The Nirvana Blues (32 page)

*   *   *

D
IANA
C
LAYMAN'S HAND
thoughtfully scrabbled at the back of his neck. “Joe, are you okay?” Her voice issued from a distant place. And even though Joe wanted to pay attention, he couldn't stop listening to the others. “I don't know,” he murmured, barely able to hear himself. Instead, he heard Ralph doing a rap on some fine mescaline that he'd dropped recently up at one of the Little Baldy Bear Lakes north of Chamisaville. Totally ripped, Ralph had caught rainbow trout on tiny flies during a savage hailstorm: he called it one of his most classic, all-time highs. At the next table, three people Joe knew only as Tammy, Vern, and Newlin were having a simple conversation—yet to Joe their words seemed lunatic.

“Why didn't you give me some more room? I felt like you were crashing in on me, cutting off my space. And I needed that space.”

“Maybe your energy just had to go somewhere else for a while.…”

“I started to realize I don't even know what your trip is about.…”

“Apparently, we just don't share the same kind of reality.”

“But I hear you, really. I understand where you're coming from. I know we could continue to have an ongoing relationship if we would just manage to be more open, especially sexually.…”

“We got rid of some of that anxiety momentum for a while, but then we started laying negative trips on each other.…”

“There was too much deception and the vibes were getting all fucked up by unnecessary distractions.…”

“You needed another space to sit in. You're not very centered at all. I was really worried. I thought you were on the brink.…”

“I love you all, I really care about you, I really care about people, but I'm not reading you very clearly.”

“Yeah, I know. My etheric is all out of whack.”

“When we discovered that you really needed that time and space, we were able to give it to you, because we understood your creative anxiety.…”

“I think a lot of my problems stem from the fact that in my last reincarnation I was a mandarin sorcerer.…”

“Well, all you really need is love.…”

“Yes, love is the only important thing.…”

The crime scene made its appointed rounds. Somebody had set a fire in the theater last night, trying to burn it down. An artist friend of Mimi's had parked her car on the gorge rim and walked off a ways to sketch; on her return, all four of her tires were gone. Somebody had lost a toolbox from the back of his truck while parked at the A&W the other evening. Three days ago, after shopping at Foodway, Tribby had placed the groceries in his unlocked Volvo, then entered Wacker's to buy birthday candles. While he was thus engaged, a thief ripped off the groceries.

“So what kind of freedom do we really have in this country?” Joe said dully.

“Don't start,” Ralph warned. “I'm not in the mood for your wishy-washy communism.”

“You people aren't ever in the mood for anything,” Joe said bitterly, staggering to his feet horrendously startled because he was almost crying. For a second his hands paddled the air helplessly, like a disoriented seal begging for its life. Turning, then, he stumbled against his chair, knocking it over, and, chased by Rimpoche's neurotic barking, he fled from their puzzled, accusatory gazes.

He was surprised, out on the sidewalk, in air he could breathe again, to find himself supported by Diana Clayman. Secreting saliva, he fumbled in his shirt pocket for an Aminodur, popped the pill, and exclaimed, “What's the matter with me?”

“It'll be okay,” she soothed. “You're just strung out. You've been going through some heavy shit, haven't you? When was the last time you logged a decent night's sleep?”

Joe faced her, honestly perplexed as he tried to catch his breath. “What are you doing here?”

“You look like you need a friend.”

“You don't appear so hot yourself. Who gave you the shiner, the Polack Apache with bad breath?”

Grinning toughly, Diana said, “Who else?”

Joe gave her more than a cursory glance. She had lovely dark and smooth hair. The skin around her large, dark eyes was wrinkled and slightly red. She had a curved nose—call it a sort of Greek beak—a thick upper lip, and a full, slightly jutting lower lip. His eye was attracted to a small deformity, a grouping under her chin of three or four large black hairs that had obviously been plucked or cut. She wore an overlarge army jacket (with the name Wiggens across the pocket), faded dungarees, and sandals. Her head only came up to his chin.

