I turned, willing my heart to slow. “When you get back?” I said.
“Couple days ago.”
I nodded. “Saw your truck parked out front.”
“Yeah.” He nodded along, as if he were warring with himself. “Hey, come in,” he said.
“Just wondered how everything was going.”
“Great,” he said, laboring over a smile, his face a mask. “Haven’t killed myself, anyway.”
I stepped up through the door. The house was more decrepit than I recalled. I looked about for the partygoers, the arguers, the special friend. The TV was playing in the corner. The voice could have been Shelly’s. He had a habit, like all of us loners, of talking to himself, very demonstratively sometimes, as if he were playing several different roles of Shelly and none too happy about any of them. If that was Shelly who opened the door the first time, then he most definitely had a multiple personality disorder. I decided that I wouldn’t visit him again without advance notice.
I made out I Love Lucy on the box, closing credits. “So, well, uh,” I ventured. “How’s your mom?”
“Dead,” he replied, picking up a Racing Form yellowing from age. He blinked at me and looked blindly at the Form. The way he was standing I could tell he was trying to block me off from a view down the hall. But I was ahead of him on this: I already knew there was someone down that hall and I had no desire to see them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was fast.”
“You want a beer?”
“All right.”
He shuffled into the kitchen, stooped as an old man, and retrieved two beers. That open slot on the couch hadn’t filled yet so I dropped into it, glancing over at Dick Van Dyke pratfall BWAP-BOP. I noted that the cushion underneath me was warm.
Shelly poised at the edge of the chair at his business table opened his beer in a trance. His voice had a faraway quality, as if he were channeling from another dimension. “She was almost gone when I got there,” he said. “Went up into her brain. Never knew she had one. I mean brain cancer was the one thing I was never worried about.” He chuckled, a sound more like sobbing. “My father, that asshole.” His voice drifted off for a moment. He stared at his beer that he hadn’t yet touched. “I thought it would be good when she died. Justice. Like the Nuremberg Trials.” He wagged his head for a while, eyebrows converged. “But she was like Adolf Eichmann, you know, just taking orders.”
Swinging his head, he seemed to be thinking long back. He hadn’t touched the beer. “Still, she could’ve stopped him, said something. Could’ve come late at night with a glass of water. They never even let me have water.” He choked as if his throat were dry, then looked about helplessly, not seeing me. He hadn’t shaved for a while. His beard was sparse, his eyes puffy and red. He was a grieving middle-aged adult in brown cords, plaid shirt, and dull brown clodhoppers, but I swore he looked five. The television burned its ancient cheery childhood scripts. For the second time in four minutes Dick Van Dyke fell on his ass.
I said nothing, not even sure he was aware I was in the room.
“I feel no relief,” he said, his voice pinched with anguish.
I nodded.
“I wanted to tell her something before she died.”
“What did you want to tell her?” I said gently.
His face contorted in confusion, he twisted his head around so that he was staring into the kitchen with one eye, the eyebrow above it tangled as old wire. “I wanted to tell her to go to hell.” He cracked a mean yellow grin. “But I figured she was going there anyway.”
“Do you think Eichmann went to hell?”
He shrugged, disinterested in the fate of the infamous Nazi war criminal.
“Anyway,” I said. “You don’t believe in hell.”
“Oh, I believe in hell all right,” he said, spreading his arms. “I’ve seen it, man.” He roared with laughter and finally took a healthy slug from his can. “I tell you about this woman that came along, came out of nowhere and started taking care of my mom?”
“No.”
“She had this hairdo like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and she wore these white bellbottoms and a lime-green plaid blouse. I thought she worked for the hospital, but she didn’t. Then I thought she was a friend of the family or a neighbor. She wasn’t. Then I thought she might be a ghoul, but what kind of ghoul comes to a hospital and helps an old lady dying of cancer? She kept smiling at me like she knew.”
“Knew what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe she was an angel.”
“I don’t know why it wasn’t him that died.”
Now I heard talking again, down the hall.
