“Whuzzat?”
“Ullman’s address,” I said. “You found it once. I need it, Loomis.”
“I can get it tomorrow morning when I’m back at my desk. You want me to call you here?”
I took one of Minna’s cards out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Call the beeper number. I’ll be carring it.”
“Okay, all right, now will you lemme take a leak?”
I didn’t speak, just clicked the car locks up and down automatically six times, then got out. Loomis followed me to the storefront, and inside.
Danny came out of the back, stubbing a cigarette in the countertop ashtray as he passed. He always dressed the prettiest of us Minna Men, but his lean black suit suddenly looked like it had been worn too many days in a row. He reminded me of an out-of-work mortician. He glanced at me and Loomis and pursed his lips but didn’t speak, and I couldn’t really get anything out of his eyes. I felt I didn’t know him with Minna gone. Danny and I functioned as expressions of two opposed ends of Frank Minna’s impulses: him a tall, silent body that attracted women and intimidated men, me a flapping inane mouth that covered the world in names and descriptions. Average us and you might have Frank Minna back, sort of. Now, without Minna for a conduit between us, Danny and I had to begin again grasping one another as entities, as though we were suddenly fourteen years old again and occupying our opposite niches at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys.
In fact, I had a sudden yearning that Danny should be holding a basketball, so that I could say “Good shot!” or exhort him to dunk it. Instead we stared at one another.
“ ’Scuse me,” said Loomis, scooting past me and waving his hand at Danny. “Gotta use your toilet.” He disappeared into the back.
“Where’s Tony?” I said.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Well, I don’t know. I hope he’s doing better than Gilbert. I just left him in the lockup at the Sixth.” I realized it sounded as if I’d actually seen him, but I let the implication stand. Loomis wouldn’t call me on it, even if he heard from the bathroom.
Danny didn’t look all that surprised. The shock of Minna’s death made this new turn unimpressive by comparison, I supposed. “What’s he in for?”
“
Danny only scratched at the end of his nose thoughtfully.
“So where were you?” I said. “I thought you were minding the store.”
“Went for a bite.”
“I was here for forty-five minutes.” A lie-I doubted it was more than fifteen, but I felt like pushing him. “Guess we missed each other.”
“Any calls? See that
He shook his head. He was holding something back-but then it occurred to me that I was too.
Danny and I stooensively regarding each other, waiting for the next question to form. I felt a vibration deep inside, profounder tics lurking in me, gathering strength. Or perhaps I was only feeling my hunger at last.
Loomis popped out of the back. “Jesus, you guys look bad. What a day, huh?”
We stared at him.
“Well, I think we owe Frank a moment of silence, don’t you guys?”
I wanted to point out that what Loomis had interrupted
“Little something in the way of remembrance? Bow your heads, you turkeys. The guy was like your father. Don’t end the day arguing with each other, for crying out loud.”
Loomis had a point, or enough of one anyway, to shame me and Danny into letting him have his way. So we stood in silence, and when I saw that Danny and Loomis had each closed their eyes I closed mine too. Together we made up some lopped-off, inadequate version of the Agency-Danny standing for himself and Tony, I for myself, and Loomis, I suppose, for Gilbert. But I was moved anyway, for a second.
Then Loomis ruined it with a clearly audible fart, which he coughed to cover, unsuccessfully. “Okay,” he said suddenly. “How’s about that ride home, Lionel?”
“Walk,” I said.
Humbled by his own body, the garbage cop didn’t argue, but headed for the door.
Danny volunteered to sit by the L &L phone. He already had a pot of coffee brewing, he pointed out, and I could see he was in a pacing mood, that he wanted the space of the office to himself. It suited me well enough to leave him there. I went upstairs, without our exchanging more than a few sentences.
Upstairs I lit a candle and stuck it in the center of my table, beside Minna’s beeper and watch. Loomis’s clumsy pass at ritual haunted me. I needed one of my own. But I was also hungry. I poured out the diluted drink and made myself a fresh one, set it out on the table too. Then I unwrapped the sandwich from Zeod’s. I considered for a moment, fighting the urge just to sink my teeth into it, then went to the cabinet and brought back a serrated knife and small plate. I cut the sandwich into six equal pieces, taking unexpectedly deep pleasure in the texture of the kaiser roll’s resistance to the knife’s dull teeth, and arranged the pieces so they were equidistant on the plate. I returned the knife to my counter, then centered plate, candle and drink on the table in a way that soothed my grieving Tourette’s. If I didn’t stem my syndrome’s needs I would never clear a space in which my own sorrow could dwell.
Then I went to my boom box and put on the saddest song in my CD collection, Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore.”
I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, b know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music had never made much of an impression on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna’s Cadillac, I first heard the single “Kiss” squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly charmed my Tourette’s, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck-but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.
“Turn that shit down,” said Minna.
“I like it,” I said.
“That’s that crap Danny listens to,” said Minna.
I knew I had to own that song, and so the next day I sought it out at J &R Music World-I needed the word “funk” explained to me by the salesman. He sold me a cassette, and a Walkman to play it on. What I ended up with was a seven-minute “extended single” version-the song I’d heard on the radio, with a four-minute catastrophe of chopping, grunting, hissing and slapping sounds appended-a coda apparently designed as a private message of confirmation to my delighted Tourette’s brain.
Prince’s music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him I was exempt from my symptoms. So I began collecting his records, especially those elaborate and frenetic remixes tucked away on the CD singles. The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.
“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” is a ballad, piano strolling beneath an aching falsetto vocal. Slow and melancholy, it still featured the Tourettic abruptness and compulsive precision, the sudden shrieks and silences, that made Prince’s music my brain’s balm.
