Idiot Wind

by Peter Kaldheim

  Peter Kaldheim a Brooklyn native, studied English and Classics at Dartmouth. After college, he worked briefly as a copy editor and freelance writer in Manhattan before embarking on a three-decade career as a line cook and chef. Now retired, he lives on Long Island and is currently at work on a novel set in southwestern Montana. Idiot Wind, his first full-length book, will be published in French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch in 2020.

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Peter Kaldheim, 2019

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  Excerpt from ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1942 by T.S. Eliot, renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Copyright © Jack Kerouac, 1955, 1957. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency.

  Excerpt from Night Freight by Clyde Rice. Copyright © Clyde Rice, 1987. Reprinted by permission of Friends of Clyde Rice (www.clyderice.org).

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Some names, dates, locations and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 736 7

  eISBN 978 1 78689 737 4

  For Gerald Howard and Susanne Williams

  ‘Remember only that in life are many useless things, and but few which tend toward a solid end.’

  – Theophrastus, The Characters

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  On the night I escaped from the land of giants, I set off into a blizzard I feared would soon make the roads completely impassable. Gale-force winds were blowing in from the northeast, churning the snow into a white froth that reduced visibility to near zero, but, despite the conditions, there was one thing I had no trouble seeing with perfect clarity: running for my life was the only choice I had.

  It was the Monday after Super Bowl XXI – 26 January 1987 – and the sports pages of the New York tabloids were full of exultant headlines celebrating the hometown Giants’ victory over the Denver Broncos, most of which, I confess, I can no longer recall. Only the back-page headline of the late-edition Post has remained fixed in my mind – as I knew it would the moment I spotted it. At the time, I was riding the IRT subway uptown from Chambers Street, on my way to the Port Authority bus terminal in midtown, praying I’d still be in time to catch a bus – any bus – out of town before the snowstorm forced Greyhound to suspend service. When the train reached Fourteenth Street, one of the other passengers got off, leaving behind a copy of the Post on the seat beside me. I promptly scavenged it, and as the train continued rattling north to Times Square I flipped through the paper until I eventually came to the back page. The three-word headline I encountered hit me with such an immediate shock of recognition I couldn’t help flinching.

  LAND OF GIANTS!

  I suspect most New Yorkers took these three words as nothing more than justifiable hyperbole, but in my agitated state of mind that night they struck me as something else entirely. To me, they were a timely – and painful – reminder of just how small my life had become.

  How small I had become.

  Perhaps I was being paranoid, but to a man in my situation it was hard not to take it as a cosmic rebuke.

  And what, exactly, was my situation? Well, for starters, I was thirty-seven years old, unemployed and flat-out broke. On top of that, I was also homeless, except for the pay locker in Penn Station where I stored my clothes and toiletries. In short, my life had become nothing to brag about, only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call akrasia – a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement. If Greek’s not your thing, call it what Bob Dylan does: idiot wind. That’s what I came to call it, and for nearly a dozen years it had been blowing my life ragged. Along the way, I’d watched it carry off just about everything that should have mattered to me. My marriage. My career. The respect of my parents and friends. Even a place to lay my head at night. All gone. Gone with the idiot wind.

  And now, thanks to the stunt I’d pulled on Bobby Bats over Super Bowl weekend, I was also about to lose the city I loved.

  Bobby Battaglia was not a dealer you could screw over with impunity. They didn’t call him ‘Bobby Bats’ for nothing. I’d once seen him splinter a guy’s shinbone in three places, just for talking trash in a pick-up basketball game at the city gym on Carmine Street. Back then, he was just a teenage sociopath with a Louisville slugger, who ran with a pack of like-minded Italian kids from the West Village. Now Bobby Bats was a twenty-nine-year-old sociopath who had pumped so much iron over the years he could no longer shoot a jump shot that didn’t clang off the rim and ricochet to half-court. But he could still swing a bat, and what he’d do to a guy who’d just stiffed him for a thousand dollars’ worth of coke was something I was determined not to find out.

  Common sense should have warned me against doing business on credit with someone like Bobby Bats, but somehow common sense never seemed to factor into the equation when I had the idiot wind at my back and a ‘sure-fire’ scheme to make a score. I figured Super Bowl weekend with a New York team in the mix would be a golden opportunity. The bars in Tribeca – where I’d been hustling grams and half-grams for a living ever since I’d proved myself too unreliable for more legitimate employment – would no doubt be packed all weekend with Giants fans looking to score something to help snort the home team to victory. All I had to do was show up with the product and the cash would come rolling in. At least, that was the theory. And as theories go, it wasn’t all that far-fetched. It was the eighties, after all. Bright lights, big city. Even the starving artists in the neighbourhood would turn out their pockets for a half-gram when they saw ‘Pete the Hat’ walk into the bar.

