I’M GLAD YOU want to hear about my pilgrimage, but I should warn you it’s a real ear-bender. Thing is, it doesn’t make much sense unless you understand what got me crazy enough to make it, and even then I’m not sure it’ll make any sense to you. I’m not sure – what is it now, twenty years later? – that it makes that much sense to me. But let me play you some background and we’ll see where we go.

I was born and raised in Florida, near Miami, the youngest of three kids and the only boy. My sisters were married by the time I was eight so we were never really close. My dad was a long-haul trucker, mainly citrus to the Midwest. He was a union man all the way, solid as they come. Driving big rigs was just a job to him, a skill – no romance. What he really loved were his roses. He and Mom grew these miniature roses, and every hour he wasn’t on the road he was in the rose garden. By the time he made retirement, the garden was a nursery. He died out in his rose garden one bright summer afternoon about two years after he retired. A stroke. Mom still tends the garden – got a couple of young girls to help her because she’s in her late seventies now and getting slowed down a bit, but the nursery actually makes pretty good money. People will pay serious bucks for fine roses.

When I was a kid I’d ride with my dad when school was out in summer. I loved every minute of it. The power of the diesels. Roaring through the night, imagining all the people asleep in their houses and dreaming all those dreams as the moon burned across the sky. Iowa sweltering in August and the little fan on the dash of the Kenworth barely drying the sweat. Guys waving howdy in the truck-stop cafes and kidding me whether I’d finally taken over for the old man or was still riding shotgun. Free ice cream from the waitresses and that hard-edged wiggle they used to move through the men, laughing and kidding and yelling orders to the cook.

I started learning to drive when my feet could reach the pedals at the same time my eyes cleared the wheel. I was driving relief for dad when I was sixteen, and by eighteen I was on my own. I wasn’t like dad. I had a bad case of the romance, sitting way up there above the road balling it down the pike, eaten up with white line fever. Bad enough to have the romance, but I was good at the work. Natural hand-eye coordination. The other truckers started calling me Floorboard George,’ cause that’s where I kept my right foot. Say what you want about good sense, one thing was for certain: I could cover ground. I took great pride in the fact the only tickets I ever got were moving violations, and that’s only when they could catch me. Unfortunately, they caught me over thirty times in twenty months, and when the judges in three states have jerked your license, work is hard to find. When you’re hauling perishables, it ain’t easy to justify driving around a state just because they’ll bust you for driving through it; trucking companies like you to take the shortest route, even if I could drive around Georgia and still make reasonable time.

Besides, early on I got into the methamphetamine version of speed. The heat wasn’t on then, and you could buy a handful of pharmaceutically pure benzedrine from any truck-stop waitress between Tallahassee and LA. That’s why truck-stop waitresses were so good humored and sassy back then: they had a lock on the bennie concession. Just about all the drivers used them, and I sure held up my end. For two years there I thought White Cross was the trucker’s health plan. Dad never used them, though, said they’d rot your reflexes and make you try to do things you couldn’t do. What I found out was even worse: they helped me do things I shouldn’t have.

What Dad used was coffee – one-gallon stainless-steel thermos – and he’d put maybe three shots of peach brandy in it. Hardly taste the brandy. And Dad knew how to sleep. He’d sleep four and drive twenty. Thing was, he slept those four hours. Shut his eyes and straight to deep sleep without a quiver. And four hours later, right to the tock, no alarm, he was fresh and ready to roll. He claimed he never dreamed on the road, or no dreams he remembered. Me, I dreamed all the time. But I never slept.

Dad dreamed at home, though. I heard him down in the kitchen one morning telling Mom he’d dreamed his brain had turned into a huge white rose. Mom just burst right out crying. Dad was saying, ‘Hey, hold on, it was a great dream – I loved it.’ And Mom, really sobbing then, said, ‘Yes. Yes it is, Harry. I know it is.’ Dad says, ‘So why the waterworks?’ And I could hear Mom sniffling, trying to gather herself, saying, ‘No, it’s a fine dream,’ and then they must’ve been holding each other because all I could hear was their muffled voices and the coffee glubbing in the percolator. But I understood why Mom was crying: some dreams are just too beautiful to have.

That’s probably part of the reason I was hitting those ol’ white cross benzedrines so hard – sometimes twenty a day. They fed my natural inclination to go fast, which I’m sure was also partly the baffled frenzy of being eighteen years old and suddenly cut loose of school. Jamming like a cannonball cross-country, riding it as fast as you could make it go, getting paid to eat the horizon was a magnificent feeling, but pretty soon it got so I didn’t want to stop. I was young, restless, and dumb, but I somehow knew deep down in my gut that when it gets so you don’t ever want to stop, that’s when you have to stop, or you’re gonna be long gone for good. I’d lost my license in two more states, had a nasty bennie habit, and was spending far too much time getting fried in the short-order hearts of truck-stop waitresses. The life was collapsing on me and I knew I had to make a move. So in October of ’56 I headed to San Francisco, mainly because hitchhikers I’d been picking up agreed it was about the only place in the country with a pulse. It’s odd, looking back: 1956, and I wanted off the road. And I really, truly, cross-my-heart wanted to get away from those little white pills that made you go fast and feel good. Well, to be honest, I didn’t want to, but I understood that I was going to make a bad and unhappy mess out of myself if I didn’t. Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to be, I knew it wasn’t a shit-heap wreck. Maybe the bare minimum, but I had some sense.

Soon as I hit Frisco, things started running my way. I found a sweet little apartment, clean and cheap, above an Italian bakery in North Beach, and took a job driving tow truck at Cravetti’s garage. After a tough month, I’d cut the bennies back to two a day, which for me, you understand, was virtual abstinence.

Towing was different back then. Any call, whether a bad wreck or just somebody parked in a red zone, went out on an open line to every towing service in the city, and the first truck there got the job. Hell, after 18-wheelers, driving a tow truck was like driving a Maserati. I snagged a lot of work. It took me a while to learn the streets and the best routes, but it never took me long to get there.

The competition was intense. I remember the first call I took. Mainly because I didn’t know the turf and innocently went the wrong way up a one-way street, I aced in about three seconds in front of this insane fool, Johnny Strafe, who drove for Pardoo Brothers. I was chortling as I hooked up, but when I got back in the cab and hit the ignition, damn engine wouldn’t grab. Like it wasn’t getting spark. I look up puzzled, and there’s Johnny Strafe holding my plug wires like some greasy bouquet at a marriage of rubber freaks, and before I can even scream he starts stuffing them down the grating on a corner storm drain. I’d have gone after him if the cops hadn’t been on the scene. I complained to them, but they had other problems. Finally this older sergeant took me aside and told me, ‘Hey, if you can’t tow him, the other guy gets to. It’s called “eat shit, rookie,” and that’s how it is. We’ve got enough to do without dealing with you crazy assholes. You’re new, okay, you didn’t know. But don’t bother us again.’

So I developed a few chops of my own. Turnip up the tailpipe, that’s one I introduced. One time around the Fourth of July I slipped under Bill Frobisher’s rig and taped a box of sparklers to his manifold. When the heat set ’em off, you should’ve seen Bill hit the pavement running. I got Johnny Strafe back, too – squirted Charcoal-Lite all over his front seat and set it off. He was hooking on at the time and didn’t even notice the flames, but fortunately I’d brought the biggest damn fire extinguisher from Cravetti’s shop and I filled his cab up with foam till it was running out both windows and the radio was gurgling like a drowning rat. The second one was even better: I took a can of quick-dry aluminum spray paint and did his windshield.

Anyway, there I was, just a nudge short of twenty, driving tow like a werewolf at top dollar for my trade and generally enjoying myself. I was still holding the bennies steady at two a day – one after breakfast and one for lunch, and that was it. It helped that I was living fairly regular, clocking 8 to 5 on the day shift, weekends free, two squares a day, and logging six hours of solid Z’s most nights. Health – nothing like it.

The job was great, even if it was work, but the true joy was living in North Beach. The place was alive. This is the late 1950s I’m talking about, and the Beats were going strong. Lots of people will tell you the best time was ’54, ’55, before all the publicity hit, but for a wet-eared kid who’d been stringing his nerves between Miami and St Lou, this looked like a good time to me. The Beats were the people I’d been looking for. They had a passionate willingness to be moved. It was a little artsy-fartsy, sure, lots of bad pretenders, but it was a whole helluva lot better than Sunday School, which is what the 50’s were generally like – a national Sunday School for the soul, smug with dull virtues, mean with smothered desires. But the thing is, you can’t live in fear of life. You do and you’re dead in the water.

The Beats at least had the courage of their appetities and visions. They wanted to be moved by love, truth, beauty, freedom – what my poet friend John Seasons called ‘the four great illusions’ – while my passion, at the time, was the firing stroke in a large-bored internal combustion engine transmitting its power through the drive-train and out to the wheels – four small illusions. Because of the explosive qualities inherent in the liquified remains of dinosaurs, I could roar through the day and the dark at speeds no one even marginally sane could consider reasonable. And if I happened to mention what that felt like in any North Beach bar, more than likely the woman on my left had just written a poem that tried to capture that same abandoned moment and the guy on my right had finished that very afternoon a painting he hoped touched the same soaring spirit, and we’d be yakking drunk and laughing till the bar closed at two in the morning and I was walking down Broadway in the fog, shivering and elated. That was North Beach. An eruption of people hungry for their souls. And for all the poses and silliness, it was splendid.

I did my share of posing, I must admit, most of it prompted by raw teenaged insecurity and a sense of intellectual inadequacy. This I hid with the usual ration of brass and bravado, but bald ignorance is a lot harder to cover. Since I could authentically claim – as few others could – an honest working-class life, I hid at first behind a fairly nasty anti-intellectualism. Fuck big words, I drive a truck. Fortunately, most people were gracious enough to ignore my bullshit, and generous enough to include me in conversations and lend me books. You could pick up a couple of Liberal Arts degrees just sitting in the bars and listening. Gradually I changed from an anti-intellectual to an unbearably eager one. I wanted to know everything – an appetite I’ve had many subsequent occasions to regret.

It’s usually the happy case that you learn best from your friends. My tightest buddy in the early years was this huge horn player everybody called Big Red Loco, a mulatto cat with rusty red hair. He was about 6’7”, and every inch of him was music. I heard him play with all the best, and he cut them into fish bait. Big Red could go out there and bring it back alive. Everybody and their aunt wanted to record him, but he’d had this vision when he was seven years old that his gift was for the moment alone, and that if his music was ever recorded, ever duplicated in time outside memory, he would lose his gift. At least this is what he told me, and I don’t doubt it at all.

Lou Jones – Loose Lou, they called him – adored Big Red’s sound so much that one night he crawled under the bandstand before a gig and hooked up a tape machine through the microphone. He was still shaking when he told me about it the next day: every instrument came through clean on the tape, except Big Red’s sax. Not a trace. I never mentioned it to Big Red. No reason to mess with a man’s music.

Except for his music, Big Red hardly ever spoke. Ten sentences a day left him hoarse. And when he did say something, it wasn’t much. ‘Let’s grab a beer,’ or ‘Can you lay a five on me till the weekend?’ If you asked him a direct question, he’d just nod, shake his head, or shrug – or, maybe two percent of the time, he’d answer with a few words. It drove me ape-shit when I first knew him, so finally I asked him point-blank why he never said diddley. He shrugged and said, ‘I’d rather listen.’

With all that practice he was an incredible listener. He ate at the Jackson Cafe because he liked the sound of their dishes, if you can feature that. I remember one time we were eating lunch and this busboy came by with a big clattering cart of dirty dishes and Big Red slipped right out of the booth, dropped to all fours, and followed it right into the kitchen, ears locked, listening. However strange, it was fortunate for our friendship that he was such a listener, since it’s plain I’m a rapper.

Hanging out with Big Red meant making the local jazz scene. Up till then I’d never given much of an ear to anything besides the singing of tires on asphalt and the throb of a big diesel drilling the dark, but jazz, heard live and close and smoky, with the taste of whiskey in your mouth and a high-stepping woman in the corner of your eye, just took me away. Lifted me right out of myself. I don’t know anything about art, but I do know when I’m gone.

It might’ve been Big Red’s influence – he never owned a record – but I only really loved jazz live, right now, straight to the spine. I bought some records, which I enjoyed and appreciated and all that, but they weren’t the same. I guess I’m one of those people who can’t really grasp something if it’s more than a foot from the source. I mention this as a way of explaining I really didn’t know anything about rock-and-roll, even though it was coming on strong at the time. Blasting from about every jukebox in every bar, it was there in the background, but it never made it through my ears to grab hold of my brain. Besides, people on the jazz scene were constantly putting it down as bubblegum for the soul. But it was interesting that Big Red didn’t bad-mouth it. ‘It’s all music,’ he said. ‘The rest is taste, culture, style, times.’ For Big Red, that was a speech. A lot later, about the time the Beatles were taking off, I remember sitting in Gino and Carlo’s with John Seasons and Big Red, and John saying, more with sadness than disgust, ‘The Beatles are the end of North Beach.’ Big Red, unsolicited, said, ‘You’re right. You can hear it.’

