“I’m going to be out the rest of the afternoon. If you read about a triple homicide-suicide, you’ll know it didn’t go well,” he called to his second-in-command, who was captivated by a video she’d found featuring a panda stuffing its maw with bamboo leaves. Roxie didn’t respond, her giggling consuming whatever slim resources she allocated to her workday chores. “I said I’m going,” he repeated, then stood and brushed past her desk.
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?” Roxie asked innocently, not bothering to even minimize the video on her screen.
“I was considering giving you a generous raise for all the fine work you’re doing, but then decided to spend it on therapy instead. I’ll need it after a day with my parents.”
“So you won’t mind if I leave early? I’ve got a sound check on the strip at six. And a girl likes to freshen up.”
“You’re going to try to catch him in the act, aren’t you?” Black asked from the doorway.
“Of course not. I told you, I have a sound check.”
“Sure. Okay then, good luck with that,” he said, and with a glance at Mugsy, who was busy clawing the leg of the coffee table to shreds, he exited his suite, shaking his head. Roxie was so damned smart, but when it came to men she had zero common sense. Not that he was anyone to talk, with his hit parade of failed relationships. But still. Eric was a complete loser, and had that perennial smirk of the punk who was always getting over on somebody – and if you didn’t know what he was laughing about, it was probably you.
As luck would have it, he made it to his place faster than he’d hoped to. He was just walking up the central courtyard to the stairs when a voice rang out like a bugle call from the unit closest to the street.
“Black!”
He cringed and wondered if he could will himself invisible. His landlady, Gracie Kemper, was a hopeless alcoholic with a heart of gold who could have gone twelve rounds with Tyson and not broken a sweat. At seventy-four, she downed a bottle of scotch per day, without fail, and insisted on regaling him for hours with her stories of the film business back in her day. She’d had a career that had lasted about as long as a joint at a rock concert, but had managed to parlay it into a marriage to a nice attorney who had promptly died of a heart attack within a year of their nuptials, leaving her with the Paradise Palms and a diesel Mercedes that was older than Tarantino. She still had both, and as far as Black could tell she would take them to her grave – which in spite of her alcohol intake was probably eons away.
“Gracie. How are you this fine day?” he sang out, resigned to paying his dues. Rent wasn’t owed for another eleven days, so he had no idea what she wanted, but it invariably involved something he wished he’d ducked.
“Look at you, you big stud! I swear you get younger and thinner every month,” she cackled as she approached, swaying ever so slightly, a fog of whiskey fumes trailing her like a semi-rig’s exhaust.
“Well, you’re half right – my hair gets thinner. Listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of in a rush, Gracie. No offense, but I’ve got guests arriving, and I need to clean the place up a little before they get here.”
Predictably, she didn’t take the hint. “Sure, Sweetie. I’ve just got a little teensy favor I need to ask you for. It’s really nothing.”
Black squared his shoulders. When Gracie led with her “it’s nothing” act, he could expect a whopper.
“Who do I have to kill?”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s my nephew. Jared. A sweeter boy you’ve never met. Just arrived a couple weeks ago from Milwaukee. He’s trying to break into acting. Good-looking kid, and I think he’s got a shot, if anyone does these days.”
“Jared. Fine. But you know I’m not in the life anymore, Gracie. I don’t know what kind of help I could be…”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s just…well, he may have gotten mixed up with the wrong people already. It’s a long story, but he came out here with five thousand dollars, and now I think he got swindled out of it by some lowlife shitgrubs he met.” Gracie had the eloquence of a drill sergeant when she’d had her morning cocktail, much less her lunchtime fortification, which Black was guessing had gone down the hatch recently.
“I’ll tell you what, Gracie. I’ll drop in later. Right now, though, like I said, I gotta run. You and he going to be around in a few hours?”
