Snitch World (3 page)

“Ten million dollars,” Mary repeated. “You know what Stendhal said?”

“Fuck no,” Klinger replied with certainty.

“He said he’d rather spend fifteen days a month in prison than be forced to converse with the people he saw around him on the street.”

“Oh yeah?” Klinger almost smiled.

“Something to that effect.”

“And when did he say this?”

Mary considered the question. “I guess by now it must be almost two hundred years ago.”

Klinger nodded grimly. “Some things never change.”

“So it would seem.”

Adjacent to one of the legs of the table, a sow bug stumbled through the grass. Blade by blade, brother. Klinger
moved his foot out of its path. “Can this gizmo detect the stink of acetylene on a drunk? Or whatever that byproduct of the metastasis of alcohol and the poor liver’s remaining enzymes is?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m not sure.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe that’s one you and I could write.” She repositioned herself in her chair. “Sure. The phone could tell you how few or many of those enzymes you got left. Maybe scare the bejesus out of a drunk enough to make him reform.” She snapped her fingers. “Our app could be the canary in the gold mine.”

“For that matter,” Klinger said, engaging the jest, “you could turn the phone into a breathalyzer. Guy makes a call, he’s too drunk to drive, the phone locks up his car’s ignition and calls him a cab.” He closed his fist in front of his mouth and contorted his voice. “You’re a cab.”

Mary looked at Klinger, aghast. “That’s fucking brilliant.”

“Wait,” Klinger said. “Guy gets too drunk to be in public, his phone calls the cops and drops the dime on him. Saves the cops the time and expense of random checkpoints.”

“Fucking great!” Mary enthused. “They used to say that the state is best served by silence. But, any time now, the state will be best served by phones!”

“Snitchahol.” Klinger laughed in spite of himself. “Now you’re talking!” He pointed at Mary: “The iSnitch.”

“The iSnitch!” she pointed back. “What an app!”

“We’ll make millions!” they said in unison.

After only a little time, their laughter subsided into silence.

Having managed to pierce the morning fog, the sun had begun to warm the yard. The hummingbird whirred overhead. The bumblebee buzzed lazily up and over the fence and out of sight. Klinger, whose every bone ached
from his three or four hours of exposure to the elements in Alamo Square Park, not to mention the walk to Mary’s from the park, a distance of about two miles, not to mention the impact with the light pole, moved his head, his legs and arms, his every hinged joint, just to feel them creak.

The sow bug had advanced to halfway between the legs on Klinger’s side of the table. Klinger wondered what sow bugs eat.

“So,” Mary said, not looking up from her phone. “You working these days?”

Klinger gave the sow bug half a smile. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

Her thumbs busy on the phone, Mary made no response.

Klinger’s smile went away. After a minute he repeated himself. “I said, Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Hm,” Mary responded, thumbing the phone. “Need any money?”

Klinger nodded tiredly. “I need money, false identity papers, a car, a dry place to sleep, a steak, and a fifth of whiskey. Even so,” he smiled feebly, “I’m a cheap date.”

Mary, who had continued to watch her phone while nodding against each item in Klinger’s list, now dispensed a definitive half-shake of her head. “I’ll give you breakfast and a hundred bucks,” she said. “After that, you’re on your own. Unless you want to write that app.”

“Christ,” Klinger said. “If only I wasn’t allergic to digging ditches. Then I could feel good about myself.”

“They got an app for that,” Mary advised him. “It’s called a backhoe.”

Klinger ran his fingers through his thinning, too-long hair. “What the hell am I gonna do with a hundred bucks?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said simply. “What were you gonna do without it?”

Klinger considered this. “Starve sober, I guess.”

“You haven’t done either yet,” Mary reminded him. Klinger diverted his attention from the sow bug long enough to consider Mary. It was hard to credit that, at one time, she and he shared more sex than all the squids in the Pacific Ocean. Subsequently some twenty years had passed without either one of them aware of the existence of the other, even though, with the exception of various stretches Klinger had spent in the Santa Rita jail, and those during which Mary had been touring Europe with some skinny-butted rock star she’d had a kid with, they both lived in San Francisco. Then, early one afternoon, right before it was torn down to make way for condominiums and a shopping mall, they’d run into each other at Japantown Bowl, on Post Street. She was there for the bowling, he was there for the cocktail lounge, both of which were cheap, fun, and open all the time. And just like that they’d fallen into an easy friendship with little to no overt evidence of what might have been much potential baggage. It was a strange eventuality, what they had become. But on the whole it bespoke a genuine affection between them, with no extenuating circumstances to generate confusion.

