by Jim Dodge
From what I gathered, Scumball was running a fairly complex scam. If I was cutting $400, you could bet Scumball was clearing at least a grand, with the rest going to the owner. But that arrangement begged an obvious question: if the owner needed the bucks, why didn’t he simply sell the car and pocket all the money? I figured either the insurance value was tremendously inflated – maybe an agent in cahoots – or there was something funny about the cars.
Now I don’t know this for a dead mortal cinch, but I’d bet the cars were stolen out of state and probably bought at quarter-price by Scumball, who in turn did a plate and paper job on them, let people use them for six months or so for the cost of full insurance coverage, and then Scumball collected close to full value when they were wrecked. Maybe the ‘owner’ got a small piece of the action, but a guy like Scumball doesn’t like to see the pie sliced up too much. I don’t know what Scumball did with his loot, but he sure as hell didn’t piss it away on clothes.
I trashed my first car for him the very next night, February 2, and I’ll admit I had more than a few whiskeys in me when I turned the key on the new Merc conveniently parked just off Folsom. I’d also awarded myself three bonus bennies for bad behavior, preferring a little extra focus for the tight work.
Big Red was my tail and pick-up man, and perfect for the job. He had his own car, an anonymous ’54 Chevy sedan, and had proven himself invariably reliable in the hundred small favors of friendship. Plus he needed the money. I’d cut him in for $100, probably too much, but I had a steady job going in and could write it off as a contribution to the arts if I ever paid taxes. Big Red also offered his imposing height, that wild tangle of copper-colored hair, and a nose that looked like it had been broken twice in each direction. Should anyone object to your behavior, he was a good man to have on your side.
Nobody objected as I let the Merc idle while the defroster cleared the glass. The car was close to mint condition, just over 9000 on the odometer, and no visible dings. When the glass cleared I pulled out onto Folsom, Big Red swinging in behind me, and headed for the Golden Gate.
I’d only had a day to think it over, but I’d come up with what seemed a solid plan. I’d go out Highway 1 up above Jenner where the road hugs the ocean bluffs, find a likely turnout, and shove it over into the Pacific. I’d brought along a bag full of empty beer cans and couple of dead pints of cheap vodka to scatter around the interior – make it look like a snorting herd of adolescent males, frenzied on some giant squirt of young warrior hormones, had swiped the short for a joyride and crashed it for fun.
I cruised north on 101 at a legal 65, took 116 through Sebastopol to Guerneville, then followed the Russian River to its mouth at Jenner, where I caught Highway 1. There was hardly any traffic. I checked the rearview to make sure Big Red made the turn, and saw the bobbing lights of his Chevy about a quarter-mile behind.
I found a good spot about twenty minutes up the coast, a wide turnout along the edge of a high cliff. I pulled over to check it out. The ocean air was powerful, a cauldron broth of salty protein and tidal decay. There were no guardrails, so it was an easy roll over the edge and a long way down to the waves bashing the rocks. I looked carefully for lights along the beach, any flashlights or campfires. I didn’t want to drop two tons of metal on a couple of lovers fucking their romantic brains out on the narrow beach below. No reason to encourage absurdity. Of course, on the other hand, nobody with a brain more complex than a mollusc’s would consider mating on a rocky, wave-wracked beach on a raw winter night, so I might’ve been doing evolution a favor.
Still wearing the gloves I’d put on before touching the car, I scattered the empties over the floorboards while Big Red wheeled his Chevy around to screen the Merc. I put the Merc in Neutral and cramped the wheels to the left. Big Red and I put our shoulders to it, a few good grunts at first, and then she was rolling on her own weight. When the front tires dropped over the edge, the back end flipped up, but rather than nosing straight down it dragged on the frame and tilted sideways slow enough for us to hear all the cans sluicing toward the driver’s side, and then she cleared the edge and was gone. The earth suddenly seemed lighter. It was silent so long I figured we hadn’t heard it hit, that the sound of impact had been muffled by the surge and batter of the waves below, and I was just about to peer over the edge when it smashed on the rocks KAAABBBBLLLAAAAAAM.
