It’s a shiny red can full of hi-test gas—
So we grooved, back on down, past
Leo Carrillo [Same horn fill],
Grille to grille all the way down to Malibu,
Just a Ford Mustang and that sweet GTee-O,
In motion by the ocean
Doin what the motorheads do. . . .
The girls in the front seat were bouncing up and down, squealing “¡A toda madre!” and “What it be, girl!” and so forth.
“Cookie and Joaquin, they are so-o-o bitchin,” swooned Motella.
“¡Seguro, ése!”
“Well, actually I meant Cookie is, I can’t really speak for Joaquin, can I?”
“How’s that, Motella.”
“Ooh, like wondering how it must be, getting into bed with somebody, who has another person’s name? tattooed on his body?”
“No problem unless all you do in bed is read,” muttered Lourdes.
“Ladies, ladies!” Doc pretended to push them apart, like Moe going, “Spread out!”
Doc gathered that Cookie and Joaquin were a couple of ex-grunts newly out of Vietnam, back in the World at last though it seemed still pursuing missions of consequence, having caught wind just before they left of some demented scheme featuring connexes full of U.S. currency being transshipped, it was believed, to Hong Kong. In-country traffic in dollars ordinarily fetched many long years in the stockade, but with the money now physically in international waters, according to various bullshit artists of their acquaintance, the situation was bound to be different.
They had manifested on to Lourdes and Motella’s flight to Kai Tak, heads seriously waltzed around with by Darvons, speed, PX beer, Vietnamese weed, and airport coffee, so as to be broadly incapable of the customary airplane chitchat and thus, as the ladies told it, scarcely were the seat-belt lights off than Lourdes and Joaquin, Motella and Cookie, respectively, found themselves in adjoining lavatories fucking each other’s brains out. The frolicking continued through the girls’ layover in Hong Kong, while the containers of currency grew more and more difficult to locate, not to mention believe in, though Cookie and Joaquin did try, whenever lulls in recreation allowed, to pursue an increasingly halfhearted search for them.
Club Asiatique was in San Pedro, opposite Terminal Island, with a filtered view of the Vincent Thomas Bridge. At night it seemed covered, in a way protected, by something deeper than shadow—a visual expression of the convergence, from all around the Pacific Rim, of numberless needs to do business unobserved.
Glassware behind the bar, which might in some other type of saloon have been found too dazzling, here achieved the smudged cool glow of images on cheap black-and-white TV sets. Waitresses in black silk cheongsams printed with red tropical blossoms glided around on high heels, bearing tall narrow drinks decorated with real orchids and mango slices and straws of vivid aqua plastic molded to look like bamboo. Customers at tables leaned toward each other and then away, in slow rhythms, like plants underwater. House regulars drank shots of hot sake chased with iced champagne. The air was dense with smoke from opium pipes and cannabis bongs, as well as clove cigarettes, Malaysian cheroots, and correctional-system Kools, little glowing foci of awareness pulsing brighter and dimmer everywhere in the dusk. Downstairs, for those nostalgic for Macao and the joys of Felicidad Street, an exclusive fantan game went on day and night, as well as mah-jongg and dollar-a-stone Go in various alcoves behind the bead curtains.
“Now Doc my man,” Motella warned as they slid into a booth upholstered with some tigerskin print in nailpolish purple and vivid rust, “remember me and Lourdes’s springin for this, so tonight it’s well drinks only, none of that li’l umbrella shit.” Plenty cool with Doc, considering the income-disparity situation and all.
Cookie and Joaquin showed up just as the house band was percolating into a zippy version of the Doors’ “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger),” sporting widebrim panama hats, counterfeit designer shades, and white civilian suits bought off some rack in Kaiser Estates, Kowloon, sauntering in in step, one step per beat, each waving a forefinger in the air, down into the echoless reaches of the club. “Joaquin! Cookie!” called the girls, “Oh wow! Dig it! Lookin so groovy!” And so forth. Though few men indeed can be copacetic enough with their lives that they won’t go for public appreciation like this, Doc also could see Joaquin and Cookie looking at each other thinking, Shit, man, I wonder how he does it.
