Double Take (8 page)

1975

Joey offered to drive me home, but I declined and managed to drive myself. I knew the streets so well I could have done it with my eyes closed, so being drunk was no problem. My parents were asleep, as usual, and the dog barely twitched as I crept up to my room on the third floor. I lay on my bed, but I couldn't sleep. I closed my eyes and saw Bando walking down 57th Street in his wide-brimmed hat. I didn't want to see Bando. I opened my eyes, turned the light on, and stared at the mural on my wall. In the lower left corner was Casa Sanchez. I didn't want to see that either.

When I closed my eyes again, I tried to think of the happiest memory I could conjure up. At first I saw myself with Michael walking across campus, talking animatedly and bumping into each other, then rolling around in our bed, but suddenly Michael was walking fully clothed down 57th Street, not as I presumed he looked now—with a corporate haircut and a three-piece suit—but the way he looked the first time I met him, like a fattening food I could gorge myself on.

My college held frequent dances that felt like a time machine into the fifties. I had been to dances when I was in high school, but they were cool ones. Bando and I had figured out how to crash events at the university, such as the Lascivious Costume Ball. We took felt-tip pens with us and drew pictures on each other's hands of the stamp they were using at the door. Sometimes when we didn't have a pen, we climbed through the window of the men's bathroom in Ida Noyes Hall. The university dances always had blues bands: classic bluesmen like Otis Rush or Sam Lay, or young guys who tried to
play like Buddy Guy. You never heard anything but the blues. The high-ceilinged rooms in the old Gothic buildings were dark and mysterious, and the university students seemed ancient and wearily hip.

In contrast, the bands at the dances at my college blasted classic rock and roll on patios nestled in groves of eucalyptus. The night I met Michael, the sky was red and the hills were necklaced with lights in the sweet night air. Warm beer flowed from shiny kegs. Some long-haired Californian dudes had been covering “Midnight Rambler” for at least twenty minutes. I stood at the edge of the patio watching the contortions of white people in Hawaiian shirts and clean Levis, their faces flushed from Coors, their arms flailing. On the opposite side of the dance floor, the African-American students did elegant steps from
Soul Train
. This separation seemed weird to me, but a little voice inside my head would say, look, everyone seems so happy. Another voice, one that sounded like Rat's, would say, yeah, but they ain't street.

I had seen Michael around but hadn't paid much attention to him, and I hadn't noticed him paying attention to me, so I was surprised when he lurched over and asked me to dance. He was wearing a faded workshirt and torn jeans with paint stains on them. He had surfer-blond hair and a sweet face, despite dark blue, scowling eyes and a nose that looked like it had been broken. Something about him struck me as delicious. Unlike other art-major types, he didn't seem pretentious, possibly because he was obviously quite drunk. Even though I didn't drink any more, drunk people seemed like old friends to me. We started dancing, and he kept falling into me and apologizing. At some point, I put my arms around him to steady him, and we started kissing. This seemed to me like a comfortable way to meet someone. He felt and smelled familiar, as if I had been kissing
him for centuries. After a while, we walked arm in arm through the eucalyptus groves, back to my dorm. My roommate was away for the weekend. We collapsed onto my bed with all our clothes on and fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he woke up and whispered something into my ear that sounded like gibberish but I thought I heard the word “petals.”

Of all the things I didn't want to find myself thinking about, Michael was at the top of the list.

1975

It was 4 a.m. and my eyes were still open. I stared at my mural, pale by the glow of the streetlights, wishing I had thought to paint a moon there. The conversation I'd had with Joey earlier was still playing in my ears.

“What makes you think Bando was murdered?” I'd asked him, strangely calm. “I mean, people die. Dying is popular.”

Lots of people we knew from 57th Street were no longer around. Jupiter had OD'd on heroin; other people had hung themselves in jail cells, shot themselves, drowned, been in weird accidents, even a plane crash. When you heard that someone was dead, you weren't surprised, but for months afterwards you'd think you saw him or her on the street. Sometimes you'd look at your old class picture and notice something doomed and tragic in their eight-year-old faces.

“I mean,” I went on, “Bando, Jupiter, Clay, Levar, Brunette, Pam—” I stopped. Pam had been the prettiest girl on 57th Street, tall and waif-like, with long black hair, luminous brown skin, huge green eyes. She had done some modeling, but the photographers had trouble with the track marks on her arms. The last time I saw her in Casa Sanchez she told me she'd been hitting up under her tongue so it wouldn't show. Chad, always the bearer of good tidings, told me someone had found her dead on her bathroom floor with a tube of mascara in her hand.