“Sure thing. Where else would a broke-ass kid and I go? We’ll be in my place, watching reruns of 24. That Kiefer. A talent, I tell you. Not like his dad, but still. Did I ever tell you I knew Donald? Many moons ago, that was, but he could take your breath away…”
“You might have mentioned it, Gracie. I’ll stop by once I’m done with my stuff, okay?” Black reassured her, trying to detach without being rude. She’d let him slide on rent more than a few times when he was short, so he owed her, although it was invariably an expensive way for him to pay her back.
“Don’t forget me. Don’t you dare forget me, Black,”
“Never, Gracie. Never in a million years.”
The hug was unexpected, but Black returned it, Gracie’s pugnacious demeanor belied by her frailty and the faint reek of perennial decay, of organs breaking down and time having its way.
The encounter depressed Black, and not only because it committed him to yet another obligation. He tried to shrug it off as he mounted the steps to his apartment, focusing on the scant few minutes he might have before his parents descended upon him, but the taint lingered like a bite of spoiled shellfish.
Dust motes performed a slow-motion aerial waltz in the beams of sunlight streaming through his guest bedroom window as he hastily changed the sheets on the sofa bed. He’d just finished folding it back up and was stuffing the cushions into place when he heard a rapping on his front door, three knocks that echoed like firecrackers in the empty rooms.
Black balled up the old sheets, tossed them into the hamper in his bedroom closet, and then answered the door. His parents stood, their overnight bags at their sides, looking lost, as they did everywhere besides Berkeley, which was the center of their universe.
“Artemus. You look wonderful!” his mother exclaimed, her face radiating a tranquility Black was convinced was chemically fortified. His dad stood slightly behind her, with the vacant expression of a deer watching an onrushing Peterbilt. Black fought to control the flicker of annoyance in his expression caused by the continued use of his legal name.
Not that it would have occurred to Spring and Chakra Skywalker, the latter AKA Ernest Black, to worry about such earthbound vagaries as Black’s dislike of his name. They lived in a constant state of giddy delusion, where it was always the Summer of Love in their time-warped Berkeley eco-system and everything was groovy, baby, and consequently they had never understood why Black had refused to answer to Art, Arty, or Artemus once he’d entered his teen years. Just as they’d been unable to understand why he’d forged his father’s signature on the consent form when he’d turned sixteen and joined the army. They had been completely oblivious to the simmering rage that had built in their son and how it colored his every decision. He would never forget when he’d broken the news to them, expecting an explosion of protest – his parents were typical hippie pacifists, and so everything was about positive energy and good vibes and love and peace.
“Mom, Dad, I’ve got news,” Black had announced, standing in the small living room of their two-bedroom hovel six blocks from the university campus, the walls plastered with concert posters from the sixties featuring Creedence Clearwater Revival and Moby Grape and similarly antiquated bands he also hated with surprising intensity.
“Whoa, cool, man. But we’ve told you a million times, use our first names. The whole structured title thing is part of a patriarchal society’s oppressive rules for keeping us subjugated,” Chakra had said with the annoyingly calm voice he used no matter what the occasion.
“Whatever. I joined the army. I’m shipping out in a week.”
Spring and Chakra had been ta
ken aback, but only slightly, and then the customary veil of tranquility dropped back into place. His mother was busy with her idiotic handmade soap in the cluttered kitchen – the sale of which at local shops their meager, sole means of support. That genius had been the brainchild of Chakra, who rejected notions of conformity and material possessions in favor of a subsistence living that was one step away from panhandling.
“The army?” Chakra had managed, his preternaturally blue eyes unwavering, beaming holes of positive energy through Black as he non-judgmentally inquired, pronouncing the words as though they were alien, as strange to his tongue as Cantonese or Urdu.
“Why?” Spring had asked from her position by the steaming kettles, her long, untamed graying hair tied back with a smudged yellow ribbon.
“Because I want to kill. I want to slake my thirst for blood and become the angel of death, snuffing out innocent life on a whim – the most vicious killer the Army has ever seen.”
