by Jeff Johnson
Most of the flash from floor to eye level was mine and Big Mike’s, with a good swath of Delia’s incredible black and gray horror-themed pieces, but as the wall stretched up out of reach tattoo history began to appear. I had dozens of Russel Shoals sheets from the fifties, some early Lou Louis, a handful of old Rex Nightly, Blue Spears, and many more. All of them were bolted behind quarter inch Plexiglas, and in the last year I’d had expensive copies made of most of the more valuable pieces and switched them out. The originals were in a gun safe that was too heavy to move, in a storage space that was too worthless to get rid of.
Delia was chattering away about records, spraying the room in general public-speaker mode. Alex and Dwight were finishing up. The zombie music hadn’t been cranked up again. Everything was stable, so I decided to do a little half-assed recon on the emerging landlord situation. I zipped up my bomber jacket and walked out into the misting rain again. Flaco’s Tacos, the temple of the neighborhood oracle, was conveniently located right next door.
The Lucky Supreme was dead center in an aging one-story brick building. There was a Korean mini-mart to one side and a bar called the Rooster Rocket on the other. Both of them were the kind of unlikely operations that could only exist in Old Town, that would have never prospered anywhere else and so could never leave. The Korean mini-mart was run by an intensely private family of five, none of whom spoke a single word of English. They sold everything from crack pipes to expired Spam and had occasional special runs of mysterious items like one-dollar steaks or Big Wheels. Their clients were all low-end local foot traffic. They ran a needle exchange for the junkie population and sold Sergeant’s Worm Away for dogs, Freeze Off for warts, the central components of Mexican sorcery, and CDs of action movies from Nigeria. And they sold it all without ever saying a word.
The Rooster Rocket was a hipster/punk nightclub run by Gomez, a hard Latino in his fifties who knew nothing at all about music. That part of his operation had happened entirely by accident and he ran it with entrepreneurial resignation. In the late eighties, the Rocket had been just a bar. The kid that they’d hired to wash dishes had a band and Gomez had let him play. Then the kid threw a few more shows and the booze really started flowing. After he finally ran off, Gomez had rolled up his sleeves and embraced his fate as a nightclub owner.
The entrance to the Rooster Rocket had an old ticket taker’s vestibule to one side, left over from its seventies incarnation as a porno theater. Gomez had converted it into Sixth Street’s smallest Mexican restaurant and rented it to Flaco. You ate standing up outside and there was room under the awning for three people. The entire food-making operation was crammed into a space with the same dimensions as a walk-in closet, proof of the miracle of Latino ingenuity and spatial acuity. I went from my awning to his with less than a foot of open sky. When I blew into my hands in front of the open window, I saw the whiteness of my breath for the first time that year.
“Two juniors,” I called, shuffling a little as the cold of the sidewalk came through the soles of my boots.
“Tattoo boy,” Flaco said, peeking out. He grinned at me, all gold and bridgework. His ancient face was part prune and part glove leather, and his eyes were always smiling. I’d never seen him sick or sad, not even once. Flaco’s mission in life was to save enough money to pay off his tiny ranch in central Mexico and then go home. He’d been at it for twenty years and said he had two more to go. He had a wife and two grown daughters already living on the spread, raising goats and chickens and tending a huge garden they’d coaxed out of the rocky ground. “Water or soda?”
I waved at him, indicating neither.
Flaco put my order together on a sheet of wax paper and slid them out. The tacos were small corn tortillas doubled up and filled with roasted pork, diced red onion, and a type of barbeque sauce. Flaco served other kinds of tacos, but these were the only ones anyone ever ordered, and for some reason everyone called them juniors. I tossed a few dollars through the slot and scooped up a junior, leaning forward as I bit into it to keep red grease from shooting all over my pants. Over in two bites.
“The leaves are turning, man,” Flaco said, peering out at the street. “Time to get my big coat out. This year, I’m thinking maybe a hat. Colorful, like the Guatemalan Rasta.”
I grunted and went at the second junior, then wiped my hands on a napkin from the dispenser on the tiny counter and tossed it with the wax paper into the dented bucket beneath the window.
“Dmitri in there?” I asked, nodding at the bar.
