Wizard, who owned Venice Cab, gave her a three-nights-a-week job and a little room at the back of the garage when the month ran out on the single apartment.
The space Wizard let her use was once part of the garage. It had a concrete floor, cinder-block walls, and a small window that looked out to his vegetable garden. He had built an interior wall with plywood to make this little harbor. The bed was a mattress on a wooden workbench built from two~by-fours, four feet off the ground. There was plenty of room for storage underneath. She didn't come close to filling it. The bathroom was at the other end of the shop, a toilet and a sink, and she made do.
She loved the night shift, loved it when the world slowed down to a trickle of the infrequent lone driver. Bars were closed, drunks passed out, druggies stayed indoors. At four in the morning, an occasional trucker lumbered down Main Street. Delivery tmcks came with dawn.
She started collecting wrenches and sockets, soon outgrowing the lunch-box-size tackle box Wizard had given her. At his encouragement, she saved her money and bought a five-drawer Craftsman toolbox new at Sears. It was red with gray handles. She engraved her name on the top and kept the key to the lock in her pocket.
She was really getting a handle on things, not drinking until the end of the shift, and then just to take the edge off the bennies.
Then, one day; she got that little urge, triggered by any number of things. The smell of burning sulfur was enough to do it, to give her that feeling in the back of her throat, to start the clatter of demons in her head. She remembered thinking she'd get a taste—just a taste—to fix a particularly nasty hangover. Once the idea entered her brain, she could think of nothing else. Maybe she could handle it this time, shoot a little smack without getting all strung out again. Dope fiends even had a name for it: chipping. Meaning occasional use. A now-and-then thing. If it had a name, it must be possible, right? She didn't know then that one time was already too many and a thousand was never enough.
She was out of touch with the life and had to search all the old haunts until she found a dealer. By then her nose was wide open. There was no question but that she would find it.
It was a dangerous combination: money in her pocket and knowing who had the bag. Soon she was camping out in the alley outside Donna Dumbcunt's little basement apartment, waiting for the bitch to get back and open for business.
Munch didn't forget exactly she was just too busy chasing the bag to go back to work. She let Wizard down one time too many And then she was right back at it with one more sorrow to drown.
Too sick to turn tricks, she dragged herself back to Flower George, telling herself that staying with her father was only going to be a temporary arrangement. She would get out, she would make it to the country and she would have that little house that was all her own, her own kitchen to stock, a little plot of ground where she'd grow vegetables, maybe even have some chickens, yeah, and a milk cow.
Flower George took her to the Mexicans, living five, six, ten to a flat, and waited outside smoking cigarettes while she serviced the masses. Even then, at ten bucks a pop, there were those who refused her. Somehow this hurt her feelings. What did it take, she wondered, until nothing was left?
The Mexicans had pickup trucks and wore black cowboy hats. There were decals of brovm horse heads on the rear windows of their pickup trucks. Their jeans and boots smelled of manure.
She saw her face in the mirror, saw the dark black sacks beneath her eyes, and realized to her horror that she'd done it again, she'd gotten all strung out. She didn't want to be a slave to grains of powder, to sloppy middle-aged fat men who tried to put their mouth on hers no matter how many times she told them, "No kissing."
She wanted a new town where nobody knew her, a job fixing cars, maybe even a motorcycle if that wasn't too much to dream.
And then the cops were on her again. She totaled two cars while driving a borrowed truck and tried to flee the scene. They found her syringes. They couldn't keep the revulsion from their faces.
"You use these?" they asked.
In the cold harsh light of the booking room, she saw how disgusting her works had to look to these people. The cotton thread she'd used to tie the rubber to the plunger. The bent needle. The old blackened spoon, licked clean too many times.
She went to jail, but only for a month.
Flower George wasn't waiting in the parking lot for her when she got released.
She had to hitchhike back to Venice. Sleaze was back in town, she heard. She didn't have the energy left to find him.
