“Better not. Its not for everybody, and if
it’s
not for you, it can be dangerous.”
They left him watching
Let’s Make a Deal
on a little portable black-and-white TV set, whose picture each time the fighters came over got scrambled into sharp fragments it seemed would never reassemble, but in the silences between sorties they returned, as if through some form of mercy peculiar to zomes.
tito and doc
drove till they saw a motel with a sign reading,
Welcome Toobfreex! Best Cable in Town!
and they decided to check in. Time-zone issues too complicated for either of them to understand had leveraged the amount of programming available here, network and independent, to some staggering scale, and creative-minded cable managers were not slow to exploit the strange hiccup in space-time
...
Everybody was here to watch something. Soap enthusiasts, old-movie buffs, nostalgia lovers had driven here hundreds, even thousands, of miles to bathe in these cathode rays, as water connoisseurs in Grandmother
’s
day had once visited certain spas. Hour after hour, they wallowed and gazed, as the sun wheele
d in the hazy sky and splashing
echoed off the tiles of the indoor pool and housekeeping carts went squeaking to and fro.
The remote-control units were bolted to the ends of the beds, and
cycling through all the choices seemed to take longer than whatever you
wanted to see was likely to stay on, but somehow about the time Docs
thumb muscles went into spasm, he happened onto a John Garfield Mar
athon that had been in progress for, he gathered, weeks now. And there
about to begin was another John Garfield movie that James Wong Howe had also been DP on,
He Ran All the Way
(1951), not one of Doc’s favor
ites, to tell the truth—it was John Garfield’s last picture before the anti-subversives finally did him in, and it had the smell of blacklist all over it—Dalton Trumbo wrote the script, but there was another name on the
credits. John Garfield played a criminal on the run who picks up Shelley
Winters at a public pool and proceeds to make life disagreeable for her family, obliging them at gunpoint, for example, to eat a gross-looking
prop turkey (“Ya gonna eat dis toikey!”), and for his miserably misspent life he ends up, literally, dead in the gutter, though of course beautifully
lit. Doc had been hoping to drift to sleep in the middle of it, but the last scene found him up and staring, sweat freezing in the air-conditioning. It was somehow like seeing John Garfield die for real, with the whole respectable middle class standing there in the street smugly watching him do it.
Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the
last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship
Enterprise,
Hawai
ian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible
audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam
footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talk
ing celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find
a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of
light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness
...
how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the
time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.
Doc didn’t fall asleep till close to dawn and didn’t really wake up till
they were going over the Cajon Pass, and it felt like he’d just been dream
ing about climbing a more-than-geographical ridgeline, up out of some
worked-out and picked-over territory, and descending into new terrain
along some great definitive slope it would be more trouble than he might
be up to to turn and climb back over again.
FIFTEEN
AROUND NIGHTFALL TITO LET DOC OFF ON DUNECREST, AND IT
was like landing on some other planet. He walked into the Pipeline to find a couple hundred people he didn’t know but who were acting like longtime regulars. Worse, nobody he did know was there at all. No Ensenada Slim or Flaco the Bad, no St. Flip or Downstairs Eddie. Doc looked into Wavos and Epic Lunch, and the Screaming Ultraviolet Brain, and Man of La Muncha, where the menudo got your nose running just looking at it, and each time it was the same story. Nobody he recognized. He thought briefly about going to his apartment but started worrying that he wouldn’t recognize it either or, worse,
it wouldnt know
him
—wouldn’t be there, key wouldn’t fit or something. Then it occurred
to him that maybe Tito had actually dropped him in some
other
beach town, Manhattan or Hermosa or Redondo, and that the bars, eateries, and so forth he’d been walking into were ones that happened to be
simi
larly located
in this other town—same view of the ocean or corner of the
street, for example—so he grasped his head carefully in both hands and,
mentally advising himself to
focus in
and
pay attention,
waited for the next nonthreatening pedestrian to come by.
