Basket Case

by Carl Hiassen

  I write it down: Shipwrecked Heart.Slightly mawkish, but it gives me a semi-ironic kicker for the story. Even Emma might get it.

  Standing up, I flip the notebook shut and cap my pen. "Thank you," I tell Jimmy's widow. "I know this was difficult."

  We shake hands. Hers is damp, the knuckles showing pink and raw.

  "When will this be in the paper?" she asks me.

  "Tomorrow."

  "Will there be a picture of Jimmy?"

  "Most likely," I say.

  The bald guy has materialized at my side.

  "Well, I hope they pick a good one," says Mrs. Stomarti.

  "Don't worry. I'll talk to the photo editor." Like he'd give me the time of day.

  No sooner has the door to 16-G closed behind me than I think of a dozen other questions I should have asked. But that's what always happens, and the truth is, I've got more than enough material for the obit. Plus I still need to talk with Jimmy's sister, Janet, and make some calls to the Bahamas.

  I scan my notes as I'm waiting for the elevator, which is taking forever. Finally there's a double beep and the door opens, and I nearly walk smack into some tall guy who's on his way out. I don't see his face because he's carrying an armful of grocery bags from a gourmet deli. We both grunt apologetically and manage to sidestep each other. As he turns the corner, leaving me alone in the elevator to gag on his cologne, I see quite a lush mane of copper-red hair shimmering down past his shoulder blades.

  The elevator door doesn't close immediately, which annoys me because I'm on deadline. Every pissant delay will annoy me until the Jimmy Stoma obit is finished.

  Repeatedly I punch the elevator button. Nothing happens. From down the hall, I hear the guy knocking on a door to one of the apartments. I hear the door open. I hear the voice of Cleo Rio, and though I can't make out her words, the tone is clearly friendly and familiar.

  Leading me to the brilliant conclusion that the shimmery-haired man who got out of the elevator was not a grocery-delivery guy, but an acquaintance of the bereaved.

  And, as the elevator door finally closes in my face, I wonder: Why would anyone wear so much cologne to visit a widow?

  3

  Where is Janet Thrush?

  I keep calling; no answer. I leave two messages on her machine.

  Meanwhile, Emma hovers. She thinks I ought to be writing Jimmy Stoma's obituary by now, but she knows better than to nag. Emma dislikes being reminded that I haven't missed a deadline since she was in Huggies.

  Come on, Janet, answer the damn phone.

  From Jimmy's sister I need two things. One is a nice warm quote about her brother—I hate to hang the entire obit on Cleo Rio. Second, I want to bounce Cleo's version of Jimmy's life off of Janet to make sure I'm not being steered off course. Wives have been known to lie extravagantly about dead husbands.

  Janet Thrush could tell me if her brother had been producing Shipwrecked Heartfor Cleo, and if the CD was nearly finished. Even if Jimmy's widow is exaggerating for self-promotional purposes, at least the tide ought to hold up. That's all I need for my last sentence, which we call the kicker.

  While waiting for Janet, I try the Bahamian police. Talk about a long shot. Headquarters in Nassau refers me to Freeport. Freeport refers me to Chub Cay, which refers me back to Freeport. Sunday, it seems, isn't the best day to track down a coroner in the islands.

  Finally I hook up with a person who identifies herself as Corporal Smith. She's aware that an American has "very unfortunately" passed away while on a diving trip to the Berry Islands, but she has no further information at hand. She politely instructs me to call Nassau tomorrow and ask for Sergeant Weems.

  It's futile to plead my case but I give it a try. And, as expected, Corporal Smith wants to know why I can't wait one more day to write the obit. It's a logical question. Jimmy Stoma certainly isn't going anywhere.

  "It's news," I explain valiantly to the corporal. "I'm in a competitive situation."

  "No one else from the press has called."

  "But they will."

  "Then they'll be advised to phone back tomorrow," she says, "just like you."

  I hang up. Emma is behind me, her presence a clammy vapor.

  "How's it going?"

  "Peachy," I say.

  "When can I see something?"

  "When it's done."

  She slides away like a fog.

