The Octopus on My Head (8 page)

The entrance to Emil's Grotto was an unpainted wood-railed screen door with an enameled Red Man Snuff sign for a push bar, rusted almost to illegibility. A nasty rumble from within proved to be Howlin' Wolf's
I Asked For Water (And She Gave Me Gasoline).

Ivy cranked the wheel, crooked his arm over his seat, and used the Lexus side mirrors to back it into a space between a brand-new burgundy Eldorado, waxed to luminescence, and a twenty-year-old Firebird with a broken rear spring, a spidered windshield, no hood, and two colors of primer.

“Curly?” Ivy put the Lexus in park and turned down the radio. “Whilst I negotiate these premises, would you mind perching up under this steering wheel with the engine running and the passenger door off the latch?”

“Here we go again,” I divined.

“Just a minute.” Lavinia threw off the blanket and sat up. “This is my goddamn car.”

“Now now, little lady,” Ivy drawled.

“Fuck you.” Lavinia batted the back of the driver's seat with the heels of both hands. “Get out.”

Ivy opened the driver's door and stepped out. Lavinia pushed the seat forward and joined him on the dirt. “Good luck, babe,” she said, and kissed Ivy full on the mouth, just like she'd done to me just a few hours before, like a pint-sized Athena encouraging her man as he sallies into battle. Ivy pulled away from the kiss, slipping a fat bindle into her hip pocket as he did so. I slid over the seat to get out, too, but Lavinia pushed the seatback into my face. “Stay,” she said, exactly as she'd have said it to a dog. She slid into the driver's seat herself and closed the door.

Ivy rounded the Eldorado and disappeared into the bar. The screen door patted the jamb softly behind him.

Lavinia leaned over the console, unlatched the passenger door, and retrieved her pistol from the glove compartment.

“Woman,” I said, “haven't you had enough of that shit for one night?”

“Ivy's cool,” she said, nosing the pistol between her seat cushion and the console, “but I'm not.”

The Lexus engine was turning over, but I could barely hear it. Even at this hour, headlights and taillights were streaming up and down Fruitvale, a mere two blocks north. No vehicle, however, came down the dirt street to Emil's Grotto, despite its being wide open long after closing time, where Howlin' Wolf now made room for
Yola My Blues Away.

“Skip James,” I marveled.

Lavinia made no reply.

The spring on the screen door stretched tiredly. From the back seat, looking over the hood of the Eldorado, I could see the black fingers of a large hand with a pink palm easing the hinge stile through its radius, as delicately as if it were parting a lace curtain. A body launched through the door, remained airborne for nearly the entire length of the Cadillac, then folded like so much laundry into the gravel in front of it.

“Good night, Dawg,” said a deep voice from the doorway. The door closed gently against the jamb, bouncing once.

“Ivy doesn't go by the name of Dawg around here, by any chance?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Why the hell is he scoring junk in this godforsaken joint when he could be buying it from you?”

“Because I sell Mexican tarball. Here he gets China white.”

It seemed like the difference between hydrozine and rocket fuel, but Lavinia put me straight. “It's the difference between fried rat and poached veal.”

“Oh.”

Emil's music segued to
Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.
“Hey,” I said, still speaking softly, “Otis wrote that in Sausalito.”

“So?”

“It had to have been forty years ago. Maybe more.”

Lavinia made no response.

“I was a bartender then. I—”

“Shh, quiet,” she whispered.

The eighty-sixed customer was pulling himself up by the Cadillac's bumper. At length he stood, more or less erect, keeping one hand on the car's trunk lid to steady himself. He wore a rumpled brown suit, a tan shirt, and a yellow tie with a tie tack that twinkled when it caught the light. Despite the relative composure of his dress, it looked as if he hadn't changed clothes in weeks. With his free hand he brushed at his clothing ineffectively.

“A lifetime ago,” I whispered.

“Yours, maybe,” she answered, her voice nearly inaudible.