Big Red stood there, rooted, eyes closed and head thrown back, swaying slightly from side to side. He was obviously lost in something, but, though I hated to interrupt, it didn’t seem wise to hang around appreciating the sonic clarity of a new Mercury meeting ancient stone in the middle of a felony.
I touched his arm. ‘Let’s hit it.’
‘You drive,’ Big Red replied – a command, not a request.
Silent, eyes closed, Big Red didn’t twitch from his reverie until we were coming back across the Golden Gate. I was half-depressed with spoiled adrenalin, half-pissed that he’d withdrawn when I felt like yammering, so when he finally opened his eyes and asked ‘Did you hear it,’ I was a little cross. ‘Hear what? The waves? The wind? The wreck?’
‘No man, the silence. The gravitational mass of that silence. And then that great, brief, twisted cry of metal.’
‘That sound isn’t high on my hit parade, Red. I like cars, trucks, four-bys, six-bys, eight-bys, and them great big motherfuckers that bend in the middle and go shooooooosh shoooooosh when you pump the brakes. It’d be like throwing your horn off the cliff.’
‘Yes!’ He grabbed my shoulder, ‘Exactly!’
He was so pleased that it seemed cruel to admit my understanding was the accidental result of petulant exaggeration, if not outright deceit. In fact, only one thing had bothered me about wrecking the Merc: it was too easy.
I reminded Big Red that we still had to check in with the man, and soon as we hit Lombard I called Scumball from a Shell station pay phone. He answered on the third ring. After that first night, I had occasion to call him lots of times, and he always answered on the third ring. We used a simple code. I’d say, ‘The chrome’s on the road,’ and he’d reply, nasty, ‘Who is this?’ Then I’d hang up.
When I slipped back behind the wheel of Big Red’s Chevy, Red wasn’t interested in what Scumball had said. He wanted to explore that silence. ‘Let’s fall by my place and pick up my horn and see who’s out jamming.’
North Beach. Where else at 3:00 A.M. could you find some small club that was supposed to be closed and jam and yak and drink because the people who owned it understood better than the law that you can get lonely and thirsty and in need of music at all hours, especially the late hours of the night?
Right before dawn Big Red took the bandstand alone and announced he was going to play a new composition he called ‘Mercury Falling,’ and that he wanted to dedicate it to me on my birthday. I’d forgotten that at midnight I’d officially turned twenty-one, but Big Red hadn’t, and I felt like a shithook for my impatience with him earlier. But as soon as Big Red’s breath shaped that first note, my little puff of shame was blown away.
For the twenty minutes Big Red played, there wasn’t a heartbeat in that room. Cigarets went out. Ice melted in drinks. I know it’s hopeless to try to describe music, but he played that silence he’d heard, heard so clearly, brought every note through it and to it, pushed them over the edge into the massive suck of gravity, hung them in the wind and hurled them gladly to the surging bash and wash of water wearing down stone, and every note smashing on the claim of silence was a newborn crying at the light. When he finished there wasn’t a sound and there wasn’t a silence and we all took our first breath together.
Big Red nodded shyly and walked offstage. Applause wasn’t necessary. Everyone just sat there breathing again, feeling air curling into lungs, afraid to break the spell, the room silent except for the shifting of weight in chairs, the scuff of shoes on the littered floor. Finally a woman sitting alone at a corner table stood up, and that snapped it. A black bass player named Bottom sitting next
to me at the bar groaned, ‘Yeeess. Yes, yes, yes,’ and then reached over, put his skinny arm around my shoulder, and hugged me, whispering with sweet citric breath, ‘Happy birthday, man – you got yourself a present there you can unwrap for the rest of yo life.’
Then everyone was nodding, smiling; a sweet, low babble filled the room. Everyone except the woman who’d stood up. She was taking off her clothes. Her back was to me, so I hadn’t realized what she was doing till the green knit dress slipped from her bare shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Tall, lean, with long hair the color of half-weathered pine, she stepped out of the dress around her ankles and made her way, composed and magnificent, between the crowded tables toward the back door. Everyone stopped breathing again. I was in love. She closed the door softly behind her without looking back. ‘Sweet Leaping God o’ Mercy,’ Bottom moaned beside me, his arm dropping from my shoulders.
