by Doug Weaver
“Bartok, huh?” Stein says.
I’m stunned, and without moving a muscle I reconstruct my previous conception of Becky Stein. My whole understanding of “gangster” and “scary” has been blown apart. What else might he know, I’m wondering. I imagine him commenting about my piano:
“I know why you’re your piano is a Yamaha and not a Steinway.”
I silently mouth the word “Why?” accompanied with arched eyebrows, tacitly encouraging Stein to please continue.
With a knowing sideways glance and a slight smirk, he says: “Because of the blood, silly!”
Stein keeps two steps ahead of me: “Don’t be coy,” he says in response to my look of befuddlement. “If this piano were a Steinway, you’d never have started selling drugs, you wouldn’t have been jacked for your drug money, and you wouldn’t have been stabbed last month – and there would be no blood – on this Yamaha thing. If this piano were a Steinway, it would go without saying that you’d know the plodding pain of sacrifice – you might be living here, but probably not. And you and I would probably never have met. Things would have turned out differently. You would have mourned the deaths of all those thousands of your brothers who succumbed to AIDS, because that’s what you do when everybody around you dies, isn’t it. But you didn’t. You looked away – you got ‘high,’ because death is – what’s a word you might use? Icky? Instead of bowing to the richness of the mourning process – the tragedy of prematurely dying – the inevitability of death – I hate to use the ‘r’ word because, in the scheme of things I don’t really have much standing to use it, but what the fuck: the Responsibility. You insisted on superficiality. You could have stopped for a minute to consider the lay of the land – to maybe lend a hand to all those guys who died because treatment came too late – the ones with the lesions who got that ‘look’ that you get when you only have a couple of weeks left, or even to attend even one goddamned memorial for any of them who were your friends. Ok…you went to a couple of memorials, but you weren’t present…you were fucked up. You weren’t there to mourn, were you? You zeroed in on whoever was loaded there too. You acted like it was a fucking bath house, surreptitiously following guys into the bathroom where, after you had sex, you both traded nasty quips about the desperate cheapness of the memorial, saying stuff like, ‘Do you believe those little cheese cubes on toothpicks?! My memorial’s going to be held on the cliffs of the ocean and there will be a grand requiem playing really loudly and all the guests will wear white.’ You went beyond merely cheapening their deaths. You ignored their deaths. Or that trip to France? Remember? You and that vulgar fat girl – Marsha – the one from Texas – and you just ‘had’ to see that Cathedral in Liege that was built using mortar made from the bones of thousands of French soldiers killed in World War I? Your behavior there would have mortified anybody with any sense. You ignored the tens of signs prominently remonstrating visitors to keep their mouths shut during their visits there. But you and your friend were drunk and nattered on like teenagers during lunch break. You insisted on being as vulgar as you could, just like you did after 9/11, remember? Instead of sending heartfelt condolences – or just doing nothing at all – you know – being ‘silent,’ you got high, and in your insanity, you constructed overtly frivolous, impossibly silly-looking shaving caddies decorated with glitter, fake jewels and curlicues that you said you wanted to send to the survivors of the deceased first responders, you know, the firemen and policemen, those selfless brave men and women – imagining the stunned disbelief of the befuddled recipients of your work reading the included sentiment: ‘Hi, I made this for you because I know you’re probably really upset about losing your family ‘n’ friends ‘n’ stuff.’ But you didn’t, though, because that would have required you to actually dredge up enough courage to make yourself vulnerable for a couple of seconds. You kept your shaving caddies, prominently displaying them as totems to your irreverence. But your piano’s not a Steinway, is it.”
I want more than anything to ask him how the fuck he knows all this shit – because I really was jacked a month ago – and stabbed. I’d say I was almost killed, but I’m not sure that’s actually true because I don’t really have a baseline to compare it to. All I really remember is at like four a.m. the electricity goes off which plunges the house into total darkness and makes the Bob Marley CD go silent. I went outside to investigate and was met by a surly looking guy who demanded to know if I was Bert. “You Bert?” he asked. My response was shaped completely with similar scenes I’d seen on TV and at the movies: “Who wants to know?”
