Snitch Jacket

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Snitch Jacket Page 19

by Christopher Goffard


  Gus looking at me in confusion, like: What do we do? Benny saying, ‘The second sounds best.’ Gus going, ‘ You think so?’ Benny going, ‘The guy said we can win some shit.’ Gus forking over a wad of cash. Plastic goodie bags materializing in our laps, crammed with coupon books, programs, souvenirs, sample packs of gum, breath-mints, teeth-whitening strips, analgesics. Then we were in, riding under a gigantic sign that read:

  Welcome to Edge City!™

  PlumpyBurger Inc.™, ComTekk Cell Systems™

  and

  Screaming Demon Power Drink™

  Proudly Present

  The 13th Annual Howling Head Festival™

  North America’s Edgiest Counterculture Party™

  ‘Where You Can Be An Individual!’™

  Parking attendants in little reflective-stripped vests took another 20 bucks from us and waved us past a few football-field lengths of parked trucks and SUVs till we found a spot. Around us people were pouring into the desert in fantastic masks, demons and aliens and insects. They leered suddenly in our windows and pounded and howled and disappeared, Gus flinching every time, looking sick, his hand tight on the gun under his gut.

  ‘We’ve gone off the end of the world,’ he muttered fearfully, his carapace of cool cracking. ‘I just remembered a dream I had last night. Skullmen on horses and goats with human heads and rivers of fire. And here it is . . .’

  ‘Christ, we’re both gonna buy it, aren’t we?’

  My cowardice seemed to hit his veins like a hypodermic, injecting him with furious courage, Gus shouting, ‘Grow a sack, soldier! You losing your nerve? Are you? Are you?’

  ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘To find the Gecko, you whimpering polesmoker! And the girl we’re gonna save! Don’t you listen?’

  Gus removed a photograph from his shirt pocket and passed it to me and I studied it, not understanding what I was seeing, studying them and squinting and trying to fit them into the world, wondering from what dream or TV show or epoch of my life I saw these faces before . . .

  Skyblue studio backdrop: mom, dad, daughter. Sharp-dressed. Honey light beautiful on their faces. Mother poised, petite, commanding, weighted with jewelry. Benny blinking, remembering. Her hair reddish in an Eighties perm, not the piled-high orange tower she wore when I’d met her at the mini-mart on Pacific Coast Highway. The photo was 10 or 15 years old, but the face belonged to the same lady – those droopy brothelmadam eyes, heavy-lidded, just-ravished. Yeah, definitely, her, the same: she of the plastic parts and the mute rasping dog, the one who called me something strange (nigger? white nigger?), who tried to proposition me for – for what? Murder? This murder? Connections being made. Anthrax spore. Nasty little number. Juilliard daughter. What is it you’re packing? A switchblade? Blackjack? Brass knuckles? Gun?

  The lady’s hand rested on the left shoulder of a girl, 11 or 12 years old maybe, sitting prettily cross-legged in a floral-print dress. The girl freckled, blond-banged, holding a violin in her lap, smiling sweetly and awkwardly, a shy smile. She inherited Mom’s sleepy eyelids, but on her they somehow made an opposite impression – innocence, dreaminess. On her right shoulder: Dad’s hand resting. Dad somehow familiar to me too: handsome in a conservative gray suit, with a square jaw, deeply sad eyes, and an apostrophe-shaped port-wine stain above the right one.

  ‘Remember that violin piece I played for you that time?’ Gus said, taking the photo back. ‘That’s who did it. Little Cloe. Little Sunshine.’

  ‘The girl?’

  ‘Ain’t she a doll?’ Gus rubbed his thick thumb along the photo, petting her hair. His voice was embarrassingly sentimental. ‘Good girl. Honor Roll. Played a gumdrop in Nutcracker. Hello Kitty. Swim team. Loved her violin. Walked around like it was attached. What you call a prodigy. Parents gave her everything. Everything. Little bit sassy, little bit headstrong. Show me a girl that ain’t.’

  ‘What do we care about her?‘

  ‘She got herself abducted is what,’ he said. ‘This evil piece of shit – some kind of fucking poetry-writer. First he defiles and despoils her using mental tricks. Then he washes her brain. Like the chinks used to do with POWs? Remember Manchurian Candidate? Turn them against everything they hold dear. Poor little Cloe, her folks can barely sleep for worry. Lucky for them, there’s remedies in this world, a few people left who care about making a difference . . .’

  ‘With Frank Sinatra? And Angela Lansbury as that scary mom?’