John Seasons was, in a strange way, more mentor than friend, and we really didn’t get close till late ’63, early ’64. John was a poet, and through him I met Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, Corso, Kerouac, Cassady, and the rest of that crew – though I don’t think they were ever all around at once. John was always there, it seemed. He’d been living in North Beach before it was hip, and was still there after the fashion had passed. He was a devoted poet with an aversion to the limelight – certainly a notable trait at the time – and a strong academic background. On his living room walls were about two dozen honorary doctorates in about half that many fields – I remember one from Harvard in physics, another from the Sorbonne in linguistics. They were all excellent forgeries. As John was fond of pointing out, he supported his poetry, which he claimed was a true attempt to forge the real, by creating facsimiles of the fraudulently real. John could find absolutely no good reason why people needed documents and licenses to partake of American culture, and it especially pissed him off that you had to pay to obtain them. John wasn’t one to favor undue social regulation in the human community. Art, sports, and the Laws of Nature, he argued, were all the regulation necessary for an enjoyable life. As an advocate of personal authority, he thought it was stupid to award real power to abstractions like nations, senators, and Departments of Motor Vehicles.

John had a darkroom, two printing presses, a complete assortment of paper stocks, and a collection of official seals that would have shamed the Smithsonian. John was also gay, and it helped that he seemed to prefer highly placed civil servants for lovers. John felt that if your sexual preferences were going to brand you a security risk, you might as well risk some security, and he was convincing enough that his boyfriends helped him expand his collection of official seals, often providing the authentic forms on which to affix them. For John, a bogus California driver’s license was little more than a snapshot and a short typing assignment. He claimed he could fake anything on paper except money and a good poem, and that he could do the money with the right plates and proper stock.

So, after about eighteen months in North Beach, closing in on twenty-one and legal American adulthood, I had a job I enjoyed by day and high friends and wild company at night; and through reading, and by talking to people who knew what they were talking about, I was accumulating enough good information to make a run at knowledge. I was beginning to know my own mind, or at least understand I had a mind to know. Or so I thought.

It was February 1, 1959, two days before my twenty-first birthday, when I came in off-shift and Freddie Cravetti – old man Cravetti’s son, the swing-shift garage manager – motioned me over and introduced me to this runty guy sporting a blue seersucker suit so filthy you could have cleaned it with dog shit. Freddie introduced him as Scumball Johnson, then discreetly remembered some paperwork. When I shook Scumball’s hand, it was like lifting a decayed lamprey out of a slough. He spoke in a low monotone mumble, head down, eyes constantly moving. I made him immediately as an ex-con.

I only liked one thing about Scumball Johnson: the money. Two hundred cash, back when a dollar bought dinner; and that was only the half in front. There was another two yards on delivery. All I had to do was wreck a car without wrecking myself – total it and walk away. Since I’d been making a living either by avoiding wrecks or picking them up, it sounded interesting. First, however, I had to steal the car, which reduced my interest considerably until Scumball explained that the car’s owner wanted it stolen and wrecked so he could collect the insurance. I was completely covered, Scumball assured me. I’d be given a key, a handwritten note from the owner explaining I was checking out the transmission or something, the owner would stay by the phone in case anyone checked, and he wouldn’t report it stolen till I’d called in safe and clear. Scumball said I could use a tail to watch my back and pick me up, but I’d have to pay for that out of my cut. Scumball didn’t care how or where the car was wrecked as long as it was totaled for insurance purposes. If I got myself hurt or didn’t phone within eight hours, I was on my own and nobody knew me. And if I even so much as murmured his name to the law, I would likely be visited by large men who’d had twisted childhoods and would undoubtedly take great delight in tearing off my fingers and feeding them to me.

A sleazy proposition, sure, but not without some provocative attractions, especially if you’re young, restless, bored, and stupid. Looking back, I’m more astounded than ashamed that I agreed to the deal, though I must admit the $400 pay-off didn’t improve my judgment.

Scumball Johnson. I’ll tell you where he was at: he liked his name. ‘That’s me all right,’ he’d chuckle, ‘a real scumball.’ As if it confirmed his essence. Those are the people I can’t understand: cold rotten to the fucking quick, and quick to brag about it. Maybe that acceptance is close to enlightenment, but to enjoy it so much seems slimy. I can still see his grin. And here’s the weird thing: Scumball was a walking compost heap, but his teeth were perfect – strong, straight, brushed to an immaculate luster. And since he showed them only when someone called him Scumball or otherwise confirmed his sleaziness, the grin always carried this shy, pleased, strangely intimate acknowledgment, as if you were praising him, or he was trying to seduce your loathing.

From what I gathered, Scumball was running a fairly complex scam. If I was cutting $400, you could bet Scumball was clearing at least a grand, with the rest going to the owner. But that arrangement begged an obvious question: if the owner needed the bucks, why didn’t he simply sell the car and pocket all the money? I figured either the insurance value was tremendously inflated – maybe an agent in cahoots – or there was something funny about the cars.

Now I don’t know this for a dead mortal cinch, but I’d bet the cars were stolen out of state and probably bought at quarter-price by Scumball, who in turn did a plate and paper job on them, let people use them for six months or so for the cost of full insurance coverage, and then Scumball collected close to full value when they were wrecked. Maybe the ‘owner’ got a small piece of the action, but a guy like Scumball doesn’t like to see the pie sliced up too much. I don’t know what Scumball did with his loot, but he sure as hell didn’t piss it away on clothes.

I trashed my first car for him the very next night, February 2, and I’ll admit I had more than a few whiskeys in me when I turned the key on the new Merc conveniently parked just off Folsom. I’d also awarded myself three bonus bennies for bad behavior, preferring a little extra focus for the tight work.

Big Red was my tail and pick-up man, and perfect for the job. He had his own car, an anonymous ’54 Chevy sedan, and had proven himself invariably reliable in the hundred small favors of friendship. Plus he needed the money. I’d cut him in for $100, probably too much, but I had a steady job going in and could write it off as a contribution to the arts if I ever paid taxes. Big Red also offered his imposing height, that wild tangle of copper-colored hair, and a nose that looked like it had been broken twice in each direction. Should anyone object to your behavior, he was a good man to have on your side.

Nobody objected as I let the Merc idle while the defroster cleared the glass. The car was close to mint condition, just over 9000 on the odometer, and no visible dings. When the glass cleared I pulled out onto Folsom, Big Red swinging in behind me, and headed for the Golden Gate.

I’d only had a day to think it over, but I’d come up with what seemed a solid plan. I’d go out Highway 1 up above Jenner where the road hugs the ocean bluffs, find a likely turnout, and shove it over into the Pacific. I’d brought along a bag full of empty beer cans and couple of dead pints of cheap vodka to scatter around the interior – make it look like a snorting herd of adolescent males, frenzied on some giant squirt of young warrior hormones, had swiped the short for a joyride and crashed it for fun.

I cruised north on 101 at a legal 65, took 116 through Sebastopol to Guerneville, then followed the Russian River to its mouth at Jenner, where I caught Highway 1. There was hardly any traffic. I checked the rearview to make sure Big Red made the turn, and saw the bobbing lights of his Chevy about a quarter-mile behind.

I found a good spot about twenty minutes up the coast, a wide turnout along the edge of a high cliff. I pulled over to check it out. The ocean air was powerful, a cauldron broth of salty protein and tidal decay. There were no guardrails, so it was an easy roll over the edge and a long way down to the waves bashing the rocks. I looked carefully for lights along the beach, any flashlights or campfires. I didn’t want to drop two tons of metal on a couple of lovers fucking their romantic brains out on the narrow beach below. No reason to encourage absurdity. Of course, on the other hand, nobody with a brain more complex than a mollusc’s would consider mating on a rocky, wave-wracked beach on a raw winter night, so I might’ve been doing evolution a favor.

Still wearing the gloves I’d put on before touching the car, I scattered the empties over the floorboards while Big Red wheeled his Chevy around to screen the Merc. I put the Merc in Neutral and cramped the wheels to the left. Big Red and I put our shoulders to it, a few good grunts at first, and then she was rolling on her own weight. When the front tires dropped over the edge, the back end flipped up, but rather than nosing straight down it dragged on the frame and tilted sideways slow enough for us to hear all the cans sluicing toward the driver’s side, and then she cleared the edge and was gone. The earth suddenly seemed lighter. It was silent so long I figured we hadn’t heard it hit, that the sound of impact had been muffled by the surge and batter of the waves below, and I was just about to peer over the edge when it smashed on the rocks KAAABBBBLLLAAAAAAM.

Big Red stood there, rooted, eyes closed and head thrown back, swaying slightly from side to side. He was obviously lost in something, but, though I hated to interrupt, it didn’t seem wise to hang around appreciating the sonic clarity of a new Mercury meeting ancient stone in the middle of a felony.

I touched his arm. ‘Let’s hit it.’

‘You drive,’ Big Red replied – a command, not a request.

Silent, eyes closed, Big Red didn’t twitch from his reverie until we were coming back across the Golden Gate. I was half-depressed with spoiled adrenalin, half-pissed that he’d withdrawn when I felt like yammering, so when he finally opened his eyes and asked ‘Did you hear it,’ I was a little cross. ‘Hear what? The waves? The wind? The wreck?’

‘No man, the silence. The gravitational mass of that silence. And then that great, brief, twisted cry of metal.’

‘That sound isn’t high on my hit parade, Red. I like cars, trucks, four-bys, six-bys, eight-bys, and them great big motherfuckers that bend in the middle and go shooooooosh shoooooosh when you pump the brakes. It’d be like throwing your horn off the cliff.’

‘Yes!’ He grabbed my shoulder, ‘Exactly!’

He was so pleased that it seemed cruel to admit my understanding was the accidental result of petulant exaggeration, if not outright deceit. In fact, only one thing had bothered me about wrecking the Merc: it was too easy.

I reminded Big Red that we still had to check in with the man, and soon as we hit Lombard I called Scumball from a Shell station pay phone. He answered on the third ring. After that first night, I had occasion to call him lots of times, and he always answered on the third ring. We used a simple code. I’d say, ‘The chrome’s on the road,’ and he’d reply, nasty, ‘Who is this?’ Then I’d hang up.

When I slipped back behind the wheel of Big Red’s Chevy, Red wasn’t interested in what Scumball had said. He wanted to explore that silence. ‘Let’s fall by my place and pick up my horn and see who’s out jamming.’

North Beach. Where else at 3:00 A.M. could you find some small club that was supposed to be closed and jam and yak and drink because the people who owned it understood better than the law that you can get lonely and thirsty and in need of music at all hours, especially the late hours of the night?

Right before dawn Big Red took the bandstand alone and announced he was going to play a new composition he called ‘Mercury Falling,’ and that he wanted to dedicate it to me on my birthday. I’d forgotten that at midnight I’d officially turned twenty-one, but Big Red hadn’t, and I felt like a shithook for my impatience with him earlier. But as soon as Big Red’s breath shaped that first note, my little puff of shame was blown away.

For the twenty minutes Big Red played, there wasn’t a heartbeat in that room. Cigarets went out. Ice melted in drinks. I know it’s hopeless to try to describe music, but he played that silence he’d heard, heard so clearly, brought every note through it and to it, pushed them over the edge into the massive suck of gravity, hung them in the wind and hurled them gladly to the surging bash and wash of water wearing down stone, and every note smashing on the claim of silence was a newborn crying at the light. When he finished there wasn’t a sound and there wasn’t a silence and we all took our first breath together.

Big Red nodded shyly and walked offstage. Applause wasn’t necessary. Everyone just sat there breathing again, feeling air curling into lungs, afraid to break the spell, the room silent except for the shifting of weight in chairs, the scuff of shoes on the littered floor. Finally a woman sitting alone at a corner table stood up, and that snapped it. A black bass player named Bottom sitting next to me at the bar groaned, ‘Yeeess. Yes, yes, yes,’ and then reached over, put his skinny arm around my shoulder, and hugged me, whispering with sweet citric breath, ‘Happy birthday, man – you got yourself a present there you can unwrap for the rest of yo life.’

Then everyone was nodding, smiling; a sweet, low babble filled the room. Everyone except the woman who’d stood up. She was taking off her clothes. Her back was to me, so I hadn’t realized what she was doing till the green knit dress slipped from her bare shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Tall, lean, with long hair the color of half-weathered pine, she stepped out of the dress around her ankles and made her way, composed and magnificent, between the crowded tables toward the back door. Everyone stopped breathing again. I was in love. She closed the door softly behind her without looking back. ‘Sweet Leaping God o’ Mercy,’ Bottom moaned beside me, his arm dropping from my shoulders.

I caught up with her at the end of the alley. Thick fog swirling in the first pale light of morning; cold; the odor of garbage. She heard me and turned around. I was trembling too wildly to speak. She brushed her hair back from her face, her fine blue eyes, fierce and amused, looking right into mine.

‘Let me walk you home,’ I said in what can be kindly described as a blurt.

She tilted her head, a playful flicker of a smile, waiting. I immediately understood and began shedding my clothes, hopping around on one foot to take off the opposite shoe – taking forever, it seemed to me, while she stood and waited, hip shot, arms folded across her breasts, watching me frantically trying to pretend I wasn’t frantic. And then, somehow, I was standing naked in front of her, my cock hard as a jack handle, shivering, foolish, hopeful. She laughed and took me in her arms. I started laughing, too, relaxing against her fine, long warmth. And then, hand in hand, as natural as night and day, we strolled the seven blocks to my apartment. There was some early morning traffic, first stirrings of the city, but we were invisible in our splendor.