Shelly didn’t seem to hear it. My beer was gone. I was the nervous drinker now. Shelly stared wearily through me. He’d lost at least ten pounds. Now something broke down the hall, followed by a cry.
Shelly set his teeth, whispered “Jesus,” set down his beer, rose, and marched away. I heard a “Shut up, will you? I’ve got company. Just sit down.” A radio clicked on, the song “Venus,” by Shocking Blue. “Play with this.”
He returned, shaking his head and offering no explanation. “Keep thinking about that woman with the bee-doo hair,” he resumed, hands on hips. “You know what she was?” He stared at me intently, the first time I’d felt as if I existed in the room.
I flicked up my shoulder.
“My real mom. The mom I should’ve had.” He wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand. “I even thought about, you know, going with her, but then again maybe she was from down there. Had to show Mom the way. Because the minute my mother died, and that lady was right there holding her hand, well she was gone. I looked for her too.” He scratched his head, hauled from his beer, finishing half the can in one tilt.
“You want to get out of here?” I asked. “Go someplace and get a couple of beers?”
He looked up, considering the offer. He might’ve aged two years. He was honestly perplexed by the woman with the bee-doo hair. “No, man, I gotta get my business back up. I’ve got about a hundred orders I need to fill. Couple of pissed off people called.” He glanced down the hall. “Lucky I don’t speak Japanese.”
“How about Santa Anita on Sunday?” I suggested.
“Hell,” he said, his barrel chest heaving with a sigh. “I’ve even lost track of the nags.”
“We can drop in on Marvelle.”
His eyes glinted for a moment, but then whether it was his mother or his guest or the thought of being obliged to a flesh-and-blood Marvelle, the light in his eyes subsided.
“I’ll give you a call,” I said.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, already raising his right hand to close the door behind me.
18.Martha at the Apollo
ANOTHER WEEK PASSED BEFORE I HEARD FROM SHELLY AGAIN. HE called me on the phone. I thought he’d finally caught up on bookwork and was a go for live racing at Santa Anita and a little sidetrip to see a Girl in a Heart-Splashed Blouse. I was ready for him to say, “Let’s hit the track, babe.”
He said instead, plainly distressed, “Can you come over?”
“Now?”
“Yeah, if you can. I’m in kind of a bind.”
I jumped into my truck and drove the thirty miles inland, six miles an hour over the speed limit. Both the gate and the front door were open when I arrived. Shelly was standing in the living room, waiting for me, hands clasped in front of him.
“My father is sick now,” he said. “The same cancer as my mother.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I’ve got to go back again. Can you watch my business for me?”
“Your business.”
“Yeah. I can’t let it fall apart again. I’ll go under.”
“I don’t know anything about it, babe.”
“Who sang ‘Jimmy Mack’?”
“Martha and the Vandellas.”
“See?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what label. I don’t know the prices. I don’t know what gown
she wore at her debut at the Apollo.”
“You know your music, babe,” he said. “Anyway, I got no one else I can trust. You got a job yet?”
“No,” I said, my sexy self-help book composed on a celebrity typewriter having gone into a stall.
“I’ll make it worth your while. I can’t lose my biz. All you gotta do is fill orders, pick up my mail at the P. O. No phone answering. No hustling. No more than two hours a day. I’ll give you fifty bucks a day, plus 10 percent commission on all sales. I’ll be back in two weeks, a month tops. I don’t think he’ll die, anyway.”
My ears had begun to sweat. “I guess I could.”
“Can you stay here, too?” he asked. “There have been some break-ins in the neighborhood recently, and I’ve got some valuable records. You can sleep wherever you like and use my typewriter if you want.”
I had a good look around and repeated the feeble phrase. “I guess I could.”
“I’ve got to leave tonight. Let me show you around. The place is yours. Listen to any records you like.”
