“How bad is it?”
“It’s broken.”
“Let’s get you out of here. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
The onlookers offered to help. Some asked if we wanted cops. Others asked if we needed an ambulance. Remembering that Shaughn was holding, I said no. Some asked if we wanted them to come with us to the hospital, and I said no. I asked for where the nearest emergency room was and was told it was at San Francisco General.
“Don’t take me there. Let’s go to a clinic I know,” Shaughn said through clenched teeth. “They know me there and my insurance will cover it.”
I gathered Shaughn together and steered him through the crowd across the street to the car. I asked someone to tell Jonas what had happened, and they said they would. We drove into downtown to the clinic. He was unusually quiet on the ride, perhaps from the pain, and I didn’t say much either. We were nearing the clinic when he finally spoke.
“I’m sorry our reunion didn’t come off like I thought it would.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get you fixed up.”
Shaughn laughed and shook his head.
“You’re always having to clean up after me, Le Doir.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. And so do I, man—from the toilet deal forward. Vancouver and Jonas, me and Laurel, and that car wreck I got in when I was drunk and that guy was crippled and you got the story killed. And Little Danny and that time I burned you on mescaline and you ignored it and bought my lies.”
“I didn’t buy them, Shaughn. I just let it go.”
His lip quivered and I thought for a minute that he might cry. Then he reached inside himself and brought his strength back to the center.
“Anyway, just know that I appreciate it, and that I’ve always appreciated it. You know what I’ve always liked most about you, Le Doir?”
“Do I wanna know?”
He laughed and I joined him. He reached his left hand out for mine. I took it and shook it, smiling as I did.
“It’s your honesty, Le Doir. You’re the most honest person I’ve ever known.”
“Oh, come on, and I’m not so sure that’s such a virtue even if it were true, Shaughn. Lots of people I wrote stories about didn’t seem to think so.”
“But you still wrote them anyway, and those people could have done you some serious hurt. Some of them did, right?”
I tried to let it go. “Whatever,” I finally said. “I did what I did. Besides, maybe I’m just more honest than you are.”
“That’s no great feat. You know how you can tell if I’m lying, right?”
“Because your lips are moving,” I said.
“You remember that, huh?”
“I remember most of them, Shaughn. Let’s get your hand fixed huh?” I eventually said.
“Okay,” he said, grinning and putting his left arm around me so I could help him out of the car. We walked through the sliding doors, and they made a sound like they did way back on when on Six East. I walked Shaughn to the receptionist and told her I thought my friend’s hand was broken. She shook her head and laughed.
“Mr. Shaughnessy, back to see us again?”
She interviewed him for a few minutes and told him to sit down. Ten minutes later, his name was called. An hour later, Shaughn emerged with a cast and a prescription for Percocets, which he filled at the clinic pharmacy before we left. We drove back to his house on Silver. The mists had passed. Now it was raining steadily. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. We didn’t speak during the ride.
It was dark except for one light in the back that you could see from the side. Shaughn had given Jonas his house key and the spare one was inside. We knocked on the door for ten minutes. There was no answer. Shaughn broke a small pane in one of the living room windows and directed me to open the window and slip inside. I managed to get it done and shimmy in then opened the front door.
Shaughn walked in down the hall to Jonas’s room and shouted from outside the door.
“Allen, are you there?” he barked, banging the door with his cast.
The door cracked open and Jonas’s raccoon face appeared. His hair was crazy, his eyes bloodshot.
“Just getting a little catnap in. Still shank of the evening, I trust?”
“Look, it’s broken,” said Shaughn, holding up his cast.
We trooped into the living room. Shaughn told Jonas to mix drinks and let me pick the music. They were dissecting the events leading up to the fight. The soundtracks I chose were Aftermath and Dark Side of the Moon, playing them in reverse order…
When I came to, I heard the needle tracking at the end of the record. Dawn was breaking and the gray was lightening as I got up to change the record. I put on John Wesley Harding and was listening to ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’ when the door opened and Jonas entered.
It was pouring outside and Jonas was soaked and dripping. He put a couple of splits atop the embers and stirred them until the oak flamed and cracked. The sweet smell of fire was counterbalanced by the smell of alcohol coming through Jonas’ skin. He turned to look at me, smiling. His nose was running and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
“Good party, huh?”
He nodded and rolled his eyes. His smile got wide and lecherous. He put his left hand out and started extending his fingers one by one, stopping when he got to four then he held up his hand for me to examine, laughing wickedly.
“You should have been there. It was memorable.”
I let it pass and looked out the window to the obscured skyline.
“I’m leaving in a couple hours. I just got to call my ride and tell them I’m ready.”
Jonas nodded, then turned his back to the fire and faced me directly. He reached in his back pocket, pulled out a half-point pint of brandy, took a long drink from the bottle, then extended it toward me. I shook my head no.
“Come on, Le Doir. Final final, shank of the… morning!”
“I’ve got too much on my mind.”
“Oh, I forgot. The great Ram Le Doir is poised on the edge of his momentous moment… It’s a serious thing, ladies and gentlemen,” Jonas said in mock commentator ease. “And we all know that Ram Le Doir is a very serious man… Dead serious.”
