One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “You’re in the phone book. We got a Thomas Guide. The phone book said Madison Avenue in Culver City, and we looked in the Thomas Guide, the part where they list the streets and it tells you which page, and—”

  “I’m familiar with the process.”

  He looked upset. Like I’d made him feel bad. That made me feel bad. What the hell?

  “Sorry, Lenny, I didn’t mean to shut you up.”

  He flashed a smile that I imagined I remembered. “It’s okay. But call me Squig, okay?”

  “Sure, whatever. What is it about me you had to check out?”

  “Woz wanted to make sure you weren’t a narc before we—”

  “A narc? Me a narc? Where’d you get a stupid—”

  This elicited a glare from Robbie Wozniak.

  “Where’d you get an idea like that?”

  “Those people you got arrested,” Woz said.

  A friend was killed a while back. The cops suspected me. I stumbled on the real culprit. A year later, something similar happened. I was a three-day wonder in the paper and on TV. Six-day, altogether. Three times two.

  “The people who got arrested were murderers,” I said. “You’re not murderers, are you?”

  Woz was back to watching the wall. I didn’t see the daddy long-legs anymore. Maybe he was having a flashback too. The acid kind. Or maybe I’d imagined the bug. Or maybe I’d fallen down a rabbit hole and was in Wonderland.

  “Guys? You aren’t, are you? Murderers?”

  Woz finally returned to Earth. He stared at me, sighed, shook his head. “A guy’s gotta be careful. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really, but I’ll take your word for it. So did I pass?”

  “Course you passed,” Woz said. “You didn’t pass, we wouldn’t’ve come back to see you.”

  “And I still don’t know what for. So will one of you please tell me what the hell’s going on here?”

  “Figure it out.”

  “Figure what out? Excuse me if I’m a little thick here. People burgling my house tend to fuck up my head.”

  “It’s simple, dumbshit,” he said, “We’re getting the band back together.”

  Fiddle About

  We were together for three months, Lenny and Robbie, Bonnie and Toby, Frampton and me. Then we got our first gig. It was in a little club off the Strip, half an hour, opening for some hotshot new group. We all got excited when we heard that Monte Freeman was there. He was the head of Hysteria Records, and he was there to see the band we were opening for.

  It turned out he hated them. But he loved us.

  No. What he really loved was Bonnie and Toby.

  “The Platypuses,” I said. “You’re getting the Platypuses back together.”

  “Yeah,” Squig said.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “It’s time.”

  “That’s mighty heavy, Squiggy, but it doesn’t tell me shit.”

  He flinched. “Don’t call me that, okay? Not with the -gy part.”

  “Squig, then.”

  “You guess how come I’m called that?”

  “Something to do with Laverne and Shirley, I suppose. So besides it being cosmic, is there—”

  “One day some asshole starts calling me Squiggy, which is dumb because Lenny and Squiggy are two different guys, right?”

  “Can’t this story wait? Because right now I—”

  “So the shitheads I’m hanging around with, they pick right up on it, and all of a sudden they’re all calling me that. Only some other prick leaves out the -gy part one day, and sure enough the rest of them go along with that too. And after I hear people calling me that enough times, I say the hell with it, if they want to call me that, it’s fine with me.”

  “Are you done?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Glad to hear it. Why’d you guys decide to get the band together now?”

  “We didn’t,” Woz said.

  “I am down a rabbit hole.”

  “Bonnie did.”

  I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. Nothing would come out.

  “Look at him,” Woz said. “Like a fucking fish. I always knew he wanted to ball her.”

  I said, very quietly, “Bonnie’s in on this?”

  “I just told you, dickhead, she’s the one getting the whole thing together. Hey, Squig, take a look at this guy. Is he spacing out or what?”

  A couple of nights after our one and, it turned out, only gig, Bonnie got me alone and said she and Toby were leaving the next morning. Monte Freeman liked them so much that he wanted them to cut a record, and he was going to have them live at his place in Brentwood until things broke for them. Then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and told me that he didn’t want the rest of the band. That he had some other musicians he wanted to use. I said he just wanted to ball her. She said, why’s he bringing Toby too? I said, he wants to ball him too.

  Back then, most of us still thought homosexuals all dressed in funny clothes and went around talking like girls. Neither of which Monte Freeman did.

  Bonnie and I looked at each other and cracked up. Then I put my hands on her shoulders and said what was happening, the band being split up, wasn’t her fault. She stopped laughing and looked into my eyes like I’d never had them looked into before. Then she was kissing me. And I was kissing back. It was my first time with tongues. I didn’t know such a thing existed.

  I was a virgin. All those girls at Mark and Ginger’s, and they all just wanted to be friends. I was dying to lose my cherry. But I didn’t have a rubber. And some renegade noble impulse wouldn’t let me have sex with Bonnie without one. Maybe it was the result of an awkward talk I’d had with my father before he went up the river. Maybe it was that I knew Bonnie was sexually experienced and I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself.

  Bonnie wanted to do it anyway. I said no. She wrestled me onto the sofa and rubbed my crotch. I couldn’t help myself. I fondled her bumptious breasts. And came in my pants.

