Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  Now, as the hill sloped, blue-collar Costa Mesa became silk-scarved Newport Beach, where, among the BMWs and trust-fund princelings and Hoag Hospital cock doctors with monogrammed cuffs, a mole man was instantly more conspicuous. I slid onto PCH and slipped into a familiar fantasy, wondering how far my Schwinn would take me in a day – a week. I imagined that I was not going to work at all, but instead was taking this beautiful coast-straddling highway north as far as it went, past all the dingy, piss-polluted beaches and the few still-pristine ones, the littered gray sands and creamy tangerine ones that comprise the Southern and Central California coastline, past Long Beach and Hermosa, past Santa Monica, Malibu and Point Mugu, past Santa Barbara, Monterey and even San Francisco; going up and up, and on my right the sun rising against my smiling, unshaven cheek.

  Instead, being a cowardly Benny, I did what I always did. I found a gas station mini-mart where I parked my bike and stood in line for my daily dozen lottery tickets.

  In front of me stood an orange-haired lady in a chinchilla-fur coat. From the top of her expensive-looking handbag emerged the head of a tiny, spotted brown terrier with blue bows tied around its ears. The dog seemed hip to its social status. There might have been a touch of condescension in its expression. But it seemed to be looking at me with empathy, the empathy of one trapped animal for another. I scratched it between the eyes, and it blinked at me. Had I not been stoned, I probably would not have said, to no one in particular: ‘That’s a beautiful animal.’

  The lady turned toward me halfway, appraising me at a glance – the short, unscrubbed man with eyes set too close together – and gave me a polite smile, really just a quick twitching of the corners of her mouth. ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said.

  The lady looked like a washed-up starlet, unreconciled to time’s rape of her once-stunning beauty. She was about five feet tall, of indeterminate middle age, Botoxed, face-lifted, drumtaut skin, equipped by surgeons with a nose so tiny it amounted to two vertical skull-slits overhung by negligible rubbery nubs for nostrils. Her eyelids hung sensually low, post-coitally droopy. Eyebrows were painted high on her brow, like something out of Shogun, and her orange hair was stacked on her head in a foot-high pile, kept in place by some miracle of skyscraper engineering. On her finger was a tremendous diamond.

  She had an air of great unhappiness about her, of high-strung, imperious authority, a woman accustomed to ordering around armies of illegal maids and nannies, houseboys and pool men, accountants and lawyers. Her breasts were an affront to time and gravity; they belonged to a 19-year-old. Every inch of her sweated money, which carried an unmistakable sexual charge, even as she lugged around her ruined looks like a shameful Quasimodo hump. Money is always young.

  I reached out to pet the dog again, saying, ‘You’re a good boy, aren’t you? Who’s a good, good boy – – ’

  ‘Please!’ cried the lady, flinching.

  ‘I’m – sorry?’

  ‘This isn’t a petting zoo,’ she said, ‘for everyone with dirty hands.’

  She smiled at me again in her curt, unhappy way, and turned back to face the checkout counter. I felt the eyes of the other people in line on me. They regarded me as incredibly stupid. I was only looking for a little love, some lotto tickets and some love, and I had humiliated myself. Again I was conscious of my squalidness, my hovel at the bottom of the socioeconomic kingdom, my unfitness to eat the snots from the canine’s nose.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, lady. I didn’t mean to offend you, or anything.’

  ‘Forget it, please.’

  ‘I was just admiring your dog is all.’

  ‘Stop menacing the nice lady, man,’ said the guy in line behind me. ‘It’s not cool.’

  The guy had blond eyebrows and wavy golden hair. Sandals, surfer-shades, guava-mango juice in hand. Some kind of yuppie beach freak, body waxed hairless, all muscle and bronze.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m a Good Samaritan,’ he said, taking in my face, my posture, my California Angeles jersey, my windbreaker, my inappropriately tight jeans. ‘I’m doing my civic duty.’

  ‘You’d crucify a man for friendliness?’