  Desperate for a second quote, I look up the home phone number of our music critic. His name is Tim Buckminster, although he recently began using the initials T. O. in his byline, because he liked the rhythm of it: T. O. Buckminster! He even sent an all-points e-mail instructing everyone at the newspaper to refer to him henceforth as "T. O.," please, and never Tim.

  I cannot bring myself to do this. Tim Buckminster is only twenty-five years old, which is too young to be reinventing oneself. So I call him Timmy, as does his mother. Unfortunately, he turns out to be utterly unfamiliar with the music of the Slut Puppies, or of Jimmy Stoma as a solo artist.

  "But you've heard of him, right?" I ask.

  "Sure. Didn't he marry Cleo Rio?"

  Next I try a rock-writer pal in San Francisco. He is kind enough to cobble together an instant quote about the Reptiles and Amphibians of North AmericaCD, which (he speculates) had an influence on current bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters.

  Good enough.

  I glance at the clock on the wall. Maybe Janet Thrush will call before deadline, which is ninety-four minutes away. On my desk I spread my meager notes and the morgue clippings, and begin to write:

  James Stomarti, the hard-living singer-songwriter who founded the popular rock group Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, has died in an apparent skin-diving accident in the Bahamas. He was 39.

  Known to millions of youthful fans as Jimmy Stoma, Stomarti disappeared on the afternoon of August 6 while exploring the sunken wreckage of a smuggler's airplane near Chub Cay, according to his wife, the singer Cleo Rio.

  Ms. Rio said her husband went diving in 50 to 60 feet of water with a former handmate, keyboardist Jay Burns, while she waited aboard the boat. Burns came up after an hour, she said, but there was no sign of Stomarti.

  His body was found later by Bahamian police, in calm seas a half mile away, Ms. Rio said.

  "I think my darling husband swam off and got lost," she said Sunday, still dazed by the tragedy. "When he went diving he was like a little kid. Totally preoccupied."

  Ms. Rio said it appeared Stomarti had gotten lost underwater, and succumbed to fatigue. She said an autopsy determined that her husband had drowned.

  Bahamian Police Cpl. Cilia Smith acknowledged that an American died last Thursday on a dive in the Berry Islands, but declined to confirm that it was Stomarti or provide details of the coroner's findings.

  Stomarti's body was returned to the United States on Saturday. A private service will be held Tuesday afternoon at St. Stephen's Church in Silver Beach. Afterwards the singer's ashes will be scattered in the Atlantic Ocean, according to his wishes, Ms. Rio said.

  It is a quiet final chapter to a life that had, until recent years, been tumultuous and troubled.

  Jimmy and the Slut Puppies barged onto the rock scene in 1983 with the raunchy hit single, "Mouthful of Muscle." Over the next seven years the band sold more than six million albums, according to Billboardmagazine.

  As front man Jimmy Stoma, Stomarti played rhythm guitar, harmonica and sang lead vocals. He also wrote the group's best-known singles, including "Basket Case" and "Trouser Troll," the latter of which appeared on the Slut Puppies' last album, the Grammy Award-winning A Painful Burning Sensation.

  "Jimmy and the Slut Puppies was a high-octane act," rock biographer Gavin Cisco said, "and the spark came from Jimmy Stoma. He was a screamer, for sure, but he was also a sly and solid songwriter."

  Cisco cited the "obvious" influence of one Slut Puppies album, Reptiles and Amphibians of North America,on the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other current rock bands.

&nb
sp; Born in Chicago, James Bradley Stomarti grew up listening to hard-driving, mainstream rock-and-roll. He had a fondness for zippy, double-edged lyrics, and among his early idols were Todd Rundgren and Jackson Browne.

  Stomarti was sixteen when he put together his first basement band, Jungle Rot. Several years later he and his best friend, Jay Burns, formed the Slut Puppies and went on the road.

  "Mainly to get girls," Stomarti joked in a 1986 Rolling Stoneinterview, "and it worked like a charm."

  Stomarti always performed bare-chested in trademark black overalls and combat boots. He was known for his elaborate tattoos, lewd comic asides and indefatigable stage energy.