Her name was Katherine Celeste Jonasrad, Kacy Jones to those who loved her, and there were many, definitely including me. When I met her she’d just turned nineteen and, to the relentless dismay of her parents, had recently dropped out of Smith to see what the West Coast had to offer in the way of an education. Her father owned the largest medical supply company in Pennsylvania, and her mother was a frustrated novelist who seemingly regretted her every act and omission since her own graduation from Smith. Kacy phoned them one night from my place – her father’s birthday – and I remember her eyes flashing as she repeated her mother’s question: ‘“What am I going to do?” Well, I’m going to do whatever I feel like, whatever I need, whatever it takes, and whatever else I can get away with.’ That was Kacy in her uncontainable essence: a free force, a true spirit on earth. She did fairly much as she pleased, and if she wasn’t sure what pleased her, she was never afraid to go find out.

That birthday morning when we walked naked through the early morning streets to my apartment, she turned to me as the door closed and said, ‘I’m not interested in a performance. The quality of the permissions, that’s what I’m after.’ I must have shown my confusion because she put it more plainly: ‘I don’t want to be fucked; I want us to feel something.’

‘I’ll try,’ was all I could think to say.

She slipped her arms around my bare waist and drew me to her. ‘Let’s try together.’

I’ve never known a woman with the range and originality of Kacy’s erotic imagination. I don’t mean positions and all that sexual gymnastics, or the wilder fantasies and obsessions – those were just the entrances to other realms of possibility. Kacy was interested in the feelings, their clarity and nuance and depth, what could be shared and what couldn’t. With Kacy there was no casual sex. I told her that much later. With that tone of playful cynicism people use to keep their dreams honest, Kacy said, ‘Well, a sweet quickie now and then sure never hurt anything.’

I don’t want to bog you down in the voluptuous details, so suffice it to say that on that birthday morning with Kacy I shoot through Heaven on my way to the Realm of Unimaginable Pleasure Indefinitely Prolonged. We tried together, heart and soul, and there is nothing like those first permissions to make you believe in magic, and without that belief in magic there’s no heart for the rest. In the late afternoon, when Kacy went out for supplies, I just laid there grinning like a fool. She was back in half an hour with a whole bag of groceries. Sourdough bread from the bakery downstairs, a carton of antipasto from the deli around the corner, two cold quarts of steam beer, a jar of pepperoncini, a half-pound of dry jack cheese, candles, a Sara Lee chocolate cake, and the afternoon Examiner. That was one thing about Kacy: she loved to pull surprises from the bag. According to Kacy, there were only seven things human beings required for a happy life on this planet: food, water, shelter, love, truth, surprises, and secrets. Sounded good to me.

I remember how happy she looked as she unpacked our feast, explaining that there were only eight candles in a package but if I wasn’t too traditional we could just make the figure of 21 instead of actually using that many candles. Suddenly she stopped in midsentence, obviously arrested, staring down at the table.

I sat up in bed. ‘Kacy, what’s the matter?’

Without turning, she made an impatient gesture with her hand as she looked down at the front page of the newspaper. I saw her shoulders rise as she took a deep breath, then fall; when they remained slumped I knew the news was bad. She turned around, tears in her eyes, and lay down on the bed beside me. ‘Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were all killed in a plane crash last night. That’s a lot of music to lose all at once.’

I held her without saying anything. Fact was, I wasn’t really sure who Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were, an ignorance I was afraid would only make her sadder. You need the same knowledge to share another’s grief, but not to comfort it. I held her till the tears were dry, then we ate my birthday feast and, later that night, opened some more presents.

The party actually lasted another four years. I can’t truly say I lived with her those four years, since she came and went as she pleased. Kacy would not be possessed. On Valentine’s Day, about a week and a half after we’d met, I came home after work to find a giant red heart pinned to my door, the words BE MINE in great white letters printed across it, the word MINE neatly crossed out. Her life belonged to her; mine to me. Where they touched, the terms were mutual regard, honor, and love without possession, dependency, or greed. I tried to explain it to John Seasons one night after Kacy had been gone a couple of weeks, and I was trying hard to convince myself that that was fine. John said, ‘Sounds like one of them modern relationships to me.’ He finished his Johnny Walker and looked at the bottom of the glass. ‘Actually,’ he continued, his voice suddenly serious, a bitter trace to his tone, ‘it sounds like Saint Augustine’s definition of love: ‘I want you to be.’ I’ve always liked that notion of love, but I’ve sure as hell never come close to making it real.’

I found it difficult myself. Doubt, jealousy, particularly the anxious stabs of inadequacy, all jerked me around at one time or another. Kacy lived out of a battered backpack, and when she left – sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks – she took everything with her except the promise she’d be back. When she returned, she’d always call to ask if I was in the mood for company. I always was, but once I said no just to see what she’d say. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll call again.’ After a couple years my doubts and dreads fell away, for finally they only compromised the pleasure of her company. Besides, when she was there, she was really there, and that’s all I could fairly ask if I wanted to love her, not own her.

I don’t want to give the impression that all we did was screw ourselves stupid while gazing deeply into each other’s eyes. When we were together we were like any other couple. We’d hit the bars and coffeehouses and jazz clubs, visit friends, go to the movies… the usual. Kacy loved good food and enjoyed cooking, and was appalled to discover I was a can opener – a can of chili, another of corn, and a six-pack of beer was my idea of an eight-course dinner. Kacy taught me to cook some simple dishes, like pasta and stir-fry. Bought me a wok on her birthday. She also introduced me to backpacking. In the time we were together we took eight or nine long trips in the Sierras. Kacy loved high mountain lakes, and after the first trip I shared her appreciation. Air, water, granite, the campfire – Kacy liked the elemental.

She was also partial to marijuana, peyote, the natural highs – ‘real drugs,’ she called them. Speed was the only thing she ever ragged me about, and she was remarkably free of judgments. She claimed speed tore holes in the soul. So, ready to give it up anyway, I finally kicked, though I did allow myself a couple when I had a car to wreck for Scumball. I smoked weed with her now and then, but never developed her fondness for it; it softened the focus, distracted concentration, seemed to make my brain mushy. Peyote was more interesting – legal then, too – but I got the bad pukes every time, and that takes the fun out of anything.

Baseball was one thing Kacy and I did hold delightedly in common. For years her father had been part owner of a Class A team in Philly, and Kacy grew up going to every home game they played. We both liked baseball the way we liked jazz, live and close up. Since this was before the Giants moved to San Francisco, that left us the Triple A Seals, though as long as it was baseball, we hardly cared if it was the majors or minors. I always thought it was a sad indictment of the North Beach crowd that you couldn’t lure them near anything as American as a baseball game even if you bought them season tickets and sprung for the beer. The only exception was John Seasons, who actually had a season ticket and was honestly offended when I jokingly suggested he print up a couple of extras for me and Kacy.

The three of us truly had a ball at the ballpark. John and Kacy were always drooling over some first-baseman’s forearms or the center-fielder’s butt, but they enjoyed the drama and strategy as much as the physical grace. And nobody ever rode an umpire like John Seasons. John was sort of gangly and diffident looking, but he had a voice like a meat cleaver. ‘May you be buggered by a caveful of Corsican thugs! May Zeus fill your loins with curdled goat’s milk! May Poe’s raven pluck your infirm eyeballs and every being in Rilke’s angelic order piss in the empty sockets!’ John really worked out.

If it sounds like I was having a good time, a life of high spirit and the pedal pretty much to the metal, I was indeed. Maybe too much so. Because when you’re running with a remarkable woman and large-hearted friends, bathing in the fountain of fresh possibilities, pulling forty hours a week gets tremendously boring, even when it’s work you like. There just wasn’t that much left to learn about tow-truck driving, and nothing’s more heartless than mastery without challenge. When you start losing satisfaction with your work, that’s the first sign of slippage at the center.

Despite the outlaw thrill, wrecking the occasional car for Scumball was also becoming routine. Maybe, if there’d been one or two jobs a month instead of one every three months, I might’ve hung it up at Cravetti’s. Granted, coming up with new ways to wreck cars without establishing a pattern stretched the imagination. But the fact is, it doesn’t take much to total a car for insurance purposes – only has to be more expensive to repair than the car is worth. Your granny could do it in an easy two minutes with an eight-ounce hammer and a handful of sand.

Anyway, this was boring enough that Big Red and I started getting fancy in our destructions. He found a place up on Mount Tam where there was a loose boulder above the road, and after we got everything lined up good we used a couple of pry bars to roll that stone straight down on a new ’61 Impala, bullseye. We torched a Chrysler out by Stinson Beach, but the most fun we had destroying a car was probably this Olds 88 we took way the hell and gone up Fort Ross Road, pretending we were deranged service-station attendants. Big Red had bought a couple of red stars at the five-and-dime to give us that official look. We pinned them on and got right to it, humming ‘You can trust your car, to the man that sports a star,’ as we bent to the task.

‘Fill it up this evening, sir? Would you like mortar mix or regular cement?’

‘I’ll get that windshield, George,’ Big Red called cheerfully, putting an eight-pound sledge right through it. ‘Clean, huh? Just like the glass wasn’t there.’ Red liked this so much he was damn near babbling with enthusiasm.

‘Hey, Red! While I’m checking things out here under the hood, why don’t you grab that pair of sidecutters and snip off them valve stems and make sure air comes out of those tires. Look overinflated to me.’

‘You got it, Chief. How’s it look under the hood?’

‘No damn good: bad oil leak from the valve cover. Toss me that number-eight sledge and I’ll see if I can get that gasket flat. Maybe reseat the valves a little deeper while I’m at it.’

By that time I was really enjoying the gig – and remember, I was a long-time faithful at the altar of internal combustion. Another sign that things were coming apart. Of course, I didn’t see it then, or not clearly. But what difference does it make to understand you’re hungry when there is nothing to eat?

I might not have known the cause, but I could feel something was wrong. I had a good woman, honest work, fine friends, and some illicit thrills to keep me sharp, but I wasn’t happy. Had no idea why, and I’m still not dead certain. John’s diagnosis was a severe case of late-adolescent spiritual edema, the strange disease of drowning in your own juices. His prescription was to let the affliction run its torpid course, hopefully washing away the more negligible parts of the psyche in the purging process.

Big Red Loco thought it was the air. He didn’t elaborate except to add, upon my harshest questioning, ‘You know, man: the air.’ He even provided a visual aid by sweeping his hand vaguely above his head.

And Kacy, sweet Kacy, I never found out what she thought, because she was suddenly gone, off to Mexico and eventually South America with two gay Jungian psychologists, brothers named Orville and Lydell Wight. The purpose of the trip was to investigate first-hand the shamanistic use of various drugs employed by native tribes. They had a new Chevy van, some independent financing, and no time limit, although Kacy was talking about at least two years, or about twenty-two months longer than I had in mind.

But what I wanted was at odds with what I knew was going to be. This was an adventure she couldn’t pass up and remain true to herself, so against my true sadness and wounded sulking I mustered the dubious grace to let go of what I couldn’t hold anyway.

Our last night together is committed to cellular memory. I don’t think I’ve ever held anyone as tightly. In the morning, wishing her off, I had no regrets. None at all. But that didn’t stop it from tearing me up.

A month later, the same day I received Kacy’s first letter, I heard that Scumball had gotten busted. Young Cravetti let me know it had nothing to do with me, that the arrest was for loan-sharking and conspiracy to commit assault. Evidently Scumball had employed some agents from the Contusion Collection Service, a company of goons who stood completely behind their motto, ‘Pay or Hurt.’ The wife of a damaged debtor had gone to the cops, who probably would’ve filed it in the wastebasket if she and the Police Commissioner’s wife hadn’t been cheerleaders together in high school. I was out a steady chunk of fun money, but felt worse for Big Red. He’d come to depend on this income, and now had to go back to work for Mort Abberman who, when he was sober enough to pour the molds, had a little cottage industry making latex dildoes in his basement.

According to Kacy’s letter they were in Mexico, near Tepic, going to a language school for a crash course in both Spanish and Indian dialects. Orville and Lydell were great company, loose and intelligent and serious scholars, and once they had enough language to proceed, they planned to stop in Mexico City for research before leaving for Peru. She missed me, she said, and thought of me often and fondly, but even as I read the letter I felt her slipping away.

North Beach itself was no longer a consolation. Grey Line had scheduled tours to look at the Beatniks, even though the germinal core were long gone to other parts, leaving young and awkward heirs who seemed more enchanted by the style than the substance, and leaving behind as well the low-life despoilers and cut-and-suck criminals who seem to thrive on exploiting freedoms they’re incapable of creating. Jazz clubs closed to become topless joints, silicon tits swinging on the same stages that had once featured music so amazingly real you didn’t want it ever to stop. Now you just wanted to leave.

