by Jim Nisbet
“Still waiting for the bus, is where it leaves you.”
“Exactly. And since they’ll steal my cell phone, too, I’ll have to wait until I get home before I can call my one sympathetic friend and tell her what a loser I am.”
“She’ll always be there for you, Curly.”
I looked at Lavinia. In her profile I could see years of heroin—or could I? She didn’t look all that bad. Her features were a little puffy, and there would be another chin one of these days. But her violet eyes were almost delicately, if falsely, lashed, and the hennaed bangs that arched over her prominent forehead cut the midday glare behind her like a cold beer cuts a hangover—no, like a saint’s corona. Madonna of the poppy. Nice. Plus, the small padlock key that depended from her earlobe had a strange effect on me. I couldn’t figure it out.
Lavinia’s key earrings reminded me that I’d once read that Ford’s new model that particular year was called the Probe, and that the Probe had been designed for and marketed to single working women. This furrowed my brow and led to all kinds of speculation involving small teams of highly paid FoMoCo psychologists in a secret unmarked building on the outskirts of Detroit. In fact it’s probably true. But I came to the conclusion that maybe women as a social group feel that, all their lives, one way or another, literally or figuratively and like it or not, they were constantly being probed by men and a masculine culture and that, in driving something called a Probe, maybe a woman could convince herself that she was in charge for a change, instead of a victim as per usual.
The Probe was the success story of the year.
Go figure.
Lavinia’s key earrings provoked similar speculation. A key could be considered the male prerogative, the male arrogation, the symbolic object of the male search or persistence to fit itself to that symbol of female mystery, the lock. So, in wearing her keys in plain sight, Lavinia was symbolically pre-solving half the battle, arrogating the arrogator, as it were, and teasing him too. The mystery of the lock remained. And the key, after all, remained merely a key, merely a symbol.
“Curly….”
Altogether, she looked well. Pretty, even. Heroin is unpredictable. Given an even temperament, enough money, a clean connection and privacy, a junky can maintain an even keel for decades. A best friend, a lover, her own mother might never figure it out.
“Curly….”
Nobody but a fool would knowingly fall for a junky.
“Yes?”
“You were saying?”
By now we were all the way down to the east end of Folsom Street. We’d already passed the next-to-last on-ramp to the Bay Bridge.
“I was saying, it’ll be late. Two, three in the morning, maybe.”
“I’ll be up.”
“Really?” I looked at her.
She smiled. “Really….” There’s a stop sign on Folsom at Beale, and Lavinia observed it. At that time it was an odd part of town. A mere three blocks from us, straight east, a broad sliver of the bay showed between two buildings at the foot of Folsom, where it dead ends into the Embarcadero. The Bay Bridge arced across the gap, toward Treasure Island and the East Bay beyond. Though we were more or less in the heart of San Francisco, however, only parking lots and half-built buildings surrounded us. And so there was little traffic in this neighborhood, excepting commute hours. Lavinia pulled through the intersection and parked at the curb, directly in front of the oldest remaining wooden building in that part of town, which, once upon a time, had housed a blacksmith. She left the engine running.
“Okay, Curly, what’s it going to be?” She put the transmission in park and looked at me. “Oakland in the Lexus? Or Hayes Valley on the bus?”
I looked at her. It was midday. It had been at least thirty-six hours since either of us had slept. The two fat lines of speedball we had nasaled apiece, not four hours earlier, had worn off. I was tired, and Lavinia had to be tired, too. Our most recent attempt at nourishment, forty dollars worth of groceries, languished on Ivy Pruitt’s kitchen counter, a thirty minute drive from where we currently found ourselves. Once we got there the priority of rest and food over drugs and derangement would be reversed.
I decided to roll the dice.
I leaned toward Lavinia and put my hand on her shoulder. She let me pull her closer. We kissed.
