Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  When his mother ran into the street, I jumped up to catch her before she could see his body – then realized she should go to him, touch him, kneel and hold him, whatever she needed to do.

  But she didn’t go to his body. She stopped short and pointed a wild, accusing finger at the blood running steadily toward the gutter, floating cigarette butts and a Juicy Fruit wrapper where it pooled against the curb. Her pointed finger shaking, she began a shrill, monotone chant: ‘This… is not… right. No. No, this is not right. It is not right. No. Not right.’ Long after the cops and neighbors had tried to calm her, comfort her, she persisted in the same stunned, determined accusation, until they led her gently back into the house, assuring her everything would be all right.

  The cop who took my statement had as much trouble controlling his voice as I did. When I told him about the paper blowing into the street, he unfastened from his clipboard a crayon drawing on cheap tablet paper. A giant sun hovered over a landscape containing a large red flower, three animals that were either horses or deer, and a long green car with shiny black wheels. The sun dominated the upper center of the picture, high noon, solid gold, its light and warmth flooding the scene.

  After the cop recorded my story, he rechecked my name and address and told me I was free to go. I’d seen the old man in the Merc being taken downtown in the back of a black-and-white, so I repeated my conviction that it wasn’t his fault, that Eddie had bolted blindly between two parked cars and there was nothing in God’s green world the man could’ve done to stop in time. ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘They just took him down to get a statement. Routine under the circumstances. The guy was shook, and it doesn’t hurt to get him away from the scene.’

  An ambulance had taken the body away, and the crowd had thinned to a few gawkers. A couple of cops were measuring skidmarks. A guy with a backpump was flushing away the blood.

  ‘I didn’t want to see it,’ I told the cop. ‘Didn’t want to, didn’t need to.’

  ‘Me neither, pal.’

  ‘How’s the mother?’

  ‘Torn up, like you’d expect, but she’ll be all right. Or as all right as you can get after something like this.’

  ‘You know, I just barely missed him.’ I held up my left hand for the cop to see. ‘I touched his pants, that’s how fucking close it was. One second closer out of all the time in the world, one second, one goddamn heartbeat, and that guy wouldn’t be hosing down the street.’

  ‘You did what you could,’ the cop grunted, ‘that’s what matters.’

  The grunt annoyed me. ‘Are you sure? Are you really, truly, deep-down positive about that?’ I started yelling. ‘Fucking utterly convinced, are you?’

  ‘Hey pal,’ he bristled, ‘don’t lay it on me. I gotta see this shit every day, so don’t get on my ass. Listen, my third month on the street, green-ass rookie, we get a guy out on a ledge fifteen floors up and he’s hot to jump. I’m leaning out the window telling him “Don’t.” I’m telling him every reason in the world to live, and I’m telling him straight from my heart, straight as it comes, how it’s worth it, life is worth it, life is sweet, come back inside, give it another shot. And I see he’s pressing himself back against the wall, I can see the fingernails on his left hand turn white he’s digging so hard for a grip, and he’s inching his way over to me and starting to cry. And when he’s almost where I can reach him, he says in a real soft voice, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and he pushes off. Fifteen stories, straight down. Strawberry jam. But even before he hit the ground I knew it wasn’t my fault. I’d done my best, and I figure that’s all you can ask, all you can ask of anybody, all you can ask of yourself.’ His eyes challenged me. ‘Unless you want to ask more than that.’

  ‘No,’ I said, slumping, ‘that sounds like plenty.’

  ‘Okay. You grabbed, you missed, you’ll never know if it could’ve been any different. Don’t get down on yourself. Go home, take a long hot bath, crack a couple of cold ones, watch the tube, forget it. Life goes on.’

  And that’s what I did, all except forgetting. I was weak enough going in, and seeing a happy bouncing kid struck suddenly dead shattered me, just ate me up. Since I didn’t know Eddie, you’d think it wouldn’t have been so bad, but in a way it was worse, a reminder of the random daily slaughter beyond the tiny circle of my life. Besides, I knew Eddie. I’d touched him.

