The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  When Pico the Rat found out about Foot sending presents to Carleen he immediately got on the phone.

  “Listen, Foot,” he said, trying to sound like 98 lbs. of menace, “it would be very unhealthy for you to keep on sending unsolicited presents to a certain female TV personality.”

  “So what are you gonna do, send another alligator to bite off my other foot?” said Foot.

  “Live in fear,” said Pico the Rat, and hung up.

  Foot Gore went out and bought a $200 gilt frame, inserted a photograph of his mother into it, and mailed it special delivery to Carleen Treble.

  NOTE HOW A MAN NAMED FOOT LOSES A FOOT TO AN ALLIGATOR. IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE STORY OF OEDIPUS, ASK YOUR INSTRUCTOR TO TELL IT TO YOU. WHY DO YOU THINK FOOT MAILS A PICTURE OF HIS MOTHER TO CARLEEN? COULD IT BE THAT HE SUFFERS FROM AN OEDIPUS COMPLEX? OEDIPUS PUTS OUT HIS EYES. DELBERT STAGGERS IS BLIND. COULD IT BE THAT FOOT AND DELBERT ARE DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SAME PERSONALITY? WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE CARLEEN? IS ELVIS PRESLEY REALLY DEAD?

  The next afternoon, a Cadillac limousine pulled up in front of Foot’s apartment and a weasel-faced runt in an oversized chauffeur’s uniform guided a giant wearing mirrored sunglasses toward the door. When Foot answered the bell, he was first pushed back into the apartment by a poke in the belly, then struck sharply across the ribs by Delbert’s white cane. Inside the apartment, Delbert whacked him into unconsciousness.

  “Wait outside. I’ll collect the money,” said Pico.

  “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know,” Delbert said to Foot. Delbert thought he was punishing an ex-employee who had embezzled funds from the hospital.

  “Stop annoying Carleen Treble or next time I will bring an alligator,” hissed Pico into Foot’s semi-conscious ear.

  Today, the Alligator Report over, Carleen’s vacuous smile fading into a feminine hygiene commercial, Preacher switches off the set, dons a yellow slicker, and exits, leaning into the bitter wind of Hurricane Zoltan. He stumps along the beach on his cork, balsa-wood, and Styrofoam prosthetic.

  A half mile up the beach he spots the dead ibis on the sand beneath a palm tree. He picks it up, examines it, decides (ignoring the pain in his ribs) that he will send it by special delivery parcel to Carleen at the TV station.

  IS IT LEGAL TO POST A DEAD IBIS IN THE U.S. MAIL? SUGGEST TO YOUR PRINCIPAL THAT HE ORGANIZE A FIELD TRIP TO THE NEAREST POST OFFICE.

  The ibis has drawn one leg up into its feathers. Foot Gore carries it by the other leg, swinging it in time as he whistles the march from The Bridge on the River Kwai. Disguised as wild orchids, two postal inspectors follow at a discreet distance.

  HOW SIGNIFICANT IS THE IBIS APPEARING TO HAVE ONLY ONE LEG? COULD THE AUTHOR BE REFERRING TO THE FOOTLESS BIRD LEGEND? READ THE COMPLETE WORKS OF D. H. LAWRENCE AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TO FIND OUT.

  The wind whips sand against Foot-to-the-Floor Gore’s pant legs. As he walks, he pictures Carleen opening the box and finding the ibis. He wiggles the toes on his right foot. He can feel the sand collecting in his artificial shoe.

  King of the Street

  1.

  A little buzzsaw of a wind chews at my ankles, whips dirt and sand up at my face, chases papers along the concrete until they flutter into storefronts like wounded birds. Though I’m over half a block behind him, I recognize King’s strut as he hoofs along Hastings Street toward the Sunshine Hotel. He hesitates for just an instant at the door of the Sunshine’s bar. I can see his lips curse as he glances around quickly to see if anyone has noticed. Two big whores wearing halters, shorts, and knee boots patrol the sidewalk. Neither looks at King. But I know, and King knows, that only cons and ladies wait for someone to open doors for them.

  “Hey, King,” I shout. “Wait up!” But he disappears into the Sunshine, probably heading to the back of the bar to find Hacksaw.