When Scumball finally came to trial in late September, leaving seemed like a good idea – just in case he was more nervous than I was and started talking deals with the DA, I decided to take a month’s vacation, maybe wander down Mexico way. There was no hassle with work; I had plenty of vacation time coming. Old man Cravetti understood my anxiety, but he assured me not to burden my trip with worry since Scumball, though not without his faults, was a stand-up guy, and moved in circles where snitches were often sent on long walks off short piers, usually in cement shoes. Since I’d been introduced to Scumball through the Cravettis, where I usually picked up my delivery money, I understood the garage was involved – maybe some of the mechanics did ID changes – but I’d never asked, figuring it was wiser not to know. If they weren’t worried, maybe I was overdoing it, though a month in Mexico City was still an attractive idea.

I hardly remember the vacation, most of which I spent pretending I wasn’t looking for Kacy. No regrets, like I said, but many, many second thoughts, most of them washed down with tequila. On Gary Snyder’s sage advice that it was the most likely place to find the face I sought, and that there was much else of interest and beauty to look at in case she didn’t show, I haunted the Museum of Anthropology, maybe the best in the world. I saw wonder upon wonder, but the only glimpse I got of Kacy was in the lines of a gold jaguar, Mayan, seventh century. A letter from Kacy, postmarked Oaxaca, was waiting when I returned to San Francisco, explaining they’d decided to skip Mexico City and head straight for Peru.

A week later, Kennedy was assassinated. I was cleaning up a fender-bender on Gough when a cop came over and said in that stunned, vacant voice you heard all day, ‘They shot the President. They fucking shot the goddamn President.’ The immediate understanding that it was a conspiracy even if Oswald had acted alone joined the forces of shock, chaos, pain, and grief in that single moment of national violation.

A lot has been made of Kennedy’s assassination as some turning point in the 60’s, the beginning of a profound disillusionment. And it was, in the sense that it cracked some illusions, but in a strange way. You’ve got to remember that we were the most privileged children in history, and probably among the most brainwashed. We had been taught history as the inevitable triumph of American ideals: those wonderful, powerful ideals of equality, freedom, justice, and dedication to the God-fearing truth. We believed. And we knew, because we were endlessly told so from kindergarten through high school, that to achieve those ideals required the unstinting application of celebrated American virtues like hard work, gumption, enterprise, courage, sacrifice, and faith. Our teachers pointed to postwar America, the mightiest, most affluent nation on the planet, as inarguable proof of the pudding.

We believed so deeply that Kennedy’s death, rather than shattering our ideals served, as only a martyrdom can, to refresh them. We believed those ideals because they were beautiful, spirited, and true. If the realities didn’t always agree, realities could be changed – were made to be changed – both by the collective will of the people and a single heroic leader with grit and stick-to-itiveness. If Negroes were being denied the right to vote – the right – we would go register them. If people in India were starving, we would sustain them with our surplus while we taught them how to farm. If the wretched rose up in a desperate rage of dignity and took arms against their oppressors, they could count on our freedom-loving support. And the more we tried to bring those ideals to reality, the more we understood how deeply the corruption reached. We believed so profoundly that even when we finally realized what hopeless, deluding, bullshit rhetoric those ideals had become, what a seething of maggots they masked, we still believed.

Once the shock of Kennedy’s assassination was absorbed, you could feel a new energy on the street, a strangely exhilarated seriousness, like that first pull of the current before you hear the whitewater roaring downriver. This quickening seemed most apparent in people my age and younger, the war babies, victims more of the victory than the pain of the effort. The older generation seemed to take Kennedy’s death as a defeat, a shocked return to the vulnerability and chaos World War II and Korea were supposed to end. They seemed tired with the knowledge that bad times weren’t going to end. But not my generation, reared on the notion that you had to dare to dream, and dream large. But we were never truthfully warned that dreams die hard.

I say ‘we,’ my generation, but I don’t know how much I can honestly include myself. As things quickened, I was beginning a slow fade into myself. I’d lost some essential connection. I logged my forty a week driving tow, which still retained some pleasure, but no sustaining joy. Nights and weekends I hit the streets, hungry for that old excitement, but for me it was gone.

My friends were sweet and understanding. John Seasons pronounced it a classical case of ennui and recommended a change of life as soon as I could gather my forces. Until then, he suggested strong drink and great poetry, offering to buy me one and lend me the other.

Big Red Loco just shook his head. He was feeling it too, as it turned out, finding less and less that moved him to pick up his horn. Spiders were nesting in the bell, he said, and I knew what he meant. They were nesting in my head. When I finally started boring myself, I went on a brain-cracking rampage. Got shit-faced crazy drunk every night for about a month straight and abused enough drugs to singlehandedly raise the standard of living in Guadalajara. I screwed everything that moved, or at least those who held still for it. The binge ended when I made a desperate play for John, who shocked me with the cold anger of his refusal: ‘I don’t want anything to do with you. You’re just thrashing around, and you don’t have enough forgiveness in your soul to expiate me if I take advantage of it. This would destroy the true feelings we have for each other, and I won’t risk that. Slow down for once, George.’ I ended up crying on his shoulder right beside the Golden Rocket pinball machine in Gino and Carlo’s.

In response to John’s admonition and the obvious fact that I was stuck in the mud right up to my frame, I changed my ways – perhaps the most decisively conscious change I’d ever made. I became austere. Not monkish, mind you, but seriously determined to eliminate the reckless waste. No booze, no drugs, no heartless sex. If I was mired in my own mud, there was no reason to blow up the engine in frustration.

Austerity is a good way to fight those bad blues, the ones that turn your soul into sewage. For one thing, you assume control, though it is, in all likelihood, sheer delusion. But if nothing else, it helps minimize the damage, if not so much to yourself, at least to others.

In a way, I actually enjoyed myself. I spent a lot of time reading, mainly poetry (taking John’s advice) and history, a subject that hadn’t much interested me before. I also took long walks around the city, looking at it without the insulation of a moving vehicle. Besides opening my eyes to a wealth of cultural diversity, the sheer exercise helped burn off that free-floating energy that comes of restless boredom. I did my job at Cravetti’s diligently, alertly, with a new eye to the fine details. That’s yet another benefit of the strict approach: you’re forced outside into the whip and welter, which in turn forces you to take refuge in the moment, which is perhaps the only refuge anyway.

Once in a while I went out just to keep in touch with friends, John and Big Red in particular. John, who claimed I’d inspired him, had cleaned up his own act and was doing more writing than drinking. Big Red, however, had all but quit playing horn, and that depressed him.

The letters from Kacy began tapering off. In nine months I heard from her four times: a postcard from Guatemala, a long letter from Lima saying they were about to head into the mountains to live with an Indian tribe, then two more from Lima. The first reported that they’d all come down with hepatitis and were thinking of returning to the States, but in the last letter, two months later, they had recovered and decided to go on. Kacy sounded weary but determined. She missed me, she said, and hoped I was keeping myself pure for her return. Though she was only teasing, this struck me as being uncomfortably close to what I was doing, and perhaps it was her distant tweak that provided the first crack in my regimen.

The trouble with disciplined austerity is that it requires deep resolve, and I’m prone to back-sliding at the slightest nudge. I’d hung tough for almost nine months, damn good for a beginner. What got me really rolling downhill was a seventeen-year-old folksinger named Sharon Cross – emerald eyed, red of mane, and a body that made you sit back on your haunches and howl. She was young, innocent, and warmhearted, three attributes that taken separately are charming, but in Sharon combined to produce the one thing I didn’t like about her: she was relentlessly, painfully liberal. But she was also lots of fun and sweet company, just what I needed to wean myself from austerity.

I tried to put some heart into the relationship. Sharon did too, of course – there’s hardly a woman who doesn’t. But we were both aware it wasn’t love. I think she was lightly enchanted by my hip working-class cachet while I was enamored of sipping some nectar from the bud. Sharon intuitively understood she had a whole lot of life ahead of her, rich with possibilities, and I was only a place to start. For my part, I felt a lot of my life chasing me, the possibilities dwindling. We were smart enough to keep it easy and not live together.

About the same time I was getting close to Sharon, late June of ’64, the Fourth Wiseman appeared in front of City Lights bookstore. He looked old, maybe in his fifties, but was so burned out on speed you couldn’t be sure. He might’ve been a hard thirty. He always wore the same clothes, a brown sport coat with matching slacks, grubby but not tattered, and a white shirt yellowed with speed-sweats, frayed at the cuffs and collar but always neatly tucked in. The Fourth Wiseman stood in front of City Lights from 10:00 A.M. sharp till exactly 5:00 P.M. every day, twirling a green yo-yo and endlessly repeating the one thing that had survived the amphetamine holocaust in his brain, the one ember his breath kept alive. It was a short poem, or mantra, that he mumbled to himself about once a minute: ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’ The whole time pacing restlessly back and forth on the sidewalk, snapping the yo-yo down, letting it hang spinning for a couple of heartbeats, retrieving it with a flick of his wrist – no tricks, no variations, none of that baby-in-the-cradle or walking-the-dog. Just spinning at the end of the string. An austerity of sorts. He ignored any efforts to engage him in conversation or otherwise distract him from his work.

‘Delivered his gift and slipped away.’ That phrase, and the idea of a phantom Fourth Wiseman, haunted me. Or perhaps, in combination with the spinning yo-yo – a brilliant blue-green, the color of wet algae – I’d been literally hypnotized. I’d drive by almost every day to see how he was doing, and he was always doing the same. Early on I tried to slip him a sawbuck. He was so startled he took it, but when he saw what it was he shook his head as if I’d completely misunderstood and flipped the bill out into the street. A ’57 Ford coupe ran over the bill, which fluttered along in its wake, riding the draft. A wino darted out and snagged it about half a block down. The Fourth Wiseman didn’t notice any of this, having already returned to his work, yo-yo singing on the waxed twine as he recited his spare testament.

The Fourth Wiseman disturbed Sharon. One of the troubles with the liberal mind is it can’t deal with things too far gone to cure with good intentions. She thought he was sad and tragic, a victim, and she wanted to do something about it. She thought a benefit for him – a hootenany – would be wonderful, something for a real suffering human being in the community rather than some abstract cause. I thought it was presumptuous, pretentious, and perhaps a little bit precious to assume he was suffering when, in fact, he seemed satisfied with his mission, or witness, or whatever it was, and that my offer of money had only seemed to confuse and offend him. I told her so. We argued, but that was nothing new.

It was about six months later, Christmas of ’64, that things really started falling apart. I remember walking over to Sharon’s on Christmas morning and taking a detour past City Lights. There he was, yo-yo blurring in the winter light, reciting his poem with a beatific fervor that brought tears to my eyes. I blurted the question I’d been burning to ask him: ‘What was the Fourth Wiseman’s gift?’

The yo-yo spun in suspension. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’

My impulse, hardly Christian on that most Christian of days, was to strangle him, to take him down on the sidewalk and choke the answer out of him, to hiss in his ear, ‘Tell me. Tell me anything, any truth or lie, that the gift was love or a steaming goat turd or sunlight on our bodies: tell me anything: but fucker, you better tell me something!’

Maybe he sensed I was about to flip, because when he repeated it again it seemed slightly altered, a shadow change, a glancing inflection: ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’

I walked away, confounded by the slight shift in emphasis, saying to myself, ‘His gift. Delivered his gift. His.’ Confused because I still didn’t know what his gift was, or mine, nor, if I even had one, whether I could deliver it or not.

Then came some hard losses. The first was Bottom, the bass player who’d sat beside me on my birthday when Big Red had played ‘Mercury Falling,’ whose arm had been around my shoulder the moment I first saw Kacy walking naked toward the door. Bottom was a long-time junkie, so his overdose was less a surprise than a raw sadness. They found him in his one-room apartment on New Year’s Eve. He’d been dead five days. That we were playing for keepsies was a hard recognition, another rank whiff of the cold mortal facts. Big Red took it particularly hard. When asked to play at the funeral, he simply said, ‘I can’t.’ By then he wasn’t playing at all, and after Bottom’s death he damn near didn’t talk for a month. I sensed that silence, once his element, was beginning to corrode him, and felt helpless to watch.

About a month later, a week or so after my birthday, Sharon and I had a bitter fight about music. About the Beatles, of all people, who were just getting hot. Sharon loved them. I thought it was just bubblegum bullshit, yeah yeah yeah. This was their early stuff we were arguing about, which to my ear was weak. I thought they were a cultural phenomenon, not so much for their music as their long hair and brash cuteness, an exotic British import. As far as I understood it (not very), rock-and-roll had ended in ’59. Not just the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in that plane crash on my birthday, but also Chuck Berry getting busted on a trumped-up Mann Act violation, and the payola scandals, and good ol’ Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. Little Richard had returned to the Church, but because he was wearing lipstick and eye shadow the Church wasn’t sure what to do with him. Rock-and-roll had gotten too weird, nasty, and corrupt for the four-square American sensibilities of the early 60’s. Besides, the King had abdicated: Elvis came out of the Army and turned his back on rock-and-roll; went in a shit-kicker and came out with schlock. An entertainer. The King made about twenty movies; the first two or three were outright stupid, and after that they rapidly declined. The way I saw it, rock had been taken over by white teen idols, the guys you’d feel safe letting your daughter date – Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson. But that’s marketing, not music. They were the last sanitized gasp of the 50’s, and after they vanished into their own vacuity came the Twist and other dance crazes, denatured ‘pop,’ and then folk music. I figured the Beatles were just a new wrinkle on the old teen-idol number, packaged as a group and imported as an invasion. The odd thing was, due to cultural lag, the Beatles’ musical roots were in 50’s rock-and-roll.

