Thorazine Beach

for my mother, Kathleen Eleanor Dain Harris, and my father, Edmund Alexander Harris, and my wife, Elizabeth Joan Deeley, for creating homes built of love and books

The governor of Tun-huang furnished us with all the provisions needed for crossing the desert. We then traveled on with the envoy of a camel train…In this desert are evil spirits and hot winds. Those who encounter them perish, to a man. There are neither birds above nor beasts below. Gazing on all sides, as far as the eye can reach…there is no guidance to be had, save the rotting bones of dead men, which point the way
.

—Fa Hsien,
AD
414

I’m headed to my Thursday night Toastmasters club—the Delta Kings, a loopy little group with a green beans-and-cornbread, church hall sensibility I can’t let go of. I’m on Summer Avenue, a couple of blocks shy of where it crosses Parkway and passes a long run of old houses, crossing Danny Thomas and into the hospital district. Six minutes, I’m thinking, to cut up to Jackson and along to the hall or I’m off the speakers’ list. Then it occurs: This is the Delta Kings, for pity’s sake. Green beans. Ham hocks. Kool-Aid in paper cups. They’ll be fifteen minutes into the hour before the real meeting starts
.

The limo-thing just ahead is pissing me off. It’s huge, and black. The car looks like it’s not only been lengthened but, oddly, widened, too. And old. A sixty-nine-ish, Lincoln-ish look. But all that’s masked somehow under what looks like extra thick, bulging body panels and—then I see it. Thick, dark windows. Massive. Bulletproof glass
.

I change lanes, commit to a right turn on Meyer, and the limo cuts in ahead. Shit. Slow. Like it’s cruising. Middle of the road. And I can’t get by
.

The limo slows even more. Crawls. Ramshackle shotgun houses. An empty lot. Then: a fierce, black wrought-iron fence, more than man-high, each vertical pale ending in a fluted African spear-point. A high-and-tight, golf-course lawn slides up the side of a deliberate embankment, a stepped sidewalk running up the middle. A dozen fonts, fountains, statues, scattered, no particular focus. Faux-Roman, faux-Greek, faux-tasteful. And the house: ridiculously new, comically massive for this neighbourhood. An absurd mix of brick, shiplap, plantation columns, and massive Teutonic oak doors—an evident Po-Mo joke played by some local architect upon someone with more money than art-historical savvy
.

Sudden thought: I know whose car this is. The vanity plate: godsown. Martavius Something. I forget the last name. He did, too, a few years back, when he decided he should be addressed as His Eminence. COGIC, Memphis’s own Church of God in Christ, had spun him out the door as soon as he’d begun preaching in one of their churches that one should, as a matter of protocol, bow to a minister. COGIC itself leans to the grandiose, to begin with. Going to church, for them, means twelve-button Steve Harvey suits, glittering dresses from the Diana Ross collection, some enlarged far beyond Diana’s domain, and massive geometric sequin hats that might have been designed for the Queen of Hearts. What do you do when you’re kicked out of a church? In Memphis, the answer is: Start your own, and go one better than the bunch who dumped you
.

The limo stops. Middle of the street. Doors. One half of The Supremes steps out. Then the other. Heels. Sequins. Balancing huge hats. They stand, either side of the door, one holding it open. Respectful pause. Then…His Eminence
.

Brushes a lapel. Reaches a hand into the limo
.

The other two are busty, brown, statuesque. Now stepping out, under a hastily thrown-over coat, this third one is in something clinging, gold, metallic. She is vaguely Asian. A confection. Tiny. A toy
.

The door shuts. The limo lurches
.

The gleaming quartet starts up the steps toward the house
.

His Eminence takes the rear, herding them up the walk. Turns. Smiles. An astringent stare at me. Turns away
.

“Shut up, Jack. You talk too much. Whaddaya want?”

Doubtless that phrasing isn’t actually
in
the Starbucks barista training manual. But Nikki Jenks had long since written her own instructions, grown her own style. What’s more, people not only put up with it, they liked it. Some of the regulars did, anyway. Guys, especially.
Beat me, baby, make me write bad cheques
.