  I lope after him. I’ll catch up while his eyes are getting used to the cavelike darkness, while his other senses ingest the warm-sour odor of beer, the smell of smoky upholstery.

  King has been in the slam for almost a year. I’m betting this is his first day out.

  2.

  It was Hacksaw I got to know first. Contrary to popular opinion, even bikers get lonely.

  The Sunshine Bar is right in the heart of the drag, and is to the skid row area what the stock exchange is to the financial district. If you can’t arrange to get it at the Sunshine, it can’t be got. And, if you can smoke it, snort it, shoot it, fuck it, wear it, or drive it, Hacksaw, the head honcho of the Coffin Chasers, can get it for you.

  Empty, the Sunshine is big enough to drive buffalo through, but it’s never empty. The atmosphere of the Sunshine is like the inside of a beehive. The walls have faded murals of girls in grass skirts dancing against a background of blue sky and palm trees. The dancing girls have twenty years of accumulated fly specks on them, just like a lot of the clientele. The front half of the bar is for anybody, but the back door and all the tables around it are reserved for the Coffin Chasers.

  I’ve been dropping in to the Sunshine a couple of times a week for years. I usually sit close to the bikers’ section—it’s called the Coffin Corner—but never in it unless I’m invited. If some stranger wanders in and goes to sit at one of their tables, one of the CCs ambles over and speaks without moving his lips. “If you want to live long and die happy, get the fuck out of this section,” he says. Ordinary citizens, unless they have a death wish, tend not to argue with bikers.

  I’m a voyeur when it comes to the bikers. I sit near their tables, eavesdrop as much as I can. I’m jealous of the women they attract. I’d give anything to behave as fearlessly as they do. But I never will. “There are only two kinds of men,” Hacksaw said to me one night, “those who are bikers, and those who wish they were.”

  I agree.

  “Come here,” Hacksaw said to me one night. He was alone in the CCs’ section, slumped down, sitting on his neck, looking like a denim bean-bag chair with a head. Hacksaw has been described as “300 lbs. of hate, with the disposition of a rhino.”

  After he beckoned to me, I picked up my beer and climbed the two carpeted steps to the Coffin Corner. Hacksaw motioned me to a chair; an honor in itself.

  “I hear you write,” he said. I was surprised that Hacksaw even knew I existed, let alone that he knew anything about me.

  I nodded, swallowing.

  “I could tell you some stories,” he said. His voice emanated from somewhere near his four-inch-square brass belt buckle. He wore oil-splattered jeans, black biker’s boots; what must have been a size 60 black tee-shirt covered his bulk. Gold lettering on the shirt read Harley Fucking Davidson.

  “I’m probably not that kind of writer,” I said, “but I’d be happy to listen any time you want to talk.” It is a universal truth that everybody, absolutely everybody, thinks they have stories to tell.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doin’ here though,” Hacksaw went on, waving his hand to show he meant not just the bar, but the area of the city, the street.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Remained silent.

  “Are you them or us?” When I looked puzzled he went on. “Are you straight or street?”

  “I’ve been both,” I said. “I didn’t know I had to choose.”

  “You can’t be both. Down there,” and he pointed to the front of the bar, “you’re swimmin’ at the bottom of the barrel. This place is full of stumble-fucks, junkie-whores, winos . . . You stand out like a fuckin’ wristwatch hippie . . .”

  “Winos and whores are some of my favorite people . . . not necessarily in that order . . .” I said while Hacksaw stared coldly at me.

  We talked for about an hour, until the Coffin Corner filled up with bikers and their ladies. The lot outside the back door looked like a chrome junkyard; the flashy motorcycles rumbled like guard dogs. Hacksaw, without ever coming right out and stating it, let me know that he was literate to some degree. Something he obviously didn’t want his cronies to know, for he stayed on sa
fe subjects—dope, sex and motorcycles, when any of them were within hearing. I remember thinking that if I had nerve enough to riff through the saddlebags on his chopper I might find a hardcover book or two stashed among his wrenches.

