Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Johnny led us away from the door, both of us. “My lucky night,” he said through his thick lips, his fingers at my waist, my skin shrinking from them. “What’s your name, baby?”

  “Paulene,” Bret answered.

  “What about—”

  “Her name’s Paulene, too.”

  “Wow,” he said as we rounded the corner, “What are the odds?”

  THE NEXT PART IS FUZZY in my mind and keeps changing each time I remember it. Sometimes he’s pushing Bret up against the side of a black van, other times, she’s pulling him to her. Sometimes, she’s slapping him across the face or calling him a murderer and he’s pulling out clumps of her hair, just like Johnny does to the last Paulene in the lyrics of the song. She’s screaming, he’s clamping his hand over her mouth. There are so many variations. Keep in mind, this all happened in a matter of seconds and I was very drunk. And drunk or not, all memories fog over with time.

  The one part that’s consistent, though, is Bret’s head slamming into the side of the vehicle—the sound of it, a loud crack. And the next part too. The next part, I have never been able to forget.

  “Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop hurting her.”

  He didn’t turn. He threw his weight into the side of the van and she squirmed against him and told him to stop and his hands went where I couldn’t see them, making some kind of awful adjustment. I heard Bret whimper and I thought about how this wasn’t the way we’d planned it and I thought about history repeating itself and about how he was supposed to be scared and sorry, how he was supposed to apologize and why wasn’t he apologizing and somehow, the knife was out of my purse, clutched in my sweaty hand. I flicked it open and rushed at him and jammed the blade into the small of his back and yanked it out again, feeling nothing beyond adrenaline and anger. Blood dripped from the knife’s blade. I stared at it and for a few moments, everything seemed to move in slow motion—Bret heaving on the pavement, Johnny whirling around like an animal, blood spraying out of him, blood on my hands, a timed streetlight humming to black. . . .

  He lunged at me. I couldn’t see his features, just the outline of him on the dark street, a shadow coming at me, grabbing me by one wrist. My eyes started to adjust, just enough to see him, the funhouse-mirror face, the gritted teeth. A bad dream. Trina’s bad dream.

  “Bitch,” he said. With my free hand, I slashed him across the throat.

  I REMEMBER THE GURGLING SOUND now as I hug Mrs. Raines, the sound of a man dying. I remember how he fell to the sidewalk and Bret and I had stared at him until he went still and quiet, without helping, without thinking to help. I remember how we’d looked down the row of quiet houses, how none of their lights had gone on and how in my dim, shocked mind, I’d rationalized that into some kind of tacit approval. They saw what he was doing to her, I had told myself. They wanted me to kill him. I remember how calmly Bret had taken the Kleenex out of her purse and wiped my prints off the knife and dropped it on him. How she’d plucked his wallet out of his pocket and tossed it into the bushes and called him scum, a piece-of-shit drug dealer, how she’d held her ripped blouse to her chest and told me I’d done the whole world a favor.

  We’d walked back to our car in utter silence. I remember how slowly and carefully she’d driven home, using her blinker for every turn. How we’d taken turns in the shower, washing off the hair dye and make-up and blood before stuffing our bloody thrift store clothes into three sets of garbage bags and throwing them in the dumpster at the gas station down the street, how we’d jumped into our sleeping bags just as Bret’s parents pulled into the driveway. “I’ll never tell anyone,” Bret had whispered.

  “Thank you,” I had said, thinking of that dying noise he made and, for a few moments, trying to feel bad about it.

  The next day, she’d given me a ride back to my house, and returned home telling her parents we’d had a fight about a boy and that we were never speaking again. It was for the best, we had decided, talking it over in the car. If we cut ties and stayed apart, we’d be less likely to give each other away. Really, though, I think there was another reason. We were different, now. Everything had changed. But so long as we stayed apart, it was easier to pretend it hadn’t.

  As I pull away from Mrs. Raines, I remember my last conversation with Bret—a phone call, two weeks after the X show, when her parents weren’t around. “It wasn’t him,” she had said. “It wasn’t Johnny.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say it again, again too loudly.

