by Seth Morgan
There were just two ends left loose, and in a flash he conceived just how to tie them together. The cheroot leveled like a saber at the charge. He reached for the phone.
LIKE, A NEW CAREER
On the frayed edge of the Tenderloin, at the triangular corner where O’Farrell slanted into Market Street, the Golden Spike Bar and Grill still offered a shot and a beer for six bits and all you could eat for a deuce. There, in the cool breeze through the doors on both streets, horse degenerates traded ponies and hookers updated their date books in dark booths beneath daguerrotypes of steam locomotives.
Rings’n’Things came striding in from the blaring end of day through the O’Farrell Street entrance. Spotting Rick Tarzon at a rear booth beside a window, she did a Cuban grind between the tables and plumped down beside him. They ordered drinks and the waiter gave them each a mimeographed menu and Tarzon began, “Rosemary …”
“Gag me with Rosemary! Call me Rings.”
“Okay,” he smiled. “Rings. I know how disappointed you must be to get back here to Frisco …”
“San Francisco,” she corrected him a second time. “Folks who live here think it’s hokey to call it Frisco.”
“Yeah. Folks who were born in New York. As I was saying, you must be let down that your testimony isnt needed …”
“Like radically,” Rings made sure he understood. Though in truth she was relieved to know that the Pimp Blimp had already crashed. The big Disappointed Act in Tarzon’s office had been for Kitty’s benefit. Not that it impressed the big TexMex gal much. She kissed Rings’s cheek and said they’d meet again in that overly cheery way that meant they never would, then booked with the baby in the stationwagon they’d driven all the way from Texas together. Rings thought fur shur she’d be happy to be home until she found herself all alone there.
“But maybe I can make up for it,” Tarzon was saying, firing up a cheroot and ordering a fresh rum and coke.
Aint no maybe about it, Rings wanted to say. Like, abuse me in ways no other men have discovered. The very thought tripped her love trigger, juicing her drawers. But instead she suggested, “You could start by gettin me something to eat.”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
BREAKFAST 24 HRS was one of the Gold Spike’s claims to fame, and Rings decided a couple of eggs over easy would fur shur knock the wrinkles out of her belly. But lamping the shortorder cook behind the counter, she changed her mind. A pasty dude with a wilted pomp, he shook with major D.T.’s.
“I may as well get em scrambled,” she told Tarzon, “cuz that’s how they’ll end up anyway. Look at him whip n jingle.”
Tarzon laughed. “That’s Fabulous Frank, the Wizard of Odds. Just another life transformed by the touch of Baby Jewels Moses.” He sounded a little drunk. “Well, look here. Our guest of honor.”
A tall black man wearing an elegant dark suit stood uncertainly a few feet from their booth. His sunglasses reflected the Golden Spike like security mirrors. Gag me, went Rings. Is this why Tarzon invited me to dinner? To pawn me off on some fly ponce?
“Look, buster,” she had Tarzon know. “I dont flatback for nobody. Aint no way, aint no how.”
“Dont worry,” Tarzon chuckled, suddenly sober again. The voice he raised was dipped in acid. “Glad you could join us, Bell. Have a seat.”
Cautiously the black man approached the booth, tucking his forearm to his middle, folding himself into the seat opposite theirs. Rings frowned at the scent of his expensive cologne.
“Who’s this?” Bell asked distastefully, tipping his head her way.
Tarzon snarled through the teeth clenching the cheroot. “A young woman who had the guts to come forward with the truth while you were hiding behind cheap sunglasses …”
Bell snatched off the glasses, uncovering eyes like knife thrusts. “I thought this meeting was confidential.”
“Those confidences,” flipped the cheroot, “have cost lives, my daughter’s included.”
“You know I regret that. I didnt know …”
Rings busied herself flipping through the jukebox station on their table, regretting that she’d spent her last quarter on the Vibro King unit attached to her hotel bed. Before she could interrupt to ask for another one, her eggs arrived, and she busied herself dumping a half bottle of ketchup on them.
“You didnt want to know,” Tarzon said.
Bell gaveled the table, jingling the glasses.
“Hey!” squawked Rings. “Like, my eggs is scrambled enough awready.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Bell told Tarzon. “I wont be intimidated again, I wont sit still for abuse. If you intend to expose me, go ahead. I’ve lived so long with the threat I’d almost welcome it. I thought we had an understanding, but if not, go ahead and do your worst—it might be best for me.”
Tarzon sighed and said, “No, I’m not going to expose you. You’re a good judge and have to go on being one. The same as I’m a good cop and have to go on being that.”
Chewing her toast, Rings stared out the window down which twilight sifted a lavender dust past the asterisks of streetlamps. The Golden Spike’s lights came on, and she saw the reflection of Tarzon’s cheroot uncoiling its smoke.
“Did you talk to your wife?” Tarzon asked.
