The Nirvana Blues (6 page)

“But he shit a rainbow,” Michael felt compelled to add.

“Fluff Dimaggio and Wilkerson Busbee are also with them.” Nancy spoke lazily, oozing soporific sexy vibes.

Joe rolled his eyes dramatically: “Oi vay.” Fluff, a former Seattle junkie refugee from the Boeing factory and currently a born-again Hanuman freak, played bass in Joe's ragtag rock band whenever they could get a gig. Wilkerson Busbee, another guiding light of the Simian Foundation's Chamisaville branch, was a successful local hippie entrepreneur, who controlled, among other things, a Winnebago dealership, a log-home-and-plywood-tipi franchise, an herbal tea company, a head shop (Tibet, Ltd.), and the Blue Star Taxi Service.

“They're planning to drive day and night,” Nancy said. “They should be here by Tuesday.”

“Well, I certainly wish 'em good luck.” Joe waved stupidly back at her as he veered past the monkey paraphernalia into the bar. Sasha grimaced mordantly, then winked and sneered. Nancy cocked her head provocatively and called after him:

“Enjoy yourself!”

*   *   *

I
N THE CROWDED
and noisy bar, a band wearing EAT ME T-shirts was playing a song called “Why Don't We Do It in the Road?” The lead singer, Jeff Orbison, another Hanuman-nik, did landscaping for the Ragtime Flowershop in town, an operation launched recently by a young Bostonian, Gil Forrester, who had dropped out of law school to seek his fortune in less hyper environs. Last year, in a mountaintop Zen ceremony, Jeff had married Heidi Miniver's good friend, Suki Terrell, a petite girl with soft walnut-colored hair who had done some time at a Zen retreat near San Francisco called Tassajara. Only a month ago, in need of more space (both inner and outer), Suki had divorced Jeff, and he was floundering, planting boxwoods and marigolds by day, singing and boozing himself into a trenchant stupor every night. After a brief lesbian fling with Gil Forrester's estranged old lady, Adele, Suki could now be seen around town on the back of Randall Tucker's motorcycle.

The incestuous interrelationships among his friends and acquaintances never failed to amaze Joe. It seemed as if everybody (except him and Heidi) had at one time or another screwed everybody else. Often Joe hungered longingly for a part in the apparently easy sexual theater they were all engaged in. At other times, finding their nonchalant copulations horrendously tawdry, he was proud of himself and Heidi and their coherent and loving little family with its firm moral and ethical foundation. Not for them the bizarre shenanigans of Chamisaville's screwing-pool denizens!

Casting a nervous glance around the crowded bar, Joe ascertained that he knew at least half the people there. Starting with Skipper Nuzum, the decadent young securities whiz from Los Angeles—he owned this bar and the movie theater. Skipper was married to an eye-catching lady named Natalie Gandolf; she claimed to have been Cherokee in her previous life and kept a pet llama on their estate. Skipper himself, a large, flabby, sensitive, and educated gangster-poet with pitch-black hair, hangdog eyes, and a raggedy 1890s moustache that appeared always to be caked with molasses and dead flies, had flair. He wore leather vests (his wife, a Sumi vegetarian as well as a monkey disciple, wouldn't don anything made from animals), magenta silk shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons, and pre-faded flarecuffed jeans above polished J. C. Penney's work boots.

Tonight, Skipper was seated over at a table with one of his primary henchmen, Cobey Dallas, the Iowa farm boy to whom he leased both the theater and the cantina operations. Next to Cobey sat a lesser flunky—a ticket taker, an all-around troubleshooter and sometime accountant: Roger Petrie. A tiny, effeminate, Harvard-educated economist, Roger drove a repainted hearse, and his various uniforms invariably included black, long-sleeved turtleneck jerseys, a slim silver cross on a fragile silver chain, and scads of turquoise bracelets.

Cobey, an alcoholic Tiparillo-smoking entrepreneur, would have denied he had an anthropology master's from Kansas if anyone asked him. He saw himself as a cross between a Runyonesque Nathan Detroit and P. T. Barnum. A high-strung, inordinately intelligent huckster with aesthetic sensibilities, he perused T. S. Eliot and Richard Eberhart in his spare time and dreamed of somehow becoming a millionaire before he reached thirty. He wore a beret indoors and out, subscribed to
The Wall Street Journal,
and jogged seven miles a day. Annie, his wife, had a radio talk show—“The Chamisaville Forum”—on which she interviewed local culture heroes three times weekly.

Joe also happened to know that Cobey Dallas was trying hard to raise cash to buy Eloy Irribarren's land. In between Jeff Orbison, Adele Forrester, and Randall Tucker, Suki Terrell had had a brief secret fling with Cobey, and she had told Heidi that Cobey was embezzling from Skipper Nuzum, in hopes of amassing the bread to buy Eloy's virginal diminutive spread.

