The Octopus on My Head (5 page)

“As I was saying, these hands are capable of almost anything, A-minor-seven-flat-five, even.”

“Good. Keep your wits about you and things will go peacefully. They almost always do. Here's your cab.”

An orange taxi was pulling to the curb in front of the cafe as we returned. The cabbie popped open the trunk lid and got out to take my luggage. I told him I would keep it with me. He slammed the lid in disgust and got back under the wheel.

“Honey?” Lavinia said, as I loaded the guitar case through the back door. When I turned around she plunged her tongue into my mouth. I drew back, shocked. Lavinia smiled dreamily. “I never kissed sushi before.”

“
Sushi
is generic,” I said. “
Tako
is octopus.”

“Whatever.” She closed the door.

As we rolled away from the curb, the cabbie dropped the flag and glanced at the mirror. “Where to?”

“4514 Anza.”

He stopped the cab. “That's six blocks from here. I drove all the way out here from the fuckin Tenderloin, man. You—”

“Hey, hey,” I said, “take it easy. Didn't your dispatcher tell you there was thirty bucks in this ride?”

“He didn't tell me shit. He was trying to give the ride to some buttboy of his, but things were so dead in the 'Loin I beat him to it. But hey, man, six blocks…. The goddamn gate fee's up to a buck and a quarter and I—”

“That's stiff,” I agreed. “But I got thirty toward your one twenty-five for a lousy twelve block round trip. Let's get it over with.”

As we discussed the fare, I realized that Lavinia had neglected to negotiate expenses. Here we go, I thought: Ivy Pruitt has figured out how to get me to spend my money on him even while he's in jail.

“I used to play guitar,” said the cabbie, as he turned up 39th.

“Yeah?” I said, without interest.

“Sure I did. All through the sixties. I knew all the tunes.” He named five or six.

“You and the sixties,” I said, “are making me carsick.”

“Don't puke in the cab. You want me to pull over?”

“No.”

“I never got laid so much in my life.”

I interrupted. “Tell you what.”

He looked at the mirror. “What?”

“Left on Anza. Do you still play?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I got married, had a couple kids, got a mortgage to pay, drink too much after work,
love
reality television…. You know how it is.”

“I do,” I lied.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Keep up the good work, don't talk about the sixties, and I'll make it forty bucks.”

“Forty bucks? Thanks, buddy. Say, do you know the chords to—”

“There it is. Park here and wait. I'll be right back.”

Forty-five fourteen Anza was the bottom half of a two-story duplex on the northwest corner at 36th Avenue. Two six-foot junipers sculpted into corkscrews flanked the windowless front door. There was a light over them. I pushed a button next to the mail slot and a doorbell chimed. A minute passed. I rang again. A window opened on the second floor, left of the door. “Who's there?”

I stepped back and looked up. An older gentleman in a smoking jacket was looking at the idling taxi behind me. The ceiling of the room behind him flickered with the blue light of a television. His hair was white and thin on the sides and nonexistent on top, but he had let the remaining tonsure grow very long and overcombed the strands, on the same theory, one supposed, that farmers apply when heaping brush in a gully to inhibit erosion. The fog wind was trying to play with these strands, but they'd been moussed into stiff resistance. His cheeks were the white of clay, the color of meerschaum, not to say sallow, but shaved closely enough to promote asymmetric patches of razor burn on both. The eyes were, in fact, intelligent but distracted. Perhaps a televised movie had proved absorbing.

Having discerned that I was associated with the taxi in front of his house, the man crossed his wrists and dangled them off the window sill. One of them held a small metal tin.

“Good evening, sir,” I called cheerfully. “Would this be 4514 Anza Street, San Francisco, California, USA, Planet Earth?” and chuckled like the chucklehead I like to tell myself I'm not.

The old man wasn't impressed. “Who wants to know?”

“David Stepnowski,” I said. “My brother Stefan lives here.”

“Stefan was your brother?”

“Was, sir?” My expression changed completely. “Was?”

“He no longer resides at this address.”

“But he's okay?”

“I guess he's okay. How should I know if he's okay?”

“Well, sir, you just said, I mean, when you said ‘was,' well, it's just that my mind….”