The man muttered curses steadily and incoherently, but also calmly and quite deliberately. He batted at the creases in his pant legs and tautened the lapels of his jacket. Dust motes circulated in the air beneath the fluorescent sign. As he turned in the light, not six feet away, we could see that the whites of his eyes were yellow and webbed by exploded capillaries. His face was ghastly, its high cheekbones accented by emaciation, its skin aged and lined and sufficiently dessicated and taut as to render its features skeletal. Abruptly he leaned against the Cadillac. He took a careful look around. His eyes passed over the windscreen of the Lexus without betraying any recognition of our presence. Then he stood nearly erect and ambulated past the hood of the Lexus. When he leaned forward, his feet sped to catch up, and when he leaned back, they slowed down. Though neither Lavinia nor I had any reason to fear this man, we both held our breath as he passed.

Three cars down the line he stopped at the trunk of a two-tone brown Oldsmobile and began fumbling in the side pocket of his jacket.

The spring on the screen door stretched and the door opened and closed again, patting its stops. Lavinia and I turned as one to watch Ivy walk briskly along the length of the Eldorado. He rounded its trunk but at the gap between the Lexus and the Cadillac he froze in his tracks. As one, Lavinia and I followed his gaze.

The trunk lid of the Oldsmobile stood open, and the man in the brown suit was breaking down a double-barreled shotgun.

I leaned over the passenger seat and carefully gripped the passenger door armrest. Lavinia watched me curiously.

“We'd best be leaving,” I hissed.

She pulled the transmission lever into gear, and our brake lights lit up the entire front wall of Emil's Grotto, in scarlet. As the car idled past Ivy I released the door and he tumbled into the passenger seat. “Go,” he rasped hoarsely.

The man in the brown suit heard our tires on the gravel, closed the breach, and looked up. I slapped the back of the driver's seat. “Go, go!”

Lavinia stomped the accelerator. A mistake. The poor girl had probably never driven a car on an unpaved surface in her life. The front wheels of the Lexus began churning gravel up along its own undercarriage. As she cranked them to the right, as if hopefully, toward the lights of Fruitvale Avenue, the left rear of the Lexus banged the right front fender of the Firebird, parked to our left.

“Back off!” I shouted. “Back off!”

“Steer toward the skid!” Ivy shouted. But he grabbed the wheel.

“No more drivers!” I yelled, and chopped the side of my hand down between Ivy and Lavinia, breaking his grip. Ivy knew I was right. But this was Ivy Pruitt. A smile stole over his features and morphed into a grin. “It's on you, baby
….
”

Lavinia straightened the car before it ran into a willow tree in the yard of an incongruously cute bungalow directly across the road from Emil's Grotto, but not before she scythed a rut through its lawn. The Lexus regained the street but its front end continued coasting toward Emil's Grotto while its tail wallowed the other way, the entire machine rotating slowly if loudly over the gravel like a coracle adrift in white water. Lavinia recovered from this course, too, however, sawing gamely at the wheel without, unfortunately, backing off the throttle, so that gravel alternately sprayed the row of vehicles in front of Emil's and the rustic clapboards of the bungalow as she corrected her over-corrections, with agonizingly little forward progress. Finally she got the car aimed properly at Fruitvale Avenue, but with still no more than thirty yards separating us from the man with the shotgun, who by then had been granted all the time he needed to bring the stock up to his shoulder, to close one eye, and to sight along the gun's length. He pulled both triggers, and the back window of the Lexus abruptly disintegrated.

Lavinia screamed. The tires got a grip and screamed, too, as they suddenly found pavement under them, at which point Lavinia gamely floored it again. We accelerated as fast as that car would accelerate until we made the corner at Fruitvale, where Lavinia remembered to brake slightly before she ran the stop sign and took a right. We hadn't gone a block before Ivy calmly told her to slow down. She slowed down. Ivy took a look over the back of the passenger seat, then he looked down. There, he found me on the floor, jammed between the seats and flocked in safety glass, looking back up at him. I would have called him a choice motherfucker, but I didn't feel like swallowing glass to do it.