19.Psychotic Reaction
BY THE TIME I RETURNED WITH A FEW OF MY THINGS TO SHELLY’S house that evening, Shelly was gone. The sun had turned red over the housetops. Shelly planned to drive straight through, with only rest-stop naps and hamburgers, as he had the last time. He did not like motels. He had no insurance, so he was a night driver, a self-proclaimed rabbit killer. He followed the back roads, the secondary highways. He’d looked so lost when I had shaken his hand and wished him a good trip, but he’d also been open and hospitable in a way that I’d never seen. I doubt that few had seen this side of him. He didn’t really need or believe he needed other people. I didn’t imagine that, outside of Mexican dentists, he’d ever had to rely on anyone as much as he was about to rely on me.
As a rule, I don’t like horror movies because their success is predicated on a protagonist who insists on going where good sense tells him he should not. On a bet long ago I slept in a mountain cabin in Cuyamaca, where a camper had been murdered and where his spirit supposedly still resided. There was also the additional danger of the murderer, still at large. I can’t say I slept. And though I won the bet, it was also the first time I experienced a psychotic episode, unless I really did see a full apparition of the murdered camper and a man with a hatchet in the window.
Now another haunted cabin, another bet. This one had much more riding on it: my promise, a man’s business, perhaps a man’s sanity, perhaps my sanity. I picked up the checklist he’d written for me and reviewed it once again.
1.Check post office box daily.
2.Wait till check clears on new clients before filling orders.
3.All records are alphabetical by ARTIST.
4.Make sure conditions of records are accurate.
5.For record prices use Giddings.
6.Petty Cash in band-aid box in medicine cabinet.
7.Extra house key in magnetic box in back of mailbox.
8.Don’t throw away paper trash, receipts, addresses, can’t let people find that, just bag it and I will burn it when I return.
9.Good luck.
List in hand, I wandered once again through the maze of Shelly’s afflicted sanctuary. I kept getting this feeling that I wasn’t alone. My imagination would not allow me to believe that the special friend had left the house. Compulsively, restively, I checked again each room. His parents’ bedroom was a dusty mausoleum with heavy peach-colored Queen Anne drapes and the reek of mothballs. On the walls were several staid and yellowed world-conqueror portraits: Hannibal, Tamerlane, Akbar the Great, Hitler, and Alexander the Great, who raped his way all the way to India and therefore could not have been that Great. Shelly’s disheveled bedroom was so cluttered with Racing Forms, clothes, and memorabilia that there was barely a navigable path to the unmade bed. Donny’s room, cool and sterile as the ghost it represented, was, Shelly had told me, unchanged since his death.
It was the stale chill air in this house, I decided, the palpably undisturbed layers of sorrow and neglect, that unnerved me. Pain is a noumenal stain that soaks into walls and fixes itself like a scent in the air. Pain, like smell and flavor, is a form of memory. You can feel the warmth of a loving house and in places like psychiatric hospitals and halfway houses and The Hubbard Museum of Pain you can feel its inimical opposite. I was tempted to hire a priest or a shaman, perhaps leave an open Bible in the middle of each room and come back next week. I wanted to clean the place up, open the curtains at least, let in some air and light. Have a chat with the spirits. Listen, I’m just here to look after Shelly’s business. I have no interest otherwise. It wasn’t my idea to stay here.
I turned the TV on, as Shelly would’ve done, to mask the silence. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet flickered up, one of the blandest most soporific sitcoms ever made. But Shelly worshipped this show and could recite entire episodes by heart. He didn’t view this series as entertainment but as a training manual or a family documentary, an electronic how-to manual on the reconstruction of a shattered past, but how could this do anything, I wondered, since the Nelson family portrayal wasn’t remotely real, except widen the gulf between himself and his unattainable ideals?
