The Octopus on My Head (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

I
DROVE THE TEN OR TWELVE BLOCKS OUT
F
ULTON TO THE
beach and parked there with the engine running. A sea was running too, much louder than the Lexus motor. Two surfers lingered astride their boards in the gloom of dusk, trying to make sense of water that boils at fifty-five degrees. A couple of dog walkers were way up the beach. Everything they had, hair, shirttails, pantlegs, parka hoods, and the mane of their golden retriever was blowing straight east. The Lexus engine was so quiet I could hear grains of sand ticking against the windshield. If I parked the car out there every night for a year, the glass would become opalescent.

Caffeine Machine held down the corner of Judah and 44th Avenue, a streetcar stop just a few blocks east of the Great Highway and Land's End. One thing about that address, there is always parking. Another thing is the streetcars that thunder by in two directions at all hours. Their rumble generally cancels out whatever guitar playing is going on inside the front window of the coffee house. But, hey, they say it rained at Woodstock.

Despite the freezing wind Padraic was pacing up and down the sidewalk out front, speaking Arabic into his cellphone and smoking a cigarette. He always sounded like he was arguing when he spoke Arabic; he sounded that way when he was speaking English, too. I didn't blame him. The son of a Palestinian professor of economics and an Irish relief worker, he grew up in Ramallah. When the Israelis nabbed a first cousin in an arms smuggling sting, they bulldozed every relative's home, and Padraic's side of the clan made its way to Jordan, where they languished in a refugee camp for two years before an uncle managed to land the three of them in San Francisco. That was a break, and Padraic was making the most of it. But, on the whole, Padraic Mousaief remained a naturally pissed-off guy.

Things hadn't changed inside the cafe, either. There were a vocal and guitar mike in the window to the right of the front door with a small wooden chair, very casual, to give the appearance that the entertainer had just taken a notion to get up there and play, inspired-like.

The rest of the place was equally stark and equally contrived. The floor was sanded fir with a hard finish. The walls had a nasturtium frieze in yellows, greens, and a loud orange, painted by an amateur for the price of the materials and a year of free coffee. The twelve-foot ceiling was high enough to hang art from the picture rail without its lower corners dangling in the soup or gouging customers in the back. There were always paintings or photographs on the walls, provided by a professional service that came around once a month to change them. All pictures were for sale. Padraic got a cut, the service got a cut, and, who knows, maybe the artist got a cut, too.

It had taken me a while to figure out what was going on in this place, but eventually I realized that Padraic had obtained all his chairs and all his tables from a day-care center that had gone out of business. That the price was right—get this stuff out of here and it's yours—went without saying; but having been constructed for children his tables and chairs could not comfortably accommodate an adult for any length of time. For some reason, rather than discouraging repeat business, the cramped seating increased it. My theory was that Padraic's customers were so wrapped up in their internal discomfort it never occurred to them that there could be an external, and simpler, cognate. The small furniture also explained why Padraic was able to jam fifty or so settings with a kitchen and a pastry counter into a thousand square feet.

One thing I never figured out was why, despite mediocre food and abysmal service provided by an ever-changing staff of clueless youth working for minimum wage plus tips, Caffeine Machine had lines for Sunday brunch. Lots of people hung around the rest of the time, too, drinking coffee, typing on their laptop computers, talking on their cellphones, and pushing feckless heaps of hashed brown potatoes around their plates while they discussed—what?

There was music playing almost all the time. Often I'd hear what has now become mainstream jazz—
Kind of Blue
Miles Davis and so forth—but most of the time Padraic let the kids working the tables play whatever they wanted to bring in, thus saving him the expense of purchasing CDs.

