“The monk’s name was Thích Quảng Dức. He lives on in the photographs of his death. One of the photogs there, Malcolm Browne of AP, took the picture that they say President John Kennedy saw the next morning in the newspaper on his desk, and that he was deeply affected by it. I had walked into one of the most famous photographs in history, sweet Jesus how small the steps, and then boom, you cannot step away from your kismet. It was like love, taking pictures. No second thoughts. What a time. It was early Vietnam days yet, for the Americans. All these handsome stateside boys just spooking around, setting things up in Southeast Asia. Guys going into Operation Rolling Thunder, guys going up the la Drang Valley, guys in their B-52s, all that was later. I was Baby Pink, pitzel photographer. I was like a ferret in the wet Asian alleys. I could smell pictures coming as dusk set in. My eyeballs were soaking up the chemistry of the complicated East. I smelled them, then I heard them: the sound of a pic coming. A wing, a clatter, a gun, a motorcycle backfiring. I was jumping out of my skin every day.
“You know what the funniest part is?” Vivienne asked, swirling around. “These new spooks came in, they’re asking around, ‘Who do we get the gen from, who knows the story on the ground?’ And my pals, my mentors, Marty and Co., they would say, ‘Ask for Baby Pink. Baby Pink can tell you.’ So these tall fit men would come knocking on Marty’s and my door – we lived behind a red door, Marty taught me, ‘Always have a red door on your house’ – and he would answer, ‘Yeah? Help you?’ in his red bandana and baggy shorts, and they would say to Marty, ‘You Baby Pink? Hear you have the word.’ ‘No, not me, hang on,’ he’d say. ‘V! Baby Pink, get your sweet ass out here, these handsome lads here want a word.’ And out from the darkroom comes me: sweet sixteen in loose thin cotton pants and an undershirt and suspenders. ‘Your Mom around, little girl?’ ‘Listen fartface, you want info or did you come into my home to insult me?’ An hour later, we were new best friends, and they were posing for pictures, two photog guys hamming it up on my pink silk bedspread. I was as young as a Viet Cong guerrilla. Everybody knew me, I was that crazy Canadian coyote with a camera.”
“Tell me more about the monk,” Andy said, taking his seat again.
“When the fire had burned him and his robe, he fell back in rigor mortis, charred, his arms stiff. They went up like rigor claws, his legs went up like rigor claws, the crowd leaned in. I took that picture, it came out in Time. By some magic, I had entered my own life. I set out unknowing. If I had known, I probably would never have gone.”
“Amen,” he said.
“I have film from that day I have never developed. I have contact sheets I have never made prints from. They talk about Vietnam protestors, they use the word hippies. Did you know the first protest against the American presence in Vietnam was organized in 1946 by merchant marines? American merchant marines in 1946? These sailors were waiting to be shipped back to the States right after World War Two, and they saw American ships being taken from the job of bringing the boys home, their US ships meant to take them – the war vets – back to the States, being used instead to help bring in arms for the French in Vietnam. Like you said, honey, it is never what you think. It is never when you thought. Come on up, let me take your picture.”
He swivelled on the stool and faced her.
“I am not going to hurt you,” Vivienne said.
“A girl like you always hurts a guy like me,” Andy said. But he sat there. The dead had cathected onto the photographic paper, their energy had pooled there. She wanted an antemortem photograph of this Andy.
“Would you like to have a picnic in my room?” she asked. Say anything to get the picture.
“You planning on smuggling in the personal vino?”
“It’s already contraband in my suitcase.” Not true, but hey.
“Sounds promising,” he said.
“So, shall we go?”
Andy held his left palm up and made the silent gesture of writing the cheque with his right hand, catching Daysee’s eye as he did it. She had the bill ready. Then he silently poured invisible coffee. Daysee brought more hot mud. What was going on? Vivienne thought. First he calls for the bill, then he calls for more coffee. “Is there a problem?” she asked. Now he was pouring three sugar packs and two petrochemical glops into his brew.
