The Octopus on My Head (2 page)

Chapter Two

A
FTER SHE LEFT
I
VY
P
RUITT
, L
AVINIA GOT HERSELF A
girlfriend. Girlfriend had been paroled from the California Institute for Women—California's “joint for the jointless,” as Ivy called it—less than six months before she was shotgunned by a terrified convenience store owner she was trying to stick up with an air rifle.

Lavinia hired a lawyer who failed to clear the girlfriend's name. But, via subversion of the discovery process, a dub of the pertinent ten minutes of videotape from the store's surveillance camera made it into San Francisco's underground rave scene, with a sound track that sounded like two forklifts fighting over a fifty-five gallon drum full of ecstasy. The clip was deemed danceable, and Lavinia found herself the here-and-now spokeswoman for the deceased ex-girlfriend, an authentic wild-blue-yonder countercultural anti-heroine (“…a woman protagonist,” Ivy sententiously reminded me, quoting from a review of the ‘performance' on a website called
KlubXeen.com
, downloaded and printed at his local branch of the Oakland Public Library, “as in a play or book, characterized by a lack of traditional heroic qualities.”); from which fifteen minutes of notoriety Lavinia entrepreneured herself to the persona of Auntie, heroin dealer to the hipoisie.

I professed shock.

Ivy shrugged. “A girl does what she knows best. What Lavinia did was talk a Mexican tarball wholesaler into a franchise.”

I professed incredulity.

“Want to experience entrepreneurial zeal at its most pristine?” Ivy extended an open palm. “Gimme ten bucks.”

I professed uncertainty.

“Look at it this way,” Ivy suggested. “It's the same price as the latest stupid Hollywood movie targeting a demographic you know nothing about, less the cost of parking and popcorn, but the taste it leaves in your mouth lasts longer.”

I frowned.

“A soon-to-be-forgotten movie.”

I forked over the ten bucks.

“Now we need a phone.” He held out the other hand.

I looked at Ivy over the tops of my sunglasses. “You don't have a phone?”

“I don't have a phone.”

“But Ivy, they're giving phones away.”

“Who is?”

“The Providers, I think they're called.”

Ivy dismissed them with a gesture.

“Not to Ivy Pruitt,” I surmised. “Ivy Pruitt can't get credit.”

“True story,” Ivy affirmed. “I don't regret a thing.”

I handed him my phone.

He dialed a number. “It's being forwarded.” We both heard the three beeps of a pager. “What's the number for this thing?”

I told him.

Ivy tapped it into the keypad and rang off.

“That's it?”

He draped his forearms over the peeling 2x6 that served as the deck's bannister. “Give it a minute.”

The heat waves had ceased to issue from the brick chimney. A raven perched on its rim and looked into it. A hearse drove out of the columbarium's parking lot, doglegged around the northwest corner of the vast cemetery, at the top of Cardoza Street, and disappeared.

At that corner, in front of the cemetery's high stone wall, stood a fire department callbox. About five feet high and a very sunfaded red, its column was festooned with heart-shaped Mylar balloons and plastic leis. Two flower pots, each sprouting a red, dessicated poinsetta, stood at its foot, the whole pediment encircled by empty pony bottles, shoulder to shoulder like the posts of a stockade. The balloons, too, were past their prime. Though still listlessly aloft, each was obviously helium-deprived and softening. The strings that tethered them to the post were slack catenaries in the windless afternoon. One, violet and silver, bore scarlet letters outlined in gold glitter that spelled, WE MISS YOU. Wilted metallic fronds, dangling off the fluted post, must have been balloons which had expired completely.

“It's a memorial,” Ivy explained. “A kid was gunned down on that corner two weeks ago.”

“For what?”

Ivy shook his head. “Gang turf, a bad dope deal, a mistake—who knows? His mother had moved him and herself out of here a few months beforehand, trying to head it off. She went all the way to Vallejo. But the boy got on the bus every day and came back, just like a commuter. He commuted to hang out.” Ivy gestured around us. “It was the only world he knew.”

“How old was he?”

