The Octopus on My Head Read online

  “That’s true,” the guy with the paper confirmed. “I was translating for the benefit of the rectally challenged.”

  “Probably says chocolate highway,” said the guy on the floor. “¡Aieee! ¡No más! ¡No más por favor!” he begged enthusiastically.

  “Nope,” said the guy to my left, folding his newspaper. “Guess again.”

  “Oh, no,” said a fourth voice. “Don’t get them—”

  “Bung hole,” said the guy with his arm over his eyes.

  “Anus,” said the guy to my left.

  “Tropical paradise.”

  “Quiver for the fun gun.”

  “Birth control.”

  The guy on the floor folded his hands behind his head, keeping his eyes closed, and said, “Sphincter Concerto.”

  “Culo,” countered the guy to my left, but it took him a second to come up with it.

  “Real sex,” came the immediate reply.

  “Unreal sex,” came the fierce response.

  “L’usine de gaz.”

  “Waiting for martyrdom.”

  “Mortar for the pestle.”

  “Better than camel.”

  “The priest’s retreat.”

  “Greek vacation.”

  “Nether lips….”

  “Watkins!”

  “Cecum of devotion.”

  “Curly Watkins in here?”

  “Perineal fiesta.”

  “Yo,” said I.

  “The astomatous solution….”

  When the turnkey opened the door, two or three men stepped forward.

  “Prolapsed rectum.”

  “Not a chance,” said the turnkey, shooing them back. “Get out here, Watkins.”

  “Cyclops on toast….”

  The door banged shut.

  “Pirate’s delight.”

  “Prostatic epiphany….”

  “¡Aieee! ¡No más! ¡No más por favor!”

  Long story short, since Ivy and I had smoked the evidence, I walked.

  They had some paraphernalia to test, but the rate of crime is sky high in Oakland, the rate of real crime that is, murder and whatnot. I was far too small a fry to prosecute. Besides, those were Ivy’s table knives, not mine. Not to mention, Ivy had a record, and I didn’t.

  All the numbers in my cell phone checked out, as the one club owner, four or five musicians, and nine or ten take-out restaurants listed in its memory now had reason to know; a persistent cop with a yen for acting called every one of them and tried to score dope from whomever answered. I’m sorry I missed out on that aspect of the investigation, but as the years went by, I heard about these calls. Most of them, anyway. The “Curly said you’d hook me up” bit put two or three people off me for good. Ah, well. Push comes to shove, you can never tell what’s going to break up a relationship.

  The instrument case in the trunk of my car was clean, too, although how they figured that out without destroying the guitar inside it makes for an interesting question. Sort of. My record was so clean it was hard for the cops to believe I was in the music business. Statute of limitations, I assured them. And besides, who called it a business? Not like crime is a business. One of the cops said he played a little cornet now and then. Cool, I said, did you bring your ax? He blushed and said no. Good, I said with certainty, and the other cops in the room got a laugh at his expense. Maybe they’d heard him play. But he was a sport about it.

  Meanwhile, the computer had turned up some prior beef Ivy had run out on in San Francisco, so they shipped him across the bridge and called it a day. That, plus the fact that as Ivy and I came out of his apartment in handcuffs, a squad car pulled up with the two Mexicans in back, which made it a pretty good haul. Why keep the consumer when you’ve got his connection? That’s a good question, but we’re not here to debate the Broken Window Theory; we’re here to celebrate our freedom by claiming our Honda from the police garage.

  Unfortunately, towing a Honda Civic backwards does something to the transmission, which costs about $250 to fix. I rode with the second tow truck over the Bay Bridge to the Unocal on Market at Duboce where Jim Zhong, who runs the place, was cool, as usual, about my Honda dangling off a hook again. He’d keep it on his lot and repair it as soon as I could pay for it. More than a square deal.

  So it was late by the time I had trudged back to the one hundred block of Haight Street. In spite of everything I still had time to grab a jacket and take a bus to work, when but whom should I find chain-smoking on my front steps but Ms. Lavinia Hahn—“Auntie” herself.