She never asked, but once someone mentioned that Thor was in the joint. She waited for them to say for what, but the specifics didn't come up, and she let the news wash past her.
She meant to get a place, but got no farther than the mattress on the floor at Flower George's. One of the Mexicans gave her a card to the free clinic after they'd had sex. Only half sex really because the sores on his dick made it too painful to continue. The card was written in both Spanish and English.
It read: You may have been infected.
She threw it away There were some things she didn't want to know, but mostly she didn't care. What comes around, goes around.
She saw Evie again. Evie, the hooker with the knot in her belly
Evie said, "Guess what? You're never going to believe it. You remember how big my stomach was getting? Turns out I was pregnant. I didn't even know until I went to jail. How about that?"
Munch acted mildly amused, imagining Evie's surprise. She didn't think that would ever happen to her—the not knowing part. She'd only been pregnant once, when she was seventeen. The pregnancy was over before it barely begin, yet she knew the whole time. Felt an excited flutter at the thought of a new life inside her, started collecting baby stuff, had a crib and everything. It was Sleaze John's baby she was sure of that. She couldn't believe how much a miscarriage hurt. The hospital shot her up with Demerol and after that she was on her own.
And then it was February 12, 1977, and she was on a bar stool at the Venture Inn and some sad-eyed man was buying her drinks. The man was Mace St. John and he was there to arrest her for the murder of Flower George. By the grace of God and the programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, she hadn't had a drink or a hit of dope since, and all it took was complete abstinence and changing everything about herself. Simple. Not the same thing as easy Sometimes she wondered if Sleaze had to die so she could live. If he hadn't died, would he have eventually drawn her back into the life? Did God toss a coin to make the choice? No, that wasn't right. God didn't test people. He didn't have to. Life tested people.
Every day in a person's life, every action taken or not taken went against his or her final grade.
With all these images from her past raging in her head, Munch arrived back at work. Safe, comfortable work, where all her customers knew her as the lady mechanic—the woman they could count on to fix their problems and give them a fair deal. The guys she worked with knew she had some problems in her past, but they didn't talk about them. It wasn't relevant. God, please, let me keep my lifie. Don't let this end.
Chapter 21
Munch looked up as a pickup truck outfitted for construction work pulled up to the self-service pumps. She saw the HIGHER POWER bumper sticker and watched to see who got out. The driver looked familiar. He was big, well over six feet, and about forty judging by the gray in his hair and the seasoned look to the muscles in his arms.
She walked out to greet him. "You a friend of Bill W.?" This was program code. Bill Wilson was one of the founders of AA.
The guy grinned. "Sure am."
They exchanged names and lengths of sobriety He was Mike, he told her, Big Mike.
"Yeah," she said, "I've seen you around. What do you run in this thing?"
"Regular," he said, "especially at these prices."
Munch made no apology The station was in Brentwood. Everything cost more, including the rent.
She handed him the pump nozzle and flipped the cradle up.
"Do you have a job around here?"
"Mandeville Canyon."
"There's been some trouble up there lately."
"The cops came by yesterday They wanted to look at my employee manifest."
"Did they say why?"
"They were investigating a murder. Some woman was found down by the junior high school."
Munch held her reaction in check. "In the storm drain. I've been following it in the newspaper. What I did it have to do with your job site?"
"I don't know. They wouldn't say. Maybe they go after all the working stiffs. All I know is I got a lot of guys working for me who are trying to get their lives together. Guys with records. I know these guys.
They're sober. They're trying. How would it be if they knew I gave them up to the cops?"
"You got a guy named Cyrill painting for you? He's on the Program. "
"We're not far enough along in the project for finish work." The gas pump clicked off at $19.85. Big Mike removed the nozzle from his gas tank and replaced his gas cap. He handed Munch a twenty before she could explain that she wasn't a pump attendant. She went to get his change, but when she looked up from the cash register, he was already driving away
She went into Lou's office and sat behind his desk. He had been calling junkyards earlier, looking for a steering column for a Ford Econoline van, and the phone book was still lying on top of his desk. She was thinking about all those TV and VCR boxes Rico had that were stamped PASCOE APPLIANCES. She didn't want him to be crooked, necessarily but it would level the playing field between them if he was.
