The Price of the Ticket Read online

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  —NOVELS—

  The Damned Don’t Die

  (AKA THE GOURMET)

  The Spider’s Cage

  (AKA ULYSSES’ DOG)

  Lethal Injection

  Death Puppet

  The Octopus On My Head

  The Price of the Ticket

  Prelude To A Scream

  The Syracuse Codex

  Dark Companion

  Windward Passage

  A Moment of Doubt

  Old and Cold

  Snitch World

  —POETRY—

  Poems for a Lady

  Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley

  Morpho

  (with Alastair Johnston)

  Small Apt

  (with photos by Shelly Vogel)

  Across the Tasman Sea

  Sonnets

  —NONFICTION—

  Laminating the Conic Frustum

  —RECORDINGS—

  The Visitor

  For more information, as well as MP3s of

  “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit

  NoirConeVille.com

  This edition first published in the United States in 2015 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2003 by Jim Nisbet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1013-9

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Dedication

  Thanks to Kate Dezina and Vince Stepnowski, for being themselves. And to Lele, Ingrid and Clementina Cassin, and Erik Gustavson, for their help in Umbria; to Ben Long and Ella Quinn for their help in Paris and Pugnadoresse; to Sally Robertson, for a quiet place to work in San Francisco; to Victoria Gill for her mauve pencil strokes, no less judicious than assiduous; to Barry Gifford, for his friendship and for his Chicago stories; to Tom Raworth and Barry Hall, for their London stories; to Bob Krolak and Jo for their snakes and snake stories: one and all, veritable plunder.

  Chapter Six of The Price of The Ticket first appeared–bilingually, yet–in Pangolin Papers, to the editors of which the author extends his grateful acknowledgement.

  The author would like to thank the translator of the French edition, Freddy Michalski, and the director of the Collection Rivages/Noir, François Guérif, for their friendship, hard work, and irrepressible enthusiasm.

  I’m not worried about going to hell, Ed, but

  I begrudge the money the ticket costs.

  — Fredric Brown,

  The Fabulous Clipjoint

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Also By Jim Nisbet Available from The Overlook Press

  Chapter One

  THE DREAM WAS HIS, AND FOR YEARS IT WAS ALL HE HAD. EVEN much later, when he had about two of life’s little extras, he clung to it.

  By the same token he never voluntarily woke himself out of it. Certainly its contents never shocked him awake. Even in the big house, when anguish and sex in the surrounding darkness attained the grunting arrhythmia of a stalled circus train, Pauley never awoke from his dream.

  Pauley liked his dream.

  “Life being what it is,” the artist Paul Gauguin is said to have said, “one dreams of revenge.” Ephemeral, fleeting, uncertain, rarely complete, practically unique revenge. Gauguin forgot to add that, life being what it is, revenge is a full-time proposition. Gauguin preferred pith to despair.

  Having once attained revenge, with little or no hope of reattaining it, one re-dreams it. Just like sex, or freedom.

  Pauley’s last year inside, an adjacent lifer picked a Sears Roebuck guitar, most nights. He was a farmer from Mississippi with a deep repertoire of what he called lights-out blues.

  If you can’t do the time, boy

  Don’t do the crime

  All a them fine things

  Git along fine without you

  –so fine without you.…

  The old man’s impeccable phrasing, ancient tone and unhurried restraint soothed all who heard him, and he never buzzed a string. The hacks liked his music, the weepers liked it. Even the crazies left him to sing in peace. His peace contributed to their peace, and helped them into the night.

  Because life is the crime, boy

  That the man done said you done

  And living is the time, boy

  You better have you some fun…

  This hour was their ration of tranquility, watched over by the disembodied voice of an old black man, singing in the dark, who had killed his wife with a pitchfork. The whole cell block settled for the hour, if not the night, opened itself to what possibilities rest or sleep might hold, like a parched flower to dew. The old man was worth five or six hacks’ worth of security. Of all the prison years it was this last one, presided over by the guitarist, that Pauley considered rehabilitating.

