The Octopus on My Head (21 page)

Mrs. Threllgood fixed the more obvious of my stigmata with eyes the color of anodized aluminum. “Some of us are beyond rehabilitation,” she suggested pointedly.

Look to thine own tentacles, I might have said. But there was no reason not to endeavor to reassure the poor woman. If she cared at all, she had lost plenty of sleep over her daughter. “Lavinia will respond from day one. She'll be as good as new in no time. She has a lot of guts. I know her well.” Her face darkened. I hastened to ask, “Would you have any idea as to when she might feel up to receiving a visitor?”

Mrs. Threllgood opened her mouth to say never, but thought better of it. A veil fell over her eyes, and wheels turned behind it. “Let me think.” She enumerated her fingers with one end of the spine of her magazine. “The doctor will be making his rounds any time now. There's physical therapy, then lunch. A nap after lunch, a sponge bath after the nap
….
” She pretended to cast her mind into the future. “Shall we say
….
” She brightened, “Six-thirty this evening?”

“Fine,” I said.

Her features relaxed, and she pointed the
Reader's Digest
at me. “Watson?”

“Watkins.” I awkwardly rolled back and through a half turn. “I'd be obliged if you were to inform Lavinia that Curly wishes her a speedy recovery, and will pay his respects at six-thirty.”

“Until this evening, then. Six-thirty. No earlier.”

“So nice to have met you.”

“Charmed, I'm sure.”

“Curly,” I reminded her, with a glance over my shoulder as I rolled away. Mrs. Threllgood didn't bother to conceal an expression she might normally have reserved for a piece of rotted salmon, as she transferred it from the meat drawer in her refrigerator to the trash caddy beneath the sink.

When I returned to the eighth floor at one o'clock, Lavinia and her mother were gone.

Chapter Twenty

T
HE PUNCTURE CONTUSIONS ON MY ARMS WENT WELL WITH
the red-white-and-blue pineapple shirt Garcia's kindly social worker brought me from Goodwill, along with some cargo pants and a clean pair of hospital booties that passed for socks. My own boots were still wearable, but the rest of my clothing had been cut to ribbons by determined paramedics.

There's a bus that runs down Arguello from California until it takes a right on Fulton instead of going into the park, and only after it made the turn did I realize I was going west instead of east. I got off at the next stop and jay-limped across Fulton. I walked southeast through the park toward Stanyan, stopping more than once to rest in shady glades nestled behind the stone wall that isolates that corner of the park from the busy streets that border it. The sun photonated my narcotized eyeballs. The hangover from morphine and Torvald's curare had left me with the squinting stumbles. But I enjoyed the fresh air enough to persevere, on foot, to Haight Street. From there I caught a bus down to Octavia and walked halfway down the block and up three flights to my crib.

It looked just as I'd left it. The Gibson that belonged in the case with the bullet hole, now no doubt taking up space in some evidence locker, stood just inside the front door, next to the Mexican six-string. Clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, dust on the furniture, mind on the blink. Make note for song. The back door must have been open since the night Lavinia stopped by. But the ersatz Picasso nailed over the window would stop any but the most single-minded burgling tweaker, and nothing obvious was missing. And anyway, excepting the two guitars, there wasn't much to miss. The B on the Mexican six-string had snapped in my absence. A change of temperature can do that. But a broken string on a guitar leaning in a dusty corner looks pretty forlorn, no two ways about it.

The glass I'd been drinking out of three weeks earlier stood in the sink. There was half an inch of vodka left in the half gallon jug, whose top was missing. I rinsed the glass, found one ice cube in the freezer, added the vodka, gave it a swirl, and downed half the dose. It tasted much like all the other medicines I'd been taking.

The pad was a riot of desuetude. I'd lived there for fifteen years and didn't want to be there anymore. In fact, however, I had no place else to go.

I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen table: a ring with three keys, a long printout from Children's Hospital, a wad of bills, mostly hundreds, and the cellphone.

The phone's digital window registered no calls. I shook it. Still no calls. I turned it on and listened: no dial tone. If you don't use it, a charge lasts a long time. But not three weeks. I plugged it in and set it aside.

I pulled up a chair and counted the cash. Six hundred and twelve dollars. I had maybe five hundred in the bank. If I took care of all my obligations—rent, the broken car, its registration, etc., I could spend it all before dark and still come up short.

Money. Goddamn money.

The key ring had the two keys to get into the building and the apartment, plus the mailbox key. Mail meant bills. To stave off that disappointment I restrung the guitar. I tuned it, too, but I didn't play it. I stood it against the wall behind the door and went downstairs to collect the mail.

There was a bill from the cell phone company: Forty-seven bucks. Peanuts. What that meant was few calls and even less business. There was the usual junk mail—two credit card offers, a postcard depicting a two-headed dog created by animal-abusing scientists in Russia, and a pink flier advertising a water-efficient toilet I could buy from the city for ten dollars in an Embarcadero warehouse two Saturdays ago. The eviction notice was
pro forma
. The lawyers that owned the building could double or even triple the rent if they managed to get me out of there. But I still had ten days to pay the overdue rent.

The only piece of mail that looked real was a lumpy envelope from Children's Hospital, hand-addressed to me.

I must have forgotten my worry beads.

I opened it. A car key on a ring with a Lexus alarm fetish fell onto the table. There was a letter, too, hand printed on three feet of toilet paper.

As regarded her daughter's recovery, it didn't look like Mrs. Threllgood was going to have much to worry about.

