Shelly and I parked our trucks around back. Shelly fancied Japanese pickups. He’d owned a brown Datsun when I knew him before. There had been what looked like scorch marks up the passenger side door of his Datsun, which I had discounted since it was an old beat-up truck that he’d bought used, but now I saw that his newer lighter-colored Nissan pickup had the same scorch marks up the same door.
“Where you get those burn marks?” I asked him. “Been driving through hell?”
“All my life, babe,” he replied, and we both slapped our hips and roared.
The sun had set and a juniper-scented fog was lapping up against the streetlamps. We entered through the whale’s mouth into a large room with copper comets suspended from a green tin-shingled ceiling and many bronze statues of Ahab and Jonah in various dramatic poses, even if in the good book it says that Jonah was swallowed by a fish. Ancient graffiti remained on the brick walls: Billy Barty Traveling Death Circus.
In the foreground was an enormous glowing Wurlitzer like the pipe organ from the set of The Phantom of the Opera. Beyond that were three pool tables and a cavernous vault where the bands played. A dozen patrons milled about: a woman with a boa constrictor wound round her neck was lowered in conversation with a man in a tilted black beret who looked like an angry ferret. A woman dressed like one of the peafowls at Napa State was shooting pool with a topless David Bowie-type whose tattoos were so deep you could read her bones. A pallid woman in a red velveteen dress with a face like Burt Lancaster sitting four stools down gave us a muscular wink. Shelly had been born to sadistic parents, so, though he wasn’t a fan of the punk scene and dressed and combed his hair as if he were still in the fourth grade, he meshed with the Moby Dick’s crowd more than he would admit. He looked around, gave a nod of approval to the David Bowie lass, peeled off his jacket, draped it over the back of a stool, and climbed aboard.
Kang Soo, or Soo as she was called, the agelessly sexy, always working Korean owner of Dick’s, glided up in front of us and leaned forward with a brittle smile, her elbows resting on the black leather cushion that rode the length of both sides of the long curved bar. We ordered draft pints of the house specialty, Old Asthma Attack. Soo raised dripping tankards and set them on coasters before us. Shelly rolled his eyes upward and drained the contents of his.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How come they call it Asthma Attack?”
“It’s a wheat beer,” I said. “The guy who invented it I think was allergic to wheat.”
“I think I’m allergic to wheat, too,” he said.
“You want another one?” challenged Soo.
“Why not?” he said with a hiccup and a shrug. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and my lungs will seize up.” His squeaky cackle was so infectious I laughed with him. He pushed his goblet forward.
Gloomy Soo pulled him another.
As Shelly settled into his second draft, we caught up on things. He chortled and licked his lips as I recounted my Napa escapades with Sturtz, Fuckface, Boothby, Flightless, and the rest of my old straitjacket pals. “Never thought it would be you,” he crowed. “Always thought I’d be the one they’d put away.”
“It’s never too late,” I reassured him. “Tell me about yourself.”
Shelly recalled the last decade and a half. Little had changed. Forty-four years old and he was still living in the same house where he was born, still single but looking, still without a draft number, a social security number, or a record with the Internal Revenue Service (his only official existence at the Department of Motor Vehicles). He was still running the same secondhand record business he’d started when he was sixteen. He still had that ruined smile from a pair of neglected teeth that had turned into a massive infection and spread from his sinuses right up into his brain, rendering him bedridden, delirious, depressed, over and improperly medicated, and in constant commute to Tijuana to see yet another Mexican dentist. He was still making regular trips to Tijuana, he said, trying to get the mess in his head straightened out.
More cups of beer arrived. Shelly drank as if he were trying to wet his face, gulping the draft back like an old prospector just in from a day of mining boron. He kept shooting me wild, guilty, suspicious glances.
I dropped two quarters into the music trivia machine planted on the bar in front of me. I figured I’d nail all the questions, but the first one stumped me. “Hey, Shell, what song did Tommy James write for Alive N Kickin’?”
Shelly, gulping now from his third Asthma Attack, took his eyes off the woman with the snake around her neck, checked himself without interest in the mirror behind the liquor bottles, and jabbed at the snapped-down flaps of his collar with his thumbs. “God my nuts hurt,” he said.
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“I think it’s my epididymis again.” He grimaced and writhed on his stool like a cattle hand after a long day.
“Four seconds,” I said. “You’re gonna screw up my bonus.”
“Tighter, Tighter,” he said. “Like my epididymis.”
“Thanks, don’t need the subtitle.”
He scowled over at the machine. “What did Bobby Fuller die of? Everybody knows that one. They got any hard questions on there?”
I pressed C. Gasoline inhalation.
Shelly was hunched over the bar now, hands folded, peering up at me. “Should be a button for murdered.” He jerked his head to clear the forelock. “Whoever he fought he lost.” He slapped the bar and honked for a while like a cold engine starting, an ee ee ee that invited me