Ivy shifted his eyes toward the hole that used to be the back window and sucked a tooth. “I used to score my shit in a penthouse in Pacific Heights,” he said. “But you know what, hoss?” He grinned at Fruitvale Avenue, unreeling behind us, and shook his head. “I just couldn't get along with those people.”

Chapter Eight

I
STRETCHED OUT ON THE FLOOR.
L
AVINIA PACED AND SMOKED
a cigarette. Ivy milled cocaine, the entire eightball, by means of a little red device designed to the purpose. Under its inch-and-a-half dome lay a screen through which, by twisting its top, coarse granules of cocaine were ground into a fine powder, which collected in a small cup that formed the mill's base.

Having processed the cocaine to his satisfaction, Ivy carefully deposited its refined dust onto the back of his all-purpose blue plate, rapping the screen lightly with the blade of his clasp knife.

He repeated the process with the heroin. He took his time, too. Like many dope fiends, Ivy Pruitt toyed with his monkey for as long as possible before allowing it to sink its teeth into him.

I slept like a poleaxed manatee for maybe twenty minutes, weightless in an amnion of exhaustion, then awoke with a gasp, only to find Lavinia watching me. “He's dreaming he's unemployed.” Ivy suggested she leave me alone since, if I never woke up, there'd be that much dope for the two of them.

I've mentioned that Ivy's apartment was pristine excepting certain moral issues, and this was true. It betrayed the almost neurotic attentions of a tenant who spent a lot of time wide awake with nothing to think about except dirt and nothing to do except relentlessly pursue it. I've also noted that the apartment was almost empty of possessions; but, looking straight across the floor, I spotted an overlooked cache of books stacked between the hot water heater and the sink cabinet. Since I knew Ivy for one of the waxing majority of global spawn who rarely read anything, let alone a book, I concluded that, having found this heap on the street or stolen them out of the back of a car, Ivy intended to sell them to second-hand bookstores in Berkeley. I let my eyes descend the spines of the dustjackets, and soon discerned a pattern. The books were
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse,
Brave New World
and
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley,
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer,
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
by Tibetans presumably,
Selected Poetry of Ho Chi Minh, The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir,
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
by Thomas De Quincey,
Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver,
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg,
Naked Lunch
by William Burroughs,
The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward
by H.P. Lovecraft,
The Mind Parasites
and
The Outsider
by Colin Wilson,
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein,
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey,
The Bell Jar
and
Selected Poems
by Sylvia Plath,
New American Poetry
edited by Donald Allen,
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller,
Justine
by the Marquis de Sade,
The Joyous Cosmology
by Alan Watts,
Nine Chains to the Moon
by R. Buckminster Fuller,
Tarantula
by Bob Dylan,
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
by Philip K. Dick, and
LSD My Problem Child
by A.B. Hoffman. At the base of the stack, like a sturdy pedestal to a column of questionable entasis, lay a thick
American Heritage Dictionary
, with dustjacket. I dismantled the pile and set aside all but the dictionary.

“These books are brand new,” I observed, “with a common design, excepting the dictionary. What gives?”

“They sent the dictionary as a perk,” Ivy said, not looking up from his task, “when I signed up with The Sixties Book Club.”

“What's the big deal with the Sixties, anyway?” Lavinia asked, browsing through the stack.

“Nobody can remember,” I said.

“I intend to collect them all,” Ivy said.

“So you can sell them,” I deduced.

“Of course.” Ivy nodded contentedly. “They send a book every week. If you don't send it back within ten days, that means you've accepted it, and they send you a bill. Eight ninety-five each, including postage.” He dipped a moistened fingertip into the powder on the back of the saucer and scrubbed the gums above and below his incisors with it. “Book dealers prefer their books unread, you know. It increases a book's value.” He smacked his lips.