Anyway, he pushes me up to my little front porch and I put on an anemic pantomime of resistance and was met with another person – a shadowy figure darting by who, in a split second, thrust a thin blade between a couple of my ribs – a quick in-n-out. That I was sure of – there’s no doubt. I’ve been stabbed. Quickly and completely cowed, I ushered this big surly guy into the house and of course it’s still totally dark because no electricity. He demands to know where the money and dope are all the while shoving me through the house and into the tiny bedroom, knocking over furniture along the way and me spilling blood all over everything including my piano. He tells me to kneel, which I do, and I’m actually pretty clear headed, which surprises me. “Where’s the money and dope,” he again demands. I want to say something like: You stupid motherfucker! If you hadn’t cut off the electricity, I could get it for you. But I think I just said that the dope and money are in the safe, which is across the room. He pulls out a gun – I didn’t see it – but he pushes what I imagined was the barrel against the back of my head. “Where’s the fucking dope and money!? I’m gonna put a cap in your ass motherfucker!” something that’s never been said in my presence, but the words made me believe that it actually was a gun digging into my skull. My thoughts embodied my outrage. This is patently unfair! He’s already stabbed me, now he wants to shoot me! where in my mind I’m standing, hands planted on hips, expressing my considerable indignation… Then, as if offering to the gods my sad opinions about the erosion of human values in this current day and age, all the while shaking my head in profound disappointment: Where… is… his… sense… of… fair… play!? as if like me his values had been shaped by the childhood experience of fucking up the Ten Commandments in front of his family’s Methodist congregation. But instead I start sobbing and say these snot-tinged words: “I don’t know where anything is…I can’t see…it’s too dark.” I can feel blood oozing down my torso and moistening my clothes, and it’s becoming hard to breathe, which makes me think that my lung has been pierced. I fish my wallet out of my pants and give him what’s inside, about $600. He left before the dope was found. I was jacked and I was stabbed. But I lived, which is probably due to the ambulance that arrived after I’d begged – no shit – I had to fucking beg the managers of the little courtyard of tiny bungalows – which, when viewed through squinty eyes, any newcomer there would have said it loosely resembled a kind of utopia, mainly because it was miniature and well-kept and kind of a progressive island in the middle of an ocean of Hispanic superstition that made up Highland Park’s gun/gang laden population. There was a center lawn and a few trees and shit – it was pretty fucking precious – and the managers reluctantly condescended to call 9-1-1 on my behalf even though I couldn’t have made it clearer that I was probably dying – because they’ve lived in Highland Park long enough that their reaction to violence had evolved into a survival-heavy doctrine of non-intervention: I see nothing; I hear nothing. But they must have called because an ambulance finally showed up just as the sun was rising.
It was, I’ll always remember, quite a beautiful sunrise, all a sleepy deep orange tinged with spots of bright yellow and deep purple, the purple being the result of the remnants of smog that still haunted LA’s skies. And the coolest thing about ambulance people – the EMTs – is how you’re made to feel like a commodity with no name – you’re just some guy t
hat’s probably dying, but they’re so fucking efficient that all you really feel is gratitude. I’m loaded into this big clean ambulance and there’s two uniformed females and one impossibly handsome guy who immediately scans my arms looking for a place to start a line. As if I’m not even there he says, “Jesus! He’s (meaning me) totally torn up” – not referring to my stab wound, but the state of my arms. I’m what’s known as a “hard stick,” meaning that my veins are shot. His proclamation is tinged with disgust, which makes me feel like – um – shit, and I look to one of the females and say, “Who the fuck is this guy?” And this female EMT looks down and puts a finger over my mouth: “Shhhh – he’s saving your life.” And I didn’t feel fear or much of anything except regret at that moment – I guess that even for proud dope fiends, circumstances sometimes will pull everything into perfect focus. The context of me was finally – finally in its correct position. I don’t want to die like this. Dying like this is just so vulgar – tedious almost – cheap. But my very next thought was that getting shot with an inexpensive pistol was probably a little bit more common than being stabbed like this in the scheme of things, which didn’t make me feel much better but I suppose you grab what you can.
