“Shit,” replied Doc, encouragingly.
“And no, I haven’t been near the heat with this. It would get back to these guys before I was out the door, and I’d end up a shark hors d’oeuvre.”
“D and D, Tito.”
“What happened, Mickey got to where he didn’t always trust his drivers. They were most of ’em ex-cons, which meant they had their own IOUs to pay off that sometimes he didn’t know about. So once in a while he calls me on the unlisted line, and I pick him up someplace we decide on at the last minute.”
“You used that limo? Not exactly a low profile.”
“Nah, we’d use Falcons or Novas, I can always score one on short notice, even a VDub if it ain’t painted too funny.”
“So the day Mickey disappeared . . . he called you? you took him someplace?”
“He wanted me to pick him up. He called in the middle of the night, it sounded like a pay phone, he was talking real quiet, he was scared, like somebody was after him. He gave me an address out of town, I drove up there and waited, but he never showed. After a couple hours I was getting too much attention so I split.”
“Where was this?”
“Ojai, near someplace called Chryskylodon.”
“I’ve been hearing about it,” Doc said, “some nuthouse for the upper brackets. Old Indian word that means ‘serenity.’”
“Ha!” Tito shook his head. “Who told you that?”
“It’s in their brochure?”
“It ain’t Indian, it’s Greek, trust me, they talked Greek around the house all the time I was coming up.”
“What’s it mean in Greek?”
“Well, it’s squashed together a little, but it means like a gold tooth, this one here—” He tapped at a canine.
“Oh, shit. ‘Fang’? Could it be that?”
“Yeah, close enough. Gold fang.”
TWELVE
DOC MADE A COUPLE OF PHONE CALLS AND TOOK THE BACK route up by way of Burbank and Santa Paula, reaching the Ojai turnoff just before lunchtime. There were plenty of signs to point the way to the Chryskylodon Institute. The high-rent laughing academy was located close enough to Krotona Hill to cash in on the mystiques of better-known spiritual facilities like the Inner School and the AMORC. The main house, a red tile and white stucco Mission Revival mansion, was surrounded by a hundred acres of orchards and pasture and sycamore woods. At the front gate, Doc was met by longhaired attendants in flowing robes under which they were packing Smiths in shoulder rigs.
“Larry Sportello, I have an appointment?”
“If you wouldn’t mind, brother.”
“Sure, grope ahead, I ain’t packing, hell I ain’t even holding.” The procedure was to park in a lot by the gate and wait for an Institute shuttle bus to run you up to the main house. The gate had a sign over it which read STRAIGHT IS HIP.
Doc had got himself up today in an Edwardian jacket and bell-bottoms in not quite matching and no longer fashionable shades of brown, narrowly trimmed late-movie mustache, hair Brylcreemed into a high pompadour with long sideburns, all meant to suggest a sleazy and vaguely anxious go-between who couldn’t himself begin to afford the fees this place would be asking. From the looks he was getting, the put-together seemed to be working.
“We were just about to go have lunch,” the associate director Dr. Threeply making with the fake-sympathetic wrinkled forehead. “Why don’t you join us? Afterward we can show you around the facility.”
Dr. Threeply was a shifty specimen with that quality now and then observed in aluminum-siding and screen-door salesmen of once having been through something—a marriage, a criminal proceeding—traumatic enough to have torqued him permanently out of tolerance, so that now he had to beg potential clients to ignore this unspecified character handicap.
Waiting on tables at lunch in the Administrative Lounge were inmates who seemed to be working in lieu of paying the full fee. “Thank you, Kimberly. Hands steady as a rock today, it seems.”
“So happy you noticed, Dr. Threeply. More soup?”
Doc, with a forkful of some unfamiliar vegetable loaf halfway to his mouth, reflected that if these folks out here were mental cases, then what about farther back in the kitchen, well out of the public gaze? Like doing the cooking, for example?