Anyway, this argument with Sharon was as pointless as most, but that didn’t keep it from turning nasty, too bitterly revealing for comfort, and afterwards Sharon and I sort of cooled the relationship. We still saw each other occasionally and even less occasionally slept together, but our fading trust could bear no more permissions.

Sharon left abruptly in the early summer of ’65. She came by to tell me she’d decided to take her music to Mississippi and help register Negro voters (they were still Negroes then, though you could tell that shit was about to hit the fan). I thought she was doing the right thing for herself and told her I admired her conviction and courage. I didn’t tell her I felt a crass glee that her innocence was about to get rolled in some reality, but despite that spot of malice I truly wished her well.

After she left, I drooped around for about a month with a hollow melancholy composed of a self-canceling combination of genuine sadness and deep relief. Women couldn’t leave me fast enough, it seemed, sailing off on their spiritual adventures while I stayed behind to move the wreckage around.

Then Big Red left for India. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own blues I might’ve seen he was hurting worse than me. He tried to explain it to John and me our last night together. I mean, Big Red talked: a speech, given his usual brevity; a virtual filibuster to forestall his demons. Ironically, he could have said it in four words: the gift was gone. Lost. And for no reason he could understand. It had been given him to hear life’s music, to reshape it with his breath, to blow it through our hearts renewed and thereby keep it real. Keep it, he insisted, not make it. ‘You can’t create what’s already there,’ was how he put it, but that, I thought, was picking the artistic fly shit out of the aesthetic pepper, because it didn’t change the pain of his loss. From that vision when he was seven, Big Red had understood his gift and had worked hard to sustain it, to deserve it, practiced till his lips were numb and his lungs ached, listened, listened as deeply as he could, listened and connected and listened again, and never dishonored it with frivolity, ego, or greed. And now he couldn’t bear the taste of the mouthpiece; it tasted like rancid milk. And all he could hear was noise.

So he was leaving for India. Why India, he wasn’t sure, but it felt right. You had to step over corpses on the way to the temples. A beggar’s face clotted with flies. Shiva, who created and destroyed. Buddha, who sowed his breath for the harvest of wind. India for no particular reason or belief, except that people he knew who’d been there just shook their heads, and Big Red felt like he needed his head shaken.

John and I drove him to the airport the next morning. I gave Big Red a $1000 severance bonus for years of faithful and felonious service in the auto-dismantling business and John gave him what he called ‘a small grant for musical research’ as well as a letter-perfect passport, a sheaf of references, and other papers designed to facilitate travel abroad. As we parted at the boarding gate, Red bent to embrace each of us. Direct and simple, that was Big Red’s way. No mawkish sentiment about the past, no false and hearty promises to the future. Goodbye and gone.

I’d already decided to take the rest of the day off, so when John suggested we stop by Gino and Carlo’s on our way back from the airport, have a drink to honor our departed friend, I was ready. We started drinking around noon and finished a couple of days later when John collapsed in the men’s room in some bar. I’d discovered early on in the binge that John had lost his grip on the wagon a week before and was still rolling from the fall. His new work, a long serial poem about the shapes of water and air, was, he claimed, ‘an utter piece of shit,’ and he’d taken a serene pleasure in composting it along with ‘the rest of the offal, refuse, and garbage I seem doomed to produce.’ That night, after I’d taken John to the emergency ward, I was lying in bed too exhausted to sleep and no longer drunk enough to pass out when it came to me that the whole problem was with gifts. Big Red had lost his. John couldn’t deliver his. And me, I didn’t seem to have one at all, no gift to deliver. With that recognition things turned to shit, pure and simple.

After considering this a few days in the grey light of recovered sobriety, I decided I needed a heart-to-heart with the Fourth Wiseman. Since I hadn’t been able to crack his mania on the job, I thought I’d follow him home, buttonhole him off-duty as it were, and ask him politely how you could deliver a gift if you didn’t have one, or at least didn’t know what it was. If he wouldn’t talk, I’d cajole, angle, reason, bribe, beg, and, if all else failed, follow my impulse of the previous Christmas and strangle it out of him. But I’d taken too long to gather my resolve into action. July 4, 1965, one year to the tock after he’d first appeared, the Fourth Wiseman vanished – how or where or why, nobody had a clue. I was a day late and a whole lot short.

Scumball’s return was another loss in what was quickly becoming a streak, one bad beat after another. He was waiting for me in Cravetti’s office. A year and a half in the slammer hadn’t changed him much, except the mumble was lower and a little more slurred and his get-out suit hadn’t had time to properly scuz. The smile was still an immaculate dazzle and the proposition hadn’t substantially changed: ‘Georgie, you ready to go for some rides?’

‘Scumball,’ I sighed. ‘You hitting the ground running?’

The mention of his name elicited the full display of teeth. ‘Well, Georgie my boy, there’s a lot of ground to cover, know what I mean? I’m sort of an independent contractor, like you, and like you I’m a stand-up guy. I go down, nobody goes down with me; people like that. I paid my debt to society, now you might say I have a little credit, maybe run up a tab. Did some thinking in slam, and some people I work with like the new wrinkles. For you it’s still basically the same number, but the bread, the bread, Georgie, is lots better. Say five hundred in front, ditto on delivery. There’ll be keys and cover, same as before.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘why not?’ My incentive wasn’t the money, though a grand was a hell of a payday. I suppose it was the promise of action, something to snatch me from the morass, a change that might ring more changes – for the better, I hoped, because if I got much lower I’d be under the bottom.

I didn’t notice anything special about the ’63 Vette till I cranked it over. The engine had belly, and it was dialed to the dot. This was obviously a street racer, stock to the eye but pure blur under the hood, with a drive-train and suspension beefed to take the load. You just couldn’t help yourself. I made another entry in the loss column: I lost my mind.

It was 3:00 A.M. and Army Street was straight and empty as far as the eye could see. However, it couldn’t see up the side alleys, and that’s where the black-and-white was idling, waiting for an idiot just like me. He must’ve heard me, because I was going too fast to clock. Whoever had put that Vette together understood in his fingertips the balance between power and stability. The cop’s red light started as a pulsing speck in the rearview mirror, but about two seconds after I hit high gear and tromped it on down, the light had disappeared. From the mirror, you understand, not my spine.

I had a lot of things going for me, even if brains wasn’t one of them. I had a good jump, haul-ass wheels, an equal or better knowledge of the streets, and a raging desire to keep my sweet self out of jail. What pulled me through, though, was luck – but it was ably assisted, I was pleased to note, by a show of excellent instincts and, believe it or not, enough common sense to understand that while it was indeed exhilarating to be sitting in a machine that could blow the doors off anything the cops had on the street, it couldn’t outrun their radios.

To know what to do without hesitation carries a bottomless sense of serenity, and I got a nice taste of it as I braked and geared down, gauging beyond conscious thought the variables of speed, distance, angle, force, stress, car-body composition, and the survival possibilities of my own mortal, maimable flesh. I took it sideways in a rubber-shredding, scrotum-cinching arc, hit the concrete streetlight stanchion dead center on the right headlight, simultaneously cramping the wheel to whip the rear end around to crash into the side of the bank on the corner. In one fluid movement I yanked the key and hit the concrete running, first down Mission a block, then sprinting up a side street and then cutting down an alley and then, slowing, a plan taking shape as I got my bearings and breath, over to Dolores. The old oak I’d remembered admiring on one of my walks hadn’t moved. I celebrated the steadfastness of trees as I went up it. Some neighborhood kids had lashed a few planks together for a low-rent treehouse high in the boughs. By leaning back against a limb I was able to stretch out. I made myself comfortable while I slowly ate the cover note. It was signed ‘Jason Browne,’ and while chewing I wondered why Jason Browne would wreck such a beautiful machine. I wondered if he was more desperate than me, then decided it was impossible to know anything like that. I flexed my throbbing left elbow; I must’ve whacked it in the wreck, but it seemed to work. Everything still functioned, more or less. There was grace in the world. A couple of cop cars cruised by slow, their spotlights stabbing between buildings, but they weren’t looking very hard. I waited till dawn collecting such small consolations, then returned to earth.

I called Scumball from a pay phone on 24th and gave him the chrome-on-the-road riff. When he replied, ‘Who is this?’ he sounded truly indignant, so maybe he’d already heard I’d cut it close. Nothing I could do about that. I used another dime to call in sick at Cravetti’s, then caught a bus home to North Beach. After a long, hot bath I opened a bottle of brandy and stretched out on the bed and had a long talk with myself.

You might’ve wondered where my back-up was. For that matter, why hadn’t I pulled over at the first pulse of the cop’s light, produced the cover letter, and taken the ticket and ton of horseshit you buy when the heat nabs you clocking double the posted limit and still in second gear? Why indeed, except for the natural aversion to scrutiny in such a vulnerable situation. Was I begging for a fall? Provocative question. Did I want to live? Jeez, I thought so, but my behavior wasn’t reassuring. I was beginning to doubt myself, that terrible doubt that’s like an obsession without an object. Fact was, though, I’d pulled it off, and I was sure that counted for something; but exactly what, I didn’t know. I’d been lucky, I supposed, but despite the gambler’s truth that it’s always better to be lucky than good, luck is subject to sudden change, and I realized that in my condition I couldn’t afford even a drop of bad luck. In retrospect it was a poignantly worthless realization, because I was about to drown in it.

But first, to encourage it, I got roaring drunk. That was a week later, during one of those rare September heat waves when the fog doesn’t form on the bay and the city stifles. I must say I was hugely and happily drunk, a welcome change from melancholia-in-the-cups. The happiness was born of some spontaneous eruption without discernible cause, a raw, joyous overflow from the fountain within, a definite sign of life. I decided that rather than swelter in my room I’d sleep out in nature. I considered one of the nearby parks, but there were too many people hanging out on the edges who’d turn you into junk sculpture for your loose change. Then I had a great, happy, drunken idea – that old tree-fort oak over on Dolores, my sanctuary from hot pursuit. I hoofed it on over and climbed into its open arms. It was lovely stretched out on the planks, the stars blurring with heat shimmers as the city cooled.

I slept so well I didn’t twitch till the morning traffic began to thicken. I checked for approaching pedestrians through the leaves and shinnied down. As soon as my feet hit the ground, I was dizzy. I leaned against the rough, heavy trunk, waiting a few minutes for my head to clear, and a few more to make sure it would stay that way. When I felt stable and lucid, or as much as my hangover allowed, I headed toward the bus stop over on Mission. I was due at Cravetti’s by 8:00.

There is no sanctuary. Down the block I saw a woman starting down her front stairs with a large bag in her arms and a heavy purse swinging from her shoulder. I didn’t pay any particular attention till she stopped halfway down and yelled something back toward the house. I couldn’t make out the words, but her tone was pissed off. A lovers’ quarrel, maybe; back to the world. When she yelled again, her voice strident, I was close enough to make it out: ‘The kitchen table, Eddie. Kitchen table! Now goddamn it, would you please hurry? We’re going to be late.’ She shook her head angrily.

I was about forty yards from the steps when she shrieked, ‘Close the door, Eddie!’ A door banged shut and a small brown-haired boy about five years old came bounding down the steps, his arms cradled under a bright yellow lunchpail on top of which were a couple of books and some big sheets of paper; he had his head scrunched down so his chin held the papers in place. He went right through his mother’s grasp, giggling, mimicking, ‘Come on, we’re late.’ His mother, haggard, started after him.

I was about thirty feet away when he tripped near the bottom stair. I thought he was going to fall but somehow he kept his balance. In doing so, however, he lifted his chin from the papers, and an errant breeze lifted off the one on top, which fluttered toward the curb. He almost snagged it, but just as his small hand reached out the paper skirred again, skittered sideways up the block, then, lifting, sailed waist-high toward the street.

I saw it coming and dove for him as he dashed intently between two parked cars and his mother screamed his name. The fingertips of my left hand brushed the leg of his brown corduroy pants. It was that close.

The old guy driving the blue ’59 Merc didn’t have a chance. The kid was dead before he hit the brakes. When I heard the sound of the car hitting that little boy, a wet smack like a side of beef thrown from the back of a semi onto a loading dock, it was like something reached down into my chest and ripped out my heart. The street was a chaos of brakes and screams. I lay there on the sidewalk, numb except for the burning in my fingertips where they’d grazed his trousers.

When his mother ran into the street, I jumped up to catch her before she could see his body – then realized she should go to him, touch him, kneel and hold him, whatever she needed to do.

But she didn’t go to his body. She stopped short and pointed a wild, accusing finger at the blood running steadily toward the gutter, floating cigarette butts and a Juicy Fruit wrapper where it pooled against the curb. Her pointed finger shaking, she began a shrill, monotone chant: ‘This… is not… right. No. No, this is not right. It is not right. No. Not right.’ Long after the cops and neighbors had tried to calm her, comfort her, she persisted in the same stunned, determined accusation, until they led her gently back into the house, assuring her everything would be all right.

