by D. Foy
“Dinky needs help, right now,” I said, shivering, “but the phone’s still dead.”
“You know like we know that the closest you are to another phone is a generous league. You seen the distance between here and the next abode.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. Like his hands, it felt hard as ivory, and cold. Even out here I could smell him—cigarettes, marijuana, blood. “But what about your place?” I said, desperate, knowing as I spoke the vanity of my words. “Don’t you live somewhere here nearby? Don’t you have a phone?”
“Your phone, boy, was fixed and fixed. If it don’t work, nobody’s does.” He may as well have handed me a rock. “Where’s Laertes?” he said. “We’ll be needing his size for the expedition we have in mind.”
“He’s a little scared of you,” I said.
“And yet what with our wheels knee high in mud, we require a beast of his mass.”
Super’s company back to the cabin was welcomer to me than his presence was to Basil at it.
“Is he kidding?” he said when I told him Super wanted his help.
The old man stood just outside, smoking and sucking his teeth. “Come with us, now, Laertes,” he said, and leaned in and pointed at Dinky. “Any little fuzznuts can see what our good cousin’s worth. And as for young Horatio here, even if he does have a furious heart, well, he’s just a bit too scrawny.”
“If you think for even two seconds I’m going out there,” Basil said, “into that, with you no less, you’re one hell of a lot crazier than I thought.”
Hickory squared herself to Basil. She whispered. “Dinky is sick, Basil. Do you understand?”
“I know it.”
“So then pull on your boots and all that and help the man get help.”
“How do I know he’s not going to slice my throat once he’s got me hunched over out there in Shitholeville?”
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“If he was going to mess you up,” I said, “he’d have already done it.”
“That’s a joke,” Lucille said.
“Andrew’s right,” Hickory said. “Why else would he be here?”
“Oh Laeeeeee-er-teeeees,” Super said, sounding like Bugs-Freaking-Bunny taunting Elmer Fudd. Basil said nothing and glared. Super waved his pipe. “We’ve got a little something for the road, if you catch our drift.”
He’d poked my friend where he was soft. Basil knew about Super’s drugs. That’s a thing he’d never forget.
“And this is no ordinary bud we’re talking about,” I said. “You get some of what he’s got and you’ll be riding a freaking dragon.”
Basil looked at me and Super and then at Super’s pipe. Then he pulled his porkpie down and said, “What’s a little more rain?”
DINKY’S HEAD ALONE DIDN’T WEIGH TWO-FORTY. And he wasn’t fat, either, just thick as a Nordic killer. And something else that confounded the world, myself included, was his skin, tan all year and, like a doll’s, seamless. It was his skin, I figured, that kept folks from seeing what a speed buster he’d been those years at Hastings, when the professor would call him out to say, for instance, whether a man who’d signed a contract with another man and then stabbed that man with a pencil could be held liable, given he’d met his contractual obligation—Mr Wainwright, will you please explain?—and Dinky, insomniacal, garbed rain or shine in rugby shirt and Bermuda shorts, would totter from his seat to hold forth like a limey MP. But just as the class thought itself with a kook, Dinky would somehow manage to conjure the magic words. “And finally, sir,” he said that time I accompanied him, “since the injury in question has nothing to do with said contract, it should rightly be considered a circumstance actionable in tort. Thus, by virtue of precedent, that being Tabucchi vs. Collins, 1976, the answer to your question must be indisputably affirmative.” And that was him. He’d huff and he’d puff like some crook on the lamb, but unless he wanted you to see it, what you saw was a man turned gold from days on a lounge in the sun, impeccable coif and skin.
Well, he was huffing and puffing now, only his hair was gone and his skin like a plum in dirt. He was so far out, in fact, it took us all to drag him to his room. We got him in the bed with his snot rags and porns, and when the gang withdrew, Basil grumbling about the dope Super’d best give him, Dinky and I were left with no one for comfort but the clown on the wall, chained to its horrible stasis.
Super as it happens never did give Basil the pipe. Fiend that he was, the old man tormented my pal, dangling the pipe before him like some thingamajig of beckoning. He knew full well Basil couldn’t resist trying to snatch it. The two slogged along for what Basil later described as “a shitload of time,” up the road opposite their aim, until at last they wound about headed toward the 50, by which time Basil had been reduced to beggary, and then to outright theft. Predictably, he said, he waited till Super lost himself in a rant on the treachery of winter before lunging at his pocket. Super, however, unlike Basil, wasn’t born at night or a fool. In short order, he slammed my friend against a tree and stuck a cutter to his throat while Fortinbras locked fangs on his ankle. Basil just stood there—what else?—helpless before the pictures in his mind, he said, though in the end they surrendered to a single image—Gomer Pyle’s face, grinning like the village dolt. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!