“Excuse me, sir, I seem to be a little disoriented? could you please tell me if this is by any chance Gordita Beach?” as sanely as he could manage, and instead of running off
in panic after the nearest law
enforcement, this party said, “Wow, Doc, it’s me, you okay? you look
like you’re freaking out,” and after a while Doc dug how this was Denis,
or somebody impersonating Denis, which, in the circumstances, he’d settle for.
“Where is everybody, man?”
“Some college break or something. A lot of junior hell-raisers in town.
I’m sticking close to the tube till it’s over.”
Denis had some dry-ice-enhanced Mexican product, and they went
down on the beach to smoke it. They watched the flashing wing lights of
a single-engine plane, looking fragile and somehow already lost, taking off into the darkening glow over the water.
“How was Vegas, man?”
“Won a bucketful of nickels off a slot machine.”
“Far out. Listen. Guess who’s back.”
The way Denis was looking at him, it couldn’t be anybody else. Doc torched up a Kool but lit the wrong end and didn’t notice for a while. “What’s she up to?”
“Could you put that thing out, that’s some evil-smelling shit.”
“Or to rephrase it—who’s she with?”
“Nobody, far as I know. She’s staying at Flip’s place over that surf shop in El Porto? The Saint split for Maui.”
“How’s her spirits?”
“Why ask me?”
“I mean, is she paranoid. Does the heat know she’s back? Last I heard,
there’s all these high-priority APBs out on her, what happened to that?”
“She don’t seem too worried.”
“Well, that’s weird.” Had she made some kind of a deal too?
“We could walk up there if you want,” said Denis.
For any number of reasons, Doc thought not. Denis went drifting off to watch Lawrence Welk. “What?” Doc couldn’t help commenting.
“Something about Norma Zimmer,” Denis called over his shoulder, “I’m still figuring out what, exactly.”
The key worked, the place hadn’t be
en robbed or rifled, the plants
were still alive. Doc watered everything, put coffee on to percolate, and called Fritz.
“Your girlfriend
’s
back,” Fritz announced, and fell silent.
After a while, growing irritated, Doc said, “Yeah and her front ain’t too bad either. So what?”
“According to the ARPAnet, Shasta Fay Hepworth showed up day
before yesterday at LAX. Plus which, the FBI, who can somehow moni
tor me now when
I’m
jacked in, keeps coming around asking what my
interest in her is. You mind telling me what the hell’s going on?”
Doc recapped the trip to Vegas, or what he remembered, interrupting himself ten minutes in to point out, “Of course if they can tap your com
puter lines, the phone here ought to be duck soup for them.”
“Oops,” agreed Fritz. “But continue.”
“Yeah well Mickey seems to be in one piece, the feds have got him on
ice. Glen Charlock is still dead, but hey, who cares about the criminal element, right?”
He complained for a minute and a half more till Fritz said, “Well, it’s
your problem now. This ARPAnet trip is eating up my time, which is bet
ter spent chasing after all them hardened skips and deadbeats, so I think
I’m gonna take a break. If there’s anything else, maybe you better ask now, cause it’s about to be back to the world of flesh and blood for old F.D.”
“Let’s see,” Doc said, “there’s Puck Beaverton....”
“Recall doing a little business with a party of that name way back when. What about him?”
“I don’t know,” Doc said. “Something.”
“Some weird acid vibe.”
“You got it.”
“Some strange inexpressible imbalance in the laws of karma.”
“Knew you’d understand.”
“Doc...”
“Don’t say it. That kid Sparky still working for you?”
“Come on around, I’ll introduce you. Also got some of this new shit,
they call it ‘Thai stick’? Kind of gummy but once you get it lit.
..
”
No sooner had Doc hung up than the phone rang again, and it was Bigfoot, who started right in. “So! The elusive Miss Hepworth it seems has rejoined your little community of drug-ravaged misfits.”
“Wow, no shit? News to me.”
“Oh, that’s right—you’ve been temporarily off the planet again. Phone calls, in-person visits, nothing has seemed to work. You know how anxious we get.”