I'd stopped talking, because it suddenly occurred to me that that someone had been Rat.

He didn't flinch at her name. “Bando's death was supposed to look like suicide, and no one could prove it wasn't,” he said. “But it was murder. Somebody pushed him.”

We sat there for a few minutes without saying anything. I stared into my beer. I wondered if I could read my fortune in the foam the way you could with tea leaves. “How do you know all this shit?” I said finally. “I mean what are you, Edgar fucking Cayce?”

“I know a lot of people, Cookie. They tell me stuff.”

I looked him in the eye and said, “Stop calling me Cookie.”

By the time I had reached my sixth beer, and I wasn't counting Joey's Scotches, we were talking about bowling. Neither of us had ever liked it, but we'd decided that it was time to give it another chance, maybe even buy bowling shirts and custom-made balls.

“There's something about the whole idea that suddenly appeals to me,” I said. “How you see all those pins standing there, minding their own business, like they haven't got a care in the world. Then suddenly from out of nowhere, you mow them down. I'd enjoy that, Joey. I'm in the mood for that. Let's go bowling right now.”

“Maybe tomorrow. You don't like this, do you?”

“Like what? Sitting here in Bert's, talking about old times? I like it just fine.”

“Sure. You say you like talking about old times, but every time we get into it, you start talking about fucking bowling or something.”

“I was under the impression that you were
digging
talking about bowling. I was under the impression you were ready to bowl.” I took a sip of yet another Old Style. “It's like we were in this war together. It's like my father—he fought in World War II, he was
in Germany
and
Japan, but he refuses to talk about it. It was his own weird secret world. I don't know anything about what he did over there. He claims not to remember a thing. That's what's so great about memory. You choose what you want to remember and forget the rest.”

“No, you can't. You can't forget the rest. That's the whole problem.” His air of coolness slipped for a second and I heard something inside it, something earnest.

“Well, I
had
forgotten. But these little conversations we keep having are dredging all this shit up. It's like you're the official street historian or something.”

“I never forget. I'm like a giraffe.”

“I believe that would be an elephant.”

“Whatever.”

“You knew it was an elephant, right?”

“I knew it was something big.”

I reached for his hand and held it. “When we talk, it makes me think about Bando, and that makes me sad. I don't want to be sad.”

“But wouldn't Bando want you to remember him?”

I didn't answer.

1971

When had he fallen in love with Rachel? Bando wasn't sure. Maybe that first time he saw her. He used the phrase “fallen in love” when he thought about her, even though it sounded theatrical. He realized that much of what he said and thought sounded that way. He had several explanations for this. One was that he was actually from another planet and had been taught to speak by an alien drama coach who had no idea how contemporary American earthlings really talked. Another theory was that he was a knight who had fallen off his horse during a joust, hit his head, and woken up centuries later with no recollection of what had happened to him. Yet another explanation, offered by one of his teachers, was that he was a pretentious twerp with an inflated sense of his own importance.

In any case, Bando realized that his feelings for Rachel were not just puppy love, which he had never bothered to experience, but a deep and abiding passion such as one might write a romantic epic about. He was in fact writing a romantic epic about it, something along the lines of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. He was going to be a writer, he was sure of that. It would have been easier in another century; maybe he would have been a Cavalier poet. Nowadays, one would be better off playing electric guitar, but he had absolutely no musical ability, though he did play a little ukulele when he was sure no one could hear.

Rachel was his muse. He was hard at work on his romantic epic entitled “Amid Epoch of Sludge.” She had not inspired it on purpose, but by summoning forth emotions
from him of such magnitude that they demanded to be turned into poetry, as he smirkingly told Sebastian, trying to sound as if he were kidding. Of course, she had no idea she had been destined to perform this role as his muse. She could be, he had to admit, a bit obtuse at times. She seemed unaware of the depth of his feelings for her, though everyone else on 57th Street seemed to know. He was content to leave things that way.

It wasn't that she was stupid, but she was not a genius. Genius was what he craved. He had always been told he had a high IQ and had believed from the age of six that he was destined for greatness. The trouble was, as he had gotten older he had been increasingly unsure how this greatness was going to manifest itself.