  Mrs. Raines gives me a weak smile. “That song is horrible, isn’t it? Bret specified they play it at her wake.”

  “When?”

  “Funeral home said she spoke with them about it years ago,” she says, a sigh in her voice. “My daughter always did love to plan things in advance.”

  NEITHER ONE OF US WAS contacted by the police. Bret’s parents never even asked if we’d left the house that night. My parents didn’t notice a change in my behavior because my behavior didn’t change. It was part of a survival plan and we both stuck to it. It scared me a little, how easy that was to do.

  Once school started again, we moved in with different crowds, me joining the school newspaper staff, Bret assuming her rightful place among the popular girls. We’d pass each other in the hallway, barely exchanging a glance. Alone in my room, I still listened to my punk-rock records. And I could only assume that Bret did the same.

  Just before graduation, I heard two boys talking about a murder near the Whisky that had happened over the summer, a bouncer knifed in what looked like a drug deal gone wrong. “My brother bought weed off that guy,” one had said. “Chuck something. Real asshole.” It was the first and last I ever heard of him, the man I had killed.

  I DUCK INTO THE FUNERAL home’s reception area, weaving my way past groups of mourners I’ve never met and thinking of Bret, sixteen-year-old Bret, her sad voice on the phone during our very last conversation. I’ll find him, Lara. I’ll find the real Johnny someday. . . .

  I spot the ladies’ room and slip inside. Once I’m in a stall, I slip the envelope out of my purse, open it while listening to two women washing their hands, one of them saying how pretty Bret was, what a tragedy, what a waste.

  “She was so sweet too,” whispers the other. “She never wanted to bother anyone with her troubles. When she got into a bad mood, she’d just escape by herself for a few days. Go to the beach or the mountains, who knew where?”

  Inside the envelope is a small newspaper clipping—a story of a fifty-four-year-old lawyer found stabbed to death at his home in Monrovia—a suspected robbery. I stare at the picture—a heavy, benign-looking man in a Dodgers cap, flanked by two skinny, smiling teenage sons. People can change. But only if no one remembers who they used to be.

  His name was John Samuelson. And when I look closely at the photo caption, I notice the n and the y, penciled in at the end of his first name in Bret’s small, careful writing.

  ARE YOU WITH ME, DOCTOR WU?

  BY DAVID CORBETT

  SHOCKER TUMBREL FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE loving Buddha inside a padded holding cell at San Francisco County Jail.

  Twelve hours earlier, a SWAT team had dragged him out of a shooting gallery two blocks from the Bottom of the Hill, the club where his band had joined a handful of other outfits in a benefit to save the venue, one of the few left in town to offer live music, now targeted for condo gentrification at the hands of the usual cabal of city hall sellouts and bagman developers.

  The night had ended with a beautiful mosh-pit frenzy unlike anything the locals had seen in years: multiple swan dives off the stage monitors from dervish girls and acrobat boys, not just fans but band members too. Pinball aggression. Brothers and sisters united in pain.

  At night’s end, stoked from adrenaline, Shocker stowed his gear in the van and headed off to mellow the edges with his best friend and bandmate, Mousy Tongue.

  The two had met through sheer dumb luck in middle school, all but inseparable since: skateboarding, tagging, paint sniffing
, runaway odysseys to Portland and Vegas and Burning Man, multiple stints in juvie detention, moving up the buzz ladder to reefer and meth and smack as they formed and dissolved a slew of bands—Molotov Snot, Flaming Citadel, Deathwagon Ponies—culminating finally in the latest, the truest, the fiercest, the best: Acid Prancer.

  Shocker writing the songs and playing bass, Mousy up front on guitar and vocals, Clint Barber on drums—they remained true to the poverty-fueled rage, the misfit love, the howling anarchy of punk. They promised themselves they’d never succumb to the soul-sucking über-capitalist fame machine, never cave to money. They started their sets screaming, “This ain’t no fucking White Stripes,” then kicked into their signature cut, “Shopping Mall Shootout.”

  Seriously, when 5 Seconds of Summer, an Aussie boy-band rehash of One Direction pop schmaltz bullshit gets crowned as the latest messiahs of hardcore, what could you do but drop trou, moon the power, and hit the spike?