The cop who took my statement had as much trouble controlling his voice as I did. When I told him about the paper blowing into the street, he unfastened from his clipboard a crayon drawing on cheap tablet paper. A giant sun hovered over a landscape containing a large red flower, three animals that were either horses or deer, and a long green car with shiny black wheels. The sun dominated the upper center of the picture, high noon, solid gold, its light and warmth flooding the scene.

After the cop recorded my story, he rechecked my name and address and told me I was free to go. I’d seen the old man in the Merc being taken downtown in the back of a black-and-white, so I repeated my conviction that it wasn’t his fault, that Eddie had bolted blindly between two parked cars and there was nothing in God’s green world the man could’ve done to stop in time. ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘They just took him down to get a statement. Routine under the circumstances. The guy was shook, and it doesn’t hurt to get him away from the scene.’

An ambulance had taken the body away, and the crowd had thinned to a few gawkers. A couple of cops were measuring skidmarks. A guy with a backpump was flushing away the blood.

‘I didn’t want to see it,’ I told the cop. ‘Didn’t want to, didn’t need to.’

‘Me neither, pal.’

‘How’s the mother?’

‘Torn up, like you’d expect, but she’ll be all right. Or as all right as you can get after something like this.’

‘You know, I just barely missed him.’ I held up my left hand for the cop to see. ‘I touched his pants, that’s how fucking close it was. One second closer out of all the time in the world, one second, one goddamn heartbeat, and that guy wouldn’t be hosing down the street.’

‘You did what you could,’ the cop grunted, ‘that’s what matters.’

The grunt annoyed me. ‘Are you sure? Are you really, truly, deep-down positive about that?’ I started yelling. ‘Fucking utterly convinced, are you?’

‘Hey pal,’ he bristled, ‘don’t lay it on me. I gotta see this shit every day, so don’t get on my ass. Listen, my third month on the street, green-ass rookie, we get a guy out on a ledge fifteen floors up and he’s hot to jump. I’m leaning out the window telling him “Don’t.” I’m telling him every reason in the world to live, and I’m telling him straight from my heart, straight as it comes, how it’s worth it, life is worth it, life is sweet, come back inside, give it another shot. And I see he’s pressing himself back against the wall, I can see the fingernails on his left hand turn white he’s digging so hard for a grip, and he’s inching his way over to me and starting to cry. And when he’s almost where I can reach him, he says in a real soft voice, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” and he pushes off. Fifteen stories, straight down. Strawberry jam. But even before he hit the ground I knew it wasn’t my fault. I’d done my best, and I figure that’s all you can ask, all you can ask of anybody, all you can ask of yourself.’ His eyes challenged me. ‘Unless you want to ask more than that.’

‘No,’ I said, slumping, ‘that sounds like plenty.’

‘Okay. You grabbed, you missed, you’ll never know if it could’ve been any different. Don’t get down on yourself. Go home, take a long hot bath, crack a couple of cold ones, watch the tube, forget it. Life goes on.’

And that’s what I did, all except forgetting. I was weak enough going in, and seeing a happy bouncing kid struck suddenly dead shattered me, just ate me up. Since I didn’t know Eddie, you’d think it wouldn’t have been so bad, but in a way it was worse, a reminder of the random daily slaughter beyond the tiny circle of my life. Besides, I knew Eddie. I’d touched him.

I took the five weeks of vacation I had coming, bought about three cases of canned stuff – hash, peaches, chili, stew – and about twelve cases of beer, and locked myself in my apartment. I didn’t want to see anybody or anything. I took three or four hot baths a day, slept as much as my nightmares allowed, and the rest of the time drank beer and stared at the walls. I didn’t know if I was going over the edge or if the edge was going over me. After a week I started pacing back and forth in my small apartment, looking at the floor, every once in a while bursting into tears. I couldn’t find anything to hang onto until I remembered the sound of Big Red playing ‘Mercury Falling,’ and felt the necessity for music. Since I was afraid to leave the apartment, I switched on the radio.

I couldn’t find much jazz on the box and what there was seemed too cool and complex. That’s when I discovered rock-and-roll. It was the right time. If it was moribund six years earlier, in ’65 the stone was rolled away, and that summer there was a revival, if not a resurrection. The Rolling Stones came out with ‘Satisfaction,’ as in can’t get no, sounding as if they might get nasty if some didn’t show up soon. Same month, Dylan went electric, bringing the power of the troubadour tradition to the power of electrical amplification, the music driving the meaning like a hammer driving a nail, and he sure wasn’t singing about holding hands down at the Dairy Queen:

How does it feeeeeel

To be all alloooone

Like a complete unknooowwwwnn

Like a rooooooolllling STONE!

With the Stones and Dylan, the airwaves suddenly seemed a long way from pretty-boy idols and teenybop dance fads. The mean gutter blues the Stones drew from, Dylan’s electric barbed-wire Madonnas, the raw surrealism of the San Francisco bands that were beginning to break out of garages and lofts – all at once there was a mean and restless bite to the music, a hunger and defiance. Yet around the same time, the Loving Spoonful released ‘Do You Believe in Magic’ and the Beatles’ film Help! came out in all its grand and whacky foolishness. That sense of lightheartedness cracked the paralyzing fear of being thought uncool, different, weird – and that dread of appearing foolish is one of the biggest locks on the human cage. So all at once, along with a roots-first resurgence of black music into the mainstream, there was a new eruption of possibilities and permissions, a musical profusion of amazing range and open horizons, from the harshest doubts and indictments and a blatant sexual nitty-gritty unthinkable the year before to a sweetly playful and strangely fearless faith. The stone was rolling, and you couldn’t mistake the excitement.

It would be silly to say the music saved or healed me, but in my daily routine of hot baths, of opening cans of beer and food, what I held onto was the music. Not for salvation – nothing can do that for you – but for the consolation of its promise, its spark of life, its wild, powerful synaptic arc across spirit, mind, and meat.

By the end of my five-week vacation I was functional, if barely, and aware that life, even by dragging itself wounded down the path, did go on. When I returned to work, however, I felt like I was coated about two inches thick with cold oatmeal. With the help of time and music I’d hauled myself up from a feeling of gutted doom to one of impenetrable depression. My flesh was bloated, my blood gone rancid, my spirit sour. Partly this was physical – I’d gone to hell from sitting on my ass drinking beer and eating out of cans. I could think of only one thing that might sharpen my reflexes, cheer me up, help me shed some flab – those little white pills with crosses on them.

I’d vowed with every fiber of purpose that I wouldn’t do it again, fought temptation like a rabid bear, hung on through the shit-mush and doldrums, and I was so determined to scourge that weakness I decided I’d only buy fifty hits for a last hurrah. In the twisted psychology of collapsed resolve, I figured this lapse was allowable on two unassailable points: first, amphetamines depress the appetite, leading to weight loss, so it was justifiable on medical grounds; and secondly, I was celebrating coming through slaughter, and what’s a celebration without treats?

Perked me right up, too, and I needed some enthusiasm to fight back the gloom. Once I got riding that fifty-hit party I knew that what I really needed was to leave, move, split, follow Kacy or Red or any of the others who’d gotten out from under themselves. That I had nowhere to go except somewhere else made me tremendously sad.

I finished the fifty in about a week. Got my nervous system tuned up and my blubber trimmed back, but best of all I didn’t try to score more when I ran out. The come-down wasn’t that bad – the usual frazzle and funk – or else I was used to misery. My display of pluck was an inspiration. It isn’t hard to make the right choices, but sometimes it’s hell to stick to them.

In that hopeful mood I met with Scumball on the twentieth of October. He’d left a message for me at Cravetti’s to meet him at Bob’s Billiards. Scumball hadn’t been particularly pleased by the job I’d done on the Corvette. I’d only heard from him once since then, a job in Oakland, but he’d canceled the next day, explaining only that the set-up had fallen through. I figured I’d been scratched from his list of reliable idiots, but then again I’d been out of action for five weeks.

The pool hall was a local hangout where you could shoot more than snooker if you had the inclination and the price. At Scumball’s suggestion we went for a walk and were just out the door when he gave me a fraternal pat on the back and said something innocuous like, ‘How’s my man been?’ For some reason, and for the first time, I resented his assumption that we were partners, brothers, buddies, pals. Scumball played the small-time edges, mealy-cheap and tight; there was no hunger or grandeur to his imagination. I almost wheeled around to slap his hand off my back when it struck me what really was eating my ass. We were alike, literally partners-in-crime, and for all the soaring grandeur of my majestic and altogether superior imagination, I didn’t seem to be doing much. Petty as he was, Scumball did have a certain gift for scamming, and in fact I worked for him. I held my tongue and listened.

It was an interesting earful. Scumball was playing a variation on his new theme, and this time a story went with it. The car he had in mind was a mint ’59 Cadillac. According to Scumball, it had been purchased by a whacked-out sixty-year-old spinster named Harriet Gildner as a present to some hotshot rock star. The old lady was ‘covered up with money,’ to quote Scumball, an heiress to a fortune in steel and rubber. The Caddy was all crated to ship when the rock star died in a plane wreck. Since she didn’t need the money or the car, and could afford to indulge her sentimentality, she’d stored it in one of her warehouses on the docks. She had a nephew, guy named Cory Bingham, who wanted the Caddy so bad he was wading in his own drool, but the old lady wouldn’t let go. She was a major loony, Scumball claimed, and her psychic adviser, one Madam Bella, told her to hang on to it, its time would come.

But Harriet Gildner’s time had come first: she fell down the stairs of her Nob Hill mansion and broke her neck, evidently so loaded that the autopsy report indicated traces of blood in the drugs. There was some quiet conjecture that Madam Bella or maybe Cory had given her a helpful nudge to get her rolling, but it was ruled an accidental death. That was in early ’62, but her will, while legit, was an homage to surrealism that every relative down to seventh-cousin twice-removed had contested. The legal dust had finally cleared a few months back. The nephew received the Cadillac he’d coveted, but that was all. Scumball didn’t remember exactly, but the stipulation in her will, to give you an idea, went something like ‘Cory gets the car he panted for, provided he’s become a knight worthy of the steed, but he gets nothing else, never ever, and if he ever sells the car he has to pay the estate double the sale price, and if his worthiness is in question the Book of Lamentations should be consulted if the ghosts see fit to reveal it.’

So Cory got the Caddy, others got odd bits and pieces, Madam Bella (her psychic adviser and, Scumball claimed, drug connection) was well provided for, and the rest of the estate was divided equally between the Brompton Society for the Promotion of Painless Death and the Kinsey Institute. I laughed when Scumball told me that, but he shot me a scornful look. ‘Fucking dame. Makes me puke how it’s always her kind that wind up with the big loot and never lifted a finger to earn it, never had to scuffle for one fucking penny.’

Cory didn’t care much about the car when he finally got it, an attitude evidently influenced by the fact he fancied himself a poker player, an expensive fancy that had placed him in pressing debt and serious disfavor with collection agencies not listed in the Yellow Pages. Although he didn’t say so directly, it was easy to guess that Scumball was affiliated with the people who wanted to be paid. Since the Caddy was the only asset, I gathered Scumball had advised Cory that a mint Cadillac – even one only six years old – was a precious collector’s item that should be insured to the hilt, and if anything unfortunate should happen to it – well, the insurance money might cover his IOUs and thereby guarantee him the continued use of his arms, legs, and sexual organs. Cory, quick to recognize wisdom when it threatened to club him, had agreed. The Caddy had been uncrated at a storage garage Cory had rented on 7th Street. A mechanic had checked it out, replacing seals and rubber as needed, and fired it up. It was all set: gassed, registered, ready to roll. Fully insured, of course.

But there was an irritating problem. I’d have to break into the garage to steal it. This wasn’t a major difficulty, since Scumball had a duplicate key for the garage lock, but I’d have to make it look like B&E to keep the heat off Cory, who was nervous about being implicated, though evidently even more worried about being maimed. I told Scumball that Cory was liable to get looked at hard, considering the recent insurance purchase, and that I wasn’t particularly interested in the job since he was liable to crumble like a soggy cookie. Scumball assured me that Cory’s alibi would be airtight, that a lawyer specializing in such claims would represent him in all transactions with the insurance people, that he knew for a fact that the agent who’d sold Cory the policy was sympathetic, and that Cory himself completely understood that if he so much as squeaked his body was shark bait.

‘Forget it,’ I told Scumball. ‘The whole thing’s got too much wobble.’

Scumball was deeply understanding. He appreciated that Breaking & Entering, even if faked, was a companion felony to Grand Theft Auto, and that working without cover substantially increased the risks. That’s why I would get two grand in front and another deuce on delivery.

I’d like to think it wasn’t the money that swayed me, but rather some profoundly instinctive understanding that the door was opening on a journey I couldn’t deny. I’ve thought about it since, of course, without concluding much except that somewhere in the welter of possibilities I might’ve felt a way out. The money, for instance, would support a long vacation to check out other places, new ideas; maybe something would click. I was still miserable, though a notch up from the gutted numbness of the month before.

Scumball smiled with pearly pleasure when I agreed to the deal. He gave me another fraternal pat on the shoulder as he slipped me an envelope with a hundred $20 bills inside. I resented the pat, welcomed the money, and wasn’t sure how I felt about the rest.

