by Jim Nisbet
“Well,” Ivy continued, “of course my friend was a junky, but he was also very well off, and along with his money he had health insurance. He also had a very sympathetic doctor, one of those guys who looks the other way when it comes to your real health problems and just does what you tell him to do. That doctor led to another and another and another, until my friend found a neurosurgeon willing to operate on my friend’s head.” Ivy touched his forehead at the hairline, above his right eye. “Here.”
“And?” Lavinia wanted to know.
“Impurities,” I guessed.
Ivy held up a finger. “A grain of something was lodged in a capillary in his brain. Tiny, but plenty big enough to dry up that part of the cortex, which left the poor motherfucker with headaches, flashes of light, and pain.”
“Really?” Lavinia said. “There’s a part of the brain that—”
Ivy waved this off. “Who knows how the brain works? They sewed up his head, sent him home, and—presto.”
“Change-o?”
“He was cured?”
Ivy nodded. “No more headaches, no more lightning flashes, no more fainting spells. But….”
“But?” Lavinia and I asked together.
“But he had epileptic-type seizures for the rest of his life. Right away he wasn’t allowed to drive. Later, he couldn’t be left alone. They got worse and worse until he died, about two years down the road.”
“The seizures killed him.”
“No,” Ivy sucked a tooth. “He died of an overdose.”
“You took the word right out of my mouth,” I said with disgust.
“Gross!” exclaimed Lavinia.
“The operation disturbed more than it cured,” I surmised. “But it didn’t disturb the idiot’s habit.”
“What is that, Curly?” Ivy cracked the lid on the egg poacher, and peered under it. “Some kind of moral?”
“Moral?” I replied. “What instruction do you take away from that story?”
“That’s easy: The brain is a delicate thing. If you’re going to fuck with your brain, it pays to eliminate the unknowns.”
I ruefully shook my head. “Unknowns like sand and glass in your bloodstream?” We all tried to see under the lid. “Was the overdose deliberate?”
“It could have been. He was pretty fucked up.” Ivy shrugged. “If it wasn’t, it should have been.”
Lavinia and I shared a look.
“Well,” Ivy smiled and turned off the flame. “We’re all gonna die, anyway.”
“Just have a look out the back door,” I said quietly.
Ivy removed the lid from the poacher.
All the egg cups were empty, except one.
“See that white stuff?” Ivy said.
“Pure speedball,” I realized.
“One hundred percent,” Ivy agreed.
“My god,” Lavinia breathed, and she looked at the saucer of contaminated heroin and cocaine. “So much for the dry run.”
Twenty minutes later, all five egg cups were half full of cloth-filtered speedball solution, the lid was on the poacher’s flange, the saucepan was on the boil, and my cell phone rang.
“Jesus Christ, I’ve been shot,” I jumped, fumbling at my belt. “I haven’t had a call since the French Revolution.”
“It’s probably for me,” Ivy said mildly, turning down the heat under the egg poacher.
Annoyed, I said to the phone, “Hello?”
The phone growled back. “For a lousy seventy-five hundred bucks you had to whack the fuck?”
“Tell him I’m busy.” Ivy eyed the flame. “Tell him to call later.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said to the phone.
“Did you at least get the goddamn money?” the phone replied.
“Who is this?”
“Well I guess this ain’t Ivy Pruitt,” the phone said, adding with a shout heard round the room, “because that prick knows who I am!”
“Mr. Pruitt is in a meeting,” I replied primly. “May I take a message?”
“Since when is a fuck in the shitter and he can’t talk on the goddamn telephone?”
Ivy peeked under the saucepan lid.
“What,” the phone screamed, “he needs both hands to wipe?”
“I’m sure I can’t answer that, sir.”
Ivy replaced the lid.
“Put on Pruitt,” the phone demanded. “This is important!”
“A call from Mr. Important.” I held out the phone. “He insists on exchanging insults with you personally.”