  I took the five weeks of vacation I had coming, bought about three cases of canned stuff – hash, peaches, chili, stew – and about twelve cases of beer, and locked myself in my apartment. I didn’t want to see anybody or anything. I took three or four hot baths a day, slept as much as my nightmares allowed, and the rest of the time drank beer and stared at the walls. I didn’t know if I was going over the edge or if the edge was going over me. After a week I started pacing back and forth in my small apartment, looking at the floor, every once in a while bursting into tears. I couldn’t find anything to hang onto until I remembered the sound of Big Red playing ‘Mercury Falling,’ and felt the necessity for music. Since I was afraid to leave the apartment, I switched on the radio.

  I couldn’t find much jazz on the box and what there was seemed too cool and complex. That’s when I discovered rock-and-roll. It was the right time. If it was moribund six years earlier, in ’65 the stone was rolled away, and that summer there was a revival, if not a resurrection. The Rolling Stones came out with ‘Satisfaction,’ as in can’t get no, sounding as if they might get nasty if some didn’t show up soon. Same month, Dylan went electric, bringing the power of the troubadour tradition to the power of electrical amplification, the music driving the meaning like a hammer driving a nail, and he sure wasn’t singing about holding hands down at the Dairy Queen:

  How does it feeeeeel

  To be all alloooone

  Like a complete unknooowwwwnn

  Like a rooooooolllling STONE!

  With the Stones and Dylan, the airwaves suddenly seemed a long way from pretty-boy idols and teenybop dance fads. The mean gutter blues the Stones drew from, Dylan’s electric barbed-wire Madonnas, the raw surrealism of the San Francisco bands that were beginning to break out of garages and lofts – all at once there was a mean and restless bite to the music, a hunger and defiance. Yet around the same time, the Loving Spoonful released ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ and the Beatles’ film Help! came out in all its grand and whacky foolishness. That sense of lightheartedness cracked the paralyzing fear of being thought uncool, different, weird – and that dread of appearing foolish is one of the biggest locks on the human cage. So all at once, along with a roots-first resurgence of black music into the mainstream, there was a new eruption of possibilities and permissions, a musical profusion of amazing range and open horizons, from the harshest doubts and indictments and a blatant sexual nitty-gritty unthinkable the year before to a sweetly playful and strangely fearless faith. The stone was rolling, and you couldn’t mistake the excitement.

  It would be silly to say the music saved or healed me, but in my daily routine of hot baths, of opening cans of beer and food, what I held onto was the music. Not for salvation – nothing can do that for you – but for the consolation of its promise, its spark of life, its wild, powerful synaptic arc across spirit, mind, and meat.

  By the end of my five-week vacation I was functional, if barely, and aware that life, even by dragging itself wounded down the path, did go on. When I returned to work, however, I felt like I was coated about two inches thick with cold oatmeal. With the help of time and music I’d hauled myself up from a feeling of gutted doom to one of impenetrable depression. My flesh was bloated, my blood gone rancid, my spirit sour. Partly this was physical – I’d gone to hell from sitting on my ass drinking beer and eating out of cans. I could think of only one thing that might sharpen my reflexes, cheer me up, help me shed some flab – those little white pills with crosses on them.

  I’d vowed with every fiber of purpose that I wouldn’t do it again, fought temptation like a rabid bear, hung on thro
ugh the shit-mush and doldrums, and I was so determined to scourge that weakness I decided I’d only buy fifty hits for a last hurrah. In the twisted psychology of collapsed resolve, I figured this lapse was allowable on two unassailable points: first, amphetamines depress the appetite, leading to weight loss, so it was justifiable on medical grounds; and secondly, I was celebrating coming through slaughter, and what’s a celebration without treats?

  Perked me right up, too, and I needed some enthusiasm to fight back the gloom. Once I got riding that fifty-hit party I knew that what I really needed was to leave, move, split, follow Kacy or Red or any of the others who’d gotten out from under themselves. That I had nowhere to go except somewhere else made me tremendously sad.

  I finished the fifty in about a week. Got my nervous system tuned up and my blubber trimmed back, but best of all I didn’t try to score more when I ran out. The come-down wasn’t that bad – the usual frazzle and funk – or else I was used to misery. My display of pluck was an inspiration. It isn’t hard to make the right choices, but sometimes it’s hell to stick to them.

