I was in my early thirties when liver failure killed Big Hal, and Mom moved into an apartment in Santa Ana. She was sick by then and couldn’t work. I was happy to have a family again, even though Mom was very bitter and prematurely old. She raved and said she’d never have sex again, the way she looked now: they may as well freeze her privates off. She made impossible demands. She could barely contain her resentment toward me. I had been an accident, a curse; I’d driven away the first man she loved, and drove the second to drink himself to death. She screamed day and night, and I never screamed back. She begged me not to put her into a nursing home, which she feared more than dying. We played a lot of checkers and pick-up sticks, and I let her win most of the time. She spent six years dying.
I told Donna all of this – or most of it, anyway – in the few weeks after our first date, some of the words catching in my throat as I said them. Some of it was shameful. At the end with my mother, for instance, I couldn’t wait for her to die and I was relieved when she did, because I figured I’d be free, it meant my life could really start. But, I told Donna, it still felt like it hadn’t started. In fact I was lonelier than I could ever have imagined. I was still in some kind of indefinite holding pattern, waiting for something I couldn’t name.
We were married a few months later: a quick ceremony at the Santa Ana courthouse and then a poolside room at the Holiday Inn with cable, spicy buffalo wings, and a bottle of champagne. All night my bride cried with happiness and told me she loved me and she was so happy she’d never be alone again. I was all hers, and she was all mine. I watched my joint disappear in that superroomy mouth and felt my whole life going with it. After a while there was a puny spasm, a paltry dribble down her esophagus, and again her smiling, tearful, loving face, pressed against my stubbly cheek on the hotel pillow, and the depths of her throat emitting pleased, purring little sounds. I couldn’t sleep. Vacationing Midwesterners splashed in the pool outside, too loud. My forehead was sweating, despite the hotel chill. I was thinking of Gwen Stacy, her tragic end, her long silky hair, getting lost in it. I was thinking how I wasn’t amounting to much. I realized I’d always secretly hoped my life was building toward some big event, some trip, some wild Easy Rider or Lawrence of Arabia adventure that would put me right in my own head and drown the persistent feeling that wherever life was going on was somewhere I wasn’t. But I had no idea where I wanted to go and so I’d never even left California. And now I felt the dreadful certainty that I’d never do anything, lashed to love like this. And maybe that’s when I quit loving Donna. Or maybe love bled out of me by invisible cuts over the next five years. I don’t know. After a while there were no more midnight love-tears and pillow-purrs from her, and I’m pretty sure I bore the blame for the loveless cage our marriage had become.
That’s not exactly right. As I mentioned before, I felt a version of love, a remnant of it, when she was sleeping.
CHAPTER 11
The fights decreased at the bar after Gus Miller moved in, which was a disappointment to those of us who enjoyed watching and wagering on them. But it saved Junior some beatings, which put him in a better mood than he normally was, more likely to let you have one or two on the house.
Gus didn’t have to raise his voice or lay his hands on people. He just lumbered up and smiled and spoke in a low voice, saying, ‘My gut’s sending me the message you’re a dickhead, but I’m thinking my gut must be lying, since this ain’t a dickhead bar. It’s a friendly neighborhood bar. Now, you gonna be a dickhead in a friendly neighborhood bar?’
‘No, sir.’
After cleaning the bar once or twice, Gus Miller decided the janitorial part of his job didn’t suit him. A few times Junior passive-aggressively reminded him that the place needed tidying. Gus ignored him, or grumbled about his sore 54-year-old joints and the shrapnel in his leg. Junior bit his lip. The bar sank back comfortably into its original ooze.
Gus didn’t let his new responsibilities impede his alcohol consumption, of course. Sometimes a night’s drinking made him very quiet, and he leaned forward, resting his fat tattooed forearms on the bar, watching nothing through his crooked glasses, emitting no sound all night beyond a grunt, and rising only to visit the shitcan or to slip a few quarters into the jukebox, playing anything by Springsteen or Johnny Cash or the Eagles. In these moods he liked songs that told stories and were heavy on misery, songs like ‘Ly’n Eyes’ and ‘Highway Patrolman,’ and there was a kind of tearless weeping in the sagging lines of his face, as he listened with half-closed eyes.
Other times, binging on what he called ‘fuck-you music,’ Sabbath and Scorpions and the Stones and AC/DC, he became a juggernaut of manic energy, a blustering, back-slapping, bellowing circus bear. He insisted on these occasions that you called him Iceman or Mad Dog. His voice would interrupt yours and blast you off your stool. There was no sense trying to talk while he told a story, because no one could hear you while he was at it anyhow. He was competitive about it too, perceiving conversation as a Monster Truck rally with room in the dirt for only one set of jacked-up wheels at a time, his own, and always ready to barrel over any smaller vessels in the way.