“And how much are these worth, on Telegraph Avenue?”

“Two bucks, two-fifty. Although that dictionary,” he pointed the damp pinky, “should bring twenty-five or thirty.”

“Beats a job,” I said, leafing through it.

“I'll never sink that low again. Don't tear the jacket.”

“‘Cocaine',” I read aloud. “‘A colorless or white crystalline alkaloid, C
₁₇
H
₂₁
NO
₄
, extracted from coca leaves, sometimes used in medicine as a local anesthetic especially for the eyes, nose, or throat and widely used as an illicit drug for its euphoric and stimulating effects.'”

“Only illicit since the Marijuana Tax Act of 1938,” Ivy pedantically pointed out. He smiled. “But why quibble?”

“‘Etymology',” I continued. “‘French
cocaïne
, from coca; coca, from Spanish. See coca—' merely one entry up the column, as it happens. ‘1. Any of certain Andean evergreen shrubs or small trees of the genus Erythroxylum, especially E. coca, whose leaves contain cocaine and other alkaloids. 2. The dried leaves of such a plant, chewed by people of the Andes for a stimulating effect. Etymology: Spanish, from Quech•ua—'”

Lavinia interrupted her pacing. “What?”

I churned pages until I achieved the Qs. “‘1. The Quechuan language of the Inca empire, now widely spoken throughout the Andes highlands from southern Colombia to Chile. 2. a. A member of a South American Indian people originally constituting the ruling class of the Inca empire
….
Etymology: Spanish, from Quechua'—get this—‘
plunderer
.'”

Lavinia got it. “The Conquistadors called the Incas
plunderers?
”

“So it would appear.”

“I'm changing the climate,” she said. “Ask me how.”

“There's nothing like a little etymology for fetching up the odd, telling epistemic relativism,” I observed.

“Is that the same as irony?” Lavinia asked.

“Now for the 'aitches.” I turned pages. “‘Heroin. A white, odorless, bitter crystalline compound, C
₁₇
H
₁₇
NO(C
₂
H
₃
O
₂
)
₂
, that is derived from morphine and is a highly addictive narcotic. Also called diacetylmorphine. Etymology: German, originally a trademark.'”

Even Ivy took note of that one.

“I
did
change the climate,” Lavinia marveled. “Ask me to do it again.”

“There's nothing like a little etymology for fetching up the odd, telling
je ne sais quois
,” I reminded them.

“Those fucking Nazis might win yet,” Ivy observed darkly.

“It's always a possibility,” I agreed. “One more?”

“This is almost as interesting as the drugs themselves,” Lavinia suggested.

“Speak for yourself,” Ivy suggested back.

With the blade of his clasp knife Ivy carefully began to mix the heroin and cocaine, drawing inscrutably calculated amounts of each from their respective heaps, thoroughly dicing them together, then organizing the result into long, thin lines. The table in front of him began to take on the qualities of an aerial photograph of a turkey farm.

Lavinia requested another definition.

“Sure. How about
….
‘Alkaloids: Nicotine, quinine, cocaine, and morphine are known for their poisonous or medicinal attributes
….
'”

“Mostly poisonous, you bet,” Lavinia commented.

“But oh so medicinal,” Ivy reassured us.

“Last etymology,” I promised. “‘Alkalai. From Middle English, from Medieval Latin, from Arabic al-qalIy, the ashes of saltwort, which comes from al, the + qalIy, ashes, which in turn is from qalAY, which means … to fry.'”

“Perfect!” Lavinia squealed.

“Ah to fry,” Ivy agreed appreciatively, “lonely as a bird.”

“Lonely as a crowd,” Lavinia corrected, “and,” she reflected, “Arabic.”

“Sons of bitches might win yet,” Ivy speculated.

“On the other hand,” I closed the dictionary, “heroin is Old World, while both nicotine and cocaine are New World. So the score's two to one. Who knows?” I rapped my knuckles on the floor. “The Last Superpower Standing might win yet.”