  And so, with some – but not enough – trepidation, I went up to the West Village on the Friday before the big game and, following Bobby Bats’ established protocols, I placed a call to his apartment from a pay phone on the corner of Carmine and Bedford Streets, just down the block from his apartment. No one got buzzed into Bobby Bats’ building by simply ringing his doorbell. You had to call from the street first, where he could check you out from his second-floor bedroom window. If he told you it was okay to come up, you rang the bell once, and once only. Then he’d buzz you into the building and he’d be waiting with his bat in hand on the second-floor landing to make sure it was only you coming through the door. (Lately, he favoured aluminum bats. Said he’d got tired of the wood ones cracking.)

  Once you got up to Bobby Bats’ apartment, he�
�d check his watch. The rule was, you couldn’t leave for at least a half-hour. I’m not the fucking 7-Eleven, he’d say. You come up, you stay long enough to make it look like a social call, or else forget about it. Keeps the neighbours off my ass that way. He did his best to keep his business low-profile, I’ll give him that. You’d never catch him slinging Sno-Seal packets in a bar-room toilet like I did. Bobby Bats only dealt ‘weight’, in quarter-ounce increments, and only to a select clientele. That way he kept the traffic at his apartment to a minimum.

  As I’ve said, I had known Bobby Bats since he was a teenager, but, even so, he would never have taken me on as a buyer just because we’d played hoops in the same gym. You had to be vouched for by someone who was already one of his regulars, and it wasn’t until a friend of mine who owned a bar on Hudson Street gave Bobby the go-ahead one night after hours that we started doing deals together. At first, it was strictly cash-and-carry. Then, as he got more comfortable dealing with me, I’d occasionally convince him to front me a quarter-ounce and he’d give me two or three days to come up with what I owed him. Which should never have been a problem if I’d handled my business properly. Bobby sold some of the purest Peruvian flake in the city – coke potent enough to take a good stepping-on with baby laxative or powdered vitamin B and still leave you with blow that gave your customers the jolt they were looking for. I could buy a quarter-ounce for five hundred dollars, step on it till seven grams turned into fourteen and, at a hundred bucks per gram, double my investment, no problem, with a few grams left over to feed my own nose.

  Sometimes things worked out that way and I came out ahead. Other times I ‘fucked up the package’, as they say in the trade, getting high on my own supply, and as the deadline for repaying Bobby Bats came closing in I had to scramble around borrowing money or taking ‘pre-orders’ from any of my customers gullible enough to entrust me with their cash in advance of delivery. I did whatever it took. If I had to string some people along for a while, so be it, as long as Bobby Bats got his money on time. And so far, despite some close calls, I had never failed to hold up my end of the bargain. Which is why I was fairly confident I could talk him into doubling down for Super Bowl weekend and fronting me a half-ounce instead of my usual quarter.

  Of course, I knew better than to broach my proposal too quickly. In his own way, Bobby was as much a stickler for the niceties of gracious hospitality as any Bedouin sheik. That Friday was no exception. He ushered me into his narrow railroad flat, propped his aluminum bat against the doorjamb, nodded toward his zebra-striped leather couch and told me to get comfortable. Then, looking every bit as cramped as a grizzly bear in an Airstream trailer, he squeezed his considerable bulk into the tiny galley kitchen to fix me a cup of espresso and a plate of cannoli from Ferraro’s Bakery in Little Italy, where he sent his live-in girlfriend, Gina, to pick up fresh pastries every morning. (She was just nineteen, a real stunner, and her only job was running errands for Bobby. It wasn’t a bad gig. It kept her in leather boots and rabbit-fur jackets. And all the coke she cared to hoover.)

  When my espresso was ready, Bobby brought it out to the living room and set it down on the weight-lifting bench that doubled as his coffee table. We sipped our coffee and munched cannoli and passed the time making small talk about the local sports teams. The Knicks were still going nowhere. The Rangers had a shot. Phil Simms would need to have a damned good game to beat the Broncos. Once we’d finished our snack and the dishes were cleared, Bobby Bats reached into the drawer of the end table beside his armchair and pulled out a big vial filled with his personal stash of uncut coke. He dumped out a mound on a ceramic tray he kept handy and chopped out two thick lines for each of us. Then he passed me the tray. Visitors first, always.

  I took two long snorts and instantly felt the burn rushing all the way to the back of my skull. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I muttered, as my head snapped back in recoil. It was crazy good shit. Train-jumped-the-track shit. Just two lines, and I was off the rails. And with that all my big plans for the weekend took a screeching lurch toward disaster. I just didn’t see it at the time. My eyes were too full of dollar signs.

  Flush with alkaloid-fuelled bravado, I made my pitch to Bobby Bats and waited expectantly for his reaction. He seemed to hesitate a moment, narrowing his gaze as he fixed me with an appraising look, but then he shrugged his muscle-bound shoulders and, just as I’d suspected he would, said, ‘Okay, let’s do it. Just give me a minute.’

  Actually it was more like five minutes before he emerged from the bedroom at the front of the apartment. I assumed he had some kind of safe in there where he locked up his product, but that was just my guess. I’d never once seen inside. The door was always closed whenever he had visitors. Another of his house rules, and he was scrupulous about it.