  “You’re droolin’,” Hacksaw said to me at one point, grinning. I was staring too long at a lithe, dark-haired girl with amber eyes, who had tattoos from her wrists to the ragged edge of her cutoff denim vest.

  “It shows?”

  “I can fix you up no problem.”

  “Not tonight, thanks,” I said with tremendous effort. There are iron strings attached to every favor a guy like Hacksaw performs. I wasn’t ready to be in his debt.

  3.

  In that way outgoing strangers in a bar have of drawing people at nearby tables into their conversations, King reeled me in, like scooping a fish from a puddle. I’d seen him around the Sunshine for a month or two. He made it plain he was from the East and considered himself a cut above the locals, but he did it in such an ingratiating way that he offended no one. He’d scored himself two chicks, neither one very pretty, but diligent whores who stayed on the street until they turned as many tricks as King thought they should.

  Some guys attract whores. King did. I wish I did. If a whore approaches me in a bar or on the street it is to ask if I want to go out: street talk for “Do you want to fuck and pay for it?”

  When I stop to think about it I realize that I have never chosen a friend. I am always chosen. Male or female. My ex-wife chose me. Every lover I’ve ever had chose me. King chose me. Though you couldn’t get him to admit it through torture, he likes me because I’m literate, introspective, shy, all the things King is not. We are friends though. He operates at the most primitive levels. But then everything on the street is at a primitive level.

  The fall King took came after he scored a third chick, a sweet thing named Lannie; smoke-blond hair, a sensual mouth, no illusions about what she is or does. Her problem was too big a fondness for junk. King would have straightened her out. But Ginny, the number one chick, got jealous and set him up.

  4.

  “Even sociopaths need friends,” Lannie said to King one evening. I noticed that she and I were the only ones who could tease King and get away with it.

  “Hey, if you subtracted my I.Q. from the National Debt, the budget would be balanced,” said King.

  “He believes that,” said Lannie.

  “What can I say?” said King, smiling like he was accepting an award.

  “King’s never read anything longer than a street sign,” said Lannie.

  King is tall, raw-boned, moves like a sleek animal. He has dark, curly hair that floods over his collar and forehead. He is super-intelligent; he has total recall of conversations held months or years before. His eyes are a bitter blue, as if they’re filled with metal filings. He always appears to be adding up unseen columns of figures, making calculations.

  At his trial King’s defense was “If she didn’t give her money to me she’d have given it to somebody else,” a premise that is completely valid on the street, but is not covered in any judge’s manual. King drew 18 months for what was called Living Off the Avails of Prostitution.

  Surprisingly, King was not bitter. “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” he philosophized. But his eyes glinted like railroad tracks under moonlight as he was saying it.

  I could have appeared at the trial as a witness for King. I was there the night he hooked up with Ginny. She came to him. I was at the next table when she sat down beside King, flashed a C-note she’d acquired by selling her services, and offered it to King, snuggling against his arm. “If you were my old man, there’d be a couple of these every day,” she said, simpering, leaking smoke through her teeth.

  I was practically exploding with lust at the thought. But King was cool as November. He let her sweat it out; he fingered the C-note, unfolded it, played with it, tucked it under a beer glass on the table instead of putting it in his pocket.

  “How do you do it?” I asked him once.

  “Never rush into anything with a broad, man. Let ’em know you don’t fucking care a lick about them,” he said. “Those kind of chicks know deep down they’re not worth shit. It turns them on to have to crawl for a little attention. Listen, you fucking guys who read big books and don’t know what’s going down on the street got it all wrong about the relationship between whores and their old men. These chicks don’t do anything they don’t want to do; they never give away money they don’t want to part with. Hell, most of them can’t wait to give away their trick money. A good old man just keep his ladies happy, and keeps them from mainlining too much junk into their arms.

  “You got to understand the psychology involved, and it ain’t in your fucking books, man. I never roughed up a chick who didn’t crave to be roughed up. Back East I had this chickie used to come to me with her belt in her hand, pull down her jeans and hand me the strap. Man, did we get it on when I was finished with her.”

  5.

  About a month after King began serving his time, Ginny kept a date first with a hot cap (heroin about a hundred times stronger than the watered down shit that’s usually on the street), then with the coroner.