For a long time I didn’t know a thing about this tale. Had Basil not called me a few months later, after I’d moved away and rented a shack by the river in Portland, I wouldn’t have known anything but what he’d told me the first time round, all of which, as it turns out, was a lie. But he did tell me, and, for what it was worth at the time, given our fix, I believed him.
The way he put it, Super slammed him against that tree strictly to air the knowledge he’d got these years wandering the vasty planet. There Basil stood, looking into Super’s eyes, knowing that for the second time in his life he was crippled. Oddly, Basil said, he almost enjoyed that sensation of helplessness, the compulsion, he said, actually to submit. I said You’re joking and he said No and I said So then now you’re addicted to crack? and he said I’m telling you, it just happened, and that was that, he went on to lay it down.
No one had witnessed his fall, he said, but Super and his dog. And if no one had seen it, how could they use it against him—at some later date, he meant, to fuck with him at the Roxy for instance or maybe the Coconut Teaszer, as he hooked into some under-aged nubile with bocci-ball tits and the ass of a little boy? He found it damn near relaxing to let Super rant on with his deep, rumbling voice. It sounded like music, almost, cozily uncertain, uncertainly familiar. Whenever I tried to butt in, Basil got all Zen and proceeded with the sappy, parson-like tongue he invoked most times for dramalogues. What with Super’s voice, he said, and the rain thrumming down and the wind through the trees, the moment made him think of some New Age soundtrack these sandal-wearing meat-haters use to fall asleep when they traipse into town. He even went so far as to confess he couldn’t tell whether he loved the old man or hated him. He wavered between wishing he could stay there forever, he said, cradled in Super’s zany wisdom, or hoping someone might come along with a pistol to pop a cap in the old man’s ass.
It grieved him to his heart, Super said, that the powers had ever made human beings, and worse, that he’d been born unto them. He praised the storm if only that it might blot from the earth not just him and Basil but all humankind, people together with animals and creeping things and creatures of the air. The earth was corrupt, he said, the earth was filled with violence.
But each time Basil tried to leaven Super’s weight, he gave him a taste of the cutter, and a squirt of fetid breath would escape his teeth, and his eyes would roll up, and he’d set again to ranting.
He swore about certain pods of anguish, of how soon, on a bed of niggardly hearts and jealous bones, beaks sewn shut with thread and the toes of babes hacked off with shears, those pods would blossom into flowers of spleen, and the colossus of venality humanity had become would shudder and
by crappers crumble in that swarm. Super was mad. The moon had come too near, he said. The eagle should never have landed. And the man on the moon was a whoreson goon and all the world his toilet. Basil looked skyward, and by godfrey there it hung, the moon, peering through the clouds like the eye of a giant owl. Even as they spoke, Super told him, they were bound by a Gordian knot and that, ecce signum, here be the storm that corresponded to the storm in the eye of another storm yet, turning on itself and turning on its turn.
“We’re just varlets in a void,” Super said, Basil said. “The stratosphere was a lovely basket before the likes of you and me and the man we used to be come along with our fubbings and shoggings and horses from the same bleeding opera evening after absurd evening. Don’t you know, boy? Don’t you know?”
Basil stayed pressed to the tree, silent and amazed, feeling he should know, feeling he did know, but for all his trying couldn’t say. And even if he could’ve said it, he wouldn’t have. Because he wanted the old man to say it for him. At that moment, Basil felt as if Super’s words somehow possessed the amplitude of prophecy. He could’ve said Orangejuice or Snot or Duran Duran and Basil would’ve found some meaning. The geeze had been trying to teach him something, but Basil, insolent and ingrate, had been unwilling to learn. Again he tried opening himself to the old man’s hoodoo but felt he was nothing to him but a trinket with which he could entertain himself until ennui sent him forth once more to search. When finally Super had resumed his speech, it seemed to Basil the sun should’ve risen and the storm passed. But not a minute had passed, much less an hour. The old man’s fingers loosened, the cutter fell away. Basil could scarcely blink or breathe, the old man had been squeezing him so. A protracted shiver ran through him as he gazed into Super’s face, and then an icy numbness. The old man grinned. The grin became a chortle and the chortle a laugh, an obscenely sinister sound that seemed from the throat of a ghoul. And yet again Super dangled his fancy pipe. “You can’t always get what you want, boy,” he said. “Just what you need.” Then he turned up the road, Fortinbras at his heel.
