by M. M. Mayle
“I promise you, you haven’t taken anything I wasn’t happy to give.”
“Very well. Then may we pick up where we left off?”
Discourse on musical influences, past and present, was originally intended to be something of a filler exercise and now he’s forced to go at it with utmost seriousness or risk being thought disobliging on all subjects. She’s jotting things down every third step and he seems set on naming every recording artist he can think of.
He’s reciting almost by rote because his upper consciousness is filling up with the sheer preposterousness of the situation. Here he is, the big rock star just rated redoubtable and magnetic by the tabloid press, and he’s planning the rest of his life around the slim possibility this fantastically desirable creature will tell him the rest of her life story. Sometime. And she only said perhaps. Not much to cling to, is it? Not for a bloke accustomed to crooking a finger at whatever he wants—whoever he wants.
He casts a sidelong glance at her and again picks up on the vibe warning that she’d view any variation of a crooked finger as an obscene gesture and react accordingly.
“And to any list of musical influences I’d have to add Rayce Vaughn, who was mentor and champion long before he became unofficial therapist,” he says. “You’ll be meeting him soon, you’ll probably want to spend time with Rayce as well as with Nate.”
“I’m sorry, did I say I was going to spend time with your manager?”
“I guess I took for granted. I mentioned yesterday in the museum that I wanted you to meet with Nate and I was just getting round to letting you know that I cleared it with him this morning. He’s willing and you can name the time providing you give him a day’s notice.”
“I see.”
“You say that a lot and I never know what it is that you see.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she says, “but in this instance I’ll tell you. I see that you’re unwilling or unable to talk to me about anything other than the most general aspects of your life, so you’re enlisting your manager and your mentor to do the job. How do you suppose that makes me feel? At your request, I’ve made our meetings as little like standard interview sessions as I know how. I have taken great pains to avoid anything faintly interrogatory. I’ve asked almost no direct questions and all I have to show for it is material that would put even one of your greatest fans to sleep. A few minutes ago I was feeling guilty for having used up so much of your time talking about myself—because I do feel comfortable and safe talking to you—and now I discover this all is some sort of delaying action until Rayce Vaughn rides into town or Nate Isaacs can make time for me.”
“Laurel, no, it’s not like that at all . . . you don’t understand.”
“Then explain.” She stops dead and turns to face him, but her expression doesn’t match her words. She doesn’t look anywhere near as angry as she sounds. If anything she looks sad, disappointed even.
“I can’t . . . at least not now. I’ll have to ask you to trust me. Please.”
“Trust you to do what?”
“To tell you as much as I can as soon as I can.”
“Very well.”
“That’s something else you say a lot and I’m never sure what it means.”
“It means that I have either accepted or resigned myself to the answer or the status quo or whatever.”
“Then you’re not giving up on me?”
“No, not just yet. I am, however, going to start asking direct questions.”
“Please do and if I can’t answer I’ll—”
“Yes, I know, you’ll find someone who will. We’ve another hour and a half to go if we stay with the present pace and that should be enough time for you to initiate an examination of your relationship with the press.”
“God, but you are lovely.” It just slips out, byproduct of extreme gratefulness.
“So are you, but I think ‘gorgeous’ was the word used to describe us.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Late morning, April 3, 1987
The way Hoop’s arms and legs feel he must not have changed position since falling asleep soon after sundown. Conditioning will do that, he reckons, stretching one leg and then an arm, still not trusting that he isn’t crammed into the back of the Jimmy alongside his gear and three bulging garbage bags.
He rolls over to read the clock part of the plastic clock radio on the bedside table. It has number flaps instead of hands. He watches a couple of minutes flip over before turning on the radio part to see if it really is almost eleven-thirty in the morning and he really did sleep more than the two hours he made himself get by on during the road trip.
He’s already sitting up when the radio voice says Colin Elliot’s name, so it’s not like the mere sound of it jerked him alert. He listens for clues to Elliot’s exact whereabouts and hears only that the rock star has ended a long relationship with his record company. Why that’s considered news he’ll never know. Hoop switches off the talk after they say a time of day that makes the radio clock believable.
The rotary card file is right where he left it when energy failed him last night. He slides off the bed, scattering manila folders and old newspaper clippings all over the place. Without even stopping for a wakeup pee, he crouches down on the floor, positions the device between his knees and gives the knob a good twist like he’s playing a game of chance.
“Round and round and round she goes and where she stops, nobody knows,” he recites the catchphrase his grandmother chanted whenever she played gambling games at the reservation.
The letter “G” comes up, as good a place as any to begin. The first four names under this heading are Miller, Roberts, Kerwin, and Plamondon, an accident maybe. He twists the knob to the letter “R” and none of the names in that division match with the letter either. This happens with three more selections, and while it wouldn’t be hard to think of Cliff Grant as sloppy and careless on top of everything else he was, it would be hard to imagine the lowlife could run his dirty business without some way of keeping the names of his contacts in order.