  Cause that mule be watching you, boy

  It gonna kick you number one

  Watching you down the line, boy

  Gonna kick you fore you done.

  That year, the dream came to him twice.

  Preliminary scuttlings under the denim jacket folded beneath the ear, as of a trapped scorpion lending its mandibles to the certain prospect of weeviling up and out of the makeshift pillow, straight through the inner ear above: whispers along the seeping stones, breathing curtains, corpses tucking in their shrouds and muttering without embarrassment; freckled gourds with hovering eyebrows and cigar-like protuberances tilting over their cash, large bills first, small bills last–an excruciating unwind, a waning vigilance for someone who finally, rehabilitated, wants only to gamely slit IRS correspondence with measurable élan, if a dull knife, on Monday, even if he barely has the courage to force his metabolism past a coffee nudged with whiskey to stare down a mere bill for the electricity by Friday, unopened; but that’s in real time, outside time, digital time, countable time, future time–the dreamer’s full analog at the moment, sinking down through the barbed wires by which he will have to climb back in the morning, getting emotionally wet but achieving psychic weightlessness, becoming the vehicle fueled by the dream which is itself a product of the combustion of pain and desire.

  Until, sometimes with an overture and bucolic transition, as formerly the bluesy prelude, just as often without, but always unpredictable and altogether infrequently–such dreams are only necessary, after all, when you need reminding that there’re some things you can’t erase without doing damage to the medium on which the erasable is recorded, smell of burning meat–perhaps once a year, and that unique year twice, the dream arrives, a
lready in progress.

  Not many people smell things in their dreams, but Pauley does, with exceptions by which he is wont to thank his fate for neglecting to impose the rule. For fate read psychic metabolism, that hasty thing half-cobbled at one’s conception, and cobbling thenceforward whether one pays attention or not, whether it’s ever finished or not. Though, as science must no doubt someday prove, if the thing is ever thoroughly cobbled the process will continue cobbling, spinning like a lobotomized spider on the ever-thickening lid, just as inexorably, heedless of and despite achievement, as incomprehensibly as it excreted and stitched and spun the contents–until the chrysalis becomes the grave. Makeup is the term most often used, psychic makeup. As if mere paint can poison as well as poison can paint. Ah: painterly insight, Gauguin again. There’s a fine envelope.

  His father has beaten him with the strop. It’s not a strop precisely, though it’s used for stropping. His father was a straight razor man. He used to say, around the barber shop, “Mind the chin.” He’d say, “I’m a straight-razor man myself, and I mind the chin,” speaking to the ceiling through a mound of lather. There were a great many things to hate about him, and that he was from Brooklyn yet affected an English accent was one of them. And your fine son over there, would palliate the barber, absent-minding the chin with the same vacancy of eye congruent to the minding of bodily functions. “The kid?” sneered the father. “Never mind the razor, but don’t spare the strop! Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh…,” and that laugh engendered of tobacco, whiskey, and the fumes risen off the galvanizing tank would quickly veer from its gravelly rattle to a phlegmy spew, flecks of shaving soap erupting ceilingward. From very early on, as Mark Paulos watched the senior Paulos get his face scraped, to the latter a pinnacle of shabby luxury dating from the days when a barber was as likely to perform a surgery as a shave, with not dissimilar instruments, jokes, flourishes, and a vacancy of eye inseparably construed in the old man’s mind with a wobbly revisionism of his own youth, a lambent haze of benevolently tilting architecture wherein goats pastured right next to the garage out of which his own father collected small bets and shined some gangster’s Packard, in the days when gangsters were employers and money was semoleons; from very early on Mark Paulos had waited tensely for the moment when his father would make this stupid joke, hoping, willing against hope that, as the barber leaned away from his work to avoid the flecks of lather he might, indeed, mark the chin deeply, with a red fissure down to its Adam’s apple, and thus spare him, Mark Paulos, the weekly re-seeding of the brutality, and, much later, the dream.