Joe said, “Excuse the hysterics. I'm not my usual cheerful, shit-eating-grin-personified self. Momentarily, I've lost the thread.”

“What happened?”

“Who knows. I'm sick of it already. It's so banal it's pathetic. I feel like some kind of Woody Allen cliché. I can't stand the fact I've become a neurotic bourgeois bum just like everybody else.…”

“Hey, kick back a little. You don't need to trash yourself like this.”

“Right out of nowhere I blew it with my family. I started balling a woman I don't even know. I just spent twelve thousand bucks to buy some pure coke to sell to buy land and a little house I probably couldn't ever move into anyway because I'm afraid to evict the old geezer living there. Last night somebody tried to kill me for that dope. But I don't even know if I'll have a family to live on that land with if I do make the score. I can't
believe
these last two days!”

She put her arm around his waist. “Join the crowd. Angel threw me out last night. He came in around two
A.M.
dressed in black and choking inside one of those Hanuman gorilla masks. We had a fight. I drove out onto the mesa and slept there. It was beautiful. And the first decent night's sleep I've had in six months.”

“So here we are: Two Lost Souls on the Highway of Life.”

She tossed her head. “I don't care, I'm used to it.”

“Used to what?”

Her eyes narrowed, indifferently hostile. “It used to be I went around looking for some kind of punch line in my life. I was like Candide, you know?—in search of Pangloss. I thought eventually you could reach some sanctified place where important events would happen, and it would all coalesce into something meaningful. But now I know the secret to existence is understanding that life is just something you do until you die. It's how you kill the time until there isn't any more time to kill. So I don't get upset or discouraged about it anymore.”

“For Christ's sake, how old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“You look younger.”

“I feel older.”

After a brief pause, Joe said, “Would you do me a big favor, Diana? Go back inside and ask Ralph for the key to his office, tell him I gotta use the phone.”

“Go back in there yourself.”

“I can't. One more false exit, and I swear I'll commit suicide. I'm not ordering you around—honest. I'm begging you for a favor.”

“All right, I'll go.”

As she departed, Spumoni Tatarsky roller-skated across the plaza, heading straight for the Prince of Whales Café. He carried a briefcase full of (either) Acapulco gold or a bunch of those cheap hologrammistic pendants known as dichromates. Resplendent in a black velvet top hat, formal tails decorated by crocheted pink-and-crimson roses, and a railroad engineer's striped coveralls, he resembled a funky Uncle Sam. Playing the movie-star-avoiding-paparazzi-during-preliminary-hearings-for-his-trial-on-charges-of-murdering-his-internationally-famous-playgirl-wife-by-clubbing-her-to-death-with-a toilet-plunger, Joe hid his face. And, after his regular salutation—“Peace, brother”—Spumoni skated right on by into the Prince of Whales, trailing an odor of marijuana, incense, and dank armpits.

Nick Danger appeared, scurried across an open area with his scabby suitcase tucked securely under one arm, and then disappeared.

A cute little blond teenybopper, wearing a white turban and a flowing robe, approached Joe and handed him a rectangular, blue, bookmark-sized card with “The Great Invocation” inscribed on it. The fourth and fifth verses said:

From the center which we
call the race of men

Let the Plan of Love and Light
work out.

And may it seal the door where
evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power
restore the Plan on
Earth.

Joe asked her: “What is The Plan?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He called her attention to the card: “What does it mean here when it talks about The Plan? What is The Plan? Communism? Capitalism? A screen pass to Franco Harris on two?”

She smiled sympathetically and drifted prettily away.

Had the moon been up, Joe would have howled at it.