“May have to leave in a hurry, mes chéries,” rumbled Cookie, burying one hand in Motella’s Afro and getting into a kiss of some duration.
“Nothin personal,” added Joaquin, “kind of a short-notice business trip,” enveloping Lourdes in a possibly even more passionate embrace, interrupted by a well-known bass line from the band, who were hidden in a small grove of indoor palm trees.
“All right!” Motella seizing Cookie by his necktie, which had a picture of a florid Pacific lagoonscape in psychedelic colors. “Let’s ‘get down’!”
In two seconds Joaquin had disappeared under the table. “What’s this?” Lourdes keeping her composure.
“Some psychological shit from the ’Nam,” Cookie dancing away, “every time people say that, he does it.”
“It’s okay, folks,” called Joaquin, who had spent the war trying to make some money, and wouldn’t know a LZ if it ran up and started firing some rockets at his ass, “I like it down here—you don’t mind, do you, mi amor?”
“I suppose I could think of it as being out with somebody real short?” with her arms folded and a bright smile that was maybe a little higher on one side than the other.
A small perfect Asian dewdrop in the house getup, who on closer inspection seemed to be Jade, came over to Doc. “There are a couple of gentlemen,” she murmured, “real eager to see these boys, even to the point of handing out twenties right and left?”
Joaquin stuck his head out from under the tablecloth. “Where are they? We’ll finger somebody else, and then we’ll be twenty dollars ahead.”
“Forty dollars,” corrected Lourdes.
“Ordinarily a sound plan,” said Motella, returning with Cookie, “except everybody here knows you two and as a matter of fact here comes the folks in question right now.”
“Oh shit, it’s Blondie-san,” said Cookie. “He look pissed off to you? I think he’s pissed off.”
“Nah,” said Joaquin, “he ain’t pissed off, but I’m not so sure about his pardner there.”
Blondie-san wore a blond toupee that wouldn’t have fooled nobody’s abuelita back in South Pas, and a black business suit of vaguely mob-connected cut. . . . Cranked up, prickly-eyed, and chain-smoking cheap Japanese cigarettes, he was accompanied by a yakuza torpedo named Iwao, the spiritual purity of whose dan ranking had long been compromised by a taste for unprovoked asskicking, his eyes sliding back and forth and his face wrinkling in thought as he tried to figure out who was to be his primary target here.
Doc hated to see anybody that confused. Plus which, the more deeply Cookie and Joaquin were drawn into discussion with Blondie-san, the less attention they paid to Lourdes and Motella, making the ladies that much crazier and more susceptible to those grand emotional disasters they shared such a taste for. None of which boded well.
Around then Jade happened by again. “Thought that was you,” Doc said, “though we ain’t exactly been wallerin in eye contact. Got your note at the office, but why’d you go runnin away like that? we could’ve hung out, you know, smoke some shit. . . .”
“Like there was these creeps in a Barracuda that tailgated us all the way from Hollywood? Could’ve been anybody and we didn’t want to get you in any more trouble than you are, so we pretended we were there for the B12 shots and I guess that made us a little speedy so when we saw you we got paranoid and split?”
“Better not be negotiating no Singapore Slings ove
r there,” Motella advised, “none of that shit.”
“She’s a old schoolmate, we’re reminiscing about the prom, geometry class, lighten up Motella.”
“What school was that, Tehachapi?”
“Oooh,” went Lourdes. The girls were on edge, and strong drink was not improving their mood.
“See me outside,” Jade whispered, high-heeling away.
THE NEARLY TOTAL absence of lighting in the parking lot could have been deliberate, to suggest Oriental intrigue and romance, though it also looked like a crime scene waiting on its next crime. Doc noticed a ’56 Fireflite ragtop which seemed to be breathing deeply, as if it had raced all the way down here gathering pinks as it came, and was trying to think of how he could discreetly pop the hood and just have a look at the hemi beneath, when Jade showed up.
