Shave
Roger Pinnell

Up on the roof of this massive rococo theater left behind by Old Hollywood, I feel connected to the Golden Age, only it’s 1981 and we’re sneaking in. “El Capitan” read the archaic neon letters below.

“Rex! Over here!” Chris bursts out. Gray night sky, coal stove wind, and a view of the lights Fallen Hollywood has strung across itself. I inhale them all.

We are determined. My army-surplus boots scrape the gravel, and Chris is trying to force open a hatch, heavy and rusted shut. Together we slowly pry it loose, hinges croaking. It’s a big show with too many bands on the bill--UXA’s the only one I came for.

“Eureka!” he screams, suddenly Yosemite Sam. Before climbing down, we listen for sounds. Bright light and linoleum.

“Who’s there?” a sandblaster voice calls up.

“Joe!” shouts Chris Jarhead into the opening.

“Who?” the voice asks back. I expect Chris to reply “Jo’ Mama!” but he doesn’t—just flashes me his shit-eating grin. Too easy, too obvious.

“Joe Stalin!”

I descend to the floor of a men’s bathroom. Chris follows. A grizzled janitor with a silver crust of hair stares at us like we’re a couple of paratroopers dropped out of the sky. We can hear the first band echoing two floors down.

“Hi!” I open up. The janitor shrugs and smiles.

Chris asks, “Say, Pops—which way to the stairs?”

The defiled movie palace is buzzing with bodies, on stairways and various tiers. “Used to be, you’d walk into a show and see your friends. The scene was that small. Now you go to a show and you’ve gotta look for your friends,” he says.

The second band comes on, and their songs rush together, faceless. Abruptly, a line of LAPD uniforms in riot gear file in, forming a chain in front of the stage. In helmets, batons, and bushy mustaches, their phalanx looks surreal. The commandant speaks through a bullhorn:

“This event is in violation of Los Angeles fire code. This theater is not licensed for dancing. This show is over. Exit and disperse.” Surely Vince and Mitzi, who rode up with us from San Diego, must be cursing now--they paid twelve bucks, like most of these kids.

Catcalls from a few kids, a lull of confusion, then the crowd becomes a blown-down power line, snapping and convulsing as it hits the ground, the juice still sparking through it. I came to see UXA. We drag fake vintage supper club booths, Grenadine red, and push them over a ledge, a skewed camaraderie. Carotene dye jobs and black jeans and Catholic schoolgirl skirts and leather are forced outside. I think I see Chris punching a bouncer who’s trying to pepper-spray him, but can’t be sure. Engineer boots kick in plate glass windows on the boulevard. A self-fulfilling shitstorm?

The sirens squall like inconsolable babies, up and down in pitch. Over our heads, police helicopters shine spotlights on the squirming larvae of California, all starved for excitement. Several of our numbers flee onto the old Errol Flynn estate, mere blocks away.

“Let’s scram, Sam,” Chris finally says, as we stand on the corner. I catch our reflections in a car’s curving windshield, my bleached hair growing out and too stubborn to spike, my Ajax-powder eyes. Chris’ bold, half-Puerto Rican face. Finding our friends, we pile into a Toyota for the long drive back to San Diego, not quite drunk but thoroughly disgusted with our amputated night.

“Motherfuckers!” Vince spews out as we finally file in the door. Still seething two hours after the fact, face creased with spite, as if now it’s our turn to pay. Punches the phone on the kitchen wall, then he and Mitzi go straight to their bedroom. She grabs a bottle and a glass and closes the door; the receiver swings by its corkscrew cord.

Chris stands blank-faced, unfazed, and puts on a Killing Joke record. “No way I’m riding that bike back to Pendleton tonight.” We sit in the living room talking, quiet. The song is “Complications.” 20 years old, I grouse, and my first band just played our last show, opening for DOA.

“And our crappiest—I guess you saw our guitar player trying to strum with a broken arm.” He smiles from a corner of his mouth, and nods.

“I dropped all my classes at Junior College,” I tell him. “All I want to do is sing and play music.” He does not tell me I suck. He confides in me that he was once abandoned in sub-zero snow by his commanding officers.