  ‘Keep your friendliness to yourself, dude, no one gets edgy,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a jerkoff.’

  ‘Oh, I’m a jerkoff now,’ he said. ‘That kind of language in front of this respectable lady. Pal, I’m here to say it’s totally erroneous. Totally.’

  Staring at him cold-eyed, I put my hand inside the pocket of my windbreaker, to allow him to consider the possibility that I may have a knife. Men who look like me carry knives. ‘Maybe you’re a totally erroneous fucking human being,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re not aware that a slashed femoral artery bleeds out a man’s life in fifteen minutes?’

  I was about to ask him, as a follow-up, how he would like a disfiguring scar on his pretty face, when he obligingly stepped back a couple of feet, reconsidering the wisdom of heroism. He tried to follow my hands with his eyes. The lady in the chinchilla coat bought a bottle of Perrier and glided briskly out the door with her blueblood mutt. With one eye on the line and a hand still in my pocket, I bought my lotto tickets and strolled out, cool, cool.

  Standing beside my bike, I scratched the tickets off with a quarter against the side of a payphone. All losers; not even a $2 or $4 winner. A minute later the Good Samaritan exited with his fruit juice and slipped his hairless body quickly into a gleaming silver Expedition. As he zipped away to his private tennis courts and indoor lap pool and beautiful girlfriend or whatever pleasure-filled life awaited him up PCH, I imagined how the SUV would look, compressed into a neat junkyard cube with his bones twisted in among the metal.

  ‘Are you packing?’

  I turned and the chinchilla lady was looking up at me, she and the cradled terrier watching with their nervous money-faces. Her small, knobby fingers made rapid circles in the dog’s fur.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘You’re a dangerous character,’ she said, those racy eyes squinting as if at an esoteric specimen in a museum. ‘Rough trade. A nasty little number right out of Casting Central.’

  I blinked at her. ‘I said I was sorry, lady. You don’t need to insult me.’

  ‘You would have cut off his balls, wouldn’t you? Even though he’s twice your size. Rrrripppp! Brutality is second nature to you. You exude it.’

  ‘I don’t mean you any harm, ma’am. I’ve had enough problems with the cops without you calling them on me.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ she said excitedly, pushing closer so that I became aware of the stench of alcohol on her breath. ‘A man like yourself is forever at odds with the authorities. Of course you have!’

  It dawned on me that it cost her an effort of will to approach me, that she was fighting to keep her nerve. And there was something besides twitchy curiosity in her manner. There was some other, definite motive, some subject she was trying to work toward.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What is it you’re packing? A switchblade? A blackjack? Brass knuckles? Or maybe a gun?’

  ‘I don’t pack,’ I said.

  She looked incredulous for a moment, then said: ‘I imagine it’s dangerous, particularly if you’re on – what is it, parole? Probation? I can never keep them straight. That man – you bluffed him. You read him in a second, and you knew he wouldn’t risk a tussle. And he knew you would.’

  We just stood there, watching each other for a while. There was more than idle friendliness in her voice. She wanted to say something more, but it seemed to me a bad idea to wait around for her to get to it. She made me nervous, with her big rock and chinchilla coat and expensive wonders-of-science parts that were created in silicon labs or snatched from the corpses of young accident victims. She could scream ‘Mugger!’ and a dozen people would come running to pummel me. Stoned as I was, I had little confidence that the conversation I thought I was having with her corresponded to the conversation she thought she was having with me.
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br />   ‘Well,’ I said, picking up my bike. ‘I’ve gotta get to work.’

  ‘Of course – “work.”’ Her tight little smile hung quotation marks around the word. ‘The kind those cocksuckers at the IRS never hear about, right?’

  ‘I work in a restaurant.’

  ‘Who was the writer – the one who talked about the White Negro? Norman Mailer?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The darker impulses, blood and instinct, and all that. Mailer was himself a Jew from a nice part of Brooklyn.’