“That’s out the window,” I said softly.
“What’s out the window, Le Doir?”
“I thought we were gonna talk this morning—yesterday, actually—and see if we could resolve some of the shit that’s been going on for the past few months.”
“What shit exactly are you talking about, Le Doir?”
“Where do I start? Do I start with the arts center or do I bring up the question of our deteriorating friendship? Or do I leave me out of it and just talk about what’s happening to you, because you’re blowing it big-time.”
“How am I blowing it big-time?”
“Come on, Jonas.”
“Come on, what? How am I blowing it?”
I let a few moments pass, while I collected myself and considered the situation. I was in too deep to let it go. Besides, I’d been storing it for far too long.
“You’re fucking up your career, blowing appointments or showing up late, or fucked up, and some of your other friends are concerned too.”
“Who is concerned? Which of my… friends… is concerned?”
I didn’t take the bait and continued.
“You’ve got your priorities backwards. You had the beginnings of a career and a great girlfriend. Now, look. She’s gone and you’re way more interested in partying and scoring pussy then you are in your craft or… anything meaningful.”
“Oh, oh, I see… I see. And you, Mr. Ram Le Doir, Mr. Ram Le Fucking Doir, Mr. Serious Artist, Mr. Meaningful Fucking Man. Oh yeah, I wanna be like you.”
“I didn’t say that, Jonas. It’s that you’re not anything like the person that you said you wanted to be when we were in Deerville last spring. You’re nothing like that. That was somebody else, man
.”
Jonas nodded, shrugged, then turned back to face the fire, dismissing me. I thought to myself: ‘Fuck it. What’s the point?’ Then I looked down to the floor and saw that Jonas was wearing my new Italian boots. They’d been ruined by the rain. I stood up and advanced a couple of paces.
“One last thing. What about the money?” I asked.
“What money?”
“You mean which money? The money I spent on you in Deerville, the money I lent you to get up here the first time, the money I spent when I first got here in June, or all the money I’ve been spending since I got back here?”
He shrugged.
“What about it? What about your rent here?” he finally said.
“My rent? How much are you charging me for the fold out sofa in the living room where I sleep? I don’t even have a room.”
“Hundred a month sounds about right,” he said. “So take three hundred bucks off my IOU and send me a bill.”
“—which you’ll never pay. I’ll never see a cent of that.”
“Maybe I’ll surprise you.”
“I really don’t think so.”
A long moment passed while Jonas turned to face me. I thought for a moment that we were going to come to blows. He turned his gaze away and looked downward, first toward the ember bed, then to his booted feet. He laughed bent over, pulled the boots off and dropped them on the hearth.
“Put them on the bill and I’ll see you when you get back,” he said, without looking back or waiting for me to comment, mounting the stairs to his bedroom. I looked down and watched steam rise from the soles of the boots. I put another log on the fire and pitched the boots into the flames.
I called my ride and waited for them to come. They got there just before noon. I wedged my two bags into the crowded trunk of the VW bug, got into the back seat alongside another California bound rider, and looked at the sleeping house on Queen Street as we backed down the drive. ‘I won’t come back here if I get landed,’ I thought to myself as we were pulling away, and like it would be so often in the future, that prophecy would prove correct…
When I awoke, it was to rifle fire coming from the next room. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. In my dream state, I imagined for a second that I was in some war zone from my news days. Then I came to and saw that I was sleeping on the floor in Shaughn’s dining room. The gunshots were coming from the living room. Another one rang out. I heard the whistle from the ricochet and walked to the portal between the rooms. Shaughn and Jonas were lying in front of a raging fire, 20 feet away, shooting into burning logs. They were in their underwear with a new Scotch bottle opened and a pile of powder on a nearby mirror. They were passing the bottle when they noticed me standing in the portal.
“Hey, Ram,” shouted Shaughn. “Come on in and join us for a little target practice.”
He laughed crazily. As did Jonas.
“Come on, have a go then.”
I saw their faces begin to dissolve, back in time and through time until we were twenty-some years old again. We were somewhere in Sagrada, a mustard field beyond the south side, shooting oil filter cans from barbed wire fence posts with revolvers, hair past our shoulders and strung to the teeth on heroin… Then I noticed that the laughter had stopped, and saw their faces losing their mirth when they looked at mine. I stood there for what seemed an eternity, taking it in—every aspect of the tableau and its symbolic inference: powder on a mirror, jug of alcohol; raging fire in the middle of the night; grown men in their underwear sprawled on a hardwood floor, shooting a rifle into a fire from twenty feet away, listening to music from thirty-five years before then. I looked from Shaughn to Jonas to the fireplace to the mirror of lines on the coffee-table and scanned back through everything again. I went to the other room, put on my coat and walked out the door. Then the door opened, and I saw Shaughn silhouetted against the doorframe.
He raised his glass. “Come on, Le Doir. Final final.”
I looked at him for a moment, then put the car in gear and proceeded east toward the freeway. By the time I got back to the river, dawn was breaking.
