“Hey.
..
but as a founding father, don’t you get freaked out a little
with this black apocalypse talk?”
“The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with
the blood of patriots and tyrants,” replied Jefferson. “It is
it’s
natural
Manure.”
“Yeah, and what about when the patriots and tyrants turn out to be
the same people?” said Doc, “like, we’ve got this president now ...”
“As long as they bleed,” explained Jefferson, “is the thing. Meantime,
what are you going to do with the information you’ve just acquired from
Mr. Khalil?”
“Let’s see, what are the choices? Go to the FBI and rat out Tariq and
WAMBAM. Sic the feds onto the Golden Fang, after giving Tariq enough
warning to keep his own ass clear. Tell Bigfoot Bjornsen everything and
let him present it to the PDID or whoever, and let them deal with it. What am I leaving out?”
“Do you begin to detect a common thread here, Lawrence?”
“I can’t trust any of those people?”
“Remember too that Glen’s weapons deal never went through. So you don’t really have to #7/anybody anything. What you
do
have to do, how
ever, is—” He fell abruptly silent and turned back into his ponytailed profile.
“Talking to yourself again,” said Clancy. “You need to find true love,
Doc.”
Actually, he thought, I’ll settle for finding my way through this. His fingers, with a mind of their own, began to creep toward the plastic hedge. Maybe if he searched through it long enough, late enough into the night, he’d find something that might help—some tiny forgotten scrap of his life he didn’t even know was missing, something that would make all the difference now. He said, “I’m happy for you, Clancy, but what happened to that two at a time?”
She gestured with her head back at Tariq, on his way to rejoin them. “Doc, this guy is at
least
two at a time.”
SEVENTEEN
BACK AT HIS PLACE, DOC FOUND SCOTT AND DENIS IN THE
kitchen investigating the icebox, having just climbed in the alley window after Denis, a bit earlier, down at his own place, had fallen asleep as he often did with a lit joint in his mouth, only this time the joint, instead of dropping onto his chest and burning him and waking him up
at least partway, had rolled someplace else among the bedsheets, where
soon it began to smolder. After a while Denis woke, got up, and wandered into the bathroom, thought he would take a shower, sort of got into doing that. At some point the bed burst into flame, burning eventually up through the ceiling, directly above which was his neighbor Chico
’s
water bed, luckily for Chico without him on it, which being plastic melted from the heat, releasing nearly a ton of water through the hole that had by now burned in the ceiling, putting out the fire in Denis’s bedroom while turning the floor into a sort of wading pool. Denis came drifting back from the bathroom, and not able right away to account for what he found, plus getting the fire department, who had now arrived, confused with the police, went running down the alley to Scott Oof
’
s beach place, where he tried to describe what he thought had happened,
basically deliberate sabotage by the Boards, who had never stopped plot
ting against him.
Doc found a White Owl cigar most of whose contents he had tweezed
out and replaced with Humboldt sinsemilla, lit up, inhaled, and started passing it around.
“I don’t see how it could be the Boards, man, really,” exhaled Scott.
“Hey, I saw them,” Denis insisted, “just the other day, lurking in the alley.”
“That was only the bass player and drummer,” Scott said, “we were hanging out. There’s going to be a free concert at Will Rogers Park, they’re calling it a Surfadelic Freak-In? and the Boards want Beer to open for them?”
“Groovy,” said Doc, “congratulations.”
“Yeah,” added Denis, “except they’re totally evil, of course.”
“Well, maybe the label they’re signed with,” Scott admitted, “but.
..
”
“Even Doc thinks they’re zombies.”
“That’s probably true,” Doc said, “but you can’t always blame zombies
for their condition, ain’t like there’s guidance counselors going around, ‘Hey, kid, you ever consider career opportunities with the undead—’”
“Mine told me I should go into real estate,” said Scott, “like my mom.”
“Your mom’s not a zombie,” Denis pointed out.
“Yeah, but you should see some of her co-brokers
...
”
“Just so’s you examine her regularly for bites,” Doc advised, “which is
how it gets transmitted.”
“Anybody understand why they call it ‘real’ estate?” wondered Denis,
who was now rolling a joint.
“Hey Doc,” Scott remembered, “I saw that Coy again, that used to
play with the Boards, who was supposed to be dead only later he wasn’t?”
Doc was just barely not too loaded to ask, “Where?”
“In Hermosa, standing in line outside the Lighthouse?”
Sending Doc off down the Toilet of Memory to when he and Shasta were first dating, evenings hanging out in front of the Lighthouse Cafe,
neither of them able to afford the prices, listening to the jazz from inside
and eating hot dogs from the renown
ed Juicy James stand around the
corner, whose sign featured a giant hot dog with a face, arms and legs, cowboy hat and getup, firing a pair of six-guns and to all appearances
enjoying itself. On Sundays there was always a jam session. Studio musi
cians showed up in rides they had bought with their first big paychecks, to
be redeemed in years to follow from impound lots, winched out of mudslides, preserved from the depredations of divorce lawyers, all replace
ment parts kept authentic for resales that would never happen, fantasies
of the eras when the longings began, Morgans from the showroom up in
Westwood with hoods held down by leather straps, Cobra 289s and ‘62
Bonnevilles and that supernatural DeSoto in which James Stewart, gone round the bend of love, tails Kim Novak in
Vertigo
(1958).
Up at Ojai, Doc and Coy had parted under strange circumstances,
with Coy doing an abrupt fade into the evening, half angry, half desper
ate, after Docs sort of half promise that he’d look for some way for Coy
to cut loose of the countersubversives who were running him. Except for the quick once-over Bigfoot let him have at Coy’s LAPD file, Doc hadn’t
made much progress with this, and he may have been feeling guilty,
because technically he was supposed to be working for Hope, too.