I was a pretty good man with a joke or a story myself – better than most – but Gus insisted on winning. If you saw Fernando Valenzuela throw a shutout, back when Fernando Valenzuela threw shutouts – well, Gus saw him back when he was just a promising wetback on a spick sandlot. If you’d done a few months in county lockup, Gus had done hard years. If you saw the famous pit fighter Tank Abbott in a Huntington Beach bar, Gus actually served as his sparring partner a few years before he became a star. If you had a cardiac murmur, Gus had a golfball-sized hole in his heart that could kill him at any moment. Once Sal mentioned getting jostled in the chaos of a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert back in the Seventies, and Gus jumped in with, ‘Chaos! You don’t know the concept till you’ve been a bouncer at a Rick Springfield concert! Savaged by the claws of twenty thousand screaming girls is chaos! And I’ve got the scars!’ Up came the shirt over his big, white belly, and there were the Rick Springfield scars, mingled among the pungi-stick scars, and the switchblade-fight-in-Tijuana scars, though it was always impossible to tell which ones he was pointing to. The whole butcher-block mess of them was enlisted to buttress the credibility of whatever story he happened to be telling at the moment. I couldn’t blame him; I’d been there.
It was unclear how seriously he expected people to take his stories; he sometimes concluded one with a mighty guffaw and the expression, ‘I’m just fucking with you, stupid.’
In any bar in America, you can safely expect the breakdown between sheer bullshit and stone-righteous veracity to be about 60 – 40, maybe 70 – 30. And in the bars I frequented it was considered bad manners, laziness, even a show of contempt for your listeners, if you didn’t attempt to embellish. Even worse manners, however, was calling a man a liar. Gus quickly developed a reputation as a bullshit king, but no one possessed the stones to challenge him.
Telly’s resentment toward him, I noticed, continued unabated; often he would rise with an ugly expression and move to the other side of the bar when Gus was holding court. It was not Gus’s bullshit that irritated him, I surmised: it was Gus’s habit of preventing other men from contributing their rightful share. When he was drunk enough, Telly lost his fear and mocked Gus’s throaty theatrical growl: ‘Fuck you, flower lady! You’d deny a job to a man who spent two years in a bamboo cage in the Mekong Delta? Deny a job to a man who can disassemble an M-16, lubricate the component parts, and put it back together in fifteen seconds? Deny a job to a man who had his cock blown off in Kai-San, humped ten miles with the stump of his bleeding dingus, and ordered it sewn back on at gunpoint? Deny a job to – – ’ He was never drunk enough to do the impression in Gus’s presence.
Myself? I was Gus’s best listener, listening being what I do best. People want to tell me things. And as I said, I’ve always been a sucker for stories. I’m easily moved.
While all around me men slouch
ed on the frontier of alcoholic comas, I presented an ideal audience, gaping, bugging my eyes, lighting up like a plugged-in bulb, exclaiming ‘No!’ or ‘Jesus Christ!’ I asked intelligent questions. I conveyed absolute credulity. And Gus responded. Quickly he came to trust me. A few weeks after he arrived, he told me in a confidential tone that when he got back from Nam, he might or might not have done a few jobs as a freelance hit-man. He might or might not have had an international reputation.
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘A buttonman? Really?’
‘I don’t wanna incriminate myself, but I could tell you some stories,’ Gus said.
And he did, naturally, rambling over half a dozen states and murder contracts: death by gun, death by knife, death by defenestration, death by garrote, and all the amusing hijinks that attended these adventures. The names and dates bled together in his mind, he explained, but the quirky incidents stuck. He told these stories in the third person, referring to the hero as Iceman, who, he explained, might or might not have been him.
Once, a rich wife on the Jersey Shore wanted her husband whacked. Equipped with a key, Iceman climbed the winding stairs of their mansion, traversed acres of plush carpet, and found the man soaking himself in a jacuzzi-tub upstairs. The man looked up, seemingly not at all surprised to see his assassin hulking in the doorway with his leather gloves and .357. It was as if he had been waiting for him. ‘I wondered what you’d look like,’ said the man, and added: ‘Look, there’s some pearls behind the painting in the living room she doesn’t know about. I don’t want the bitch to have them. Go ahead, take them. They’re yours.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Sure. I’m . . . very tired.’
‘What of?’