He had taken to walking by Saul Bellow's apartment on his way to visit his father. As he passed, he would shake his fist up at him in case he happened to be looking out the window; it was like shaking his fist at God. He thought of Bellow as his real father, one who would not treat him with condescension and urge him to go out and get a job. As he traversed this route every other Sunday afternoon, his father's customary visitation day, his mind often leaped ahead to the time when people would have entirely forgotten Bellow but would point to the high-rise across the street and say, “Robert Bandolini's father once lived there.”

Although Rachel was clearly not a genius, she had potential. He had once been fortunate enough to share a bed with her at the house of some friends, a brother and sister. The siblings' parents were away on a ski trip, and Bando had persuaded Rachel into the single bed belonging to their grungy seven-year-old brother, who had also gone skiing. They lay on Mickey Mouse sheets and talked all night, and when the sky began to
lighten, they spent a moment kissing before finally falling asleep. In the process, he had gotten up the nerve to put his hand up her green Army surplus T-shirt and discovered that her back was covered with fine hair. Back hair was a sign of genius, he informed her. She told him to shut up and go to sleep, but he was sure she was secretly pleased.

One day as they stood outside Casa Sanchez, she told him he was obsessed with being a genius and that it didn't matter, there were more important things in life. He had asked her to name them, which had stumped her, as he knew it would, but she had persisted. “Nobody cares if you're a genius,” she'd said. “Don't you see? It doesn't make any difference.”

“Ah, but you're making a mistake. I'm not saying I'm a genius.”

“No?”

“I
used
to be a genius, but I ruined it.”

This was what he secretly believed, and in his darker moments, he worried that he would never be a writer, that he would never be anything. He sometimes feared he had made a terrible mistake dropping out of Martin Academy, that maybe he should have finished high school and gone on to college. Instead, he was living with his mother, financially dependent on her, with no prospects. He could imagine himself an old man, still living with her, still working on “Amid Epoch of Sludge.”

And now, Rachel was leaving for college.

1975

We were in Bert's again. I've got to stop this, I thought as I sipped the last of my beer. It was almost closing time, and the bartender was cleaning up. The jukebox was still playing—I had put all my tip quarters in it a while ago. Joey and I were talking about the time the students had occupied the university administration building for several days, but we could no longer remember why. We had both hung out at the sit-in, though we had nothing to do with the university, unless you counted the fact that both of my parents taught there. I had no idea what Joey's parents did.

“Apples,” he said.

“And bagels. They had those huge boxes of bagels.”

“That's all I remember. All these students hanging out and snacking. And then there was that time they dug those trenches all around Rockefeller Chapel.”

“Oh, yeah. That was after Kent State. They called it Kent State Park.”

“I didn't really care what that was all about at the time. It was cool, though. Bands playing all day and all night. Lying in the trenches listening to some college guys play the blues. I remember thinking, well, at least I'm not in Vietnam.”

“How did you—”

“I had a high number. I was ready to cut my fucking toe off if I had to. But I didn't have to.”

“I guess it goes without saying that you didn't want to go.”

“Not after I saw how some of those guys came back. All squirrelly and shit.”

“Not Arthur.”

“Arthur?”

“You remember Arthur. I used to go out with him. For a while.”

“Dude with long blonde hair?”

“Yeah. He was in Nam. He wasn't squirrelly.”

“He probably was, you just didn't know it.”

“It's true we didn't do a whole lot of talking.”

“You ever noticed how Jupiter and all those dudes always wore army jackets? Like we were soldiers? The cops were always fucking with us like we were the enemy. Sometimes I thought I knew how the Viet Cong felt.”

“May I remind you that you were drug dealers?”

“Yeah, but they didn't know or care who they was messing with. They were always cornering some poor little hippie and slamming him up against their car. I been frisked so many times I still got fingerprints all over me. By the time they shot those kids in Ohio, their side was winning. Remember? The feds closed off the Mexican border and there was no more smoke, just ragweed from downstate. So we sort of became what they thought we were. What they seemed to want us to be.”

“You mean you switched your product?”

“The heroin was Sam's idea. Everything back then was his idea. It was cheaper to ship than weed, he said, and easier to hide. It didn't smell, and you could carry ten thousand dollars of it up your ass. You remember how Levar got killed in that plane crash in the desert near the border? After that we had a meeting and decided two things. Sam decided, really. One thing was we were giving up on herb. It was too much hassle now
that the President had declared war on the border. Sometimes I think Nixon knew exactly what he was doing, like he wanted everyone on heroin instead, on a permanent nod. Just like the British in China. You know all about that shit, right?”

