Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  “Please shut up,” Neon explains again. “We’ll do this. We’ll take care of things. Get ice.” They apply hotel ice to certain intimate parts of Elvis; they push ice cubes up into him, to make Elvis an Eskimo. Country matters.

  “Man, I’m not paid enough to do this.” The young taxi dancers may have the same complaint. If you let Elvis sleep he’ll never wake again. Neon forces the lungs to linger; Neon works on a body he loathes, with a band he hates.

  Neon and the sodden ice cube Elvis walk and walk in circles like drunken debutantes, like oil patch buddies. Elvis finally perks up, finally comes around, the ersatz Elvis lives, although only half of one eye is open, a stupid look stuck on his mug, lank hair plastered all over and black greasy dye coming out over his big hillbilly ears.

  “Elvis is back! Elvis has come back from the dead!” (Gun Club sings, You look just like an Elvis from Hell . . . .)

  The demented guitarist feels this really is Elvis. The pony boy from Mississippi, the bloat and wanton king. The king rises, frighted with false fire. Dead naked Elvis has risen, dead naked Elvis looks around with half of one eye (I spy with my little eye), and says, Did I do something? Then he asks for more of that dynamite dope, wants to go out and get more: It’s so cheap! Neon drops dead naked Elvis to the floor. “That’s it, that’s fucking it. I quit.”

  Neon quits the dog country combo and the underage taxi dancers. They had to find a local drummer fast.

  “Man I ran to the airport, I grabbed the first thing smoking back to Canada. I kissed the ground, I ate the air. You know I nearly puke now when I hear Elvis tunes, especially those weepy ballads, that drive-in-movie crapola.”

  Like Johnny Rotten, Neon felt nothing when Elvis bought the big one. Elvis was dead for years before they found him in the Graceland bathroom in his big diaper and O’Henry wrappers. Or was that Lenny Bruce? Neon saved him for nothing, should have let him die.

  Back in Canada’s treacherous nightclub scene, Neon’s neonew wave retro sixties band plays briefly to mobbed houses. The air is cooler. However, no one in the new band can agree on haircuts: mysterious Brian Jones bangs or the more risky nerdy Freddie and the Dreamers look? Risk it? And are gravel-dragging bellbottoms so cheesy they’re cool or already a fallen lumpen icon? As the Chinese woman says, You have to be very, very careful. As Neon agonizes over these matters his mod combo falls swiftly from grace, from graceland; the mercurial white-skinned mob shifts, decides to dig Cajun accordions in a big way. Now Neon has a vintage Rickenbacker guitar and a big box of self-produced cassettes in his basement. They won’t sell (I would they were clyster pipes). They seemed so close. Farang, mai pen lai. Neon thinks of the woman he saw hit by the motorcycle in Bangkok. She fairly flew, she rose briefly into the oiled air and paused there, seeing things differently, but with the happy knowledge that her fall back into the hard city was imminent.

  CHAPTER 17

  Sexual Nebraska

  By the rivers . . . there we sat down and wept as we remembered. . . slanted big piers burning timbrel and processional.

  Sudden rain turning on a crown of hills, in shadowland draws and school house valleys, clouds moving to us, to where we live, then pushing rain into the lake and you see a flawless line of storm on water. A doctor drowned off that point; those he tried to rescue washed in alive. Did he create orphans and their secrets? Where is their father hidden?

  My Intended is up to her naked hip in freezing mountain water, in her eyes a colour of blue sun-washed coral. Her hair. Clean light fills the lake after rain, light fills the narrow valley, and the cleansed trees seem to open and wave.

  We run up to the cabin, shivering. I desire her after swimming, desire the slight violence and disguise of half-sleeping union. The firefly weakens, the crimson petal sleeps.

  I sleep in after going out to the country with the Intended and am late for practice. Supposed to be half an hour early. Long drive into town and through the iron gates. The ghostly coach comes in while I’m getting into my gear as fast as possible. Fifty dollar fine for being late to the locker room. Two hundred for being late onto the ice. Miss practise completely, lose a game-day salary. Expensive weekend.

  Shirt Is Blue’s Jeep has no roof: his clothes seem the colour of raisins. He drives up in the rain wearing my blue ski goggles and an extra wide Stetson. I don’t know how he can see. Maybe he can’t see. I have other things on my mind. Maybe I worry too much.

