by Jim Nisbet
“Huh? Well, no, you didn’t,” Ventana admitted. “But why else would somebody clock a faggot on the cantaloupe? Did they take your wallet? Your cash? Your ATM card?”
“They took my dignity,” Quentin stipulated.
Officer Ventana pointed his pencil. “You’re queer—right?”
“How—how can you tell?” Quentin said uncertainly.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” the orderly said, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “My god,” he said abruptly. “There’s blood on the ceiling.”
Quentin and Officer Ventana, though wary of each other, looked up.
“I guess that’s why they call it the Emergency Room,” Ventana said.
Quentin nodded. “Put that in your screenplay.”
“The day autoinfantilization gets used in a movie,” the orderly assured the ceiling, “is the day my dick stops getting hard.”
“Hollywood would excise incarnadine from Macbeth,” Quentin said.
“They already did,” the orderly sighed. He returned his eyes to Quentin’s wound. “Speaking of which.”
“Be sure to wear your little gloves,” Quentin reminded him. “I’m positive.”
“Don’t worry about me,” the orderly assured him, snapping the cuff of the latex glove on his razor hand. “If I get the HIV, I’m going to get it the right way.”
“That’s not even funny,” said Quentin.
“I know,” said the orderly. “It’s my way of keeping you awake.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Officer Ventana announced.
The orderly was examining the top of Quentin’s head. “Does that mean you’re through being pissed off?”
“Negative.” Officer Ventana shook his head. “I’m permapissed.”
Quentin, whose head was tilted forward, beamed without moving. The orderly directed a wide grin at Quentin’s wound. “Excellent!”
Officer Ventana affected bashfulness. “You think?”
“You are too cute,” the orderly affirmed. “And you have no idea what I could do for your marriage. Hold still.”
Quentin frowned. “That’s … uncomfortable.”
“I’ll be finished eventually. How’d you let all this blood get so dry?”
“I spent a weekend in Cabo before I came to see you?”
“Why didn’t you call me? I could have met you there.”
“So, listen,” Officer Ventana interrupted. “What did the guy look like?”
“He was a redhead, too.”
“What did we do to piss off the redheads?” the orderly asked.
“I haven’t the slightest.”
“Redheads are all permapissed,” Officer Ventana offered. “Little guys need to steer clear.”
“There he goes again,” the orderly remarked. “In all of Macbeth—in all of Shakespeare—incarnadine occurs but once—you hear what I’m saying?” He dabbed a sponge soaked in warm water over the coagulated blood caked in and around Quentin’s scalp wound. “That’s aside from making outrageous generalizations about minorities.”
“Is that all you remember about him?”
“He looked like an over-the-hill pirate. Far beyond anything I ever saw in the nineties real estate market. Lots of scars, balding on top, heavy set, another alcoholic, probably. Or a fellow who likes to eat. He used a lot—” Quentin stopped himself quite suddenly.
Ventana waited.
What the hell am I doing, Quentin said to himself. I must be more debilitated than I realized. The theory was that if I told this cop exactly what Tipsy and Red look like, he’d never find them. It seemed like a reasonable approach at the time, and easier than making it up, which I’d then have to remember, and which almost certainly might get innocent people arrested. But if I go so far as to tell this cop that for example Red Means talks a salty lingo and most assuredly knows his way around boats and drug smuggling, why, Officer Ventana might guess Red’s identity without any more assistance than that! On those few clues alone! Admirable deduction. Besides, it was just a perverse joke I was playing, mainly on myself. What was it Genet said about betrayal? It aroused him? Something like that. That, and the act is ecstatic. Plus, the result is freedom. Or liberty. It’s like Jesus at the moment of realization—or of presumption—that he’d been betrayed, not by Judas, but by God. Is not the agony of our Lord fueled by the knowledge that, once God has betrayed His own son, God is rid of mankind forever, thereby freed and, therefore, Himself ecstatic? Liberated from wrath? What am I? Quentin wondered, Martin Buber on mescaline? Officer Ventana’s walking, talking syllabus? Is this a trauma-induced epiphany, or is it chopped liver?
