Budding Prospects (3 page)

This was a mistake. As my buttocks made contact with flesh and bone rather than Herculon and Styrofoam and I began to intuit that the couch was already occupied, a quick lithe form jerked up to shove at my chest, rake my face and gasp a few emphatic obscenities. “Nooooooooo,” the voice—it was feminine—half rasped, half shrieked, “I’ve had enough. Now get off!" I found myself on the floor, muttering apologies. Then the light exploded in the room as if it had come on with a blast of noise, and I was staring up at a tableau vivant: the girl’s white naked arm poised at the lamp switch, her furious squinting eyes, high breasts, the lavender comforter slipped to her waist. “Who the hell are you?” she hissed.

“Felix,” I whispered, somehow feeling as if I were covering up the truth, “Phil’s friend.”

She glared at me as if she hadn’t heard. Her hair was a cracked fluff of peroxide blond, her eyes were green as glass marbles, she had no eyebrows. I watched her nipples harden in the cold. “I’m looking for Phil,” I said.

“Who?” The tone was barely under control, the upward swing of the interrogative a scarcely suppressed snarl. “Listen, mister”—drawing the comforter up under her armpits—“you better get your ass out of here or, or I’ll—“ She never finished the phrase, gesturing vaguely and then fumbling for a cigarette on the coffee table.

This is what an inept rapist must feel like, I thought. Or a cat burglar who catches the Mother Superior with her habit down. Despite myself, I found I had an erection. “Phil,” I repeated. “Phil Cherniske? The guy that rents this place?”

Suddenly the rage went out of her face. She looked up at me over her cigarette as she lit it, shook out the match and took a deep drag. Eyebrowless, she looked like Humpty-Dumpty or the Man in the Moon, too much pale unbroken space between
eyes and hair. I watched her exhale a blue cloud of smoke. “Oh, Phil,” she said finally, wearily, as if she’d just experienced a revelation that hadn’t seemed worth the effort. “He’s in jail.”

Phil and I had been close all our lives. Our parents had been friends before we were born, we’d attended the same elementary and secondary schools, had quit separate colleges in the same year. Phil went west, I stayed in New York. I got married, went back to school, dropped out, found a job selling life insurance to pensioners with trembling hands and hated myself for it. Phil made a brief splash in L.A. (Pasadena, actually) as Phil Yonkers,
sculpteur primitif.
He roamed junkyards with the avidity and determination of a housewife at a Macy’s white sale, collecting fascinating slabs of rusted iron, discarded airplane wings, scalloped fenders, anvils, stoves, washing machines, useless but intrinsically edifying cogs, springs and engine parts from obsolete heavy machinery. These he would weld together in random configurations, hose down to encourage oxidation, and offer for sale.

I remember a brochure he once sent me in advertisement of his first (and last) show. The cover featured a poorly reproduced photo of the artist (the sagging pompadour, pointed nose, emaciated frame and wandering eye) grinning in the lee of a gargantuan iron monster that dripped oil like saliva and seemed to be composed around the gap-toothed shovel of an earthmover and a set of pistons frozen at descending intervals. The text indicated that the piece was titled
Madonna and Child
, and compared the artist to Herms, Smith and Keinholz. Unfortunately, the show had to be canceled the afternoon it opened, owing to irremediable structural damage to the building that housed the gallery. The immense, crushing weight of Phil’s pieces, combined with the exuberance of his friends and acquaintances—who turned the sedate, champagne-sipping gathering into a foot-stomping celebration of rock and roll and the sculptor’s muse—fractured several floor joists and collapsed a section of the foundation. Phil did manage to sell one piece—three table saws welded together beneath a corona of conjoined lug wrenches molded in the shape of a butterfly’s wings—to a retired tool-and-die maker
from Boyle Heights. Then he went into the restaurant business.

The restaurant business, as far as I can see, harbors a greater assortment of misfits, bon vivants, congenital crazies and food, drug, and alcohol abusers than any other méeAtier, with the possible exception of the medical. Phil, disappointed in his effort to combine artistic expression and pecuniary reward, was only too willing to give himself up to the pharmaceutical oblivion of the world of waiters and
plongeurs.
He stood before a blazing grill at a steak house in Boulder, washed dishes at a Himalayan restaurant in Montpelier, tended bar in Maui, Park City and Aspen, bisected oysters on Bourbon Street. For a time, like most restaurant people, he attained restaurant nirvana, opening his own place. He borrowed money from his parents, his friends, relatives whose existence he’d forgotten, went partners with a savvy Greek in his mid-fifties, opened an impeccable haute-cuisine eatery in the suburbs of Sacramento, and went broke in nine months. Bad location, he said, but he later confided to me that the savvy Greek had been skimming money off the top. When I came to town that early morning with the proposition Vogelsang had made me, Phil was employed as a dishwasher at the Tahoe Teriyaki and, as I learned from the girl on the couch, temporarily incarcerated.

