“You know your music, babe,” he said. “Anyway, I got no one else I can trust. You got a job yet?”
“No,” I said, my sexy self-help book composed on a celebrity typewriter having gone into a stall.
“I’ll make it worth your while. I can’t lose my biz. All you gotta do is fill orders, pick up my mail at the P. O. No phone answering. No hustling. No more than two hours a day. I’ll give you fifty bucks a day, plus 10 percent commission on all sales. I’ll be back in two weeks, a month tops. I don’t think he’ll die, anyway.”
My ears had begun to sweat. “I guess I could.”
“Can you stay here, too?” he asked. “There have been some break-ins in the neighborhood recently, and I’ve got some valuable records. You can sleep wherever you like and use my typewriter if you want.”
I had a good look around and repeated the feeble phrase. “I guess I could.”
“I’ve got to leave tonight. Let me show you around. The place is yours. Listen to any records you like.”
19.Psychotic Reaction
BY THE TIME I RETURNED WITH A FEW OF MY THINGS TO SHELLY’S house that evening, Shelly was gone. The sun had turned red over the housetops. Shelly planned to drive straight through, with only rest-stop naps and hamburgers, as he had the last time. He did not like motels. He had no insurance, so he was a night driver, a self-proclaimed rabbit killer. He followed the back roads, the secondary highways. He’d looked so lost when I had shaken his hand and wished him a good trip, but he’d also been open and hospitable in a way that I’d never seen. I doubt that few had seen this side of him. He didn’t really need or believe he needed other people. I didn’t imagine that, outside of Mexican dentists, he’d ever had to rely on anyone as much as he was about to rely on me.
As a rule, I don’t like horror movies because their success is predicated on a protagonist who insists on going where good sense tells him he should not. On a bet long ago I slept in a mountain cabin in Cuyamaca, where a camper had been murdered and where his spirit supposedly still resided. There was also the additional danger of the murderer, still at large. I can’t say I slept. And though I won the bet, it was also the first time I experienced a psychotic episode, unless I really did see a full apparition of the murdered camper and a man with a hatchet in the window.
Now another haunted cabin, another bet. This one had much more riding on it: my promise, a man’s business, perhaps a man’s sanity, perhaps my sanity. I picked up the checklist he’d written for me and reviewed it once again.
1.Check post office box daily.
2.Wait till check clears on new clients before filling orders.
3.All records are alphabetical by ARTIST.
4.Make sure conditions of records are accurate.
5.For record prices use Giddings.
6.Petty Cash in band-aid box in medicine cabinet.
7.Extra house key in magnetic box in back of mailbox.
8.Don’t throw away paper trash, receipts, addresses, can’t let people find that, just bag it and I will burn it when I return.
9.Good luck.
List in hand, I wandered once again through the maze of Shelly’s afflicted sanctuary. I kept getting this feeling that I wasn’t alone. My imagination would not allow me to believe that the special friend had left the house. Compulsively, restively, I checked again each room. His parents’ bedroom was a dusty mausoleum with heavy peach-colored Queen Anne drapes and the reek of mothballs. On the walls were several staid and yellowed world-conqueror portraits: Hannibal, Tamerlane, Akbar the Great, Hitler, and Alexander the Great, who raped his way all the way to India and therefore could not have been that Great. Shelly’s disheveled bedroom was so cluttered with Racing Forms, clothes, and memorabilia that there was barely a navigable path to the unmade bed. Donny’s room, cool and sterile as the ghost it represented, was, Shelly had told me, unchanged since his death.
It was the stale chill air in this house, I decided, the palpably undisturbed layers of sorrow and neglect, that unnerved me. Pain is a noumenal stain that soaks into walls and fixes itself like a scent in the air. Pain, like smell and flavor, is a form of memory. You can feel the warmth of a loving house and in places like psychiatric hospitals and halfway houses and The Hubbard Museum of Pain you can feel its inimical opposite. I was tempted to hire a priest or a shaman, perhaps leave an open Bible in the middle of each room and come back next week. I wanted to clean the place up, open the curtains at least, let in some air and light. Have a chat with the spirits. Listen, I’m just here to look after Shelly’s business. I have no interest otherwise. It wasn’t my idea to stay here.
I turned the TV on, as Shelly would’ve done, to mask the silence. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet flickered up, one of the blandest most soporific sitcoms ever made. But Shelly worshipped this show and could recite entire episodes by heart. He didn’t view this series as entertainment but as a training manual or a family documentary, an electronic how-to manual on the reconstruction of a shattered past, but how could this do anything, I wondered, since the Nelson family portrayal wasn’t remotely real, except widen the gulf between himself and his unattainable ideals?
I moved all the items I’d brought — blanket, pillow, flashlight — to the record room, the only sane room in the house, a converted bedroom with painted wooden shelves on every wall to the ceiling. Each square cubby hole was filled with a neat leaning stack of sleeved vinyl. Shelly had several cubbies marked NO SALE. He made most of his money selling junk to Asians and Europeans.