“Hold still,” entreated the orderly, sounding very far away.
It’s Tipsy and Red who got me into this mess. Not God, not Jesus, not Jean real-estate-free Genet. Except for myself, of course. I, myself, didn’t have to leave the dock with them. Or cast off, as they say.
I wonder what they talked about during that hour, while I lay bleeding on the floor. The deck, I mean.
Damn them anyhow.
Maybe I should describe the severed head for the nice, neurotic officer? They thought I didn’t see the severed head. Silly conspirators. The Shadow knows!
Oh dear. I’m deliberating the consequences of betraying my dearest friend, along with her newest friend, as well as her brother’s severed head. Can you betray a severed head? If this were a detective novel, the head would give me nightmares. One doesn’t often encounter severed heads in mainstream novels. But there’s one in Stendhal, bless him. It’s hard to have nightmares when you have insomnia. Inconsolable insomnia, that ol’ alligator of alliteration. This way, he vaguely pointed, madness lies. That way, he vaguely pointed, madness tells the truth. Which way is which? Weren’t we just talking about alligators? Anyway, it’s a crocodile. No. That’s not the problem.
“Mr. Asche?” The orderly snapped his fingers in front of Quentin’s nose. “Hello?”
“Yes? Yes, what?” Quentin drew away from the snapping fingers. “What is it?”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure I’m all … What’s the matter?”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” said the orderly. “I was thinking the concussion had kicked in. No big deal.”
“Why would I wear your panties on my head?”
The orderly looked at him and blinked.
“I thank you for doing your job,” Quentin persevered. “But that’s a bit rich. Don’t you think?”
“Man,” groused the orderly. “You’re plenty mean enough to survive a conk on the head. What’s this?” He stood on tiptoe as if to peer at the top of Quentin’s head. “I can see your brain.”
“You can see my what?” Quentin screeched.
“It’s pulsing red.”
“Pulsing?”
“When it’s not pink,” said the orderly, giggling.
Officer Ventana sniggered before he could cover his mouth with his notepad.
“How professional,” Quentin sniffed, with as much hauteur as any man with a half-shaved head and wearing a backwards nightie can muster. He flicked an imaginary speck of lint off his exposed kneecap. “It goes right along with the television. Imagine.”
Both Ventana and the orderly glanced toward the platform above the hallway door on which a television squatted. On its screen, a sports journalist soundlessly proclamated. Beneath his image crawled the message, … Gasoline at the pump: UP 27 Cents. …
The orderly reverted his attention to the wound in Quentin’s scalp. “I forgot that infernal machine about seven thousand shifts ago.”
“A television,” Quentin replied, “complete with fluorescent lights, blood on the ceiling, mustard walls, a battered linoleum floor, and crude jokes about homosexuals with head injuries. It’s all of a piece. I’m surprised you don’t have a shopping cart in here for body parts. It’s a cul de sac of the civilized world.”
“I’m not arguing with that one, Mary,” the orderly muttered decisively.
Officer V
entana gestured with his notebook and pencil. “Red hair and a pirate,” he prompted.
“Hold still.”
“Insomnia’s not the word I’m looking for,” Quentin said. “It’s not about not being able to sleep after a head injury, it’s about not being able to remember things. Like in the detective novel.”
“Amnesia?” both Ventana and the orderly said.
“That’s it.” Quentin blinked. “That’s it,” he said again, though with less certainty. He laughed. “Gentlemen,” he addressed the room, “since when can’t I remember amnesia?”
Officer Ventana’s expression of expectation, surfing weakly on boredom and exhaustion, didn’t change. Quentin angled his eyes toward the orderly.
“Since when can’t I remember amnesia?” Quentin repeated thoughtfully. He didn’t want to supply an answer. Or couldn’t. However, his fascination being on the order of one unable to look away from the enfeebling agonies of a crushed spider, arachnid allegory for one’s own mind, eight legs sapped, sixteen knees unstrung, fit her for the cobblestone web, Quentin took a guess. “Since I got hit on the head?”