Her response was tentative. That is to say she didn’t exactly kiss me back, but she didn’t pull away, either. That is to say, she let me kiss her. The radio was playing Autumn in New York. Which meant nothing, you understand. It’s just that I remember it.
After a minute we let our lips separate, so we could breathe. Sinus congestion, you should infer. I said, “Let’s go to your place.” I smoothed her hair. Mousse had made it coarse. Her violet irises floated in jaundiced cream. “To hell with Ivy,” I added huskily.
Her eyes were watching her fingertips tarry over my scalp. I might have taken this attention as significant, but experience told me that she was tracing the length of one or another tentacle. If I told you that some girls can’t resist this indulgence, would you believe me?
“I’m grateful at least that you didn’t suggest we go to your own foetid little pad,” she said tenderly.
“I’m trying to show respect. Plus, the nature of relationship is compromise.”
“On the other hand, how do you know my place is any less squalid than yours?”
“I’m an optimist.”
We toyed with one another. Physically, I mean. Mentally too, I suppose, we toyed with one another. Entoyment. Was that a word? It is now. There was an element of suspense, although the outcome was never really in doubt. It was the element of hope that was suspenseful. A tiny element of hope that made for a tiny element of uncertainty. But there was never all that much doubt. After a minute Lavinia couldn’t think up another way to go about it and, in fact, she didn’t care. So what if she thought up a cagey or devious or delusional way to go about it? I wouldn’t be fooled. So she simply said, “Can’t we go to Ivy’s first?”
Our toying ran down of its own accord, like a top drained of spin. Another minute passed. Our hands were hardly moving at all. Her eyes slid eastward.
“The bridge is right here,” she said.
“Yeah.” My eyes watched hers. “It is.”
“Easy on,” she shrugged, “easy off.”
I massaged her shoulder. “My idea precisely.”
She laughed without amusement. “We can do that later.”
I tapped one of her ear keys. It swung back and forth.
“If you still want to, I mean,” she said.
Every time the key swung back toward my finger, I touched it again, just perceptibly adding to its momentum, like pushing a monkey on a swing.
After a full minute of silence I said to the earring, “Do you really think that Angelica Stepnowski murdered her husband?”
Lavinia didn’t move. The little key swung back and I tapped it once, twice, three times. Then the musculature beneath the fine down that covered Lavinia’s cheek rippled and I heard, “Musicians are hard to live with.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Drummers are the worst. All those paradiddles, whatever you called them. What a drummer calls etudes everybody else calls noise.”
“But they love it.”
She nodded. “It’s still noise. But a musician has to practice. You’d think a woman who would marry a drummer would realize what she was letting herself in for.”
Her eyes met mine and we shared our inner depths, two aquariums that wanted cleaning. I looked away. “That’s what you would think.” What the hell was I expecting?
Lavinia said, “A musician wants to fuck; then he wants to play music. That’s his life.”
“Oy,” I agreed. “It seems so simple.”
“But a man is a man,” Lavinia continued. “Some men are good, some bad. So a guy’s a drummer. So what?”
“That Garcia guy thinks it was a crime of passion,” I noted. “That’s why the money wasn’t taken. The o
nly person in this picture to feel passionate about Stepnowski, theoretically, would be his wife.”
“He’s entitled to his opinion. And it lets us off the hook.”
“‘Like loveboids’,” I said.
“Who?”
“Stepnowski and his wife.”
“Angelica.”
“Loveboids.”
“How do you know?”
I shook my head. “I don’t.”
“Then why do you say so?”
“That’s what the landlord told me.”
“That guy? Yuck.”
“I know what you think of him, but that’s not the point. Listen to what he said. They were like that.” I entwined two fingers and held them up. “A couple of loveboids.”
“I wouldn’t believe that guy if he told me George W. Bush was a puppet of the oil industry.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a creep, that’s why.”
“Bush?”
“No. Yes. But I meant the landlord.”
“He was right about the De Haro Street address, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, so? Look what we found there.”