Plus, neither one of them no longer even so much as thought about cocaine, let alone consumed it.

Coincidence?

Klinger smiled and looked down. The sow bug had disappeared.

Who the hell knew? Who understood? Who could even remember, much less keep track of it all?

Not Klinger.

In the interim, while Mary Fiducione worked her way through the rock star, parenthood, her first two or three businesses, and finally an apprenticeship in “botanicals” under an acknowledged and much-published expert in
the field, Klinger had maintained himself within San Francisco’s asteroid belt of petty crime and criminals, never approaching too close to the warmth of the sun shed by the big score, never straying too far into the gelid outer reaches of the prison system.

Last night was an exception, he reminded himself hopefully. Chainbang, who had done plenty of time in real joints, long enough for his real moniker, Chang Yin Winter Horse, to have permanently metastasized into his nickname, was (a) not supposed to be in possession of a gun, being a felon and all, and (b) not supposed to have bashed that convenience store clerk on the side of his head with a frozen whole chicken. It was bad enough Klinger was hanging out with Chainbang at all; totally over his head, in fact. Chainbang had a theory, which was, either a man evolved at the expense of society, or it was going to be the other way around. Not that Chainbang could articulate this idea; but Chainbang had advanced far down a path illuminated by its and his own lights. And now there seemed to be a, er, uh, shadow, that was it, a shadow hovering over, nay, blighting his existence as a result.

“Put your clothes in the washer,” Mary told him, still not looking up from her phone. “Take two ibuprofen and have a bath. There’s a box of epsom salts under the sink. Use two cups. Take your time. I’ll rotate your stuff into the dyer. There’s an Italian place around the corner on Chestnut Street that’s open for lunch. Little booths, excellent wines, only jazz on the sound system. It’s on me.” She tapped the face of the phone, dropped it onto the table cloth, stretched her arms, and yawned.

“Then you’re out of here,” she concluded with a sleepy smile.

When Klinger hit the door of the Hawse Hole, he had $120 in his pocket.

A couple drinks to take the edge off, he was thinking, then a good night’s sleep at the Tuolumne Meadows Residential Hotel, which was right upstairs, where he could put down the C-note against a week’s rent.

The well vodka was a Chinese brand he’d never heard of, but three dollars got you a good pour, and it was 100 proof.

“Can’t see how you can drink that shit,” said an old man seated two stools down from Klinger. “Ain’t fit for motor grader coolant.”

“Tastes pretty cool to me,” Klinger affably stipulated. “But you wait right there while I double-check.” Klinger assayed a second and then a third sip, each less dainty than the one preceding it. “Ahhhh,” he allowed, carefully centering the empty nervous glass on its coaster. “Cool as can be.”

“Cool as October punkins in a frosty moonlit field, I guess,” the old man obliged.

Klinger shook his head. “I’ve never seen a pumpkin in a field by day or by night. Though I have,” he added truthfully, “been frosted upon.” He turned the glass between his fingers reflectively.

“Easy does it,” his neighbor concluded.

“That’s about the size of it,” Klinger agreed.

“You like to savor it,” the old man reasoned, “or you’re too broke to do it right.”

“Right in two.”

”Hit us again,” the old man told the bartender.

The bartender did as he was bade.

“Thanks.” Klinger toasted the old man with his freshened drink.

The old man nodded. “Minds me of a famous singer/
songwriter/guitarist I seen once, up there in Bolinas. You know Bolinas?”

“Heard of it,” Klinger nodded. “Up the coast a ways.”

“It’s thirty miles,” the old man said. “And you never been there?”

Klinger shook his head.

“You oughta go sometime,” the old man suggested. “They got trees and beaches and shit.”

“Yeah?” said Klinger, evincing no interest whatsoever. “Anyway,” the old man continued, “this singer/song-writer/guitarist guy had spent many a year practicing to be an alcoholic, as he himself put it. Got pretty good at it, too, as he himself put it. One thing, though, drunk as he got? He could still play the guitar, and he’d never buzz a string.” The old man took a sip of his own drink. “It’s about enough to piss a man off.”