  I was mortified. Bonnie was sympathetic. She said we should try again. I said I really didn’t want to get her pregnant. She said there were other things we could do. I vaguely knew what she was talking about. I was too embarrassed to find out for sure.

  After a while we both fell asleep on the sofa. At some point she got up and left. I pretended to still be asleep. I never saw her, nor Toby, again.

  “Yo. Joe. You with us here?”

  My turn to return to Earth. I looked from one to the other. I wasn’t sure which had spoken. “I was just remembering some things.”

  “Yeah,” Woz said, “And I know what two of them are.”

  “Hand me my OJ.” Squig stood and got it for me. I took the vacant seat and drank down half the juice. Stalling. Not knowing where to go next. Squig kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like the conversational vacuum was eating at him. Finally Woz said, “Frampton’s already in.”

  I half-looked at him and said, “Frampton Washington?”

  “You know anyone else named Frampton?”

  “There’s Peter Frampton—”

  “You know Peter Frampton?” Squig said. “Far out.”

  “No, I don’t know Peter Frampton. It was just an example. Of someone else named Frampton. What’s he up to these days? Our Frampton, I mean.”

  “Lives near the Marina,” Woz said. “Got a wife’s twenty years younger’n him and a couple of kids. Works in El Segundo. Some kind of engineer. We went over to his house a while back. He answers the door, we think we’re in the wrong place.”

  “How come?”

  “He got skinny,” Squig said.

  “No way.”

  “Like a fucking toothpick,” Woz said.

  “You never know,” I said. A semi sequitur. I was still thinking about Bonnie. Trying to figure out why I was all shook up over a woman I hadn’t seen in over thirty years.

  “He’s like you,” Squig said. “Just got back to rocking and rolling.”

  That brought me ar
ound. “How’d you know I just got back to it?”

  He looked over at Woz, who wasn’t ready to help. “Just something we figured out.” Clearly a lie. Maybe when they were in the house they took a look at my amp and found the manufacture date.

  I didn’t feel like pursuing it. “And what about you guys? You just get back to playing?”

  “Uh-uh,” Squig said. “We been playing all along. Together.”

  “Squig’s my best friend,” Woz said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “We live together,” Squig said. “I mean, not live together like a guy and his old lady live together, but we live in the same house. Have for … how long’s it been, Woz?”

  “A fucking long time,” Woz said.

  Squig nodded. “A fucking long time. We been in and out of a lot of bands. Some were pretty good. But you know what?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I do. None of them were as much fun as the Platypuses.”

  “You got it,” Woz said.

  After I left my sanctuary, after my mother died and I blamed myself, I moved back home. I wasn’t sure why. I just knew I had to. Elaine, who’s a few years older than me, wasn’t getting along with her parents, and she moved in with me, serving as a sort of surrogate mother. During that time, in the five years until she got married and left, I was in and out of a dozen bands. I didn’t last in any of them. They never had the vibe that banging around in the music room at that spooky old monastery had. The music might have been as good, maybe better, but it didn’t matter. I always found something wrong, something to get me out.

  Over the next four or five years my interest in making music petered out. I got into acting, if you can call what I do that. The guitar went into the closet, as did the acoustic I’d left behind when I ran away. I sold the amp. And things stayed like that until my neighbor at the Aerosmith concert offered me a joint.

  “Aren’t we forgetting something?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Squig said.

  “Toby.”

  “What about him?”

  “Rumor has it that he’s dead.”

  “You believe everything you hear?” Woz said.

  “No. But, and correct me if I’m wrong here, no one’s seen or heard from him since 1980 or so.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “You guys know something I don’t?”

  “Yeah. We know a lot you don’t.”

  “About Toby, dumbshit.”

  “Hey, Squig. Guy called me a dumbshit.”

  “About time,” Squig said. “You been calling him all sorts of stuff.”

  “Okay, guys,” I said. “Spill.”

  “We’re not supposed to,” Squig said.

  “Says who?”

  “Bonnie.”

  “Then maybe I need to talk to her.”

  “Maybe you need to ball her,” Woz said.

  I turned on him. “Get this straight, Robbie. I have no interest in screwing Bonnie or anyone else except my girlfriend.” Gina hated the term, I wasn’t fond of it either, but it was convenient. “If I go along with this insane idea, it’s because I want to be in a band again, not because of Bonnie. Got that?”

  Woz smiled. The first real, somewhat-warm smile I’d seen out of him. “Hey, Squig,” he said. “I kind of like this guy.” He looked right at me. “I thought you were kind of a pussy, but you got some cojones after all.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I got as many cojones as anyone.”

  Young Man Blues

  Squig said they were getting together that night to jam at Bonnie’s house in the Hollywood Hills. I hadn’t jammed with anyone in twenty-five years. The concept was exciting. Also scary as hell.

  After Woz drove them off in a cool old Barracuda, I stayed on the porch and tried to process what had just happened. I should have felt more upset, more violated, at them breaking into my house and squeezing my oranges. But I couldn’t. Too much else to keep my mind occupied. I was, maybe, going to be in a band again. And not just any band. The best band I’d ever been in.