‘Arguing.’
For a long time the doomed man looked at his toes, emerging pink, fat, and wrinkled above the line of bubbles. He sighed with deep weariness and said, ‘Well, I guess you better go ahead.’ So, grimly, Iceman put one in his head and one in his heart and watched him sink underwater to his sudsy sleep. Then he went down and found the pearls just where the man said they would be.
‘He fenced them for twenty large,’ Gus bellowed, eyes popping with mirth and remembered astonishment, ‘five times more than the contract itself!’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘He gives him these pearls so he won’t whack him and he whacks him anyway?’
‘No, no, no! The pearls he gave in a spirit of kindness, because our man was doing him a kindness. It wasn’t Iceman that took the life out of that man. It was the institution of marriage. It was in his face. The bitch had the hex on him and he couldn’t get out.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose getting whacked can be a terrific service.’
‘Sure . . .’
Which reminded Gus of an even more bizarre incident. A cowboy strip mall developer in Houston decided his brother was running their company into the ground, looting the accounts to pay track debts. Naturally he had to go. All stealth, Iceman jimmied the lock to the guy’s office one night and crept inside, roscoe at the ready, to discover the miserable gambler slouching at his desk with a handgun in his mouth. Plastered on the wall behind him was a riot of cranial pigments. And his coffee mug was still hot.
‘Maybe the taste of the coffee depressed him,’ I said.
‘Our man thinks, “What miserable, shitty luck – the cowboy won’t even want to pay me now.” And he starts feeling sorry for himself. I mean, he must have eaten his gun five minutes before he arrived.’
‘He didn’t even need Iceman’s kindness at all that time,’ I said.
‘Well, so Iceman has an idea, which is that he’ll say, “I planned it to look like he ate his gun. I planned it.” And guess what? The cowboy buys it. Couldn’t have been happier. It made everything easier, really, because there wasn’t even a murder case, just a man with plenty of reason to snuff himself.’
He ran a hand over his beard thoughtfully. ‘But our man knew what happened, and he got to pondering, thinking, “Here I am, supposedly breaking the law, and the law makes no fucking sense. I get Old Sparky if I put a bullet into him at ten p.m., but if he puts the bullet in himself at nine fifty-five, there ain’t even a crime!”’
Gus shook his head and drank. ‘They don’t take these details into account when they make up our so-called laws, Benny. I say so-called because I don’t recognize their authority over me, since I’m an Outlaw. Outlaw’s a state of mind, brother. Saying, “No one controls me.” You didn’t know I was a philosopher too. My master’s Mr. F. Nietzsche, the Kraut. He invented a lot of this shit. He’s the second-greatest Outlaw of all time.’
‘Who’s the first?’
‘Jesus Christ. I’m Roman Catholic from way back.’
‘Jesus Christ?’
‘He was the original Outlaw, and he hated the rich, and he fucked up their shit, which is why they had to kill him. A man who makes up his own rules is too dangerous to keep around. Same deal with Satan, who if you ask me always got a bad rap.’
Listening, I began to grasp the appeal of a headcase like Charlie Manson. Say a thing with enough fire and conviction, add a few fistfuls of Svengali charisma, and just about anything sounds true. Gus Miller’s mind, it occurred to me, was as chaotically cluttered as his van. He had been picking up things for years that he couldn’t bring himself to throw away. So his brainpan swarmed with wild notions snatched from a book half-read in 1972, a conversation with a street-corner prophet in Detroit, maybe a 10-year-old LSD-induced revelation or two: anything he touched went into the bitch’s brew of his philosophy.