“Yes,” Bell said. “I told her everything. She agrees to your terms. She’ll auction the Blue Jager Moon and donate the proceeds to whatever drug rehabilitation fund you designate …”
Rings started. What moon? Wait a sec. That’s where she last smelled the cologne. Fur shur! In an elevator on Nob Hill.
She dogeyed Bell. “You were Glori girl’s sugardaddy.”
“That’s right,” Bell said, smiling sadly.
“I did some digging last week,” Tarzon said, “and discovered Miss Cywinski was on your payroll.”
“You are thorough,” Bell admitted.
Rings made a face. It was like they were feeding each other lines all of a sudden.
“Apparently the same federally funded job training program is still in place. I think I know a particularly worthy candidate, one who would actually show up at the office to learn a profession …”
Complicity lit Bell’s eyes and wreathed his face. “Oh, yes …” He turned to Rings. “Yes, indeed. If you wouldnt mind starting in the mailroom, Miss …”
“Hooten,” Tarzon supplied.
Rings gave up trying to understand what was going on. On they talked of other things with the eager intimacy of strangers who had discovered a mutual friend. The Golden Spike filled with the early evening crowd, sneering pimps and bellylaughing whores and bookies with backcombed hair. Outside, the great purple and green bubbles of twilight swelled up from the pavement and bulged against the buildings and burst in the indigo zenith, melting into night; and she noticed suddenly that Bell’s reflection was missing.
“You got a job,” Tarzon said. He was slumped in the booth with a fresh drink in his hand and a bittersweet smile on his face. He explained that she would be paid a salary to work parttime in the judge’s offices while she got her GED and enrolled in college.
“Like, a new career,” Rings said, a little scared.
“You’re all set,” he mumbled with just a twinge of resentment, and ordered another drink.
“Aint you had like enough, sailor?”
He puffed fresh life into his cheroot and, jetting a long stream of blue smoke across the table, flicked a shy look at her.
“Say, do you ever do it for … fun?”
And here Rings thought she’d never be asked.
DON’T LOOK BACK
Joe came to the following night on the floor of his own cell. He felt behind his head. The gash already was scabbed. He stood shakily and found cigarets and lit one, stepping to his window bars. A fire on a floor above glowed the opposite cell block. Behind it, smoke from the burning Admin Bu
ilding squidded oily black ink into the midnight blue.
He heard the ugly stutter of helicopter rotors. The noise swelled, then smashed the night with clattering as the great iron locust crested the cellblock, washing the barred window sockets with bluewhite light, driving Joe backward to his cell gate.
When the stars swam from his eyes, he saw that the other cells on his wing were standing open and empty. From the Mainline, the measured tramp of boots: not guards, not convicts—soldiers. The pen had been stormed and retaken. The tramp dimmed; the cellblock refilled with a dreadful thunderous peace.
On the morning of the third day, the National Guard officer found Joe sitting in his cell like Jonah beneath his trick gourd. Joe smiled hearing civilization’s first utterance following the long night of the Butcher Knives.
“Hey, asshole! Roll it up. Some damn thing called a ‘Special Circumstances’ parole just came over the wire for you.”
Joe sloshed behind the soldier’s clanking battledress down the flooded Mainline. Guardsmen stood every fifteen feet, M16’s at port arms. Joe was chained hand and foot: the final irony, being bound over to freedom. The windows all were smashed, the walls blackened. Torn centerfolds, halfburned trial transcripts, discarded masks, love letters, looted disciplinary chronos stirred sluggishly as Joe slogged through the alluvial ooze of convict wrath. Amidst ribbons of their fathers’ blood floated children’s smiling photos.
He was escorted through the burned and gutted Admin Building to R&R, where he signed his parole papers and was issued a hundred dollars in gate money. Miraculously his street clothes had escaped the fires. He stripped off his blues and put on his old jeans and T-shirt, his boots and dragon jacket. They let him keep the cap despite regulations prohibiting an inmate from leaving the institution with any apparel he didn’t possess when he arrived. But he couldn’t wear it for his Dress Out mugshot. This would have been Earl’s job, and sitting in the plywood booth Joe had to blink fast and swallow hard not to give away his grief.
Out in the bright morning Joe bellowed his lungs, flushing them of death. It was a moment he’d so long dreamed of, it had acquired the surreality of a dream. Unchained, he walked through milling soldiers to the Gate House. Police cars, media vans, army jeeps, and ambulances jammed the entrance drive. The dusty cars of the convicts’ people stretched a mile either way along the fences. Joe heard the iron gonging of their hearts.
Moving through the freeworlders he felt he’d known them all before, known them intimately: the civilians with their leeching eyes, the clamoring reporters, brows pleated with predatory concern, the soldiers, fear barricaded behind parade eyes—known them intimately some time before, yet now they were subtly but utterly altered. He felt like a bit movie player moving across the set of some disaster epic, mistaken for its star and pelted with questions neatly typed on a script beneath the arm of someone just out of sight.
“What’s it like in there?” shouted the first reporter.
“You all should see,” he said, shouldering politely past.