The next weeks went by uneventfully. Day followed day, shift followed shift, and I remained fixed and concentrated on what was directly in front of me, which long spells of self-hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestions, to stay focused in the present, aided and abetted. The sun rose later and set earlier as winter crawled in. The clouds rolled in from the northwest and filled the river even fuller with rain, turning it from green to brown with silt from the runoff. Flood warnings were up, and there was a high-seas advisory one weekend, when I drove down to The City for some Christmas shopping. I meandered through the department stores around Union Square, considering purchases while Muzak washed over me.
When my arms were full and my spirits began to sag, I walked west on Ellis Street until I came to John’s Grill, one of Dashiell Hammett’s favorite haunts from his Pinterton days. I sat at the bar, ordered a lunch of pork chops, peas and chips, and reviewed the shopping list and saw what I still had left to buy. A patron at the end of the bar got up to leave, but eventually, I became aware he was standing directly behind me. The hair on the back of my neck bristled, and I could hear the man’s breathing. I was about to turn, when he spoke.
“That is you, isn’t it, Le Doir?”
I spun around on the stool. There, grinning slyly, stood John Devlin.
He seemed much changed now since the last time I had seen him, which was from back in the early days of Vera and I, a seeming eon ago. Devlin was clean-shaven now, with a bald pate, and he was much heavier, moon-faced, and thick through the neck. But the voice was still the same coarse South Boston accent that I remembered from when we first met in London thirty years before.
For a long beat, we did nothing but look at one another, Devlin, with his slightly mocking grin, conveying a sense of an inside joke that he was debating on whether or not he’d share with you, and me with the look of astonishment of one who’d seen a ghost and couldn’t decide whether or not the apparition was a good or bad omen and where or if it beckoned him. It was Devlin who finally spoke.
“Let’s get out of here, Ram, too many tourists.”
I rose, paid my check, and collected my packages.
“We’ll take a cab to my place,” Devlin said. “You can stash your stuff there, and then we’ll go to the park. There’s a concert today.”
We hailed a cab and Devlin directed the driver to a Noe Valley address above 24th Street. On the way there, Devlin offered a running commentary on the new landscape in The City’s transforming silhouette of gleaming new towers and obsolete industrial zones being morphed into high-tech centers. He chuckled softly through his clenched teeth and shook his head slowly. “It’s the new Gold Rush,” he said. “Just think about it.” But I had drifted out of the moment and the cityscape I was in with John Devlin had evaporated and been replaced by another…
…we were sitting on a wall along the Chelsea Embankment, drinking Double Diamond out of Imperial Pint cans, and watching the Spastics pass by. It was early fall, bright, still warm, with the sun glinting off the Thames so hard that it made us squint. Devlin was rolling a joint while we sat there. I was the lookout.
“Why do you think they call it the Spastics Parade, John?”
Devlin snickered and gestured with his head. “Well, look at them, Ram, that’s what they are.”
The crowd marched by us. Proctors in armbands with logos on them maintained order and kept the spastics moving forward. It was a function to raise money for their care. “A pound per marcher per kilometer,” Devlin said, and Devlin and I were perched at the halfway point…
…I had met him the week before, at the hostel I was staying at on Clerkenwell Close. I was standing by my bunk, conversing with somebody else, when John Devlin shuffled over and took over the conversation.
What the conversation was, I didn’t recall, but the force of Devlin made a lasting impression. He was of medium height and build, with thinning bla
ck shoulder-length hair and a wispy beard and mustache with brown eyes that were large and placid—beatific almost—except for when he was drinking. But Devlin didn’t drink much then; he was an herb man, and he was an inexhaustible and fascinating monologist and indefatigable walker. On that night in question, he honed in on Graham Greene whom I hadn’t yet read, so Devlin gave me his copies—gave them, not lent them—of “The Heart of the Matter,” and “The Quiet American," recommending the latter as probably the best thing he’d ever read about Vietnam. He added,”the closest to the truth anyway." When he said that, his face grew distant. Then he remembered the purpose of his coming by, I guessed, and pulled out a foil-wrapped cube of hashish and flashed it. “I got this from one of the fucking Canadians. He said it was Lebanese, but I think it’s Moroccan.” Devlin scanned slowly to his left, where the Canadian I had been talking to was standing. He saw the look on his face, and smiled. “I’m sorry. Are you Canadian?” His look bore no trace of sorrow, and when the Canadian turned and left, Devlin smiled triumphantly. “Come on, we’ll go for a walk,” he said.
I stuffed the books in my backpack, shoved it under my bunk, and obeyed John Devlin’s command to follow him…
…we did then as we always did: wander aimlessly and without purpose in any general direction and without any clear or defining objective. Devlin talked and I listened while we paraded past monuments I’d long read about and longed to see, and occasionally, every so often, during those first few weeks of our friendship, we’d stop at one of them and take the tour—the Tower of London, the Tate Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, Madame Tussauds—but mostly, it was when Devlin sensed that my attention was meandering away from his monologues.
I was a good listener then, and liked listening to much of what he had to say. And Devlin needed a listener, for he had much that he wanted to say…
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