I had never liked La Zona Norte, where the tourists and the drunken college kids rented their overpriced and diseased prostitutes, but my favorite whorehouse on Espejo had moved, and the Chicken Brothel on Avenida Revuelto was now a language school. I drove my truck until I couldn’t smell the river anymore, parked on a side street, and wandered into a bar where all the paisanos looked up at me as I came through the door as if I were an ostrich. Indeed, in the mirror I did look like an ostrich. I had a shot and a beer and listened to the cumbia on the jukebox. Some vaquero threw a firecracker under my chair which got me so rattled I almost laid him out as everyone in the confounded place laughed, but here I recognized was a test, which I decided to pass since if I were arrested in Mexico it might be my last act in the free world, and anyway I had come for love not war.
It is always best to go off the main track looking for whores. They are floozier on the fringes, cheaper, sweeter, more discreet. So I wandered down the street until I came to a little wooden two-story Moroccan looking hotel with dahlias and marigolds in big broken-mirror pots on the wrought iron balconies and six brightly dolled and over-smiling tarts standing out front under the jacaranda trees, pulling at their stockings, waving at the taxis, and shoving with palms the bottom of their hair. Though I sensed that they all disliked me, I picked the one who seemed to dislike me the most, a “repetition compulsion” as Fasstink would’ve labeled it, or a subconscious method in other words to symbolically reenact the early days with my mother and get her somehow to like me so she would not leave or perhaps leave her before she could leave me. Either way there was probably something to that. She said her name was Carmelita. Squat, fleshy-cheeked, flat-nosed, and slightly cross-eyed, she looked like a Veracruzana. She had a gap between her teeth and smelled of four differently colored melons. She wore a red locket around her neck the size of a pocket watch. She must have been about twenty-six. I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere, a restaurant or the beach. She said osteones, which might have meant either, and quoted me a price. I paid her double up front out of discretionary funds, said vamanos, and off we went to an oyster bar that she knew of not far from the sea.
Afterward, I felt drained and ashamed and found a church, where I slumped in a pew at the back near the candles. The Virgin Mother towered gold above me. The light coming through the windows was like dust from a box of Cap’n Crunch. I thought about driving south and abandoning my truck and just living on the beach for a while. Maybe the ocean would cure me. But I had had those kinds of thoughts before and recognized them as precipitous, especially since I could not swim. So I made a quick prayer to the Mexican God who is more forgiving than the American One and went to find my truck. Maybe when I got back on my feet I would become a better man.
9.Gigantic Australian Counterclockwise Stampedes
EVERY NIGHT I CAPPED THE RACING FORM, AND EVERY MORNING I checked the results in the newspaper. I’d usually have two or three winners, not all of them favorites. After about two weeks of this I drove over to the satellite facility on the Del Mar Fairgrounds to test my methods. The place was packed. It was a posh spot with plush carpet, plenty of tables and chairs, scores of televisions, and many vendors selling food, booze, and news. I recognized a few faces. No one recognized me. I would not have recognized myself either. Gravity and antipsychotics had served to pull down my heavily scarred face. I was flushed and at the same time sallow. And my nose, the only thing rigid about me, stuck out of my face like a bird beak. Trembly and disheveled, I looked like an old stressed-out Irish mariner or Barbra Streisand after electroshock therapy.
I had never been in a room with so many televisions, each one with a different picture. There were races from all over the country and all over the world, including Australia, where they ran gigantic counterclockwise fields in virtual stampedes. Though they had betting machines, I felt more comfortable at the windows, letting the live human push the buttons for me. Everyone shouting or rooting for a different race jammed my signals and I could not pick a single winner. The flickering of the television screens robbed the electricity from my brain. I switched from Santa Anita to Turfway Park and then to Hialeah but I had no luck anywhere.
Then I saw my father in the paddock at Santa Anita helping saddle up an entry in the seventh. Mercy Blast, a two-year-old, was seven to one. My father was good with first time two-year-olds, but I did not bet first-time two-year-olds, so naturally he won.
While I was watching a crazy backward Australian race, someone swatted me across the back with a program.