So he thought he’d take a stroll down to Pier Avenue. The palm trees
along the Strand cast shadows through the fog with
it
s
usual chemical smell, the Juicy James sign glowed cheerfully smudged at some uncertain distance, and there in front of the Lighthouse, sure enough, was Coy, among a ragged line of hipsters nodding to the music, Bud Shank today and some rhythm section.
Doc waited for a break between sets and said howdy, expecting another Invisible Man number, but right now Coy had the look of a
sailor on liberty, willing to live inside the moment till he had to be back
in some condition of servitude.
“I got to take the day off.” He checked the light over the ocean. “But it looks like maybe I’m about to be AWOL.”
“You need a ride back up to Topanga? Long as I don’t have to come in
with you, that is.”
“Oh, that all got fixed. Now everything’s cool.”
“‘Drac’s a part of the band’?”
“Seriously. It was the chicks. None of them could handle it anymore,
so they all got together and kicked in and hired an exorcist. Some Buddhist priest from the Temple downtown. He came up one day and did his thing, and now the Boards and the house are all officially dezom-bified. They gave him a maintenance contract to run regular psychic perimeter checks.”
“Did any of the band, like, suddenly recognize you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. It don’t matter as much as it used to.”
The fog had thickened by the time they reached the car. Doc and Coy got in, and Doc put the wipers on for a couple of cycles, and they headed up Pier Avenue.
“Chisel one of your smokes?” Coy said. Doc reached him the pack off
the dashboard and pushed in the lighter and took a left on Pacific Coast Highway. “Hey, what’s this button here?”
“Uh, maybe not, that’s the—” They were submerged in the bone-shaking reverberations of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive.” Doc found the volume knob. “—the Vibrasonic. Takes up half the trunk, but it’s there when you need it.”
Going under the runway at the airport, they lost the music for a minute and Doc said, “So the Boards really aren’t so evil anymore?”
“Maybe confused now and then. You know a band that isn’t?”
“You back playin with them now?”
“Workin on it.” Doc knew there was more coming. “See, I always needed to think somebody gave a shit. When the call came from Vigilant California, it was like, somebody’s been watching all the time, somebody who wants me,
sees
something in me I never guessed was there
...
”
“A gift,” they told him, “for projecting alternate personalities, infiltrating, remembering, reporting back.”
“A spy,” Coy translated. “A snitch, a weasel.”
“A very well-paid actor,” they replied, “and without groupies or paparazzi or know-nothing audiences to worry about.”
It would mean kicking heroin, or at least the kind of habit he had then. They told him stories about junkies who had gained control of their addictions. It was called “the Higher Discipline,” more demanding than religious or athletic or military discipline because of the abyss
you had to dare successfully every moment of every day. They took Coy
to meet some of these transcended junkies, and he was amazed at their
energy, their color, the bounce in their stride, the improvisational quick
ness of mind. If Coy performed up to spec or beyond, there would also
be the bonus incentive of a once-a-year fix of Percodan, then regarded as
the Rolls-Royce of opiates.
Of course, it would mean leaving Hope and Amethyst for good. But nobody at home, he kept reminding himself, had been happy for a real long time, and the Viggies promised to send Hope an anonymous one-time payment, suggesting strongly that it was from Coy. It would
have to look like something he’d left them in a will, however, because in
order to carry out this particular job he must assume one or more new identities, and the old identity of Coy Harlingen must cease to be.
“Fake my death? Oh, I don’t know, man, I mean, that’s really bad karma. Don’t know if I want to what Little Anthony & the Imperials call ‘tempt the hand of fate,’ you know?”
“Why think of this as death? why not reincarnation instead? Everybody wishes they had a different life. Here’s your opportunity. Plus you get to have fun, to take chances with your ass unparalleled even in the
world of heroin abuse, and the pay is far, far better than scale, assuming
you ever worked for scale.”
“Can I get some new choppers?”
“False teeth? That could be arranged.”
The fix was also in, they assured him, with Coy’s dealer, El Drano, to
provide some especially lethal unstepped-on China White to be found
at the scene of the overdose. Coy was advised to use only enough to be
plausible in the emergency room but not enough to kill him.
“Not my favorite part of the caper,
” Coy confessed to Doc. “It was
like, I better not fuck up this time, I better have my wits about me, and
of course I didn’t. As it was, I nearly ate the Big Wiener anyway.”
“Where’d your dealer get this heroin from?” Doc asked as pretty much a formality.
“Some bunch of heavies who bring it in direct—not the connection El Drano usually dealt with. Whoever they were, they had him scared shitless, even though he was just the cutout guy, in there to keep it from being traced back to this other source. But they kept telling him, ‘Never say a word.’ Silence, that was their big thing. So when he showed up floating in the canal the other day, you know, naturally I couldn’t help but wonder?”
“Could
’ve
been anything, though,” Doc said, “he had a long history.”
“Maybe.”
Eventually, like other turned souls before him, Coy put in some discomfort time at the Chryskylodon program kicking heroin, from which visits to the Smile Maintenance Workshop of Rudy Blatnoyd, D.D.S., seemed almost like vacations. The new teeth meant a new embouchure, and that also took some adjusting, but finally, one night there he was in a toilet stall at LAX, passing compromising notes on toilet paper under the partition to a state legislator with hidden sexual longings whom the Viggies wished to have, as they put it, “on the team.” After this—he guessed—audition, the assignments gradually got more demanding— preparation sometimes included reading Herbert Marcuse and Chairman Mao and the comprehension issues that came along with that, plus daily workouts at a dojo in Whittier, dialect coaching in outer Hollywood, evasive driving lessons out in Chatsworth.