The Octopus on My Head Read online

  “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?”

  “Excell
ent,” 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.

  “Me? I can talk to anybody about anything at any time, fucked up or not. Worth talking to,” he cocked an eye my way, “or not.”

  “Yeah, sure. You get loaded and talk. It’s different with me. I don’t know about heroin, but all I want to do when I’m loaded on most other things is come down enough to get back to work. I don’t want to talk to anybody, I don’t want to fuck, I don’t want to eat. All I want to do is work. Think of me as boring.”

  “No problem.” Ivy made a minute adjustment to the height of the flame. “When you say work, you mean play.”

  “When I say play, I mean work.”

  “Work or play or none of the above, you’re talking misanthropy. So, now what’s the difference between you and me?”

  Ivy was getting under my skin. “There’s a big difference,” I said, annoyed. “If I’m too loaded to communicate with the outside world, I’m doing something wrong.”

  “Which reminds me,” he said. “Can you delete that number from your phone’s memory?”

  “Huh? Yeah. Sure.”

  “Do it.”

  “What’s the—”

  “Just do it.”

  “It’ll be the last one.” I retrieved the cellphone from its holster and paged through the calls. “Area Code 510?”

  “Let’s see.”

  I showed him.

  “That’s it.”

  As I was about to delete it, he said, “Show me how you do that?”

  I showed him.

  “Cool. Now. Where were we?”

  I indicated the flame. “We were discussing misanthropy.”

  He watched it flicker. “So we were.” He reinitiated the cadence with the knife blades on the stove top, then lost interest. “It’s different with me, Curly.”

  “I know that, Ivy.”

  He persisted. “Smoking this shit is one thing. Who cares what happens to me? Shut up,” he snapped, before I could say anything. “I hated that life. The music sucked, the gigs sucked, dragging the kit from bar to studio and back to another bar sucked, and the money sucked, too. At this point, you know it better than I do.”

  “It still sucks,” I agreed.

  “So why do it?” He held one knife vertical, like a baton. “Don’t answer that.”

  “Why not do it,” I said anyway, “is more like the question.”

  “That’s not an answer. Good. Non-answers are what I want to hear.”

  “You were good, Ivy,” I countered hopelessly. “Better than good.”

  “And you’re completely mediocre, Curly. How can you stand it?”

  I enumerated three fingers. “It’s all I’ve got, it beats a day job, and you haven’t heard me play in ten years.”

  “I don’t need to,” Ivy said softly, as if kindly.

  That really pissed me off, but I let it pass. People can change and I had, but they don’t have to, too, and Ivy hadn’t. Ivy had made up his mind about all this stuff a long time ago.

  “As to the day job, who knows?” When he proudly smiled, I realized that a slight sibilance in his speech came not from loss of control due to the drug but because his teeth, not merely going, were mostly gone. “I don’t.”

  “I do. I’ve had plenty of them.”

  “That’s true. You were a Xerox clerk at an accounting firm, or something, when I first met you.”

  “Law firm. Before I quit, they promoted me to proofreader.”

  Without betraying a particle of curiosity Ivy said, “What’s that mean?”

  “They give you documents and you proofread them. Not even copy-edit them, just proofread for spelling errors and punctuation. That’s it. Each line in the document is numbered. They run to scores and even hundreds of pages. It’s all legalese; you couldn’t copy-edit it if you tried…. How’d we get into this?”

  “In discussing how low I’ve sunk, we were casting about for a standard of comparison.”

  “Fuck you, Pruit
t. I’m the one who came up with ten bucks without stealing a radio.”

  “Who the hell said anything about stealing radios?”

  “You know what I mean, you ingenuous sack of shit.”

  “Ingenuous?” Ivy drew himself up to his full height. “I’ve been called a lot of things, Curly, but nobody, and I mean not a single person, ever, has called me ingenuous.”

  “I’m charmed and castigated.”

  “Throw in mediocre and you got a hit tune.”

  “Let me make an entry in my diary,” I retorted.

  But Ivy’s attention had been drawn back to his tarball, which had been languishing on the saucer. He picked it up between the blades of the two knives as handily as an egret employs its bill to pluck a tick off the hump of a Brahma bull.

  “How are you making it, anyway?” I looked around the kitchen. “Your gas bill must be enormous.”

  “Every day,” Ivy said, rolling the drug in the flame, “I get an old friend to feel sorry for me.” Abruptly he wheeled and held the fuming tarball directly under my nose.

  “Son of a b—”

  “You know all those sixteenth notes you hate to practice, Curly? The thing about this shit you’re gonna like is it makes it feel like you got a whole bar to play each one of them.”

  “But you don’t have a whole bar, man, you—”

  “We’re gonna do it all, Curly,” he declared. “Breathe deep.”

  I was just about to pass out when Ivy abruptly removed the apparatus from beneath my nose and positioned it under his own.

  “Mmmm…,” he groaned, without opening his mouth. Thirty seconds later he laughed the peculiar, powerless laugh of the heroinated, exhaling not a wisp of smoke. “One part for you and two parts for me—wouldn’t you say?”

  As I was coughing little clouds like a preteen cigarette smoker, the room began to fill with uniformed police officers.

  Chapter Three

  SAYS HERE IN THE PAPER,” SAID A GUY SITTING AGAINST THE cold tile wall to my left, “that a tumor in your asshole can rupture your colon.”

  “I got your tumor,” said the guy sitting against the wall to my right. When I turned to look at him he looked me back and said, “I got yours, too, motherfucker.”

  “It don’t say asshole in the Chronicle,” said a third guy, lying on his back on the padded floor against the opposite wall with his arm over his eyes. “The Chronicle is a family newspaper.”