Flaco shook his head. “No, no. He was earlier. I think our fucking landlord is losing it, esse. He was wearing clown pants, like the old golfer.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. Shit,” Flaco agreed, still studying the street. “Hospital shit.”
“Later days,” I said, wiping my hands on my pants. It was a routine of ours.
“Better lays.” His customary reply.
When I walked into the Rooster Rocket, I had to pause for an instant to let my eyes adjust to the year-round gloom after the blinding fluorescence of Flaco’s window. There were a few drinkers with stamina in the dark interior, mostly local restaurant workers. Gomez was behind the bar with a clipboard in one hand and the chewed stub of a pencil in the other, checking off an order form. Gomez was a striking older man with heavy, slicked-back hair and a tidy baseball player’s moustache that was as black as a charcoal briquette. His root beer eyes had a distance picked up in a history I’d never asked about.
“Hola,” Gomez said. “Workin’ or drinkin’?”
“Christian thimble,” I replied, making the gesture for weensy with my thumb and forefinger. “Just doing the door tonight.”
“You need a social life, hombre.” He put his clipboard down and poured me a small shot of vodka, then one for himself.
“Seen Dmitri?” I asked, cupping the thimble.
Gomez tossed his shot back and scowled. “We need to talk about him. That man needs antidepressants. Therapy. You should have seen what he was wearing.”
“I heard.” I tossed my shot back and Gomez glanced at the bottle. I shook my head.
“It worried me,” he continued, picking up the clipboard. The jukebox came on somewhere in the back of the bar. Old Gypsy Kings. “This neighborhood is going somewhere else and it’s taking our landlord with it.”
“I’m not worried,” I lied. “Got a five-year lease.”
“Me too,” Gomez said, his face unreadable. “But what good is that going to do if Old Town turns into café loft space, eh?”
I looked at the bar clock. The shift change at the Lucky was minutes away, so I tossed a few bucks on the counter. Gomez ignored them and went back to work, and just like that the neighborhood business association meeting was complete.
When I walked back into the shop, I knew instantly that something had happened. The dayshift guys were packed up and had their jackets on, ready to split, but they were sitting on the stools along the tip wall listening to Delia. My two night guys, Nigel and Big Mike, were just standing there, still dripping rain and holding their art bags, also captivated. Everyone looked at the door and froze at the sight of me.
“What?” I asked. The inside of my mouth tasted like snow. My vision went hyper-crisp, and everything looked like it was made out of painted glass.
Delia’s little pixie face lit up with inner Manson light. Nigel and Big Mike gave me Sleepy Hollow grins. Both of them had worked for me for years, Nigel all the way back to when I was still a shit-upon employee myself.
“Aw man,” Nigel purred. “It’s like an early Nightmare Before Christmas. But without the whole movie part.”
“This is gonna be raw,” Big Mike chortled. “Raw like in a whole fucking buffalo raw.”
“Obi called from Monterey,” Delia said, sugar on sweet. She resisted a pirouette, but an ecstatic, serpentine ripple went up her entire body. Her eyes glittered with an almost confusing level of delight. Even her hair was smiling. “He was surfing in Santa Cruz tod
ay and guess who he found?”
Obi was my old apprentice. He’d moved to San Francisco a year ago, hated it, and moved farther south to the peninsula. I felt my jaw clench. The two juniors and the vodka in my stomach went from hot to foamy. Strong déjà vu. Delia enunciated her next three words in the lilting singsong parody of a thirsty baby demon.
“Jason fucking Bling.”
“Who in the world is Jason Bling?”
Alex broke the long silence with a whisper. A pre-earthquake stillness had spread through the shop. Alex looked worried, buried under the totality of the mood shift. Dwight was wearing his poker face, which in his case looked a little like brain damage. Big Mike, Nigel, and Delia were all watching my face like it was their first color TV.
“A dude fixin’ to shit his wisdom teeth,” Big Mike said.
“A dude who would drop dead of a multiple heart attack/stroke/embolism with spontaneous cancer if he knew we were standing here talking about where he was,” Nigel added. “Where he lives. Where we can find him.” He rubbed his long skinny hands together. His eyes never strayed from my face.