  “A tragic loss,” drawled Hacksaw from under half-closed lids. “In the downward order of the universe there are cockroaches, slugs, shit, snitches, and bare pavement,” and he smiled like a lion that had just eaten its fill of something less fortunate.

  I was the one who introduced King to Hacksaw. King mentioned that he needed some wheels and had the bread to buy them.

  “You’re not gonna pay full price?” I said.

  “Hey, what’s money for?” said King, patting his vest pocket.

  “I’ll introduce you to Hacksaw,” I volunteered.

  “I don’t know. I usually leave sleeping bikers lie.” But he didn’t stop me.

  “You just put out the word on what you want and in a day or two it’ll appear in the back parking lot. Two-thirds off retail. Hacksaw doesn’t scoff it himself; he doesn’t even hold; he just takes his cut.”

  I visited King in the slammer, twice. I went to tell him about Ginny, but of course he already knew.

  “What can I say?” said King, grinning. “As you sow, so shall you reap.

  “Like they say, man, the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day. By the way, I’ve joined the Bible Thumpers.” He lowered his voice. “Hell of a P.R. move. Good for a couple of months off this gig.”

  The second time I offered to take Lannie.

  “Nah,” she said, “visitin’ the joint always makes me sad.”

  When I told Hacksaw I was taking the bus out to the prison he said, “How much money do you make from writing stories?”

  “I haven’t made any yet,” I admitted.

  “For chrissakes,” said Hacksaw, reaching deep into his boot and producing a plastic folder full of credit cards and I.D. “Rent yourself a car. Buy yourself some threads; you look like a bum. Go to the bank, go to seven or eight banks and get some cash. Then flush this stuff down a sewer.”

  What the hell! Being indebted to Hacksaw probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

  6.

  “Hey, King, you leave your fucking hearing behind the walls?” I say as I catch up with him in the middle of the bar. A pathetic little half-breed girl is trying to dance on a tiny stage covered in green indoor-outdoor. She has a homemade tattoo on her butt reads: Property of Big Frank. Her sad little titties point at the floor.

  King shakes hands, clasping my arm with his free hand. I think he is genuinely happy to see me. He is thinner, his clothes hang at odd angles.

  “Come on,” he says, “I’m goin’ to see the Hacksaw. I need some new threads.” He stares around the smoky beehive. “Place is still jammed with college graduates, I see.”

  We wait at the bottom of the steps until we catch Hacksaw’s eye. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you don’t wear the club colors you don’t go up the steps unless you’re i
nvited. Hacksaw’s newest lady is squashed up next to him, a snubnosed chick with freckles and wheat-colored hair, must be at least sixteen. Up top she’s wearing only a denim vest with the CC’s colors on the back; she’s busy licking Hacksaw’s ear. He has his left hand all the way down the front of her jeans.

  Hacksaw buys a round and we visit for a while. King lets his needs be known. “Who’s boosting these days?” he asks.

  “The Fox,” says Hacksaw. “See the guy with the red hair and beard,” and he points to the middle of the lower section where this laid-back lookin’ dude has his chair tipped back and his Dingos parked on a table. “Works with a Black chick. They’re cool. How long you been away?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “I figured. When you want wheels you know who to see.” King nods. “Make it within a week and I’ll throw this in for a couple of days,” and he uses his right hand to lift the kid’s vest and show her little, freckled tits. “Nice, eh?”

  “Nice, Hacksaw. You shouldn’t do that to a guy who’s only a few hours out of the slam.”

  “Take her back to the john for a few minutes. She sucks like silk.”

  “Maybe later,” says King. We head down the steps toward the Fox’s table.

  Same old Hacksaw, wants to have everybody in his debt.

  “Hacksaw sent me,” says King, pulling up a chair backwards, straddling it.

  “I seen you jawing with him,” says the Fox. He is rightly named: only about 5’7”, skinny, with a shag of red hair and a scraggily beard. His eyes are golden, and move around fast like a chicken’s. King explains what he wants.

  “I’ll alert my boost,” says the Fox, “back in two,” and he signals the waiter to drop us a beer each.