“We were on maneuvers up in the Sierra. Couldn’t see in front of my own face. I could’ve died,” he tells me, voice low and vexed. In the silent shadows of the living room, it’s understood—he’s never been true USMC material, being too much of a smartass, a quick-witted scallywag corralled into the Corps by cynical Chicago cops.

“But in a month you’ll be a free man, Corporal Cruz,” I remind him.

When we’ve lost all track of time, we play Public Image’s “Radio 4” over and over: after the long, fractured night, an odd melancholy as the sun takes a stab at the sky. The wistful, spidery bass line, the volume turned down low. Unlike Vince, Jarhead can drink all night without becoming a human hand grenade, waiting for someone to pull his pin. Crazier but less disturbed.

I can identify.

*

I’m a fly slamming into a windowpane, trying to shoot through—something stops me cold, but I can’t see what it is. I walk room to room through this party, filled with a tension and ugly scraping I can barely fathom, let alone release or even forge into violence. It just escalates inside my skin.

Night after night ‘til the day I moved out, my family of six sat down around the dinner table. My dad said a blessing; we closed our eyes. We passed around margarine and sterilized small talk. Our mom and dad had the best intentions. Feeling suffocated or getting fucked with at school, those things were left unspoken, those omissions our unspoken law.

Cleo with her high cheekbones and a thin copper snake coiled around her upper arm; Skunk woman, her black hair split by a white stripe; Chuko Tony, a Mexican rottweiler half the time, the other half producing intricate, breathless, disjointed drawings. A carnival sideshow in the midst of some girls’ party. We become our own tent of human curiosities, and it doesn’t matter if there are only one or two live shows a month and our scene is full of infighting and we work at shit jobs or not at all, it doesn’t matter. We choose this.

Suddenly I see Chris Jarhead pedaling someone’s bicycle, straight-faced, through a crowded living room at a party we weren’t invited to. Or Chris with a huge bowling trophy inverted on his scalped head like a Viking helmet, blurting “Va-Va-Va-Voom!” at Cindy Arson, who watches him with a demure grin, cigarette smoke and voltage entangling her bone white hair. At the end of the night I see them talking back at our flat, two confidants, and I realize he’s virtually her older brother.

Smoldering all night on acid, later on methamphetamine, the nights themselves rush together and chisel down our vision ‘til the brittle sunlight and cars and people filling the streets are all too clear. Returning home to sleep but lying awake for hours.

It’s dark inside a freakshow tent, and you know there is no actual Alligator Boy, but for a moment you want to believe it’s the only truth in the world. A few of the carnies are creeps, but screw it—I’m in love with the carnival.

*

“Christ,” I complain to Jake, “What’s with Jarhead? He’s been out of the Marines since last September, but hasn’t come around our place for months. I told him not to move to that fucking suburb with Harry and Ian.”

“Really?” he answers, “Haven’t seen him at any shows lately, either. I think he’s burned out.” But two days later I run into Chris at the Salvation Army up the street. I’m looking for pants.

“Look what I found, Rex—Coleman Hawkins! He’s the greatest.” Holds up a worn record cover, edges fuzzy white. “I really dig his tone.”

“Where’ve you been lately, Chris? What’s up with you?” I inquire.

“Hey, have you heard Slaughter On Tenth Avenue? Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!” he grins, ignoring my question. “By the by, did I tell you I bought a tenor sax? I’m learning scales.” I just nod.

“Wasn’t it only a couple of years ago that people going to punk shows were the smartest ones around?” he finally asks me.

“Yeah, the whole idea’s been overrun by the dull and stupid,” I concur. But there’s got to be a new place to glow in the dark, I tell myself—new sounds, new streets, new eyes that bristle at the Styrofoam core of the world.

One Saturday afternoon months later, we’re watching The Sea Wolf on TV, John Garfield recoiling from Edward G. Robinson’s sadistic chortle. Eyes glued to the screen, Chris tells me abruptly, “Y’know, Rex, I can’t stand it up there in Rancho del Boredom anymore. I’ve gotta get a place in the heart of town before I end up in the psycho ward.”