“Little R&R. Wish I had your work ethic.”
“No you don’t. Any developments on the Coy Harlingen matter?”
“Chasin
down one bum lead after another
’s
all.”
“Any of them include young
...
what was his name again, Beaver-ton, I believe?”
Fuck off, Bigfoot. “Traced Puck as far as West Hollywood, but nobody’s seen him since Mickey did his board fade.”
“As for Dr. Blatnoyd and his unfortunate sports injury, we did mention your interesting puncture-wound theory to Dr. Noguchi’s people— inquired about testing for copper-gold dental alloys and so on, and one of them smiled strangely and said, ‘Mind if we call in the lab on this one?’ ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Wonderful. Oh, Dwayne!’ and in bounded this vicious Labrador retriever with, I must say, such an unhelpful attitude that we all became rather discouraged.”
“Gee and they’re supposed to be such great kids’ dogs—”
“We have one in this house, actually.”
“Only thought it’d be a helpful tip to a fellow professional—just tryin
save you some trouble down the line
’s
all
...
.”
“How’s that?”
“When your own hearing comes up.”
“My
...
Sportello, are you suggesting—”
Doc allowed himself one evil grin a week, and tonight was the night. “All’s I’m saying is, is if it happened to Thomas Noguchi, the most brilliant medical examiner in the USA, well, who among you protect-and-servers is safe? One county supervisor with a bug up his ass is all it takes.”
Total silence.
“Bigfoot?”
“I had been enjoying a quiet family evening with Mrs. Bjornsen and the children, and the dog, watching Lawrence Welk, and now see what you’ve done.”
Doc heard an extension being picked up. A woman’s voice with a steep front edge to it and very short decay time said, “Is everything all right, Kitkat?”
“What’s this,” Doc said.
“This
is Mrs. Chastity Bjornsen, and if
that
is one more sociopathic ‘special employee’ of my husband, I’ll thank you to stop harassing him on his day off, as he has quite enough to do all week trying to keep dopers and lowlifes like yourself off the streets.”
“There
there, my lit
tle boysenberry. Sportello’s only been indulging in his idea of humor.”
“Doc
Sportello?
The
Doc Sportello? So! at last! Mr. Moral Turpitude
himself! Have you any idea of the therapist bills around here for which you are directly responsible?”
“Now, Snookums, the Department picks up most of that—”
“After a deductible that would choke a horse, and meanwhile, Chris
tian, I quite fail to understand
your
spineless response to this wretched hippie freak with his unending provocations—”
Doc discovered he was out of cigarettes. He put the receiver on the kitchen table and went looking for his carton of Kools, which after a lengthy search turned up in the icebox, next to the remains of a pizza he’d forgotten about, not all of whose ingredients, though colorful, he
could identify any longer. Feeling despite this a little hungry, he decided
to make a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, located a cold can of Burgie, and started into the other room to flip on the television when he noticed strange noises coming from the phone, whose receiver, actually,
seemed to be off the hook..
..
“Oh.” He went to put the instrument to his ear, though the Bjornsens,
now in full screaming confrontation, h
ad actually been audible across
the kitchen, reviewing some recent personal history, with footnotes, unfamiliar to Doc but still embarrassing, and after a minute or two of
calculating how likely were his chances of getting in even another word,
he replaced the receiver in
it’s
cradle as gently as if he were about to sing it
a lullaby and went in to watch the last couple minutes
of
Adam-12.
The Saturday horror movie tonight was Val Lewton
’s
I
Walked with a Zombie
(1943), hosted by subcultural superstar Larry Vincent, aka “Seymour,” who liked to address his population of faithful viewers as “fringees” and also hosted the annual Halloween show at the Wiltern Theatre, which Doc tried never to miss. He had seen this zombie picture a couple of hundred times and still got confused by the ending, so he spent the news hour rolling joints to help him through, especially
with the calypso singing, but somehow despite his best efforts fell asleep
in the middle, as so often before.