  Offstage, he exuberantly sustained the Jimmy Stoma persona, sometimes with embarrassing results. Stomarti had numerous brushes with the law, including one memorable arrest for indecent exposure during a concert in North Carolina. In that incident, Stomarti strode onstage wearing only a prophylactic, and a mask likeness of the Rev. Pat Robertson, the Christian broadcast personality.

  Another time, the singer and an unidentified woman companion were injured when he crashed his high-powered waterbike into the stern of the luxury liner SS Norwaywhile it was berthed in the Port of Miami. Later Stomarti admitted he'd gotten "seriously lit" before the accident, in which he fractured nine out often knuckles.

  Indeed, his years of greatest fame and success were marred by heavy substance abuse, leading to the breakup of numerous romances and one marriage.

  Stomarti eventually dissolved the Slut Puppies, and in 1991 released his first and only solo album, Stomatose,to mixed reviews and disappointing sales. He soon dropped out of the Los Angeles music scene and moved to Florida.

  His wife said Stomarti gave up drugs and alcohol, and became an avid outdoorsman, fitness enthusiast and environmentalist. He bought a second home in the Bahamas, where he indulged his passions for boating and scuba diving.

  Last year, while attending a VH1 party for guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Stomarti met Ms. Rio, the former Cynthia Jane Zigler. Three weeks later they were married in Reno, Nevada.

  "Jimmy was everything to me, you know?" Ms. Rio said. "My husband, my best friend, my lover, my manager."

  At the time of his death, Stomarti was producing an album for his new wife. The title: Shipwrecked Heart.

  I re-read the piece and decide it's not terrible, for a forty-five-minute writing job. Maudlin as it is, the kicker works.

  Jimmy Stoma's obit is 810 words, or about twenty-four column inches of type. The fastidious Emma will be plenty steamed. She told me fifteen inches, max. Anything longer won't fit into the layout of the Death page, meaning the story must be trimmed or moved to another section of the paper.

  Emma would rather French-kiss an iguana than try to cut nine inches from one of my obits, because she knows I'll be breathing down her collar, giving her hell about every measly comma she has the gall to delete.

  Even when allowed to toil unmolested, Emma's editing cannot be described as seamless. In the fever pitch of battle, she tends to quaver; even her punctuation (normally a strong suit) becomes shaky. Trimming an inch or two from one of my stories is merely excruciating. Cutting nine inches would be indescribable torture, and Emma knows it.

  Which leaves the other option: Move the Jimmy Stoma obit to a section front. That would shift the editing duty into the hands of one of Emma's competitors. More unpalatably, it might result in a prominent display of my byline—an event as rare and mystical as a solar eclipse.

  Poor kid. What choices!

  Before pressing the Send button to ship her the Jimmy Stoma obit, I go through it once more, tidying up.

  I delete the "likeness" after "mask."

  I wince at the Chili Peppers reference, suspecting that the Slut Puppies had no influence whatsoever on that particular band.

  I cringe at the "marred by heavy substance abuse" line, but I can't come up with anything that isn't equally cliched.

  I insert the phrase "highly publicized" in front of "romances." ...

  Tinkering is a way of stalling, and I'm stalling in the hope that Janet Thrush might still phone with a quote or two about her brother. Except for a few paragraphs of background from old clippings, the obituary is pretty much all Cleo Rio. Single-sourcing always makes me uneasy, and I'm stuck with Cleo's word on lots of material facts, including the cause of Jimmy Stoma's death.

  I keep thinking of the shimmery-haired guy with the deli bags who got out of the elevator. Hell, there could be a dozen innocent explanations. Maybe he was Cleo's big brother, or some diving buddy of Jimmy's. That bull-semen cologne, though, was definitely too heavy for the occasion.

  My eyes fall skeptically on the phrase "still dazed by the tragedy," which I've used to describe Jimmy's widow. I should probably take it out, but I won't. It paints a gentler scene than if I'd written she was "knocking back screwdrivers and staring blankly out a window," which was the sad truth.

  One more detail jumps out of the obituary to give me a twinge of acid reflux: the bit about how Jimmy and Cleo Rio first met at a VH1 party. That's what Cleo told me.

