Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Lonnie bit back a chuckle. The form. Like concertos, the minuet. “Equal Vision,” he said, thinking: lightweight boojie pseudo-angst. Not quite as lame as Christian metal, but who wants nihilism with a melody, let alone a message. “I know about them, yeah. Based in New York?”

  “I was wondering if you would be interested in developing something of that sort out here on the West Coast.”

  Lonnie, unaware up to that point that he’d indeed been rocking, stopped.

  Doctor Wu leaned a bit closer, grazing one hand pensively across the other. “Much of Buddhism focuses on the wisdom of emptiness, the perfection of silence. But the arts, when practiced with right intention, can be useful as teaching tools. Stories excel at demonstrating moral truths. Are you aware of the Shasekishu, the Collection of Stone and Sand?”

  “Not . . .” The rest of whatever his mind had hoped to say abandoned him. He shook his head, swallowed. “No.”

  “It’s a collection of Zen stories from the thirteenth century, written by a master named Muju.” He glanced around the room. “I’m sure I have a copy somewhere. I can loan it to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s a wonderful example of how stories can enlighten and guide.”

  Almost imperceptibly, Lonnie resumed rocking.

  “As for music, nothing so touches the heart, ennobles the mind.”

  Yeah, Lonnie thought. Same thing occurred to me last time I slam-danced.

  “The popularization of the traditional chants, such as I heard all of you playing downstairs last night, is one such example. Though I must admit, to my taste, Shi Changsheng, for all her good intentions, is a bit . . .”

  Slick, Lonnie thought. Cloying. Sanitized.

  Doctor Wu reached out, set his hand on Lonnie’s knee. A gaze to cut glass. “I realize that what I’m saying may seem outlandish in the context of . . . ‘punk’. But as you’ve already admitted, there is a spiritual side, and certainly a political side, to the music as well. It is not all swagger and attitude.”

  “No,” Lonnie said. “It’s not.”

  Doctor Wu withdrew his hand and sat back. “I’ve read the lyrics to some of your songs.”

  Lonnie crossed his legs, feeling a sudden, overpowering need to urinate. “How—”

  “Katy sought them out, found them online, your musical troupe’s website. They are very powerful, very true to the spirit of anti-materialism, the quest for truth.”

  “Thank you . . .”

  “Most of what one hears and sees in this culture is commercialist propaganda. Advertising for excess and vanity. An ironic pose masquerading as wisdom. I gather you agree.”

  “I . . .” Lonnie felt a sudden mysterious weightlessness—and feared he might pass out. Breathe, fool. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “So.” Doctor Wu laced his fingers together. Two hands joined as one. “Do you know of anyone to whom we might turn to help us with our enterprise?”

  TWO HOURS LATER, DRESSED IN a crewneck sweater and jeans, a simple blue windbreaker, Lonnie found himself, courtesy of several bus transfers, seven miles south of downtown outside a ramshackle row house along the Islais Creek Channel, the borderland between Hunter’s Point and Dogpatch.

  He knocked on the door. Middle of the afternoon, he thought, hard to know if anybody’d be up yet.

  No answer, he knocked again—not louder, though. Why be a dick?

  Finally, muffled footsteps thumped down an inner hallway. The door swung open. An immediate waft of tobacco, reefer, and something sweet, Jack and Coke maybe.

  “Hey, Clint.”

  He hadn’t been sure what to expect. What he got was a stunned, brutal stare, eyes blasted—Clint shirtless, shoeless, just a pair of black leathers worn low on his hips, boxer mushroom at the waist. Pipe-thin torso, ropey arms, every inch blazing with tats. Barbell studs in the nose and lip. His hair, as always, shaved away on the sides, madly disheveled up top.

  Lonnie said. “Been a while.”

  Clint crossed his arms, leaned against the doorframe, glanced quickly up and down the street, like Lonnie might conjure a posse of narcs.

  “Just me,” he said. “Sorry I’ve been out of touch. Been stuck way across town.”

  Silence.

  “I’ve gotten clean, been—”

  “The fuck you want?”

  So this is how it’ll go, Lonnie thought. I’m the stooge. The one to blame.

  “I just wanted to see you. Thought we might talk.”

  “About?”