Basil felt ultimate disappointment. Super had lied. More heinous still, he’d stolen his lie from a song by one of Basil’s most idolized bands, those five timeless beings who with sheer cheek and scorn for so-called bourgeoisie protocol had achieved a stature very near to that of God and second only to Iggy Pop, who was himself God (after all, Basil had said on numerous occasions, no one but God could survive on peanuts and bloody marys and bihourly main bangers of the jeweler’s little kid, and then hit the road to put on the show Iggy put on night after night, and any dork foolish enough to say otherwise must be summarily flogged). And not only had Super lied—he’d had audacity enough to fob the notion off as his. Now the words would be forever leashed to his condescending growl. Not to mention, again, they were a lie. Basil had always got what he wanted, for as long as he could remember. And yet, he thought, if that were so, why was he standing alone in the dark in a storm?
You can’t always get what you want.
He’d wanted to shout after Super, to tell him how full of shit he was, that he didn’t, as Dinky’d always said, know his ass from fat meat. But Basil only stood there, absurd, swathed with the mud the old man had given him a rolling in. He peered through the gloom, hoping some face from his past might appear, cheesy and smiling, to reassure him—Potsie Weber or Mr Rogers or the Charmin Man—but nothing of the sort. Super had gone for good.
You can’t always get what you want.
But goddamn it, maybe Super hadn’t lied. When Basil looked at his life, he had to confess that nothing he really wanted had fallen his way. He’d wanted, for instance, to be a rock star since that day in ’75, when he’d gone to see KISS at the Cow Palace (in the middle of “Rock and Roll All Nite” Paul Stanley had skittered across the stage with his famous mouth and eye, straight toward the hirsute but awestruck teenager, and flung his monogrammed pick right at him; after all these years Basil still carried the thing; he loved it so much, he always bragged, he intended someday to bestow it on his eldest child as a principal family heirloom), and yet They hadn’t deemed him worthy. His grandparents by then had of course already given him more money than he could spend, but not a dollar in the pile had lured Fame his way, the old pimp, nor the love and attention he’d thought Fame would bear.
But more than the rest, Basil longed for a father, or for the return of the father he’d had. Come Basil’s seventh b-day the swindler told the boy’s mother he needed to run an errand. On his way back, he promised, he’d nab some Otter Pops and Fritos for the imminent bash. Instead the villain bailed—caught a number 15 AC Transit to the Fruitvale BART, a train to Civic Center Frisco, a jitney to SFO, and thence a plane to Puerto Vallarta, where he rendezvoused with a recently immigrated Hungarian secretary from the accounts department of Kilpatrick Baking Company, Oakland, California, a woman whom only three months earlier he’d bought a new nose, two grand. The mula for this he’d conned from another mark yet, a senior citizen named Mrs Annabelle Lovejoy, exstripper, porn-star, and erstwhile mentor to Bettie Page—yes, the Bettie Page—who, Mrs Lovejoy, had been making regular monthly deposits of 500 smackaroonies into Basil’s father’s account, under the presumption, as the tale gets told, that he in turn would soon begin work on a private ranch in southern Nevada, a discreet, albeit fully indulgent, men’s club. And once bolted, Basil’s father never returned. Nor did he so much as call, nor even send a card. His mother learned of his father’s whereabouts four years later, by happenstance, from a grocery clerk at Lucky’s whose husband knew a bookie Basil’s father was up to his neck in debt to. He’d left his Hungarian nosejob for the daughter of a snake-charming preacher from the Church of the Redemption of the Lost Apostles, Woodland, CA. Yes, he’d got religion now, and in the biggest way. Holy-rolling via cable from his own late-night soap box (much like the infamous Dr Scott), he and his sermons (authorized of course not only by the good Lord Himself but as well by a PhD from Dr Ronald Hassler’s Night School for the Ecclesiastical Faithful, Soledad, CA, just a block down the street from the prison) could now be seen and heard in more than fifty-five municipalities throughout the Great Central Valley. Not until Super had appeared, Basil said, had he admitted how very much he’d missed his father, and yearned for his father, and for his father’s love. He’d wanted his father’s love for as long as he could remember, really, badly enough that ultimately that wanting had parleyed to a hurt only a bottle or bud or rock could ease. They, however, hadn’t seen fit to grant him this, either, this revenant daddy.