“You play?” Klinger thought to ask, as he realized that the fluttering on the surface of his drink was the reflection of the blades of a ceiling fan, and not his optic nerve shorting out.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” the old man said. “I had the classic problem.”

Klinger raised an eyebrow. “And which classic problem was that?”

“I’m straying from my original story—.”

Klinger lifted both thumbs without losing his grip on his glass. “I got all day.”

The old man nodded. “I’m minded of another guy, who announced to his momma, one fine morning, when he
was about nine years old, that he wanted to be a musician when he grew up. Well now, son, his momma replied, that’s all fine and dandy, but you can’t do both.”

Klinger affected half a smile. “I like her.”

“Me, too,” the old man agreed.

“You know her?”

The old man nodded.

“So what happened?”

“I grew up.”

“And the music?”

“Had to put it down. Children to raise, food to put on the table, wife to look after, job to attend to. Like that.”

“Uh …” Klinger said, temporarily at a loss. “Well? You probably got grandchildren.”

The old man assumed a thousand-yard stare and shook his head. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

Why am I drinking in this dump and acting surprised that I’m talking to a human train wreck instead of the president of Hewlett Packard? Klinger wondered to himself. He took a sip of vodka. The ice had gotten to it by now, diluting it slightly, but chilling it too. He had another sip.

“So,” Klinger said aloud, setting down his glass, “you spent your whole life taking care of a family that blew up or died off or disappeared somehow, and in any case left you with nothing but a guitar, in a case under the bed, that you no longer remember how to play?”

Abruptly, Klinger fixed his gaze on his drink. Every once in a while he’d get in a mood and find himself making aggressive remarks to perfect strangers which proclivity generated at least a fifty-fifty chance of fetching him a beer bottle upside his head as opposed to witnessing a fit of convulsive weeping, and he had scars where the hair had never grown back to prove it. Today, however …

“Something like that,” the old man said simply.

“Shit.” Klinger said gruffly. “I’ll bet you can play the chromatic bejesus out of a guitar.”

The old man shook his head. “Not really.”

Klinger slipped each of his hands palm down on the barstool, each under its respective thigh, and stared at his drink. “Anyway,” he said, “we were talking about a musician who was practicing to be an alcoholic.”

The old man nodded. “Indeed we were.” He lifted his glass and found it empty. “Damn,” he said.

“Hit us again,” Klinger said.

“Thanks,” the old man said, as the bartender covered the ice in the old man’s glass with Jameson.

“What kind of Irish is in the well?” Klinger asked hopefully.

“Standing Stone,” the bartender said. “Guaranteed to be the death of you.”

“Says so right on the label,” the old man said.

Klinger nodded.

“How about it, amigo?” the bartender asked him.

“Sure.” Klinger freed his right hand and downed his vodka.

“Don’t know how you can drink that shit,” the old man said, as he watched the bartender dispense a generous pour of whiskey into a fresh glass. “You’ll be shitting blood in the morning.”

“You were telling me a story,” Klinger said.

“So I was. Singer/songwriter/guitarist is sitting on a stool in the bar, facing an audience. He’s completely drunk. There’s a shot glass brimful of tequila sitting dead center on a second stool, right next to him, directly below the peg-head of his beautiful big-body D-35 Martin, a guitar he’s managed to hang onto his whole life.”

“How old is this guy?”

“Seventy if he’s a day.”

“Damn,” admitted Klinger.

“Not sure how he made it.” The old man looked at his whiskey. It had always amazed Klinger how some people could let a drink just sit in front of them for what invariably seemed an eternity. “So he’s rambling, this guy. He’s got on the ten-gallon hat, the concho belt, the brush-popper shirt with nacre buttons, a duster, boot-cut jeans, and riding-heel cowboy boots. It’s raining outside. Do you remember when it used to rain in California?”

Klinger nodded. “I do.”

“Special, wasn’t it?”

“Very.”

“Every year, regular as clockwork, Mother Nature would show up in late October, early November, Thanksgiving at the latest …” The old man swept one hand at arm’s length over the bar to his right, then repeated the gesture to his left. “… and wash away six months of piss and dogshit and good intentions. Just wash them away.”