He tries another approach, opens the “A” section by its tab and finally catches on. If any of the names here happen to start with the letter “A” it will be by accident because the names are sorted by location, by the state they live in. Alaska has only two addresses. Alabama has five, all in a place called Muscle Shoals; Arizona has seven, all in Sedona. He goes to the thick “M” section where he knows he’ll be on the right track if he finds his own name there.
After working his way through Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts, his name shows up halfway through the Michigan grouping, proving this truly is Cliff Grant’s list of informers and close contacts. For extra proof he looks under the letter “N” and finds the name of the New York guy listed on Grant’s message tablet right off. From a pocket, Hoop takes out the crumpled sheet torn from that tablet and compares it with the file card entry.
The handwriting’s the same and the name’s the same. There it is—Gibby Lester—on the file card, plain as day, no doubt about it, and the address there says Gibby Lester lives in New York City, so that’s where the West Village must be. And who knows? The Silent Woman could turn out to be some kind of guidepost for Lester’s place on West 4th Street.
It’s a lot to pin his hopes on—hoping that this Lester guy is really in the know concerning the rock star’s whereabouts—but so was driving all the way across the North American continent in hope of corralling the rock star one way or another.
The notion of soon closing in on Colin Elliot puts a surge through him like he just chugged a two-liter bottle of Coke and sends him running to the toilet. After he’s peed like a plow horse he hurries through a bath, scraping his backside on the dingy nonskid strips half-unstuck from the floor of the tub.
He dresses in clean underwear and the clothes he wore the day before. Because he shaved at a truck stop two days ago, he doesn’t need to now. The few strands of hair come loose from his plait he slicks back with water and c
lamps down with his usual Detroit Tigers baseball cap.
Thirst for the coffee denied him the night before is strong, but not strong enough to overcome distaste for whatever polluted brew they might be serving in the motel restaurant today.
In the lobby, he heads for a pop machine seen earlier and settles for canned Coca-Cola—one for now and one for later.
At the reception desk, he’s looking over the tourist leaflets displayed there when a clerk appears. Hoop asks for the best route to New York City and she tells him of a means he hadn’t heard about till now. She writes down directions to a nearby place where he can leave his truck in a fenced lot and catch a bus direct to Manhattan’s Port Authority Terminal, whatever that is.
The clerk gives him a New Jersey Transit bus schedule and a compact map of Manhattan and that somewhat makes up for yesterday’s bad experience with the slovenly waitress. Hoop pays ahead for another night’s lodging and would seem to reverse himself by then taking a luggage cart back to the room with him.
Bagging up Cliff Grant’s history of Colin and Aurora Elliot as told through newspaper clippings and smutty pictures doesn’t take long at all. More time is spent gathering together his personal belongings—the tool chest, the paint bucket, the grocery sack holding spare clothes and toilet articles—and deciding what goes and what stays. Then there’s the rotary file to think about now that he sees it as his own, and the pocket photo album and the medicine packets he stole from the rock star’s room and hasn’t had time to puzzle over.
In the end, he holds back only the notched file card with Gibby Lester’s address, and takes everything else to the truck. The fenced park-and-ride lot he was told about sounds a lot safer than leaving the stuff in the room where it could be pawed through by the cleaning help, providing there is any.
He finds the fenced lot right where the desk clerk said it would be and finds a parking space that’s out in the open, where anyone meddling with the truck would be seen. Within minutes of buying a roundtrip ticket at the stationhouse, a Manhattan-bound bus lumbers up to the loading area and he’s on his way.
The bus is only halfway full, so he has enough privacy to study the Manhattan street map without looking like a greenhorn. He’s still not real sure how a village can be within a city and it takes him a while to get the hang of it. Once he does, he sees by the map that a lot of Manhattan neighborhoods have their own names and makes a game of spotting them. He’s counted off Greenwich Village, the West Village, the East Village, Murray Hill, China Town, Little Italy, Soho, and Chelsea by the time the bus goes into a tunnel. When it comes out he sees that he better start thinking about what to do when the ride ends.
At the Port Authority Terminal, he’s struck by the huge size of it and the emptiness of it this time of day. Almost as unnerving is imagining what it must be like when it’s not so empty. From an information desk, he helps himself to a subway map and heads for the nearest exit.
He comes out into unclouded daylight and orients himself by the sun to go east. A signpost confirms that he’s going in the right direction on 42nd Street and that he has two more intersections to cross before he’ll come to the subway station he wants. A short way along the first block, he notices the kind of neighborhood he’s in.
Nearly every shop he passes displays the letter “X” in threes and fours and fives. He fast figures out this is a rating system, a way of bragging about how low you’re willing to go in the smut trade. He hurries past movie houses with hawkers out front crowing about the extremes of nudity and live sex acts performed inside. He looks away from marquees advertising double and triple bills with guarantees that “you won’t cum away empty-handed” and invitations to “man your own cockpit.”
Some of the places he shuns offer grotesque marital aids, including one in the shape of an oversized banana sporting an antenna and rows of studs, and another obscene object advertised as the steel-belted radial special-of-the-week.
The scattering of half-naked streetwalkers lining the curb at intervals look old, tired, and diseased although he estimates a few are teenagers—including the unblinking one now darting her tongue at him and making lewd moves with her hips. If this neighborhood has the name it deserves he wonders if any map would dare show it.