I pry myself away from these thoughts – it can’t continue because I’m almost a hundred percent certain that Becky Stein isn’t actually reading my mind. I feel a bead of sweat roll down my neck.
“Bartok, yeah – the Microcosmos – ‘Boating,’” I say.
“Why are you playing it in two instead of three?” Stein says.
There’s a dry sober quality to his query. The question completely throws me off balance again. I rise to the occasion and offer him my response:
“Huh?”
“Look,” he says. “This part is just the accompaniment – the part in three – the left hand before it switches to the right hand.”
He sits at the piano.
“This theme here in the right hand is actually in two.”
There’s a generosity – a kindness in his voice that speaks to unlimited patience.
“See?” he says. And he plays.
And he counts while he’s playing. And he’s incredibly musical and I feel like a complete charlatan because I realize that I’ve become comfortable with my incorrect assessment of Bartok’s intentions – I’ve become lazy – rather than playing the piano I’ve been playing at the piano. I’ve allowed the appearance of two sets of three eighth notes in the bass to lull me into a sleepy understanding of two sets of triplets instead of three sets of doublets, tempered, of course, with an awareness of the downbeat at the beginning of each measure, which encourages whatever buoyancy the music may have had through the perception of an unimpaired brain to dissipate and drag the whole thing to the bottom of Bartok’s pond. I at once suspect my musical impairment – or my non-musical interpretation – has been the result of my almost continuous ingestion of meth and other drugs – a subject that I’m loath to address – especially now – simply because I’ve placed all my eggs for the time being, the time past and into the foreseeable future, into the dope basket. I’ve dug myself a rut musical, and social and every other –al– and furnished them all with dumpster furniture. My boat has sprung leak after leak until being dragged down into the muck.
Stein finishes the piece and turns to face me.
“May we see your product?” he asks.
I want to pull back on the reins for a minute, just to regroup, because I’ve been gut-punched by the unexpected. I want to further size up this Becky Stein and his friend – I’m still not sure what his name is – Kenyon – what kind of a name is Kenyon? And “Becky” too. Isn’t that short for Rebecca? He doesn’t seem like a queen – at least in my brief experience with him. The only thing I can think of that may have fostered this gender-confused name is something ethnic – maybe it’s a Jewish thing, some orthodox nickname or something, like Bibi, and I quickly try to come up with a convincing syllogism about Jewishness and the last name Stein, but I don’t know if my original premise is true, that all Steins are Jewish, which would make my conclusion that Becky Stein is therefore Jewish false – or at least unprovable given the dearth of knowledge I possess on the subject. As a matter of fact I don’t really know if Stein is his last name. All I’ve heard are stories about some dangerous guy named Becky Stein who’s been known to shoot people to get his way. His last name could be McGillicutty for all I know. It seems that I know as much about onomatology as I know about Bartok. Plus I’ve never had the opportunity to socially entertain such an infamous gangster before either and I’m scrambling to come up with a plausible delaying tactic – Would you like a nice cup of tea? Lemon or milk? Do I have any tea? Nope. How about cookies? Would you like a cookie? There haven’t been cookies in my house for months, if not years. What do I have? Would you like a squirt of ketchup? It’s just in the fridge – I think. I could garnish it with some that frozen shit on the walls of the freezer if you’d like. Maybe a bowl of Froot Loops with no milk? How about some real entertainment that doesn’t have anything to do with playing the piano? Maybe the TV? Probably not. I don’t even have any porn, at least gay porn. I’ve allowed my elevated sensibilities to fuck me again. I hate gay porn. I’m completely bored with gay porn because it’s so fucking earnest – probably because if it weren’t earnest it would just be a bunch of queens fucking each other and that’s not exactly sexy, so the porn actors are always growling at each other and being earnest cops or coaches or convicts who threaten to penetrate their victims with luggage-sized cocks, which we all know is what they wanted all along. I could offer to put on a tape of straight porn.