“Try some of this chenin blanc, Mr. Sportello, right from our own vineyard.” Doc had learned from his dad Leo, and later cruising supermarket shelves, that “blanc” meant “white,” and that California whites tended to be, well, at least whiter than the queasy shade of yellow he was looking at. He squinted at the label and noticed an ingredient list several lines long, with the note, in parentheses, “Continued on back of bottle,” but whenever he tried, as casually as he could, to have a look at the label on the back, he noticed he was getting these stares, and sometimes people even reached and turned the label away so he couldn’t read it.
“You’ve . . . been here with us before?” said one of the staff shrinks. “I know I’ve seen your face.”
“First time I’ve been down here, normally I never get much south of South City.”
“And ab-normally?” Dr. Threeply chuckled.
“What?”
“I only meant that with any number of qualified facilities in the Bay Area, why bother coming all the way down here to us?” The others at the table leaned forward as if keenly interested in Doc’s answer.
Time to pull out some of the stuff he’d run through with Sortilège. “I believe,” said Doc earnestly, “that just as chakras can be identified on the human body, so does the body of Earth have these special places, concentrations of spiritual energy, grace if you will, and that Ojai, for the presence of Mr. J. Krishnamurti alone, certainly qualifies as one of the more blessed of planetary chakras, which regrettably cannot be said for San Francisco or its immediate vicinity.”
After a small patch of silence, somebody said, “You mean . . . Walnut Creek . . . isn’t a chakra?” which drew nodding and chuckling from colleagues.
“Some religious thing,” supposed Dr. Threeply, maybe trying to restore an air of professionalism at the table, though what profession was unclear.
After lunch Doc was bustled around on a tour which included dormitories, a staff lounge with a dozen TV sets and a full-service bar, the sensory-deprivation tanks, the Olympic-size pool, and the rock-climbing wall.
“What’s in here?” Doc trying to seem no more than casually curious.
“A brand-new wing for housing our Noncompliant Cases Unit,” announced Dr. Threeply, “not quite operational yet, but soon to be the Institute’s pride and joy. You may certainly have a look inside if you wish, though there’s nothing much to see.” He swung open one of the doors, and just inside the vestibule Doc caught a glimpse of the same publicity photo he’d seen at the Wolfmann home, of Sloane in a skip loader delivering an oversize check. As closely as he could, he scanned the photograph again and noticed now that none of the other faces in it seemed to be Mickey’s. Mickey was nowhere in sight, but Doc was visited by the creepy feeling that somewhere close by, in some weird indeterminate space whose residents weren’t sure where they were, inside or out of the frame, might indeed be some version of Mickey, not quite in the same way that the lady with the big check was a version of Sloane, but altered and—he shivered—maybe mentally or even physically compromised. Past this vestibule here, he could make out a long corridor lined with identical knobless doors receding into metallic shadow. Before the main door swung shut again, Doc just had time to notice a chunk of marble with a bronze plaque that read, MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE SELFLESS GENEROSITY OF A DEVOTED FRIEND OF CHRYSKYLODON.
If Sloane was endowing loony bins with Mickey’s money, why not take some credit? Why be anonymous?
“Nice,” said Doc.
“Come, we’ll have a look outside.”
As they moved out into the grounds, Doc could see, through the haze, eucalyptus trees, colonnaded walkways, neoclassic temples faced in white marble, fountains fed by hot springs. Everything looked like painted glass mattes in old Technicolor movies. Well-to-do nutcases and their attendants drifted now and then in the distance. As Aunt Reet had suggested, there was a lot of capital improvement in progress. Landscaping crews tossed through the air and neatly caught long curved stacks of clay flowerpots. Framers played hard-core acid rock ’n’ roll out of truck radios and hammered along with the beat. Paving crews shoveled blacktop, and rollers rolled it smooth.