  In that hopeful mood I met with Scumball on the twentieth of October. He’d left a message for me at Cravetti’s to meet him at Bob’s Billiards. Scumball hadn’t been particularly pleased by the job I’d done on the Corvette. I’d only heard from him once since then, a job in Oakland, but he’d canceled the next day, explaining only that the set-up had fallen through. I figured I’d been scratched from his list of reliable idiots, but then again I’d been out of action for five weeks.

  The pool hall was a local hangout where you could shoot more than snooker if you had the inclination and the price. At Scumball’s suggestion we went for a walk and were just out the door when he gave me a fraternal pat on the back and said something innocuous like, ‘How’s my man been?’ For some reason, and for the first time, I resented his assumption that we were partners, brothers, buddies, pals. Scumball played the small-time edges, mealy-cheap and tight; there was no hunger or grandeur to his imagination. I almost wheeled around to slap his hand off my back when it struck me what really was eating my ass. We were alike, literally partners-in-crime, and for all the soaring grandeur of my majestic and altogether superior imagination, I didn’t seem to be doing much. Petty as he was, Scumball did have a certain gift for scamming, and in fact I worked for him. I held my tongue and listened.

  It was an interesting earful. Scumball was playing a variation on his new theme, and this time a story went with it. The car he had in mind was a mint ’59 Cadillac. According to Scumball, it had been purchased by a whacked-out sixty-year-old spinster named Harriet Gildner as a present to some hotshot rock star. The old lady was ‘covered up with money,’ to quote Scumball, an heiress to a fortune in steel and rubber. The Caddy was all crated to ship when the rock star died in a plane wreck. Since she didn’t need the money or the car, and could afford to indulge her sentimentality, she’d stored it in one of her warehouses on the docks. She had a nephew, guy named Cory Bingham, who wanted the Caddy so bad he was wading in his own drool, but the old lady wouldn’t let go. She was a major loony, Scumball claimed, and her psychic adviser, one Madam Bella, told her to hang on to it, its time would come.

  But Harriet Gildner’s time had come first: she fell down the stairs of her Nob Hill mansion and broke her neck, evidently so loaded that the autopsy report indicated traces of blood in the drugs. There was some quiet conjecture that Madam Bella or maybe Cory had given her a helpful nudge to get her rolling, but it was ruled an accidental death. That was in early ’62, but her will, while legit, was an homage to surrealism that every relative down to seventh-cousin twice-removed had contested. The legal dust had finally cleared a few months back. The nephew received the Cadillac he’d coveted, but that was all. Scumball didn’t remember exactly, but the stipulation in her will, to give you an idea, went something like ‘Cory gets the car he panted for, provided he’s become a knight worthy of the steed, but he gets nothing else, never ever, and if he ever sells the car he has to pay the estate double the sale price, and if his worthiness is in question the Book of Lamentations should be consulted if the ghosts see fit to reveal it.’

  So Cory got the Caddy, others got odd bits and pieces, Madam Bella (her psychic adviser and, Scumball claimed, drug connection) was well provided for, and the rest of the estate was divided equally between the Brompton Society for the Promotion of Painless Death and the Kinsey Institute. I laughed when Scumball told me that, but he shot me a scornful look. ‘Fucking dame. Makes me puke how it’s always her kind that wind up with the big loot and never lifted a finger to earn it, never had to scuffle for one fucking penny.’

  Cory didn’t care much about the car when he finally got it, an attitude evidently influenced by the fact he fancied himself a poker player, an expensive fancy that had placed him in pressing debt and serious disfavor with collection agencies not listed in the Yellow Pages. Although he didn’t say so directly, it was easy to guess that Scumball was affiliated with the people who wanted to be paid. Since the Caddy was the only asset, I gathered Scumball had advised Cory that a mint Cadillac – even one only six years old – was a precious collector’s item that should be insured to the hilt, and if anything unfortunate should happen to it – well, the insurance money might cover his IOUs and thereby guarantee him the continued use of his arms, legs, and sexual organs. Cory, quick to recognize wisdom when it threatened to club him, had agreed. The Caddy had been uncrated at a storage garage Cory had rented on 7th Street. A mechanic had checked it out, replacing seals and rubber as needed, and fired it up. It was all set: gassed, registered, ready to roll. Fully insured, of course.