Actually, according to Joe's pal Tribby Gordon—the lawyer in charge of Cobey's (though not Skipper's) affairs (of a financial nature)—Cobey's accountant, Roger Petrie, was doing the embezzling. “In return,” Tribby told Joe one day out on the Rio Puerco while they cast for trout, “Cobey has promised to deed to Roger the water rights once he gets the land.” And the water rights, according to Tribby, would probably go, if sold to a new motel, hotel, or other business trying to hook up to town water, for at least ten thousand bucks an acre-foot.

Cobey himself made no bones about how he planned to develop that land. On the back acre he would build a Born-Again Laundromat, where Jesus freaks and other spiritual groupies could wash their clothes with vegetarian or herbal soaps, one-hundred-percent pure well water (guaranteed from the fourth aquifer), and completely biodegradable bleaches and other laundering agents.

In the front part of the property he hoped to construct an alligator wrestling pen and pool. The snouts of the small gators would be bound with leather belts so nobody could be bitten. And the prize to any tourist capable of pinning one of the beasts would be a miniature Bible, or a plastic cross that glowed in the dark, or a fluorescent portrait of Jesus. The theme, in keeping with the spiritual nature of his complex, would be “Wrestle a Gator for Christ.”

One thing Cobey did not know: Roger Petrie was a double agent. He reported the embezzlements in detail to Skipper Nuzum as they occurred, and for a substantial remuneration into the bargain. In this way Skipper kept tabs on his financial empire. At least, so said Tribby Gordon.

According to Tribby, “Skipper figures he'll give Cobey enough rope to hang himself. He may even let it reach the point where Cobey buys Eloy's land. Then he'll lower the boom, file charges, send Cobey to jail, and grab the land as legal restitution for some of his losses.”

“What does Skipper want with more land?” Joe had asked. “A million acres already isn't enough?”

“He couldn't care less. But Natalie wants it for the Simian Foundation: she's working hand in hand with Nikita Smatterling and Nancy Ryan to obtain it for the temple site.”

Meantime, if what Heidi had gathered from Roger Petrie's ex–girl friend, Bliss Chamberlain, could be trusted, Roger himself had his eye on Eloy's property. He knew Skipper was going to lower the boom on Cobey once Cobey had the land, but he figured he could manipulate some money out of the embezzlements into his own bank account. More importantly, having separated the water rights from the land before Skipper's agents could ram the case into (let alone through) a court, he would sell them quickly to a buyer who'd already made a large downpayment (held in escrow) to assure them for himself once the deal went down. With all that instant cash, Roger would be in a position to buy out Eloy, if the old geezer was still involved, or to wield a heavy hand in any auction that occurred.

The buyer who had already made a substantial downpayment on the water rights was Eloy's flamboyant lawyer, Scott Harrison. Scott expected that he himself would wind up in control of the property, on which he planned to build a tax-exempt Universal Life Church, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. His major goal in life, according to his sometime mistress, Annie Dallas (who'd confided this to her good friend, the Cinema Bar waitress Diana Clayman), was to salvage Eloy's beautiful property (in Eloy's name) from the school of sharks intent upon either its ownership or dismemberment, and then grab it himself as payment for his services. He foresaw complications, however, sensing that Skipper Nuzum's convoluted procedures represented significant dangers to his own plotting. Hence he thought to tilt the scales in his favor by sewing up those gallivanting water rights if at all possible, even if, in the end, it turned out they could not be legally separated from the terrain in the manner he'd chosen.

Through all this, Joe's major ace in the hole was the fact that Eloy liked him and would try everything under the sun to see that he wound up with the property.

Joe had started toward the Nuzum-Dallas-Petrie table when Diana Clayman slipped an arm around his waist, giving him a squeeze. “What are you up to, Joe? You look terrible.”

His heart deep-dived, his crotch prickled. Diana was twenty-five, a classics scholar from McGill, born and bred and bored stiff in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She loved the ancient Greeks, gave poetry readings with one of the groups in town, roomed with two idiotic teen-age female junkies when not visiting her occasional boyfriend (a harbinger of malice known simply as Angel Guts), and always had car trouble. Her raven hair and snow-white skin aroused him. Her heroes were Robert Graves, Antonin Artaud, and Baudelaire. Joe had met her several times in bars accompanied by her menacing “Apache” with his horribly pitted skin. This sidekick posed as a silversmith: he refused to talk with white men except when drug deals were going down. Diana had enormous dark eyes and an altogether melancholy world-weary mien until she smiled. Then her face bloomed, her mouth radiated radiance.