The orderly pursed his lips. “Makes sense.”
Quentin looked at Officer Ventana.
“Red hair and—?”
Quentin sighed. “That’s all I can remember.”
“That, and autoinfantilisation,” the orderly reminded them both.
“On the contrary,” said Quentin. “I made that up on the spot. Think of it as spontaneous bop neologia. It has nothing to do with amnesia.”
“Hup you,” said the orderly, “finger-poppin’ daddy.”
“Bullshit,” said Officer Ventana.
“More words you never heard before?” the orderly asked.
“No, but …”
“Speak up. It’s busy in here.”
“In general I hear only a very limited subset of any given human language, English or otherwise,” Ventana explained. “Including click languages.”
The orderly hesitated, briefly resumed, then stopped what he was doing. “All right,” he said, “I’ll bite. What does ‘Fuck you’ sound like in a click language?”
“Which one?”
“Bad-géd asshole,” the orderly announced. “This guy’s a—.”
But when Officer Ventana spoke, it sounded like August grasshoppers in a sheetmetal duct.
“How dare you speak like that to me?” the orderly demanded.
“That’s what I tell them,” said Officer Ventana. “Right after I chill them with my sap.”
Quentin and the orderly repeated in unison, “Chill them with your sap?”
“You never hit nobody with a nightstick,” said Officer Ventana, “you ain’t no friend of mine.” Officer Ventana blushed. “I accidentally killed a guy with one,” he blurted. “My first unpaid leave.”
“And how long was the administrative leave?” the orderly demanded.
Quentin found himself transfixed by the expression in Officer Ventana’s eyes—nostalgia? dismay? regret? The door beneath the television swung open. The orderly heard it, threw a glance over his shoulder, and looked to his work, speaking rapidly. “This is San Francisco. Guys kill to get a residency here. Kill, I tell you. We take our pick from every medical school in the hemisphere. Of all the bright, motivated people, we get first choice. And whom does the system cough up?” He made a noise a like a dog dislodging a hairball. “The Heterosexual Sawbones from Hell.”
Unable to move his head, Quentin rolled his eyes. “The what?”
The orderly distributed emphasis equally among the meticulously enunciated syllables of his hushed reply.
“What part of Heterosexual Sawbones from Hell don’t you understand?”
THIRTY-ONE
“LISTEN, OSCAR, THERE HAS TO BE A WAY.”
Officer Few stared into his coffee.
“I mean, where do these people come from?”
Oscar sighed. It happens every time, he thought to himself. Every time I meet a woman I think I can get something going with, it turns out there’s an ulterior motive. A ray of sunlight fell across the table, and in it his coffee cup gleamed like diction in a symbol, as the poet Darrell Gray once noted. Few pursed his lips. Shadows cast by a ceiling fan fluttered on the surface of his coffee. A motive ulterior to my ulterior motive, that is.
“Well …” He touched his spoon to the rim of the cup. “There’s this thing they do on Tuesday nights.”
Tipsy narrowed her eyes. “That’s tonight.”
“They call it the Newbie Scooter. It’s an open mic kind of deal. You sign up, you do your thing, they measure the result the old-fashioned way.”
“How’s that? By the amount of money people throw at you?”
Few made with a rare smile. “You wish. It’s called an applause meter, but it’s nothing more than a VU meter with a tell-tale. They don’t even use a separate mic. More’s the pity, because the speaker’s mic is a cardioid. They should really should be using a—”
“What time?”
Oscar Few could always warm to the subject of audio gear, but one thing he’d never met with was a woman whose enthusiasm for it equaled his own. “They go up at seven-thirty. If you don’t want be hanging around listening to a bushel of half-baked bromides, we should get there by seven.”
“We?”
“Until they extend you an invitation, or you meet somebody else, you’ll still need me to get you in there.”
“I’ll meet you on the steps in front of Bryant Street at six-thirty.”
“I advise you to sign up second or third so you can get a feel for how it works.” Few sighed at his coffee. “Six-thirty it is.”