I caught up with her at the end of the alley. Thick fog swirling in the first pale light of morning; cold; the odor of garbage. She heard me and turned around. I was trembling too wildly to speak. She brushed her hair back from her face, her fine blue eyes, fierce and amused, looking right into mine.
‘Let me walk you home,’ I said in what can be kindly described as a blurt.
She tilted her head, a playful flicker of a smile, waiting. I immediately understood and began shedding my clothes, hopping around on one foot to take off the opposite shoe – taking forever, it seemed to me, while she stood and waited, hip shot, arms folded across her breasts, watching me frantically trying to pretend I wasn’t frantic. And then, somehow, I was standing naked in front of her, my cock hard as a jack handle, shivering, foolish, hopeful. She laughed and took me in her arms. I started laughing, too, relaxing against her fine, long warmth. And then, hand in hand, as natural as night and day, we strolled the seven blocks to my apartment. There was some early morning traffic, first stirrings of the city, but we were invisible in our splendor.
Her name was Katherine Celeste Jonasrad, Kacy Jones to those who loved her, and there were many, definitely including me. When I met her she’d just turned nineteen and, to the relentless dismay of her parents, had recently dropped out of Smith to see what the West Coast had to offer in the way of an education. Her father owned the largest medical supply company in Pennsylvania, and her mother was a frustrated novelist who seemingly regretted her every act and omission since her own graduation from Smith. Kacy phoned them one night from my place – her father’s birthday – and I remember her eyes flashing as she repeated her mother’s question: ‘“What am I going to do?” Well, I’m going to do whatever I feel like, whatever I need, whatever it takes, and whatever else I can get away with.’ That was Kacy in her uncontainable essence: a free force, a true spirit on earth. She did fairly much as she pleased, and if she wasn’t sure what pleased her, she was never afraid to go find out.
That birthday morning when we walked naked through the early morning streets to my apartment, she turned to me as the door closed and said, ‘I’m not interested in a performance. The quality of the permissions, that’s what I’m after.’ I must have shown my confusion because she put it more plainly: ‘I don’t want to be fucked; I want us to feel something.’
‘I’ll try,’ was all I could think to say.
She slipped her arms around my bare waist and drew me to her. ‘Let’s try together.’
I’ve never known a woman with the range and originality of Kacy’s erotic imagination. I don’t mean positions and all that sexual gymnastics, or the wilder fantasies and obsessions – those were just the entrances to other realms of possibility. Kacy was interested in the feelings, their clarity and nuance and depth, what could be shared and what couldn’t. With Kacy there was no casual sex. I told her that much later. With that tone of playful cynicism people use to keep their dreams honest, Kacy said, ‘Well, a sweet quickie now and then sure never hurt anything.’
I don’t want to bog you down in the voluptuous details, so suffice it to say that on that birthday morning with Kacy I shoot through Heaven on my way to the Realm of Unimaginable Pleasure Indefinitely Prolonged. We tried together, heart and soul, and there is nothing like those first permissions to make you believe in magic, and without that belief in magic there’s no heart for the rest. In the late afternoon, when Kacy went out for supplies, I just laid there grinning like a fool. She was back in half an hour with a whole bag of groceries. Sourdough bread from the bakery downstairs, a carton of antipasto from the deli around the corner, two cold quarts of steam beer, a jar of pepperoncini, a half-pound of dry jack cheese, candles, a Sara Lee chocolate cake, and the afternoon Examiner. That was one thing about Kacy: she loved to pull surprises from the bag. According to Kacy, there were only seven things human beings required for a happy life on this planet: food, water, shelter, love, truth, surprises, and secrets. Sounded good to me.
I remember how happy she looked as she unpacked our feast, explaining that there were only eight candles in a package but if I wasn’t too traditional we could just make the figure of 21 instead of actually using that many candles. Suddenly she stopped in midsentence, obviously arrested, staring down at the table.
I sat up in bed. ‘Kacy, what’s the matter?’
Without turning, she made an impatient gesture with her hand as she looked down at the front page of the newspaper. I saw her shoulders rise as she took a deep breath, then fall; when they remained slumped I knew the news was bad. She turned around, tears in her eyes, and lay down on the bed beside me. ‘Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were all killed in a plane crash last night. That’s a lot of music to lose all at once.’