*   *   *

R
ALPH
K
APANSKY'S MINIATURE
office never failed to amaze Joe. The man had once earned millions, yet here he was, camped in a stark cubicle with not a picture on the wall, seated day after day at a Salvation Army grade-school desk hacked half apart by the crudely gouged names of a thousand Guillermos, Josés, and Marias, surrounded by three cardboard boxes filled to overflowing with crumpled wads of rejected pages and a zillion cigarette butts. A bookcase held a couple dozen male, girly, and fuck magazines, a few cheap pornographic novels, a handful of Al Goldstein's
Screw
newspapers, and copies of
A Farewell to Arms, Mrs. Bridge, Ulysses,
a repair manual for Pratt and Whitney bubblecopters, and
The Bhagavad Gita.
Hanging from a pink ribbon around her neck, a semideflated life-sized sex doll graced the wall like some lascivious polyester poontang from a demented avant-gardian's screwball imagination. On the desk sat a battered old Remington, an ashtray, a ream of cheap sixteen-pound duplicator paper, a telephone, and an electric alarm clock. A single sheet in the typewriter held the following:

and Bill's prick was in her ass, Joe's cock was in her cunt, and Larry's fat succulent shlong was in her mouth. In a cage on the nearby table the myna bird

“How can your imagination flower in such a depressingly banal atmosphere?” Joe had once asked.

“Who's asking the imagination to flower? I just want to get my foot in the door and earn a few bucks—later I'll worry about art.”

Diana said, “You don't mind if I crash, do you?”

“Be my guest.”

“Thanks.” Her back against the wall, she slid straight down to the floor. Giving him a weary, playful wink, she tipped slowly sideways, laying her head on her hands, tucked up her legs until the knees almost touched her chin, and instantly fell asleep.

Joe regarded her for a minute, affected by her vulnerable posture. The large sleeves of her jacket almost covered her hands. Her toenails were painted dark burgundy. Joe shook his head, dropped the cocaine onto the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed Heidi: Heather answered.

“Hi, sweetie, how are you?”

Her voice sounded like that of a fifty-year-old former Parisian call girl who had recently gone straight (after a thirteen-year stretch in the Bastille) by starting a small aerospace information industry: “What do you want?”

“What do you mean ‘What do I want'? Heather, this is your father speaking.”

“I know who it is, for Christ's sake.”

“Don't swear at me, kid. You're only eight years old.”

“I'll be nine in September.”

“Big deal. Listen, lemme speak to your mother.”

“If you come back here and try to live with us, Michael and me are gonna run away,” she said tightly.

“Look, Heather, I'm sorry, I know this is a big mess. But skip the recriminations, huh? Save all the venom for your autobiography, and right now lemme speak to Heidi.”

“She's in the bedroom.”

“Well, how far is the bedroom from the telephone—four steps? What happened—you caught muscular dystrophy suddenly?”

“She doesn't feel so good. Last night she killed a whole bottle of Black Jack and we watched ‘Star Trek' together. Captain Kirk got trapped in this weird interphase and they almost couldn't beam him back on board. Spock had to take over the
Enterprise
while these creepy things called the Aoleans were weaving a time-warp fabric around the spaceship. It put weird vibes in the air and into all of them. McCoy and Mr. Sulu tried to kill each other. They wound up in straitjackets down in the sick bay. Except for Spock, of course, because Vulcans don't have the kind of feelings that could be affected.”

We should all be so lucky.
“Heather, that's nice, I'm glad you had fun, now—”

“We didn't have
fun,
stupid. Nobody could go to sleep, and Mommy was getting drunk. Guess what Michael did today?”

Joe heard Michael in the background shouting, “I did not! You shut up you little stoolie or I'll bash your teeth in!”

“He shot a chickadee with his BB gun.” She sounded so prissy and self-righteous Joe wanted to slug her.

“It couldn't of been a chickadee, Heather. They all went into the mountains. Now listen—”

“We fed it to Barby Lou. She loved it.”

“Heather, if you're trying to get my goat, it won't work. I'm too tired. Now do me a favor, go fetch your mother.…”

“I think maybe she's asleep. She was awful sick last night. She said if you drove her to an early grave she would come back as a ghost and haunt you until she drove you crazy and foaming at the mouth.”

“That's great. Now cut the crap and go tell her I'm on the phone and we need to talk—it's important. Hey, how come you guys aren't in school this morning?”

“We're staying home to make sure that if she upchucks anymore she won't gag to death on her own puke.”