  “What happened.” Lonnie swallowed. “What’s going on. I dunno . . .”

  Clint’s eyes tightened, like he was trying to get Lonnie a bit more in focus. “I got something going on right now.”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  “No you don’t. That’s not the point. I’m tied up the next hour. Come back then, we’ll sit and . . . you know.” He nudged off the doorframe, stood upright. “That work for you?”

  “Yeah,” Lonnie said. “I’ll come back.”

  He turned to go. Clint called him back with, “Hey, Shocker.”

  It took a second for Lonnie to remember: That’s me. Over his shoulder: “Yeah?”

  That tight-eyed stare again, like there was just too much to take in. “You look good.”

  LONNIE FOUND A SANDWICH SHOP, feeling too shaky even to risk a café on the off chance they’d have beer and wine on hand. He couldn’t risk a relapse. Cardinal rule of rehab: avoid all triggers, like former friends.

  He ordered a Snapple and took a seat by the window. A processed, instrumental version of “The Ballad of John and Yoko” simpered through an overhead speaker, as though to remind him that nothing is sacred.

  Focus, he told himself. Three months you’ve been at Metta House, a devoted student, steady and strong. Worthy of trust. Why else would the man in charge send you on this mission?

  And yet, having now seen Clint eye to eye, he felt groundless. Maybe this is what they mean, he thought, when they talk about No Self. An anxiety-tinged emptiness.

  It was way too soon to bring up starting a production studio, no matter how he pitched it. Sure, he could make the case that they’d weed out the listless cutesy poseurs so typical of the scene now: Doom Dirge, Bitch Pop, Sad Core, Lo-Fi Bedroom Grunge. He had no intention of selling out, going mainstream, becoming the Shi Changsheng of punk. They’d restart true hardcore, give a voice to the angry, young, and poor, speak the ugly fucking truth to power.

  Clint would laugh in his face. How many times had he said it? The minute you think you have something to say, you’re on the path to asshole. Kind of thing you expect from a drummer.

  But jacking the system was righteous—what did punk mean if not that? And what better way to answer back to the sniveling greedy horseshit than selflessness? Not groovy peacenik sniveling, that’s not what I mean—I’m talking defiance of the emperor, like the venerable Tano and his warrior monks of Shaolin.

  Buddha is true revolution. Buddha is the real Mao Tse-tung.

  Which brought him back around to the real problem. They had to talk that out, Mousy’s death. He had to own the rage, the spite. Cop to the guilt. All grand plans for anything else lay on the far side of that. Regardless, this was the place to start, for a thousand and one reasons.

  CLINT MET HIM AT THE door, now wearing an Evil Conduct T-shirt—admittedly not a positive sign—and gestured him toward the back of the flat. “We’ll talk in the kitchen.”

  From somewhere on the second floor, a stereo blasted “Slave State,” one of Acid Prancer’s signature numbers. Lonnie stopped in his tracks and glanced up the smoke-hazed stairwell. Mousy’s vocals stitched through the air:

  A sweat-soaked bed

  Then daylight and dread

  Stuff whatever you’re dreaming

  Back inside your head

  How many lifetimes ago, he thought, did I write those words? How many eternities have come and gone since I showed them to Mousy, watched him make that wicked, lopsided grin. “Let’s work up a
tune, Shocker McRocker.” So full of faith. So present.

  Clint, standing hallway down the hall, snapped his fingers. “You coming?”

  “Yeah.” Lonnie shook off the moment. “Sorry.”

  It wasn’t till he passed the first doorway that he sensed the other presence in the house. Two presences, actually.

  One had a ball bat, but by the time Lonnie noticed the thing coming at him all he could make out was a blur. The wood shaft crashed across his temple and ear, knocking him down like a bag of cement. Instantly all but deaf. Blinded by pain. Wetting himself.

  The three of them kept him down with kicks to the kidneys, the groin, the head. He curled up like he had with his father so many times, making out little by little that the other two were Mousy’s sister, Jordan, and her old man, Gearhead Greg, who continued chipping in with the bat.

  A voice for the angry young. Speaking the ugly truth.

  About the time he was choking on blood and his right knee felt on fire, Greg and Clint got down on the floor to hold him down, one pinning his legs, the other his shoulders, while Jordan knelt beside him, leaning close to be heard over the music from upstairs, everything swathed in hiss.