Basil found himself shortly crying out, and more than once at that, but for answer got only the wind and rain and the creaking of trees in the wind and rain. To the west he could see the void that was the lake, black as the hole of his hurt. Lights winked at its edges, a perforated thread which for now was all that stood twixt the town and its destruction.
Basil began to shiver. At first he managed to contain his fear, but as it all continued to mingle and grow, his loneliness and guilt and disconsolation, so too did its outward display. Something had been taken from him, that much he knew, and yet precisely what he couldn’t explain. Or perhaps he was simply lost. He knew only that with the ferocity of some malevolent germ the sense he’d been living a protracted mistake was devouring what little of him remained. And then he wept into oblivion.
When he came to, he said, he was so cold that should someone so much as tap him, his body would shatter like an effigy of ice. But the longer he waited, the more deeply he’d be lost. He didn’t have his hatchet. He didn’t have even a knife.
And so visions of catastrophe rollicked through his mind. Any minute now a tour-bus jammed with cultic octogenarians might descend on him, strayed from the path to some Lawn Bowling Tournament for Abused Geriatrics. They’d have painted faces and doctor’s smocks, wooden dentures and powdered wigs. They’d sport bifocaled pince-nez, diapers by the ream, and with their embroidery needles tipped in poison they’d set to work on his flesh as thoug
h a hopelessly imperfect doily. Or maybe something worse, a heretofore undiscovered tiger perchance, the last of its kind pouncing from the dark with nuclear fangs. Or maybe a swarm of winter-loving bugs, clawing through the earth to feed on his brain. But worst of all, he fantasized, much worse, he said—and here, at this possibility, Basil felt what he only later realized was the essence of panic, of real human terror—a colony of Lilliputian Deadheads might emerge from the boroughs of patchouli they’d fashioned in the trees about him, roaring about in a murder of Lilliputian schoolbuses, each painted in patterns of red, white, and blue, replete with toupéed death-heads, all of the groupies with their nasty feet and rastafied haberdashery, macraméd roach clips, earthenware bongs, Moosewood Cookbooks and astrology charts, organic cottonwear, dreadlocks, Greenpeace and tarot cards, too, and the diminutive women with their hairy legs and bushes, and the men with their John Muir beards, they’d all truss him up and cram his gullet with Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia while around him, from the multitude of Lilliputian tweeders and woofers they’d have installed on the roofs of their Lilliputian busses, the anthemic “Truckin’” would blare, each and every one of these fiends, man, woman, and Muckluckian brat, flailing about in terpsichorean frenzy, The Wiggly-Womp Dance of the Dead. Basil wanted to run but his feet had sunk to the ankles in sludge. Sad but true, the bastard was stuck.
Directly after our conversation that early April afternoon, I walked into the sun to contemplate whether Basil had found any pleasure in his despair. Because now and then, I’ve heard it said, it’s in despair we find our deepest joy, and more so yet when we see the hopelessness of our state. But who’s to say? None of us really knows that much.
That night in the rain nearly four days had passed since Basil had slept. The meth was at best a ghost in his veins, and he’d been heavily drinking. Going underground was not an option. He may’ve been wretched, but he wasn’t a mouse. And yet neither was he any longer the man he’d been, if ever he was that man. He didn’t know who he was anymore, or what. He knew only that once upon a time he’d scoffed at the delay of action, because delay implied thought and thought, in short, was for pussies. And this for Basil was so. He’d never measured the cost of his deeds—what might happen should he bash this nose or snap that arm, say, or ingest this drug, or bang that drunken lass. Never once had he agonized before probable litigation, damage to the brain, unwieldy prophylactics. All these things Basil would do in a flash, especially if the man was blocking his yen, or the drug could bring him up or down, or the lass was there for the taking. Because Basil too had adopted The Cry of Twentieth-Century Solipsism, come straight from the mouth of his sometime-significant other. Hang the cost! he’d shout, and leap into the fray. Never once, in truth, had Basil considered even the notion of consequences, not, at least, insofar as that thinking concerned the philosophies of action and reaction, how in his moments of resolution he, Basil, functioned merely as a catalyst for the further realization of as-yet suppressed events.