“That is what I’m looking at. Why did he send us there?”
“Because you tricked it out of him.”
“What if I wasn’t so smart as we think I was?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if that guy knew Stepnowski was already dead?”
“How would he know that?”
“Because he killed him?”
“Oh, yeah, right. For what? Back rent?”
“For the sound system.”
Now she was amused. “Stepnowski was a nowhere drummer that had over eight thousand bucks on him when he died. The only way he could have gotten that much dough was to sell that sound system. The King said so, Ivy said so, and I say so. If somebody set him up to rip him off for it, they would have cleaned out his pockets, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have missed eight grand in hundred-dollar bills. Am I right? Then Garcia’s right, too. It was a crime of passion. Stepnowski’s wife killed him cause he had a girlfriend. Or his girlfriend killed him because he had a wife. Or they both hired him killed because they were sick of paradiddles. Now please can we go get high?” She touched my cheek and smiled tenderly. “You can fuck me later, if you want.”
My phone rang.
Chapter Fourteen
CURLY, WHERE ARE YOU?”
You want to know something about musicians? When somebody they know calls them on the phone, they never have to ask who it is. Sound, to a musician, is identity. “I’m languishing in a purgatory of my own design, Ivy. Where are you?”
“In sunny Oakland, Curly, and I’m higher than Dizzy’s double D.”
“That’s peachy.”
“You sound like you’re still with Lavinia.”
“How perceptive.”
“Don’t you know better than to try to make it with your old buddy Ivy’s ex-girlfriends? A chick just can’t go from the percussion section to the strings, Curly. Not one with ambition, anyway. And don’t go trolling among the reeds for cast-offs either, while you’re at it. It’s like Bird going from Dizzy to Miles. A real comedown.”
“That opinion has been around for a long time, Ivy. Step out your back door and you’ll get an argument from a dead man on that one.”
Ivy said, “Miles was buying the Bird’s dope for him.”
This rationale of that opinion has been around for as long as the opinion. But what difference did it make to me? Musically, I couldn’t hang with any of those guys. The mere fact that such irrelevant op-ed material had even come up represented an anomaly in Ivy’s single-minded pursuit of the poppy. Which only meant, of course, that he was momentarily out of the business of pursuing it.
“Call the tune. I gotta go beg a man for meaningless, underpaid employment.”
“Forget that guy. I’m here to make your day meaningful and overpaid. How’d you like to make five hundred bucks in two hours?”
“Oh, no, Ivy,” I laughed. “I have frolicked in lucre’s golden shower enough for one week. It was just yesterday in fact. Twice in two days might kill me.”
“Okay,” Ivy said. “Seven-fifty.”
I glanced at Lavinia. Since it was Ivy calling, her radar was on. Avarice had dwindled her pupils to pinpricks.
“Two hours of work,” said Ivy. “Max.”
“Here,” was my answer, “talk to Lavinia.”
Before the phone was even on her ear, she said sweetly, “Hey, needle-dick. What’s up?”
As she listened she frowned. Then her face began to darken. Then she shook her head, no, but her mouth said, “Yeah, but….”
I looked out the window. Commuters had begun to inch along Beale Street, a block south of us. A double line of their cars had begun to back up from the Harrison Street on-ramp, where it merged eastbound onto the Bay Bridge. It must have become three-thirty, somehow. Time flies until your drugs wear off.
I sighed at the windshield. A seagull overflew the roof of the Lexus, over the automobiles creeping across Beale, and drifted down the last two blocks of Folsom to the waterfront; mulling its options, no doubt, whether to further enguano the statue of Harry Bridges or, if it was built yet, the monument to Herb Caen. Then maybe the gull would glide on down the Embarcadero and around the corner to Fisherman’s wharf, there to get in on the remains of one of those rounds of sourdough bread, about the size of a five-eighths frustum of a bowling ball and filled with crab chowder, that the tourists buy and eat a third or half of and discard into the gutters along Jefferson Street. From there, well, who knows, maybe there will be one more good year in which to follow the fleet to the herring before both the fish and its fishermen become extinct.