“Nah, nah,” the man said, waving the thought away. The tin rattled like a dried gourd full of seeds. “He just moved, that's all.”

“Oh, well—but wait. We talking about the same guy?” I held up the guitar case. “He's a musician, right?”

“That's right. Does it run in the family?”

“Oh, we all sang in church. Stefan's a drummer.”

“That he was—still is, probably.”

“Well now, sir, this is strange. I've come all the way from Philadelphia to play with my brother's band, see—he still has his band?”

“How the hell would I know about his band?”

“Well, I mean, Stefan called me in Philadelphia a month ago. His guitar player quit or got pregnant or something
….
”

“Busy guitar player.”

“Yes, sir, most of us are, sir
….
”

“Ever think about getting a real job, son?”

“Music is my life, sir.” I put a headlock on the neck of the guitar case. “For better or worse.”

“Yes,” the man said thoughtfully. “I was young once
….
So.” He cleared his throat. “Care for a mint?” He rattled the tin.

“Thanks, but not on an empty stomach.”

He opened the tin and took one for himself. After chewing thoughtfully for a moment, he said, “I take it you haven't spoken with your brother lately?”

“No, I haven't. We talked a month ago, right before I went on the road. He said that when I arrived, he'd have a job for me, and … and a place to stay.” I set down the guitar case and pulled the police garage paperwork out of my hip pocket, squinted at it, and gestured toward the apartment door. “This is the address he gave me.”

“It was his address until just a week ago. He moved quite suddenly.”

“I've been all over America since then, sir. It's quite a place. Met all kinds of people. But I haven't thought to call my brother.”

“I can understand that. What kind of songs you play?”

“Railroad songs, sir. I know every song Jimmy Rodgers ever recorded.”

“Jimmy Rodgers!” the old man said. “The Singing Brakeman!”

“The very same, sir.”

The old man grew pensive. “Your brother Stefan lived here almost two years. I heard a lot of music come through the wall, but I never heard a Jimmy Rodgers tune. Not one.”

Well, I thought to myself, if there were actually a guitar in this case, I might play you one. To head off the possibility that I might be asked to do so, I said, “I'm hoping to bring Stefan around to my way of singing, sir. But I don't know. He's a wild one.”

“Mm,” was all he said.

“Sir?”

“Yes, son?”

I shivered visibly. “Is it always this cold in San Francisco?”

The old man permitted himself a smile.

“I haven't eaten since yesterday,” I hastened to add, “and this gig I mean job my brother was telling me about, it starts tomorrow night. We got a lot of music to learn between now and then, not to mention catching up on some sleep. Would you possibly know where he's moved to?”

The old man bit his lip. “I'm not supposed to tell.”

“Not supposed to tell? Why forever not?”

“Must have to do with that other guitar player. Stefan said he was a bad element. Borrowed money from Stefan and drank it all up. Kept coming back for more. Skipped rehearsals. Showed up drunk for jobs. Stuff like that. Stefan's trying to get away from him.”

“Oh, well, I can understand that,” I said. “That's awful.”

“I kept telling him that's the nature of the business he's in,” the old man said pedantically. “The music business, I mean. Told him he ought to get off that path and turn to Jesus or stockbroking. But Stefan said if he was going to hell, he was going to take rock and roll with him, and there would be plenty of stockbrokers there waiting for him. Said the devil wouldn't have it any other way.”

My neck ached from looking up at him, and it
was
cold out there. A horn honked behind me. “Hey,” yelled the cabbie. “They're calling for a fare to the airport!”

Not liking an interruption while I'm performing, I glared over my shoulder. The cabbie held up both hands and said, “I'm cool, I'm cool,” and settled back into his seat. I looked back at the landlord and smiled. “High finance.”

He smiled thinly. “If you don't mind my asking, son, what's that on your head?”

“An octopus, sir.”

After a moment he said, “Is that right.”

I shrugged modestly. “Youthful indiscretion.”

“Youth.” Without looking into his tin he thoughtfully chose another mint. “And by the way,” he said, as he placed it on his tongue, “stockbrokers belong in hell.”

I grinned. “It sounds like you learned more from my brother than he did from you, sir.”

The old man said slyly, “You brother's wife has lots of pretty girlfriends. She's a looker herself.”