Ivy took the cellphone. “Yo, Sal—” he began. “—What?” He listened. “Wait a minute, why should we kill the guy? He paid off. We went away.” Ivy said, to us, “Did you guys shoot that Stepnowski guy?” I shook my head. Lavinia rolled her eyes. “No,” he said to the phone, “they didn’t shoot him. Obviously, that shit happened later.” He listened some more. Then he said, “How many repos have I–? No, no, no, Sal, I beg your pardon, it’s more than twenty. Yeah. Has anybody gotten killed—who? That wasn’t my gig, dickhead, that was Tony’s gig. Yes, your nephew. Who, in turn, as I recall, got himself killed just last Christmas. So much for nepotism—Of course it was cash. Cops? How did–? A receipt…?” Ivy frowned. Then he said, to nobody in particular, “The cops found a World of Sound receipt in Stepnowski’s hip pocket.” I looked at Lavinia, who bit her lip. “Shit!” Ivy said, and angrily turned off the flame under the saucepan. “No, Sal, not you, I’m trying to cook some breakfast here. Sure I eat. He told you what? So what’s a cop know about it? Oh. Ouch. What? All hundreds. Sure…. I’ll send it over with Curly. Watkins. Yes, yes, the Curly Watkins.” Ivy winked at me. “Sure you know him. He’s probably another guy who owes you money.” Ivy shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Okay, Sal, today you don’t know him. What the fuck difference—Illegal? Since when? Oh. Yeah. Well, yeah, sure, of course murder’s against the law.” Ivy waved an impatient hand at the saucepan.
I plucked the lid off the egg poacher with one of the new potholders and set it down on the stove top. In the die-cut platter, each egg cup was frosted white, like so many UFO windshields of a crisp winter’s morning, say, but in fact they were more like the sclerae of a five-eyed dragon.
A real delicacy.
“Sal, you don’t give a shit about Stepnowski, so get off it. The bread’s here, you’ll get it this afternoon. When? What’s the big deal? Curly’s not there, he’s here. Sure. Here is Oakland, but—Okay, Okay! Fuck you, too. And very much.”
Ivy held the phone at arm’s length, made a face, and pitched it to me. I caught it with the potholder and turned it off.
“A fucking receipt,” Ivy muttered disgustedly. “I thought you guys went through his pockets.”
“Curly went through his pockets,” Lavinia corrected him, somewhat defensively. “I only touch live men.”
“Pocket,” I corrected them both. “The dough was in the first pocket I checked, so that was that.”
Ivy wasn’t even listening. “Whatever happened to the handshake deal?” he groused. “Isn’t a man’s word good for anything anymore? Fucking paper trails….”
His attention fell upon the egg poacher, and his mood shifted. After a close inspection of the cooling saucepan, he happily scrubbed his hands together.
“I’ll take the vapor trail,” he said. “Every time.”
Chapter Eleven
SAL ‘THE KING’ KRAMER’S WORLD OF SOUND IS ON FOLSOM AT Sixth, right across the street from a place called the Brainwash, where you can watch your clothes tumble dry beyond a soundproof glass wall while you sit in a comfortable chair eating a cheeseburger with a beer and pretend to listen to live poetry while in fact browsing the sex ads in the back of the Bay Guardian.
The poet Jim Carroll once observed that, while he enjoyed fronting a rock and roll band, when the gig was over, he wanted silence. The guys in his band, however, would go home and listen to music. He couldn’t figure it out.
What I can’t figure out is drummers who go down to Kramer’s Wor
ld of Sound and pretend to test-drive the most expensive kit in the inventory, by way of practicing their paradiddles, at ten o’clock in the morning. Another thing I wonder about is how Sal Kramer can stand to smoke a nickel cigar at that hour—or any other, for that matter. Traffic was inexplicably light, so, as we sank down the Fifth Street ramp, westbound off the Bay Bridge, I expressed these concerns to Lavinia.
“That’s easy,” she said. “They’re connected—the practicing drummers and Sal’s cigars, I mean. Plumbers smoke cigars to mask the smell of shit, right?”
“You know,” I admitted, “I never thought of it that way.”
She tapped her right temple. “Vassar.”
“I got another question.”
“Shoot.”
“What about that back window?”