  “You remember what you said, cocksucker?” Her breath smelled rank from cigarettes, Southern Comfort and Coke—the sweet smell he couldn’t quite make out earlier. “I’m outside the room, pounding on the door, trying to get inside—see my brother, see if he’s okay, see if he’s fucking alive—you remember that?” She grabbed his chin, squeezed like she wanted to rip it off. “Remember what you fucking said? ‘He don’t want to know you, you smokehound cunt.’ But those weren’t his words. That was you. My beautiful little brother was already dead.”

  Even with it pressed so close he could barely make out her face, his vision fragmented from the pounding, blood streaming into his eyes. But despite the angry buzz inside his brain and the thundering music upstairs he could suddenly make out nearby sounds with eerie clarity. What he heard was a match scrape a friction strip, the whisper of the flame, the singed tobacco of the cigarette. And he could smell: not just her breath but the billowing exhale smothering his face. Just beyond the smoke, in the haze, the red tip of ash glowed like the eye of an angry angel.

  Two strong hands gripped his head and Jordan’s thumb pushed back his eyelid. Even then, he couldn’t see, but that was the least of his problems just then.

  She said, “He didn’t belong to you, asshole. He was mine, too. He was everybody’s.”

  He wasn’t sure whether he merely thought the words or screamed them—He died quiet, he died peaceful . . . if you wanted in so bad why didn’t you force the door, why leave it to the cops?—but he also realized none of that mattered. This was the price of finding his way. This was the low, loathsome place.

  HE SHUFFLED UP THIRD STREET toward Mission Bay, bent over like he’d been gut-shot and dragging one leg. A bus was out of the question: one, Gearhead Greg had taken his money. Two, the driver would no doubt call the law. And that just wouldn’t do. They could have killed him, that would’ve been just and fair, but they hadn’t.

  So, as best he could, he walked.

  The dragged knee buckled every time he tried applying weight, the joint a grinding, boiling knot of gristle. Given the stab in every breath, at least one broken rib seemed likely. As for the eye, an oyster couldn’t clench shut tighter, and the scalding pain sent sickly orange flashes throughout his body, crackling and sparking along every nerve.

  He crossed Lefty O’Doul Bridge where China Basin narrows into Mission Creek and kept trudging up Third, ballpark looming to the right, downtown a mile ahead. Avoiding eye contact as pedestrian traffic intensified, he continued across Market with its trolleys and traffic and crowds, aiming almost unaware toward Chinatown, sensing somehow he could find a place there to sit, rest. No one would trouble over him. For all intents and purposes, he’d be invisible.

  He passed through the pagoda-style gate on Grant Avenue and dragged himself up the steep hill, maintaining his balance any way he could, bracing himself on cars or delivery vans along the curb, latching onto parking meters, grabbing lampposts entwined with dragons, trying not to tumble into the vendor tables mounted outside every storefront.

  Somehow he managed the two long blocks to California Street and planted himself breathlessly on a wooden bench in the shaded square across from Old St. Mary’s. Rest here, he thought, not long. Once you’ve got your strength back and can talk without choking, maybe ask a lady with a kind face if you can use her cell, call Katy at the center. Say you were mugged, which is true after all.

  Wiping tears from his good eye, he glanced up at the cathedral’s bell tower and felt a sudden, powerful sense of release. He’d reached a place of reckoning, acceptance, and felt ready to surrender. If he could only decide: to whom?

  IN TIME HE SPOTTED A familiar figure at the corner, waiting for the light. A slender man in a sport coat, a scarf knotted at his neck. His appearance seemed incongruous, even impossible, and yet not. Excluding Metta House, where else but here to encounter Doctor Wu?

  Lonnie scrambled from the bench and headed toward the corner. He didn’t make it in time for the light, and he lacked the strength to call out, but he watched Doctor Wu continue down Grant, deeper into old Chinatown.

  Traffic was light so Lonnie crossed against the red, shambling as quickly as he could. He spotted Doctor Wu turning into an alley and hurried to catch up, forgetting his pain, his weakness, his savaged eye and ribs and knee. When he reached the corner where Doctor Wu had turned he found himself facing a narrow cul de sac cluttered with nondescript shops and restaurants at street level, tenements overhead, towering above the damp pavement.