Often I wondered why Padraic wanted any live music in his place at all. But despite the canned art, the uncomfortable environment, and a decidedly unartistic clientele, they and Padraic too were acting out a nostalgia for a San Francisco they'd only heard about, a bohemian, poetry-spouting, Socialist, dues-paying, longshoreman, merchant-marine, two-fisted, labor-organizing, jazz-loving, jazz-playing, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, pot-growing, blue-collar milieu that is nothing if not ninety percent perished from the glorious island of prime real estate that retains the name of San Francisco. No daring thin ice for the cafe owner who hangs great art on the walls of his joint because his wife insists it's great; no clutch of credit chits under the tray in the cash register, the names on which can be found in almost equal number along the spines in the poetry room at City Lights Books; no pawned musical instruments in the back room, either; or forgotten dogeared underlined copies of Verlaine erotica or Mingus charts. Me? I was there because my rent-controlled apartment allowed me to work in San Francisco for forty-five—make that sixty—dollars a night, supplemented by music lessons and royalties from songs I'd published fifteen years before. I entertained no illusions; Padraic retained my services as a nostalgia act, as vestigial to his Bohemian cafe as glass slippers on a two-toed amphiuma.

The door opened and closed behind me. “So you've come.”

I had aged years since I'd last set foot in this cafe. The customers looked like kids. They looked naive, innocent, thin, prosperous, uninteresting, and let's don't forget ambitious. Hard by me sat a young woman reading a book called
How to Get Rich and Stay That Way—N.Y. Times National Best-Seller!

“Yes, Padraic,” I turned to face him, “I've come.” Padraic wore a look of well-fed prosperity. A cookie-cutter version of this cafe half-way across town, Caffeine Machine No. 2, backed up this image with cash. No. 3 was in the works. He had the Mercedes SUV and three kids and a wife and a house in which to keep them all, too, but, no dummy, Padraic Mousaief bought his house in Hayward, across the Bay and twenty miles south on the freeway, where, they tell me, money still means something.

“Jesus Christ, Curly, what happened to your face?”

“I had an accident. But, don't worry. I feel … centered.”

Padraic frowned. How can a shaved head with an octopus tattooed on it get any weirder? Well, start with a centipede of sutures, then add two black eyes. But I still had the watch cap on, so the face must have looked pretty bad.

Padraic overcame his misgivings enough to parry, “You should feel rested. A month without working? You sell a big song or something? Still, you look tired. How about a nice cup of coffee?” He clasped my arm and smiled. “On me.”

“How about that first glass of wine instead?”

His smile faded.

“Red wine.”

His eyes shifted. “While we're on the subject, there's one other thing.”

Maybe I was tired. Usually I don't trust the minor details of wage-earning to the hands of the people I do business with, whether they're likable or not. “One other thing?”

The cashier was new but there was nothing new about that. Padraic beckoned, and she passed him a printout, which he turned over to me.

I had a look. “There seems to be a theme, here.”

“How perceptive. The question is, do you know them?”

“Know them? You can't escape them.”

“Excellent!” Padraic said. He clapped me on the shoulder, eliciting a wince. He noticed. He gingerly removed his hand and said, “You'll play them, then?”

“All of them?”

“If there's time. If you know them all. If not, you could repeat a few from set to set.”

“But aren't these tunes a little … patriotic? That's the word.”

“Of course they're patriotic. That's the idea.” His cell phone began to chirp.

“Where the hell did you dig it up? The Library of Congress?”

“I took a poll.” He swept his arm at the room as he unclipped the phone from his belt. “It's what they want. Hello.”

I stared at the list. Padraic might not have been the first merchant in San Francisco to display a large American flag in the front window of his business after September 11, 2001, but he came close. Padraic's flag was up and showing no wrinkles before noon, Pacific Standard Time, and I can't say that I blame him. Three nights a week, until he took it down some three months later, I sat on a chair in front of that flag and played standards.

“Padraic. What about jazz, America's classical music?”

Padraic, listening to the cellphone clasped to his ear, raised a forefinger and wagged it right and left. I continued anyway. “Couldn't we have more of a, I don't know, not a musical debate exactly but some variety, a sort of a musical dialogue, let's say?”