“Seventeen.”

“Young.”

Ivy shook his head. “Not if you're black and male. He was the third kid in as many months to be murdered within a couple of blocks of here. A fourth victim was an older woman, also African American, who got caught in a crossfire. Thirty rounds in less than a minute. She was climbing the steps to her porch and never knew what hit her. Even though it was broad daylight, nobody else got a scratch, nobody saw it of course, and nobody got caught either. Not only that but she happened to be the same lady who had embarrassed the city into picking up the refrigerators and TVs and couches off the sidewalks around here and towing away all the dead and stolen cars. It took her two or three years. She harangued them into it with petitions, confrontational public meetings and hearings, and by calling the newspapers and who knows what else—the kind of involvement with city hall and the community that nobody else wants to get into. The irony is troubling.” He pointed the phone. “That punk up there might easily have been party to her death. He might just as easily been in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like her. See those bottles? Jack Daniels, Bombay Sapphire, Couvoisier—quality is important. The fellas drink a toast to the dead seventeen-year-old, leave the empty at the foot of the memorial, and go get shot themselves.”

My phone rang.

Ivy studied it, chose a button, then tilted the phone so we could both listen.

“Auntie,” said a woman's voice.

“Ivy.”

“What's up, train wreck?”

“A ten.”

“Wow,” she whistled, “ten bucks. You get a job or something?”

“I'll never sink that low again.”

“So just how low are you sinking? Skip that. I don't want to know. Just tell me where you're doing it.”

“My crib. Where else?”

“We don't keep records, you fucking idiot.”

“2733-1/2 Cardoza. Stairs up the back.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“I'll wait here.”

Ivy handed over the phone. “When they get here, hang back in plain sight. I'll do the talking.”

We watched the cemetery for a while. Not far from the stone wall at the back of Ivy's yard a squirrel humped along the chamfered top of a catafalque of black granite flecked with pink. When it reached a corner, it stood up to gnaw an acorn between its front paws, watching us the while.

I tried again. “You never think about playing music?”

Ivy didn't look at me. His hair had gone gray since I'd last seen him, but he still wore it in a pony tail, pulled neatly back. “Shit,” was all he said.

In ten minutes they appeared at the foot of the stairs—two Mexicans, one of them a kid. The older one sized us up, then let the younger one precede him up the stairs and follow us into the kitchen. Once inside he pushed the door to behind him, not closing it, and held out his hand. Ivy laid the two fives across it. The younger kid spat a green penny balloon with a knot in its neck onto the palm of his own hand and passed it to Ivy, saliva and all. Ivy closed his fist around it, and the Mexicans left without a word.

“Home delivery,” I marveled. “Are we strung out yet?”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I am speaking for myself. That's just too damned easy.”

“It is that,” Ivy agreed. “The hard part's the money.”

“Oh,” I said. “You want I should iron the bills first?”

Ivy almost smiled. “It just makes up for the shit you wasted.”

“So whose dope is it?”

“Ours, of course.”

“How
simpatico
.” I followed him to the stove. “What's with the kid?”

Ivy rinsed the balloon and his hands at the sink. “The kid carries the dope; the older guy handles the money.”

“He's not sixteen,” I surmised.

“True story.” He patted dry the balloon and his hands on the folded newspaper. “They get busted, which they will, the kid is under age with no papers: no matter what they charge him with, he just gets deported. The older guy's clean, so he walks. Six weeks later the kid's back in the country and back in business.”

“Nobody gets hurt,” I concluded, “except the greater society.”

“Jesus Christ, Curly, you are about as square as the corner in a 3-4-5 triangle.”

“Oh, man. You really know how to hurt a guy.”