I held her without saying anything. Fact was, I wasn’t really sure who Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were, an ignorance I was afraid would only make her sadder. You need the same knowledge to share another’s grief, but not to comfort it. I held her till the tears were dry, then we ate my birthday feast and, later that night, opened some more presents.
The party actually lasted another four years. I can’t truly say I lived with her those four years, since she came and went as she pleased. Kacy would not be possessed. On Valentine’s Day, about a week and a half after we’d met, I came home after work to find a giant red heart pinned to my door, the words BE MINE in great white letters printed across it, the word MINE neatly crossed out. Her life belonged to her; mine to me. Where they touched, the terms were mutual regard, honor, and love without possession, dependency, or greed. I tried to explain it to John Seasons one night after Kacy had been gone a couple of weeks, and I was trying hard to convince myself that that was fine. John said, ‘Sounds like one of them modern relationships to me.’ He finished his Johnny Walker and looked at the bottom of the glass. ‘Actually,’ he continued, his voice suddenly serious, a bitter trace to his tone, ‘it sounds like Saint Augustine’s definition of love: ‘I want you to be.’ I’ve always liked that notion of love, but I’ve sure as hell never come close to making it real.’
I found it difficult myself. Doubt, jealousy, particularly the anxious stabs of inadequacy, all jerked me around at one time or another. Kacy lived out of a battered backpack, and when she left – sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks – she took everything with her except the promise she’d be back. When she returned, she’d always call to ask if I was in the mood for company. I always was, but once I said no just to see what she’d say. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll call again.’ After a couple years my doubts and dreads fell away, for finally they only compromised the pleasure of her company. Besides, when she was there, she was really there, and that’s all I could fairly ask if I wanted to love her, not own her.
I don’t want to give the impression that all we did was screw ourselves stupid while gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. When we were together we were like any other couple. We’d hit the bars and coffeehouses and jazz clubs, visit friends, go to the movies… the usual. Kacy loved good food and enjoyed cooking, and was appalled
to discover I was a can opener – a can of chili, another of corn, and a six-pack of beer was my idea of an eight-course dinner. Kacy taught me to cook some simple dishes, like pasta and stir-fry. Bought me a wok on her birthday. She also introduced me to backpacking. In the time we were together we took eight or nine long trips in the Sierras. Kacy loved high mountain lakes, and after the first trip I shared her appreciation. Air, water, granite, the campfire – Kacy liked the elemental.
She was also partial to marijuana, peyote, the natural highs – ‘real drugs,’ she called them. Speed was the only thing she ever ragged me about, and she was remarkably free of judgments. She claimed speed tore holes in the soul. So, ready to give it up anyway, I finally kicked, though I did allow myself a couple when I had a car to wreck for Scumball. I smoked weed with her now and then, but never developed her fondness for it; it softened the focus, distracted concentration, seemed to make my brain mushy. Peyote was more interesting – legal then, too – but I got the bad pukes every time, and that takes the fun out of anything.
Baseball was one thing Kacy and I did hold delightedly in common. For years her father had been part owner of a Class A team in Philly, and Kacy grew up going to every home game they played. We both liked baseball the way we liked jazz, live and close up. Since this was before the Giants moved to San Francisco, that left us the Triple A Seals, though as long as it was baseball, we hardly cared if it was the majors or minors. I always thought it was a sad indictment of the North Beach crowd that you couldn’t lure them near anything as American as a baseball game even if you bought them season tickets and sprung for the beer. The only exception was John Seasons, who actually had a season ticket and was honestly offended when I jokingly suggested he print up a couple of extras for me and Kacy.
The three of us truly had a ball at the ballpark. John and Kacy were always drooling over some first-baseman’s forearms or the center-fielder’s butt, but they enjoyed the drama and strategy as much as the physical grace. And nobody ever rode an umpire like John Seasons. John was sort of gangly and diffident looking, but he had a voice like a meat cleaver. ‘May you be buggered by a caveful of Corsican thugs! May Zeus fill your loins with curdled goat’s milk! May Poe’s raven pluck your infirm eyeballs and every being in Rilke’s angelic order piss in the empty sockets!’ John really worked out.