“I can’t stay out here long. We’re in Golden Fang territory, and a girl doesn’t necessarily want to get into difficulties with those folks.”
“This is the same Golden Fang you said to beware of in your note? What is it, some band?”
“You wish.” She made a my-lips-are-zipped gesture.
“You’re not gonna tell me, after ‘beware of’ and so forth?”
“No. I really only wanted to say how sorry I am. I just feel so shitty about what I did. . . .”
“Which was . . . what again?”
“I’m not a snitch!” she cried, “the cops told us they’d drop charges if we just put you at the scene, which they already knew you were so where was the harm, and I must’ve panicked, and really, Larry, I am, like, so sorry?”
“Call me Doc, it’s cool, Jade, they had to cut me loose, now they just tail me everyplace, is all. Here.” He found a pack of smokes, tapped it on the side of his hand, held it out, she took one, they lit up.
“That copper,” she said.
“You must mean Bigfoot.”
“Some warped sheet of plastic, that one.”
“Did he ever come around your salon, by any chance?”
“Looked in now and then, not the way a cop would do, not like expecting freebies or whatever—if this guy was being paid off, it was more like some private deal with Mr. Wolfmann.”
“And—don’t take it personally, but—was it Bigfoot himself who put me on the Buenas Noches Express, or did he subcontract it?”
She shrugged. “Missed all that, Bambi and me were so freaked with that badass brigade stomping in, we didt’n stick around?”
“How about those jailhouse Nazis ’t were supposed to been covering Mickey’s back?”
“All over the place one minute, gone the next. Too bad. We were their damn PX there for a while, we even got to where we could tell them apart and whatever.”
“They all disappeared? Was that before or after the fun started?”
“Before. Like a raid, when people know it’s gonna happen? They all cleared out except for Glen, he was the only one who . . .” she paused as if trying to remember the word for it, “stayed.” She dropped her cigarette on the blacktop and squashed it with the pointed toe of her shoe. “Listen—there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”
“You mean I should get out of here quick.”
“No, he thinks you can help each other out. He’s a new face, I’m not even sure of his name, but I know he’s in some trouble.” She headed back inside.
Out of the onshore mists known to shroud this piece of waterfront, another figure now emerged. Doc wasn’t always that easy to creep out, but still wished he hadn’t waited around. He recognized this party from the Polaroid that Hope had given him. It was Coy Harlingen, newly returned from the next world, where death along with its other side effects had destroyed any fashion sense the tenor player might have had left when he OD’d, resulting in painter’s overalls, a pink button-down shirt from the fifties with a narrow black knit tie, and ancient pointed cowboy boots. “Howdy, Coy.”
“I would’ve come to your office, man, but I thought there might be unfriendly eyeballs.” Doc needed an ear trumpet or something, because along with the horns and bells out in the harbor, Coy also had this tendency to fall into a nearly inaudible junkie’s murmur.
“Is this safe enough for you, out here?” Doc said.
“Let’s light this up and pretend we came out to smoke it.”
Asian indica, heavily aromatic. Doc prepared to be knocked on his ass but instead found a perimeter of clarity not too hard to stay inside of. The glow at the end of the joint was blurred by the fog, and its color kept shifting between orange and an intense pink.
“I’m supposed to be dead,” Coy said.
“There’s also a rumor you’re not.”
“That don’t come as such great news. Bein dead is part of my job image. Like what I do.”
“You working for these people here at the club?”
“Don’t know. Maybe. It’s where I come to pick up my paycheck.”
“Where are you staying?”
“House up in Topanga Canyon. A band I used to play for, the Boards. But none of them know it’s me.”
“How can they not know it’s you?”
“Even when I was alive, they didn’t know it was me. ‘The sax player,’ basically—the session guy. Plus over the years there’s been this big turnover of personnel, like, the Boards I played with have most of them gone off by now and formed other bands. Only one or two of the old crew are left, and they’re suffering, or do I mean blessed, with heavy Doper’s Memory.”