“Oh,” I said, “that would be Angelica.”

He beamed at the name. “They're a couple of rockin' robins, those two. Regular loveboids. Very close. Although I don't see what she—” He stopped, cleared his throat, and pointed the tin. “When you get to 112 De Haro Street, tell Stefan anything you damn well please. But when you see Angelica, tell her that old Ari Torvald misses her.”

I brightened considerably. “112 De Haro,” I said. “Yessir. I certainly will tell her, sir.”

“That's Ari Torvald, now. From Anza Street.”

“Ari Torvald,” I repeated, retreating towards the taxi. “112 De Haro Street. Thank you so much, Sir! I'll send you an invite to our first gig!”

The old man shook his head. “Jimmy Rodgers and an octopus.” He lowered the sash.

“Oh, boy.” The cabbie rubbed his hands as I got into the back seat. “Potrero Hill, here we come.” He slid a hand flatwise over the dashboard. “Alllll the way across the city.”

I closed the door. “Forget it.” The fare on the meter had reached thirteen dollars. “Drop me where you found me on Balboa.”

“Sonofabitch
….
”

“Do it.”

He turned south on 36th Avenue and muttered imprecations the whole six blocks.

Chapter Five

D
E
H
ARO
S
TREET EXTENDS NORTH, FROM ONE OF THE WORST
housing projects in the city, up and over Potrero Hill and down to 17th Street, past the softball diamonds at Lazzeri Playground to the intersection of King and Division Streets, through what used to be a warehouse district. In the dotcom times—roughly the last ten years of the 20th century—you couldn't rent unimproved space in that neighborhood for less than $80 per square foot per annum, even if you could find it. After the dotcom crash, however, the vacancy rate climbed to 30% in less than a year, and suddenly you could take your pick from any number of nicely turned-out commercial spaces at about $20 per foot. Owners and landlords began to offer incentives. They even sank to renting rehearsal space to bands again. I'm sure some of them cried.

In the dotcom times a pedestrian could get run over crossing any street in these flatlands, day or night. Lucre-crazed SUV drivers ignored stop signs, pedestrians, other SUVs, even cops, certain that the gold rush would wait for no one. A worker flagging a lane of traffic while his crew backed a cement truck toward a pour was run over and killed by a man driving an SUV, steering wheel in one hand, a phone in the other. Whatever he was talking about proved to be more important than another man's life. Despite the presence of an entire construction crew, any number of other drivers, and the SUV's female passenger, all of whom bore witness, the hit-and-run driver was never caught. The dead flagman left a wife and three kids.

Not two years later the flatlands at the foot of Potrero Hill had become nearly as deserted by day as they were by night, as exposed as an intertidal reef by the recession of the tsunami of avarice. Gold rush over, the locals started to poke their heads out again in order to enjoy their restored tranquility—to wit, we saw a man in a pink tutu and tights and yellow dance slippers accompanied by a mincing, perfectly coiffed pink Pomeranian, the only citizens in sight, as Lavinia made a preliminary pass down the one hundred block of De Haro, and I counted down a series of roll-up doors along a waist-high loading dock: 116, 114, 112, 110
….

We circled the block for another look. The citizen and his dog had disappeared. A city is funny like that. You see something notable, turn a corner, never see it again. Across the street from the warehouse stood another, still with its loading dock; but its roll-up doors had been replaced by glassed-in office bays, its freight spur so hastily paved over that the street retained a phantom trace of rails. A vinyl sign dangled limply from the remodeled building's stucco parapet, advertising the availability of raw space from 450 up to 45,000 square feet.

“Man,” I observed, “you might think that it looks like the seventies down here, it's so deserted, but I might think it could be more like the fifties.”

“I've only seen pictures,” Lavinia said.

“Me, too.”

“Visions of the railroad earth,” Lavinia said.

I turned to look at her. The shadows moved off the dashboard and over her hands on the rim of the steering wheel, sculpting her face. It looked like a flight of pelicans limning a swell. “My favorite Kerouac piece,” I said.

She shook her head. “
Mexico City Blues
is better.”

“I don't think so, but you're not alone; Michael McClure called it the great visionary poem of the twentieth century.”