“Ma’am, I do not think I would truly be any good for you, right now. I’m on the wrong end of a hangover this morning. And the truth is I’m off to Baghdad tomorrow, so let’s say good night and call it a day.” His eyes flashed at what he just said. He grinned. But Vivienne could see that his body was rocking slightly with a new weather system coming through. An agitation causing him to shy back.
“Partying hard?” she asked. Trying to revive the moment.
“Ma’am, I –”
“Vivienne.”
“Vivienne. Okay. Vivienne, you see, well. I had a bit of a situation over the weekend. Not a good one, by any stretch. My buddy Sean and I were on the road from LA to Twentynine Palms. That wind came at us, blew us off the road. It blew down a palm and crushed our Commander.”
“You had a commanding officer with you in the accident?”
“A Studebaker Commander Starlight, 1951. Lemon yellow. A real beauty. The plan was for Sean to take it to the shop. That never happened. That beauty looked like a crashed yellow spaceship sitting under all those stars.”
He liked cars, he liked stars, he liked clothes that fit, he liked sweet white coffee, he was at ease in public, he was composed, his eyes were deadly marine blue. “It is so dark, you know, out in the desert.”
“We’re in the desert now,” he said. He had been to the still place. His face showed old geology, old worn harm.
“There’s red corpse debris out there all over the sky, you know,” she said, and when he smiled at her, she felt her right arm wanting that dear camera in it, badly. “Those stars, they are already gone from us, they are just energy cadavers.”
Andy’s eyes turned midnight black. “Ma’am, I think I’ll just ride it out until morning, thanks all the same.” He brought his hand down Vivienne’s pink leather-clad arm to her wrist, where his fingers began playing on her wrist bone. Their shoulders were touching. She moved her wrist so her palm opened. His hand did the same. They each drew their fingers back, curling, staying an inch away. He wasn’t leaving. Her camera was waiting in the room.
“It could be a quiet spot, upstairs. Quiet conversation,” she said.
“Possibly.”
She spoke in a low voice, “So, listen, Andy, if you’re not doing anything for the next hour or so…”
Andy’s eyes had gone off with the ghosts. His body was still there beside her at the counter, but his eyes had travelled to the solo place. Vivienne knew about those micro-blackouts that came after too many shock waves. Temporarily, even without your conscious knowledge, you speak from the grave while being alive.
Andy reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s again. He pulled out something crumpled, so old the creases were white. He unfolded it. It was a picture from a magazine, originally in colour. “This is my baby,” he said.
Vivienne looked at her watch. 1:35 p.m. Less than three hours to sundown.
Andy pressed the cracked paper with his hand like it was money. “This is my Ford Mustang I have back home in San Diego. It’s the prettiest blue you ever saw, some people call it sky blue, some call it robin’s egg. You look at that Mustang when it’s parked, you can feel the wind blowing through a pretty girl’s hair.” The talk of being photographed had put him in his own photograph already. “I’d like to redo the interior in a cream channeling. I’m thinking I’ll get around to getting it detailed when I get back from over there. I bet you’d like to tool on out to Death Valley in a pale blue Mustang convertible.”
“I would,” Vivienne said.
“That red hair of yours would get crazy going at speed, real Medusa.”
“It grows like weeds.”
“Mighty fine weeds, ma’am.” He began to stroke her
pink leather jacket, her animal hide. That move was okay now, because she could just smooth it along to the elevator, the room, the lens, the shot. Get the man by a window, before sunset.
“The Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon,” she said.
Andy was framing her in that pretty blue Mustang on an open grey road under blue sky. The model was picturing how he could be the artist. This made him the perfect model. The dark kingdom of light was awaiting, the land of light that came after the end of Eden and snakes, the wild light that ran up into mountains through the wind horns of the endemic bighorn sheep and blew down the hard notes of awe into the beds of salt, deep into their ancient cracks. Nothing was settled, nothing stayed in place where the wind ruled the land.
Andy held the salt-white channels of the clipping up to his face. “I’d be sitting with sand right up my ass crack over there in the desert, I’d pull out a picture I used to have of my wife in this very Mustang. I’d stare at that picture the whole night, trying to remember what she looked like.”