Altogether, despite the vicissitudes of progress, San Francisco is still a great place to be a seagull.
“Hold on.” Without bothering to put her hand over the microphone, which is hard to figure out how to do on a cellphone anyway, Lavinia said to me, “Ivy checked in with Sal.”
“If they don’t talk to each other, nobody else will,” I replied.
“Sal got a call from Angelica Stepnowski.”
If I had any more dog in me than I already do, my ears would have pointed at her. “And?”
“Remember that synthesizer Sal was wondering about?”
“Yeah…?”
“She’s got it. Wherever Stepnowski got all that dough, he didn’t get it from selling the synthesizer.”
“Good,” I said. “As her public defender bobs and weaves through the many shadows along her path to death row, maybe Angelica will learn one or two Brandenburg Concertos.”
“That’s not the proposition.”
I closed my eyes. “Of course it’s not. Ivy wouldn’t be calling if that were it. Ivy hates Bach. There’s no money in Bach for drummers.”
The cellphone emitted incoherent squawking.
I said, “Let me guess. If you, because you have the car, drive to wherever Mrs. Stepnowski is and pick up this synthesizer, and maybe pick up Mrs. Stepnowksi too, and bring it all down to the World of Sound, Sal ‘The King’ Kramer will make it well worth your while.” I pointed at the cell phone. “And Ivy’s, too. Is that it?”
Lavinia clasped the phone to her breast. “You are so smart.”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“Letter N, letter O. Go do it yourself.”
She shook her head. “No way.”
“Why not? It’s more bread for you and Ivy.”
The phone emitted incoherent squawks. “What?” Lavinia put it to her ear. “Okay, okay…. Yeah…. No.” She began to shake her head. “No,” she said sharply. “The guy’s a fucking creep, that’s why.” She raised her voice. “I’m not going out there without Curly!” She handed me the phone.
“If you can get the car off that bitch,” Ivy said, “the split will be seven-fifty apiece.”
“How about I just do the whole thing myself and leave
both of you out of it?” I suggested. “What then?”
“Curly,” Ivy said patronizingly, “Sal isn’t going to hand this contract over to you, because Sal knows that guitar players got no balls. They’re too worried about their hands.”
“Listen, Ivy—”
“Let’s get one thing straight: This is my gig. You work it for me or you don’t work it at all—get it?”
“Fine,” I said. “Adios.”
Ivy’s tone changed without missing a beat. “Come on, blood. It’s easy money. The chick’s waiting for you to come get the thing. It’s practically in your lap. Borrow the car.”
I knew what Lavinia would say but I asked anyway.
She mouthed the words: “No fucking way.”
I said into the phone, “No fucking way.”
Ivy said, “Shit. Come get me, then.”
“Go get him, then,” I said to her.
Lavinia looked thoughtful. “Is there any dope left?”
I repeated the question into the phone.
“What dope?” came the response.
Lavinia threw a hand toward Beale Street. “The bridge is already backed up.”
“It’ll be an hour before she gets there, plus at least an hour back.”
“Forget it,” Lavinia said loudly.
After a pause Ivy said, “Okay. We’re back to fifteen hundred split three ways.”
One month’s rent and change for two hours of riding around. I looked at Lavinia. “Five hundred bucks, and I go with you.” She frowned. I waited. She nodded. “Deal,” I told the phone.
“Good.” Ivy cleared his throat. “There’s a catch.”
“Oh,” I said to nobody in particular, “there’s a catch.”
“What catch?” Lavinia said.
“You gotta front five hundred bucks to the Stepnowski broad.”
“What?”
“It’s half the down payment. She gets the cash to blow town, Sal gets his synth back. That’s the deal.”