  Ya, I won the Meat Draw at the Elk’s Lodge dance, he says, dripping rain—a small curtain off his big hat.

  Meat, I think. That’s good, I say.

  It was a crazy dance. Yes, we were all dancing.

  Good. I’m glad.

  Any used plywood for sale? He is stalling. I smell a hidden agenda. Christ’s face is stencilled in white on one wet door, Roy Orbison in black on the other door.

  I thought I’d build a camper, he says, adjusting the ski goggles. I have some saddle mules for sale, he says, if anyone is interested.

  Hey, Shirt Is Blue says, You know that Fuhr getting his appendix out was a big mistake, eh? I know a doctor at the hospital. It was diagnosed wrong. They covered it up.

  Well we all cover things up.

  Hmmm. Some more than others; hey is that Flames goalie still drinking his face off?

  I heard he’s cut back, I say. I used to see him in 4th Street Rose pissed as a newt.

  You know that back injury was a cover up, Shirt Is Blue says. What it was was a chuckwagon driver hit him with a chair at a drunken party for coming on to the driver’s wife.

  Shirt Is Blue used to be a goalie with the Oil Kings, the Smoke Eaters. He taught me to skate on the lake. He gave my Intended an albino pheasant when he found out we were engaged. He feels he has a right to comment.

  How many you miss? he asks.

  How many what?

  Games, Shirt Is Blue says politely. How many games? Oh, one or five.

  There was talk. It was in the papers.

  Fuck the papers. Reporters are all drunks, out of shape voyeurs, pencil-neck geeks.

  I’m saying, is, what I’m saying is maybe that’s why they traded you to Salt Lake City.

  Maybe that’s why they traded me. Maybe that’s why they gave me a termination contract.

  Yes, maybe. That’s all what I’m saying. You there with Brackenbury? Him and Clackson used to go. Those were good fights.

  No, different time. I remember Clackson with the Jets. Brackenbury was up in Quebec, then the Edmonton Oilers too. He got around.

  I always liked Brackenbury, Shirt Is Blue says, I read where he’s on a sailboat now. In the tropics somewhere. That’s all right. I liked Gary Smith too. Suitcase Smith. I saw him punt a puck like a football once. I think he works at the racetrack now.

  I read he works for a sheriff’s office. He’ll be back somewhere.

  I guess maybe you’ve run out of teams now, eh?

  I guess I have.

  Am I wrong? If so, speak up. Feel free to correct me.

  Nail on the head, old buddy. Right as rain.

  And on Byzantine crosses, rain, on the Ukrainian church’s onion dome, rain. Rain on the headless figures, last light the colour of cranberry juice, the colour of a bat’s tongue, colour of somewhere like Belize, a slow storm shifting over sandy lake cliffs and my wooden cabin. I can’t be out of teams. Not yet. The new broom sweeps clean but the old broom knows all the corners: the assistant coach in New York mumbled this when he was fired. Now what could he have meant? Suddenly I’m the oldest guy on the team, the old broom, knowing the corners more than I care to.

  CHAPTER 18

  We Got Exotic

  Tornados walk the big river, one wiggling down by us like a leg through a ceiling. Black cabs move silently in pines, steering us from childhoods of ice cream and klieg lights, mittens on strings, to roll and plunge through invisible hymens and broken noses and ribs aching in the parking lot where it happens somersaulting and bleeding under hyper cowboy boots, where crows dance in another bird’
s broken eggs and a vaguely familiar Indian sleeps in a circle of thorns.

  It’s Sunday morning. My blue-eyed Intended has a sore on her lip but I forget and kiss her hard in the dark hall of the Ex-Wife’s farmhouse, my ex-farmhouse. My Intended wants to go to church just to hear the people sing.

  We drive under the trash trees, her short skirt, I’m driving her latest mod car, a ‘63 something, push-button transmission, pristine white bucket seats. To a lake shaped like a jawbone, to cold hard trout running in underwater hallways and grasses; casting and waiting for fish (like us) to put metal to mouth (the host melted in my mouth like candy) in a lake the colour of coffee, studded with rain.

  The Intended is afraid of tornadoes, of bugs, of nature.

