by David Gordon
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” I couldn’t think of what to say.
“Damn. White,” he muttered as he pondered this revelation. Morris was now weeping into the blonde’s enormous boobs while the redhead stroked his head. RX738 finished his drink.
“Well, you did write some good shit,” he said finally, then laughed and play-slapped my arm so that it only bruised lightly. “What the fuck, we all got secrets. I’ll tell you some shit.” He leaned forward. “I’m from the burbs. Long Island. I went to Great Neck South High.”
“Me too,” Dani said. “I moved there from Hollis junior year. My parents wanted me in a better school. That’s how we know each other.”
“Course I dealt reefer and blow there. Got mixed up with the Bloods.”
“Sure,” I said quickly. “Right.”
“Damn,” he said again. “Duke Johnson. I still want to shake your hand.”
We shook. “Thanks RX738,” I said. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder.
35
From Double Down on the Deuce by J. Duke Johnson, chapter 1:
“Mordechai Jones? Funny, you don’t look Jewish.”
She smiled slyly at her own joke as she stepped into my office. I’d heard it before. I am six-two, 200 pounds on a good day, and a deep dark brown every day, good or bad. Which was today? That remained to be seen, after the witty blonde with the hot body and the cold blue eyes told me what she wanted.
“My mother was an Ethiopian Jew,” I explained. “Traditionally, Judaism passes through the mother’s side, so yeah, technically I am Jewish.” I held out my hand. “Though I don’t keep strictly kosher anymore, Miss . . . ?”
“Cherry Blaze. I dance at the Player’s Club. Jorges the bartender told me about you.” She shook out a Marlboro Light 100, which I felt revealed an ambivalent nature. “I want you to find a missing person. My daddy. Juniper Blaze.” She fumbled in her purse for a light.
“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked, getting out a match.
“Ten years ago,” she said.
I leaned across and lit her. “Not easy, but doable,” I said. “Where was he then?”
She looked me in the eye and exhaled between pursed red lips. “In his coffin.”
Down at the Hi-Lo, two drinks later (whiskey sours for her, Chivas rocks for me), Cherry Blaze tried to clarify her story. It was clear all right, clear that this girl was either crazy or lying. Or she was telling the truth. In which case I’d be a crazy fool to go near it.
Her pops was a trumpet player, Juniper “Honky” Blaze, so-named for both his sound and his color, making the scene in the fifties and sixties as the one white dude who could hang. He had the chops, they said, and could hit that high, sweet spot, but by the time Cherry came along, that day was long past. Now Daddy was a junkie, playing dives and raising little Blaze out of a suitcase. On the old Forty-deuce you grew up fast, so at eighteen, when Daddy died behind one shot too many, she didn’t cry. She hit the pole. Today she was twenty-eight and still looked mighty fine. As long as you didn’t stare into her eyes, the way I was doing now.
“Let’s cut to the twist,” I said, and lit her next 100. “Why come to me?”
“I had a dream about him.”
“A dream?” I’d heard a lot of tales in my day, and even more in my nights, but that was a first. I laughed. “All right, I’ll bite. Let’s hear it.” I ordered us two more.
She didn’t laugh or look angry either. She sipped her drink. She smoked her smoke. She looked me in the eye. She spoke:
“About a month ago, I had this dream, where my dad was in my room, playing a song. ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.’ One of his favorites. But in the dream he wasn’t playing it through the horn. I mean it was his trumpet sound for sure, but it was just coming from his lips, pursed up like a kiss. Anyway, in the dream he took my hand and led me into the closet, the same closet I have now, but it turned into a long hallway that opened into our old hotel room, down by Times Square. Then he got excited, playing wilder and higher, and pointing under the bed. Finally I looked, and there was his old trumpet case, full of blood. Now my dad was screaming, trumpet-screaming. So I put my hand in the blood. And there was a knife inside. That’s when I woke up.”
“Creepy,” I allowed. “I had a crazy one myself last night. My grandma was riding an elephant up Broadway. Always happens when I eat Popeye’s chicken after midnight.”
“I know.” She waved her smoke. “Everyone has weird dreams. So what. But I kept having it. And I found myself humming that song. I couldn’t get it out of my head. In the shower. On the train. At work. It was driving me nuts.”
“So you got issues. But I still don’t think you need a detective. More like a week at the beach.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“OK then.” I reached for my wallet.
“Until my dad started sending me emails.”
“What?” For the first time, my ears twitched a little, and my nose opened up, like a hound catching the scent of something new in the air.
“Yeah. Little notes. About things only he would know. How we used to get hot fudge sundaes at the Howard Johnson after his gig. About pawning his horn to buy me school shoes. How I could dance but couldn’t sing.” She finished her drink. “So what do you think? Do I need a detective now?”
I helped myself to a smoke from her pack, broke off the filter. “And where would you suggest this detective start looking?”
She picked up the matches and lit my cigarette. “The graveyard, of course.”
