It was funny that of all things to mention in the limited space of a coconut-launched postcard Shasta should have picked that day in the rain. It had stuck with Doc somehow too, even though it came at a point late in their time together, when she was already halfway out the door and Doc saw it happening but was letting it happen, and despite it there they were, presently making out frantically, like kids at the drive-in, steaming up the windows and getting the seat covers wet. Forgetting for a few minutes how it was all going to develop anyway.
Back at the beach, the rain continued, and every day up in the hills, another fragment of real estate came sliding down. Insurance salesmen had Brylcreem running down into their collars, and stewardii found it impossible even with half-gallon cans of hair spray purchased in duty-free zones far away to maintain their hairdos in anything close to a stylish flip. The termitic houses of Gordita Beach had all turned to the consistency of wet sponge, emergency plumbers reached in to squeeze the beams and joists, thinking of their own winter homes in Palm Springs. People began to go crazy even while on the natch. Some enthusiast, claiming to be George Harrison of the Beatles, tried to hijack the Goodyear Blimp, moored at its winter quarters at the intersection of the Harbor and San Diego Freeways, and make it fly him to Aspen, Colorado, in the rain.
The rain had a peculiar effect on Sortilège, who was just around then beginning to get obsessed by Lemuria and its tragic final days.
“You were there in a former life,” Doc theorized.
“I dream about it, Doc. I wake up so sure sometimes. Spike feels that way, too. Maybe it’s all this rain, but we’re starting to have the same dreams. We can’t find a way to return to Lemuria, so it’s returning to us. Rising up out of the ocean—‘hi Leej, hi Spike, long time ain’t it. . . .’”
“It talked to you guys?”
“I don’t know. It isn’t just a place.”
DOC TURNED OVER Shasta’s postcard now and stared at the picture on the front. It was a photo taken underwater of the ruins of some ancient city—broken columns and arches and collapsed retaining walls. The water was supernaturally clear and seemed to emit a vivid blue-green light. Fish, what Doc guessed you’d call tropical, were swimming back and forth. It all seemed familiar. He looked for a photo credit, a copyright date, a place of origin. Blank. He rolled a joint and lit up and considered. This had to be a message from someplace besides a Pacific island whose name he couldn’t pronounce.
He decided to go back and visit the Ouija-board address, which, being the site of a classic dope misadventure, had remained permanently entered in his memory. Denis came along for muscle.
The hole in the ground was gone, and in its place rose a strangely futuristic building. From the front it might have been taken at first for some kind of religious structure, smoothly narrow and conical, like a church spire only different. Whoever put it up must have had a pretty comfortable budget to work with, too, because the whole outside had been covered in gold leaf. Then Doc noticed how this tall pointed shape was also curved away from the street. He went down the block a little way and looked back to get a side view, and when he saw how dramatic the curve was and how sharp the point at the top, he finally tumbled. Aha! In the old L.A. tradition of architectural whimsy, this structure was supposed to be a six-story-high golden fang!
“Denis, I’m gonna look around for a while, you want to wait in the car or come in and cover my back or something?”
“I was gonna go try and find a pizza,” Denis said.
Doc handed him the car keys. “And . . . they did have driver ed at Leuzinger High.”
“Sure.”
“And you remember this is a stick, not automatic and so forth.”
“I’m cool, Doc.” And Denis sped off.
THE FRONT DOOR was nearly invisible, more of a big access panel that fit snugly into the curving façade. In the lobby beneath a tasteful sign in sans-serif face reading GOLDEN FANG ENTERPRISES, INC.CORPORATE HQ and behind a nameplate of her own that said “Xandra, hi!” sat an Asian receptionist wearing a black vinyl jumpsuit and a distant expression, who asked him in a semi-Brit accent whether he was sure he had the right place.
“This is the address they told me at the Club Asiatique in San Pedro? Just here to pick up a package for the management?”