  “Hi, Curly,” she chirped, her eyes as miotic as they were bright.

  “Oh, no,” I said, with feeling.

  She dropped her cigarette to the pavement with several of its brethren and crushed it beneath the sole of her boot. “What’s the matter, Curly? Blood sugar down?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I used to own a massage parlor.” She stood up and smoothed her skirt. “Can I come in?”

  “What if I say no?”

  “I’ll tie you up and make you watch my video until you say Auntie.”

  “Auntie.” I gathered the mail in the front hall and led her up the stairs. Three flights later I opened the apartment door and stepped aside. “If you need to shoot up, the bathroom’s on the right.”

  “I’m cool,” she said, brushing by me, trailing the by now unmistakable odor of combusted tarball. Once you’ve identified the smell, you begin to notice it often.

  “I always thought so.”

  “Besides,” she said, appraising the apartment without bothering to conceal her disdain, “I don’t carry weight when I’m working.”

  Wearily I closed the door and stood the guitar case against the wall in the modest entryway. “What brings you to Hayes Valley?”

  “You, of course.” She breezed through the living/dining/sitting/practice room and set about checking her makeup in a mirror that overhung the kitchen sink.

  “You, of course,” I parroted. I noticed a blinking light on the answering machine and pushed the Play button. “I hear that video of yours is all the rage.”

  “Rave,” she said past the tip of a lipstick. “Rage is for people who drive cars too big to park.”

  “Curly,” growled the answering machine, “you asshole.” It was the voice of Padraic Mousaief, who owned a coffee house way out Judah, almost to the beach. “Today this guy calls me to score for dope and says you told him I can hook him up? What the fuck? Not only that, he had to be a cop. You think this is funny? Do you have any idea what it means to be an immigrant in this country?”

  “You know what my uncle and eleven of his sons do for a living in the Bekaa Valley?” I muttered unhappily.

  “Although,” Lavinia observed, “Talking back to your answering machine is symtomatic of rage, too.”

  “I think,” Padraic continued, “is best you are canceled tonight and from now on, at least until you come to me with an open heart and explain to me why it is I should not deny employment to a man who peddles dope.”

  “Who doesn’t cut me in,” I added. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” said Padraic. Three beeps indicated that there were no more messages, and the machine turned itself off.

  “Why is it,” I said to the wall, “that nobody calls a cell phone with bad news? What if I had gone straight from jail to my gig, instead of coming home to freshen up first?”

  “They learned it from Hollywood,” Lavinia said from under an eyeliner brush. “You know what the second hardest answer to get in Hollywood is?”

  “No,” I said, browsing through the mail for something that was going to get me out of this fix.

  “That’s right. Very good.”

  “Flyers, postcards, and performance calendars from every bar or club or coffee house I’ve ever played in—wait. Here’s one from a street corner I used to play on.” I culled the two phone bills—two phones, right?—and dropped the rest of the mail into the trash. “What’s very good?”

  “Your a
nswer. It was correct.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “What,” Lavinia pursed her lips at the mirror, “no blowjob?”

  I shook my head sadly. “I can’t get it up.”

  “You really know how to make a girl feel attractive, Curly. You send me, though. And how.”

  “Not far enough, evidently.”

  “Don’t be so paranoid, Curly. I won’t bite it off.”

  “Why not? Because your teeth are still in a jar next to the coffin you sleep in?”

  Not to be outdone Lavinia hissed like, presumably, a vampire; like, presumably, she would know.

  “I could have been a bag man,” I said morosely, “or a stock broker. Numbers come naturally to me. I’ve counted sheep into the millions. But no. I had to become a bohemian. Not only that, I had to become a musician, too. My star must be an asterisk. Where’s my beret?”

  “You followed your bliss,” Lavinia suggested.

  “I wish she followed me once in a while.” I squeezed past Lavinia into the kitchenette, covered a glass of ice with three ounces of vodka, and toasted her face in the mirror. “I never drink when I work.” I took a big swallow. “Hard alcohol, I mean.”

  “Then take it easy, Curly. I came here for a favor.”