  When Bobby Bats finally returned to the living room, he was carrying his industrial-grade Ohaus triple-beam scale and a Tupperware container full of pre-bagged rocks of coke. ‘Take your pick,’ he said, passing me the Tupperware. ‘They’re all halves.’ That’s how he always worked. He’d pre-weigh all the packages before bagging them, but he’d let you pick the bag that caught your eye. Then he’d zero out the scale and weigh your package right in front of you, so there’d be no doubt you were getting good weight. It was a sign of respect – and as Italian as the neighbourhood butcher shops.

  I made my selection and Bobby went through his triple-beam routine. I then borrowed his screen-mesh hand grinder and spent the next fifteen minutes cranking the handle till all the rocks in my bag were reduced to a fine powder, ready to be stepped-on with cut. I’d add the cut later, once I got back downtown to Tribeca. Bobby Bats wouldn’t let you cut the stuff at his place. He understood it was part of the business, but it pained him to see perfectly good coke being fucked with in his presence and he wouldn’t put up with it. I could see his point. But, hey, not everyone can afford to be a purist.

  It was going on five o’clock by the time I finished grinding, and as soon as I was done bagging up the coke I stashed it in my backpack with the rest of the tools of my trade. I stood up to put my coat on, then headed for the door, thanking Bobby Bats for the ‘taste’ and promising I’d be back to settle up with him on Monday.

  ‘You can’t fuck this up, Hat. You know that, right?’ Bobby Bats cautioned me as he unlocked the deadbolts and opened his door to let me out. A word to the wise. Unfortunately, I failed to take it to heart – as the next seventy-two hours would make abundantly clear.

  ‘No problem, Bobby,’ I blithely assured him, and out the door I went.

  It was already dark when I stepped out into the street. A crisp, cold winter night, the air faintly redolent of exhaust fumes from the evening rush hour. I was so wired I couldn’t face riding the subway. Instead, I decided to make the trek downtown on foot, figuring the cold air would clear my head by the time I made it all the way to the Raccoon Lodge. So I turned up the collar of my overcoat and set off south on Seventh Avenue at a brisk pace. At Canal Street, I had to weave my way through the usual rush-hour log-jam of Jersey-bound cars inching in fits and starts toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, but once I got past that obstacle it was an easy ten-minute walk down Hudson Street the rest of the way. I made it to the Raccoon Lodge in plenty of time to catch the tail end of Happy Hour.

  The Raccoon Lodge, my de facto base of operations, was a long, narrow bar tucked into an old six-storey yellow-brick building at 59 Warren Street, a few steps east of West Broadway, down in the shadows of the ill-fated Twin Towers. There were plenty of pretentiously hip new bars downtown in those days of the Tribeca renaissance, along with a dwindling handful of old-time, unpretentious watering holes, but the Raccoon Lodge was a rare hybrid. It somehow managed to be both hip and unpretentious in equal measure, which is a neat trick I’ve never seen successfully duplicated by any other bar I’ve ever raised a glass in.

  The Raccoon harboured one of the last coin-op pool tables left in lower Manhattan, and a gem of a jukebox eclectically stocked with hard-to
-find treasures that ranged from rockabilly to roots reggae, from vintage Motown to Mississippi Delta blues. The jukebox alone was reason enough to seek the place out. But for me the bar’s biggest draw was the mix of customers it attracted, a shifting cast of characters every bit as eclectic as the evening’s playlist.

  Where else but the Raccoon could you belly up to the bar and rub elbows with commodities traders and high-steel ironworkers, secretaries and kinetic sculptors, truck drivers and abstract painters, schoolteachers and struggling actors? Or shoot pool with Keith Richards? Or shoot eyes at Debra Winger? Or shoot the shit with Jay McInerney? You never knew who might walk through the door, or what they’d have to say for themselves when they started bending your ear, but it was rarely a boring conversation. To a motor-mouth cokehead like me, there could hardly have been a more congenial place to ply my trade.

  The bar was extra busy when I walked in that night, as it always was on Fridays. Thirty or forty drinkers, mostly regulars, the majority of them waving empty glasses at the bartenders and clamouring for refills before Happy Hour expired. I worked my way through the crowd and squeezed into my usual spot at the far corner of the bar, down near the pool table. I was still feeling chilled from my hike downtown, so I ordered a double Akvavit to turn the heat up and a bottle of Rolling Rock to chase it. The first shot went down so good I ordered another. Then I stepped over to the pool table and added a quarter to the queue lined up on the rail. There were six quarters ahead of mine. I’d be waiting a while for a turn at the table. I didn’t mind. I needed time to do a little business first anyway.

  I didn’t have long to wait on that score. One of my regular customers was standing, cue in hand, beside the table, watching his opponent line up a shot, and as I passed him by he gave me that expectant look they all get, right before they ask you, sotto voce, ‘You holding?’