The job was set for late on the twenty-fourth, giving me a couple of days to prepare. The storage garage on 7th was within walking distance of my place, so I hoofed over that evening to check it out. The lock was a heavy-duty Schlage and the door was steel. Getting in, of course, was no problem – I had the duplicate key – but I had to fake my break-in.

What I did was fairly simple. I bought another Schlage lock, same model as the one on the door, and late that night I went over and switched the new one for the original. I took the original to Cravetti’s with me the next morning and used a portable oxy-acetylene torch to cut through the shackle just enough that it would slide out of the staple. I saved the metal drippings, putting them in a film cannister when they’d cooled. I fried the duplicate key beyond recognition and tossed it into the scrap bucket. I worked with a concentration and precision I hadn’t felt in a couple of months, and let me tell you it felt good. Felt alive, like I was finally rolling with the river.

Then I hit a snag. I couldn’t find a back-up driver. All my old outlaw cronies were gone except John Seasons, and he wasn’t remotely interested. Neal Cassady was supposed to be around, but I couldn’t locate him; he was already turning into a rumor. There was an old friend named Laura Dolteca, but her mother was in town for the week in a last-ditch effort to change her daughter’s delightfully wild ways. I couldn’t think of anyone else I trusted. Three people, when five years before there had been thirty. It was time to move on. Big Sur. Santa Fe. Maybe across town to the Haight – I’d heard rumblings of some high craziness over there. With the four grand from the Caddy job and another two at home in a sock, I could afford to roam around and see what connected, what pieces fit.

But first the business at hand. When I came off-shift at 5:00 I went straight to my apartment, soaked for an hour in a hot bath, and cooked myself a steak dinner. I ate with gusto for the first time in a couple of months, then did the dishes. At 9:00 I checked and packed my tools: the torched original lock and metal drippings, key to the new lock on the garage, flashlight, gloves, and a few odds and ends like sidecutters and jumper wires. Once everything was all set I stretched out on the bed and dialed up some rock on the box and, riding the anticipation, methodically considered the pile of possibilities and contingencies.

The only three crucial problems I hadn’t resolved were where and how to wreck the Caddy and how to get away. I say I hadn’t decided, but I had – subject to tough review. I applied all the hard-headed logic I could muster, weighing, balancing, trying to enforce an intelligent objectivity, but I finally approved my original inclinations, which were based on pure sentimentality and an aesthetic disposition for the symmetrical: I’d put it over the same cliff out on the Pacific where Big Red and I had dumped that first car, the Mercury falling into silence. Of course this would leave me on foot about a hundred miles from home, but I saw a pleasing way around that. I’d hide out in one of the rugged coastal ravines for a day devoted to contemplating what to do with my life, then hitch back the next evening. That left a minor hang-up, which I solved immediately with a phone call to Cravetti’s, telling them that a buddy of mine had been badly hurt in a logging accident near Gualala and I was on my way up to see him for a couple of days.

I lay there listening to the music till almost 1:30 in the morning, then gathered my crime kit and headed for the door. My hand was on the knob before I realized I’d left the radio on, and just as I reached to snap it off the deejay dropped the needle on James Brown’s ‘Pappa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ I could never figure out whether the new bag was smack, a recharged scrotum, or a new direction in life, but you could sure as shit dance to it. And that’s just what I did, bopping around my apartment, little shimmy and slide, touch of Afro-Cuban shuffle here, four beats of off-the-wall flamenco gypsy twist there, a bit of straight-on ass shaking to smooth it out, and ending with a flourished twirl that Mr Brown himself, King of Flash Cool, would’ve applauded. Yea, if the heart’s beating the blood’s gotta move. Flushed with dancing, nearly giddy, I clicked off the tunes and lights and hit the street.

The bars were just beginning to empty as I headed up Columbus toward Kearny. Lots of sailor boys fresh from the tit shows and a handful of new fuzz-beard beatniks who looked like they were wondering where they might score a lid of the good stuff. A black-and-white cruised by and I kept on walking as cool as you can get until it turned the corner, then, irrepressible me, I broke into a full-tilt boogie step and took it right over the top into my newly discovered James Brown whoop-da-twirl, a double this time.

The double whoop-da-twirl was actually a one-and-a-half, and I landed facing a young couple that I hadn’t noticed behind me on the sidewalk, scaring the holy bejeesus out of them. ‘Love each other or die!’ I commanded, a line John Seasons was fond of screaming unexpectedly when he was at the peak of a binge. And I’ll be go to hell if they both didn’t simultaneously blurt, ‘Yes, sir!’ They were scared, and that certainly wasn’t what I’d intended, nor what I wanted. I could see them flagging down the next cop car with a babbling raw-panic story about some guy who’d spun around and threatened to kill them, so I said, ‘Hey, relax. I was just quoting a line from a poem. You know, poetry? And that wild old twirl was straight from unbearable exuberance. Sorry if I startled you, but I didn’t hear you coming up behind me.’ I bowed to the woman and offered my hand to the young man as I introduced myself: ‘My name’s Jack Kerouac.’

‘I thought you were taller,’ the woman said. I could’ve kissed her.

‘You wrote On the Road,’ the guy announced. ‘I dug it.’

We chatted a few minutes as I basked in their reverence, and then I told them I had to go find Snyder because we were taking off in the morning to climb Mount Shasta. Once we reached the peak we’d each say one word to the wind and then give up speech for a year. Bless their hearts, they wanted to go along.

I was turning to go when the woman stopped me with a touch on the shoulder. She reached in her pocket and handed me a small foil-wrapped package. ‘LSD,’ she murmured. ‘Only take one at a time.’

‘Thank you,’ I said politely. I’d been hearing about LSD but hadn’t been interested enough to score. I had enough trouble with peyote. I realized it wasn’t exceptionally bright to add drug possession to a list of imminent felonies, but there was no way to gracefully refuse.

‘Take it in a beautiful place,’ she advised. ‘It’ll really open things up.’

Well, after all, I was interested in opening things up, so why not? Keep the spirit of adventure alive. ‘Wish I had something I could offer in return,’ I said – except lies, my conscience reminded me.

‘There’s something I’d like to know,’ she said shyly.

I braced myself. ‘Name it and I’ll try.’

‘I’d like to know what word you’re going to say on top of Mount Shasta.’

‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know,’ I said, relaxing. ‘I’m just going to say whatever comes to me, whatever I feel. Spontaneous bop of the moment’s revelation, you understand. Sorry I can’t tell you or I sure would.’

‘Just a minute,’ she said, rummaging in her buckskin purse till she found a card and a pen. She talked as she scribbled under the streetlight. ‘It’s a stamped postcard. I’ll address it to myself. My name’s Natalie. After you come down from the mountain, write what word you said and mail it to me – but only if you feel like it. No obligation. And I promise not to tell anybody.’

‘That’s fair. Assuming I make the top and have something to say.’ I pocketed the card.

‘Can she tell me?’ her boyfriend asked.

‘Sure, if you still love each other and haven’t died.’

They both giggled.

‘Don’t die,’ I admonished them, and then I was gone up Columbus to Kearny, strolling up the mountain toward the wild wind and the mighty clouds of joy, letting fly with a bit of the double-shuffle be-bop buck-and-wing as the spirit moved me. From the instrument room of my psyche, a voice as dry as my conscience’s but with a more sardonic edge announced, .You’re asking for it. And I answered under my breath, ‘That’s right, I’m asking for it. Hell, I’m begging for it.’ And I bopped on down the street.

I was more subdued by the time I reached the garage on 7th, but still full of juice. I felt alert, confident, inevitable, and I hadn’t felt any of that in a long time. I walked up to the garage door like I owned the place, used the key, and swung the double doors open. I stepped inside, shutting the doors behind me, slipped the flashlight out of my crime kit, and stood still in the darkness, senses straining. The air seemed warmer inside. There was a musky odor of gear oil, sharp tang of solvent. I switched on the flashlight.

The garage was full of Cadillac. The car looked about seventy feet long. Where it wasn’t chrome, it was pure white, including the sidewalls on the tires. Six years is a long time for rubber not to roll, and though Scumball had assured me there were new tires all around, I wanted to be sure. There were. I checked the plates: current. Despite my attention to safety items as I made my inspection, it was impossible to miss the extravagance of the styling: swept fins that seemed as high as the roofline, each sporting twin bullet taillights; a front grille divided by a thick horizontal chrome bar and studded with small chrome bullets, a pattern repeated on the rear dummy grille that ran across the lower back panel above the bumper; fenderskirts on the rear wells; tinted wrap-around windows front and back; chrome gleaming everywhere. It was an Eldorado, and if memory serves that meant 390 cubes, 345 horses, fed by three two-barrel carbs. You’d need that kind of thrust to move such a chunk of metal.

I opened the door to check the key and registration and was hit by the odor of new leather upholstery and, over that, a fragrance I knew in my loins and reeled to remember: Shalimar. Kacy’s favorite perfume. I inhaled deeply, and again, but still wasn’t really sure I still smelled it. The uncertainty spooked me. I kept sniffing, starting to tremble, then willed myself back to the job at hand before I snapped my concentration. Forcing myself to relax and slow down, I slipped the registration from the visor and went over it carefully. Clean as a whistle.

The key was under the front seat where it was supposed to be, and slipped smoothly into the ignition. The engine caught on the first stroke and settled into a purr. I gave the gauges a glance; everything looked good. The tank was full. That just left the tricky part, the point of maximum vulnerability. I had to open the garage doors, drive out, stop, close the garage door, reattach the duplicate lock, scatter some metal drippings under the hasp, toss the cut lock out where it wouldn’t be obvious but where it could be found without a struggle, then get back into the Eldorado and cruise away. I figured five minutes at the outside if nothing screwed up; two if it all jammed together smooth. What I didn’t need was a cop cruising by or some good neighbor with insomnia who collected the Dick Tracy Crimestopper Notes out of the Sunday funnies.

ABCDEFG. Plans. Pure delusions. How can you ever accommodate the imponderables, the variables, the voluptuous teeming of possibilities, the random assertions of chance, the inflexible dictates of fate? You jump out of a tree and walk down the street and a little boy is slaughtered in front of your eyes. The music ends and a woman stands up and takes off her clothes and you fall in love. I was turning the key when I heard a car swing around the corner and come down the street. Then another right behind it, radio blasting rock-and-roll. Both passed without slowing. Then another cruised by from up the block. Far too much traffic for 2:30 in the morning. Maybe there was a party in the neighborhood, a card game, whorehouse, drug deal, who knows. I figured I’d give it a few minutes to settle out.

I decided there were a couple of useful things I could do while waiting, like get the lock and metal drippings out and ready, and then stash the rest of my kit in the glovebox. When I leaned over and opened the glovebox, the powerful scent of Shalimar carried me back into Kacy’s arms.

I came back to reality fast, greatly aided by another memory – that I was in the middle of multiple felonies – and by the fact that Kacy wasn’t likely to be curled up in the glovebox awaiting my amorous designs. Shalimar is hardly a rare perfume. Maybe Cory Bingham had a girlfriend who used it, or maybe he liked to splash a little on himself and prance around. I shined the flashlight in the glovebox, expecting to find a leaky perfume bottle or a scented scarf, but the only thing in the glovebox was a crumpled piece of paper which on closer inspection turned out to be an envelope. I lifted it to my nose: absolutely Shalimar, not overwhelming but distinct. Of course, logical, always an explanation – a perfumed letter, addressed in a fine, precise script to Mr Big Bopper. That was all, just the name. No stamps or postmark. I turned it over in the flashlight’s beam and saw the jagged tear where it had been ripped open. The letter inside was typewritten, single-spaced. I took it out and smoothed it on the steering wheel.

I read the letter seven times straight through right then, another seven later that night, and maybe seven hundred times altogether, but after the first time through I knew without doubt or hesitation what I was going to do.

I can recite the letter by heart. The letterhead was embossed in a rich burgundy ink: Miss Harriet Annalee Gildner. Under her name, exactly centered, the date was typed, February 1, 1959.

Dear Mr Bopper,

I am a 57-year-old virgin. I’ve never had sex with a man because none has ever moved me. Don’t mistake me, please. I’m neither vain in my virtue, nor ashamed. Life is rich with passions and pleasures, and sex is undoubtedly one. I haven’t denied myself; I simply haven’t found the man and the moment, and see no reason to fake it.

I hope you won’t mistake me as a hopeless kook, but one of my deepest interests is the invisible world. Over the years I’ve employed some of the most sensitive psychics, shamans, and mediums to provide access to that realm of being which defies the rational circuits of knowledge our culture enforces as reality. I’ve sought those realms out of a desire to know, not a need to believe. I’ll spare you the techniques and metaphysics; since they are much closer to music than ‘thought,’ I assume you’ll understand.

To the point then: About a week ago, while I was in my office perusing my broker’s report and enjoying a pipe of opium, I was visited by formless spirits bearing a large book. It was bound in the horn of a white rhinoceros with the title stamped in gold: THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS.

I asked the spirits to open the book.

‘One page, one page,’ voices chanted together in reply, then held the book out to me.