“Yeah, sure, I studied drug history in college. It was a required course.”

“Well, I'm a fucking drug Ph.D.”

“What else?”

“We had to get someone to replace Levar and Clay. With them gone, it was just the three of us, me and Fletcher and Brunette. Not Bando—not yet. At first it was Pam. You might not remember this, but Pam was my, well, my girlfriend, I guess you'd say.”

“I remember.”

“I loved her, Cookie. I loved the shit out of that girl.”

“Really? I mean I knew that you were involved, but I didn't know it was like that.” Then I said, “I'm sorry.”

He shook his head. “So Pam turns out to be this genius. She starts out small, just doing errands for the rest of us, but then people start to notice her. She starts working as a courier, flying down to South A-fucking-merica, meeting all these international sleazebags, dudes with yachts and shit. Things changed between her and me. I knew she was running around on me, but I didn't even care. She had my nose wide open, like people used to say. I used to sing that Impressions song to myself about being a fool for someone.” He sang a line from the song. He had a sweet falsetto, like Curtis Mayfield's.

“Last call,” the bartender shouted. A bell rang.

“Then she got strung out?” I asked.

“Not at first. At first she thought she could handle it. She started out snorting it but it was the classic situation, pretty soon she was hitting up and before long she wasn't in charge any more, that shit ran her. Like it was her lover and I was just someone she knew. Well, we all got sad stories. It's a sad planet, spinning around here, bleeping out signals and hoping some fucking Martian might answer.”

“Can I get you another drink?”

“I don't think so, and I wouldn't recommend any more for you either.”

“Yeah, okay, I've reached my caloric limit for today.”

“So I guess you know what went down. I was the one who found her. With some people when something like that happens they swear they will never touch that shit again, but I was already strung out. I'd been trying to kick, but after that I didn't care what happened to me. That's when I got to know Bando.”

“When was that?”

“I don't know. Must have been fall of '72. Pam died that August.” Maybe his voice broke a tiny bit there, I wasn't sure.

“So you got your friend Bando this great job?”

“I knew how smart he was, and I knew we needed somebody. At first he had his drug habit under control, and dealing was a good way to make sure you had a stable, safe supply. You've got to understand, I was doing him a big fucking favor. Like my daddy was some kind of business tycoon and I gave him Bando's resume. Sam didn't really dig him too much, but he didn't care by that time, money was just pouring in. Sam rented an office downtown like he was some kind of straight businessman. It was an ideal situation.
We were safe, we had protection, we had the right people on our payroll, and we had enough money to buy whatever the fuck we wanted.”

“What did Bando buy?”

“Antique furniture. I guess his mother still has it, wherever she is, and she probably don't know what any of it's worth because he never told her, he wanted her to think it was all junk. Classic Bando. When his mother asked him what he did for a living, he told her he was a junk dealer.”

I laughed so loud and so long that the bartender stopped wiping a glass and turned to stare at me.

“Girl, you okay?” Joey eyed me like he was trying to decide whether or not to give me a Heimlich.

“I'm fine.” I laughed some more.

“Sure you are. So it was all right for a while, about two years, I guess. By then, shit had gotten really cold-blooded. We had no illusions any more, we knew who we were really working for, and we knew what our product could do to people. So I took my last little bit of strength and I kicked. I was strung out on methadone for a while.”

“And Bando?”

“Cold turkey. His friend Sebastian helped him. So there we were. We were clean, we were young—what was he, about nineteen, twenty? I was twenty-one—and we had never held a straight job.”

“What happened next?”

“I can't tell you the rest, you'll hate me.”

“No, I won't.”

“Oh, you say that, but you ain't heard it yet.”

“Tell me.”

“Cookie—”

“Just tell me. What difference does it make? It's in the past.”

“Promise me you won't tell nobody.”

“I promise.”

“
Promise
.”

“I promise.”

“Okay.” He drew a breath that sounded like it hurt his lungs. “I
want
to tell you.”

“So tell me.”

“I don't know who killed Bando. I have my suspicions, but I don't know for sure. But I do know why he was killed. See, someone thought he was a police informant. You know what they do to police informants, right?”

“Was he—”

“No, of course not, Bando wasn't no police informant. Here comes the part you can't tell.”

“I think I already know. I'm getting this feeling on my arms, like goose bumps.”

“I'm gonna whisper it in your ear.” He leaned over to me. “Oh girl, you smell good. I know who the informant was,” he whispered. “It was me.”