  He went storefront to storefront, glancing through steam-fogged windows. At last he spotted the telltale sport coat vanishing up a stairwell inside a crowded dim sum tearoom. Totally Asian clientele, not a round eye in the place—it worked to his advantage. Nothing but stunned glances tried to stop him as he plowed through the dining room to the doorway that led upstairs.

  His good fortune ended at the top. A wide, thick-necked, short-haired guard in a black suit manned the door at the hallway’s end, the one just now closing. He stood with his open left hand covering his right fist, as though ready for a Bao Quan bow.

  “I need to speak with Doctor Wu.”

  It came out slurred—the damage to his face, the stabbing lack of breath from his stairway climb. Bracing himself with one hand against the wall, he shoved off with each step, pushing himself along. The guard simply stood there, eyes front, the empty gaze of a temple dragon.

  “I need to speak with Doctor Wu!” Bellowing now, as best he could.

  That brought the door guard forward, ready to wrap Lonnie up, pitch him back down the stairs into the clamor of voices and hissing oil, clanging pots. Lonnie slammed his palm against the wall, pounding against the ancient plaster as he continued shouting, “I need to speak to Doctor Wu! It’s me, Doctor Wu, Lonnie, I need to speak with you, please! Please come out, talk to me, please!”

  He was thrashing in the guard’s vice-like arms when the door opened. Doctor Wu stood there, ashen but otherwise expressionless. Beyond him, inside the room, a number of stern-faced men in suits, white shirts open at the neck, no ties, sat around a conference table in utter silence.

  Doctor Wu whispered something harshly over his shoulder to someone inside the room, then entered the hallway, closing the door behind him. He said something in Chinese to the guard who, after a long moment, released his hold.

  Lonnie collapsed to the floor. Doctor Wu bent over him, checking the various obvious wounds, specifically trying to look at the shuttered eye.

  “You need medical attention,” he said.

  A SHORT TIME LATER KATY arrived and, with the help of the thickset guard, managed to get Lonnie down to her car. Doctor Wu had long since vanished back inside the room with the other men.

  She turned up California, heading west. Lonnie said, “Don’t take me to a
hospital.”

  She didn’t respond—just kept driving, eyes straight ahead, hands at ten and two.

  “If I wanted to go to a hospital I could’ve stopped at SF Gen.”

  “Lonnie—”

  “It was on the way. Kinda. Given where I was coming from. Where I . . . ended up.”

  She stopped at a crosswalk and they watched a gaggle of Asian school kids troop merrily corner to corner, the sound of their laughter dulled by the windshield.

  “Why didn’t you?” She looked both ways, then accelerated from her stop. “Go to the hospital, I mean.”

  He sank a little deeper into the car seat. In a whisper: “I don’t know . . .”

  They continued on in silence for several blocks. “Well, never mind. Doctor Wu feels terrible about what happened—he assumes it had to do with the errand he gave you—and he’s already called his personal physician. He’s waiting for us at Metta House.”

  How responsive, Lonnie thought. How discreet.

  “Those guys back there at the tea house,” he said, “the ones Doctor Wu was meeting. Who are they?”

  Katy shrugged. “I’m not sure. Businessmen, I suppose.”

  Lonnie managed a small laugh. “Think I don’t know a gangster when I see one?”

  “Lonnie, please.” Like she was talking to a feverish child. “You’ve been beaten nearly to death, who knows what kind of damage you’ve suffered, shock alone, but that’s no reason—”

  “The Triads are in bed with the Chinese military.”

  “According to who—the US press?”

  “He’s a spy, isn’t he—Doctor Wu, I mean.”

  Katy put her hand to her head. “Lonnie, for God’s sake—”

  “Christ, for all I know, you’re all spies. Mazur for sure. Jonathan?”

  “Yes, yes. You’ve found us out. We’re all . . . spies! What better way to end the infinite afflictions of all living beings. You know what bodhisattva really means, right?”

  “Secret agent?” He’d never seen her angry before. She looked on the verge of tears. “Have to admit, it’s a perfect front. Put a little ‘boo’ back in Buddha.”