Spring had stopped what she was doing and rounded the makeshift work area to stand behind his father, hands on the shoulders of his African Dashiki shirt. They’d exchanged a long glance, and then Chakra had nodded.
“Son, you’re almost eighteen–”
“I’m sixteen. Just turned. Two days ago,” Black had corrected, seething just beneath the surface.
“Yeah, you know what I mean. It’s cool. Anyway, you’re almost a man, and dude, while I don’t agree with what you’re doing, I totally support you, you know? Like, it’s your right to move forward in life. If you want to be part of the establishment, answer to the man, that’s your bag, you know? You need to figure it out on your own.”
“I forged your signature. They wouldn’t let me join if I hadn’t. I committed a felony. Because I want to kill.”
“Hey, you know we don’t get hung up on legal stuff. It’s all artificial constructs imposed on us by the oppressors. You did what you thought you had to do. We understand,” Spring had said, nodding sagely like some B-movie Wiccan priestess.
“I broke the law. I lied. I cheated to get in. And now I have the power over life and death. I can’t wait.”
“Your mother and I support any decision you make, Artemus. You’re a positive energy field, and maybe you need to work through all this to discover your higher power. We’re all just ripples on the surface of the same lake, but some of us view ourselves as separate, which is an illusion. But you need to learn that yourself. We’re sure you’ll do the right thing. If you want to go spend time with a bunch of other young men, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You make it sound like some gay convention.”
“What Chakra is saying is that we can understand that things get confusing at a certain age. And it’s okay. We love you unconditionally no matter what you do.”
“I’m not gay. I’m not joining the army because I’m a homosexual,” Black had said through gritted teeth. “It’s because I hate everyone and I want to kill them.”
“It’s a fine line between love and hate. Go explore however you need to. We’ll send out tons of positive vibes no matter what.”
“Have you heard anything I’ve said?”
“Of course. You’re a young man, and you want to be around others like you, in a structured environment, where strong older men will organize your life for you and order you around. You want the discipline of structure. It’s natural. And you have urges. It’s got to be hard for you–”
“I’m not gay!”
“Those are just labels. We don’t use them. They’re meaningless to us. We’re all just us. Spirits. Seeking enlightenment, moving toward the light. You are whatever you are, however the Cosmos made you. But we love you, and we won’t judge.”
Black had spun, disgusted, and spent the rest of the week in a blind fury, his final bid for help mistaken as a confession of homosexual ideation. On his last day home, Spring had presented him with a flower-power T-shirt and wished him well, assuring him that his head would get into a more positive space at some near point. Chakra had given him a battered acoustic guitar in a cracked cardboard case, assuring him that music would help him make sense of everything – even though Black had never expressed any interest in music or played a note in his life.
Three years later, having never fired a shot in combat or hurt anyone beyond his constant skirmishes in bar fights, he was dishonorably discharged for disciplinary problems after a brief stint in the brig. Contrary to everyone’s expectations, his anger management issues hadn’t diminished in the army; rather, he’d quickly discovered that the one thing he hated more than his dimwit parents was his chain of command and being ordered around like a slave by sadistic pricks who could ruin his life on a bet. That hadn’t worked wonders for his rage, which usually manifested as drunken brawls with civilians on lonely weekend nights off base.
All of which flashed through his consciousness as he faced his parents, the memories as vivid as fireworks going off in his head. Shaking off the moment, he plastered an artificial smile across his face.
“Mom. Dad. You look great, too!” he assured them with practiced insincerity, and then motioned them into the apartment with a gesture that would have been at home in a royal court, replete with small, self-mocking bow. If they were going to use the name they knew he hated, he’d be calling them Mom and Dad. “Come on in. What brings you to town?”
Spring put her bag down and hugged him while his father stood by, smiling like a tall, graying, Caucasian Buddha, his hair pulled back into a pony tail, his perennial beard now demoted to a goatee. Black took in his tie-dyed T-shirt, shapeless linen pants, and Birkenstock sandals, and for the thousandth time wondered that he’d sprung from his parents’ loins.