  Yet she also told me her husband had broken completely from his past, and wanted nothing more to do with the music world until he'd met her. So why was he attending a Van Halen bash?

  One of many things I'll probably never know.

  I check the clock. I punch the Send key, then e-mail Emma to tell her Jimmy Stoma's on the way. I head downstairs to grab a soda. Upon my return I see Emma has responded with an electronic message of her own: "We need to talk as soon as I'm out of the news meeting!"

  She probably hasn't even read the obit—all she did was scope out the length, then freak. Minutes later I see her crossing the newsroom and I pounce like a wolverine.

  "Metro took it," she says, acting as if she couldn't care less.

  "Yeah? For out front?"

  Emma says nothing. She knows where the Jimmy Stoma obit is being played, but she won't give me the satisfaction.

  "Talk to Metro," she says, now pretending to edit a story by young Evan Richards, our college intern. Upon my approach Evan warily has drifted away from Emma's desk; he has witnessed too many of our dustups.

  "What about you?" I say to Emma. "You got enough to fill the page?"

  "I'll find something on the wires."

  She won't look directly at me; her slender hands appear bolted to the keypad of her computer, her nose poised six inches from the screen. The worst part is, the screen is blank. I can see its bright blue reflection in Emma's reading glasses.

  Unaccountably, I am overtaken by pity.

  "Rabbi Levine won't be on the wire services, Emma. You want me to make a few calls?"

  Her eyes flicker. I notice the ivory tip of a tooth, pinching a corner of her lip. "No, Jack. There isn't time."

  Back at my desk, I dial three phone numbers: the rabbi's wife, the rabbi's brother and the synagogue. I bat out twelve inches in twenty minutes flat, shipping it to Emma with the following note:

  "You were right. The hang-gliding stuff makes the whole piece."

  On the way out of the newsroom, I hear her call my name. Walking back to her desk, I see the rabbi's obituary up on her computer screen. It's easy to guess what's coming.

  "Jack, I like the brother's quote better than the wife's."

  "Then move it up," I say, agreeably. Emma needs this one more than I do. "See you tomorrow."

  Out of the blue she says, "Nice kicker on Jimmy Stoma." Not exactly oozing sincerity, but at least she's making eye contact.

  "Thanks. Was it Abkazion who bumped it to Metro?"

  Emma nods. "Just like you said. Our new boss is a Slut Puppies fan."

  "Naw," I say, "a true fan would have put it on Page One."

  Emma almost smiles.

  Dinner is a lightning stop at a burger joint. Then I go home, open a beer and ransack the apartment in search of my copy of Reptiles and Amphibians of North America.Finally I unearth it from a loose pile of Dylan and Pink Floyd CDs. At the touch o
f a button, Jimmy Stoma is alive and well, shaking the rafters of my living room. I flop on the couch. Maybe he's no Roger Waters, but James Bradley Stomarti is not without talent.

  Correction: Was.

  I close my eyes and listen.

  One night I fell through a hole in my soul,

  And you followed me down, followed me down.

  I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn

  And you followed me down till you drowned ...

  Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.

  Again I close my eyes.

  When I awake, it's daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I've forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.

  "Yeah, what?" I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.

  "Is this Mr. Tagger?" Woman's voice.

  "Yeah."

  "This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper."

  Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.

  "Holy shit," says Jimmy Stoma's sister, "did you get scammed, or what!"

  4

  When I went to work for this newspaper I was forty years old, the same age as Jack London when he died. I'm now forty-six. Elvis Presley died at forty-six. So did President Kennedy. George Orwell, too.

  It's an occupational hazard for obituary writers—memorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one's own life. I can't seem to stop myself.

  Not being a rotund pillhead with clogged valves, I am statistically unlikely to expire on the toilet, as Elvis did. As for succumbing to a political assassination, I'm too obscure to attract a competent sniper. Nonetheless, my forty-sixth birthday brought a torrent of irrational anxieties that have not abated in eleven months. If death could snatch such heavy hitters as Elvis and JFK, a nobody like me is easy pickings.