of transplanted Montagnard scouts in charge.
He made a half-assed living doing that. With the invention of the VCR the colonel moved into the electronics business, renting players and TV sets by the month. By that time he’d done some recruiting of his own “in country,” appreciating the fact that he was drawing on the native population of South Central the same way the Americans had drawn on the South Vietnamese. Most of the guys he hired were at loose ends since coming home to the ’hood-they needed that military discipline in their lives, and the colonel gave it to them.
The colonel forged an elite corps of repo men from former badasses who’d done tours as LURPs and worse in ’Nam. Get behind on your payments to the colonel, those bastards showed no mercy. They’d repossess the TV, the VCR, and take any damn thing that wasn’t nailed down to sweeten the pot. You complain, suddenly your dog’s dead and the repo men are out back cookin’ it up on the barbecue. You call your brother in the Crips, your cousin in the Bloods, suddenly you’ve got a telephone cord wrapped around your neck and that percussive sound you hear is fists rat-tat-tatting on your face while your white and pearlies rain down on the floor.
Yeah. Colonel Da Nang was one bad-mother-shut-your-mouth. Isaac Hayes would have said so himself.
It was funny how the whole music thing happened. One day Alonzo the LURP-a big bald Earnie Shavers lookin’ bro who’d lost an ear to some honkies at Fort Bragg but hadn’t received one scratch in ’Nam-anyway, Alonzo goes after a cokehead musician who’s three months behind on a big-screen TV. Turns out that the cokehead had shot out the TV, which didn’t make Alonzo very happy. So to smooth things out the cokehead offers Alonzo his guitar. Pretty good for openers, but Alonzo, he’s a born negotiator.
That night Alonzo shows up on the colonel’s doorstep with a truckload of amps and guitars and drums. The colonel says. We sell this stuff easy. But Johnny’s mama, she says. We keep it. Why the fuck we do that? the Colonel wants to know. You got five sons, his wife says. Jackson Five make big money.
So, in the tradition of Joe Jackson (the psycho
And they were making music, too.
All Johnny needed was his music and a big blond now and then.
And friends. Friends were good. You helped them and they helped you and you never had to beat anyone up or break any arms to get what you wanted. Hell, the more people you knew, the more people who’d buy your CD when you finally got a recording contract. And Johnny Da Nang knew a hell of a lot of people. He had made good friends in Vegas. He knew most of the tenants in the condo complex where he lived. Some of them were crooks, sure, but what the hell. Johnny’s old man was a crook. And there wasn’t any law against crooks buying CDs or concert tickets. Johnny didn’t walk around with his nose in the air. He was a people person. Wow, what was the use of being alone?
Johnny leaned back and settled in, enjoying life, celebrating the fact that he was hardly ever alone. He watched the morning sun tip the point of the Luxor pyramid. Ran his fingers through the big blond’s long hair, let his hands settle down around that big caboose and gave it a good squeeze.
“Un-guh,” said the blond.
“Baby,” Johnny said, “I second that emotion.”
Afterward the only classy thing to do was buy the blonde breakfast at the Luxor. Most guys wouldn’t bother with that, especially when they found out that the blonde was in town for a three-day dental hygienists’ convention and had a flight out later in the afternoon. But Johnny didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially when that anyone was a blond who gave good head. Besides, his oldest brother’s girlfriend was a waitress at the Luxor. If she was on duty (which she was), Johnny wouldn’t even see the bill.
Hey. That’s what friends were for, right?
So they were eating lox and bagels in Cleopatra’s Barge, which was a little restaurant next to a faux Nile, and Johnny was sure that the whole experience made the blond feel very continental because she was from Iowa and Johnny figured that, forget the Nile, lox and bagels were probably a pretty rare commodity in the land of Ma amp; Pa Corncob. But he didn’t say anything about it because he wasn’t sure about the blond’s sense of humor and didn’t want her to get the idea that he was being mean.
Because you never knew, you know? Maybe someday he and the boys would be touring, end up in Iowa. He’d look up the blond. They’d spend the afternoon together, laugh about those lox and bagels and that wild, impulsive morning in Las Vegas. She’d tell him that she’d bought all his CDs, too. Talked all her friends into buying concert tickets when she heard Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms were playing the Corncob Dome.
Hey, it could happen, couldn’t it?
Sure it could.
“Before I forget,” Johnny said, pushing a napkin her way. “How about you write down your address and phone number for me?”
She looked a little surprised. “Are you planning a trip to Sioux City?”
“Not right now,” Johnny said. “But you never know, y’know?”
There were downsides to having lots of friends, of course. Like when Johnny got home. Seventeen messages on the answering machine.
He opened his filing cabinet and tucked the blonde’s napkin into the folder labeled IOWA.
The phone rang. He snatched it up. “It ain’t Memorex,” he said.
“Johnny.” It was a guy on the other end, but Johnny didn’t recognize the voice until the caller clued him in. “It’s Jack. . Jack Baddalach.”
Baddalach lived on the other side of the complex. Johnny knew him from the pool. The guy was always down there reading paperbacks that were about thirty years old. Seemed like he always had a couple of bruises or a black eye, but that was because he was a boxer. Actually, he had a pretty friendly disposition for a guy who beat the shit out of people for a living. And he was always ready to share a bottle of beer from his ice chest. Besides that, he’d been on TV. He knew people at HBO, suits who handled pay-per-view, too. Johnny considered him a good contact, someone he could consult about matters of fame when such matters became an issue.
So Johnny said, “Jack, how you doin’, buddy?” as if he didn’t have seventeen messages on his answering machine. He always liked everyone to feel real special when he talked to them, and notching up the old enthusiasm meter didn’t really do any harm, did it?
“I’m doing okay, Johnny. Hey, I got a favor to ask you.”
“Shoot.”
“Well, I’ve gotta go out of town for a few days. In fact. I’m already gone.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Mostly. I mean, the whole thing with the promoter is still pretty wacky, but everything else is pretty much cool.”
“Where are you going?”
“Town called Pipeline Beach.”
“Oh,” Johnny said, because he didn’t have a clue.
“Anyway …” Jack paused because he was getting to the meat of it. “I was wondering if you could feed Frankenstein.”
A chill traveled Johnny’s spine. Friendship was one thing, and greasing potentially good contacts was quite another, but this-
“Johnny? You still there?”
“Yeah, Jack. . Hey, it’s not gonna be like the last time, is it? I don’t have to yank out any stitches or anything,