“I feel okay,” Joe said. “I mean, my kids are healthy, I just put some earnest money on a beautiful piece of land, and if everything goes without a hitch, we're gonna build a house this summer. It's all falling together. I'm gonna be a secure and happy man.”

“Oh you poor thing.” Stretching, she brushed her lips against his cheek, touching almost hidden, yet impossibly full breasts against his arm. “You're gonna fit into a slot, Joe, it's so sad. You used to be beautiful.”

For a second their eyes met—hers were so dark. Intimations of beautiful tragedy … smoldering sexuality. Her fingers fluttered off his shoulder … and then she was by him, carting two Coors, six Dos Equis, and a bourbon old-fashioned to a corner table.

*   *   *

J
OE TRIED TO
suck in a deep breath without actually sucking in a deep breath: the air was so full of smoke that an honest-to-goodness inhalation probably would have triggered his asthma. Nervously, he cast about for Tribby and Ralph. Everywhere bodies cavorted, undulated, danced, and jabbered. Half the crowd was in costume. People wore outsized rubber ears, gorilla masks, Hanuman T-shirts. Several couples sported head-to-toe brown fur costumes made from dyed coyote pelts. Pink helium balloons, monkey faces painted on their silky rubber skins, bobbed and popped loudly. A dwarf, Ephraim Bonatelli, the wayward son of Chamisaville's Godfather, Joseph Bonatelli, was drunk and obnoxious as usual. At the top of his voice, as he toddled about snapping his teeth against the numerous plump rumps at his eye-level, Ephraim sang, “‘Abadabadabadabadabadabadaba' said the monkey to the chimp!”

Joe spotted Eloy Irribarren. Across the room, seated at the bar, he wore an old straw cowboy hat, a faded dungaree jacket, overalls, and heelless cowboy boots. One hand self-consciously clasped a beer; in his lap he guarded a small pile of benefit goodies—a rubber monkey mask, a Hanuman T-shirt, and a Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil statuette. The old man looked bewildered.

Joe took a step in Eloy's direction. But his progress was immediately arrested by the great man himself, Nikita Smatterling, a middle-aged (but svelte) Jungian analyst who dabbled, on the side, in everything from biofeedback and LSD therapy to aura adjusting and group gropes. He was the brains behind the local Hanuman craze, the founder of the Simian Foundation, and definitely a spiritual hombre for all seasons. The door to his eclectic vision and healing powers was always open: night and day disciples gathered at his feet. With some he drew mandalas; with others he rapped on Edgar Cayce and performed feats of psychic yoga. On Sunday mornings his students gathered for sufi dancing. His Moslem name was Jamal Marrakesh. He had a tanned and powerfully wrinkled face with an iron jaw and startlingly vivid pale blue eyes. His smile could reduce granite to oily puddles; his white hair was the valley's most perfectly “leonine mane.”
Handsome
was hardly the word to describe his fantastic stage presence. Had he chosen an acting career instead of this spiritual charlatanism, the man undoubtedly would have been typecast as God.

Rarely had he spoken with Joe. Tonight, however, he threw his arm around the budding convict's shoulders. “Joseph, m'boy, I want you to meet my good friend, Paula Husky.”

A hefty, nubile girl with short-cropped blond hair and a peppy cornfed-healthy face glacéed with sleazy makeup, Paula couldn't have been more than sixteen. A transparent peach-colored rayon blouse and an even skimpier aqua miniskirt left her body definitely out there, in the spotlight, On a Platter. Drunk as a coot, she giggled, having a wonderful time.

“I just jumped the carnival,” she explained. “I told Charley to shove it, and split. All I've got are these clothes on my back, but look at my luck—I've just met this adorable man. Christ I dig monkeys!”

This Adorable Man, Joe knew, had an official girl friend—Belle London (rumored to be the great-granddaughter of the writer Jack London)—and three children: Sanji, Tofu, and little Siddhartha. They all lived in a homemade mansion on a hillside north of town. After two years shrinking Navajos in Arizona, and twelve months counseling archcriminals in Soledad, Nikita had shown up in Chamisaville nine years ago to work construction jobs at the Pueblo's abuilding racetrack and Ya-Ta-Hey resort compound: immediately, he had commenced plying his maverick spirituality. Beige turtleneck jerseys under tweed sportcoats were his uniform. That, or fluffy-sleeved Pakistani blouses unbuttoned to the navel, exposing the mezuzah on a silver chain against his macho hairy chest. His public personality oozed sympathetic, friendly vibes. Yet Joe had never been much attracted either to the myth or to the man. He thought of Nikita, rather, as a spiritual bigwig on a cosmic power-trip who liked to get laid a lot.