I snapped off the player and headed for the front door.
20.The Missing Prostitutes
I COULDN’T LET SHELLY DOWN OR PERMIT HIS BUSINESS TO GO under or allow someone to break into his Cracker Jack box of a house and steal his “Rocket 88” or Electric Toilet or “Ring Chimes” by the Dots, and his house was the perfect hideout since I had talked to my father who said a detective asking about me had stopped by and I didn’t know how long I could trust him before he spilled the beans. So I went back to the Island and got Sweets and a King James Bible and a bottle of Presidente brandy. I apologized to Sweets about the killing of pets. Sweets pointed out that forgiveness, along with gratitude, spontaneity, and eating stale food without complaint, was his bag. He had a good sniffing all around and confirmed that no one was there.
So, what I am I receiving? I wanted to know.
Fear, he said. Crimes.
What kind of crimes?
All kinds, he replied.
Killing?
Yes.
People, I mean.
Yes.
Old or new?
Both.
Men or women?
Hasn’t been a woman in this house for years.
I took a slug from my brandy and let it glow in my gullet. Is Shelly a killer, Sweets?
Someone in this house is.
Man, am I a magnet for killers, I said.
That’s because you’re corrupt, came the reply.
All humans are corrupt.
Not to your degree.
Well, I’m working on it.
I hope you brought tortillas.
Forgot, sorry. How about a can of tuna?
Tuna will be fine.
21.The Bones of La Zona Basura
THE DAYS PASSED PLEASANTLY ENOUGH IN THE COMPANY OF Sweets. We listened to records. We sat out in the yard, feeding peanuts to the blue jays (as Shelly was fond of doing). We cuddled and took naps. On Saturday nights we had pork chops and popcorn and watched a movie together. Now and then I’d dredge up one of Sofia’s made-up camp songs (“Faaar From the Outhouse on a Cold and Runny Night” was Sweets’s favorite) and get him to sing, which he did with gusto. I thought of Sofia often and ran memories of her like magic lantern slides through my head, revisiting the time we’d organized the first (and last) Wienerschnitzel Parade, and the day she and I had taken on Morris and his Tagalog social worker buddy, Angelo, in a game of two-on-two basketball. She was an ace from the three-point line, and though I couldn’t shoot for beans I was four inches taller than Morris, gleefully boxing him out for every board and assuring our five-dollar victory: 21 – 3.
I studied the Giddings, memorized collectibles, read up on bands and songs. I closed off all the parts of the house I didn’t need, sealing Donny’s bedroom with a hook that latched curiously from the outside. I rolled sheet after sheet into the platen of my typewriter, staring into the white wilderness of what was supposed to be the chapter on ethics. I mowed the lawn and pruned back that thornapple tree whose branches were growing into the neighbor’s yard. Shoring the fence with a piece of angle iron where the dog hurled itself every time he heard me coming through the gate, I knocked it down to reveal a woman and her daughter sunning topless. The mother said, “What are you looking at, asshole?” Sweets made a run at the yapper, who was lucky to get back through his little pet door in time. The neighbors cursed me once more and I fixed the fence so that it would not fall again.
As my Sex and Murder Self-Help continued to fizzle, a deep and complicated melancholia began to seep into my soul. Fat people when they become thin realize that only the misery that made them fat in the first place is there to welcome them, as is often the case with the long-incarcerated released to a stigmatized life without purpose, structure, or companionship: a life in which freedom is a burden. I fell back into old mental health strategies: comparing myself to those worse off than I, attempting to live in the moment, reminding myself of God’s mercy and His plan. I recited New Age saws: everything has a reason; be grateful for the simple things. When those failed, I switched to heavy but equally useless doses of darker wisdom: life is tragic, no one gets out alive; pleasure is transitory, existence is an illusion. I had known people, like Flightless, who’d been spared from their date with death, and who’d done nothing with their extra days except make things worse for themselves, as if not dying at their appointed time had been a karmic violation. I wondered if Napa State Hospital had been my fate, if I had died with Sofia (as I’d wanted), and I was now only a ghost whose greatest power was scavenging vinyl and annoying my topless neighbors. Aware that somehow I needed to forget myself, for the first time in my life I fell back on my father’s method for killing the days without killing myself: I worked.
Shelly’s catalogues, his guides, his pricing, were all in need of an update. His Xeroxed order forms were fading. His accounting system was in disarray. He needed to expand the catalogues. Why, if the Japanese liked Ed Ames and Dinah Shore, wouldn’t they want Eydie Gormé and Paul Anka too? There was no inventory for some of the orders, so I had to go through other dealers in a less profitable arrangement to find the requested records. Shelly needed to put everything up on a computer and save himself a few hundred hours of work. I didn’t know how many
