The Octopus on My Head

by Jim Nisbet

  Money. Goddamn money.

  The key ring had the two keys to get into the building and the apartment, plus the mailbox key. Mail meant bills. To stave off that disappointment I restrung the guitar. I tuned it, too, but I didn’t play it. I stood it against the wall behind the door and went downstairs to collect the mail.

  There was a bill from the cell phone company: Forty-seven bucks. Peanuts. What that meant was few calls and even less business. There was the usual junk mail—two credit card offers, a postcard depicting a two-headed dog created by animal-abusing scientists in Russia, and a pink flier advertising a water-efficient toilet I could buy from the city for ten dollars in an Embarcadero warehouse two Saturdays ago. The eviction notice was pro forma. The lawyers that owned the building could double or even triple the rent if they managed to get me out of there. But I still had ten days to pay the overdue rent.

  The only piece of mail that looked real was a lumpy envelope from Children’s Hospital, hand-addressed to me.

  I must have forgotten my worry beads.

  I opened it. A car key on a ring with a Lexus alarm fetish fell onto the table. There was a letter, too, hand printed on three feet of toilet paper.

  Curly Darling,

  You should have let me take the gun, you stupid fuck.

  Okay. I got that off my chest.

  I didn’t think I was going to get a chance to write. Mother’s been watching me like a hawk. But right now she’s down the hall arguing about what the insurance covers. My nurse said he’d see that this letter got stamped and mailed if I could get it to him by the end of his shift. It’s a bitch with one wrist in a cast and oops the pen tears this paper but here goes.

  Looks like this is the end for me and San Francisco, Curly. I didn’t make much of a run at the old town either and anyway, it’s more like the town has made a run at me. I’m done. Remember how we used to make fun of trust-fund kids from the East Coast? The ones who came west, kept you up all night talking about Art, took every drug, wrecked your car, broke up someone’s marriage, starred in a porn film, and disappeared without a trace? Friend, lover, no matter, poof: Gone with not even an adiós. Years later one or another of them would be spotted wearing a silly hat on a late-night TV commercial, insisting on the quality of the used cars vended by the dealership he’d inherited from his daddy in Buffalo. Now he’s treasurer of the Rotarians, a member of his wife’s church, he’s got the golf game down to a six handicap whatever that means, there’s one kid in college with two still in high school, and his cocaine consumption is confined to two binges a year at his beachfront timeshare in Belize.

  Those guys. Remember them?

  Well, Curly, brace yourself. Except for the used cars and the cocaine—I hope—c’est moi. I just held out longer than the rest of them, that’s all. And it’s not Buffalo, it’s Pittsburgh.

  I haven’t seen Daddy in years and Mother’s married to a man I can’t stand but the fact is there are considerable assets that need looking after—they came to me from Grandmother—and I just can’t pretend to manage them long-distance and strung out anymore. I see that now. A bank has been looking after them for years but it seems they’ve squandered and mismanaged and maybe even embezzled a meaningful portion of my nest egg and, as you musicians say, use it or lose it—right?

  Not that I’ll have to bite the bullet exactly. Mother’s found a nice place in rural Pennsylvania where they ease you off whatever drug you’re stuck on with a decreasing dose and a strict regime. Whatever it takes. You even get a personal trainer. The trust will pay for it so money’s not a problem. In short—a new life!

  Okay, Christopher just stuck his head in the door to say he’s clocking out in five minutes.

  I want you to have the Lexus. (As far as I know it’s still parked around the corner from—ugh—you know where.) I’ll mail you the title when I get out of detox, if I can find it. Meanwhile the registration is current until I think June. If Mother remembers the car at all I’ll tell her I totaled it after I let the insurance lapse. By the way I was awake when she got rid of you this morning. Rightly or wrongly she associates you with Ivy and San Francisco and everything west of the Monongahela River, which is anathema to her, so I thought it best to ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’ Once Mother makes up her mind she is rather intransigent.

  Here’s Christopher.

  I learned a lot from you Curly. Forget being a security guard, okay? Don’t ever give up on your real talent. I’ll be watching the bins for your records!