“Guess what, Chris? I’m not so sure there is a heart of town here. Why do you think we call it Slow Death?”

Nevertheless, Chris and I soon find an old in-law unit behind a Buddhist Center on Park Boulevard. Living room wallpaper with a fake brick pattern, and a small side room with a slanted floor where Chris practices his sax.

“Nothing like starting over in new digs,” he says. Carefully lifting the needle from a record, he rattles on about his mother moving three boys and a girl between apartments full of empty cupboards, how his father Chico had split early. “For a while she had this boyfriend, a Cherokee guy—my mom was one of those white broads being a Free Spirit,” he adds. No sooner have we unpacked our boxes, than Chris brings a new girlfriend, Rebecca, over. I sense her spunk in her voice and reactions. She’s OK.

And then, the crackerjack prizes.

A war-torn paperback by Rocky Graziano, Somebody Up There Likes Me.

“Go ahead, Rex, keep it—I read it in one day.”

“You must read fast.”

“I read when I’m driving for work, those long stretches through the desert.”

One of his old 78s: Carnal horns and neurotic strings and slinking piano. Lust, psychosis and unspeakable heartache, all on one brittle shellac. “Original sound track of the motion picture, A Streetcar Named Desire,” reads the cover, over a fading sketch of a woman gazing absently down at a streetlamp from a spindly staircase.

A hardcover book of Damon Runyon stories. The long-evaporated swagger of Times Square nightclubs and hungover racetrack gamblers. Week to week, month to month, I keep thinking of New York or Chicago or San Francisco.

THE BLURRING TOGETHER! Black and white faces, smoke and fury, acid-gold pages that fall out when you turn them, blurred until we want into that other America, hard-boiled, devoid of the office parks and strip malls metastasizing like cancer in San Diego.

Working for five bucks an hour as a line cook, I slowly scrape together my funds. I dig up my own hot-shit jewels from Folk Arts Records, when I can stand the obese, wheezing clerk following me around. Pharoah Sanders and Roland Kirk: spasms and spiritual Drano. Free-jazz records now as dusty and obscure as Chris’ big band ones.

Honest to God, Chris now seems to spend every spare minute with Rebecca. And I don’t care if she’s monopolizing the crystal meth trade—we all dig one-stop shopping—but she’s become so manipulative with him and me both, it makes me want to retch. Is his middle name Oblivious? I can see it right on her calculating face.

Three months later, a guy from work tells me he’s driving east in his Camaro. It’s time to go.

“Guess I won’t see you for a long time,” Jarhead says one September night, standing on Rebecca’s front porch. A tight, quick farewell hug.

*

“Lucky you,” says a waitress in the small East Village restaurant where I’ve just started cooking, “You know the Tylenol Killer? He was staying at the same hotel you are, only a month or so ago. Just before they got a bead on him.”

As I wait for a drink in a tiny bar, a TV screen overhead reads “Election ‘84” endlessly, and there’s an unreality in the faces of people coming in and out, not wanting to believe Reagan’s been reelected. Some weeks later, I walk across Tompkins Square, its bare winter branches now ethereal with snow and overhead lights.

“You blew it,” I tell a friend I run into there. “You shoulda gone to see Sonic Youth with me. The doorman at Danceteria just waved me in, as if I was Somebody. The fool.”

“Maybe you’re hip and fabulous and you don’t even know it,” he smirks.

“Yeah, right.” And we snigger.

One night I lie awake at three a.m. in my room at the Rutledge

Hotel, loving the molten ebb and flow of heroin inside my skin but hating the men in the next room screaming at each other in Arabic. My mind keeps circling like a late plane over the realization that the old crowd in California has lost only one face, but I’ve lost all of theirs.

Standing at the rail of the Staten Island Ferry, I watch the bow crush apart a crust of late January ice, pulling back into its Manhattan berth. My mind’s made up—I’m leaving.

*

Flicking Jake’s Bic lighter, I ignite a firecracker, tossing it to the bricks that pave the bridge, our vantage point for the 1986 Chinese New Years’ Parade. The tiny red stick explodes with a sharp smack in the February chill. A powder burn smell. The bridge juts out from Portsmouth Square over Kearny Street and it’s crowded.