He’s just short of holding his hands either side of his eyes like blinders when he comes to a complicated crossroads he’s heard of but never envisioned. He gawks openmouthed at Times Square, sees it as the glittering entrance to the Netherworld, shuts his mouth and looks away before it can suck him in.
At Avenue of the Americas, the scenery changes enough that he eyeballs a sampling of the passersby. It’s their clothes that interest him. He’s drawn to anyone not wearing a necktie or polished leather shoes and there are plenty of them to look at. From their example, he concludes that to fit in he should have Adidas sneakers, tight blue jeans that don’t look new, rock band T-shirts and either a jeans jacket or a leather jacket. His hair is acceptable as it is, in a plait. If he wants to wear it in a tail, that’s all right too. A baseball cap is okay if it shows the name of a local team. And he’ll need a wristwatch because folks here rely more on minutes than hours, something else to get used to.
A glance at the street map shows that he’s lingering on the edge of Bryant Park and the subway station he wants is close by. After everything he’s seen so far today, nothing about the subway system or its riders will surprise him.
Once into the station, he grasps the payment system right off and doesn’t see anything that rates a second look other than a guy who appears to have painted his bald head with shoe polish in a poor imitation of hair. On the train he’s jammed in so tight he’s forced to touch other passengers. None of them seem to mind, so he tries not to mind either.
From the West 4th Street stop, he makes a zig and a zag before he’s on the street itself. Within a short block, he’s able to pick out a large-lettered sign in the distance that lifts his spirits. “Silent Woman Pub” it reads, and as he gets closer he sees why the pub is given as a guidepost. The big stone building lords it over the corner it’s on, making the businesses to either side look small by comparison.
He also sees someone’s twisted idea of what makes for a silent woman: The main sign for the pub is flat against the building, high above the double doors. It’s painted the way a kid would paint and shows the figure of a woman in old-fashioned dress carrying her severed head by the hair.
Hoop looks away like he’s just seen another entrance to the Netherworld and walks on to the place next door, where he checks the address against the one for Gibby Lester. The numbers on the awning match the ones written on the file card, so he bothers to notice other details of the place before he approaches the door.
These details tell him he’s come to a weak version of a 42nd Street store—weak because this place sells novelties, souvenirs, collector’s items, and clothing as well as sex toys. Samples of everything fill up the display window and block the interior view; the door has a shade pulled down behind the glass lettered with the name “Cravings” in Pepto-Bismol-pink paint.
Flummoxed for a moment because while he never thought he was looking for a private home, he never thought he was looking for this kind of place either. A record store, yes; maybe a bookstore with newspapers and magazines, but not a variety store that sells vibrators and strap-on hard rubber man-tools alongside postcards, candy, and other tourist items.
He looks over both shoulders as if his grandmother or the tribal chief were watching and satisfies himself that all the street activity is at the pub next door where a gang of college students is rowdying around the doors and laughing at the sign. If they think that sign’s funny, they should see the one he saw earlier for “The Jubilant Joystick.” He sneers in their general direction and tries the door in front of him. It’s locked. He feels flummoxed again. Then he sees the card in the window that says the place doesn’t open till one o’clock in the p.m.
Without a watch or a straight-up view of the sun to guide h
im, Hoop can only guess if that hour is about to come or has just gone. However, through a crack between the window shade and the doorframe, he does see movement inside the store, so he taps on the glass. Shortly after, the shade flies up and an older man with bulgy eyes in a toadish face looks out.
“Whaddya want?” the man shouts through the locked door. “Cliff Grant sent me,” Hoop shouts back and checks that the students didn’t hear before checking the reaction of the guy on the other side of the door who did. The students are gone, presumably into the pub, and the guy in front of him looks like he could pull a disappearing act any second.
Gambling that this contact hasn’t heard about Cliff Grant is not the biggest chance Hoop has taken so far. It’s not even the most nerve-wracking. Sweat nevertheless breaks along his spine, and his scalp tingles. He plasters both the rotary file card with Grant’s writing on it and the page torn from Grant’s notepad against the door glass and like magic, dead bolts are released and the door swings open.
“You buyin’ or sellin’?” the guy says while leading the way to the rear of the store.
This is not a question Hoop expected to hear. He stalls an answer by faking interest in what’s being said on the TV that’s suspended above a display case and turned up too loud.
. . . has become something of a loose cannon since his unscheduled performance at the Icon-cast earlier this week. Elliot is now said to have walked away from Pinnacle, his longstanding record label, and other changes may also be in the works. Although recently linked with Pamela Willburcross in London, Elliot’s constant New York companion has been . . .
“Damn MTV news,” the store owner says and cuts the volume to nothing. “They could run me outta business with all the on-air gossip bullshit, but I can’t complain when they beat the drum for a product I’ve got. If you were sent by Cliff Grant you gotta know that Colin Elliot’s in the news again and demand for pix of Aurora Elliot is on the upswing. No one ever seems to get tired of that pussy, dead or alive . . . Say, did I get your name, and did we settle whether you’re buyin’ or sellin’?”