“Jason used to work here,” Delia said, gracefully taking the stage again. She began to slowly pace, gesturing with her arms with perfect posture, a small and psychotic presenter. “Couple of years ago. Flashy playboy dickhead, liked sports cars, had a big diamond earring and chunks of gold in his teeth. Dressed like a tacky pimp version of Nigel here.”
“Kid would have licked out my bathtub, I asked him to,” Nigel said. Nigel had rarefied taste in everything, from clothes to Italian handguns. He was tall and thin, with sharp, angular features. That night he was wearing his standard ghetto uniform: shiny black boots, black Dickies, black T, black hoodie, black jacket, and a black skullie, all of it perfectly new. He had a serious policy about wearing anything with words or color. “I was never able to teach his dumb ass a damn thing. The idiot banged half the junky strippers in this city, and I’m not exaggerating. Liked to brag he never wore a condom, too. He called rubbers ‘fag bags.’ Swear to God. Kid was that retarded.”
“Yeah, ew. Anyway,” Delia continued, “one day he just splits town, no warning, no notice, nothing. We all had to cover his shifts for a few weeks until Darby finally found a replacement we thought might not be as bad. That. Sucked. The whole thing. So a month or so after he’s gone people start showing up looking for him. Bad people. I mean even worse than Big Mike. We dug around a little and it turned out that our little Jason was into some insanely stupid shit, light years beyond his VD collection. The dumbass had been moving pills out of Canada and selling them around town. He got bigger and bigger and then burned a shitload of total strangers as the grand finale.”
“And that ain’t all,” Nigel said.
“Nooo,” Delia crooned. “Our boy decided to burn the Lucky while he was burning everyone else. Look up there.” She pointed to a space high on the wall, all the way up at the Roland Norton flash. Alex and Dwight looked. So did Big Mike.
“I was cleaning this filthy shithole one night a few weeks after Bling split and I noticed one of the Norton pieces was crooked. Got the big ladder out and climbed up there, since no one else ever does anything around here, and guess what I found?” She tossed her story in my direction with a flick of her head.
Alex and Dwight looked at me. Nigel and Big Mike loved this part of the story.
“They were copies,” I said. “Bling had taken all fifteen of the original sheets down and copied them. We’d never have known he’d stolen the originals if he hadn’t screwed up when he hung the fakes.”
“Jesus,” Alex said. “How … how’d a cretin like that ever even get a job here?”
All eyes were on me again. I shrugged.
“What are you gonna do, boss?” Big Mike asked. He flexed one meaty hand and the knuckles popped. Big Mike’s huge mitts were completely tattooed and the skin over his hands reminded me of tractor tires. Every tattoo artist we knew had been looking for Bling for almost two years. The nationwide hunt was over.
I looked back up at the copies of the Roland Norton flash. I already knew what I was going to do. I didn’t have any choice. I’d half hoped this day would never come.
“I’m gonna go get my shit,” I said. “Mike, you’re in charge of supplies while I’m gone. Alex, tomorrow morning you call all my appointments for the next few days and reschedule them. If any cops call, give them to Nigel. Delia, you’re in charge of the day shift, and needless to say, none of this leaves this room.”
Alex and Dwight looked a little worried as they split. They were going to get more and more worried as the night went on too, I knew, until they finally got The Fear. Big Mike and Nigel, on the other hand, quickly put their things away and started setting up as though nothing had happened, maybe with a little less banter than usual. I went back to my office corner, Delia close on my heels.
“What,” I said flatly, crashing down in my chair.
“I’m going with you.” Delia settled on the edge of the desk and primly crossed her hands over her knee. Her short fingernails were painted and buffed, the color of algae. A wave of birthday cake caught up with her and rolled over me.
“I need you at the shop,” I said. Alex and Dwight were too new to be left alone. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”
“C’mon,” she whined, squirming. She was incapable of doing one without the other. “Someone needs to mind you. You know how you get, Darby. All fuckey-shit-up. Plus I always hated Jason, fuckin’ no-talent fast-money scammer piece of shit. I wanna watch what happens when you find him.”
“I’m not going to hurt him.” The lie was loud in my voice.