Jake, Chris and Randy are up in San Francisco visiting me. We’ve just bought two dozen small fireworks from an acne-scarred Asian boy, his tone of voice both surly and scared of getting caught. One after another, we light the fuses.

No trace left of the spirit of bands who once played the Mabuhay a few blocks away, or the Deaf Club: The Dils, KGB, Negative Trend, a brief intangible spirit both scorching and smart. Poring over a book on Chinatown’s vaporized opium dens, I’ve become obsessed with the secret tunnels rumored to run below these streets, providing sanctuary to smugglers. I can’t find a trace of these, either.

“Hey, Jake,” Randy says, “Better hide your beer. I see a couple of cops.” The rest of us have finished ours, or hide them under bomber jackets with sheepskin collars. But the officers, as if detecting by radar, make a beeline to us. A young clean-shaven cop grabs Jake by the wrist, twisting it back.

“What are you doing?” Jake asks, annoyed. He reverses the cheap wrestling move, since he’s bigger.

“Stupid,” the second, husky cop calls him, with the contempt of an old man berating his dog for shitting on the kitchen floor. Grabbing Jake’s bottle and pouring it out, he says “Here,” shoving the empty back into Jake’s hand. “Now throw this away!”

A marching band comprised of Asian teenagers comes crackling below us. Sharp indigo caps, heads held high. Snare drums kick-start, trombones build muscle. Chris and I lean over the railing, peering down at the horns, their odd power in large numbers. Our breath comes out like lumbering fog.

“A marching band, that’s the ticket,” he tells me in a conspiratorial voice.

“Yeah? Yeah. But wearing our own uniforms,” I add. “Move up here, man, let’s do it. I’ve already found some good players. Our kind of brass band, crazy and ragged.”

“I don’t know, Daddy-O. Not sure if I’m ready.”

“Come on, Chris. You can crash at our place. You’ve already got friends here. What’s keeping you in San Diego? Your girlfriend, the speed dealer? In case you hadn’t noticed, she can be a real cold-blooded bitch.” I’ve said too much, and I don’t care.

“Say Rex—this town feel like home now?” he asks, shifting focus.

“Yeah. Sure.” But still I feel a colorless claustrophobia inside that no wide-open avenues can relieve. First your family feels stifling and you have to get away, then your hometown does too. But where do you go when your skin itself feels like it’s closing in on you?

A bulbous, bright red and gold dragon trails down Kearny now. All the minuscule human feet underneath create a serpent crossbred with a centipede, sashaying side to side. The crowd of drunken college kids packing the sidewalks squawks and bellows.

“So, pal, gotten hitched yet?” Chris asks me, grinning. My eyes stay on the dragon.

“We need to get more beer,” Randy informs us, still incensed by the cops.

After the parade, we light out to the boutique streets of Pacific Heights and set off our last firecrackers next to late-model Peugeots, just to trigger their alarms.

*

“Just like a soldier boy/ I’ve been out fighting wars/That the world never knows about...”

.................................................................--Tim Buckley, “Dream Letter”

Waiting down in the 24th Street BART station, I’ve been puzzling over Chris’ last-minute phone calls at odd hours. Still, thank God he’s prying himself away from his skinny girl Trisha and her revolving door of rehabs. In three days we’ll go out and celebrate his birthday, I’ll slap his back and say “You’re young for 35, and anyway I’m close behind.” With my steady, mundane work and night classes, feels like years since I’ve been part of any flickering midway. I smile when I spot him; I’m running out of kindred souls.

First thing I notice when Chris walks through the turnstile is his eyes like 8-balls, bulbous and shining black. The way he looks exhausted and wired simultaneously. Thick eyebrows, bushy black hair grown out farther than I’ve ever seen it. In October 1994, there is no short or long. Chris gives me a tired grin, a hug. Picks up his old straw-colored suitcase.

“Wait’ll I tell you why I had to blow town,” he says to me as we head for the escalator.

*

“San Diego cops are just hormones with handguns. That’s all they are!” Chris Jarhead spouts emphatically, as if I don’t remember. We’re in the Horseshoe Club now, shrill hipster kids surrounding us. I empty my glass too quickly, eyes vacillating between my old pal and the dregs of beer in front of me.

