Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Don DeLillo

  “The product isn’t here,” I said.

  “I’ve been apprised of that,” Dr. Pepper said. “This courier they hired is off somewhere trying to deal on his own. Predictable. At the very least semi-predictable. This Happy Valley bunch is not what you’d call a heads-up collection of people. They’ve got initiative to spare but they lack keenness. First they tell me to expect two people with the product. Then there’s an unforeseeable delay. In my lexicon there’s only one kind of delay. Strategic delay. But I let it pass without comment although I’m satisfied in my own mind, see, that this bunch lacks the necessary keenness. You hone yourself. I’ve honed myself over the years. I’ve dealt with the quickest minds and the quickest intellects. That’s how I’ve acquired my own quickness. I’ve dealt with people who know which deck is the marked deck. I call these people the makers and shakers. You hone yourself. You cut away the glut. So then what do they tell me? They tell me the messenger is now bargaining agent with full bargaining powers. I replace the phone with a smile. A smile creases my face. Lack of judgment, I conclude. Lack of experience. In other words Happy Valley is not to be trusted. Their leadership is not to be trusted. Their hirelings and minions are not to be trusted. Other agencies of the underground are to be viewed with a jaundiced eye in the light of past performance. U.S. Guv is to be viewed with two such eyes in light of the fact that they’re the victims of this rip-off. I have one word for U.S. Guv. Booshit. That word is booshit. What is U.S. Guv? It’s a bunch of rich men playing golf. It’s big business, big army and big government all visiting each other in company planes for the sole purpose of playing golf and talking money. So who does that leave in positions of trust? Friend, it leaves you and me.”

  Dr. Pepper wore a small fedora with the brim turned down. His suit was a couple of sizes too large, an aged gray outfit over a narrow gray and white tie and a dingy white shirt with frayed collar. He appeared to be in his late forties. His face was blank, tending toward narrowness, and his eyes were dark and still. Although at first he seemed unremarkable in every way, I began to note touches of professionalism about him. His deadpan expression was classically intact, put together from a strip of silent film, frame by frame. His speech was flat and rickety, hard-working in its plainness, the voice of an actor delivering monologues from a rocking chair. Of course I had the advantage of knowing who he was. Also I was fairly certain I’d seen him before and heard either that voice or an approximation. Perhaps the oddest thing about Dr. Pepper was that he didn’t wear glasses. He had the kind of face that needed glasses to be complete, old rimless spectacles worn low on the nose, but the absence of this final detail only confirmed his elusiveness and skill; one was inclined to fill in the face, provide a finish to the comic proposition. A single thing connected all others—the invisible mannerisms, the craft, the tightfisted humor—and this one threading element was danger. Dr. Pepper had lived among dangerous men, worked in hazardous circumstances, and his eccentricity, his distance from the axis, had its origins in the basic machine-like pressures that bear on a man who is unable to think or live in accordance with the central themes of the law. Even his appearance, ordinary as it was, suggested some acquaintance with illegality. More than anything else he looked like a man released from prison in 1947 in Joliet, Illinois. It would have been difficult to say what crime he’d been convicted for. He had the gift of putting distance between himself and his applauders. My own tenuous guesses would have included child-molesting, embezzlement, the defrauding of widows.

  “I’ll tell you, Buck. This stuff they’ve come up with is not the kind of product a man like me is likely to dismiss. I give them points for initiative. I have sources and these sources confirm what I’ve long suspected. This isn’t some kind of rinky-dink schoolboy caper. No way, manner, shape or form. This is a weighty affair we’re involved in here. This drug is some kind of extreme substance. This is a pressing matter and deserves our closest attention.”

  “I’ve figured that out for myself,” I said. “Everybody in the free world wants to bid. There’s a group on the Coast wants to bid. They’re very anxious to bid. There’s a group in Europe also wants to bid, also very anxious. That’s Watney’s group. Great Britain and Europe. I haven’t heard from the Japanese yet. Of course Hanes may have heard. He’s out there with the product.”