There were tennis courts and swimming pools and outdoor volleyball. The Zen Garden, according to Dr. Threeply, had been transported from Kyoto, reassembled here exactly in place, each grain of white sand, each textured rock. A ceremonial bell stood nearby, and next to it Doc noticed a strange shadowy gazebo, like a steel engraving in some old and likely forbidden book, out of which he thought he heard sounds of chanting. “Advanced therapy group,” said Threeply. He led Doc to a concealed spiral stairway, and they descended into a sort of grotto, damp and dimly lit. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. From down the damp corridors, the sound of chanting got louder. Threeply led Doc into a soundproofed space behind one-way mirrors, and among underground shadows green as aquarium slime Doc immediately recognized one of a dozen kneeling figures in robes as Coy Harlingen.
Now, what the fuck?
As it turned out, this was not the only familiar face around here. Lounging by the observation window was an orderly who had apparently brought the inmates here and was waiting to take them back. He was passing the time with the age-old diversion of rolling up his necktie, holding it for a minute under his chin, and then lifting his chin and letting the tie unroll again. Hours of fun. Doc didn’t notice the tie itself until he’d been watching this for a while, and then he either thought, Holy shit! or actually hollered it out loud, he wasn’t sure right away which, because what this gorilla happened to be wearing was one of Mickey Wolfmann’s own custom-made specials—in fact the exact tie Doc had failed to find in Mickey’s closet, the one with Shasta hand-painted on it, in a pose submissive enough to break an ex–old man’s heart, that’s if he was in the mood. Doc was just able to return to the present tense in time to hear Dr. Threeply wrapping up some commentary and asking if there were any questions.
Several, in fact.
Doc wanted at least to mention to the gorilla by the window something like, “Hey, that’s my ex–old lady you’re fondling there,” but how wise was that? The world had just been disassembled, anybody here could be working any hustle you could think of, and it was long past time to be, as Shaggy would say, like, gettin out of here, Scoob.
Loaded down with application kits and Institute literature, Doc climbed onto the shuttle back to the main gate. At the creepy gazebo stop, one passenger got on, who turned out to be Coy Harlingen in a hooded robe, making dummy-up gestures, which included, “Get off when I do.”
They got off by the dodge-ball court. Some kind of Regional All-Institution Playoffs were in progress, with a lot of matching T-shirts and screaming, not all of it playoff-related, and nobody paid much attention to Coy and Doc.
“Here, put this on.” One of the hooded robes people wore around here, which Doc doubted came from a religious-supply house—more like some clearance sale of no-longer-stylish beachwear. He slid into it. “Wow . . . makes a man feel like . . . Lawrence of Arabia!”
“As long as we walk slow and stoned, nobody’s gonna bother us.”
“Here, maybe this’ll help.” Producing and lighting a pinner of gold Colombian. They passed it back and forth, and after a while Coy said, “So you got to see Hope.”
“For a minute. She’s okay. And looks like she’s been stayin clean too.”
It wasn’t easy to see what exactly was going on with Coy behind his shades, but his voice dropped to a whisper. “You talked to her?”
“I put my head in the front door, pretended to be one of these magazine hustlers. Caught just a glimpse of that li’l Amethyst, too, and from what I could see, they’re both doing fine. And I almost sold Hope a subscription to Psychology Today.”
“Well.” Coy shaking his head slowly, as if listening to a solo. “You don’t know how worried I’ve been.” Maybe more than he meant to say. “She kicked, are you sure? Is she on a program, or how’s she doing it?”
“She’s back teaching, is all she said. Public health, drug awareness, something like that.”
“And you’re not gonna tell me where.”
“Not even if I knew.”
“You really think that I would ever start giving either of them shit?”
“I don’t do matrimonials, man. I have a terrible history of putting in, and it’s never ended well.”
Coy walked along with his face in the shadow of his hood. “Don’t matter, I guess.”
“How’s that?”
“No way I can ever go back to them.”