  ‘It’s a great flick, but this ain’t about that.’ Shaking his head, lips downturned in disgust, he returned the photo to his pocket and said, ‘It’s about an innocent little girl got turned into a whore. He’s selling her like chattel out there. All to bankroll his lazy, poem-scribbling lifestyle. Remember Harvey Keitel as that evil pimp pimping out little Jodie Foster in her hot pants? Remember that shit?’

  ‘Taxi Driver.’

  ‘And she still loved him. Incredible.’ He pounded his heavy fist six or seven times on the dashboard. ‘That worthless waste of flesh! That motherfucker! She’s someone’s kid, you know.’

  He let out a few breaths, and it looked like he was struggling to say more. ‘My ticker holds out through this, I’ll be – – ’ Then his face turned the color of ashes and he was leaning out the door and retching, spitting phlegm and puke and beer. Panting, he closed the door and slumped in his seat. ‘I was saying, I hold out through it, I’ll be a blessed man.’

  Running his forearm over his beard, wiping spittle away, he turned slowly to face me and added weakly, ‘Benny, what would you say if — What if I said – – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What if I told you I ain’t genuinely done this shit before?’

  Silence hanging between us in the van, Benny scouring his brain for a way to break it, trying to fit his mouth around the right words, and instead just pretending not to hear, saying the safe thing, saying, ‘What?’

  ‘What if I told you I ain’t done this before? Never genuinely even did someone?’

  ‘Well, I guess – – ’

  ‘ You’d probably call me a goddamn liar, wouldn’t you? And I couldn’t blame you. Take one look at Big Bad Gus, anybody’d call him a liar for saying that. But what if he said, “I never really did a good thing in my life. A noble kind of thing.” You’d believe that one no trouble at all, wouldn’t you?’

  His eyes were full of uncertainty and fear and he wanted to tell me something.

  ‘People are a mixed bag,’ I said, but I didn’t know if I was having the same conversation he was; we were on different drugs.

  ‘Maybe the Almighty or the Great Spirit or whoever’s in charge don’t give up on His fuckups like I thought,’ he said. I thought I saw moisture fogging up the lenses of his slanted glasses. ‘Maybe not totally. Because then why would He give ’em one last thing to do? Why would He give ’em an important mission, if they were lost to Him forever?’

  He wanted something from me, I didn’t know what, his look imploring me for some kind of words. Finally he muttered, ‘Real reason I brought you along, brother? ’Cause you’re better than Jack Daniels himself for giving me balls. I don’t mean just when you’re acting like a pussy, either. And that’s the first and last time I suck your dick . . .’

  Clomping into the back of his van, rummaging among the junk aisles, he emerged moments later changed, his body topped by the bright crimson head and tall cruel ears of an Egyptian jackalgod. In one hand he extended an awful white face, with amoeba-shaped perforations in its eyes and mouth. A Greek stage mask.

  ‘Put it on,’ Gus said. ‘We’re gonna need to fit in.’

  I fixed it over my face and tightened the straps behind my skull. Benjamin Bunt (a name I already only vaguely recognized: strange characters on someone’s birth certificate, a marriage license, a rap sheet) vanished . . .

  Now bodies were jostling us, Gus swaggering half-drunk, his thick inky arms swinging beside me, his body flinching at the screeeeeBLOOMBLOOMscreeee of electric guitars be
ing tortured on a stage somewhere close . . . Air impregnated by smells of burning petrol and sulfur and cordite . . . Liquidy carnival faces surging past us on either side: malignant insects, demonic Rumsfelds and Cheneys and George W. Bushes, wormheads with pulsing gashes in place of mouths, corpse-white swinethings like creatures out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales ambling around with sunscreen tubes and Evian bottles . . . Horror-house apparitions: smiling devil clowns stalking the desert on stilts (were they born that way?) . . . painted bodies rolling around in gigantic hamster wheels and flinging themselves into the sky off trampolines . . . Sand thick in my throat . . . Mobs blowtorching television sets . . . Revelers bouncing around bare-assed, guys with naked corporate-cubicle guts and heavy swivel-chair asses and flabby hippie chicks flailing their limbs in dance like mustard-gas victims, their arms above their heads flaunting (celebrating!) run-amok armpit thatches, and their nether triangles fuzzing up bellies and snaking mosslike down the insides of legs, pubic hell-thickets fit for ticks and brambles, malevolent mushrooms, colonies of trolls . . . A sign that said ‘LEARN TO AUTO- FELLATE WITH THE WEST COAST’S PREMIER YOGA MASTER DEEPAK PRAHUPADA! BLOW YOURSELF THE PRAHUPADA WAY!™’ . . . Groans belting from a medical tent where people were getting their feet bandaged, blistered by hours of hot sand and too blitzed to know it . . . A troupe of performance artists lacing up their sneakers for a reenactment of the Heaven’s Gate suicides . . . Wheeling by on castors, the glass-encased corpse of Sixties poet Andy Gibberstein, author of the famous ‘YAWP!’, dead ten years but looking spry, rebellious, wild-bearded, a jumbo cell phone planted in his taxidermied hands, a digital sign flashing above his waxy head: ‘I Yawp!™ for CommTekk’s Free Weekend Minutes Anywhere in the Continental United States! Because It’s All About Freedom™’ . . .