I blinked at her two or three times. My eyes felt as if they were bleeding. I staggered to my feet, dragging the sleeping bag like the corpse of a dead enemy, fumbled my way out the door, across the blackened and pissed-over snow, and back into the Toyota. Ten minutes later I pulled into the courthouse lot where the Eldorado County Sheriff’s Department maintained its drunk tank and holding facility.

If the stereotypical desk sergeant is loose of jowl, corpulent, balding and noncommunicative, the man I encountered at the Sheriff’s Department didn’t break any new ground. A cardboard container of coffee steamed on the counter before him, his eyes were as puffed as a prizefighter’s, and his loose jowls were reddened with a thousand tiny nicks and abrasions that gave evidence of a recent and clumsy shave with one of the new, ultramodern, reclining-head skin-whittlers reinvented by Gillette, Bic and the rest each month. I wear a beard myself.

“Excuse me, officer,” I said. “I’d like to put up bail for someone
you might be holding here.” I felt like Raskolnikov in Myshkin’s office, born guilty, guilty in perpetuity, guilty of everything from not honoring and obeying my parents to adolescent masturbation and stealing cigars to the larger and more heinous crimes of adulthood. I wanted to blurt it all out, confess in spate, be shriven and forgiven. Uniforms did that to me.

The desk sergeant said nothing.

I repeated myself, with a slight variation, and began to think wildly of all the possible permutations of this simple communication I might have to sift through until I hit the right one—the combination that would set clicking the tumblers of the policeman’s speech centers—when I hit on revealing the name of the incarceree after whom I was inquiring. “Cherniske,” I said. “Philip T.”

Still nothing. The man was immovable, emotionless, a jade Buddha serenely contemplating some quintessential episode of a TV police show, perhaps one in which a mild-mannered desk sergeant is moved to heroics by the sick and sad state of society, leaping out from behind his deceptive mask of lethargy to pound drunks, pleaders, crooks and loophole-manipulating lawyers back into the dirt where they belonged. I tried again, this time making it a question: “Phil Cherniske? Brought in this morning? Public intoxication?”

The thick neck swiveled like a lazy susan, the blue beads of the eyes hesitated on me with a look of hatred or impassivity—I couldn’t tell which—and continued past me to focus on an object over my left shoulder. The officer’s next motion was almost magical, so abrupt and yet so conservative of energy: his chins compressed briefly and then relaxed. I looked over my shoulder to a wooden bench flanked by a battered water cooler and a forlorn flag. “You want me to wait over there?” I said, my voice unnaturally loud, as if in compensation for his rigorous silence.

I watched his eyes for the answer, in the way one watches the eyes of a stroke victim for life. They squeezed shut, slowly, tenderly, then flashed open again—he could have been a dragon disturbed in its sleep—before drifting down to contemplate the steam rising from the cup. I turned, obsequiously dodging leather-booted, black-jacketed, hip-slung patrolmen, who stomped and
jangled across the scuffed linoleum floor, and started for the bench. Halfway there, pausing to maneuver around a fleshy colossus who stood yawning and scratching before the water cooler, I was suddenly arrested by a summons at my back, a croak really, like some barely breathed disclosure of the oracle. “Sixty-five dollars,” the voice whispered.

I gave him three twenties and a five. As the crisp folded bills passed between us, I felt we’d attained some sort of brotherhood, a moment of truth and accord, and I took advantage of it to ask the sergeant if he could possibly tell me when the prisoner might be released. His eyes were glass. Five fat fingers lay on the bills like dead things. When I saw that no answer was forthcoming, I wheeled round, irritated, and blundered into an officer dressed in the uniform of the California Highway Patrol, replete with mirror shades, Wehrmacht boots and outsized gunbelt.

“Oh—excuse me,” I gasped, regaining my balance and letting the final vowel trail off in a little bleat of urbane laughter meant not only to implicate him in a shared responsibility for our collision and the foibles of the human condition in general, but to assure him that it had been purely accidental and that, just as he would think no more of it, neither would I. I was grinning like an idiot. He was not grinning. The shades in fact seemed to draw his eyes together into a single horrific Cyclopean mask that rendered the rest of his face expressionless. He stood there a second, rocking back and forth on his heels, then tore off the sunglasses. “You,” he snarled.