  I perched on a countertop and watched her in the mirror. Lavinia was under forty, no longer looked it, yet still managed to remain attractive. While her complexion had the grayish pallor of freshly hung drywall, the bluish blush and mauve eyeliner and dusky rose lip-gloss she deployed only enhanced it. The considerable money she spent on facials and mud baths in Calistoga only served to leave her skin with the unwrinkled sheen of a glazed doughnut. The net effect was an artificiality, which, if à la mode, so belied her eyebrows that they looked applied rather than expertly shaped. The traffic-vest orange of her hair only accentuated the impression that her hairline wasn’t a line at all, but a seam. For all the time she spent applying cosmetics, I might as well have been mooting existentialism with a clown in the green room.

  Yet, and yet, Lavinia’s carriage, her self-possession, her intelligence, and our erstwhile friendship, which predated her two disastrous years with Ivy Pruitt by five or six more years, disposed me favorably towards her.

  “Ivy sent me.”

  “Ivy’s in jail.”

  “They gave him a phone call.”

  “You’d think they’d learn.”

  “Guy’s got rights.”

  “Lavinia?”

  “Curly?”

  “How many times has Ivy been in the pokey?”

  She permitted herself a little smile. “How many lesbians can dance on the head of a pin, Curly?”

  “But aren’t there theoretical limits? What happened to three strikes?”

  “Curly, don’t quote me, but you really got to fuck up to get three strikes laid on you.” Her eyes caught mine in the mirror. “It’s like getting busted for dope.”

  “How’s that?” I sighed, feigning interest.

  She turned around and stabbed at the floor with a 1963 Buick Riviera Purple eyeliner brush for emphasis. “You’ve got to try really hard to get busted for dope in Oakland,” she said with mock earnestness. “Almost as hard as in San Francisco.” She started laughing.

  “No doubt my expression is caught between a smirk and a grimace,” I said ruefully.

  “That little nocturnal mammal of your spirit spiked on the thorn of the moment by the shrike of your dignity.” Lavinia tried to smile, but her lower lip was slack.

  “The leer of the sensualist,” I said quietly.

  “The fuck you say.” She turned back to the mirror.

  “That fact is, Lavinia, I need the job, I’m a very straight boy these days, and I’m decidedly uncomfortable with the position into which Ivy seems to have landed me with a mere flick of a couple of table knives. I’m more than uncomfortable. I’m annoyed and cornered. That dalliance cost me a job and some auto repairs, not to mention ten bucks, and I’m not exactly flush.” I took a sip of vodka. “More like flushed. Or about to be.”

  “It cost you a job.” Lavinia continued with her makeup. “I’ve heard about that job.”

  I couldn’t help myself: “You saw that review in the Bay Guardian? About my gig at the Caffeine Machine?”

  “Heard about it,” Lavinia said. “I also heard it pays you forty-five dollars a night.”

  I nodded. “And all the coffee I can drink.” Of course she hadn’t seen the review.

  “Coffee keeps you awake.”

  “Water, then.”

  “Bottled water?’

  “Hetch Hetchy; the freshest municipal water in the world. Plus a meal.”

  “Tap water.” Lavinia fluttered her eyelashes at the rust-flecked mirror as if it were a camera.

  “Yeah? So? It was a job. J-O-B. You remember what that is? Three nights a week, all year round, and whatever charts I felt like playing, they didn’t mind.” I rattled the ice in my glass. “I was getting paid to practice.”

  “With that and rent control,” Lavinia observed accurately, “a guy could tread tap water for the rest of his life.”

  “Fuck you very much,” I said politely. I tried for another bracing swallow of vodka, only to get an ice cube against the incisors. I looked at the glass. It looked at me. “My vessel is drained of its essence.”

  “Did I sleep through another blowjob?” Lavinia asked sincerely.

  I had made another cocktail and resettled onto the countertop, sitting on my hands, watching my boots swing back and forth, silently mulling the atonal oeuvre of Arnold Schönberg note by note, when Lavinia said to the mirror, “There’s more.”

  “Always.” I blinked. “More what?”