  “Watney first swam into my ken in Boston,” Dr. Pepper said. “Sure, Watney and that crowd of his. I was bumping into a whole lot of crank behavior about then. There was a man there that could imitate a sewing machine. There was a pair of girls, Lenore and Doreen, they come up from right off the street, quack-quack, sisters they were, Lenore’s the fat one, see, and they’re trying to sell me a radio that gets Perth, Australia. I’d just finished manufacturing and dealing off I won’t say how many dollars worth of shiny black capsules in bulk, posing as my own sales manager. There were any number of stunts being pulled that night. The sewing machine guy was being hypnotized by a cousin of Watney’s that was making his first trip here and refused to leave the hotel for fear of being lashed to the fender of a car and taken north for resale to a lumber operation. At that time in Boston stories of abduction in the night were rife. There was a guy there as I recall, Montaldo, a promoter and manager who on the side controlled the entire orchid business north of Braintree right up to the border, for whatever that’s worth. Watney himself was tripping in a unique and interesting manner. There was a kitchenette in the place, just the bare essentials, and Watney takes an egg and places it whole and intact on a frying pan, no fire going, no heat coming up, and he stands there waiting for a fried egg to appear and he just can’t understand why it won’t. Nobody knew who I was. I was drifting through the suite, witness to any number of propositions. The equipment man for some local group, name of Mulderick, I recall, he’s selling credit cards, driver’s licenses, army discharge papers, transcripts from Harvard Business School. A kid with his arm in a cast tells me the cast has a secret compartment for transporting dope and offers me the plans for twenty dollars. I’m diverted by all these signs of enterprise. I find it an occasion of mild diversion with the sole and single exception of the hypnotism routine which I can tell is being done without any real feel for the subject, which is a subject I happen to know something about, being the recipient of one of the few legitimate degrees in hypnotology ever given out by an accredited college in this country. Watney by this time has placed a call to his house outside London and finds himself in the regrettable situation of not being at home to answer the telephone. He’s trying to call himself, ding-ding, and nobody’s picking up the phone. The result is fear and dread. He sits on the floor weeping real tears into the phone. Oh, it’s a crisis of no small proportion. The guy is in the grip of blackest anxiety. Absolute terror in his eyes. Oh, he’s terror-stricken, no doubt about it, ding-ding-ding in his ear. This was Watney when he first swam into my ken, long before he picked up the shield of the businessman.”

  “Tell me if I’m right,” I said. “You were here the night there was a party here. Whole place full of people. You smoked a pipe. You were the professor of latent history. You talked about that a while. Tell me if I’m right about that.”

  “I’ll tell you why I was here, Buck. I was here to check on the young lady’s credentials. At that point I didn’t know the product was in your possession. But I did know the identity of Happy Valley’s chief agent So being I was in town and being I knew about the little shindig through various local sources, I thought I’d drop on by. I wanted to make the young lady’s acquaintance, get the first foothold in the bargaining process. Unhappily, never got to say a word to her. She retired early, faded away in the midst of all that smoke.”

  “I remember.”

  “Just scouting out the premises. I like to do that, earliest opportunity. Same as I was doing when you and I first met.”

  “We met the same night you came to meet Opel.”

  “Earlier,” he said. “I knew you’d been in touch with Happy Valley. Wanted to scout out the wh
ole neighborhood, including your place. Just a quick look around, swish-swish, in and out, to get my bearings.”

  “When was this?”

  “I was the brush salesman. I came around with a sample case and some patter about mutilation and exchange rates.”

  “Gaw-damn.”

  “An old, a very old routine of mine. Thought I’d dust it off and try it, being I was here in town.”

  “I was told you didn’t travel anymore,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you how word got out on that. I leaked that particular word. Have to keep people off balance. If you let people maintain their balance, there’s any number of things likely to happen, the likeliest of which is that you lose the edge. Operations of this kind are a matter of balance and edge. I still travel. I like slipping in and out. Like coming to New York four, five times a year.”

  “Not me,” Menefee said. “I have to load up on dope every time we come to New York. I stoke myself like a coal-burning engine. New York is too real. It’s just about the realest thing there is in the observable universe.”