  My heart whacked thwam! thwam! thwam! against my chest and I could hear the roar of freighter-crushing sea fathoms in my skull and my breath short and hot and foul in my mask, my face melting like candle wax down into my neck, and there came the sound of someone muttering prayers: ‘Forgive me, Father . . . Deliver us not into temptation . . . Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil . . . Fear no evil . . . Fear no evil . . .’ Whether it was my voice or Gus’s, I couldn’t be sure . . .

  Something went KAPLOOOOM! nearby and Gus staggered back a step or two, and I could see the gray eyes behind his mask move with fear and I could hear his breathing getting shorter and tighter, going into prison-riot mode, incoming-flack mode . . . ‘Too much like The Shit,’ he muttered, advancing with his hand on the lump of the .38 in his waistband . . .

  Howls and cheers erupted from a crowd nearby. In a dirt pit, two remote-control gladiator droids with Bill Gates heads were battering each other into fragments.

  Then someone was telling Gus, ‘Gecko’s right in there,’ and pointing us to a 12-foot-tall geodesic dome made of PVC pipe and covered with sheets of Desert Storm-style camouflage tarp. We ducked inside and saw him. He looked like some kind of unhinged trailer-park Jesus or acid-rock prophet – stringy long hair, greasy goatee, soiled clothes, high sharp cheekbones. But it was clear he wore the look to conceal how pretty he was. Sensitive globular eyes, long feminine eyelashes, arrogant bee-stung lips: shaved and scrubbed, you could imagine a fresh-pubed Teen Beat coverboy spattered with kisses, a boy-band bad boy. It took me a few minutes to recognize him, from that afternoon in Zapata! Zapata! when something about his mixture of insolence and entitlement and the way he treated the girl he was with had driven me to sabotage his mole con pollo. Right now he slouched contemptuously in a wheelchair, a blanket across his lap. Shriveled flippery legs stuck out from under it. His chest was scrawny, his arms long and bony. On his T-shirt President Bush stared knot-browed under the words ‘THE GREATEST MIND OF OUR TIME.’

  ‘Some people have called this next one an indictment of the capitalist packaging of the godhead,’ said the gimp. His voice – high, thin, almost girlish – supplied another motive for the roughed-up look. ‘Some have called it a Marxist take on religion. I consider it a full-frontal assault on the hypocrisies of our time. If it doesn’t offend every asshole in this tent, be sure to tell the Gecko, and he guarantees the next one will . . .’

  He flashed a fuck-you smile/sneer, bringing narcotized worship-noises from the red-eyed, smoke-fogged audience clustered around him – 10 or 15 half-naked dudes and chicks slumped on their sides or ranged Indian-style with monster bongs, nasty blunts, carved peace pipes, syringes, junk-works – Gus and I trying to keep low, willing ourselves into invisibility.

  ‘Anyway, I think you motherfuckers’ll find it pretty subversive,’ said the gimp, reading from the PowerBook in his lap:Freebase Jesus, cook him up in a spoon Pack Mohammed in a bong, pain dies soon Put Buddha in a blunt and Vishnu in a pill Like Yahweh on a mirror, snort Him through a bill

  ‘First taste’s on me,’ says the man with the vial Medicine to keep the pain away awhile Pack Confucius in your pipe, fill it to the brim Put Jesus in a needle and find a vein for Him . . .

  ‘That’s the bomb!’ the crowd cried, and ‘Awesome!’ Gecko the Gimp’s face getting redder and angrier as the waves of audience love washed over him.

  ‘What distinguishes a real poet from the rest,’ he piped in his high voice, ‘is he looks right into the abyss! The rest of you can’t do it! You aren’t willing to do it! You flinch!’