“Yeah, well,” she shrugged, “he's probably never read
The Sorrow of War
, by Bao Ninh.”

“I'd prefer to call that novel an elegiac triumph, and to hell with visionary.”

“Curly,” she purred, “you are the only person I've ever met who's read as many books as I have.”

“More,” I corrected her. “More than you have.”

“After you starve to death,” she cooed, “can I have your library?”

“I'll leave you mine if you leave me yours.”

“Can't do that, I'm sorry to say. Ivy pawned the whole thing one box at a time.” She softened her tone. “Don't I have anything else you want?”

I shook my head. “This doesn't look like a real address.”

“What would you know about a real address? You mean it's not a toilet with a bed and a sink?”

“You slagging my crib?”

“No, I'm talking about your shitty apartment. When's the last time a woman was in there?”

I gave this a moment's thought. “About two hours ago,” I replied. “At least, it used to be a woman.”

“You know what I mean,” she insisted.

“Not counting my guitar?”

“Don't be pathetic.”

“None of your business,” I replied pathetically.

“Don't you know any female octopi?”

“I wouldn't spend so much time with her, meaning my guitar, if she weren't the real thing.”

“You wouldn't spend so much time with her, meaning your guitar, if you had a real thing.”

“That,” I conceded, “might be a brush with the truth.”

“Anyhow, where people keep their stolen PA systems isn't necessarily where they sleep.”

“And here I thought I was looking for my beloved brother.”

“You might still be looking for your beloved brother. Nobody is saying our bird is still here—if he ever was here. Did that landlord look cagey to you?”

“Lavinia, think about it. When was the last time you saw somebody look cagey who actually was cagey?”

“Um
….
The last time I saw a picture of Little Bush on the cover of
Time
?”

“That guy's not cagey.”

“On the contrary, my mouse, I think he put one over on everybody, including himself.”

“Speaking as a small rodent, I agree with you.”

“If only there were a little id to go along with it.”

“Like when Clinton was President? But hey, now that we've established our San Francisco political credentials, we didn't come here to talk politics.”

“No. We came here to talk money.”

“What's the difference?”

Lavinia took a left around the north corner of the block, on Alameda, and parked on the wrong side of the street.

“Will it fit in your car?”

“What, seventy-five hundred bucks?”

“I was thinking we might get the merchandise instead. Seventy-five hundred dollars worth of PA system could take up a lot of space.”

“That's just what he owes on it,” she reminded me.

“…Mixing console, the wire snake, speakers, microphones and stands, a rack full of amps and preamps, EQ, a patch bay
….
”

“I forgot that you know something about this stuff.”

“Almost as much as you know about documentary videos.”

“Hey,” she retorted sharply, “Every time I sleep deeply enough to dream, I pay for that experience.”

“I hope you never have to go through another one like it. Sincerely.”

“Telltail was my friend.”

“I know that. Didn't you hear what I just said?”

“She was just a kid. We—”

“Yes, yes, of course. Kids stick up liquor stores several times an hour in America. If this were a Moslem country, we wouldn't have that problem.”

Lavinia stared at me. “You don't feel my pain.”

I stared at her. “No.”

After a minute she said, “Let's get this over with.” She pointed. “Hand me that piece in the glove compartment?”

“Piece?” I blinked. “
Visions of the Railroad Earth?
”

She gestured impatiently.

“No.” I shook my head.

She unfastened her shoulder belt.

“Lavinia
….
”

She leaned over the center console, opened the glove compartment, and removed a flat, black, automatic pistol. “Think you can open your door?”

I didn't move. It wasn't courage or even the lack of it, you understand—though I'm as pusillanimous as the next guy when it comes to guns. Everything is so obvious when it comes to guns. Everything's all figured out already. There's no leeway, no bargaining, no intellectual freedom. Guns kill people. That's what they're for. But it wasn't precisely the gun that was bothering me. What was bothering me was that, as with guns, I now knew everything I needed to know about Ivy Pruitt and his ex-girl-friend, Lavinia Hahn. And what I knew about them was, they kept guns around. They liked guns. I didn't want to get into it just then, at so inopportune a moment, into so sensitive a subject, but I was willing to postulate that what Lavinia regretted about the liquor store holdup was not that it had failed, or even that her girlfriend Telltail had gotten herself killed, but, on the contrary, that Telltail hadn't been toting something more lethal than a BB gun. Now wasn't the time to be getting into such quibbles, of course. Now was the time to be getting out of them.