She turned to the Yellow Pages and looked up Pascoe Appliances. They had a quarter-page ad that claimed they were a family-owned business established in 1952. The phone number was in bold red ink. A man's voice answered the phone. "Pascoe. How can I help you?"
"I know this is going to sound strange, but have you been robbed lately?"
"Personally?"
"The store, I mean. "
"No, and nobody better mess with me either. My daughter is engaged to a cop."
"Would that be Kathy?"
"You know her?"
"I know the name. I hadn't heard about the engagement."
"We just found out ourselves. We couldn't be happier. And who are you?"
She mumbled that she had to go and hung up just as Lou walked into the office.
"I'm not feeling too good," she said.
"I can see that. You want to take off early?"
"Yeah, I won't be any good to you here." They talked a few minutes about the jobs in progress and what she expected to come in.
"You think this bug is going to last?" he asked.
"Too soon to tell."
"Go now if you want."
"Thanks, I just have a few more calls to make."
He held her gaze for a minute. "You need anything else, ask. What about Asia?"
"She's got rehearsals after school. I don't need to pick her up until six."
"Good, good. Well, then. I'll, uh, be outside."
"Thanks."
She didn't know where she wanted to go, she just knew it needed to be somewhere where no one would know to look for her. She reached into her purse and pulled out Roxanne's phone bill, then she turned to the front of the phone book. This time she looked up prefixes, checking them against the Los Angeles phone numbers Nathan had called from Roxanne's. She found two calls to the same number in Compton, several more to three different numbers on the Westside, and one to a Valley exchange.
Deb kept up connections, it seemed. Were any of these dope connections? Is that where Nathan had gotten his drugs'?
She called the Compton number. "Is this Mrs. Franklin? Doleen Franklin?"
"Yes it is."
"You don't know me. My name is Munch Mancini."
"You the girl Nathan's been staying with."
"Yes, ma'am. Do you think I could come visit you? I want to discuss something that involves your grandson."
"What' s he done?"
"Nothing too terrible. I was hoping to keep it like that."
Munch wrote down the address and told the woman she'd be there as soon as traffic permitted. Doleen Franklin had a small wooden clapboard house with a cactus garden. The spiniest species grew beneath the windows. Munch knew this was no accident. All the windows on the block were protected by burglar bars. Likenesses of big-jowled dogs and the business ends of large-caliber revolvers hung on chain-link gates. Red-and-white signs read BEWARE OF DOG and BEWARE OF OWNER.
Munch parked on the street. The front door opened; an older black woman emerged and lifted a hand in greeting.
"Mrs. Franklin?"
"Call me Doleen. That or Mama D. The onlyest people ever call me Mrs. Franklin want my money or come to tell me bad news."
"I'm here for neither."
She chuckled and held the door open. "Come on in. I made us some lemonade."
The house smelled of fried food. Doleen was a big woman with fleshy arms and wide hips. Her fingernails were trimmed short. Her mostly gray hair was permed in tight curls and held flat against her head with a hair net. She was wearing a flowered housedress, cotton hose, and sensible shoes—black and rubber-soled. She wore thick-lensed eyeglasses with dark, no-nonsense frames. Munch sat on the living room couch on cushions wrapped in knitted blankets. The chairs on either side of the coffee table were upholstered in fabric from different decades, but coordinated with lace doilies on the backs and arms.
Religious statues adorned the bookshelves. The television was on and tuned to the soap opera All My Children.
Doleen shuffled into the room with a lacquered tea tray Munch stood and took it from her.