I was sitting with the key in one hand and the thirty-inch tail of the letter in the other, thinking that the last time I missed a bus after a gig and had to walk home amounted to the last time I stayed up all night for art, when the cell phone rang. I jumped so hard, my cracked rib tweaked. It startled me. It really did.

“Mr. Curly Watkins, please.”

“Padraic,” I gasped, pressing the rib with the palm of my free hand, “is that really you?”

“Do people actually buy drugs from you?”

“Who, me? Never. I give them away.”

“You don't sell them? Truly?”

“I promise.”

“Good. I need a guitarist.”

“You—?” I cleared my throat. “The rates you pay, I'm sure you do.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I. But you fired me just
….
When did you fire me?”

“Three, four weeks ago. Forget about that. The guys been coming through here, you wouldn't believe these guys. And they call themselves musicians?”

Three weeks? Four? It seemed like a year. “Did you advertise?”

“Advertising costs money. I put a notice in the window. Better I should put a sign on my back: KICK ME HARD. They are bad, these guys. Bad musicians!”

“What, no girls?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Pretty girls, tall girls, three girls at once, even a pregnant girl. But they don't got… what you call it.”

I shrugged. “Chutzpah?”

“Chutzpah, they got. What they don't have is songs. I mean knowledge. You know? What do you call it?”

Chops, I thought to myself. Aloud I said, “Repertoire?”

“That's it. Repertoire. How come this stuff is in French?”

“You mean how come it's not in Arabic?”

“It is in Arabic. But you don't speak Arabic.”

“I don't speak French either.”

“That's what I like about you, Curly. You are one hundred percent American.”

I looked at the letter. It looked like toilet paper with writing on it. I wondered if it already came like that, by the roll, with the writing already on it. They could sell it in train stations. The wad of hundred dollar bills took on an abstract quality too, ruined and illegible like a waterlogged book. But somebody already makes toilet paper that looks like money. My eye fell on the Lexus key and I thought, I could drive to work.

“Same old job?”

“Yeah.” Padraic said. “Sure.”

I'd known Padraic Mousaief for a long time. In an environment designed to help his customers linger, he was convinced that just the right music would encourage them to linger longer. It had to do with money.

“Three sets? Forty-five minutes each? Forty-five bucks and dinner? A glass of wine after each set?”

“I was thinking maybe thirty-five bucks and an extra glass of wine, before you start—plus the one at the end,” he hastily added.

“I like that extra glass of wine. Even your wine. But I gotta have the forty-five bucks. Isn't that what you meant when you said it was the same gig?”

Padraic hesitated. “Some people come in, they ask where are you.”

“Make it sixty bucks. Dinner, sixty bucks, and four glasses of wine.”

Silence on the line. I was certain I could hear the satellite whistling through the ionosphere. Finally Padraic said, “Okay. I accept.”

“No, my friend,
I
accept.”

“But you don't play loaded.”

“Padraic,” I said. “Have you ever known me to play loaded?”

He let that one go. “Six-thirty. We'll talk before you start at seven.”

I grabbed a bus up Van Ness to Geary and maintained an uninterrupted train of thought about mostly nothing in the back of the nearly empty 39, even as it bored into a freezing wall of evening fog at Arguello. The bus and I stayed like that, cool and empty, all the way out Geary to 38th Avenue.

Walking downhill toward Anza the westerly nearly tore the gig bag off my back. I switched it to the windward shoulder. Better a guitar handcrafted in the mountains of Guerrero, whose luthier never imagined conditions such as these, than me. I wore a pea jacket, buttoned to my Adam's apple with the collar turned up, and a watch cap. The Navy wore such caps and jackets in the North Atlantic during World War II, but so what? A San Francisco fog penetrates them like gasoline wicks through cheesecloth.

The Lexus was parked where we'd left it, and its windshield wipers were festooned with parking tickets. They flapped in the breeze like a row of Tibetan prayer flags, each envelope half a day or a day more weather-beaten than the one succeeding it. The moment I swept them into the gutter, the car was mine. People had noticed that the back window was blown out and helped themselves to the CD player, the spare tire, and the jack. The trunk, the driver's door, the glove box and the console lid were all open. Somebody had wiped their miserable ass with Lavinia's picnic blanket—that's what it looked like, anyway, from a discreet distance—and left it in the gutter. Insurance notices, maps, more parking tickets, and pages of the owner's manual were lifting and settling in windy eddies up and down the sidewalk.

Lids closed, blanket and tickets disposed of, this was still a nice car. But even blowfish, perfectly prepared, has its dark side. Somebody had been spending his nights in my back seat. The odor peculiar to an unwashed body suppurating badly metabolized wine from every pore clung tenaciously to the car's interior. Somebody had pissed back there, too. The more expensive the upholstery, the more difficult it is to get rid of such aromas. Ever notice that?

Somebody had knifed the leather upholstery and broken the steering lock, but nobody had bothered to steal the battery. The car started and purred, as silent and smooth as the odors from the back seat were loud and rough. All said and done, the Lexus might have the makings of a perfect street ride: trashed on the outside, mechanically sound on the inside. So what if the seats had been slashed? In such condition, people might leave it alone.

I powered down all the windows for the fresh air and made a U-turn out of the parking space. This put me on 38th looking south across Anza. I took a right, westbound, and immediately passed Torvald's adjacent houses. Both properties were garlanded with yellow Police Line, Do Not Cross, and Crime Scene tape, vibrating in the wind. A sheet of unpainted plywood was nailed over the front door of Torvald's home. Some lengths of tape had parted. The buildings with their trailing ribbons gave the impression of a grounded box kite, its two sections painted the same shade of an unadventurous gray.