  ‘I don’t know what you – – ’

  ‘My world, it’s – different,’ she said. ‘If there’s a thorn in your toe – an intractable problem – you call your lawyer. And your lawyer makes threats. He promises to tort them till their rectums hemorrhage. Of course, this only works with people rational enough to know what they have to lose. You see the limitations. You see what a headache it becomes. But in your world – your antisocial, Molotov-cocktail world – the solution is simple and quick, a slashed artery.’ Pressing her lips toward my ear, she whispered with great intensity: ‘Yet how often do our worlds collide? How often do they intersect?’

  In her low-lidded eyes I glimpsed a hint of what I suddenly perceived as her true motive: a smoldering sexual eagerness. Yes, this is what she’d been driving at. This was the salve she sought for her rich-lady blues. I began to suspect there might be something in this for me. If I heard her correctly, she believed me to be a black man. I was not about to disabuse her of this notion, which could work to my advantage. I smiled. I now had a read on this lady. She imagined herself as one of those romance paperback covergirls, limp in the grasp of some cruel, dusky-chested Fabio. I could picture her watching the windows from her oversized satin bed at night, some shriveled millionaire sad sack snoring beside her while she fantasized about masked intruders.

  Maybe she would pay me absurd amounts of money to carry out such a scenario.

  ‘I’ve read all about ladies like you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, ambiguously hopeful.

  ‘Trapped in some big old Newport mansion with a priceless Ming Dynasty dildo and a withered old husband with a colostomy bag, right? You want someone from the wrong side of the tracks? Little danger, little excitement?’

  First, her mouth opened in a little O. Then, as her features contracted into a tight, furious circle, like a sheet of paper crushed in a fist, her hand flashed out to sting my cheek. I realized my mistake.

  She emitted a tortured-bird squawk. ‘You verminous, vomitous – – ’

  ‘I’m sorry, lady,’ I said, palms out pleadingly.

  ‘You malignancy! You anthrax spore!’

  ‘I didn’t mean – I misunderstood – I thought – – ’

  ‘Do you have any notion of – – ? I’m a woman who – why – – ’ She sputtered, ‘I have a daughter at Juilliard! I’m on the museum board! You believe I’d allow – someone like you – – ’

  People were starting to turn their heads from their gas pumps. The lady’s hand flailed in my face like one of those New Orleans voodoo chicken-claws. Wild-eyed and tossing its head, the terrier was barking, or trying to bark: the sound that emerged from its throat was more like a wheezy smoker’s cough, an oldster gasping with emphysema.

  Shakily I straddled my Schwinn and jumped the curve, maneuvering through the maze of cars at the pump-station. Flashing by, I got a glimpse of three or four faces in tinted sunglasses watching me from the safety of their SUVs and over the glinting hoods of their Beemers. Someone shouted, ‘The Mexican mugged that old lady!’ And another voice: ‘Somebody do something!’ All of them making private risk – benefit calculations, debating whether apprehending an absconding wetback was worth a broken jaw, a gouged eye, death. But all these potential urban heroes, like the Good Samaritan before them, remained immobile, their instant of action lost.

  ‘Cobardes! Putos cobardes!’ I cried, hitting the sidewalk and peeling away. I booked 15 or 20 blocks, legs pumping, before I was confident no one was following me. Probably overkill, but there was still the paranoid whispering of that good cannabis in my brain.

  I leaned my bike against an alley wall to catch my breath, aware that the confrontation had unhinged me on a number of levels. We were having different conversations, she and I. So much of the trouble between people is just that. They’re on different drugs, and they think they’re on the same drug.

  It was not just that I misread a situation so badly – not unusual for me – although I wondered what clues I missed in discerning the lady’s real intentions. And I was disturbed at all those people watching and none of them coming to the aid of that shrieking lady. Don’t they have mothers? Wasn’t I menacing her? At a mini-mart in Costa Mesa – parts of that city, at least – I’d be swarmed in an instant and dangled from the ankles. But of course the moneyed had so much more to lose. They had their cars and hot tubs and all those years of terrific athletic fucking with multiple partners to lose. They possessed no rational reason to risk violent death from a nasty little number like Benny Bunt. I couldn’t blame them; nevertheless I despised them.