Nikki wasn’t the manager—just a shift supervisor. But she’d outlived, outdone, and done in at least three managers in the four years I’d been coming to the Summer Avenue ‘Bucks. I knew why I liked her. She wasn’t what you’d call pretty. Cute might be a stretch. But Nikki has…forget it—it’s got no easy name. A smile, an evil wee twinkle, and an always-evident edge you could bleed to death on. And for all that, as Eliot put it, her laughter “tinkled among the teacups.” She’d known that line when I’d first quoted it to her. Knew Milton inside out, and a good smattering of everything from Beowulf to Don DeLillo. She’d been an undergrad in English Lit at Memphis State, she told me, her twenty-something to my noticeably over-forty, around the time I’d been there for grad school, in the nineties. I hadn’t known her in those days, it turned out, didn’t even recognize her. But she’d known who I was. And that’s the way she’d kept it since I’d first popped up at Nikki’s ‘Bucks.

“You people sell coffee?” I ventured. I felt a little like playing today. There was no lineup inside, just a couple of cars at the window, those looked after by some new kid.

“Hell, no,” Nikki said. “We just sell that mocha-chicka-choco-chino crap. You want some of that?”

“Caramel macchiato with a shot?” I said, feeling a touch of surprise at my voice’s rising, question-style. Might as well have been a question—you could
ask
for anything you wanted, but what you’d get was pretty much up to Nikki.

“Okay,” she said. “But skinny for you, today. You been packin’ it on there lately, Poncho.”

“Twist that knife,” I said.

“You love it, honey.”

“Yep.” I rolled my eyes. “And remember, I don’t like foam.”

Fssshht. Hiss. Gurgle. Clank of spoon on counter.

“Licked it off myself, Jack,” she said, turning to set the cup down. “That’ll be thirty-eight dollars.”

“Is it
burned
coffee, Nikki?”

“Course it’s burnt, Jack—you didn’t read the big green sign when you pulled in here? Chick with the wavy hair?”

“I’ll give you a five,” I said, handing her the bill. “You can keep the change.”

“Like I wasn’t gonna.” She rolled her eyes, tossed me a wink.

Inside, business was slow, even for the slowest ‘Bucks in town. I looked around—I was all the business they had at the moment, in fact. I sipped as I stood at the counter, Nikki wiping and fiddling. “You this rude to
all
your customers?”

“Certainly not,” she said without looking up. “They won’t pay as much as you do, so you’re gettin’ the primo.”

“Privileged, then.”

“Quite,” she said.

I looked about once more.

“Jack, your usual seat’s available. Why don’t you grab a
Wall Street Journal
and fake it for a while.” Nikki’s typical way of hinting she was busy. Or didn’t want to talk. This one stung, though. There had been a time—Lynette’s time—when I could look up something in the Dow, the Toronto, or the
NASDAQ
, even the Nikkei, and it would have been legit. All that, it was gone, now. And Nikki didn’t know that history—so cut her some slack, Jack. Or did she know?

I turned to the rack. I actually did feel like having a look at a paper, a local one. But as close as you can get to a newspaper in Memphis is the
Commercial Appeal
. I’d sometimes sneak one to my table without paying, Nikki would pretend not to see, I’d pretend to be absent-minded, and one of the two would always work. “Just don’t wrinkle it before you put it back,” she said,
sotto voce
, and I whispered something to her. “And no coffee rings this time,” she added.

A glance at the front page said all I needed to know. City school’s security guy takes a dive for sexting a fifteen-year-old girl. City councilman’s third
DUI
. City ranked ninety-fourth among nation’s top hundred cities for public safety, places second in homicides per capita. City’s downtown revitalization losing vitality. City becomes major centre for human trafficking. Shipments of Mexican drugs. Shipments of Mexicans. Meth lab in a junior high school boiler room, janitor and assistant principal arrested. God, I love this burg. I tossed the paper back on the rack. Nikki wasn’t even at the counter, but from somewhere I heard, “Good boy, Jack.” Patronizing as hell. But better than the usual, “Cheap bastard.”