  Then there was Bonnie. My male friends, admittedly not a huge sample, have all had one woman they wish they would have slept with. Not the great love who got away, though everyone seems to have one of those too. But the one they wished they’d nailed, for the pure carnal joy of it. Mine was Bonnie. Over the months after she left Mark and Ginger’s, as she zoomed to fame and just as quickly back to obscurity, I berated myself hundreds of times for not screwing her when I had the chance. After I moved back home I kicked myself less often, but she was always there in my mind. Maybe if I’d been getting any I would have forgotten her faster. Maybe not.

  Even as I got older, I’d get that little twinge once or twice a year. That little voice in the back of my head that said, You blew it, Joe, you could have balled a super chick with humongous tits back when you were fifteen, and you didn’t. And you can’t ever fix that.

  Now, suddenly, three decades later, I was going to see her again. It made me a little queasy. It made me feel like a teenager.

  At nine-thirty—we music types kept late hours—my SG and I showed up at the address Squig gave me. The amp stayed home. He’d said there’d be plenty of amps.

  Squig had told me that after Bonnie’s singing career went south she stayed at Hysteria Records, switching from artist to employee. She’d been there ever since, working her way up to president, changing her name somewhere along the line from Morgenlender to Chapman.

  Being a record exec must have paid well enough. The place was huge. Three stories, lots of windows, a facade enveloped in ivy and creeping fig. Giant split-leaf philodendrons and a jumbo schefflera out front, along with half a dozen towering palms. A couple of mil at least.

  I rang the doorbell. It echoed somewhere beyond the door. Eventually I heard footsteps inside. I held my breath. The door opened.

  A man of around thirty stood there. A bit shorter than me, green eyes, dark hair needing a trim. “You must be Joe,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Darren. Bonnie’s son.”

  “Hello.”

  “Planning on coming in?”

  “Oh. Right.” I moved inside.

  “Something the matter?” he said.

  “I didn’t know Bonnie had a son.”

  “No reason you should.” He shut the door behind me. “Something wrong with that?”

  “Of course not. It’s just—nothing.”

  He knew it wasn’t nothing, and maybe he knew what it was … that there’s nothing better than meeting your childhood friends’ adult children to make you feel old.

  If he did know, he didn’t let on. “They’re in the back,” he said. “Come.” He turned and walked off across the parquet. I followed, taking stock. The furniture was the kind you see in architectural magazines. The art looked expensive. The plants were low-maintenance.

  We went through the house and out the back. A path cut across a patch of ground cover to a guest house. Light leaked out around the curtains in the front windows. Someone was practicing drumrolls inside. I followed Darren in.

  The front was a kitchen and a small living area, neat, spare, functional. A red-eyed basset hound lay in front of the sofa, languidly guarding the premises. An open door led to the back, where the drum sounds were coming from. Frampton was in there. I wondered who else was.

  Squig and Woz were. They stood in front of a Fender Bossman. Off to its side were a couple more amps, another Fender and a Marshall. In front of them, a synth setup. One keyboard said Yamaha, one Roland, one Korg. They were surrounded by pedals and racks and dozens of patch cables. Three mics waited atop chrome stands. Darren headed for a closed-in area in the corner. It had a big glass window, behind which a console sat bristling with knobs and sliders and lights.

  Frampton sat behind a minimal drum kit. I assumed that was who it was. No way I could reconcile this stringbean with the blob of a kid I knew back in the day.

  He put down his sticks, rose, moved out to greet
me. “Joe?”

  “Frampton?”

  “The same.”

  Then he was laughing, a big, genuinely pleased laugh, a laugh that brought back a summer of no worries, abundant dope, and all the music in the world.

  Instant Party

  “Where’s Bonnie?” I said.

  “What did I tell you?” Woz said. “That’s all he’s interested in.”

  “Hey, putzface, she’s part of the band. Why wouldn’t I expect her to be here?”

  “Putzface?”

  “Sorry. Best I could do on short notice.”

  “Putzface. I like it. Care if I use it?”

  “Be my guest. So where is she?”

  “She’s at her office,” Darren said. He’d crept up behind me. “Got a problem with one of her acts. Singer got caught with a fourteen-year-old.”

  “Things never change.”

  “They do a little. This fourteen-year-old was a boy. Anyway, she should be here within an hour.”

  I walked over to the drums. “Nice kit. New?”

  “Uh-huh,” Frampton said. “Just got back into playing a couple of months ago.”

  “I heard.”

  “You too, right?”

  “Pretty much. Electric, anyway. Liking it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we ought to make some music.”

  “I agree.” He turned to Squig and Woz. “Guys?”

  I opened my case and took out the SG. Squig said, “Same one?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Right arm.”

  “Out of state.”

  “Farm out.”

  “Farm fucking out,” I said.

  We all plugged in. Darren went back in the booth. “He going to record this?” I said.

  “If you don’t suck,” Woz said. He had a Fender Precision bass. The strap had skulls on it.

  Squig flicked a couple of switches on the Yamaha. “‘96 Tears,’“ he said. He diddled another switch, fingered a couple of chords. You would have sworn he was playing a Farfisa.