"Bless your heart. You want some cookies? I got some HoHos up in the freezer. "
"No, I'm fine. Please sit. I don't mean for you to go to any trouble,"
Doleen sat next to Munch and fixed her attention on the television, where skinny white women plotted against each other. She chuckled at their antics, shaking her head and murmuring, "Don't that beat all?"
Munch watched the soap people confront each other on the fuzzy black-and-white screen. Years ago, she and Deb had followed this same show, and when Munch went to jail that month, she learned that prisoners, male and female, followed the series with religious fervor. Susan Lucci's Erica was as conniving as ever and still beautiful. It wasn't difficult to pick up the story line. Erica was scheming to break up yet another happy couple.
Munch waited until the show broke for commercial to broach the subject of her visit. "Nathan's a great kid."
Doleen's eyes loomed large behind her thick lenses.
"Um hmm." She said it as if she were waiting for the "but."
"He's working hard. Got himself a job as soon as he got to town."
"Bless his little heart. You see what he gave me for my birfday?" She got up before Munch could stop her and lumbered off to the bathroom. She returned moments later holding a glass swan hand-towel holder.
"When was your birthday?"
"January."
Munch turned the swan over in her hands. She would treasure such a gift. "I never met Walter, but I knew Deb pretty well."
The older woman closed her eyes as if in prayer and said, "Deborah."
Doleen limped stiff-legged down her hallway telling Munch over her shoulder, "Wait here." When she returned from the back of the house, she had a photograph album. She set it on the coffee table, moving aside the bowls of waxed fruit and peppermint candy. She opened the thick cardboard cover and showed Munch pictures of smiling black people.
"This is my Walter," she said. Walter was sitting in what appeared to be a living room, looking up and smiling at the camera. His arms were skinny but knotted with muscles. He was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, a thick gold chain, and a big smile. His hair was styled in a big Afro and he was no-lie gorgeous.
"Walter was one fine-looking man," Munch said.
Doleen smiled fondly and traced his picture with weathered fingers. "He was beautiful just
like his daddy"
"Was he always into music?"
"Um hmm. " Now her voice was deep and melodious. It often seemed to Munch that black people had a way of tapping into a rhythm of a world that she had no access to, some undercurrent of beat that connected them all. Infinitely hip, dangerously seductive. She heard tantalizing wisps of that cadence in every "uh-hub" and "That's right" uttered by people of colors mysterious to her. Her old boss Wizard was suffused with it. She used to time herself to the rhythm of his nodding head, falling easily into the beat of it when she was standing next to him, as if she were listening to a song with a contagious pulse. It was a wondrous thing about him—perhaps born of a heritage of pain—its root in exotic lands rich with color and texture. Nathan didn't have it, she realized suddenly. Another thing they'd stamped out of him.
"Black is beautiful" wasn't a sentiment expressed much up there in redneck land.
"Walter played the piano over at the church when he was li'l. Such beautiful hands." Doleen kissed her fingers and touched them gently to the photograph. .
"Deb said he worked three jobs at once?"
"Oh, child, yes. That boy was going places. Alls he ever wanted was to make his music. The ladies loved him too. Yes they did."
Doleen turned the page to a picture of young Nathan dressed in his Sunday best—a powder—blue suit that Deb had sewn herself.
"I remember when Deb had these taken," Munch said. "We got these coupons from someone who came to the door. "
"She was always good about pictures, bless her heart," Doleen said, then added, "Yes she was," under her breath, talking more to the past than to Munch. She turned the page to show Munch a group of four more photographs, this time of Nathan and Walter side by side on the Venice boardwalk. Munch wondered if the Social Security people would accept pictures as proof. Nathan was wearing his little Levi's coat, the one with the Harley wings patch sewn on the back and treble clefs embroidered on the collar. Their little Boogieman. Walter wore a leather vest with nothing underneath and was making a peace symbol with his right hand. Nathan squinted into the sun, his Kodak slung around his neck.
Unpaid Dues Page 17