Snitch World (23 page)

Gent:
How’d he get his hand in your pocket?

Jim:
“Jimmy,” he said, “he’s a dipper.” I said, “What the fuck is that?” He said that sometimes they call him a wireman. He’s got a piece of wire that’s got an “L” on the bottom of it. “And he checked you out, man. He marked you. He saw you buy a drink a couple times and you always went into the same pocket. Man, you didn’t have a chance. And you were loaded.” And I said, “Wow, man, that’s pretty good.” And he said, “Yeah, they’re all very good. But the problem with those guys is that they’re all fucking hop-heads; you can’t trust ’em.”

Patrick:
What are you going to trust ’em for?

Jim:
Well, you know, guys partner up and stuff and they never snitch. They’re all junkies and they make good money doing this. They only gotta dip one or two guys
like me and they’re good for a couple days. ’Cause they got a habit. It’s like, I ran into an old friend of mine and I said, “Hey what are you up to?” And he said, “About sixty a day.”

Patrick:
You put that in
Snitch World
. Except it was a hundred. Pretty funny. There is a lot of hilarious stuff in the book. Like the scene of the nightmare where he’s digging under the cemetery with the Chinese guy in Colorado.

Jim:
That’s another true story.

Patrick:
What? Wait a minute!

Jim:
It was told to me on a ski lift in Colorado. A place called Ski Cooper. All these stories, I left out a lot. Because of my narrative I was servicing. But in those days I had a small pickup truck and I was winter camping and skiing all over Colorado and New Mexico. March and April. I had my dog, pH. We slept in the back of my truck. Not even a camper shell. Brown rice and tea. Living outside. I would find a ski hill with nobody on it and I would just go skiing for half a day. I wound up in Leadville and I found this place called Ski Cooper. It’s in this big long flat valley, and it turned out that the United States Army trained their ski troops there during World War II. And when it was over they leveled all the buildings, which explained this big unblemished valley that was completely filled with snow when I was there. And they had this very modest ski hill that had a rope tow still. And I found a place called the Little Tundra Motel. I stayed for a week and they finally bumped me out because an evangelist choir had booked the whole place six months in advance. I was reading Tanizaki,
The Makioka Sisters
, the whole time. So I’m on a chair and here’s a guy, breathing hard, because he only has one lung, see. Leadville is the highest town in the United States. And it’s played out. There’s a closed-down molybdenum mine north of the town, and the pickup truck of whoever owns it is parked in front of all this gear and they’re waiting for
the molybdenum deposit in Congo, or wherever the fuck it is, to play out, so they can reopen it. Leadville was silver and gold at one time.

Patrick:
That was Horace Taber and Baby Doe—

Jim:
I wanna hear that story. So this guy was winded, on the chairlift, and we started talking and his story is he was from Leadville. A Vietnam vet, and he got shot up in Vietnam, that’s where the lung went, and got airlifted back here to Alameda, and was in a busload of wounded vets on the way from Alameda to Letterman Hospital in San Francisco—which is now George Lucas’s Letterman Digital Arts Center—and during Vietnam it also had a psych ward. On the Bay Bridge demonstrators turned the bus over and he and this one other vet who still had their arms and legs got out and pounded the shit out of every demonstrator they could get their hands on. Until the cops broke it up. Okay, so that was one ski lift story. We ski down the hill together. So on the next trip up he asks me what I do, and I mumble I’m a writer. And he gives me his card and it turns out he is a dynamiter. He makes his living, such as it is, dynamiting. He learned demolition in the service and once in a while he sets charges. For roads or mines. He was in AA and had a twenty-four-hour tureen of coffee going in this big Victorian in the middle of Leadville. And anyone who came through could get a cup of coffee from him, drunk or sober, vet or not. And he had huskies on the roof, three stories up, looking down on Leadville. At that time Leadville was pretty moribund.

Gent:
It don’t look too good now.

Jim:
So, he had become a drunk, he had become homeless, he had gotten cleaned up, and he came back to Leadville, adjusting to the altitude in stages, because of the one lung, beginning here, at sea level. So we’re going back up on the lift again. I said, “So, do you really make a living blowing
up shit for mines and roads, and stuff?” he said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I got a buddy, and he’s a vet, too.” You know, Leadville, like a lot of places in California and the West, is honeycombed with tunnels that Chinese laborers would dig on their days off. They would just follow seams looking for gold. He said, “My buddy and I, we got a pretty good map of what goes on under Leadville.” It’s all owned and forbidden. But they had a place on the outside of town, this cut-bank, with all these bushes on it, where you could go into the tunnel system. And it’s dicey, because the tunnels weren’t at all reinforced. And he said they would get out enough nuggets every year to supplement the dynamiting income.

Patrick:
There are hundreds if not thousands of people living in the boony wildernesses of the Sierra.

Jim:
So, he told me that the first time he took his buddy, with picks and headlamps and the map, they got into this one place. There were boards on the roof of the tunnel, which was rare, because the Chinese had not reinforced the tunnels, and the wood was fairly rotten and they chipped away at it and it caved in and it was all bones. They were under the Leadville cemetery. It was a long time before that story worked its way into the greater narrative of
Snitch World
.

Patrick:
Well, hell, I’m glad it did.

San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published thirteen novels, including the acclaimed
Lethal Injection
. He has also published five volumes of poetry and a nonfiction title.
Dark Companion
was shortlisted for the 2006 Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in A Mystery Novel, and
Windward Passage
won the Science Fiction Award of the 2010 San Francisco Book Festival. Ten of his novels have been published in French, six in Italian, and these are constellated by a miscellany of translations into German, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Russian, and Romanian. One of his current projects is the complete translation of Charles Baudelaire’s 1861 edition of
Les Fleurs du mal
. Another is a new novel, currently titled
You Don’t Pencil
, which he is considering changing to
Stuck on Stupid
. Learn more at
www.noirconeville.com
.

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