Agreeing with whomever he was talking to, Padraic wagged his finger back and forth and directed my attention to the front of the cafe. There the new cashier was helping a new waiter hang a new American flag in the alcove containing the mike stands. This flag was bigger than the earlier version. It would cover the entire window, like a curtain.

“How about,” I said, “
Autumn in New York?
Or
Waltzing Matilda?
Those are … they're … relevant tunes…?”

Padraic put his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone and quietly mouthed,
Too depressing
, in English. He removed his hand and began to disagree with the guy on the phone, too, only louder and in Arabic.

At that moment my own phone rang. Twice in one week? It had to be a wrong number. Since Padraic had interrupted our conversation to answer his phone, I interrupted it to answer mine.

The voice beamed down from the satellite, inviolate. “Curly baby, I am calling to rock your world.”

“Oh, no. I only answered because I thought it was Carnegie Hall calling about my birthday tribute. Can't we talk tomorrow, Ivy? I'd rather have my world rocked after I've had a good night's sleep. It's not so hard on my kinesthesia.”

“Sal ‘The King' Kramer waits for no man nor no car sickness. Not only that but our quarry is scheduled to take the Midnight Flyer to L.A. tonight. You take possession of your new Lexus, yet?”

“How'd you know about the Lexus?”

“What, you think private hospital rooms come without telephones?”

“When did you talk to her?”

“Right before her mother pulled the plug. Is it gassed up?”

“Why?”

“The guy lives in Bolinas.”

“So? What's that to me?”

“So come get me. Get a move on. Bolinas is a long way from Oakland.”

I stalled. “You're nuts. What time is it?”

“It was my Daddy's watch,” Ivy drawled. “I hated to pawn it.”

A clock hung over the grill in the back of the cafe. “It's five minutes to seven.”

“So?”

“So I'm to hell and gone at 44th and Judah. It'll take me at least an hour to get to you, fifteen minutes to gas up someplace along the way—”

Ivy laughed. “You know exactly where to gas up along the way.”

“Another hour and a half puts us at nine-forty-five probably ten o'clock just to get to Bolinas, let alone find your … quarry.”

“That's why we're taking the Lexus instead of your piece of shit Honda. It'll be faster.”

Ivy knew I was stalling but I didn't care, for, just then, I bumped my teeth with the edge of the cellphone. Earlier, restringing the guitar, I'd noticed that my hands weren't as agile as they should have been. It was true I hadn't played in a month. But I'd been warned about the aftereffects of my recent drug experiences, and now reality dawned. No matter what I thought about Padraic Mousaief's patriotic playlist, it might be the only music I'd be capable of playing for a while. Maybe for a long while. Maybe—

“Curly? You there?”

“I'm here, Ivy.”

“You sound depressed.”

“Depressed? Why would I sound depressed?”

“If you're at 44th and Judah, you're about to kick off your first set in that shitbird cafe out there. Boring music for boring people in a boring place. Who wouldn't be depressed?”

“Listen, Ivy,” I said sharply, “we can't all live the exciting life of a full-time junky.”

“We can't all be full-time shitty guitarists, either,” Ivy replied matter-of-factly.

“I can hardly believe I'm talking to the greatest jazz drummer ever to let me play with him,” I shot back, “let alone the best player I ever knew to just plain hang it the fuck up.”

“Listen to me carefully, Curly,” Ivy said evenly, “while I set you straight on the one fact you need to know about life.”

“Yeah? What fact is that?”

“The music business sucks.”

Padraic clapped shut his cellphone and tapped one of its corners against the crystal of his watch.

The front door of the cafe opened and four or five people trailed in, talking excitedly. The lights of a streetcar skimmed over the street behind them, borne along by the thunder of rolling stock.

“Thirty-two hundred bucks,” the phone said, the rumbling of the streetcar and the palaver of the crowd insufficient to drown the voice entirely. “Split two ways and I'll cover expenses. Plus,” it added emphatically, “I'll hit you with that hundred bucks you were so kind as to front me in my hour of need.”

I'd forgotten about that hundred bucks. But I said, “I'm losing you, Ivy.”