“Oh, just some silly business stuff,” Spring replied, releasing him and stepping aside so Chakra could shake hands.
“Business? What business? I thought you were retired?” Black asked, curious now as to what hare-brained idiocy they were planning to squander his inheritance on.
“You know your mother’s always been handy. Well, it’s been so boring since the soap company sold. She’s been driving everyone crazy, even with the volunteer work at the shelter and the work on the house.” The couple had bought a large home in the Berkeley Hills on a massive lot that was easily worth many millions by now, even if the house itself was a hodgepodge of conflicting eclectic styles Black would have described as somewhere between shipwreck and scavenger hunt. His mother was constantly adding on or fixing something, and the resultant monstrosity was uglier than a water treatment plant.
“Oh, stop it. I’ve always enjoyed making things, you know that, honey,” she said, slapping at her husband playfully. “About six months ago I started making hand-dipped fragrant candles. Anyway, I managed to convince some of the shops in town to sell them, and then some stores in San Francisco and Marin wanted some, and, well, it got too big for me to do in the kitchen, even with a helper. So I rented some space in Emeryville, and now I’m in the candle business!”
Black listened in disbelief. “Candles? People still buy candles? I mean, what’s the barrier to entry? Aren’t they all made out of wax?”
“Apparently people do buy them. Who knew? I call them Spring Love Candles. ‘The secret ingredient’s love!’ That’s the marketing slogan.”
“So you’re investing your money in candles,” Black said, his voice neutral.
“Spring has never been happier, and everyone seems to like her candles, so there are worse ways to make a living. At least we’re not injecting hormones into poor helpless animals or genetically modifying food until it’s poisonous. Candles don’t hurt anyone, and you never know…” Chakra said, his voice still tuned with the breathless wonder of the hippie movement. Black smiled in what he hoped was an upbeat manner and nodded.
“Well, I suppose if you burn your house down, candles could hurt someone, but hey, anything can cause harm if mishandled. You can die from drinking too much water.”
“You can?” Spring asked. “How?”
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Black felt less sure of himself. “I read it on the internet. I don’t remember all the details.”
He led them down the hall to the spare bedroom and showed them their shabby sofa bed, which they greeted with the enthusiasm of a vagrant stumbling across a fifty-dollar bill. He’d cleared a small area of the closet for them that wasn’t stuffed with boxes of shark cartilage – another business he’d invested in, sure it was his big chance, only to wind up with fifteen thousand dollars of worthless capsules and the newfound knowledge that sharks suffered from cancer, too.
He busied himself in the kitchen throwing away a bagful of expired items. A couple of minutes later Spring and Chakra entered the living room and sat down, exuding happiness. He eyed them as he tied the top of the green plastic trash bag closed – they looked more like street people than super-rich retirees.
The next two hours dripped by like Chinese water torture as they alternated between sharing their thoughts on life with him and asking him about his business, which even on its best months was nothing more than a lifestyle-support mechanism, unlikely to ever enable him to do much more than he was already doing – renting a fleabag, living month to month, and waiting for the next big idea to come along and make him a fortune.
When his phone rang he practically did a backflip at the interruption, and even though he felt a tingle of apprehension when he saw it was Gracie, on balance that was better than sitting in the same room as his parents.
“Sugar, I hate to bug you, but if you could tear yourself away from whatever you’re doing for a few minutes, Jared really needs your advice,” she said.
“No problem. I’ll be there in a few. I’m sure it’s important,” he assured her.
He turned to his mom. “Sorry. I’ve got an issue I need to sort out. A client. I’d love to spend the rest of the afternoon with you, but…”
“No, no, you do what you have to do. You’ve already done more than we had hoped with the hospitality. Will you at least let us take you to dinner?” Spring asked, her accommodating tone making him feel guilty at the relief he felt at the prospect of getting away from them.
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