“And you get home to where she is,” Vivienne said, “and there she is, right in front of you and you still can’t remember what she looks like. The photograph knows, but you don’t.”
Andy squinted his eyes like How do you know what’s in my head?
“It won’t take long, honey, I promise. We can be in and out of my room in twenty minutes. Fifteen. How ’bout fifteen?”
“You ever see that movie Wings of Desire? Berlin before the wall fell?” Andy asked.
“Black and white; the angels in the archives,” said Vivienne. He had taken her to a car crash, a car love and now he was talking Wim Wenders.
“The very one,” he said. “One night my wife, Caroline, and I head out to see Wings of Desire, but we never made it. A drunk comes out of nowhere and broadsides us. Caroline dies on the way to the hospital. I was blessed I have to say. I walked away with two broken legs.” He smiled at the tender idiocy he had just uttered. “Right here,” tapping the creased photo of the blue Mustang, “is the car we were in. I got it rebuilt afterwards. One night, honestly, I can’t tell you what channel I was watching on TV. I was back stateside. There’s Peter Falk on the screen, at some hot dog stand talking to a guy with wings. It’s black and white. How the hell did I know it was the movie Caroline and I had set out to see and never saw? So it’s looking a lot like Berlin. The angel’s taking a tour of his former life, walking past the Berlin Wall and all. I felt sick with happiness watching it, and I did not know why. This angel goes into a club. Oh yeah, I been there, some sort of German punk band on stage.” He drank down the whole cup of sugary white coffee. “But he’s invisible. He’s back home, but no one can see him. He’s listening in on a woman talking Chinese, which he can’t understand a word of. He’s cracking up with joy at nothing. He’s just glad to be back. He’s dead and he’s glad to be alive. Jesus, ma’am, I’m in bad need of a drink.”
Vivienne extended her hand to his forearm. His skin was warm, the hair blond. She stroked his skin lightly. “Let me take your picture.”
Andy looked at her, his blue eyes going dark. “You know what, Vivienne, why the hell not? I might not have a face next week. I went to a wedding last year where the groom, a buddy of mine, had half a face. I don’t know why I have a face, ma’am. Sure. Take my picture. If it’s twenty minutes, what’s twenty minutes?” He took her hands. “Baby Pink, you sure are some –”
“Hello, gorgeous, que tal?” A tall man with silver hair sat down to Vivienne’s right, where there was an empty chair. He pulled at her swivel chair’s bottom and swung her to face him. “Having fun, Vivi?” It was Val Gold, who lived with her and Johnny. He kissed her right hand. “How’s it going, my darling Vivi? Stepping out on me again, are you?” Val held the seat of her counter stool so her back was to Andy, then let it swing around. “Don’t let me interrupt. Go on, rob the cradle, I’ll just watch.”
Vivienne gave Val a dead-eyed look. “Piss off, you spook buzzard. Piss off, Val, I am working. Can you men ever let a woman get her work done?” Andy looked down into his coffee cup and sucked up the moment. He motioned to Daysee the waitress, and made that writing-out-the-bill pantomime.
“Ain’t she cute,” Val said. “Oh, I remember now, you used to take pictures, didn’t you, Vivi? She used to be a big deal once upon a time, son.” Vivienne watched Andy push away from the coffee counter.
Andy gave her a nod and departed. Vivienne swivelled the seat and watched him walk across the room. Her brain was banging around in its skull jelly. The one who got away. Her eyelashes flickered a thousand white T-shirts in one second.
3
PINK LEATHER JACKET
JOHNNY COMA SAT in the hotel garden, reading Genesis on a wooden park bench. The sun shone from the east on his pale face. He had the Holy Bible in a small black classic edition open on his lap. And the LORD God called Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.
Johnny liked that quote. Genesis was good. He liked Genesis. It was a great guide to simple direct writing. Johnny looked down at the Good Book in his lap.
And Cain talked with Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
There you had it, one-two-three, twenty-nine words, the basic Cain and Abel short story. More than a tweet, practically an IM, thirty-four syllables.