  Do we find something we need in rain’s shadow? Umbrellas open beneath our city condo, startling blossoms, one the pattern of a death’s head moth.

  At the cabin in the country we hear Neon’s melancholy piano troubling the trees. The tiny bedroom smells of cedar and the window is small and dusty.

  What are you thinking? she keeps asking. I’m thinking it’s nearly impossible to keep a piano in tune on the high plains.

  Are you having an affair? she asks over and over. Radar, unalterable waves and melodies.

  In April hawks make their way north past us, too many to a field. They have to adjust, levitate. In November arctic loons tarry at the quarry behind the beach, tundra swans singing, winging it south. Same with me soon, winging it south.

  I cut toast into thin slices so I can slide them into the side of my mouth, avoiding a tender front tooth, hit by an aluminum stick. Every time I move I have to find another dentist, find more vitamin E for scars and cuts. My little finger is wrecked. Surgery on your knuckles and tendons makes you question whether the game’s worth it, to stay and bop someone on the helmet some more. At least in the minors some helmets are jettisoned before a fight. Saves your hands. Your hand can get infected from hitting someone in the teeth. I read that dentists have strangely high suicide rates. Why? My old dentist on the coast beat his wife to death and then took an overdose. Why do I keep thinking about this? Hand to mouth. Just like me.

  Dave The Enforcer was practising his psycho fighting face at the mirror, his eyes out and wild, snorting. He turned to the reporters. “What do you mean? Nature is cruel. I’m natural. You pigs are the ones who’re unnatural. Grab another Danish, another donut, go back to your little house, go write your fake little stories. And don’t call me goon again. I got two goals last year.”

  “How about a drunk, can we call you a drunk?” asks an old reporter from The Star. The old reporter had known Elmer Lach, Connie Mack, Joe Dimaggio. He doesn’t smoke a stogie but you expect one.

  We all laugh. Dave The Enforcer walks very close to the older man, threatening.

  “Hey nice aftershave—pick it up at a garage sale?”

  “Hey pisstank, hey watch my teeth, let me take off my glasses, my fedora, and my coat, hang on, and my toupée, and . . . .”

  “Look at this old coot!” The older man wants to fight Dave.

  “I’ll take on this young whippersnapper . . . you’ll see.”

  “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

  “Why, I don’t rightly catch your drift.” We get between them, things settle down.

  Dave The Enforcer was mad because he broke his hand in a training camp fight and some reporters wrote that he’s history, that he’s lost his mean streak, that he’s too old to cut it. His hair is thinning; it looks bad on TV. He fears the new broom.

  “You assholes are all drinking each other’s bathwater.” Dave tosses a stick and it cartwheels and chatters across the painted cinderblocks. I’ve heard that noise a thousand times but it still makes me jump.

  We’re out in the arena parking lot chasing kids from our vehicles. Several cars have been stolen or had parts ripped off. The GM lost a brand new 4x4. The coach a Camaro. No one wants my car.

  The young Finn prospect pops open another can of beer. He doesn’t know anyone on a strange subterranean continent. He’s used to seeing the sea and he didn’t plan on the minors. (Though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.)

  “THIS thing your car?”

  “No, it’s a test car, this is test dirt.”

  He drains the can of Milwaukee’s worst offering. “Don’t get snarky now,” he says. His vocabulary is improving.

  Snarkiness is inevitable. Snarkiness is general over Ireland, over lost Finland and the pretty planet of Omaha.

  A bunch of guys were sick before the afternoon game.

  “What did you drink? Beer?” They’re swiped, swacked.

  “No, we got exotic. That was our big mistake.”

  A line of us walk past the camera, down the tunnel to the old dressing rooms, holding sticks like pilgrims with staves. The coach is weeping in his epsom salts, he’s drowning, over his head. The ghostly coach took counsel with his princes. The man they traded was now tearing up the scoring race, yet another bad move. Nice trade, Ray. The young draft choice died in his car crash on Pipeline Road, the red light, the first fight he lost; now there is no depth at centre. Get on the horn, it’s desperation time. Who will they pluck from the wire, from the pecking order? The GMs lean their heads together. O there has been much throwing of brains. Who do they like? On the jukebox I plug Bo Diddley: Who Do You Love.