36
The next time I went to interview Darian Clay, the weather was cool and clear. You could see a long way and even the trees on the farthest ridges seemed distinct. Inside the visiting room, of course, there was no weather, and the time was always the same: midnight or noon under the flat fluorescent glare. I sat in my bolted chair at the bolted table. The cement floor had just been cleaned and the pine scent stung my nose.
“Good. That story was pretty good.” Clay grinned as he offered his critique of my Marie Fontaine piece. “You really captured her character. It’s the little details. Like her chomping the bit in that scene where I brand her.”
“Thanks,” I said, uneasily flattered, and then sneezed.
“God bless,” Clay said. “You got to watch it this time of year. I take vitamins.”
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
He sat back, thoughtfully stroking his chin. He was unshaven and the whiskers were coming in black and gray, like mine. “That Marie’s a little chubster though, huh?”
“No.” I shrugged. “Well, just a little.”
“I don’t mind that.”
“No, she’s cute . . . ,” I agreed, seeing her again in my head, hearing that mocking laugh. I ruffled my notes, as if to hide her memory from Clay. I started the tape. “So you wanted to talk about going to school, you said?”
“Well, art school yeah, but I didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
He chuckled. “They rejected me. That’s why not. Who knows what I could have been? A famous artist.”
“Sure. Well, let’s talk about that. How did you begin making art? When did you know that you wanted to be a photographer?”
“You know, I’ll tell you. It was at my foster mom’s, Mrs. Gretchen, who I hated.” He stretched his legs, easing into the story, revealing the thick white gym socks stuffed into his prison slippers. “A real cunt and a half. Used to beat me with this old car antenna. Right across the thighs, that stung like hell. She ought to be the one in prison instead of sitting on her ass in that old house watching TV. Her boyfriend used to strip me, push me in a cold shower, and then throw me out on the porch naked so that the neighbors could see. For humiliation.”
“Why?”
“Wetting the bed,” he said amiably, looking me right in the eye.
“Oh right, right.”
“But he had a camera, see? An old Nikon. He used to shoot a lot of just regular stuff.
Her around the yard. His car. Squirrels and such. The leaves. He’d let me look through the eyepiece, when he had it set up on the tripod, but I better not press the trigger, man. Waste his film. Ha. So I’d keep my hands behind my back and just take like pretend pictures.” He smiled and made a play camera out of his cuffed hands, hard-bitten fingers bracketing his face. “Click. Pick the moment. Click.”
He paused and I fought the urge to jump in, as I would at a dinner party during an awkward silence. Clay knit his fingers together and folded his hands in his lap and went on:
“He had a darkroom down in the basement and he’d let me help out. Sometimes I’d sneak down there too when he wasn’t around. I liked the smell of the chemicals and that earthy basement kind of smell. It was small, dark. I don’t know, I felt safe there. And I liked seeing the prints form in the developer. Coming to life like underwater in the tray. Anyway.” He sat back, crossing his legs. “I couldn’t wait to get my own camera. I just scraped up every dime I could, working odd jobs, stealing change. Then finally I got a used Canon. I was fifteen. I was thrilled. The thing leaked so bad, I had to cover it with tape every time I reloaded, but fuck it. I was a photographer. Except I still had to pretend, because I couldn’t afford film.”
On the tape you can hear us both laugh.
“But then,” he said, “I started shooting for real. I shot a lot of stuff. I don’t know where the hell it went. I bet it’s worth some bucks now. Collector’s item.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Anything. Trees. Dogs. Other kids. The neighbors. I carried it everywhere, crept around like a scout or whatever. Learned patience. You know. Waiting. That’s what it is. Like a hunter. Waiting for the thing to show itself, the thing you’re seeking.” He crouched forward and made his hands into a rifle, sighting along the thumb at me. I smiled.
“But you shot mostly models, right? I mean posed photos.”
“Same thing. It’s the same thing. That’s the relationship between you and the subject. Waiting, working, coaxing, looking, waiting for something to emerge. That mysterious thing or whatever. That’s the hardest part.”
“Waiting?”
“Yeah. That and getting them to hold still.” He chuckled again, lightly, and chewed a finger. I uncapped my pen and made a pointless checkmark on my notes.
“So when did you decide to make it a career?” I asked.
He spit something invisible from his tongue and shrugged. “As soon as I knew it was one. Like at first I wanted to take the news photos, you know, like wars and fires and whatnot. Like a foreign correspondent. Escape. Then later I realized, hey, someone took the pictures in the magazines too, ha. Like posters, billboards, everything. There’s pictures everywhere and someone’s taking them, right?”
“But you wanted to do fine art.”
“Yeah, this one teacher I had. Mr. Barnsworth. He lent me books, well, they were from the library, but anyway he saw me tramping around the fields near school with my camera and showed me books: Stieglitz, Brassai, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus. She was my favorite. That’s when I realized, a photographer could be an artist just like a painter or whatever. He could create an image. Like express something and not just record it. It could be a picture of his mind.” He slowed again, following a thought in the air above me. Tiny flares, reflections of the plastic light fixture, moved inside his eyes.
