I think that luck is like the tide.
When it comes in, it comes in.
I was really going to enjoy the luxury of the bus trip. I had been hoofing it around San Francisco for weeks. This was the poorest I’d ever been but those days were over now.
I got onto the bus, paid my nickel and sat down as if I were a king enjoying a brand-new throne. I sighed with pleasure as the bus started up Sacramento. I think I sighed a little too loudly because a young woman who was sitting with her legs crossed in a seat opposite me, uncrossed her legs and turned her head uncomfortably the other way.
She’d probably had a bus seat every God-damn day of her life. She may even have been born on a bus and had a lifetime ticket, and when she died, they’d take her coffin on a bus to the cemetery. It would be painted black of course and all the seats filled with flowers like crazy passengers.
Some people don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it.
Drums of
Fu Manchu
The short trip on the bus up the hill was a good time to do a little thinking about my private-eye serial in Babylon. I settled back and Babylon took over my mind like warm maple syrup being poured over piping hot pancakes.
…ummmmm good.
…ummmmm Babylon.
I had to have a name for my serial.
What was I going to call it?
Let’s see.
Then I thought about the names of serials I’d seen in the
last few years. I’m really quite a movie fan:
Mandrake the Magician
The Phantom Creeps
Adventures of Captain Marvel
Mysterious Dr. Satan
The Shadow
Drums of Fu Manchu
and The Iron Claw.
Those were all good titles and I needed one just as good for my serial. As the bus travelled toward the top of Nob Hill, stopping and starting, picking up passengers and letting passengers off, I ran a hundred titles through my mind. The best ones I came up with were:
The Horror of Dr. Abdul Forsythe
Adventures of a Private Eye in Babylon
The Shadow Robots Creep.
Yes, this was going to be fun. I had a lot of possibilities to work with, but I had to be careful not to let things run away with themselves. Even with a tight rein on Babylon, I still went two stops past my stop and had to walk back a couple of blocks.
I had to watch myself very carefully, especially because I had a client, not to let Babylon get the best of me again.
Friday’s Grave
I saw a pay telephone.
Maybe I’d better call my mother and get it over with. The sooner I called her, the sooner I wouldn’t have to call her again. It would be taken care of for another week.
I dropped a nickel in the slot and dialed.
I let the phone ring ten times before I hung up.
I wondered where she was.
Then I remembered that it was Friday and she was at the cemetery putting flowers on my father’s grave. She did that every Friday. It was a ritual with her, rain or shine, she visited his grave every Friday.
Maybe today wasn’t the day to call her.
It would only remind her that I had killed him when I was four years old.
No, I’d better call tomorrow.
That would be a smart move on my part.
I started to think about the day I killed my father. I got as far as remembering that it was a Sunday and a very warm day and a brand-new Model T sedan was parked in the street in front of our house and I had walked over to it earlier and had smelled how new the car was. I was a kid then and just walked right over and put my nose directly down on a fender and gave it a big sniff.
I think the best perfume in this world is the smell of something brand-new. It can be clothes or furniture or radios or cars, even appliances like toasters or electric irons. They all smell good to me when they’re brand-new.
Anyway, I was remembering back to the morning that I killed my father. I had gotten as far as having my nose on the fender of a brand-new Model T when I suddenly rerouted my thinking. I didn’t want to think about killing my father, so I just changed the subject in my mind.
I couldn’t think about Babylon or I might blow it, so I thought about my client.
Who was my client?
What did they look like?
What did they want done?
Why did I have to have a gun?
Were they going to ask me to do something illegal?
If they did, of course, I would do it, short of killing somebody. Beggars can’t be choosers. A man in my boat has to row where he’s told to except that I wasn’t going to kill anybody. That was the only thing I wouldn’t do. I was really desperate. I needed the God-damn money.
I didn’t know whether my client was a man or a woman. All I knew was that I was supposed to meet somebody in front of a radio station at 6 P.M. They already knew what I looked like, so I didn’t have to know what they looked like. It only made sense if you were as broke as I was, and it made a lot of sense to me.
Smith
Thinking about the fact that I didn’t know the name or sex of my client somehow returned me to Babylon and my serial.
Sometimes Babylon just happens like that.
What was I doing trying to think up a title for the serial when I hadn’t even given all my main characters names yet? There was of course a name for the villain: Dr. Abdul Forsythe, but I didn’t even have a name for myself.
Oh, boy, where was my noggin? I’d better get a name for me. I might want to use it in the title.
I had used the name Ace Stag for my name in the detective novel about Babylon that I had just finished living, but I didn’t like to use the same name for myself in my Babylonian adventures. I liked to change my name. For instance, when I was a baseball hero in Babylon, I used the name Samson Ruth, but enough of that. I needed a new name for myself in the serial.