He seemed to know a lot of unusual things, things I filed away in the rooms in my head. Like how a man locked in a cage can, if he’s desperate for alcohol, make his pruno by fermenting orange juice with sugar packs smuggled from the mess-line. How knives could be made from bench struts and toothbrushes, and how prison stabbings almost always happened in the morning, because a man’s head is foggy and his guard is down. How an inmate with a toothpick and urine can inscribe a secret message between innocent lines of ink, the piss-letters invisible till you wave a flame under the paper or press an iron to it. How longtime prisoners spoke a rhyme language called Carnie, so ‘Caesar’s life, struggle and strife’ was how you said knife, ‘I’d like to meet the Lady from Bristol’ meant get me a pistol, and ‘Happy Easter the nail and plank’ meant keister the shank (and if the occasion called for you to thus sequester your jerrybuilt weapon, you best sheathe the sharp edge with a pen-cap and swaddle it with Saran Wrap before launching it into your ass). He taught me how a man without cigarettes can mix coffee grounds with lettuce to make a smoke, tamping it nicely in a page from the Gideon Bible. He knew these things from first-hand experience. He smoked Genesis through Revelation at San Quentin, he explained, smoked up the Serpent in the Garden and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and the Beast from the End-Times, smoked up the Hebrews wandering in the desert and Judgment Day and all the minor prophets. Most of his reading he did while serving time. There was a book on comparative mythology that he found in the prison library and read cover-to-cover three times. He particularly admired the Norse way of looking at the world. Dying of old age was a pussy’s death. You had to make your exit young, and by battle-axe, to be rewarded in the afterlife with . . . more fighting. In Valhalla you hacked and clawed all day, your limbs magically reattached themselves at sunset, and you retired to the Great Hall with your friends for the Norse equivalent of a Coors. He liked some American Indian notions, too. Skinwalkers. Shamans. Vision quests. The Great Spirit who loved warriors and rewarded them with teepees full of virgins in the afterlife. I wondered if he might be mixing up his mythologies.
For years now, he explained, he had been having a peculiar dream that he imagined might be a vision of heaven. The dream revolved around sex with small-bodied Indian girls with long braids and tiny moccasined feet, girls who spoke only in brief sentences, praising him in sweet bad English. He didn’t know why his notions of the afterlife should take this form. Probably a
man he shared a cell with once, an Indian or someone pretending to be an Indian, planted it in his head, and he found it so beautiful it stayed with him. Yeah, the Indians had the right ideas. In death Apache warriors went to the front of the line, with their loincloths and moccasins and bodies marked with arrowheads and spear-gashes, elbowed right up with the scalps of a lot of white motherfuckers and said, ‘I believe I’m first.’ And then all those sweet little Pocahontases were there to bathe your gashes clean with their little brown hands in the eternal cool porno shade of a teepee.
‘Isn’t that kind of entry-level stuff?’ I said. ‘I mean, it couldn’t be right. Because a man gets tired of fucking girls after a while.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Religion’s never solved that one.’
‘Heaven’s got nothing to do with your dick,’ I said. ‘A righteous man’s reward in the afterlife is he loses his need to use it. That’s if they even let him keep it, and I doubt they do.’
He frowned. The Indian girls receded, left him: an abrupt pattering of tiny moccasins. He decided it was something to consider. Yeah: lurching after your joint for 45 years left it ensconced with so much bad meat that you barely recognized it. It picked up tags, like an old suitcase. You could read the trajectory of its travels in the scars and sores. Nothing to put your faith in. Before the war had shellshocked his dick, he explained, he had misused it badly. ‘Drink up, brother,’ said Gus, a charming madman, an inexhaustible source of half-anxious amusement. ‘Just wish mine worked again. World’s best poon could be right there, I wouldn’t give up my stool.’
CHAPTER 12
We had grown tight. There was a fast brotherliness between us based (I suspected) on nothing more complicated than his desire to tell stories and my desire to hear them.
It turned out his handyman gig at the bar did not even cover his drinking tab, so he’d disappear now and then to fix roofs or lay tile or install decks. He also had another kind of ‘job,’ which was more lucrative, but proved very dangerous. Knowing I was out of work and hurting for cash, he invited me along. On corners in the nicer Newport Beach neighborhoods he lurked, whistling, glasses carefully pocketed, waiting for Jags and Benzes and Porsches to roll up at a red light. While they were still moving, he gave the hood a terrific thwack with his head, howled like a maimed bear, and, writhing under the stopped bumper like a South American soccer player with a pulverized limb, squeezed the bright crimson of a Halloween dye-pack over his forehead. There was good money to be made in this. The drivers emptied their wallets when he suggested (after unleashing some terrifying verbal abuse) that he saw no need to involve the insurance vultures, provided his needs could be taken care of quickly. My job was to pose as an independent witness corroborating that he, a poor pedestrian, had the right of way when the recklessly negligent driver barreled into him. He gave me a third of the take, which helped tide me over while I was out of steady work, and afterward, back at the bar, we laughed for hours replaying every detail. Human nature being what it is, however, the scam was not always successful. There was a sunburned man in a Polo shirt who, even after jumping out of his Lexus to glimpse the bleeding giant under his fender, sped away without a word, much less a cash offering. Springing to his feet, Gus shook a fist into the air and yelled after him: ‘Heartless cocksucker! Get me a goddamn icepack, Benny . . .’ Sometimes there was as much real blood on him as fake blood, and he complained of terrible headaches for days afterward, wearing a stunned, cross-eyed expression.
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