“Thought about turning yourself in?” I ask, striving to act nonchalant about what he’s done, as Chris is.

“I’m not spending one day in jail for that son-of-a-bitch,” he declares, resolute, over his pint glass. “I know what I did, and I did it for the right reasons. I didn’t walk into McDonald’s and blow everyone away.”

“I’ve gotta piss,” I say.

Staring at my reflection in the men’s room mirror, splinters of our long conversation sticking in my head:

“He grabbed my girlfriend at a bus stop, raped her, and—”

“Trisha? Is she OK?”

“She’s fine, but she’s back in a rehab.”

“Anybody I know?”

Chris reciting a litany of slashed tires, threats and a stiletto puncturing his left arm—Trisha’s ex-boyfriend Link, stalking her and Chris both. I’d heard only shards of it over the last two years. How Link had shape-shifted over the years from a harmless new wave dork in bowling shirts to some malignant predator. Hadn’t heard about the restraining orders violated, the sluggish San Diego police and the DA labeling Trisha a “non-credible witness.”

“You sure you killed him?”

“Oh yeah—I saw his brains in the gutter.” My silence belies the cold electric charge through my skull. “Oh, don’t look so shocked.” The charges that never stuck. Link shooting Trisha up with heroin in the motel room, keeping her for days.

Is this really Chris, sucked into the role of Hollywood vigilante? Chris Jarhead, independent to the core, one whom I could always trust to be the anchor? Are all my friends full of strangers, full of hidden black holes?

I study my five o’clock shadow face, my static granite eyes. What do I do? What? Wishing I could flush this whole goddamn quandary down the toilet right now, watch it whirlpool down the porcelain hole.

“Wait’ll I tell you why I had to blow town.”

Wish I could shove those words back into his fucking mouth, forcing us back to the point where we were just two old friends who haven’t seen each other since Christmas. I dry my hands and exit.

*

His eyes no longer dilated when I get home from work on Tuesday, Chris has resumed talking in wisecracks and going on about playing his accordion and selling off old records. I go into my bedroom to put on some music. I can cope with this. I can cope.

“Bet you’ve never seen a real murder weapon this close before,” he says, approaching from behind. I do an about-face. “Sorry. I know it’s uncomfortable when someone’s aiming one at you. It ain’t loaded.”

Standing on a crowded bus is uncomfortable. This is something else.

“Here, hold it—it’s a Taurus, just a little hand-held.”

Forsaking any better judgment, I grasp it, fingers brushing the fine ridges on the steel handle, the tiny trigger.

“Jesus, why didn’t you get rid of it?”

“It’s registered to me—I got it legit,” he tells me, as if proud. “Look, Rex--it’s funny, but once you use it on somebody, you don’t feel safe without it. You need it with you all the time.”

“Like an American Express card? Great. But I’ve got this roommate, Gus. He cannot know about this fucking gun.”

“He’ll never see it. I promise.”

“Why couldn’t you just—”

“Hey, you know who I really want to see? Rosanna.” As always, veering away when the subject turns sober. Reluctant, I pick up the phone.

As soon as she opens her door, I can see in Rosanna’s face that had they both been single these last few years, living in the same city, she and Chris could’ve easily fallen for each other. Ever since she was Randy’s girlfriend, we’ve all connected. I hear her phone ringing as she lets us in.

“It’s Liz, in San Diego,” she says cheerfully. Her smooth-pearl face and porchlight-blonde hair echo the Minnesota Swedes she comes from. Chris and I sit on her couch while she takes a long, hushed call in her bedroom. As if imitating their exchange, Chris and I glance at each other and murmur about what’s going through the phone lines. When Rosanna returns, she uncorks a bottle of red wine, starts filling glasses. Her face is placid, giving up nothing.

“To old friends,” she toasts, smiling faintly. The late daylight slanting into her living room holds slivers of dust. The particles float there like slow, drunken insects. In what we don’t say, I feel the sunken shipwreck quality of what we all know. We shoot black and white photos of each other on the couch, until we run out of film. I can sense they want to talk alone, and I leave them.