I turned to see a short-legged, middle-aged fellow with hickory-flecked green eyes, a nose that looked to have been broken more than once, a bit of a paunch, a deeply cleft chin, and a mangled yellow smile. He wore brown corduroys, clumpy dress boots, and a red plaid short-sleeved shirt with snap pockets.
“That you, Eddie?” he shouted in the voice of Norton on The Honeymooners, tipping his head over and flipping back a long strand of oiled hair that immediately dropped back into his eye. “Eddie Plum, I don’t believe it.”
“Shelly Hubbard,” I returned.
“Man have you changed,” he said, waving his program under his chin. “I wasn’t even sure it was you.”
No one from my ancient past would have been a more welcome sight, for Shelly was as much of a screwball and more of an outsider than I was. “You haven’t changed at all,” I said. “You still dealing records?”
“Oh yeah, babe, what else am I gonna do?” He looked around. “Last I heard, you were up in Frisco.”
“Yeah, got married and lost my mind.”
He cackled. “Shouldn’ta got married. Hey, just saw your dad. Won the seventh with Mercy Blast.”
“Yeah, I didn’t have that one,” I said.
“Me neither. Seven to one. Sheezus.”
“Still don’t like the two-year-olds?”
“Not with your money. Who you like in the ninth?”
“I’m done for the day, lost thirteen in a row.”
“Me too. What do you say we go get a beer somewhere?”
10.Hermaphrodites, Bikers, and French Teachers
ABOUT A MILE INLAND FROM THE TRACK, NOT FAR FROM THE SAN Dieguito River, on a hillock overlooking the marshy maritime mists of the estuary, stood Moby Dick’s, a punk bar with a leviathan chipped bluecement whale-mouth entrance. I had seen Siouxsie and the Banshees here back in 1980 before someone threw a smoke bomb and the show was canceled. Del Mar is a stodgy old town inhabited by many rich and famous geriatrics, but Dick’s still attracted freaks, not only masqueraders with patches on their eyes and safety pins hanging from earlobes but ghouls, goths, hermaphrodites, bikers, and French teachers. And now and again a relic band like the Misfits or Social Distortion would parade through on their way up to L. A.
Shelly and I parked our trucks around back. Shelly fancied Japanese pickups. He’d owned a brown Datsun when I knew him before. There had been what looked like scorch marks up the passenger side door of his Datsun, which I had discounted since it was an old beat-up truck that he’d bought used, but now I saw that his newer lighter-colored Nissan pickup had the same scorch marks up the same door.
“Where you get those burn marks?” I asked him. “Been driving through hell?”
“All my life, babe,” he replied, and we both slapped our hips and roared.
The sun had set and a juniper-scented fog was lapping up against the streetlamps. We entered through the whale’s mouth into a large room with copper comets suspended from a green tin-shingled ceiling and many bronze statues of Ahab and Jonah in various dramatic poses, even if in the good book it says that Jonah was swallowed by a fish. Ancient graffiti remained on the brick walls: Billy Barty Traveling Death Circus.
In the foreground was an enormous glowing Wurlitzer like the pipe organ from the set of The Phantom of the Opera. Beyond that were three pool tables and a cavernous vault where the bands played. A dozen patrons milled about: a woman with a boa constrictor wound round her neck was lowered in conversatio
n with a man in a tilted black beret who looked like an angry ferret. A woman dressed like one of the peafowls at Napa State was shooting pool with a topless David Bowie-type whose tattoos were so deep you could read her bones. A pallid woman in a red velveteen dress with a face like Burt Lancaster sitting four stools down gave us a muscular wink. Shelly had been born to sadistic parents, so, though he wasn’t a fan of the punk scene and dressed and combed his hair as if he were still in the fourth grade, he meshed with the Moby Dick’s crowd more than he would admit. He looked around, gave a nod of approval to the David Bowie lass, peeled off his jacket, draped it over the back of a stool, and climbed aboard.