  For to Mark Paulos it was no joke, that business about sparing the razor and not the strop.

  And it wasn’t really a strop because, as a rule, strops came without buckles, whereas a belt, which the strop really was, came with a buckle, a heavy rectangle of beveled brass. And there was nothing like a buckle, the senior Paulos had discovered, for cracking the meager defense afforded by the knuckles of the little fisted hand likely to be at least tentatively proffered by almost anyone having the post-cognitive data-structures lashed out of him by a strap of tanned leather.

  The architectonic of the dream apparently programmed as unnecessary so humiliating a preliminary as to re-enact or even fictionalize an actual beating. In every instance the fear welled intact, artesian, the act opened with pain and fear welded and ascendant, right down to the acrid taste of his own tears in the dreamer’s dreamed mouth. How many years since he had tasted awake the brine of his own tears in his own mouth!

  The old man always made him stand in the door of the bathroom and watch the shave, afterward. If “Dad” was really fouled he wouldn’t even let the kid button up but stand there clutching his pants to his welting hips. Paulos senior was always fouled, as the years wore on, some days more than others, but he was never too fouled to administer the weekly beating, and never so unfouled that he wouldn’t apply himself and the strop with a thorough severity that, every time, quickly had the kid whimpering and thrashing like a leashed ferret on locoweed, in advance. Staying him was out of the question. One summer night a large woman from next door, firebird-kimonoed, receiving in her quest for coolness not fresh air but the mendicant screams of a child and no longer able to stand them, had burst into the tiny bathroom demanding to know what beast was it, that could sustain and prolong such pathetic hollering from a child. Gleaming with perspiration, himself naked to his waist, astonished into a momentary if thunderous silence by the temerity of her interruption the beast abruptly identified itself, backing her into the hallway as it did so, and with a roar planted its belted fist squarely in the middle of the poor woman’s forehead with such force that she assumed the momentary weightlessness of poleaxed bovinity, and with such vector that, dropping, she launched backwards, straight past the door she called her own, and down a flight of graffitied stairs onto the filthily carpeted landing, whereon she thumped like a bale of gas-station dipstick wipers, kicked out the back of a delivery truck every Tuesday, there to beach among the litter of syringes, styrofoam, birth-control devices, cigarette ends, cardboard and listless newsprint, pink and inert.

  Mark Paulos endured the balance of the stropping, sure the beast had killed her. But when “Dad” opened the front door an hour later to sport his clean shave and paycheck and guilt-quilled catharsis down to the corner gin mill, there was no sign of a corpse, if such it had been. Even the trash on the landing seemed to have redistributed itself, and now appeared as evenly and thickly undisturbed as the dust on a neglected terrarium, containing but a subtle aberration of stillness. Thirty-five and forty years later Pauley could plainly recall young Mark Paulos gazing through his pain down the staircase, marveling at the transience of life.

  The mildew, the fouled water, the whiskey breath, the patronymic sweat, the shaving soap–these odors would stay with Mark Paulos forever. Perhaps twenty cheap apartments with smaller and smaller bathrooms–though never so small as to inhibit a beating–chained through his mind like battles in war, stemmed from the motherless nebula like some insidious creeping plant, blooming every Friday. He had that peculiar patent of memory whereby musicians and idiots are able to recall the serial order of apparently unrelated events, harmonious or merely numeric, written or heard or seen. But he also had a sense, not quite prescient, hardly clairvoyant, but definitely anticipatory, that informed him finally, upon moving into yet another rancid crib with one window and its own private if smaller mildewed bath, that this one, this bathroom, might be the last to host his father’s rank discipline.