“Story was you came to grief behind some bad smack. You still into that?”
“No. God. No, I’m clean these days. I was in a place up near—” A long silence and a stare while Coy wondered if he’d said too much and tried to figure what else Doc might know. “Actually, I’d appreciate it if—”
“It’s okay,” said Doc, “I can’t hear you too good, and how can I talk about what I don’t hear?”
“Sure. There was somethin I wanted to see you about.” Doc thought he caught a note in Coy’s voice . . . not exactly accusing, but still sweeping Doc in somehow with some bigger injustice.
Doc peered at Coy’s intermittently distinct face, the drops of fog condensed on his beard shining in the lights from the Club Asiatique, a million separate little halos radiating all colors of the spectrum, and understood that regardless of who in this might help whom, Coy was going to require a light touch. “Sorry, man. What can I do for you?”
“It wouldn’t be nothin heavy. Just wondering if you could check in on a couple of people. Lady and a little girl. See that they’re okay. That’s all. And without bringing me into it.”
“Where are they staying?”
“Torrance?” He handed over a scrap of paper with Hope and Amethyst’s street address.
“Easy drive for me, probably won’t even have to charge you for mileage.”
“You don’t have to go in and talk to anybody, just see if they’re still livin there, what’s in the driveway, who’s going in or out, law enforcement in the picture, any details you find interesting.”
“I’m on it.”
“I can’t pay you right now.”
“When you can. Whenever. Unless maybe you’re one of these folks who believe information is money . . . in which case, could I just ask—”
“Bearing in mind that either I don’t know or it’ll be my ass if I tell you, what is it, man?”
“Ever heard of the Golden Fang?”
“Sure.” Was that a hesitation? How long is too long? “It’s a boat.”
“Off-ly in-t’resteen,” Doc sang more than spoke in the way Californians do to indicate it isn’t interesting at all. Since when do you beware of a boat?
“Seriously. A big schooner, I think somebody said. Brings stuff in and out of the country, but nobody wants to talk about what exactly. That
blond Japanese guy tonight with the badass sidekick, who’s talkin to your friends? He’d know.”
“Because?”
Instead of answering, Coy nodded somberly over Doc’s shoulder, across the parking lot, down the street at the main channel and the Outer Harbor beyond. Doc turned and thought he saw something white moving out there. But the fog coming in made everything deceptive. By the time he got to the street, there was nothing to see. “That was it,” Coy said.
“How do you know?”
“Saw it sail in. Got here about the same time I did tonight.”
“I don’t know what I saw.”
“Me neither. Fact, I don’t even want to know.”
Back inside, Doc found the light apparently shifted to more of an ultraviolet mode, because the parrots on his shirt had now begun to stir and flap, to squawk and maybe even talk, though that could also have been from smoke. Lourdes and Motella meanwhile were behaving very badly indeed, having chosen to assault a couple of local gun molls as a sort of tag team, for which waiters and waitresses, keeping semivisible, had relocated a couple of tables in order to clear a space, and customers had gathered around to give encouragement. Clothing was ripped, hairdos disarranged, skin exposed, and many holds with sexual subtexts wriggled into and out of—the usual allurements of girl wrestling. Cookie and Joaquin were still deep in conversation with Blondie-san. Iwao the torpedo was busy watching the girls. Doc edged closer into earshot.
“Just conferenced with the partners by satellite,” Blondie-san was saying, “and the best offer is three per unit.”
“Maybe I’ll go back and reenlist,” muttered Joaquin. “Make more off of the bonus than I will this.”
“He’s only being emotional,” Cookie said. “We’ll take it.”
“You take it, ése, I ain’t gonna take it.”
“I need not remind you,” said Blondie-san with sinister amusement, “that this is the Golden Fang.”
“Best we not be messin with no Golden Fang,” Cookie agreed.
“¡Caaa-rajo!” Joaquin in a violent double take, “what are those chicks doín over there?”
Inherent Vice Page 9