As she made a right at Seventh, broken safety glass rattled over the rear window shelf. It sounded like the percussion instrument known as a rainstick.
“Insurance. Ask me a hard one.”
“Okay, how much dope will be left by the time we get back to Oakland?”
“Any amount of dope divided into a zero like Ivy equals zero dope left over.”
“Vassar,” I concluded.
She nodded.
“Do you think Sal was making it up, insisting that we had to bring his thirty-seven fifty to him immediately?”
“Otherwise Sal would have no choice but to admit to the cops about siccing Ivy onto Stepnowski?”
“Which would force the cops to admit to themselves, disappointing as that might be, that Ivy was under lock and key in their own basement the whole time Stepnowski was getting himself killed?”
“But wasn’t his payment to the bail bondsman in cash?”
“Hundred dollar bills, in fact.”
“Of which Stepnowski had some twelve examples in his jeans when they found him.” Lavinia looked at me. “Right?”
I shrugged. “The paper didn’t say anything about it.”
“How much do cops make?”
“About that much a week, I’d think. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Lavinia said, grasping the steering wheel with both hands. “Here we are.”
Actually, we’d been in the World of Sound’s parking lot long enough for Lavinia already to have parked and turned the engine off. Immediately to our left, a purple two-story cinderblock wall with yellow flowers and green leaves painted on it emitted deep thuds.
“It was generous of Ivy to allow us a couple of fat bumps apiece before he threw us out,” Lavinia said. “I was really tired.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Not that I care about the stuff.”
“But it made you feel better, didn’t it.”
“Sure did.”
“Real better.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad we didn’t take the time to make breakfast, too.”
Lavinia shrugged. “What can you do in the kitchen of a man who says food makes him paranoid?”
“Eat his breakfast for him.”
“Isn’t that some kind of business homily?”
“You’re asking me about business?”
The thudding stopped. One minute elapsed peacefully. Beyond the hood of the car, orange nasturtiums bloomed along the base of a chain link fence.
“Hey, Curly, remember what Saint Augustine said?”
“Fuck no.”
“If you can understand it, it is not God.”
Another minute of silence passed.
“That speedball sure is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell you what.”
“Tell me anything you want.”
“If we manage to navigate through today without getting arrested, let’s celebrate with a little speedball.”
“Good idea.”
“Just a little.”
“Yeah.”
“Couple hits each.”
“Sure.”
“Get us through the night.”
“Yeah.”
“We could even have sex.”
“What did you say?” I asked mildly.
“Let’s get this over with.”
Sal ‘The King’ was sitting at a desk within a glass-walled cubicle in the back of the store, the atmosphere inside of which reeked of an electrical fire doused by soy sauce. It looked that way, too. Invoices, pieces of cardboard, cymbals and drumheads in and out of their cartons, drumsticks and curly cords, packs of guitar strings and styrofoam coffee cups littered every available surface. The fax machine was overflowing faxes into an overflowing wastebasket. A gold record hung among framed and autographed concert posters and band photographs on the wall behind the desk. Everything was askew and covered with dust.