  Applause.

  ‘ You comfort yourself with stupid illusions! You brainless lemmings!’

  Wild applause.

  ‘I loathe you! I despise you for worshipping me! I’m no one! I’m against mediocrity in all forms! I do not crave the adulation of apes! My work is worthless! And you’re worthless for tolerating it!’

  Ecstatic applause.

  Gus’s elbow rammed my ribcage. He pointed to a waifish, sunburned blonde girl propped on her elbow a few feet away in a hemp flower skirt, one hip in the air, smoking an elephantine blunt. Here she was. Same heavy-lidded eyes as before, but everything else different, everything else corrupted, just a few years separated from the girl in the photo, but aged as if by decades; she was not even the heartbreaking heroin-ad Gwen Stacy I’d seen weeks back, but something sadder and less substantial, like a photograph bleaching toward oblivion.

  ‘Look at the whore he made her,’ Gus said angrily. ‘Stay cool. We have to get his guard down.’

  The crowd thinned, people eddying in and out of his geodesic tent in their fantastic masks. Gus and I lingered, pretending to belong, my brain now and then focusing enough to remember why I was here and to ask what I should do. Was there a chance – a slim chance – police had picked up our trail and followed us here? Were they waiting right outside for some signal, some code word they’d given me that I couldn’t remember? Was the chameleonic Munoz already in the tent with us hiding behind one of the masks, the bull or demon bear or lunatic clown or Tonto the Indian?

  ‘This used to be a really cool party,’ Gecko the Gimp was telling Gus. ‘Five, six years ago? No cash allowed here, all barter-system. Radical concept. You packed your own food and traded with everyone else and survived the weekend that way.’

  ‘So what happened?’ said Gus, sucking a blunt through the slat of his mask.

  ‘Bad sushi, E. coli outbreaks,’ said Gecko, shrugging. ‘I mean, look, so you shouldn’t swap snacks with the feces fetishists. That’s a given. That was the problem. But to bring in vendors and sell a bottle of water for eight bucks? There used to be a point to this festival.’

  ‘What was the point?’ I said, realizing suddenly that my face was naked, my hot mask somehow vanished, my hand going to my face to ensure it was still there, unmelted.

  ‘Just this great big fuck-you, anti-establishment howl, man,’ said Gecko. ‘It’s all just staged rage now. I’m here strictly ironically, and under protest. They’re selling this pathetic simulation of experience out there, so shitheads can come and pretend to have an experience and put nothing on the line, and it’s all vapor, man, the vanilla Disneyland
of the soul. No one believes it anymore, no one goes home changed! It’s got as much to do with rebellion as the House of Blues does with blues, or the Hard Rock Café does with rock ’n’ roll, or Sea World does with the fucking sea. It’s theme-park reality, man. I hate these people, everything they represent. They come for the weekend and get wasted and go back to their corporate climbing and their murder of salmon populations, the economic butt-fucking of indigenous Eskimo populations, the great savage ass-rape of globalization, while Third World populations die in sweatshops so that overpaid American athletes can sell sneakers to ghetto kids who grease each other on the playgrounds, priests diddling choirboys, the hypocrisies! I mean, the fucking hypocrisies!’

  ‘I’m sympathetic to your being a gimp,’ said Gus. ‘I had brothers in The Shit who lost limbs. Landmines, screaming amputees, bone, blood – I’ve been there. I mean, they weren’t born gimpy, like you, they got that way in Nam. I’m only saying the principle’s the same – no legs. You know that if a man’s standing between you and a mine when it goes off, his atomized flesh and bone will embed itself in you? Major cause of infection.’

  Gecko wore a look of fascinated admiration. ‘That’s bad-ass,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. You’ve really lived life. I love your tats, man. You’ve done time?’

  ‘Sure, these are my degrees,’ Gus said, pointing to a forearm crawling with biker bitches and Norse heroes. ‘San Quentin, class of ’78, summa cum laude. I got a Masters in sarcasm and criticism, brother. You can call me Iceman.’

  ‘I hope I get to do time someday,’ said Gecko, swigging bottled water. ‘I mean, not a lot, not enough to be raped, just enough for a serious taste of it, you know? Write the prison memoir. Raw incarceration poetry. Same as war. I’d go in a second. Not long enough to get my ass shot up, lose my nuts, fight for some stupid shit the fat old men dictate I should kill and die for. Just to bear witness, you know?’

 

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