Ascending the stairs inside my Victorian flat, I’m relieved to see my roommate’s not around. When Chris meets me back at my place late that night, he says in a chipper tone, “Look, I got you something.” He hands me a tall candle, burgundy wax in a glass cylinder. Shamrocks! Horseshoes! Diamond rings! Also painted on the glass, hopeful phrases such as “Buena Suerte” and “Your Wish Come True.”

“Come on,” says Chris, “Let’s break it in.” He opens a matchbook, strikes one and the wick flares yellow. He still has half a bottle of Cabernet from Rosanna’s, and we sit in the living room finishing it. We talk about Rosanna, the speed of sound, and the encroaching tide of rumors.

“Why didn’t you head straight for Mexico, man? You were so close.”

“Why? ’Cause I wanted to come up and see you, knucklehead. Anyway, it’s New Orleans for me, like I told you. Real soon, I’m gonna go disappear in the Crescent City.”

“New Orleans? Too small. We gotta be realistic, Chris.” The candle flickers, wax starts to pool below the wick.

*

The ringing phone jabs me awake, the clock reads 1:30. I let it ring. Each time, the sound gets harsher, colder. Dreading it will be another call from San Diego, alerting me, asking questions. Machine clicks on, I hear my brother’s voice.

“I gotta talk to you man, it’s important.”

Staring at the charcoal ceiling, I feel that electrical high-tension wire running through me again, as if it’s replaced my veins. Why can’t they all just shut the fuck up? Minutes ago I’d been dreaming, now sleep is suddenly miles away, inconceivable.

Daybreak and dead weight. I drag myself out of bed to get ready for work. Dark coffee’s dripping into the glass pot when Chris enters the kitchen.

“Sleep OK?”

“No, not for long—my brother called,” I tell him, filling two mugs. “I didn’t pick it up.” We sit at the Formica tabletop, staring into steam and ghosts rising from the coffee cups. “People are finding out too fast, Chris. If our old friends know you’re up here—”

“The cops can’t be far behind,” he finishes. Pastel sunlight and silence in the kitchen.

“Maybe you need to split today, Chris. People sell cheap plane tickets every day in the classified ads. Just grab a paper.” I push two quarters across the table toward him.

He seems to ponder them.

“God, it’s ten to nine! I’m running late.” I slug down my coffee, grab my jacket.

“Don’t be surprised if I’m gone when you get back,” he tells me, looking at the red carpet. All I feel is a need to be a human trash compactor, to push everything down.

Outside, at the top of the stairs, I say, “Somehow, soon, let me know where you are. Good luck, Chris.” We shake.

“Thanks, Rex, thanks for everything. Guess I won’t see you for a long time.” I close the iron gate, with a burgeoning flesh-and-blood sense that our handshake was inadequate, that he wants to embrace me, wants to say something more, but I’m in a hurry and I just look back and wave. His face looks dislocated, as if it belongs to someone else.

*

At lunchtime in the huge kitchen, I call my number from the phone on the wall, and I’m greeted by my own voice, over and over. “This is Rex speaking, leave a message.”

He really split. He’s already out of town.

All day I find it impossible to focus. I find a prickly, alien hybrid of nerves, melancholy and sleep-deprivation.

But finally, back on my block, I check my watch. Five to 5:00. I remember it’s Columbus Day, Wednesday. Sure, I’m still wound up, but I’m relieved in an odd way, knowing this quandary has passed out of my hands.

I climb the steps and turn my key in the lock, pushing the door open. It jerks inward and stops—chained from the inside. What the hell? We never use that chain.

“Chris! You in here?” No reply. “Chris, open up.” In the vacuum of silence, all the questions rush in. Is he paranoid? We never use that chain. A slow, dull panic starts to screw itself in. I walk around the side, up the back stairs. The kitchen is quiet; his coffee cup still sits on the table, half consumed. I start gingerly down the hall.

I call out “Chris?’’ and get no answer, but hear faint, fuzzy dialogue from a TV somewhere. Hallway without end. Around the corner, where it turns, I see the edge of someone, slumped over beneath the mirror and its heavy wood frame.