Xandra reached for a telephone, punched a button, murmured into it, listened, gave Doc another doubtful once-over, stood, and led him across the reception area to a brushed-metallic door. It took only a step or two for him to dig that she’d logged more dojo hours in the year previous than he’d spent in front of the tube in his whole life—not the sort of young lady whose displeasure you’d go looking to provoke.
“Second office on the left. Dr. Blatnoyd will see you in a moment.”
Doc found the office and looked around for something to check out his hair in but saw only a small yellow-framed feng shui mirror by the door. The face looking back did not seem to be his own. “This is not promising,” he muttered. Behind a titanium desk, the window revealed a stretch of lower Sunset—taquerías, low-rent hotels, pawn shops. There were beanbag chairs and a range of magazines—Foreign Affairs, Sinsemilla Tips, Modern Psychopath, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—that gave Doc no handle on the clientele here. He started paging through 2000 Hairdos and was just getting into “That Five-Point Scissor Cut—What Your Stylist Isn’t Telling You,” when Dr. Blatnoyd came in wearing a suit in a deep, nearly ultraviolet shade of velvet, with very wide jacket lapels and bell-bottom trousers and accented with a raspberry-colored bow tie and display handkerchief. He seated himself behind the desk, reached for a weighty loose-leaf manual of some kind and began consulting it, squinting over at Doc from time to time. Finally, “So . . . you have some ID, I imagine.”
Doc went looking through his wallet till he found a business card from a Chinese head shop on North Spring Street he thought would do the trick.
“I can’t read this, it’s in some . . . Oriental . . . what is this, Chinese?”
“Well, I figured that you, being Chinese—”
“What? what are you talking about?”
“‘The . . . the Golden Fang . . .’?”
“It’s a syndicate, most of us happen to be dentists, we set it up years ago for tax purposes, all legit— Wait,” peering at Doc you’d have to say diagnostically, “where’d you tell Xandra you were from again?”
“Uh . . .”
“Why, you’re another one of those hippie dopefiends, aren’t you. My goodness. Here for a little perking up, I’ll bet—” In a jiffy he was out with a tall cylinder of brown glass sealed elaborately with globs of some bright red plastic—“Dig it! just in from Darmstadt, lab quality, maybe I’ll even have some with you. . . .” And before Doc knew it the hectic D.D.S. had a quantity of fluffy white cocaine crystals all chopped up into snortable format and arranged in lines on a nearby copy of Guns & Ammo.
Doc shrugged in apology. “I try not to do dope I can’t pay for, ’s what it is.”
“Whoo!” Dr. Blatnoyd had a soda straw and was busy snorting away. “No worries, it’s on the house, as the TV antenna man always sez. . . . Hmm, missed a little. . . .” He took it on his finger and rubbed it enthusiastically into his gums.
Doc did half a line in either nostril, just to be sociable, but somehow could not shake the impression that all was not as innocent here as it looked. He had been in a dentist’s office or two, and there was a distinctive smell and a set of vibes that were as absent here as room echoes, which he’d also been wondering about. Like something else was going on—something . . . not groovy.
There was a quiet but no-nonsense knock at the door, and Xandra the receptionist looked in. She had unzipped the top of the jumpsuit, and Doc could now make out this exquisite pair of no-bra tits, their nipples noticeably erect.
“Oh, Doctor,” she breathed, half singing it.
“Yes, Xandra,” replied Dr. Blatnoyd, moist-nosed and beaming.
Xandra nodded and slid away back on out the door again, smiling over her shoulder. “And don’t forget to bring that bottle.”
“Be right back,” Blatnoyd assured Doc, speeding out after her, eyes frenziedly focused on where her ass had just been, his echoless footsteps soon vanishing into unknown regions of the Golden Fang Building.
Doc went over and had a look at the manual on the desk. Titled Golden Fang Procedures Handbook, it was open to a chapter titled “Interpersonal Situations.” “Section Eight—Hippies. Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the moment.”