  “About you, silly, in that coffee house.”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  “That’s it. Exactly.”

  I stopped waving my feet. “What are you talking about?”

  “You. In that coffee house. You were wasting your time there.”

  I set my heels loudly on the floor and paced to the back door and opened it. There I saw a broom whose straws were worn to a nub, a mop with a head like a nuked Medusa, a hot water heater with rust-stained rags knotted around its pipe joints, and an amazingly bad copy of Picasso’s Three Musicians, painted onto a piece of plywood, that had been nailed sideways over a hole that once was a window. “You know,” I said to the closet, “Ivy hasn’t heard me play a note in ten years.” I turned and paced back to the sink, hands in back pockets. “You know?”

  Lavinia paused the reconstruction of her face. “I know,” she said to my reflection in the mirror. “I didn’t hear it from him.”

  I smiled in spite of myself, and shook my head. “I read an article about Sonny Rollins in the Guardian once. Right off the bat it said that while he’s never recorded a classic album, he’s a pretty good saxophone player.” I studied the glass of vodka. “What the fuck does The San Francisco Bay Guardian know about music, anyway?” I took a stiff swallow. “Is that self-deprecating enough?”

  “Less than nothing,” she said. “But hey, I didn’t come here to tell you about your lousy life, or to hear about it, either. You’re hard enough on yourself. And, I must say, when I heard about that review, I thought it was so great I’d crawl over broken glass to bring you marzipan if I thought it would ease your travail through this vale of tears.”

  “Marzipan?” I said. “Really?”

  She smiled sweetly. “That review said you were great, despite the circumstances—streetcars and espresso machines and cellphones in the background, and whatnot.”

  “Special circumstances is life,” I said, scrubbing my face with one hand. “And everybody gets the death-penalty. Thank you so much. I think.”

  “You’re welcome. So.” She began placing makeup tools into her purse. “That’s that.” She closed the purse a snap and turned to face me. “How do I look?”

  “Animatronic.”

  “Wow, cool. Pornographic Hintai is all the rage, on today’s Int
ernet.”

  “You’ve put on weight, too. How is it possible?”

  She blushed as only a ’toon can, who knows she rarely eats anything more substantial than a blue-screen carrot smoothie.

  “No offense,” I insisted. “For a girl who’s five-foot-five, you carry ninety-seven pounds like it’s natural. Plus the clothes help. Your legs look long, your hips look slim, your bosom looks shapely.” I framed her between squared forefingers and thumbs: “For a junky who hasn’t slept or eaten in—how many years?” I moved the frame to one side. She shrugged. I looked through the frame again. “Sleek as the nose cone on a Studebaker. How do you do it? You got a trust fund?”

  “I have a career.”

  “Dealing dope is a career?”

  She arched a cold eyebrow. “I can afford my insomnia.”

  “What’s to afford? We know you don’t eat. As to rent—how many square feet can a coffin take up, anyway?”

  “Fifteen hundred. On Grizzly Peak.”

  Do I have to point out that, even though it’s in the East Bay, it’s a nice address?

  She dug in her purse and produced a ring of keys. “Let’s take a ride in a brand-new Lexus.”

  “So,” I hesitated, “there’s money in dope. I’m impressed. I’m also tired. Can I go to bed now?”

  “You’re too broke to sleep.”

  She had me there. “So?” I said grudgingly.

  “We have a plan, Ivy and I, and there’s a paycheck in it for everybody. You, too. Eight or nine hundred bucks for a few hours’ work. And it’s completely legal,” she added, “almost.”

  “Almost, she says.”

  “Come on, Curly,” she cooed. “You need a break. Ivy needs a hand. Both of you need money.”

  “All too true,” I said cautiously. “So where do you fit in?”

  “I’m the enabler.” She dangled the car keys off an index finger.

  I folded my arms and set my jaw. “I refuse to steal organs.”

  “No keyboards involved,” she laughed. “Just bring your guitar case.”

  “Why? I just got fired.”

  “Just the case. Leave your ax here. Do you have a piece of respectable-looking carry-on luggage?”