I moved all the items I’d brought — blanket, pillow, flashlight — to the record room, the only sane room in the house, a converted bedroom with painted wooden shelves on every wall to the ceiling. Each square cubby hole was filled with a neat leaning stack of sleeved vinyl. Shelly had several cubbies marked NO SALE. He made most of his money selling junk to Asians and Europeans. The good stuff he kept for himself. I rummaged through them: a Beatles’ Butcher Block (the original controversial cover of Yesterday and Today, with the lads posing draped with meat and dismembered naked dolls, was recalled and then pasted over with a more congenial cover and re-released; but you could tear away the second cover and, if you were lucky, find yourself a rare Beatles collectible underneath); a ten-and-a-half-inch Stowaways on Justice Records; a Johnny & the Jammers (Johnny Winter); the Infatuators on Fellatio Records; a promo copy of “In the Hands of Karma” by the Electric Toilet; a sample copy of “Ring Chimes” by the Dots; a stereo version of “Bring Down the House” by the Escorts; a blue vinyl copy of a Five Satins single; and the crown jewel of his collection, Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” on Chess Records with Ike Turner on guitar, asserted by many to be the first rock and roll record ever issued. (The record was a 1954 reissue delta-marked, 1954, but no original 1951 recordings, according to the pricing guides, were known to exist.)
As a child I collected coins. It was exciting to dream that one day I might find in circulation a coin that would make me rich. But I never found anything worth much more than eight bucks. Too many people hoarded old coins. It you wanted a truly valuable coin you had to go to a dealer and pay what it was worth, hope for market appreciation and in the interim the joy of ownership. But coins are dull. They don’t sing songs. They contain no emotion, risk, love, no passion, art, memory, little history, and nothing human beyond the oil and dirt from spenders’ pockets and hands. Even if Shelly never made a plug nickel for all his effort, I marveled at what a cultural gold mine he’d amassed.
I was about ready to set “Rocket 88” on the turntable to hear it for the first time when the phone rang, startling me. No chance I would answer. Shelly would only be a city or two down the road. I glanced at my watch. Four rings and a stop. I wandered back down the hall, into the living room, and unplugged the phone from the wall, feeling guilty and wondering where Jackie Brenston was. Shelly’s guide told me that his Delta Cats weren’t even assembled at the time of the recording, and that Ike Turner composed the song, and what could that have been like, composing the first rock and roll song ever? Ike Turner would nevertheless be remembered for the rest of his life as the beater of his ex-wife Tina.
I checked the fridge to find nothing but shreds of cardboard from torn-open twelve packs and a few portion-control packets of Jack-in-the-Box hot sauce. The freezer was blocked with speckled ice. Th
ere was a sound down the hall, a sort of furry thump. I’d already explored every room, high and low, bed, closet, tub. Possibly I’d left the record player on, and the arm had kicked back on its own.
I told myself there was no one here. The intruders, the phantoms, were in my mind. The threats, as they were in the mountain cabin, and as I walked the streets of San Jose stealing suits and insulting strange women, were figments, residual at best, a torment that didn’t possess the substance to physically reach me. I had to get a grip. Still, I couldn’t sit or relax. I turned off the television. I didn’t want to play music anymore for fear I might be unable to hear the sound again. I returned to Donny’s room, the origin it seemed to me of the disturbance, and of all the noises before. I noted that the bedspread was rumpled as if someone had recently slept here. This is where the secret friend resides, I realized, though I couldn’t conceive of sleeping in what amounted to a dead boy’s altar. Again I checked the closet and looked under the bed. I promised myself I would not dwell in this room. It was, as Shelly described, a Donny Ray shrine. On the walls were San Diego Padres banners, Alice Cooper posters, a framed high school diploma, the lyrics of a Chicago song, “Colour My World,” written in felt pen in a feminine hand. There was a bottle of Hai Karate on the dresser along with a desiccated corsage, ticket stubs, and a religious trinket. Beads hung from the neck of a bust of Jim Morrison. Above the bed was a large portrait of the same girl who resided on Shelly’s TV set. I had asked Shelly if that was a girlfriend. It was apparently a girlfriend, just not Shelly’s. I opened a photo album and studied the many pictures of the same girl. She was leaned down, hands on knees, mouth open. She was diving for a volleyball. Here she was in a bikini, looking very trim. I sat down on the bed.
On a table to the left was a reel-to-reel player, a black Marantz model, state of the art in its day, a tape threaded in. Below the player in a milk crate were boxes of tapes. One was marked “Donny’s favorite songs, 1986.”
Nineteen eighty-six? He would’ve been many years gone.
Whirlaway Page 10