From the doorway came a loud, violent chirp. Doc looked up and saw a smiling young woman, blond, Californian, presentable, wearing a striped minidress of many different “psychedelic” colors and waving at him vigorously, causing enormous earrings, shaped like pagodas of some kind, to swing back and forth and actually jingle. “Here for my Smile Maintenance appointment with Dr. Rudy!”
A blast from the past. “Hey! that’s ’at Japonica, ain’t it. Japonica Fenway! Imagine meeting you here!”
This was not a moment he’d been either dreading or hoping for, though now and then somebody would remind him of the ancient American Indian belief that if you save somebody’s life, you are responsible for them from then on, forever, and he would wonder if any of that applied to his history with Japonica. It had been his first paying gig as a licensed private eye, and pay it did, for sure. The Fenways were heavy-duty South Bay money, living on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in a gated enclave located inside the already gated high-rent community of Rolling Hills. “How am I supposed to come see you,” Doc wondered when Crocker Fenway, Japonica’s dad, called him at the office.
“Guess it’ll have to be outside the gates and down in the flats,” said Crocker, “like Lomita?”
It was a pretty open-and-shut runaway-daughter case, hardly worth daily scale, let alone the extravagant bonus Crocker insisted on paying when Doc finally brought Japonica back, one lens missing from her wire-rim shades and vomit in her hair, making the handoff in the same parking lot where he and Crocker had met originally. It wasn’t clear if she’d ever clearly registered Doc then, or remembered him now.
“So! Japonica! what’ve you been up to?”
“Oh, escaping, mostly? There’s this, like, place? that my parents keep sending me to?”
Which turned out to be Chryskylodon, the same nut plantation in Ojai that Doc remembered his Aunt Reet mentioning and which Sloane and Mickey had donated a wing to. Though Doc once may have rescued Japonica from a life of dark and unspecified hippie horror, apparently restoration to the bosom of her family had been enough to really drive her around the bend. Against the neutral surface of the wall opposite, Doc had a moment’s visual of an American Indian in full Indian gear, perhaps one of those warriors who wipe out Henry Fonda’s regiment in Fort Apache (1948), approaching with a menacing frown. “Doc responsible for crazy white chick now. What Doc planning to do about that? If anything.”
“Excuse me, short man with strange hair? Are you all right?” And on she went without waiting for an answer, twinkling like a roomful of speed freaks hanging Christmas tinsel, about her different escapes. It was beginning to give Doc a headache.
Owing to Governor Reagan’s shutdown of most of the state mental facilities, the private sector had been trying in its way to pick up some of the slack, soon in fact becoming a standard California child-rearing resource. The Fenways had had Japonica in and out of Chryskylodon on a sort of maintenance-contract basis, depending as always on how they themselves were feeling day to day, for both led emotional lives of unusually high density, and often incoherence. “Some days all I had to do was play the wrong kind of music, and there’s my bags already packed, down in the front hall waiting for the driver.”
Soon Chryskylodon had found itself attracting a type of silent benefactor—middle-aged, male, though occasionally female, more focused than usual on the young and mentally disturbed. Freaky chicks and fun-loving dopers! Why do they call it the Love Generation? Come on up to Chryskylodon for a rockin weekend and find out! Absolute discretion guaranteed! Circa 1970, “adult” was no longer quite being defined as in times previous. Among those who could afford to, a strenuous mass denial of the passage of time itself was under way. All across a city long devoted to illusory product, clairvoyant Japonica had seen them, these travelers invisible to others, poised, gazing from smogswept mesa-tops above the boulevards, acknowledging one another across miles and years, summit to summit, in the dusk, under an obscurely enforced silence. Wingfeathers trembled along their naked backs. They knew they could fly. A moment more, an eyeblink in eternity, and they would ascend. . . .
So, Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, out on a first blind date with Japonica at the Sound Mind Café, a secluded eatery with a patio in back and a menu designed by a resident three-star organic chef, was not only enchanted, he was wondering if somebody hadn’t slipped some new psychedelic into his pomegranate martini. This girl was delightful! Being a little ESP-deficient, of course Rudy failed to appreciate that behind her wide sparkling gaze Japonica was not only thinking about but at this point actually visiting other worlds. The Japonica sitting with the older man in the funny velour suit was actually a Cybernetic Organism, or cyborg, programmed to eat and drink, converse and socialize, while Real Japonica tended to important business elsewhere, because she was the Kozmic Traveler, deep issues Out There awaited, galaxies wheeled, empires collapsed, karma would not be denied, and Real Japonica must always be present at some exact point in five-dimensional space, or chaos would resume its dominion.
She returned to the Sound Mind to find that Cyborg Japonica had somehow malfunctioned and gone skipping into the kitchen and done something gross to the Soup of the Day, and now they would have to pour it all down the sink. Actually, it was the Soup of the Night, a sinister indigo liquid which probably didn’t deserve much respect, but still, Cyborg Japonica could have showed some self-control. Naughty, impulsive Cyborg Japonica. Perhaps Real Japonica should not let her have those special high-voltage batteries she had been asking for. That would show her.
Dr. Blatnoyd, escorting her out through a roomful of disapproving faces, only grew more bedazzled. So this was a free-spirited hippie chick! He saw these girls on the streets of Hollywood, on the TV screen, but this was his first up-close encounter. No wonder Japonica’s parents didn’t know what to do with her—his assumption here, which he didn’t examine too closely, being that he did.
“And actually, I wasn’t too sure about who he was till I came in for my first Smile Evaluation. . . .” At which point in Japonica’s reminiscing, in popped the lecherous toothyanker himself, zipping up his fly.
“Japonica? I thought we’d agreed never to—” Catching sight of Doc—“oh, you’re still here?”
“I escaped again, Rudy,” she twinkled.
Denis also now came lurching in. “Hey man, your ride’s in a body shop.”
“It signed itself in, Denis?”
“I sort of mashed the front end. I was looking at these chicks out on Little Santa Monica and—”
“You went to Beverly Hills for a pizza, and rear-ended somebody there.”
“Needs a new . . . what do they call that, with the hoses, where the steam comes out—”
“Radiator—Denis, you said you took driver ed in high school.”
“No, no, Doc, you said did they have Driver Ed, and I said yes ’cause they did, this dude Eddie Ochoa, that there wasn’t a cop south of Salinas could get near him, and that’s what everybody called him—”
“So, like, you . . . never actually . . . learned . . .”
“All that stuff they wa
nted you to remember, man?”
Xandra, visibly disheveled, now came running in after Denis, yelling, “I told you you couldn’t come up here,” then spotted Japonica and screeched to a halt. “Oh. Smile Maintenance Chick. How lovely,” while scaling tiny glares Dr. Blatnoyd’s way like the star-shaped blades in kung fu movies.
“Miss Fenway,” the doctor began to explain, “may seem a little psychotic today. . . .”
“Groovy!” cried Denis.
“What?” Blatnoyd blinking.
“Being insane, man? it’s groovy, where are you at, man?”
“Denis . . .” Doc murmured.
“It is not ‘groovy’ to be insane. Japonica here has been institutionalized for it.”
“Yep,” beamed Japonica.
“Like, in the place? Psychedelic! They put those volts in your head, man?”
“Volts ’n’ volts,” twinkled Japonica.
“Whoa. Bad for la cabeza, man.”
“C’mon, Denis,” said Doc, “we’re gonna have to figure out how to catch a bus back to the beach.”
“If you need a ride, I’m heading that way,” offered Japonica.
Running a fast eyeball diagnostic, Doc could see nothing too alarming—right at the moment she was being as sane as anybody here, not too many useful remarks Doc could pass, so he settled for, “Everything cool with your brakes and lights, Japonica? license-plate lights and so forth?”
Inherent Vice Page 18