I tried out a few names as I backtracked the two blocks to my intended bus stop. I like the name Smith. I don’t know why but I’ve always liked that name. Some people consider it ordinary. I don’t.
Smith…
I ran some variations of Smith through my mind:
Errol Smith
Cary Smith
Humphrey Smith
George Smith (as in Raft)
Wallace Smith
Pancho Smith
Lee Smith
Morgan Smith
“Gunboat” Smith
“Red” Smith
Carter Smith
Rex Smith
Cody Smith
Flint Smith
Terry Smith
Laughing Smith
Major Smith (I liked that one a lot.)
“Oklahoma Jimmy” Smith
F.D.R. Smith
There certainly are a lot of possibilities when you use the name Smith.
Some of the names were good but so far I hadn’t come up with one that was perfect and I wouldn’t settle for less than a perfect Smith.
Why should I?
Lobotomy
Ah, shit!
I walked two blocks beyond my stop the other way, past the street that I lived on, thinking about having the name Smith for a private eye in Babylon, so I had to turn around and walk back again and felt like a fool because I couldn’t afford to do things like that when I was just a few hours away from my first client in months.
Thinking about Babylon can be a dangerous thing for me. I had to watch my ass.
I walked back down Sacramento Street very carefully not thinking about Babylon. As I walked along, I pretended that I had a prefrontal lobotomy.
The Milkmen
I felt a certain sense of triumph when I arrived at Leavenworth Street and walked half a block to the broken-down apartment building I was living in. I hadn’t thought about Babylon once.
The morgue wagon was parked in front of the apartment house. Somebody had died in the building. I tried to imagine one of the tenants bei
ng dead but I couldn’t imagine anyone being dead in that place. Why bother when paying your rent there was a form of death?
I certainly was going to be surprised when I found out who it was.
The morgue wagon was a converted panel Mack truck with enough corpse room to accommodate four brand-new ex-taxpayers.
I walked up the steps and opened the front door and stepped into the dark musty hall of the building that some called home but I called shit.
Though I had cooled the rent business with the landlady, I involuntarily looked up the stairs to the second floor and her apartment. The door was open and two morgue attendants were carrying her body out. It was lying on a stretcher covered with a sheet. There were some tenants cluttered around the door. They acted like amateur, just-drafted mourners.
I stood at the bottom of the landing and watched the attendants bring her body down the stairs. They did it very smoothly, almost effortlessly, like olive oil pouring out of a bottle.
They didn’t say anything as they came down the stairs. I knew a lot of guys who worked at the morgue but I didn’t know these guys.
The tenant mourners stood in a very small crowd at the top of the stairs whispering and mourning amateurishly. They weren’t very good at it. Of course how good can you be at mourning a landlady who had a shrill temper and was a big snoop? She had a bad habit of peeking out a crack in the door to her apartment and scrutinizing everybody who came and went in the building. She had incredible hearing. I think there was a bat somewhere in her family tree.
Well, those days were over for her.
She was now taking a trip down to my peg-legged friend who’d be putting her on ice shortly. I wondered if he would do any sight-seeing on her naked body. No, I don’t think so. She was too old and had eaten too many stale doughnuts. She couldn’t hold a candle to that prostitute who was keeping him company now, the one who’d been opened up with a letter opener.
For a few seconds, I saw her dead body in my mind. She was a real looker. Then I thought about the beautiful blonde that I’d met leaving the morgue and how she’d been crying when I saw her but had pretended to be very aloof and distant to Peg-leg when she’d looked at the body of the dead whore. That line of thought led to a Hash of her chauffeur smiling at me as they drove away up the street, almost as if he knew me, that we were old friends who didn’t have time to talk right now but we’d see each other soon.
I mentally returned to the business at hand, watching the attendants complete getting the dead landlady’s body down the stairs. They sure were good at it. Of course that was their occupation but I had to admire it. I think there’s an art to doing everything and they were proving my theory by moving that old bag’s carcass just like she was an angel or at least a millionaire.
“The landlady?” I said as they finished getting her down the stairs. Saying that made me sound like a private detective. I like to keep in shape.
“Yup,” one of them said.
“What was it?” I said.
“Ticker,” the other one said.
The amateur mourners followed down the stairs and watched the attendants finish carting her out of the building. They slid her body into the back of the morgue wagon. There was already another corpse in there, so she’d have some company on her trip downtown to the morgue. I guess it beats going by yourself.
The attendants closed the door behind her and her newfound friend. They walked slowly around and got into the front seat. There was a very offhand casualness to their demeanor. They had about the same attitude toward dead bodies as a milkman does toward empty bottles. You just pick them up and take them away.