  Which was exactly what he and Mousy did after the gig, trundling over to a long-familiar nod pad, scoring from an obese albino named Jelly Stone, and heading upstairs to the playroom. The shit Jelly sold them was powdery and fine, a fresh batch of china white, he said, new to the street. Mousy fired up first, passed the gear, and Shocker tied himself off, slapped up a vein. He eased back on his first hit, figuring he could bump it up if need be. Hearing a deep, chesty sigh beside him, he figured Mousy had slipped into the haze, and settled in to do likewise.

  By the time it dawned on him Mousy hadn’t spoken or even stirred in far too long, no amount of shouting or shaking could bring him back. Neither one of them had brought along naloxone, the thinking man’s OD antidote, because, well, they hadn’t been thinking. Jelly hadn’t offered any, either—I’m your connection, he’d say, not your mother. The Free Clinic and the needle exchanges handed out injectable vials to any dope fiend who bothered to ask—Christ, they practically forced it on you.

  But that argument was over. Mousy had wandered across that invisible line where your lungs forget to breathe. All things considered, a gentle death.

  Born Robert Sean McFadden, Hayward, California. Twenty-three years old.

  Shocker didn’t exactly remember stacking the moldy couch and two broken chairs in front of the door, or screaming at anyone standing outside that he had a gun and would shoot to kill any motherfucker dumb enough to try to force his way in.

  The clearest thing he recalled was dragging Mousy into the corner, sitting there curled up with him, the lifeless head in his lap, that handsome, waxy face staring emptily up into his own as the SFPD busted their way in—battering ram, follow-up kicks, a final shoulder or two—suited and booted in storm-trooper black, aiming their AR-15s in his face and screaming like Warg riders: “On the floor! Show your hands, asshole! Do it! Now!”

  TIME SWIRLED IN AND OUT—he sat cocooned in a straitjacket, entombed in his quilted cell—until finally the lock clattered open, the door swung back.

  Even if given a thousand lifetimes of lovely dreams, he could never have imagined the person who entered, sat beside him, and said gently, “Would you rather I call you Shocker or Lonnie?”

  It wasn’t how she looked that made her sitting there astonishing—just another tall, slender, California blonde: center part on the pulled-back hair, fat brown eyes but prim lips, a dusting of mustard-brown freckles. Her voice had a clipped warm twang—Midwestern vowels wrapped in tortilla consonants—but that too seemed irrelevant. She wore an ID card on a lanyard that read simply “Visitor.” Given his savage state of mind, though, where the edge of the universe felt intimately close, he misread the word as “Visitation.” And that seemed perfectly right. She wasn’t just someone from beyond the locked door. She’d been transported here from a totally different plain of existence.

  “How did you know that name?”

  “You mean Lonnie?”

  He nodded, thinking: I probably look like a missile went off inside my head. Nerve endings were crackling back to life. His blood had started to itch.

  “It’s on your booking sheet. They printed you on intake, remember?”

  He didn’t. Suffering a sudden wave of shame that quickly metastasized into utter self-loathing, he dropped his eyes, studied the straitjacket’s crisscrossed sleeves, the security loop pinning them to his chest. He caught a whiff of bleach off the white cotton canvas.

  “My name is Katy,” she said, leaning a bit closer. “I’m a counselor here at the jail. I’ve come to help you feel better.”

  Good luck with that, he thought, even as, from somewhere beyond the oily skid at the bottom of his mind, he sensed a feeble hope that it just might be true.

  She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, and crossed her ankles, as though in sympathy with his bound arms.

  “I’m going to guide you in some breathing exercises, very simple stuff. It’s the principle aspect of Buddhist meditation. I think it might help calm you.”

  He considered spitting back: What fucking makes you fucking think I’m not fucking calm? His skin felt like a carpet of chiggers, the air in his lungs had been set on boil. And there’s this guy they found with me, he thought, fella named Mousy, sweet skinny fuckup with a chain-lightning mind—we grew up in the same stinking shithole—maybe you’ve heard of him?

  “Close your eyes,” she said, “not completely, you don’t want to fall asleep.”