  In his dream, enriched by the passage of time and the dream’s cathartic office, the anticipation came up sweet and obvious like, say, blood in the sun-streaked brine above a shark attack. By and through whose biochemistry the narration flows, the little boy dreams himself weeping and short of breath as he watches his father reattach the strop to its nail adjacent the sink. The taste of tears lingers somewhere beneath the plane of the point of view; but the strop is hot with the pain of another. Tempered thus, it takes his father a lesser forever than usual to coax an edge from it, onto his blade.

  The stainless razor has stainless marquetry like piping outlining its nacre handle that gleams anyway in the yellow light. Steam rises from the water drilling into the sink. Always, always, when searching for a new apartment, the standard was hot water, hot water instanter from the lavatory tap. Never mind the roaches, the jukebox in the bar downstairs, the brittle newspaper stuffed in the hole in the window glass, the mythological stains on the striped mattress, the wallpaper bursting through its own orchids like a vivisection of a mad horticultural mind and the water coming down webbed capillaries behind it, the screams from beyond the ceiling: hot water instanter, I’m a straight-razor man. Instanter was the word his father used, English accent and all. Some landlords shrugged, some rolled their eyes. Others showed him the fetid ‘studio’ adjacent the water-heater’s closet at the end of the hall and clinched the deal. From then on, the hot water whined from its pipe before the strop was unwoun
d from the fist, its ends reversed and the buckle hung from its nail. If Eric Hoffer, San Francisco’s waterfront philosopher and spasmodic Calvinist, thought the nail on which hangs the broom immortal, he should have contemplated the nail on which hung the strop. Trans-dimensional nail? Nail that finites the soul? When a threshold is the trans-axial thickness of a nail, what’s the difference between the expectation of pain and the real thing? The nail on which the strop hangs: the nail of quite an ordinary fatalism: the nail circumrotated by Möbius. Think of the nail as One: since All is One there’s Nothing left over: except Pain. Like the lysergic pinwheel from which depointillates all phenomenology, Mark Paulos’ entire juvenile world devolved upon that nail and its strop. Fired by pain out of Friday, sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning his determined arc mysteriously and ineluctably reversed, trajecting him back toward Friday upside down and centripetal. When the strop left its nail a sulfurous stench smoked the child’s nostrils, acrid, debased, intoxicating, pumped instanter by cellular contraction. When the strop rearrived upon its nail, the rhythmic shnik shnik of the denouement began to emanate from it, and a vegetative humidity billowed through a child’s senses like fog in a bad movie: infusing a warm, uncaring abatement, like senile urine wicked by cotton diapers. Giddy relief, suffused with despair.

  The dream had steam, too. And odors. It had the shnik shnik shnik. It had the taste of tears. Pain informed it with color and accuracy. It had other sounds as well, of the toilet which never quite ceased its sighing, and, at the last station, an intermittent sizzle whenever his father’s swinging arm brushed the frayed cord which dipped down from the unfrosted bulb over the mirror and shot up like a hummingbird’s J-stroke of love to a switched socket high in the ceiling; and the dream had visions forever burned onto the retina, written once, recited often, from the resultant blinking on and off of the light as the unsynchronized blows nicked it and fell, nicked it and fell. But most strangely of all, unlike many of its terrifying brethren, through its unique, maternal clairvoyance, the dream instilled confidence in Pauley. One wouldn’t want to wake screaming before a happy ending, would one? An unfortunate miscue. Over the years this foreknowledge had achieved its own luminosity. The awe which had grown out of anticipation–for Mark Paulos and his father lived in this last apartment unnaturally long, nearly six months–as if, in fact, there were plenty of time, if at young Mark’s expense, for the beatings had entered a crescendo of virtuosity–until, his mind casting itself forward, toward some unrealized and unknowable promise, in which he had absolutely no reason to hope, except that but for this hope there was no possibility of salvation, unless it was the remote fantasy that he might someday grow old enough to buy a gun, Mark Paulos was practically able to endure the beating almost as if the ritual itself were some kind of door to which he not exactly held the key, but to which he was betrothed, a bargain to which his suffering firmly bonded him, and made good his half of the deal–whatever such a deal was.