And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
Syllable count: thirty-four plus twenty-seven. Goddamn, at the sixty-one syllable mark, there is Cain, trying to talk himself out of that one: “How am I supposed know where my brother is?” That’s right, Johnny thought, keep it up, Cain. Tell us one we never saw on any Law & Order. Detective Bobby Goren on Criminal Intent would be head-tilting into you, Cain baby, breaking down that alibi. Yeah, fifty-one sob-sister words. God tested you, brother Cain, God said your crops will fail, Cain you momzer mobster in waiting. Cain whines, boo hoo, Everyone will come and kill me. God takes pity on poor Cain the brother-murderer, God puts his personal protective brand on Cain’s forehead so that no one will kill the murderer, the community will treat him as a protected killer. The first skell in history to get a deal, our Cain. God gives Cain immunity.
Johnny flipped to the previous page and counted the lines: sixty lines from the moment Cain was born, through his murder of his brother Abel, through Cain’s whining about the diplomatic immunity deal with God, through Cain’s going east of Eden to Nod, where Cain meets his wife who is not named, where he has a son named Enoch, and now Cain is let off by God, Cain becomes a real estate developer, Cain did build a city and he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.
A masterpiece of short story concision. Genesis gives the story of Cain from birth to post-God-parole-business success about six hundred words. Two book pages.
Johnny had received an email, unsolicited, just before he flew here to the desert, which had the erroneous title “Just a Thought on God.” The sender, who decided to treat Johnny the Jew to a dissertation on Jesus, decided most cleverly to fold into his piece six pages from Johnny’s own 1988 book, The Spiritual Atheist, verbatim. Now, that was the gold standard for chutzpah: you plagiarize word for word from a man’s own book and send it to him as your own spam and ask his opinion.
The man who sent that email was Danny Coma, his older brother.
Tell me what you think.
I think you should see a shrink, you pinhead. Johnny was finally writing the book he wanted to, a novel set in Death Valley. He was sketching, jotting down a few phrases. Danny’s “Just a Thought” email was ninety-three thousand words. Three hundred book pages. When Johnny did not answer him in two days, Danny started sending snide-mails. Cain, the older brother, arrogant, furious that his younger brother, Abel, wrote books and people read them.
>
Danny was the handsome one as a youngster, Danny was the one with the big dark eyes, Danny was the smiler in the photographs. Johnny was the goofball, Johnny was the kidder, Johnny was the joker.
It was Vivienne who pointed out that even as a teen Danny’s smile in photos did not include his eyes. Cover the mouth, the eyes were hoodlum eyes: I’m getting away with this, you squares. Handsome Danny announced in high school he was going to be a writer. Johnny the joker announced he was going to be a magician. He did magic tricks for auditoriums. He sought out ladies’ silk scarves at the dime store. He spent all his time in his room doing card tricks, playing solitaire. Johnny developed agile hands; Danny went to Harvard, then Cambridge and got hired by maybe Canada, maybe Britain, maybe the States, maybe all three, to do intelligence work. Danny was named as an Economic Advisor. Johnny the magician morphed into Johnny Coma, novelist, while Danny wasn’t looking. While Danny was in Bolivia, hunting down Che Guevara, Johnny was in Toronto, conjuring words for the page. When Danny was palsy-walsy with the CIA in Chile, Johnny was prowling Havana with Vivienne, scribbling notes for his 1974 novel, Cuban Lament. Then Danny retired, after forty-three years in the shadows as a fixer and began a keyboard mania, babbling, enthusing, bubbling, acknowledging, planning for launches, entering high hypomania, a grand emperor believing life had waited for him, and all he had to do was pick up where he left off as a teenager when he said, “I am, of course, the writer in the family.” But when he came to the keyboard for the first time, in his sixties, he was at entry level in a job he had never done.
Johnny opened to Genesis 22. The story of Abraham and Isaac: ninety-two lines. But short ones. Seven or eight words to the line, okay. So call Abe and Ike: ninety-two times eight, equals 738 words. Danny’s acknowledgements for his emailed doorstop were five times the length of the Abraham and Isaac legend. (What was dementia, what was dysmorphia?)
Death Valley Page 3