“Chris?” I stab at his name as if it’s a demand, and he just hasn’t heard me. Dropping down, I strain to roll him over. He’s a concrete block. I shove him onto his back, I see a face and hands, dull purple.

“Godammit!” Thin stripes of blood from his nose and mouth. He’s still wearing the blue flannel shirt he borrowed from me. An empty Jim Beam bottle lies on the carpet just beyond his left hand. His eyes aren’t open, his eyes aren’t closed. I try to pry his mouth open, but the jaw won’t budge. I breathe into him hard. Instead of breath or life coming out, only gurgling. Blood. Stomach acid, its acrid fumes.

“No!” My heart stomps bones. My heart is hot staccato shards.

“No!”

This hallway isn’t real.

“I need paramedics right away! My friend has OD’d. I think he mixed downers and alcohol.” On the single bed in the back room I see blackened foil, wrappers emptied of their pills. The tiny TV left on, ragged static on the screen.

“Where the fuck are they?”

I hear silence. I hear silence.

*

“Can I just—say goodbye to him?” Rosanna asks the Asian paramedic.

The coroner steps into my bedroom, saying clinically, “We’ll need to take that letter for the inquiry.”

“That’s my name on the envelope, see? He wrote it to me! And it doesn’t explain, not at all, just says,” I stare at the wallet and postcards on my desk, which he’s instructed me to mail in his note. “Something about scattering his ashes at Seaman’s Reef.”

“Where’s Seaman’s Reef?” somebody asks.

Drunks outside the liquor store watch the coroner’s van pull away. Crowd of squinting neighbors disintegrates. No sooner are we left alone than Rosanna and I hear the sharp “Chink!” of breaking glass. We eyeball each other, startled. In the living room I find the candle Chris bought me, evidently burning since last night. The wick has veered against the glass, cracking it. I start making phone calls. I can hear Jake’s voice breaking; I hear Randy’s flooding with rage. A cold cup of coffee remains in the kitchen, half full, milk streaking the surface.

*

Fishing through my closet for the brown suit I’ll wear to the funeral, I do a double take. And Chris’ worn leather jacket, made for a motorcycle cop, hangs among my clothes. Turning to his suitcase, I ask, “You think you can pay me for this?” I dig and find his handgun in a box below, buried under clothes. I sit cradling it, cross-legged on the floor, focusing not on the steel chamber, but on Irreversibility--the events this micro-equalizer set in motion.

Who’s going to get his pearl accordion? I wonder.

*

“I understand you have something for me.”

He stands on my doorstep, politely declining to enter. Tall black man made towering by his manzanita cowboy boots and white suit. Napoleon something, Homicide, he says, handing me a card. I glance at the boots and back at his aged, striking face and gravel-gray hair.

“Two cops from San Diego were already here yesterday, a man and a woman?” I say as if unsure. “Asking questions. Disappointed, when they couldn’t find the gun. But I found it last night. I just want it to end. See, my friend Chris came up here—“

“I know the story,” he states, his baritone cauterizing everything. I tell myself corrosively, They only care about closing out their paperwork. They don’t give a shit if he’s dead. I don’t mention that I wiped it clean.

I hand him the box.

*

The all-occasion minister seems at a loss for material. “Chris was a proud United States Marine, and—”

Chris? A proud what? Chris was a carnival barker dropped into a world that had no idea what he was yelling about. Two or three old friends stand up and recite memories in the small San Diego funeral home, against the sound of Sunday traffic outside. But where’s the music? Where has it gone? No Taps, no Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Parents are here. His stoic mother, estranged father and brother who shifts his eyes sideways like a photocopy of Chris, they just want to get it over with. My own mom and dad, embracing me with wet eyes, Dad skinnier than ever from his chemotherapy. Sullen girls I’ve never seen before stand around in vintage dresses.

After the formalities, most of us keep drinking back at my brother’s house, and I hear scattered spite toward Trisha. A sour mash, angry taste in the air, not detectable at the funeral or the wake.

A guy I just met prods, “How is it she just happened to keep running into Link? Who do you think she was scoring from?”