Kang Soo, or Soo as she was called, the agelessly sexy, always working Korean owner of Dick’s, glided up in front of us and leaned forward with a brittle smile, her elbows resting on the black leather cushion that rode the length of both sides of the long curved bar. We ordered draft pints of the house specialty, Old Asthma Attack. Soo raised dripping tankards and set them on coasters before us. Shelly rolled his eyes upward and drained the contents of his.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How come they call it Asthma Attack?”
“It’s a wheat beer,” I said. “The guy who invented it I think was allergic to wheat.”
“I think I’m allergic to wheat, too,” he said.
“You want another one?” challenged Soo.
“Why not?” he said with a hiccup and a shrug. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and my lungs will seize up.” His squeaky cackle was so infectious I laughed with him. He pushed his goblet forward.
Gloomy Soo pulled him another.
As Shelly settled into his second draft, we caught up on things. He chortled and licked his lips as I recounted my Napa escapades with Sturtz, Fuckface, Boothby, Flightless, and the rest of my old straitjacket pals. “Never thought it would be you,” he crowed. “Always thought I’d be the one they’d put away.”
“It’s never too late,” I reassured him. “Tell me about yourself.”
Shelly recalled the last decade and a half. Little had changed. Forty-four years old and he was still living in the same house where he was born, still single but looking, still without a draft number, a social security number, or a record with the Internal Revenue Service (his only official existence at the Department of Motor Vehicles). He was still running the same secondhand record business he’d started when he was sixteen. He still had that ruined smile from a pair of neglected teeth that had turned into a massive infection and spread from his sinuses right up into his brain, rendering him bedridden, delirious, depressed, over and improperly medicated, and in constant commute to Tijuana to see yet another Mexican dentist. He was still making regular trips to Tijuana, he said, trying to get the mess in his head straightened out.
More cups of beer arrived. Shelly drank as if he were trying to wet his face, gulping the draft back like an old prospector just in from a day of mining boron. He kept shooting me wild, guilty, suspicious glances.
I dropped two quarters into the music trivia machine planted on the bar in front of me. I figured I’d nail all the questions, but the first one stumped me. “Hey, Shell, what song did Tommy James write for Alive N Kickin’?”
Shelly, gulping now from his third Asthma Attack, took his eyes off the woman with the snake around her neck, checked himself without interest in the mirror behind the liquor bottles, and jabbed at the snapped-down flaps of his collar with his thumbs. “God my nuts hurt,” he said.
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“I think it’s my epididymis again.” He grimaced and writhed on his stool like a cattle hand after a long day.
“Four seconds,” I said. “You’re gonna screw up my bonus.”
“Tighter, Tighter,” he said. “Like my epididymis.”
“Thanks, don’t need the subtitle.”
He scowled over at the machine. “What did Bobby Fuller die of? Everybody knows that one. They got any hard questions on there?”
I pressed C. Gasoline inhalation.
Shelly was hunched over the bar now, hands folded, peering up at me. “Should be a button for murdered.” He jerked his head to clear the forelock. “Whoever he fought he lost.” He slapped the bar and honked for a while like a cold engine starting, an ee ee ee that invited me to join in.
“Okay, Mr. Know-it-All, who was the lead singer of the Talking Heads? You don’t know that one, do you?”
“No idea.” His knowledge of the pop music industry from the origin of rock until about 1976 was encyclopedic. After 1976 there was an abrupt drop-off, as if the world or American culture had come to an end, which you could make an argument for.
A pasty girl dressed in black lace, hair shot and teased, her fingernails lacquered black, strolled in.
“Funeral home’s down the street, Morticia,” Shelly sidemouthed at me as she passed, her shoulders giving off waves of lilac and cedar.
The goth sat, ordered Southern Comfort neat, rummaged in her purse, and glanced over at us with her spidery eyes.
These children mourning the death of the republic were beyond Shelly’s ken. “Looks like a corpse,” he whispered to me.
“That’s the idea, son.”
Shelly showed that snaggled yellow smile, all the molars in it extracted or dissolved.
The goth lit a cigarette but did not inhale. She looked at me and I wondered by her expression if she could read my mind.
“She’s looking at you, Gomez,” Shelly gruffed with a leer. “You oughta take her home. She’s probably tired of sleeping alone in the same casket.”