Doc knew that tone of voice and hated it. It reminded him of too many vomit-spattered toilets, freeway overpasses, edges of cliffs in Hawaii, always pleading with men younger than himself distraught with what they were so sure was love. It was actually why he’d quit doing matrimonials. In spite of which, he now found himself prompting, “You can’t go back, because if you did . . .”
Coy shook his head. “It would be my ass. Understand? My family’s, too. This is like a gang. Once you’re in, you’re in, por vida.”
“Did you know that when you joined up?”
“All I knew was we couldn’t do each other no good staying together. The baby was looking like shit and worse every day. We’d get fucked up and just sit there and go, ‘We’re draggin each other down, what’re we gonna do?’ and then end up doing nothing, or we’d say, ‘Wait till we score again and that’s out of the way, then we’ll come up with something,’ but that never happened either. So here came this opportunity. These people up here had money, it wasn’t like it was Bible freaks wandering up and down the beach screamin at you or nothin, they really wanted to help.”
It was occurring to Doc now, as he recalled what Jason Velveeta had said about vertical integration, that if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and also sell them a program to help them kick? Get them coming and going, twice as much revenue and no worries about new customers—as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.
“They just gave me the tour here,” Doc said.
“Thinkin about signin yourself in?”
“Not me. Couldn’t afford it.”
By now they were tuned to each other enough that Coy, if he wanted, could take this for an opening to talk about what kind of a deal he’d made. But he just paced along in silence.
“Short of actual marriage counseling,” Doc said carefully, “if I did just run a fast check and happened to find some angle you maybe haven’t thought of—”
“Nothing personal,” was that a small tremor of anger? “but there’s too much you haven’t thought of. You want to run your check, I can’t stop you, but maybe you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
They had walked almost to the gate, and the shadows around the place were lengthening. Back at the beach, the sea breeze would be turning around about now. “I can dig you’re trying to chase me off of this,” Doc said, “and it’s also a bad idea for me to try and phone you. But look. Whatever it is you’re caught inside, I’m still out here, on the outside of it. I can move in ways you may not be able to. . . .”
“I can’t come any further now,” Coy said. They were in an apricot orchard near the gate. “Here, let me have the robe back.”
Doc must have taken his eye off Coy for a second. Somehow in the act of shaking the robe out or folding it or something
, it was taken from his grasp, flourished like a magician’s cape, and when Doc looked where it had been, Coy was already gone.
Doc took 101 back and arrived at the grade up to Thousand Oaks just in time to have to brake abruptly for a paisley-painted VW bus full of giggling dopers which had materialized in front of him. The passing lane was already solid with semis trying to swerve around the VW, so there was no point trying to go there. Once Doc might have grown impatient, but with age and wisdom he had come to understand that these units never had any fucking compression to begin with, owing to engineering decisions taken long ago at Wolfsburg. He shifted down, reached for the volume knob on the radio, which was playing “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” by the Stones, and figured he’d get up the hill when he got there. Which would have been fine except that now he had time to think about Mickey’s necktie and begin to wonder how the ape who was wearing it had come by it, exactly, and recall unavoidably the hand-painted image of Shasta Fay, on her back, spread and wet and, if he was not mistaken, though he’d only caught a fast glimpse, just about to come, too.
Mickey must’ve been wearing that particular tie when they grabbed him. Just took it out of the closet that morning at random, or maybe because of something deeper. Then when they processed him into an inmate uniform at Chryskylodon, they confiscated the tie, and that’s when the ape saw it and just decided to take it. Or had Mickey exchanged it later for some mental-slam favor, a phone call, a smoke, somebody else’s meds? Back in junior college, professors had pointed out to Doc the useful notion that the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory. He supposed you could extend this also to the nudie necktie is not the girl. But he wasn’t rational enough right now to feel anything but ripped off, not for Mickey so much as—ancient history by now or whatever—for Shasta. Forget the fantasies her picture might’ve aroused in the ape—how little could she have meant to Mickey, for him to let it happen?
Inherent Vice Page 20