her.

  “Melvin Morgue! Frankenstein! Dracula!”

  Ralph said, “Is she telling the truth about the Hanuman brigade?”

  “Rumors. You know this town. An eight-year-old kid falls off his bicycle in front of the Tastee-Freez and scrapes his knee: five hours later Darlene serves Cobey Dallas his coffee and asks did he hear about the kid whose head was crushed under the metal treads of a backhoe in front of its own mother who at the time was gagging on a chicken bone at the Colonel’s bucket of toasted pullets.”