  By way of demonstration, she dropped her eyelids to half-mast, while Shocker flashed on trying to bitch slap his only real friend back to life. Yeah, he felt pretty sure he didn’t want to fall asleep.

  “Be present,” she said, “but focus on nothing except your breath. Inhale . . . let the air fill your lungs, drop your diaphragm. Gently, gently. Then just let it go, exhale . . .”

  She did it herself a few times, as though to show him how, and he figured, why not? What other miraculous plan is in the works?

  “If thoughts enter your mind, don’t dwell on them. Let them go. Return to your breath. Focus on that. There’s nothing so important it can’t wait.”

  He couldn’t imagine such a thing could be true. My brother-from-another-mother died a few feet away and I was too loaded to save him. There was a thought to latch onto, cling to, like an anchor dragging him down to the bottom where he belonged.

  Except maybe he didn’t. Maybe, just maybe, he belonged here, with this woman named Katy, nothing to do but breathe in . . . breathe out . . . breathe in. . . .

  He wasn’t sure how much time passed, but the freedom to let go, the simplicity of nothing in the world to do but breathe, felt strangely forgiving. He imagined her hand on his chest, just above the solar plexus, creating a kind of radiance, a warm rush not unlike heroin, and all the nagging, bitchy questions of his life seemed answered, or answerable.

  He opened his eyes a little and looked at her, wondering if it could be true. This stranger, this visitor—could she possibly be the person who might save him?

  He whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

  She glanced up—no expression at first, like she was waking from a dreamless sleep—then offered a smile.

  “We all want to live and keep living,” she said. “Unfortunately, that’s not a viable long-term option.”

  AFTER THAT, HE LET HER call him Lonnie, a name he’d long associated with a mother drowning in self-pity, a father too focused on being pissed off to make a living, a ratty house in a crap town. But Shocker would no longer do. Shocker died with his unlucky friend.

  From an investigator at the public defender’s office he learned that the stuff he and Mousy booted that night wasn’t heroin at all, but fentanyl, and there’d been a flood of overdoses all across town. Useless knowledge in retrospect. Meanwhile, Jelly Stone had disappeared, haunted by hindsight or just run out of Dodge by an angry mob of fist-shaking junkies. That won’t last long, he thought. The strung-out are notoriously indulgent.

  Katy’s visits continued. His parents had split up and moved to their separate redneck havens far away and out of the p
icture—happy chance, to his mind—and no one from the scene, not even Clint, bothered to come by, no doubt meaning they all blamed Guess Who for Mousy’s death. Get in line, he thought. Regardless, for all intents and purposes, Katy became his world.

  She and the center she worked for helped liaise with the public defender handling his case, offering to provide housing, oversee and monitor his diversion to rehab. He took heart in that show of confidence. Besides, he felt no inclination to backslide. The very idea, in fact, came to terrify him.

  But being an addict by nature, and having discovered something that made him feel good, he couldn’t help but want to do it relentlessly. So within the confines of his cell he dove into not just meditation but the dharma, memorizing the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, devouring every text Katy provided: the Mahayana Sutras, the Dhammapada (Treasury of Truth), the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification).

  By the time he walked out of the detention facility into the foggy burn-off of a mid-winter morning, carrying his shoebox of books and dressed in the spanking new jeans and sweatshirt Katy had brought him (the better to obscure the freakish ink scrolled across his skin from knuckle to neck and down to his skinny flat butt), he felt reasonably ready to confront the monster he’d always pretended didn’t exist: the future.

  SHE DROVE HIM TO A quiet street on the edge of the Presidio and parked outside a sprawling three-story Shingle Victorian with a brick façade—an anomaly in a town known for its earthquakes. It seemed to suggest either reckless optimism or uncanny luck, and that struck him as only too apt for a rehab center.

  Banyan trees shaded the pebbled walkway, and Lonnie half expected to spot a smiling monk perched beneath one of them plucking an angular banjo. Similarly, he wondered what kind of wistful muzak might be playing inside the house, and whether with its flutes and singsong chants it would conjure a spa or a noodle house.