  “We’re growing a race of giants here,” I said. “This fact isn’t clear yet but will be one day soon. Men, women and children. All giants. Prepared to eat glass and punch their way through concrete.”

  “I stoke up, man. I mix me some weird concoctions. That’s the only way I can survive this kind of realness.”

  “I like traveling close to the ground,” Dr. Pepper said. “Getting to know the road people. The drifters. The pure products. I can recall Roy Best, a legendary banjo player who was working for a perforating company when I ran across him. Bushwick Perforating, Roy Best. Another legend about that time was Vincent T. Skinner, habitué of the billiard parlors, a whole anthropological culture in itself, Vinny Skinny, sold pool tables door to door because he loved the game, Vincent T. Skinner, froze to death in the middle of summer when he went to sleep in a refrigerated packing house between shifts. Mylon Ware, the mad dog folk singer, a near legend. James Radley, nutritionist, a legend many times over. The semi-legendary disc jockey, Howard Mud Stump Meegan, a man who wore white socks every day of his life because his feet were allergic to colored dyes. Bobby Boy Todd, a free spirit who worked as a dispatcher for a bus company, dispatching buses until he quit to travel, just travel, nothing but travel, spent his days and nights traveling, a free spirit, a legend of travel, married a half-breed girl and on his wedding day fractured both legs riding a kid’s tricycle down a ravine. Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb? Rosalee Dowdy, the comic book queen, a legend and a half. Tristan Bramble, folklorist and musicologist, busted for possession nine times, an important early influence. Earlene Griffin, the r-and-b arranger, a seminal figure. Just last night at the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I like to hang out when I’m in New York, I ran into Vernon Kliegl and Mary Kliegl, the husband and wife midgets who became legends in the late fifties for department store pilferage. They’re more or less retired now, living on deferred income. Stone drunk when I ran into them. Hanging all over each other. I called them but they were too drunk to hear me. So I followed them toward the down escalator. The down escalator as it turns out was not running at all, out of order, stalled. The Kliegls are standing there on the top step, too drunk to know they’re not moving. The up escalator is working fine and about a hundred people go gliding past the Kliegls before Mary Kliegl realizes they’ve been stationary all this while and begins punching Vernon Kliegl on the arm and chest, demanding to know what the hell is going on. A smile creases my face. I choose this moment to get them off the escalator. Vernon recognizes me right away and we shake hands and start talking about this and that. I’m aware all the while we’re talking that Mary Kliegl is looking up at me and squinting, too drunk to know who I am. She resumes her battering of Vernon’s arm and chest, all the time squealing out at him: ‘Who is that, who is he, do we know him?’ I finally had to cut the conversation short for the sake of Vernon Kliegl’s physical well-being. She wouldn’t even let me explain who I was. Midgets are clannish people.”

  His hands were set flat on the table. All through the narrative there was no change in his expression. I knew those people were out there. The pure so-called products. Found dead near railroad tracks or shipped in bulk to the warehouses of the certifiably insane. Pepper nevertheless seemed to be reciting for mere exercise. Maybe he was giving this particular identity a workout, stretching its muscles, adding a furlong to its distance. To my ear there were no defects in the unstressed delivery of his voice.

  “What happens now?” I said.

  “Eventually I want to package the stuff in twenty-five-milligram green capsules. Mean green beans. Too early to work out pricing.”

  “But you don’t have the sample. Hanes has it.”

  “That’s why I’m here, Buck. Hanes won’t be able to unload the product easy as all that. Hanes doesn’t know about balance and edge. The kid’s untried and untested, a pissy little babe among the timber wolves. He doesn’t have any up-top connections and he doesn’t know what it’s like out there, although by this time he’s maybe finding out. He’ll be back is my guess. He can’t stay out there indefinitely without putting himself in grave danger. This whole business qualifies as high risk. If he survives at all, back here is the first place he’ll come. I’m all but convinced of that. He’ll put the thing back where he got it from. That’s the first instinct of the trapped man. Meanwhile I’ll be close by. I’ll be keeping an eye on things. I’ll be in touch.”