Delia laughed hard enough to blink. “Yes you are! I just wanna be there. C’mon, man, road trip.” She batted her lashes. “I give an all-tonsil road willie …”
“Ew,” I replied. “Answer’s way absolutely no now. I need you here, Delia. Seriously. Someone trustworthy and resourceful has to watch my cats.”
“Shit.” She got up. I could tell she was disappointed, but she was also worried. She put on her big girl face and I inwardly cringed. “And you’re going to go down to the Bay Area to deal with a known scumbag and you’re going to stay out of trouble? Really? And I’m supposed to believe you?”
“This is really touching, Delia.”
She snorted. “I just don’t want to have to look for a new job if you royally fuck up.” She turned in the doorway, held her hand to the side of her head in the universal gesture for phone and mouthed “call me.” Then she flipped me off as an afterthought, made the gun-blows-brains-out gesture, gave me the clown frown, split.
“No boyfriends at my place,” I called after her. “Or whatever you call those things before you eat ’em. And use toilet paper! That’s what it’s there for!”
On the way home, I listened closely to my car’s engine. I’d bought the BMW through a customer of mine who worked as a mechanic at a dealership. They got well-maintained trade-ins all the time, and the mechanics picked them up to make a little cash on the side. The car sounded good. It was a late nineties 530 wagon, not at its most glamorous with an overflowing ashtray and random papers, shop supplies, and assorted crap all over the seats, but it would hold up through the twelve-hour drive.
I pulled up in front of my place and sat in the warm car, thinking. I thought about the drive and how I wanted to leave before sunrise. I thought about the rolling hills four hours south, and lonely Mt. Shasta just beyond it. The Kingdom of Cannibals. Zombie Country. Big Dead County. A scenic place to make sure to check the oil before you ever passed through, because breaking down out there would be worse than breaking down in Compton at three a.m.
After the government had run the weed growers out of southern Oregon and Northern California, a thousand tiny meth labs had taken their place. The hippies turned grim, picked up guns and hammers and saws, lost all their teeth, and started listening to Motorhead, the whole nine yards. Most of the women who weren’t scarecrows had become Walmart fat
and their heads all looked curiously primitive, as though the speed had rearranged the bones in their skulls. All of it had gone straight to the lost episode of The Twilight Zone and points beyond. The small-town newspapers in that region read like fictional horror tabloids.
I thought about that and listened to the rain on the roof of the car, but mostly I thought about Bling, and how I’d be standing in front of him in less than twenty-four hours. I could see why Delia was worried. I was paranoid about what I was going to find when I went into his hiding place and I had every reason to be, because if the idiot was still alive, that meant he’d gotten better at being what he already was. Two years had given Bling time to develop into a mightier kind of shithead. That he was still alive was direct evidence.
My two cats were milling around on the porch as I walked up the steps. One of them was a Manx named Chops, a truly ugly, heavily muscled creature who trundled like a miniature rhino and fought successfully with dogs. His tail looked like a misshapen thumb. I’d paid a few hundred dollars for him at an exotic animal farm and I suspected I’d been ripped off. The other cat was named Buttons, an orange Maine Coon, also enormous, dripping wet and purring without a thought in his head. His big, unfocused eyes looked like green grapes. I sometimes thought poor Buttons had confused himself with some variety of forest mushroom. Delia had renamed them Pinky Bong and Dillson.
I let them in and they rampaged over each other to their food bowl. I’d lived there for almost a decade and it showed. The living room was crammed with inexpensive antiques I’d picked up at random with the intention of restoring. An old walnut armoire I’d found a few years before was my best effort to date, more of an experiment. There was also a huge 1940s AM radio with a crack in the top, a couple of wooden bookcases with brass hinges and glass doors, and a fat gray sofa I slept on sometimes. Next was the dining room where I never ate, dominated by a six-seat walnut table where no one ever sat, a piano I never played, and two freestanding brass lamps that may or may not have had been plugged in. Some of my more important curios were in an old china cabinet. Off to the side was the spare room, where I kept my collection of books, fossils, cool rocks, and trinkets, plus my drafting table. Past the dining room was the kitchen, the bathroom, and my bedroom. The ceiling had cracks in it and so did the walls. It was the kind of place that made all my old junk look good.