“Fuckin’ junk faxes,” Kramer said to nobody in particular, reading a page as the machine excreted it. “Repair Grandfather Clocks At Home In Your Spare Time for Big $$$!” He threw the sheet to the floor. “That’s my fuckin’ paper they’re wasting, my toner, my phone line—I should pay for this shit and read it, too? I pay some recycler he should cart them faxes away, I pay some kid he should go to the Office Depot to buy me more fucking cases of toner and paper…. I’d like to fax the Federal Tax Code up this clock guy’s ass. This grandfather clock guy’s costing me money! Look at this!” He snatched up another sheet from the floor. “$99 Disney Vacation! Fuck! See that 800 number? Tiny print, right? Tough shit. Buy yourself some glasses. Says, If you feel that you’ve received this fax in error, please call 1-800-HIY-ASAP and request that your name be removed from our database. Right!” He threw the sheet to the floor. “Look at this!” He pointed his cigar at the wastebasket. “How many faxes you think are in there? A thousand? A million? It’s a fire hazard! I got time to call all these jerkoffs? No! They should call me. And beg me—beg me—not to kill them when I catch the cocksuckers. I pick up this phone—” He jabbed his cigar at a telephone hidden beneath a coil of audio cable on his desk. “And right now,” he snapped his fingers, “the guy is dead.” He snapped his fingers again. “Grandfather clock guy is a dead grandfather clock guy.” He abruptly collected himself. “What am I saying? Here I am, raving on and on about junk faxes, for chrissakes—junk faxes! I should kill somebody? For a junk fax? And right here in my office are a couple of musicians, a couple of envoys from the most sensitive tribe on the planet.” He waggled the cigar. “My children, disregard the petty concerns of the workaday world, and take a deep breath. Center yourselves. Now.” He exhaled a gout of fetid smoke toward Lavinia’s breasts. “Tell me what kind of gear you need, and what kind of credit problems you have. And….” He tapped his chest with the forefinger of his cigar hand, “Sal Kramer will show you how you can afford it. They don’t call Sal ‘The King’ for nothin’. Hell, I knew Joe Ellis when he couldn’t even blow out the candles on his birthday cake, let alone hold down first desk in the pit on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Greatest Hits!—that show’s been camped at the Orpheum for, what, twelve years? Joe still had hair when he started that gig.” He pointed the cigar at Lavinia. “You hearda Joe Ellis?” Lavinia shook her head. Sal took one of Lavinia’s hands between his, the cigar protruding from his fat fingers like a zeppelin leaking fumes. “Joe Ellis didn’t have a watch to keep time with when I sold him that horn. On credit, too. One hundred percent financing! But ‘The King’ believed in Joe. ‘The King’, for no money down—”
I suddenly said, “Joe Ellis didn’t buy that trumpet from you.”
“He—What?” Kramer squinted through the cigar smoke at Lavinia. “Who let him in here?”
“Lambert Deutschen sold his trumpet to Joe Ellis in the basement of the Great American Music Hall in 1988 for enough cash to buy an ounce of blow, a thousand bucks, about one sixth what that horn is worth. It was a dark hour in the history of jazz. But if he hadn’t sold it to Joe, he would have sold it to somebody who didn’t know what it was. But you know what, Kramer?”
Kramer hadn’t taken his eyes off Lavinia’s breasts. “Tell him to go away, sweeth
eart.”
Lavinia got her hand back and said, “What, Curly?”
“If Lambert ever asked Joe to return his trumpet, Joe would give it to him.”
Lavinia frowned. “Didn’t Lambert Deutschen die of a heart attack while snorting cocaine off the dashboard of a car behind a club in Detroit about ten years ago?”
“That’s not the point.” I stabbed my forefinger at my chest and said, “I saw the look in Joe’s eyes when that deal went down. I—”
“What the fuck were you doing there,” Kramer interrupted, “cleaning the toilets?” He smiled lasciviously at Lavinia. “Not for nothing do they call Sal Kramer ‘The King’, baby.” Confused and alarmed, Lavinia looked back and forth between us. Sal ‘The King’ Kramer called me a motherfucker and stood up. I advised Sal that on the contrary he was the motherfucker, and stepped up to meet him.
We embraced.
“Curly.”
“Sal.”
“Long time.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“No you haven’t.”
“Okay, I haven’t. How you been keeping? Let me look at you.” Sal held me at arms’ length.
“Ah, I don’t look as good as you, Sal.”
Sal’s smile faded. “That’s true. You don’t look so good.” His face assumed a pained expression. “Where’s my money?”
“It’s all bullshit.” Lavinia shook her head. “Why should musicians be allowed to talk? Why can’t they just play music and go afterwards to a shelf in a closet away from the rest of us, some place where they can’t make normal people crazy?”
I produced the wad of hundreds.
Kramer plugged the cigar into his mouth, took the money, sat into his office chair and counted the bills into the styrofoam lid of a take-out carton. “Thirty-seven.” He looked up. I handed him fifty in small bills. He counted those, too, then stacked the lot. “Okay.”