  But there was an irritating problem. I’d have to break into the garage to steal it. This wasn’t a major difficulty, since Scumball had a duplicate key for the garage lock, but I’d have to make it look like B&E to keep the heat off Cory, who was nervous about being implicated, though evidently even more worried about being maimed. I told Scumball that Cory was liable to get looked at hard, considering the recent insurance purchase, and that I wasn’t particularly interested in the job since he was liable to crumble like a soggy cookie. Scumball assured me that Cory’s alibi would be airtight, that a lawyer specializing in such claims would represent him in all transactions with the insurance people, that he knew for a fact that the agent who’d sold Cory the policy was sympathetic, and that Cory himself completely understood that if he so much as squeaked his body was shark bait.

  ‘Forget it,’ I told Scumball. ‘The whole thing’s got too much wobble.’

  Scumball was deeply understanding. He appreciated that Breaking & Entering, even if faked, was a companion felony to Grand Theft Auto, and that working without cover substantially increased the risks. That’s why I would get two grand in front and another deuce on delivery.

  I’d like to think it wasn’t the money that swayed me, but rather some profoundly instinctive understanding that the door was opening on a journey I couldn’t deny. I’ve thought about it since, of course, without concluding much except that somewhere in the welter of possibilities I might’ve felt a way out. The money, for instance, would support a long vacation to check out other places, new ideas; maybe something would click. I was still miserable, though a notch up from the gutted numbness of the month before.

  Scumball smiled with pearly pleasure when I agreed to the deal. He gave me another fraternal pat on the shoulder as he slipped me an envelope with a hundred $20 bills inside. I resented the pat, welcomed the money, and wasn’t sure how I felt about the rest.

  The job was set for late on the twenty-fourth, giving me a couple of days to prepare. The storage garage on 7th was within walking distance of my place, so I hoofed over that evening to check it out. The lock was a heavy-duty Schlage and the door was steel. Getting in, of course, was no problem – I had the duplicate key – but I had to fake my break-in.

  What I did was fairly simple. I bought another Schlage lock, same model as the one on the door, and late that night
I went over and switched the new one for the original. I took the original to Cravetti’s with me the next morning and used a portable oxy-acetylene torch to cut through the shackle just enough that it would slide out of the staple. I saved the metal drippings, putting them in a film cannister when they’d cooled. I fried the duplicate key beyond recognition and tossed it into the scrap bucket. I worked with a concentration and precision I hadn’t felt in a couple of months, and let me tell you it felt good. Felt alive, like I was finally rolling with the river.

  Then I hit a snag. I couldn’t find a back-up driver. All my old outlaw cronies were gone except John Seasons, and he wasn’t remotely interested. Neal Cassady was supposed to be around, but I couldn’t locate him; he was already turning into a rumor. There was an old friend named Laura Dolteca, but her mother was in town for the week in a last-ditch effort to change her daughter’s delightfully wild ways. I couldn’t think of anyone else I trusted. Three people, when five years before there had been thirty. It was time to move on. Big Sur. Santa Fe. Maybe across town to the Haight – I’d heard rumblings of some high craziness over there. With the four grand from the Caddy job and another two at home in a sock, I could afford to roam around and see what connected, what pieces fit.

  But first the business at hand. When I came off-shift at 5:00 I went straight to my apartment, soaked for an hour in a hot bath, and cooked myself a steak dinner. I ate with gusto for the first time in a couple of months, then did the dishes. At 9:00 I checked and packed my tools: the torched original lock and metal drippings, key to the new lock on the garage, flashlight, gloves, and a few odds and ends like sidecutters and jumper wires. Once everything was all set I stretched out on the bed and dialed up some rock on the box and, riding the anticipation, methodically considered the pile of possibilities and contingencies.