“Thanks, Oscar.” Tipsy stood and retrieved a twenty from her hip pocket. “Let me get this.” She paid and tipped at the counter, dispensed a little wave in his direction, and left.
Few remained sitting at the table for a long time, lost in thought. His cellphone irregularly vibrated in its hip holster, like a cicada nested on the bark of his being, but he ignored it. By the time he took a sip of coffee, it had become too cold to drink. He got up and left the cafe.
After the volunteer techie got more or less on top of some pesky feedback, the third speaker got down to it.
“Iraq, as we all must know and admit by now, is intractable.”
The room was packed, and seventeen of the attendees had signed up to speak.
Rooba rooba, the crowd responded.
“Iraq has cost the developed ‘hood blood and treasure beyond measure, blood and treasure, beyond measure.”
Rooba …
Not a bad start, Oscar thought. Despite a thick sheaf of notes, she addresses the crowd directly. They usually just sit there. To get any reaction out of them at all on her first go was somewhat marvelous.
“Yet the developed ‘hood needs, must have, calls out for the petroleum reserves of Iraq.”
Roooooba …
“For what we’ve squandered on this war, we might have bought oil from Saddam Hussein for the better part of the century!”
Rooooooba …
“What is to be done?” Tipsy held up the sheaf of papers. “This afternoon, riding BART home from work, knowing I’d stand here before you tonight, I came up with a plan.”
“Where do you work?”
“City Hall.”
“Where do you live?”
“Sixteenth and Mission.”
“That’s one stop!”
“Hey,” Tipsy said, “I’m good.”
Rooooba roooba rooba …
Goddamn, thought Few, with a covert glance at his own VU meter. She lives in the Avenues, she mentioned in passing that she never rides BART, I know perfectly well she doesn’t have a job, and, something like five hours ago, she didn’t have any plan at all.
The chick’s a natural.
A voice cried out from the back of the room. “That’s ten minutes longer than the Bush Administration spent on the entire Iraq invasion strategy!”
Roooooba …
<
br /> “I couldn’t agree more,” the speaker acknowledged. …
Oscar had audited five or six Newbie Scooters, and, excepting Tipsy, it was pretty much the same people. But since he had taken the trouble to show up he insisted that he document the entire event. So they stayed till the end.
Seventeen people had signed up; in the end, fifteen of them spoke. Aside from Iraq, topics included the Super Bowl, Afghanistan, Columbia, the depredation of Antarctica, trees in Berkeley, 9/11, the rudderless Republican party, the rudderless Democratic Congress, the hideous Chronicle redesign of 2009, Woody Guthrie, the economic meltdown of 2008, the alarming rise of ocean acidity, “How Neocons Hibernate In The Mud, Like Locusts,” How Jews Can’t Catch A Break, followed by How Palestinians Can’t Catch A Break, Corporate Media, and the globalization of shade-grown coffee.
None of this had anything to do with why Few attended events thrown by the umbrella organization, the Cavalcade of Wonders, and he would have been bored out of his mind regardless.
Not so Tipsy Powell. Tipsy was fascinated. So far as she was concerned, if there’d been a bar to go along with the open microphone, the setup would have been perfect.
To make up for this default, they repaired to a Mexican restaurant on Folsom Street, where Tipsy proceeded to hammer three Margaritas before Few got a second pour out of his bottle of Bohemia.
“I got a million ideas,” she told him, and proceeded to continue with the body of a rant only hinted at by her open-mic ramble, which had been limited to five minutes.
Few watched the bubbles in his beer.
In between her first and second margarita, Tipsy asked him why he wasn’t recording what she was saying.
Few lifted his eyes from his glass long enough to stare at her, then shook his head.
“I only got twenty-three terabytes of storage,” he said, his voice flatter than roadkill. “It’s a budget thing. And, as usual,” he took a sip of his beer, “the budget’s threatened.”
Dismissing Few’s zinger as more mere bureau-techie talk, Tipsy proceeded to elaborate on the possibilities brought to light by the Newbie Scooter forum.