It opened at my touch. The page revealed was in a language I’d never encountered before, but somehow I understood clearly as I read that it was a lament of virgins, both men and women, who, by whatever cause or reason, had never known (I quote the text) ‘the sweet obliterations of sexual love.’ The text continued, a chronicle of regrets, but the page faded as I read. In foolish desperation I tried to grab the book. It vanished with the spirits. But immediately a single spirit (they are invisible, but overwhelmingly present) returned. I could feel it waiting.

‘Why was I allowed this visit?’ I asked.

There was a giggle, a 17-year-old’s nervous glee, and a young woman’s voice replied, ‘Trust yourself, not us.’

‘How will I know?’ I asked her.

She giggled again. ‘You just do. And you’ll probably be wrong.’

‘Are you a virgin?’ I asked.

‘Are you kidding?’ She vanished into her laughter, leaving me confused and, I must admit, distraught.

I didn’t fall asleep until late that night, but I slept deeply. When I woke the next morning, shrouded in the membranes of dreams I couldn’t remember, I reached over to my nightstand to turn on the radio to a classical station I frequently listen to. Or such was my attempt. I somehow turned the tuning dial rather than the on-off switch. I realized my mistake and turned the right knob, forgetting the station would be at random.

And there you were: ‘Helllooo bay-beeee, this is the Big Bopper.’ And I was moved. Men that have made sexual advances toward me in the past have always made it seem such an awkward, harrowing pursuit. When I heard the playfulness in your voice, the happy, loose lechery, I knew. And maybe – probably – I’m wrong, but that doesn’t alter the conviction.

I want you to understand this car is a gift, yours without strings or conditions. It is a gift to acknowledge your music, the desire that spins the planets, and the power it portends. So it is very much a gift to the possibilities of friendship, communion, and love. You owe me nothing. I can afford it because I’m ridiculously wealthy.

If you’re ever in San Francisco, please give me a call or drop by my house. I would like very much to meet you.

Sincerely yours,

   

Harriet Gildner

I sat there in the Shalimar-scented darkness, a man without a gift insidze a gift undelivered, a heartfelt crazy gift meant to celebrate music and the possibilities of human love. I would deliver it, all right.

Then a couple of pieces fell together. Scumball had said it was a present to some rock star who’d up and died, but the Big Bopper’s name hung on the threshold of memory for a moment before it arced across. ‘That’s a lot of music to lose,’ Kacy had said. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. And now this Cory jerkoff expected me to wreck the Bopper’s Cadillac, his aunt’s gift, to pay off his stupidity at the poker table? Nope. No way was it going to happen. The car didn’t belong to him. It belonged to the ghosts of Harriet and the Big Bopper, to love and music. I, too, was probably wrong, but fuck it. You move as you’re moved, and what I felt moved to do was drive it to the Big Bopper’s grave, stand on the hood and read Harriet’s letter, and then set it all ablaze, a monument of fire. I was going to climb the mountain and say my word; deliver my gift and slip away.

I knew this was going to be more difficult than it sounded. Besides a whole pile of luck, I needed a couple of other things I could think of offhand: solid cover and a little information. I figured the cover shouldn’t be too difficult. John Seasons and his many official seals could probably handle it as long as I didn’t come under hard scrutiny. The only information that seemed crucial was the location of the Big Bopper’s grave, and I figured I could find that out on the way.

I carefully refolded the letter and returned it to the envelope, pissed that someone – most likely that asshole Cory – had ripped it open and then crumpled it. The letter was a noble document, a little strange maybe, but that’s no reason to treat it like a used Kleenex.

The occasional car still passed on the street, but I felt charmed in my elated conviction of doing right – or at least doing something – and if you’re going to throw your ass up for grabs, that’s a good time.

I didn’t hurry. I cranked the Caddy over again and let it idle while I opened the garage doors. I pulled out into the driveway, put it in neutral, and set the brake. That damn Caddy was so long half of it was in the street. I closed the doors, snapped on the duplicate lock, sprinkled the container of melted drippings around, side-armed the torch-cut original into the space between the garage and the building next door, climbed back in the Caddy, snugged up my gloves, took off the brake, and my ass was gone.

John Seasons answered the door with a distant grin. It was 3:30 in the morning and he’d just finished a poem he thought was worthy. He understood before I spoke that something was up, and fixed me with a cocked gaze. ‘My, you’re looking awfully lively this morning.’

I ran it down for him as quickly and as clearly as I could. ‘I bow to the romance of the gesture,’ he said, and actually gave me a formal little bow. That he liked the idea made it seem even better.

I explained my need for cover. I told him the Caddy was legally registered to Cory Bingham, so what I needed was either new registration or a damn good reason for being in the car.

John had an innate understanding of such things. ‘Do you have any leverage on Bingham?’

‘Since I’m off and running, and know the scam, he should be reasonable. I wouldn’t say I had him by the nuts, but I could sure yank on some short hairs.’

‘It would probably be best for all concerned if the guy took a vacation where he couldn’t be reached for a few days. Then he wouldn’t have to lie.’

‘I was thinking along the same lines,’ I said. ‘No need to pull on a wet noodle.’

John said, ‘All I need from you is a photograph for a new driver’s license, and the rest is easy. And I will need the current registration and that letter from the woman … Harriet Gildner, was it? Think I met her once at the Magic Workshop. Definitely out there.’

I had the registration and letter with me. John was impressed. ‘Why, George, you’re becoming lucidly thorough in your foolishness.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

John shrugged. ‘Well, at least it’s grand foolishness.’

‘I hate to hurry an artist at work,’ I said, ‘but do you think you could have the paperwork finished in four or five hours?’

‘By dawn’s early light.’

‘Well, shit, if you have time to kill, how about putting some of your legendary scholarship to work and see what you can find out about the Big Bopper for me? Especially where he’s buried.’

‘Really, George, that’s not my field. Prosody, history, the graphic arts, baseball – those I might be able to help you with. But I lack the proper references for the burial sites of rock-and-roll musicians. However, I recently met a darling young boy who happens to be a janitor at the library. He should be there now, and maybe he can help us out.’

‘I just want to get rolling in the right direction.’

‘I understand,’ John said. ‘What’s a pilgrimage without a destination?’

My immediate destination was my apartment. I parked around back and climbed the stairs. I stood in the center of the room and thought about what I’d need, and decided to go as light as possible. I threw together a duffle of clothes and my shaving kit, then withdrew my life savings from the First Bank of the Innersprings. I counted it on the kitchen table – $4170, including the $2000 Scumball had fronted me.

That reminded me I had to call. I dialed the new number he’d given me. As always, he answered on the third ring.

‘Complications,’ I said.

There was short silence, then a displeased question: ‘Yes?’

‘Of the heart.’

The pause was longer, but I waited him out. ‘Well?’ he said, not happy.

‘Don’t worry. The job’ll get done. It’s just going to take some time.’

‘I hope we’re talking minutes.’

‘Maybe three or four days. Could be a week.’

‘No.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

‘I don’t know what your problem is,’ Scumball hissed, ‘but if you got a dumb urge to play games or mention names I got something for you to remember, wise-ass. There’s over two hundred bones in the body, and I have friends who’d enjoy breaking them for you, one by one, slowly. When they got done, you’d be a fucking puddle, savvy?’

‘Fuck your friends, too, and the Sheriff, and the whole posse. If you want your ass covered, tell your shithead friend to be gone for a week. Might do his slimy soul some good to take a long hike in the Sierras. I’ll take care of my end. I don’t need any premature mention about missing machinery. That might make it tough on everybody concerned. You can keep what I have coming, make up for your inconvenience, but this one gets played my way. I’m going to deliver it where it rightfully belongs.’

‘You’re gonna eat shit, is what you’re gonna do. Save some money for doctor bills. This is gonna make a lot of people unhappy.’

‘Not for long. And they’ll get over it. But you know what? It’s going to make me very happy. Ecstatic, I hope. I’m going to send it roaring upward in the flames. What do you think of that?’

‘I think it’d be nice you went with it.’

‘Listen, it’s not a rip-off, you understand? It’s going to go down, like all the rest. A few days’ extra time ought to be worth the balance due. Goes in your grubby pocket. I’m not jerking you around. It’s just something that I need to do, and you can’t do shit about it, so why not squeeze a little grace out of that fucking mustard seed you call a heart?’

‘Die,’ he snarled, and hung up, depriving me of the chance to urge him to improve his imagination.

Given Scumball’s nasty mood I figured it wouldn’t be wise to hang around my apartment too long – nor the city, for that matter – so I locked up and loaded my stuff in the Caddy’s trunk, then cruised over to the all-night Doggie Diner for two large coffees and a double burger, which I ate on my way over to John’s.

My traveling papers were ready. At John’s insistence, we sat down at the kitchen table to go over them. He flipped through and explained each one. A new California driver’s license in the name of George Teo Gass (John’s sense of humor), a Social Security card, draft card, and other ID featuring my new name. In addition, a very official looking DMV Certificate of Interstate Transport, a document I didn’t even know existed, and I’m not sure John did either. There was a notarized letter from Cory Bingham attesting to the fact that Mr Gass was authorized to transport the vehicle for display at a memorial tribute to the Big Bopper. Cory’s letter was accompanied by a sheaf of papers on letterhead from the law offices of Dewey, Scrum, and Howe, which covered the terms and liabilities of the car’s display at the memorial. John said that if I got stopped, I should be sure to explain I’d been hired through an agent for the lawyers and had never personally met Mr Bingham or the lawyers, though the agent had told me there was a kind of legal hassle going on between Cory Bingham and the Big Bopper’s estate. He even had a card from the agent, one Odysseus Jones.

Poetry or forgery, John Seasons knew what to do with paper and ink. He wouldn’t take a penny for it, either. I told him I had a wad of money to cover travel expenses and that proper documentation was foremost in the budget, but John, with the exaggerated professorial tone he used to mock himself, said, ‘Ah, but my dear young man, the object of price is to measure value, and the highest value is blessings. One easily infers from the works of Lao-Tze, Dogen, and other Masters of the Path that blessed most deeply is he who helps a pilgrim on the way.’

I was about to insist on a token $50 to at least cover wear and tear on the seals when there was a loud pounding on the door. I spun around, the ruby neon flight-light pulsing in my brain stem, certain one of Scumball’s goons had spotted the Caddy down the block. John grabbed my arm. ‘Easy,’ he said softly. ‘Too late for fear.’ He went to the door and asked, ‘May I inquire who has come to call at this ungodly hour?’

Myron and Messerschmidt, as it happened, both wired to the tits, just hitting town after a forty-hour nonstop run to Mexico and back. They came in babbling, each bearing a large, rattling shopping bag full of drugs available only by prescription in this country, while in Mexico, with its less formal notions of restriction, they were available in bulk over-the-counter, especially at the more enlightened border farmacias. The first item out of Myron’s bag was a 1000-tablet bottle of benzedrine, factory sealed. They wanted $150, and got it on the spot. John clucked his tongue but I ignored him. I was already tired, and it might be a long drive. Besides, I was bold, imaginative, and decisive; such virtues wither without reward.

While Myron and Messerschmidt rummaged through the portable pharmacy for John’s order of Percodan – I clucked at him – he accompanied me to the door. ‘Any info on the Big Bopper,’ I asked.

‘Ah, yes. I called my young friend at the library and he went through the newspaper files. The Big Bopper’s real name was Jiles Perry Richardson, born and raised in Sabine Pass, Texas. If my spotty geography serves, that’s right on the Louisiana border, near the mouth of the Red River. He was working as a disc jockey in Beaumont when he “hit the charts,” as they say. My friend said there was no information on his burial site in the papers, but I would assume he was interred in Sabine Pass, or possibly Beaumont. If I were you, I’d head out yonder to East Texas – Beaumont’s not far from Sabine Pass – but it would be smart indeed to do a little library research along the way. Shouldn’t be difficult to find out where he’s buried. But I’d find out before you get too far, because you’re going to feel like a dumb shit if you’re parked in Sabine Pass and find out his bones found their rest in LA.’

I blessed him for his help and gave him a big hug, putting some feeling into it. He returned it, then held me at arms’ length and looked in my eyes. ‘So,’ he said approvingly, ‘the Pilgrim Ghost.’

‘Hey, I’m no ghost yet,’ I objected, slightly unnerved. But I’d misunderstood.

‘No, no,’ John laughed. ‘Goest. Go-est. Like, “The pilgrim goest forth, the journey his prayer.”’

‘More like it,’ I said, relieved.

‘Well, give my best to the dragons and wizards, and pledge my honor to the maidens fair. And the pages, if you see any cute ones. And George, seriously: fare well.’

The stars were fading in the dawnlight as I left, forged papers under one arm and a 1000-hit bottle of bennies tucked inside my jacket. The Caddy was waiting where I’d left it, pure white and heavily chromed, blast-off styling and power everything, a cross between a rocketship and Leviathan, an excessive manifestation of garish excellence, a twisted notion of the American dreamboat.

I slipped inside and turned it over. While it warmed up I put the papers in the glovebox and clipped the registration back on the visor. I lined up three bennies on my tongue like miniature communion wafers, swallowed, and stashed the bottle under the seat. I sat there tapping the gas, wondering if I was forgetting anything. But I’d reached that point where anything I was forgetting was forgotten. The clutch plate kissed the power and I came down on the juice. By the time I hit the end of the block I was long gone.