  Love,

  Lavinia

  As regarded her daughter’s recovery, it didn’t look like Mrs. Threllgood was going to have much to worry about.

  I was sitting with the key in one hand and the thirty-inch tail of the letter in the other, thinking that the last time I missed a bus after a gig and had to walk home amounted to the last time I stayed up all night for art, when the cell phone rang. I jumped so hard, my cracked rib tweaked. It startled me. It really did.

  “Mr. Curly Watkins, please.”

  “Padraic,” I gasped, pressing the rib with the palm of my free hand, “is that really you?”

  “Do people actually buy drugs from you?”

  “Who, me? Never. I give them away.”

  “You don’t sell them? Truly?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. I need a guitarist.”

  “You—?” I cleared my throat. “The rates you pay, I’m sure you do.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. But you fired me just…. When did you fire me?”

  “Three, four weeks ago. Forget about that. The guys been coming through here, you wouldn’t believe these guys. And they call themselves musicians?”

  Three weeks? Four? It seemed like a year. “Did you advertise?”

  “Advertising costs money. I put a notice in the window. Better I should put a sign on my back: KICK ME HARD. They are bad, these guys. Bad musicians!”

  “What, no girls?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Pretty girls, tall girls, three girls at once, even a pregnant girl. But they don’t got… what you call it.”

  I shrugged. “Chutzpah?”

  “Chutzpah, they got. What they don’t have is songs. I mean knowledge. You know? What do you call it?”

  Chops, I thought to myself. Aloud I said, “Repertoire?”

  “That’s it. Repertoire. How come this stuff is in French?”

  “You mean how come it’s not in Arabic?”

  “It is in Arabic. But you don’t speak Arabic.”

  “I don’t speak French either.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Curly. You are one hundred percent American.”

  I looked at the letter. It looked like toilet paper with writing on it. I wondered if it already came like that, by the roll, with the writing already on it. They could sell it in train stations. The wad of hundred dollar bills took on an abstract quality too, ruined and illegible like a waterlogged book. But somebody already makes toilet paper that looks like money. My eye fell on the Lexus key and I thought, I could drive to work.

  “Same old job?”

  “Yeah.” Padraic said. “Sure.”

  I’d known Padraic Mousaief for a long time. In an environment designed to help his customers linger, he was convinced that just the right music would encourage them to linger longer. It had to do with money.

  “Three sets? Forty-five minutes each? Forty-five bucks and dinner? A glass of wine after each set?”

  “I was thinking maybe thirty-five bucks and an extra glass of wine, before you start—plus the one at the end,” he hastily added.

  “I like that extra glass of wine. Even your wine. But I gotta have the forty-five bucks. Isn’t that what you meant when you said it was the same gig?”

  Padraic hesitated. “Some people come in, they ask where are you.”

  “Make it sixty bucks. Dinner, sixty bucks, and four glasses of wine.”

  Silence on the line. I was certain I could hear the satellite whi
stling through the ionosphere. Finally Padraic said, “Okay. I accept.”

  “No, my friend, I accept.”

  “But you don’t play loaded.”

  “Padraic,” I said. “Have you ever known me to play loaded?”

  He let that one go. “Six-thirty. We’ll talk before you start at seven.”

  I grabbed a bus up Van Ness to Geary and maintained an uninterrupted train of thought about mostly nothing in the back of the nearly empty 39, even as it bored into a freezing wall of evening fog at Arguello. The bus and I stayed like that, cool and empty, all the way out Geary to 38th Avenue.

  Walking downhill toward Anza the westerly nearly tore the gig bag off my back. I switched it to the windward shoulder. Better a guitar handcrafted in the mountains of Guerrero, whose luthier never imagined conditions such as these, than me. I wore a pea jacket, buttoned to my Adam’s apple with the collar turned up, and a watch cap. The Navy wore such caps and jackets in the North Atlantic during World War II, but so what? A San Francisco fog penetrates them like gasoline wicks through cheesecloth.