  Any player will tell you the game has less to do with true skill and more your gift to learn the ropes and to play politics and get that ice time.

  Give me more ice time.

  I would if you scored more.

  How in hell can I score? I’m never on the ice.

  Score more and I’ll give you ice time. In fact, you’re benched until you score more.

  The centre says he’s playing on the helicopter line: No wings, he says, haw haw.

  The seasons roll: Does God never tire? I drive and I drive and never get there. I am lost in some sexual Nebraska. I splurged on boutique clothes. Sharkskin, velour, Elton John heels. I was hot. I saw myself in a window later, I was an idiot, I’d gone out of style overnight. I gave the clothes to the Sally Ann. As kids we sang “Salvation Army, put a nickel in the drum, save another drunken bum ...”

  Things were never the same after the WHA folded. We were watching cartoons in a burning house, dogs howling in Spanish, in Ukrainian, in Gaelic, in Cree. The NHL owners got their revenge.

  Waitress X revs her loud Mustang engine and asks, Where to? 4th Street Rose? Picasso’s and decide there? Marty’s Café? Getting tired of polite jazz, she says. Tired of me, I think. She’s in a thrift store bowling shirt with no bra. She is driving barefoot. To drive in the forbidden leather of her car is erotic. Will someone see us? In her car one believes in miracles, a future, though clearly there is not one for the two of us. I choose to forget this fact, to skate around this, to gamble, like her boyfriend. I no longer think I know what she is thinking.

  The sky is like a mood. I just want to touch her. Why is jazz so stale now?

  We drive south as the suburbs play leapfrog and Waitress X starts talking while watching the road.

  She says, “I was in a lounge and Gretzky and his old agent are there, they send over drinks, big white concoctions called Blowjobs, so my girlfriend and I join them, I mean why not, it’s Wayne Gretzky, we’re getting pie-eyed, we’re tying one on. We’re there a while when a gorgeous blonde comes over, leaves another woman at the bar. They look like agency models, they’ve been watching us. The blonde whispers in Wayne’s ear, Wayne turns red as all get out, mumbles Uh, no thanks, and the blonde leaves. Wayne won’t tell us for a while. Then he says they’ve got an RV or a van outside. If Wayne’s interested she’ll strap on a dildo and do her girlfriend and he can watch. He was so embarrassed,” Waitress X tells me.

  I’d watch, I say.

  No. No you wouldn’t. I’ve got you sussed. She says this good-naturally while keeping her eyes on traffic but it still seems to imply our X-r
ays have come back from the lab.

  Baseball, she says, staring with hate at the word itself hanging in the air. All he cares about is baseball.

  That same sunny prairie morning Waitress X had driven to her boyfriend’s house to take back her stereo and blowdryer.

  He’s scared of me, she tells me, laughing. I was mad and I spit on him. GET AWAY FROM ME! he said. YOU’RE CRAZY! I’ve beaten him up before, she says, pleased with herself, zipping lane to lane.

  But: if she implies they’re not getting along, that she’s sleeping alone on the couch, that she may be mine alone, well I don’t mind, I’m glad of it. Refrain tonight, to the next abstinence, the next more easy. That monster custom.

  I hardly see you.

  Ask me out. That’s the usual drill. And you have to be around. You know?

  I wish to respond with something endearing and witty but fail to do so.

  I dream I have three wives and they are in my childhood bedroom watching Jeopardyl I hear them shout answers at the screen in unison. It is a question about my total number of penalty minutes, the sin bin. I have no complaints regarding Jeopardy! Knowledge is rewarded, my evasions, my dekes, my minute editing of memory would not be allowed by Alex Trebek.

  CHAPTER 19

  Drugs: Part 1

  Charleyhorse! Charleyhorse! Can’t goddamn walk.

  Can’t you freeze this knee or something? It’s killing me.

  Who was that woman last night?

  Medic, witch doctor, corpsman!

  Another game for the record book.

  This zit on my nose is one for the record book. How can I have grey hair and zits at the same time?

  Got no wheels out there, no legs, I’m snake-bit.

  Don’t have it today? Too much tom-catting, that’s what.

  Goddamn back spasm’s killing me. Give me something.

  Out, all out. Here, nuprin, codeine, try some of this.

  Where’s your wife?

  Gone.

  Gone?