Enter Mookie

Tara takes off around one in the morning. I’m out of smokes and I stay up most of the night chewing Nicorette and listening to the insectian buzz of the streetlights outside my window and thinking about drinking.

Around 6 A.M., I get tired of thinking and head down to the street to find someone to talk to so I can take my mind off me and my troubles. I start to go to Wang’s Everything’s a Dollar Chinese Food/Doughnut House, but I realize I’m tapped out. Benny the Mole last night set me back to my last twenty cents. Broke as I am, I usually have enough for something at Wang’s, but now I can’t even get coffee. I’m kind of shaky and I need a meal, so I set out for Sergei’s, figuring we’re in business and we’re about to turn a quick ten grand, he can buy me some hash browns.

But Sergei’s not at home. I check in at Wang’s and he’s not there either. I stop back by the Lincoln, but no luck.

He’s gone.

He’s playing DB Cooper with me. He’s swept away and swallowed whole by the natives like Michael Rockefeller.

He’s Amelia Earhart—gone over to the other side and living as a geisha.

Where did he go?

It hits me that this may not be funny. I can’t really trust Sergei and I’ve put myself in a situation where I have to trust Sergei. Where could he be? Not off with Mr. Frank Carr? He could pocket the ten grand all by himself. But, if he was going to screw us, it would make more sense to wait until after the basket fills up a bit, and then screw us. If this is a score, it’s a big one. But he might have gone to Carr and gotten the ten grand? He wouldn’t. My head spins.

I can’t be thinking like this.

I need sleep. I need food. Money for food.

And my head’s doing this ugly dance when Mookie the Fisherman comes up and nearly bumps into me with his shopping cart that has two white five-gallon buckets and two deep-sea fishing poles sticking out. Mookie lives by the riverbed, he sleeps tucked in between the spaces the pillars carve in the freeway overpass. They bust him out every couple of months and he has to find a new place to live, which makes no sense to me, since it’s not as if it’s a place that’s being used for anything else.

They arrest him and he pinballs north and south. Last I heard he was under the Pacific Coast Highway exit overpass. Sometimes, he lives in the old Pike Subway. He’s told me there are still some of the old arts-and-crafts booths down there, still a couple of the human-pulled carriages they zipped the rich back and forth on. On the overpass, you can see his stuff, his and a few other people’s, if you walk up by the river. There’s sweatshirts and blankets all laid between the supports and you look for those if you need to find him.

“Better watch out, Nick,” Mookie says as he pulls his cart to a stop. “Don’t want a hook in your ear.”

I’m not sure I heard him right and I don’t say anything.

He points to his fishing poles, halved and bent over, but with the sharp lures and hooks sticking out. “End up in an ear—got to cut the ear.”

“I follow,” I say.

“Ear ain’t like no fish mouth,” Mookie says. “Ear don’t grow back.”

“Fish mouths grow back?”

“They do,” he says, and he looks up at the sky like he’s on some game show and the category’s things that grow back. “Fish mouths, genital warts.” He pauses, stumped. “Fifty-one percent of a worm.”

“What?” I say.

“You can cut a worm up to a half and the back half’ll grow back,” Mookie says. “Down to fifty-one percent.”

“But if you cut, say, fifty-one percent, there’s still forty-nine percent on the other side—wouldn’t that grow back?”

He shakes his head. “I’m talking the head side. Fifty-one percent and the head, and you’re in business—the worm grows back.” Some fish thump against the side of one of his buckets and I can see their angry silhouettes shadow-flash through the white plastic in the sunlight.

I point to them. “Can you eat those?”

“Nope.” Mookie dips a hand in, comes up with a fish that’s gray as concrete and lumpy as wet stucco. “Toxic from the navy dumping all that shit in the harbor all these years—plus the Japanese tankers. Pretty much poison—these fish.”

“Why do you keep them?”

“Sell ‘em as bait—Bondo Bob at the pier gives me a buck a foot.”

“What does he use them for?”

Mookie looks at me like I’m an idiot. “I told you, man. They’s bait.”

“But if they’re poison, won’t eating them make the big fish poison?”

Mookie shakes his head. “You know what happens when you ask these kinds of questions?”

I don’t say anything.

“You don’t get a dollar a foot for your catch, I’ll tell you that.”

Mookie starts to push off east toward the pier.

“Can you lend me a couple of bucks?” I say, and right away feel like shit for asking Mookie—he needs what he has. I make a mental note to get it back to him with interest.

He holds up two fingers like the peace sign. “Two things they’ll say about Mookie. Mookie never showed up late and he never lent money,” he says. “They’ll carve that on my headstone.”

“C’mon, Mookie.”

He considers me for a moment. “Thought you had some big-money thing cooked up with that Russian fellow.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“From the Russian—from Stalin’s mouth.”

I shake my head—I’m having trouble focusing, but I know that if Sergei’s talking about this, there’s no way that could possibly be anything but very bad news. “I don’t know what you’re talking about with Sergei,” I say. “But I need a couple of bucks for some coffee and food. Can you help me?”

“You look bad.”

“I feel bad,” I say.

“Tell you what,” Mookie says. “I’m covered on the fish—don’t need any work—I’ll hook you up with some work with Bondo Bob.” He smiles proudly. “I been knowing Bob long enough to set you up.”

“Set me up with what?”

“Work,” he says. “You ain’t too proud to work, are you?”

I shake my head and we go up to the pier to see if we can, as Mookie puts it, wrestle me up some food money.