  Maybe one or two of those frozen bystanders were suffering now, having learned they were cowards. The moment for action came – an innocent lady in jeopardy – and they failed, they blew it, they just stood and watched. How could they have known, on waking this morning, they would find themselves passive poltroons in some Kitty Genovese microdrama? I read a 40-page comic book adaptation of Lord Jim once. I’m thinking of the moment Captain Jim ditches his imperiled ship, the single moment that wrecks his life with the self-knowledge it brings. It all hinges on those unexpected split-seconds (it’s going down NOW!). You act before you think and learn what you’re made of, and then you’re chained to that knowledge forever. Who knows that one of those moments isn’t waiting for all of us before we’re through?

  Then I realized the strangest thing about the incident: the terrier in the crook of the lady’s arm. How it made no dog-sounds at all, not a single woof or yap or yawp, even as its maw snapped open and shut and the eyes rolled furiously in its head. No, there was just that eerie asthmatic rasping. Like the poor dog was trapped in one of those nightmares where you need to talk, you need to scream, and you can’t. As if the orange-haired lady had put it on mute.

  Puzzling over these thoughts, I pedaled toward work, late for my shift. In my headphones Motley Crue were singing about blowing some bastard’s head off. Normally the lyrics would hearten me. But already it had been a rough and bewildering day, and there were times when even Nikki Sixx and Vince Neal in their prime could not speak to me.

  It would be six weeks before I saw the old lady’s face again, in a photograph several hundred miles away, and came to understand what she’d wanted from me.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was still daylight when I finished my restaurant shift and pedaled over to the Greasy Tuesday, breaking one of my how-to-outsmart-alcoholism rules – I had a thousand of them – which was: Don’t start drinking while the sun’s out. (In the end, it only made you despise the sun.)

  I arrived to find Gus Miller moving into the little cubbyhole behind the bar. It was really just a janitor’s closet that had been cluttered with old stools and jukebox parts and cobwebby bric-a-brac for years. Gus hauled all this junk to the trash bin and ran a broom along the floor and went through a full can of Raid, methodically slaughtering roaches. Then he carried his bedding from his van to the room, his narrow bachelor-sized mattress balanced on one of his broad shoulders as effortlessly as a little pillow. He threw down some Mexican blankets for Jesse James and put out his water bowl and a squealing chew-toy. (The dog needed no food bowl, eating only take-out Mexican.) He put in a foot-locker and a small Sony AM/FM cassette player. On the particleboard shelves overhead he stacked a bunch of paperbacks and old hardcovers: James Michener’s Hawaii, Alaska and Centennial; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; Homer W. Smith’s Man and His Gods; Mac Bolan and Tom Clancy adventures; a bunch of true-crime bo
oks about the mob, serial killers, and high-profile murders. He pinned up all the Vietnam veteran photos, and carefully set his war medals out on top of the cigar box.

  His heaviest piece of furniture was a padlocked, waist-high, battery-powered freezer, which Junior and I helped him carry from the van to a corner of his room. ‘How else does a homeless man keep his venison cold?’ Gus grumbled, when Junior asked what it was for. Junior sputtered an apology; he meant no insult to the homeless. Gus explained that a few months ago he and some buddies bagged four bucks in the Northwest with a bow and arrow and he’d been living off the meat ever since. There had been many nights in the desert, a hundred miles from any human light, when a good slab of campfire-seared deer is all that kept his heart from despair.

  ‘My new pimp pap,’ Gus said, pulling the chain on the naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling to illuminate the cubbyhole.

  ‘How’d you swing this?’ I said.

  ‘Reptile cunning,’ Gus replied. ‘I said I’d be Junior’s bouncer, keep the riffraff out.’

  ‘But everyone’s riffraff here.’