I have a couple of literal VCR videotapes of straight porn that I’ve been lugging around for decades – one that I purchased at the request of a young man I picked up on the street once who’d insisted on watching guys gangbang girls and shoot cum all over their faces, only after plowing them mercilessly for several minutes, content that I’ve since learned is requested by many so-called “straight” guys while they’re having sex with other guys because, in the process of transference (mentally changing places with the porn characters on the screen), they imagine themselves to be the girls – no shit – a fact that’s always been a mild disappointment to me, and is something that skirts the boundaries of victimhood: should I not also be entitled to occasionally have permission to perceive stereotypes performing their advertised roles? Regardless, I’ve been happy to accept the yoke of responsibility in these cases, and have even driven a young soldier fresh from the killing fields of Iraq, while both of us were screaming high on meth, to a twenty-four-hour Mexican swap meet where I paid for a slinky undergarment he called a “teddy,” which he confessed to me mere minutes after meeting, that he wanted to wear while I fucked him silly. I have two other tapes: one I purchased because it had earned a place in the pantheon of campy weirdness, meaning that it featured several aging female porn actresses who’d seen better days, but they were making a comeback of sorts, and who, after spending a considerable amount of time lounging on seedy-looking couches in some motel room while wearing skimpy nighties, once their studly and much younger “dates” showed up, the most infamous of the actresses grabbed the horns of her impatience and spit out through clouds of cigarette smoke and with a substantial amount of gravel in her voice the phrase: “So you gonna fuck me or what!?” a demanding query that’s always elicited a ton of guffaws from me and my friends. Then there’s another tape that I may have that’s just a study in the pathetic. It’s this forty-something blonde-haired woman performing on stage for a smattering of degenerate men in some seedy theater purportedly located in San Francisco. Her performance consists of variations on what she could do with several ping-pong balls she’d stuffed up her vagina, all of which were designed to mimic some kind of vaginistic volcano that produces smoke (baby powder) and lava (hand lotion) and other surprisingly well-aimed e
jaculates (who knows), a process that creates an amazing mess on the stage. The salient part of this tape wasn’t the volcanic performance, but what she did after the show was over. Apparently (and pathetically) her contract included a codicil that required her, after all the erupting and whatnot, and after every last degenerate had exited the theater, while being cruelly illuminated by the raised house lights, to grab a container of 409 spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels and clean up the stage, which was now slick with bodily fluids and sexual detritus, all of which she did while still naked (except for a pair of stiletto high-heeled shoes), and which was recorded on the tape. What am I thinking? Even if I loved gay porn, or still owned a VCR machine, this is a dope deal. Stein wants to buy the shit and get the hell out of here.
I produce a sample and each man tastes it. There are a few nods.
“How much for two ounces,” Stein says, to which I kind of stammer, “$1,200.” I’d originally wanted to charge $2,000, but Stein’s personage has left me scrambling toward a hurried discount so that I can save face somehow.
We do the deal, and after a friendly handshake between us, all three men leave.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The female section of the Cri- Life dining room, between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. – at least five nights a week – is home to a ritual that the facility Administration members tacitly allow the mostly Hispanic gang- bangers who’d landed in Cri- Life directly from extended stays at various California prisons to hold: Spread, which is the monosyllabic equivalent of Sacred Banquet, suggesting not the verb “spread,” but rather a noun that encompasses the panorama of sustenance and its attendant serving vessels that’s “spread” over the surface of a tabletop and is available to all those who’ve been invited to partake, necessarily excluding any person of the female variety because of the ritual’s provenance, which is the pretty much all male brand of penitentiary inmates, not to mention that pesky Non- Com rule that’s pretty much omnipresent in the Cri- Life ether.