“So you applied to art school,” I prompted.
“Yeah, to a bunch.” For the first time maybe, he seemed visibly annoyed. He ran his hands through his hair, brushing his head with the chain. “They didn’t want me. Poor kid from nowhere. Shit schools. Bad grades, so I couldn’t get a scholarship. I mean there was no way I could go otherwise. Anyway, that’s all art school is. A big clusterfuck for rich poseurs. Who the fuck needs it? But it’s a system, right? You have to go to the art schools to get into the galleries, to learn how to talk that bullshit. That’s what they’re learning, to talk shit.”
“You did take a class though?”
“Yeah, at the community center, with some jerk-off. Supposedly a professional fine art photographer. Two shows in Baltimore, big deal. He told me I was underdeveloped like I was a retard or some shit. That I needed seasoning like a bowl of soup. After that I just worked on my own. But that’s the thing about art. No one can say, right? Who can judge it? Only the future. Maybe a hundred years from now, I’ll be hanging in a museum. Maybe my work will be worth a fortune. Hell, they say it always goes up when the artist dies. Who knows? Maybe your books about mummies and elves from Mars will sell a million too, after we’re dead.”
He laughed again, softly to himself, and fell silent. Again I held my tongue. Shut up, I told myself. Let the fucker talk.
“That’s what art is too,” he said, finally. “Revenge. Ha. And justice. A photograph’s like evidence. It’s like a message in a bottle for the future. Something I saw in my dreams but that won’t come to pass for a long time yet. I have faith in this. I’m not afraid to die. I know my work will be there after I’m gone, one hundred, two hundred years. You live forever in the mind of others. And those you touch. I don’t need religion or anybody’s god. Art is my heaven.”
37
When I got home the apartment was empty. Claire’s mom was in town, on a shopping layover between Palm Springs and Europe, and Claire had to meet her for some “family bondage.” So I went down to the Peking duck place on Main Street and got on line, communicating with hand signals when my turn came at the window. Behind the steamed glass, a man in a tall white hat laid golden ducks on a thick round of wood and slashed them to glistening bits with a cleaver. Another man tucked the slices into open pockets of dough, added cucumber and scallion, a dribble of brown sauce. I sat at a long table of loners, across from a middle-aged guy with paint on his coveralls, next to a young woman in hospital scrubs and a raincoat, all of us staring into the blank space between us as we chewed. Everyone was speaking Chinese, if they spoke at all. It was a relief not to understand.
Then I went home, cruised through my email, my regular mail, my voice mail, the Times. I took a shower, clipped my nails, swabbed my ears out. Then when I couldn’t restrain my curiosity any longer, I went online. And like a spider sitting in my corner of the Web, I watched for vampT3. Was this cyber-stalking or merely cyber-lurking? Lying in wait for a woman, or not even, a mere name, a blip that might or might not be Theresa Trio, I was embarrassed, in front of myself. This was a new low, combining the perverse and the pathetic. Perthetic!
vampT3: Hey . . .
crimson1: Hi
vampT3: hows it going?
crimson1: Good . . . you?
vampT3: good . . . i still can’t believe im really talking to you. Sibylline!
crimson1: me either . . . neither, I mean.
vampT3: you cant believe your talking to ME???
crimson1: I mean I don’t usually speak to fans. Not that you are I mean necessarily.
vampT3: but I am ur fan. lol
crimson1: lol? Lolly?
vampT3: No that means laughing out loud! Sorry
crimson1: I’m sorry . . . just not used to this text thing
vampT3: IM . . . lol
crimson1: right, ha.
vampT3: so can i ask you . . . what i said last time . . . did it seem strange to you?
crimson1: No . . . what?
vampT3: about your books . . .
crimson1: right
vampT3: but i felt like, reading your work, i keep thinking how does she know how i feel?
crimson1: just a hunch
vampT3: haha. But you really don’t think it’s weird?
crimson1: well if it is I wrote it so I guess then I’m a total weirdo
vampT3: good me too
crimson1: lol
vampT3: Is it too forward to suggest that we meet? If it is im sorry.
crimson1: no its not that, I’d love too. But with the book just out, I’m traveling a lot, you know . . .
vampT3: oh you’re out of to
wn?
crimson1: yes
vampT3: i didn’t think you did readings or book tour stuff. They say you’re a recluse
vampT3: are you there?
crimson1: yes sorry . . . ha . . . you got me . . . I forgot you knew so much . . . it’s true . . . I don’t know if I’d use the word recluse but I don’t often see people or go out . . . tho I am out of town now . . . in seclusion.
vampT3: sorry if I hit a nerve
crimson1: no its fine . . . maybe I’ll get over it one day and we’ll meet.