The reporter skipped nimbly around, blocking his path.
“Who’s this guy ‘Voice One’?”
“It doesnt matter, could have been any of em.”
Joe stood on his toes scouting the crowd’s nearest edge and knifed toward it, ignoring the multiplying questions as they realized he was one of them. They closed like hounds to a wounded stag; the bristling microphones, the cyclopean cameras, the clamoring bloated faces lit in the false dawn of their kliegs until he halted and growled with unmistakable menace and the hounds shied back.
Walking alone, he passed one last spectator, a pudgy and disheveled old gent whose wilted seersucker suit was straining a fresh dark sweat in the rising heat. A halfpint of cheap whiskey was upended in his dissolute mouth. Seeing Joe from the corner of his eye, he sucked it dry and tossed it twirling into the high grass along the fences.
“Looks like it’s fixin to get hot as a twodollar pistol …” he began with the hasty jocularity of one caught at something shameful. Then, pouched eyes squinting with mean surmise over Joe’s shoulder, demanded, “Why those boys killing each other up in there?”
Joe stopped and stared blankly at him. “It’s all that was left to do.”
“Fuckin animals,” smacked the greasy lips.
“Wrong, amigo. Men built those cages for themselves.”
Then he was swinging down the road, humming a rebop “Saint James Infirmary,” when he heard her voice to the side:
“Fella, you better have a kiss in both pockets cuz there’s two of us now.”
He was laughing as he turned beholding those goofy eyes like the five ball off the eight, the hard way. She took his kiss swiftly, on a cool cheek that smelled of soap, then eagerly held up to him the bundle she carried. His cautious finger parted the tiny blanket. He stared with astonishment at one gray eye, one blue staring back with that profound consternation of infants that verges on anger.
He bent to kiss the downy globe, and a tiny fist jerked up and popped him in the nose. He jerked back with a bemused and crooked grin. “Christ!” he breathed. “Everything comes around …”
“Whoa!” Now it was her turn to jerk back. She tucked a fold of lip between her teeth to bite suspiciously, gunned him that savvy sly ole slantendicular, and said, “Dont tell me you went and caught religion in there …”
Joe ballooned his cheeks and popped his lips. He tipped his chin toward a distressed Chevy wagon with Texas plates facing away from the penitentiary along the fencing.
“That heap belong to you?”
“Shitfire, no! That tragedy belongs to us. So dont say if it was a horse, I’d have to shoot it.”
“All I got to say is, let’s blow this popstand,” already striding toward the station wagon.
“To which I’d say you got a bright ideer …” She followed him, swinging the infant onto her hip to open the passenger door.
“Fella, you got some drawings for your new family?”
Joe cocked his head and torqued an eye to slant her a speculative sidelong across the car. Dropping his voice and stretching it confidentially, he asked: “Do you have any idea how an armadillo crosses the Mississippi?”
“No, and that very question’s been pesterin me all my life.”
“I’ll pull your coat when we get down the road a piece,” he promised, slipping behind the wheel.
She sighed settling in beside him with the infant. “I dont judge another few minutes of suspense will kill me.”
“I’ll give you a hint, though. Something to think on.” He cranked up the aged short block; it fired up with a bang and burst of black exhaust. “They got two choices.”
“I knew it couldnt be as simple as waddlin across a bridge.”
Laughing, Joe swiped off the cap, hung it over the rearview mirror, and dumped the Chevy into Drive.
About the Author
Seth Morgan (1949–1990) was an American novelist whose sole published title, Homeboy, received much critical acclaim. Morgan drew from his own experiences with San Francisco drug culture and prison in order to write what the New York Times called “an unnerving and utterly persuasive rendition of hell.”
As a young boy, Morgan attended many elite private schools, including St. Bernard’s School in New York and the American School in Switzerland. He also briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out and moving in with singer Janis Joplin. They became engaged shortly before she died. At the time of his own death in a motorcycle accident, Morgan was under contract for a second novel, set in New Orleans and titled Mambo Mephiste.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of f
iction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Leiber and Stoller: Excerpt from “Jailhouse Rock” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Copyright © 1957 by Jerry Leiber Music and Mike Stoller Music. Reprinted by permission.
Milene Music, Inc. and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” by Fred Rose and Hank Williams. Copyright © 1952, renewed 1980 by Milene Music, Inc., 65 Music Square West, Nashville, Tennessee 37203 and Aberbach Enterprises Ltd. All rights on behalf of Aberbach Enterprises, Ltd. Administered by Rightsong Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Milene Music, Inc., and Wamer/Chappell Music, Inc.
University of Illinois Press and Frederick Morgan: Excerpt from “Meditations for Autumn” from Poems: New and Selected by Frederick Morgan. Copyright © 1987 by Frederick Morgan. Published by University of Illinois Press. Reprinted by permission of University of Illinois Press and Frederick Morgan.
Copyright © 1990 by Seth Morgan
Cover design by Gabriel Holiman
978-1-5040-0584-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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