  The Lexus was parked where we’d left it, and its windshield wipers were festooned with parking tickets. They flapped in the breeze like a row of Tibetan prayer flags, each envelope half a day or a day more weather-beaten than the one succeeding it. The moment I swept them into the gutter, the car was mine. People had noticed that the back window was blown out and helped themselves to the CD player, the spare tire, and the jack. The trunk, the driver’s door, the glove box and the console lid were all open. Somebody had wiped their miserable ass with Lavinia’s picnic blanket—that’s what it looked like, anyway, from a discreet distance—and left it in the gutter. Insurance notices, maps, more parking tickets, and pages of the owner’s manual were lifting and settling in windy eddies up and down the sidewalk.

  Lids closed, blanket and tickets disposed of, this was still a nice car. But even blowfish, perfectly prepared, has its dark side. Somebody had been spending his nights in my back seat. The odor peculiar to an unwashed body suppurating badly metabolized wine from every pore clung tenaciously to the car’s interior. Somebody had pissed back there, too. The more expensive the upholstery, the more difficult it is to get rid of such aromas. Ever notice that?

  Somebody had knifed the leather upholstery and broken the steering lock, but nobody had bothered to steal the battery. The car started and purred, as silent and smooth as the odors from the back seat were loud and rough. All said and done, the Lexus might have the makings of a perfect street ride: trashed on the outside, mechanically sound on the inside. So what if the seats had been slashed? In such condition, people might leave it alone.

  I powered down all the windows for the fresh air and made a U-turn out of the parking space. This put me on 38th looking south across Anza. I took a right, westbound, and immediately passed Torvald’s adjacent houses. Both properties were garlanded with yellow Police Line, Do Not Cross, and Crime Scene tape, vibrating in the wind. A sheet of unpainted plywood was nailed over the front door of Torvald’s home. Some lengths of tape had parted. The buildings with their trailing ribbons gave the impression of a grounded box kite, its two sections painted the same shade of an unadventurous gray.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I DROVE THE TEN OR TWELVE BLOCKS OUT FULTON TO THE beach and parked there with the engine running. A sea was running too, much louder than the Lexus motor. Two surfers lingered astride their boards in the gloom of dusk, trying to make sense of water that boils at fifty-five degrees. A couple of dog walkers were way up the beach. Everything they had, hair, shirttails, pantlegs, parka hoods, and the mane of their golden retriever was blowing straight east. The Lexus engine was so quiet I could hear grains of sand ticking against the windshield. If I parked the car out there every night for a year, the glass would become opalescent.

  Caffeine Machine held down the corner of Judah and 44th Avenue, a streetcar stop just a few blocks east of the Great Highway and Land’s End. One thing about that address, there is always parking. Another thing is the streetcars that thunder by in two directions at all hours. Their rumble generally cancels out whatever guitar playing is going on inside the front window of the coffee house. But, hey, they say it rained at Woodstock.

  Despite the freezing wind Padraic was pacing up and down the sidewalk out front, speaking Arabic into his cellphone and smoking a cigarette. He always sounded like he was arguing when he spoke Arabic; he sounded that way when he was speaking English, too. I didn’t blame him. The son of a Palestinian professor of economics and an Irish relief worker, he grew up in Ramallah. When the Israelis nabbed a first cousin in an arms smuggling sting, they bulldozed every relative’s home, and Padraic’s side of the clan made its way to Jordan, where they languished in a refugee camp for two years before an uncle managed to land the three of them in San Francisco. That was a break, and Padraic was making the most of it. But, on the whole, Padraic Mousaief remained a naturally pissed-off guy.

  Things hadn’t changed inside the cafe, either. There were a vocal and guitar mike in the window to the right of the front door with a small wooden chair, very casual, to give the appearance that the entertainer had just taken a notion to get up there and play, inspired-like.

  The rest of the place was equally stark and equally contrived. The floor was sanded fir with a hard finish. The walls had a nasturtium frieze in yellows, greens, and a loud orange, painted by an amateur for the price of the materials and a year of free coffee. The twelve-foot ceiling was high enough to hang art from the picture rail without its lower corners dangling in the soup or gouging customers in the back. There were always paintings or photographs on the walls, provided by a professional service that came around once a month to change them. All pictures were for sale. Padraic got a cut, the service got a cut, and, who knows, maybe the artist got a cut, too.