“Globalism!” said Lavinia. “Cigarettes and cocaine all round!”

“It's no wonder we are the last superpower,” put in Ivy.

“I like the emphasis on ‘we,'” I told him. “It conveys solidarity.”

“Always glad to be of service. Although,” Ivy added thoughtfully, “when that superpower is nothing but one big we, when there's nobody left out, when it's truly global, then we'll see what's what.” He produced a candy-striped drinking straw and set about knifing it into three equal lengths. “Marx predicted, a century and a half ago, that when capitalism goes global, it will destroy itself.”

I frowned. Hadn't this idea come up already? “It sounds like Marx had more faith in capitalism than I do,” I remarked suspiciously.

Lavinia narrowed her eyes. “How the fuck did Marx know that?”

“Better you should ask,” I suggested, “how does Ivy Pruitt know it?”

“I'm going to be more specific than that,” Lavinia said, as we gravitated toward the table. “How can we sit here doing drugs knowing, as we now know, that dedicated, talented, intelligent and well-funded people are determined to destroy us and our way of life?”

“Same way we sat here doing drugs before we knew it,” Ivy pointed out. He handed a two-inch section of straw to each of us. “Keep your straw to yourself because, you know, Hepatitis C is extremely communicable.” He snapped a finger.

Transgressing the boundary between cosmetics and flesh, Lavinia inserted an end of a straw into one of her petite nostrils and bent over the array of lines.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“A mere fleck of contaminated blood in a dollop of mucus,” Ivy replied, watching Lavinia, “is all it takes to transmit the virus that causes Hepatitis C.”

“Ivy,” I said. “Are you—?”

“If a straw has your number on it,” Ivy interrupted, leaning into his own pair of lines, “then it has your number on it.” He snorted twice, smoothly and deliberately, then sat back in his chair with a satisfied air. “Son of a bitch, at fucking last, I am one with my numinosity. Curly, you're on deck.”

I felt like I was on a deck. If that stack of books from the sixties had tampered with my equilibrium, the idea that Ivy Pruitt might have an incurable and fatal disease seriously moiled it.

As I leaned over the table to do my pair of lines, however, I gave everybody else a reason to be nauseous, for a steady stream of glass particles cascaded out of the cuff of my shirt, littered the surface of the table, and polluted every single line and heap of dope upon it.

I jerked my arm away, but that reaction only sewed additional fragments over the table, more or less as if I were seeding it for a crop of martini glasses. I couldn't have contaminated the scene more thoroughly if I'd done it deliberately.

The room fell silent.

Earlier, in the street in front of Ivy's place, Lavinia had kindly brushed the glass off my clothes with a folded road map. I had removed my jacket to shake it out, but not my shirt. While there was no hair on my head to capture glass fragments, quite a few had fallen out of the ear that had been uppermost when the window shattered.

If twisting the tip of a finger in that ear would not have been a good idea, snorting speedball cut with the odd particle of glass seemed a worse one.

I straightened up, carefully laid my straw on the table, and stood away.

I cleared my throat.

“Oops?”

“That,” Ivy said, staring dully at the table, “does not count as positive feedback.”

Lavinia sniffed. “We are experiencing technical difficulties.” She looked hopefully at Ivy. “Should we stayed tuned?”

“I might be able to think again in about sixty seconds,” said Ivy. “Stand by.”

“We could cook it up and geeze it,” Lavinia said hopefully.

“That's bright,” I said. “Even supposing that you enjoy needlework, a single particle of ground glass is bound to give you a rush, as it courses through your bloodstream.”

“Hell,” Lavinia sniffled defiantly, “if impurities in drugs killed junkies, there wouldn't be any junkies.”

“I didn't mean to suggest it would kill you,” I said patronizingly. “I meant to infer that it would be an unusual experience. Sensational, possibly.”