Sick of talking, sick of people, I spread out a striped Indian blanket on the crabgrass behind the house, and sit alone watching bright red pinpricks in the distance. Radio towers on the hills above Tijuana. They puncture the black like furious stars. Jake, my old friend and partner in crime, finds me and we sit smoking cigarettes, trying to absorb the suckerpunch.

“A lot of people are saying that Trisha ‘hallucinated’ the rape,” he tells me.

“Think it’s true?”

“I don’t know what I think right now,” he admits.

It’s not until we get back to San Francisco that gravity truly takes over. October is cold this year and the wind is full of friction. Pigeons bunch up on the sidewalk, bickering with dry leaves that got there first. Accessory After The Fact, Harboring A Fugitive—paranoia rattling the windows. The streets are full of strangers who’ve never heard his name.

Clean white T-shirts.

Wire-rimmed sunglasses, lenses seaweed-green.

Blank white envelopes waiting for letters.

Each morning I wake up and stare at Chris’ thrift-store suitcase in the corner. I rifle through it, hoping I’ll come across some hidden, overlooked key. But the mundane curios of a quick pack job are all there is. I send his dog tags to his mother in Chicago.

Waves of ravenous nothing. No sensation whatsoever.

“At a certain point, you’ve just gotta let it go,” Randy tells me on the phone.

“We’re keeping busy, real busy,” Chris’ sister Jen informs me, long distance.

A balding, oafish manager at work asks me, “Well, getting back to normal?”

As if there’s a normal left to get back to.

As if this lingering blackness is just an unsightly growth like the week-old stubble surrounding my mouth; something I could slice away if I’d only buy a Trac 2 razor. But it’s a blackout—one where the entire city’s gone dark and your radio can’t pick up any sound but screaming static and you remember every screaming microscopic detail.

“He trusted you,” Rosanna tells me. “He trusted you more than anyone with this. I know it sounds bizarre, but you should feel honored.”

I hear silence.

*

One late night in April, I walk along the Embarcadero, deliberating. I feel the silent but cantankerous wind off the water, I look out for cops. It’s been a year and a half. Above the Bay Bridge, the sky is a grainy, luminous purple, reflecting the lights strung between the towers. Bums try to sleep huddled against the railing. Concrete supports from vanished piers reach out of the bay.

I stop at a spot where the promenade forms a right angle, nearly underneath the bridge. I glance up and down the sidewalk again. Even with no moon, I see the bold red of the fireboats docked at their station.

Now is the time. Now.

I pick up Chris’ suitcase and hurl it as far as I can, out into San Francisco Bay. A curt, tiny splash. No release, no closure, none of that cotton candy to crystallize and dissolve in my mouth.

“It’s yours, now take it already.” Quietly, without the vitriol. From here the bridge appears obvious and unshakeable, the opposite of everything below.

Only last Easter, with my Dad reluctantly and irrevocably fading out—maybe a motorized hospital bed sucks out any fight you still have left—only then did the sheer Absence sink down, sink in, like slow motion, glinting sediment. The barenaked Tears, in splintering silver. A taste in my mouth vaguely like rusted iron.

I stand watching the valise float out, impossibly slow on the icy black. I’ve pierced it with my Swiss Army knife so it will sink, but it doesn’t. Everyone knows a carny’s got to work his hardest after the crowds have gone home and forgotten, tearing down the Tilt O’ Whirl, tearing down the carnival walls. Working in spite of lacerations and bruises, refusing to acknowledge their power.

So many kinds of murder, and only one of them’s illegal.

And I conjure him up, leaning against a Falcon in the North Park Lions’ Club parking lot, grinning and shouting in that sarcastic way of his when we would stop at nothing just to feel something.

Glacier-slow, still buoyant. A suitcase floating in blackstrap molasses. A red herring of a plan to find sanctuary in the birthplace of Louis Armstrong, the cradle of jazz. Past algae-slick rocks, not out to sea but parallel to shore, bouncing off pilings and eventually drifting beneath a derelict pier. And finally, disappearing behind the fireboats.

Leaving just this absence and the blackout.

I start back the way I came. As if I could flush it down the toilet. As if I could shave it off my face.

© Roger Pinnell