Lavinia released the automatic's clip and inspected it. A row of snub bullets glowed dully under the streetlight. She jacked the slide and a slug hopped out onto the leather upholstery between her thighs. “Ivy usually handles the ordnance.”

“Why am I not surprised to hear that?”

She jacked the slide again. The gun was empty.

“Haven't you had enough of shooting?”

“I've had enough of having no protection from it.”

“Funny, I was just thinking that.”

She fingered the ejected shell into the clip and the clip into the hand grip.

“Where does this leave me?” I asked.

She jacked the slide, which chambered a round. Then, aiming the gun at the floorboard between her knees, she let the hammer down with her thumb and set the safety. All very pro. But now she closed her eyes and lay the pistol flat against the side of her face, as if to cool her raging intellect. “Protected,” she answered, “is where it leaves you.” She tapped the length of her finger alongside the trigger guard.

“That's all this pistol is about?”

“That's all.”

“Promise?”

“You sound like a little boy.”

“I feel like one.”

“A babe with a gun doesn't make you hard?”

“Are you nuts? I have to have, you know,
feelings
for a gun.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lavinia hissed. “No wonder that guy fired you.”

“Hey,” I retorted testily, “I got fired because a bunch of Oakland cops arrested me for buying heroin from two Mexican illegals and smoking it with Ivy Pruitt, who is a repeat offender. I
never
go to Oakland. Put that fucking thing where I can't see it and let's get this sordid version of wage-earning over with. What caliber is it, anyway?”

“Don't feel so fine, ain't got my nine.”

“Oh, the famous nine millimeter, storied of song and verse amongst punks and fuckups.”

“It fulfills a great need between the .32 and the .38.”

“And to think I traded my singleshot .22 rifle for my first guitar. The only gun I've ever owned. A rabbit gun.”

“You never shot a rabbit, you ain't no friend of mine.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “How many rabbits you shot, Elvis?”

She didn't answer.

I nodded curtly. “Where's that leave us?”

“Fucking peacenik.” Lavinia opened the driver's door. “Don't forget your guitar case.”

“What for?”

“It worked once. Maybe it will work again.”

“Maybe you should carry it,” I grumbled, wresting it over the seat back. “As in, carry his ax, bear his children?”

“For a guy who can't get it up, that's thinking pretty far ahead.” Walking in front of me, Lavinia raised the back of her blouse to park the barrel of the pistol under her belt, in the crack of her ass.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“Don't mix your metaphors,” she said.

We turned the corner and climbed a short set of creosoted wooden stairs. We weren't exactly innocuous; a mercury streetlight laved our every move in a grayish blue. At the top of the loading dock a roof rat scurried along the splintered boards ahead of us and disappeared into a crack at the bottom of a roll up door. “Eek,” Lavinia said, without enthusiasm.

“Shoot it.”

“I don't need the practice.”

“You can hit a rat with a handgun?”

“Sure. But if it's carrying the plague, I want it to live.”

“Lavinia
….
”

“Yes, Curly?”

“Is a darkly pessimistic conception of mankind and the fate of the earth the other thing you have in common with Ivy Pruitt?”

“That and television. Until he pawned it.”

“A veritable spiral into hell.”

She nodded. “The intensity of it broke Ivy of two habits.”

“You and television?”

“Yep.”

“Which he replaced with the one big habit?”

“That would be correct.”

The door of 112 De Haro was big enough to forklift a pallet of flywheels through, maybe twenty feet wide and sixteen high. In the lower left corner of its metal slats a mandoor bore a faded sign.

B
AY
A
REA
I
CE
, C
O
.
112 D
E
H
ARO
S
T
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
PO
TRERO
2595
“Icing the Fleet Since 1946”

“What fleet?” Lavinia whispered.

“There used to be actual maritime commerce in San Francisco,” I whispered back. “We even had a fishing fleet.” I touched the date. “I'd say some guy came back from the war and started himself a business.”