Ivy bit the knot off the balloon and turned it inside out over his thumb. A lump of paste that looked like a quarter-inch of brown crayon dropped onto his palm. “Voilà.” He rested his eyes on it. “One ten-dollar tarball.” And, just then, I glimpsed Ivy Pruitt's solitude. With whom he was sharing these arcana was, perhaps, immaterial. Whether they were reprehensible didn't matter. He was showing me what he was doing, what it felt like, and how it worked. It seemed to me that he hadn't shared anything with anybody in a long time; equally obvious, he had only the one deal left to share. This brief glimpse was a reduction and a condensate, diminished and perversely so, of the kind of conjoint moment that people can discover when they play music together. And a glimpse was all it was. Ivy's solitude winked briefly through his savor of this moment of his addiction like a bit of glass tumbling over the muddy bed of a fast-moving stream. Then it was gone.

I was wasting my time.

“It sure enough looks like one,” I said, blinking. Ivy might have caught the tone of my voice, but he didn't look up. All I could think to say was, “How's the weight?”

“Excellent,” he replied, and the day resumed its pace. “She hates me, but she's always generous.”

“It has nothing to do with keeping you strung out and grateful, I suppose?”

“Customer satisfaction, you mean?” Ivy held the tarball up to the light. “Who's strung out?” he said happily.

“SUV owners,” I suggested, “on foreign oil.”

“True story.”

“So the older guy doesn't pack any heat?”

“Why should he?”

“Guys like you get desperate?”

“That'd be pretty desperate,” Ivy said, “not to mention short-sighted and dumb. It could happen, of course. It has happened. But this racket is strictly word of mouth. If I took those two kids off for ten bucks, Lavinia would either have to cover for me or tell her Mexican wholesaler where the missing ten bucks went. If the former, she would then cut me off, and I'd soon be jonesing. If the latter, not only would I be cut off, her
jefe
would have me mainlined with acetone or battery acid or something equally difficult to metabolize. So you see,” he smiled, “it's a matter of trust.”

“My my my,” I said, “here we ain't been on the road but two months and it's already Tennessee.”

“Nowhere near it. But thanks for the ten bucks.”

“You're welcome. I don't know why I'm such a soft touch.”

“Sure you do.” Ivy looked at me frankly. “I gave you a job in my band when nobody else would so much as give you an audition.”

“So I'm sentimental.”

“No way,” he said with quiet conviction. “You're stupid.”

I nodded toward the tarball. “Not that stupid.”

“What do you mean, not that stupid? Where was your head an hour ago, while the rest of you was smoking heroin in this very opium den?”

“Good question. The answer is, it was being curious.”

Ivy said impatiently, “Why did you come over here, again?” He lit the flame and adjusted its height.

“Something to do with music.”

Ivy snorted. “Music.” He took up the two discolored table knives and drummed a tattoo on the metal stove top between the burners, most of two four-bar marching figures called a
cadence
and
roll-off
. “You're the only motherfucker I know who's had the same telephone number for ten years.”

“Twelve. How else are club owners and booking agents and record companies and gossip columnists going to find me?”

Ivy made as if to smash his fist onto the stove top but pulled the punch about a centimeter short and just touched it with the side of his hand. “Who in the fuck,” he said measuredly, “wants to be found?”

“Not the lost, certainly,” I answered, with some acid. “But, on the other hand, it seems to me that staying lost has got something to do with denying a certain responsibility that comes along with staying alive.”

Ivy stared straight ahead. “It's true.”

“Especially if you have talent,” I added sententiously. “What's true?”

“There's no such thing as a free lunch.”

“That's right. Now that you've got my ten bucks, you still have to talk to me.”

“Says who?”

“Nobody. As a matter of fact, you could just make yourself unpleasant until I leave.”

“I got a better idea. Why don't you and me split this tarball fifty-fifty and see what we got to say for ourselves afterwards?”

So there it was. If I got stoned enough, I would miss my gig, maybe make no music at all that day, maybe get fired in the bargain. Then maybe we would smoke up my pitiful bank account and my car, too. Maybe even my guitars. Ivy was interested in that. While the whole endowment might only get the two of us into next month, to Ivy that might well have looked like a protracted future.

“Seventy-five/twenty-five would be a more than generous split,” I said carefully. “Biased your way. I'm not all that interested in getting so fucked up I can't drive or work or think or, for that matter, continue to talk to you. All of which I'm interested in doing,” I added stubbornly.