I thought, despite the complications and the risk, about taking her home.
“Dead girls are too easy, man,” I replied.
Shelly had a fantasy about finding a vulnerable woman on a beach or in a park and having his way with her, not a far cry from necrophilia, and he replied predictably, “That’s about the only action I can get these days.”
I sang sotto voce: “She’s a horrible corpse but she’s always a woman to me.”
In the middle of a splash Shelly gasped, inhaling beer. Choking and snorting, he slapped the bar. “God, don’t joke when I’m on the intake, babe,” he mouthed in an odd inflection like a poor immigrant yelling at his wife. “I just about dropped my prostate gland there.”
“Go ahead and drop it, babe,” I replied. “What do you need one for anyway?”
Shelly, still relishing the exchange and the novelty of a necrophilic tumble, wriggled on his stool, as if testing his prostate. “I think I felt it work loose there.” His gaze swept the floor and he tongued his Tijuana smile. “Maybe it was my epididymis.”
We were both chirping and giggling now like schoolgirls between wisecracks. I had earned my bonus on the trivia machine but lost interest in a second round. The goth with her Southern Comfort and the freaks in their snakes and green feather gossamer and Ziggy Stardust tattoos glanced over at our gigglefest with vague distaste. Soo watched us stone-faced but ready to smile if duty called. Shelly splashed the beer against his face and somehow gulped it down.
“Let’s go to Santa Anita tomorrow, babe,” I said.
“What are you talkin’ about, babe?” he chided, turning on me and speaking in the angry immigrant voice. “You wanna drive all the way up to L. A.? What do you think they got satellite for?”
“Satellite’s the Tower of Babel,” I said. “I need to smell those horses and see their flesh.”
He fingered back his oiled, side-parted hair and regarded me as the devout regards the infidel.
“Probably going to rain anyway,” I added with a shrug.
“Rain,” he whispered, narrowing his eyes, for rain is rare enough in southern California that it has meaning: it means that pace models collapse, morning lines dissolve, turf races are moved to dirt, fields shrink. It means, to the astute player, a man who might study and circle and cipher a Racing Form all night, as if it were some kind of sacred text, or more precisely because he has no other life to speak of, the possib
ility of opportunity.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll swing by your place around ten and if you want to go, fine. If not, I’ll tell ’em your prostate fell out.”
“I don’t need a prostate to bet, do I?” he retorted, taking a slop from his tankard. “Is it a betting gland? No wonder I’m doing so lousy. Tell you what, babe, I’ll go with you.”
11.Coco Puff
AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING I PARKED IN FRONT OF SHELLY’S dark, suburban ranch-style tract home built somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Shelly, it hadn’t changed much. In our days together long ago I’d picked him up and dropped him off here countless times, but he’d never invited me inside. I’d never even been past the front gate. He routinely referred to his sadistic parents as “Nazis,” but he was so secretive and kept his life so carefully partitioned that it took me years to learn the grim details: that his mother and father dressed him in girls’ clothes, made him eat without utensils, twice killed his pets as punishment, and kept him in a cage in the garage with a bowl of water like a dog. It was a forbidding, peeling old house, the kind the kids would skip on Halloween night, the kind you’d dare your childhood friends to peek in the window of or knock on its door.
Shelly was habitually late. Untold times in the days of our youth he’d stated an intention to meet me somewhere and never shown, or he’d actually follow me from the track or the fast-food joint to some agreed-upon destination and then peel away into the night before we arrived. He suffered from a variety of maladies, malaises, manqués, and melancholias, imaginary and otherwise. He harbored so many secrets I don’t think he could keep track of them all. I asked him once why he kept so many secrets and he replied with a leer, “How do you think I survive, babe?” His appearance at my front door when I had that apartment on University Avenue two decades before, six pack in hand, was almost always unannounced. And though he might stay for several hours, pondering an elusive God or delving into mare cycles and pace configurations, he usually left abruptly, sometimes mid-sentence, as if fearful of that sweep of the hour hand that would trigger within him some unholy change. One of the many questions about Shelly that I could not answer was why he still lived with these people who had tortured and disabled him.
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