  It had taken me a while to figure out what was going on in this place, but eventually I realized that Padraic had obtained all his chairs and all his tables from a day-care center that had gone out of business. That the price was right—get this stuff out of here and it’s yours—went without saying; but having been constructed for children his tables and chairs could not comfortably accommodate an adult for any length of time. For some reason, rather than discouraging repeat business, the cramped seating increased it. My theory was that Padraic’s customers were so wrapped up in their internal discomfort it never occurred to them that there could be an external, and simpler, cognate. The small furniture also explained why Padraic was able to jam fifty or so settings with a kitchen and a pastry counter into a thousand square feet.

  One thing I never figured out was why, despite mediocre food and abysmal service provided by an ever-changing staff of clueless youth working for minimum wage plus tips, Caffeine Machine had lines for Sunday brunch. Lots of people hung around the rest of the time, too, drinking coffee, typing on their laptop computers, talking on their cellphones, and pushing feckless heaps of hashed brown potatoes around their plates while they discussed—what?

  There was music playing almost all the time. Often I’d hear what has now become mainstream jazz—Kind of Blue Miles Davis and so forth—but most of the time Padraic let the kids working the tables play whatever they wanted to bring in, thus saving him the expense of purchasing CDs.

  Often I wondered why Padraic wanted any live music in his place at all. But despite the canned art, the uncomfortable environment, and a decidedly unartistic clientele, they and Padraic too were acting out a nostalgia for a San Francisco they’d only heard about, a bohemian, poetry-spouting, Socialist, dues-paying, longshoreman, merchant-marine, two-fisted, labor-organizing, jazz-loving, jazz-playing, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, pot-growing, blue-collar milieu that is nothing if not ninety percent perished from the glorious island of prime real estate that retains the name of San Francisco. No daring thin ice for the cafe owner who hangs great art on the walls of his joint because his wife insists it’s great; no clutch of credit chits under the tray in the cas
h register, the names on which can be found in almost equal number along the spines in the poetry room at City Lights Books; no pawned musical instruments in the back room, either; or forgotten dogeared underlined copies of Verlaine erotica or Mingus charts. Me? I was there because my rent-controlled apartment allowed me to work in San Francisco for forty-five—make that sixty—dollars a night, supplemented by music lessons and royalties from songs I’d published fifteen years before. I entertained no illusions; Padraic retained my services as a nostalgia act, as vestigial to his Bohemian cafe as glass slippers on a two-toed amphiuma.

  The door opened and closed behind me. “So you’ve come.”

  I had aged years since I’d last set foot in this cafe. The customers looked like kids. They looked naive, innocent, thin, prosperous, uninteresting, and let’s don’t forget ambitious. Hard by me sat a young woman reading a book called How to Get Rich and Stay That Way—N.Y. Times National Best-Seller!

  “Yes, Padraic,” I turned to face him, “I’ve come.” Padraic wore a look of well-fed prosperity. A cookie-cutter version of this cafe half-way across town, Caffeine Machine No. 2, backed up this image with cash. No. 3 was in the works. He had the Mercedes SUV and three kids and a wife and a house in which to keep them all, too, but, no dummy, Padraic Mousaief bought his house in Hayward, across the Bay and twenty miles south on the freeway, where, they tell me, money still means something.

  “Jesus Christ, Curly, what happened to your face?”

  “I had an accident. But, don’t worry. I feel … centered.”

  Padraic frowned. How can a shaved head with an octopus tattooed on it get any weirder? Well, start with a centipede of sutures, then add two black eyes. But I still had the watch cap on, so the face must have looked pretty bad.

  Padraic overcame his misgivings enough to parry, “You should feel rested. A month without working? You sell a big song or something? Still, you look tired. How about a nice cup of coffee?” He clasped my arm and smiled. “On me.”