“Me?” The smile had gone sick on my face. I recognized him in that instant, the guilt I’d felt on entering the station house infesting me like a cancer, my mind racing through the minuscule store of legal knowledge I’d accumulated under duress in the past, thinking moving violation, his word against mine,
judicium parium aut leges terrae.

All for naught. He threw me against the wall in an explosion of shoulders and arms and began to shout in my face. “What in
Christ’s
name do you want here?” he spat, his voice breaking on the expletive. The room had gone silent. All the others—big, beefy local cops—looked up from their coffee and clipboards and took an involuntary step or two toward us, like a defensive backfield converging on the ball carrier.

I began to offer an explanation when my antagonist bellowed for me to shut up. His hands pressed my elbows to the wall. He was breathing hard, his upper lip was wet and his eyes shone with the fierce fanatical glow of righteousness one recognized in the eyes of Muslim zealots. A black plastic plate over his shirt pocket identified him as Officer Jerpbak.

There in the police station, up against the wall, physical harm and worse shouting me in the face, I found a moment to indulge myself in the luxury of philosophy, to acknowledge my debt to empiricism, causality and John Locke. A mere eight hours ago I’d been padding round the apartment in my bathrobe, listening to the rain and Stravinsky preparatory to turning in. All was right with the world. And then the Grail, in the form of half a million dollars, sashayed through the room and I ducked out into the rain, inserted the key in the ignition of my Toyota, welcomed the answering shriek of the enervated engine, and drove here, to Tahoe, where I had managed to make an enemy of the most desperate and lawless sort—a cop—simply because I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suddenly I felt indescribably weary. “Get your fucking hands off me,” I said.

Officer Jerpbak responded by spinning me around like an Indian club and slamming me back into the wall in the classic shakedown position. “Spread ’em,” he snarled, patting me down with all the finesse of a middleweight working out with the body bag. He gave elaborate consideration to the genital area, all the while breathing obscenities over my shoulder. “You fuck,” he whispered, his voice trembling at the breaking point. “You stupid-ass dildo motherfucker: you nearly killed me out there, you know that? Huh? Huh?” His breathing was furious, incendiary: I could hear the hardened snot rattling in his nostrils. All I wanted at that moment was to swell to Laestrygonian proportions and murder him, pound the other beefeaters to hamburger, set fire to the station house and go home to bed. Instead, I listened to the harsh jangle of handcuffs and relaxed under his grip.

“You know who was in that ambulance?” he demanded, leaning into me with one broad hand while he fumbled with the other for the cuffs. “Huh? Huh?” It was a quiz, that’s what it was. Twenty questions. Hit the jackpot and win two free tickets to the Martial Arts Exposition. “Merv Griffin, that’s who, shit-head.
Merv Griffin.” There was reverence in his voice—he could have been naming the Pope’s mother or the winner of the Miss America Pageant—reverence, and outrage. “The man took twenty-two stitches in his thumb—he could of bled to death.” Suddenly he was shouting again. “You hear me? Huh? Huh?”

My hands were torn from the wall and forced behind me, there was the cold bite of the cuffs, the furious breathing, and then, just when things had begun to look grim, the soft restrained tones of a second voice, deus ex machina: “John, John, take it easy.” I looked over my shoulder. Officer Raab had joined us. He had a head the size of a beachball, crimson face, white hair. His voice was as soothing and softly modulated as a shrink’s. “John,” he repeated, “the man hasn’t done anything. He’s here to bail somebody out is all.”

Jerpbak wheeled round on him. “I don’t give a shit.” There was a whining edge to his voice, the young hothead reluctantly deferring to a higher authority, and I realized in that instant that Jerpbak was no older than I. It was a jolt. I could have submitted to a middle-aged cop—an Officer Raab or the mute desk sergeant—could have rationalized the father figure’s need to assert himself and all that, but with a coeval like Jerpbak the experience was humiliating, deeply shameful. A whole series of childhood episodes suddenly flooded my mind. I saw every physical confrontation in a flash, tallied up the wins and losses, counted the times I’d backed down, conjured the faces of the class bullies and extortionists as if they were snapshots in a riffled deck.
No older than I.
I jerked my neck at Officer Raab. “You don’t get these cuffs off in two seconds, I’ll sue everybody in this place for false arrest, and, and”—I was so wrought up I nearly sobbed the word—“brutality.”