My Day
After the landlady was gone I walked down the hall to my apartment and suddenly the bright side of the situation came into focus. The old landlady owned the building and she was a widow and she didn’t have any relatives or friends. Her estate would be in a complete mess. It would take months to sort out, so nobody would be bothering me about my overdue rent.
What a break!
This was really my day.
I hadn’t had a day like this since that car ran over me a couple years ago and broke both my legs. I got a nice settlement out of that. Even though I was in traction for three months, it beat working for a living and oh, what times I had! dreaming of Babylon there in the hospital.
I almost hated to leave.
I guess I showed it.
The nurses made some jokes about it.
“Why so gloomy?” one of them said.
“You look as if you’re going to a funeral,” another one said.
They didn’t know how comfortable the hospital was, just to lie there and have all my wants taken care of, with practically nothing to do except dream of Babylon.
The second I went out the front door of that hospital on my crutches everything started downhill. From then on it just kept spiralling down until today, and what a day it had been so far: a client! Bullets for my gun! Five dollars! And best of all, a dead landlady!
Who could ask for anything more?
Christmas Carols
The dank grubbiness of my apartment hadn’t changed while I was gone. What a rock bottom hole… Jesus, how could I live the way I was living? It was a little frightening. I stepped over some unidentified objects lying on the floor. I deliberately didn’t look at them very hard. I didn’t want to know what they were. I also avoided looking at my bed.
My bed resembled something that belonged in the violent ward of an insane asylum. I had never really been much of a bedmaker even when I had been inspired to do so in days long gone past.
My mother used to yell at me all the time, “Why don’t you make your bed! Do I have to do everything for you!”
After I made my bed, she’d yell, “Why can’t you make your bed right! Look at those sheets! They look like nooses. I don’t know what I’m going to do! Mercy, Lord, please mercy!” And now I owed her eight hundred dollars and my bed looked like the gallows they hanged the people who’d assassinated Abraham Lincoln from, and I hadn’t called my mother this week.
I needed a shower to impress my client, so I took my clothes off and was just about to turn the shower on when I realized that I didn’t have any soap. I’d used up the last little scrap a few days before. Also, my razor possessed a blade so dull that you couldn’t shave a pear with it.
I thought about putting my clothes back on and going out and getting some soap and sonic razor blades, but then I remembered that there wasn’t a store within a mile of the place that I didn’t owe money to. If I flashed that five dollar bill in front of a store owner, he’d tear me limb from limb.
No, sir…
What was I to do?
I couldn’t borrow some soap or a razor blade from any of the tenants in the building because there wasn’t a single one that I hadn’t borrowed down like a forest tire. They wouldn’t loan me a Band-Aid if my throat was cut.
I thought it all over very carefully.
My thinking went something like this; Water is more important than soap. I mean, what is soap without water? Nothing. That’s what it is. So logically water could handle the situation by itself, and also it was better than nothing, if you know what I mean.
Having convinced myself of this logic, I turned the water on and stepped into the shower. I immediately stepped back out.
“YEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!” I yelled, jumping around in agony.
The water had been scalding hot and I was paying for it. Too bad my thinking had not been carried to the point of adjusting the temperature of the water so that a human being could stand it.
Oh, well…
It was just an oversight on my part. As soon as the pain stopped, I adjusted the hot and cold faucets so that they combined to create an acceptable environment for a shower without soap.
Normally, I sing in the shower, so I started singing in the shower:
“O come, all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant,
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.
; Come and behold him, Born the King of angels…”
I always sing Christmas carols in the shower.
A few years ago a woman spent the night with me when I was living in a fancier apartment. She was the secretary to a used-car dealer. I really liked her. I had hopes that we might get something heavy going between us and maybe a few bucks off a used car.
We’d gone out on a few dates together but this was our first time together in bed and we did pretty good at it, anyway, I thought so. Those were the days when I had soap, so in the morning I went in to take a shower. She was still lying in bed when I left the room. I got into the shower and started singing:
“It came upon a midnight clear that glorious song of old…”
I sang away…
When I finished my shower I returned to the bedroom and she was gone. She’d gotten up, dressed and left without saying a word, but she’d left a note on the table beside my bed.
The note read:
Dear Mr. Card,
Thanks for a nice time. Please don’t call me again.
Yours sincerely,
Dottie Jones
I guess some people don’t want to hear Christmas carols in July.
A World Renowned
Expert on Socks
I finished my personal hygienic orgy by throwing the world’s least effective shave on my face, thanks to the dullness of the razor blade, the sharpest one I had.
Then I sorted through various piles of my clothes and put together the cleanest wardrobe I could under the conditions brought about by months of extreme poverty, and also I made sure that I had two socks on. They of course didn’t match but they were close enough, not unless you were a world renowned expert on socks.
Dreaming of Babylon Page 5