  “I may not be here,” I said.

  “Buck, I want this product badly. This may be my last venture in the field of drugs and drug abuse. I crave new frontiers. There’s a craving in my breast for the uncharted spaces and territories of the human mind. Energy. I want to tap untapped fields of energy. Dope is okay. Dope is the power of the earth, the use of earth products to dig deeper into the earthen parts of the mind. But energy is the power of the universe. I want to tap that power. I see masses of people changing their energy patterns by controlling biorhythms from the basic frequencies of the universe. Stereo electrodes. Control of internal changes. I envision abuses, of course. I envision mail-order ads in the rear extremities of men’s magazines. Cures cancer in seconds! Adds inches to your cock! But that kind of booshit’s inevitable and I can’t take time to worry about it, much as it grieves me in the professional sense. I’m already semi-involved in a process I call the process of centrifugalism. Stereo electrodes. Blood-pressure impactors. What I call the auto-domination of the inner mind.”

  “I’ve got problems right now that don’t have anything to do with you or Hanes or the universe.”

  “I want to end this phase of my career with a technical and merchandising feat that goes beyond the legendary. You and I, friend, are the only two people in positions of trust. Once the product is returned, we’ll go into deep consultation. Where there’s money to be made and legends to be created, I don’t leave anything to chance and it strikes me as boding well for the future of our partnership that you’ve been wooed by other agencies of the underground without releasing the product. But accept a word of caution. This operation is fraught with danger. Bohack is not a man to be trifled with. He’s an edgy gent with all kinds of deliveries. Some reasonable. Some not so.”

  “Who the hell is Bohack?”

  “Pffff.”

  “What?” I said.

  “He laughed,” Menefee said. “That’s the way he laughs. Pffff. Pffff-pffff. It took me months before I caught on. For months I thought he was blowing loose threads off my shirt.”

  In his toxic glee Menefee repeatedly bumped his chin on the edge of the table. Finally he told me that Bohack was the name of the man who commanded one of Happy Valley’s two camps. As both men rose I heard the pneumatic drill jabbing into stone. Then Dr. Pepper took a pair of glasses from the inside pocket of his suit coat. With a disposable tissue he rubbed the lenses, held them to the light and then carefully fitted the glasses over his ears and nose. They were dark glasses with heav
y black frames. A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another. The touring clown doubly self-effaced.

  19

  OPEL AND I made love once in the anechoic chamber in the mountains. I thought of this as I lay in bed, unable to sleep. What were we like then, in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were like angels harboring each other in the notion of desirelessness, dazed in our acquiescence to this drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. Opel never returned to the chamber because the wedge-shaped baffles made her think of bats hanging in a cave.

  I took the number of steps necessary to get from the bed to the door. No one was there. I picked up a magazine and tried to read a column of print, getting to the second line before I had to stop because of the pressure behind my eyes. Molten water dripped from the pipe connected to the radiator, bleaching the wood floor. It was almost daylight, snow on the way, the phone squatting on the stacked phone books, the firemen breathing in the firehouse. I went to the door again. A young black woman stood in the hall, legs well apart, hands on hips. She was arrayed in burnishings and pleated streaks, and there was a trim glitter about her, a commercial grace, evident in the seamless way she shifted weight to orchestrate a sort of stylish body violence. I stood there in old shorts and dirty toenails. Azarian came up the stairs then. We went inside, where he took a chair and I got into bed. The woman remained in the open doorway. For the first time in three days I felt it was possible to sleep.

  “The group broke up,” Azarian said. “As a group we no longer exist. We officially broke up.”

  “Who’s the nice lady?”

  “Security,” he said. “Her name’s Epiphany Powell. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She used to sing, she used to model, she used to act. Now she’s doing security. The group broke up. We no longer exist as a group. Of course there wasn’t any real hope once you left. Still and all it’s frightening. Nobody was really prepared for it. But it happened. We no longer exist in the old sense.”