OUR NEXT STOP WAS A MERE TEN MINUTES AWAY, UP 7TH STREET and right on Bryant to Barrish Bail Bonds. Don’t Perish in Jail, Call Barrish for Bail. Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Serving the People Since 1961. Se Habla Español.
After Lavinia spent about forty-five minutes doing paperwork, we backed the Lexus onto the sidewalk on Gilbert, an alley a few doors west of Barrish’s and directly across Bryant Street from the many doors of the Hall of Justice, whence Ivy would be sprung in due course. A thick fog had rolled in, cold and damp. Lavinia produced a picnic blanket from the trunk (“Telltail just loved picnics.”) and we cozied up under it with our money and a pint of brandy, the better to keep a warm eye on each other. I prevailed upon her to return the pistol to the glove compartment.
I stayed awake for about ten minutes, worried about spending the rest of my life in jail for crimes I may or may not have committed. Gradually, my eyes closed. At the threshold of dreamland, I heard Lavinia’s voice. “Doesn’t the leather back seat of a luxury vehicle make you feel horny?”
“No,” I replied, pretending not to wake up. “It makes me feel homeless.”
“Be that way,” she groused petulantly. “Save it for Miss Right.”
She reached between the front seatbacks and turned on the radio. It was 2:30 A.M. Harold Land and Clifford Brown were working out Land’s End with Max Roach. We snuggled up.
“Don’t you wish you could play like that,” she declared.
“May it please the court,” I kept my eyes closed, “counsel for the defense would like to stipulate for the record that, aside from the fact that there’s no guitar on this band, the state isn’t asking a question.”
“I’ll rephrase, your honor.”
“Skip it. The answer is yes—yes, I say, yes—I’ve always wanted to play like that!”
“And you never will! Isn’t that true? Isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes! Oh, god, oh god oh god….”
“Bam! Guilty!”
“I know, I know, I know….”
Roach’s brooding tom elided into somebody tapping on the window. We woke up. Ivy Pruitt stood on the sidewalk, looking in. He was tapping the glass with his clasp knife.
Lavinia unlocked the driver’s door and Ivy slid behind the wheel. “Man,” he said, “all they talk about in that joint is assfucking and Jennifer Lopez.”
“Who’s Jennifer Lopez?” I asked sleepily.
Ivy started the engine, put the car into gear, and nosed onto Bryant Street. “Well, Curly,” he said, looking to his left for oncoming traffic, “if you go from the latter to the former, it’s a prime example of deductive reasoning.”
“It’s a prime example of wishful thinking,” Lavinia snorted.
Across Bryant Street, the curb in front of the Hall of Justice was lined with black and white police cars, many of them double-parked. Hookers on bail descended the steps to the sidewalk and chatted with loitering cops. Ivy turned right, accelerated hard down Bryant Street, then braked to a dead stop for the light at Sixth, all within one hundred yards of the police station. Lavinia and I braced ourselves to avoid being thrown to the floorboards. “Can it be said that a Lexus has floorboards?” I wondered aloud.
“Good question,” Lavinia said, “but for sure it doesn’t have an extra battery in the footwell.”
“Fasten your seat belts,” Ivy suggested mildly.
On the radio, John Coltrane started in on I Want To Talk About You. “The very idea of Oakland,” Lavinia cooed, “fills me with a sense of adventure.”
“Oakland?” I repeated ingenuously. “I’m not going to Oakland.”
“Why not?” Lavinia asked frankly. “You don’t even have a job to get cleaned up for.”
Ivy’s eyes snapped to the rear view mirror. “No job?”
“He got canned,” Lavinia helpfully supplied.
The light turned green. “Oakland,” Ivy announced, “here we come,” and he floored it.
The brandy bottle tumbled to the floor and Lavinia and I were thrown against the back seat. “Wait a minute,” I shouted from the tangle of arms and picnic blanket, as the Fifth Street on-ramp began to fill the windshield. Between Fifth Street and the bridge there are no more San Francisco exits. “I need to go home!”
There was a slight dip at the intersection of Fifth and Bryant, and Ivy had to swerve some thirty degrees to port to line up for the onramp beyond. The Lexus bottomed its springs, rebounded and angled left. Lavinia and I were thrown against the right side of the car in a heap. Before we untangled, we were on 80 East and heading for the maw of the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, not one hundred yards away.
“Goddammit, Ivy, I already spent a day and a night on your agenda. I’ve got my own trip to attend to.”
The speedometer said we were doing eighty. Ivy’s free hand was draped behind the passenger headrest. He turned up its palm in my face. “Gimme.”
“I’ll take you home when Ivy gives me my car back,” Lavinia laughed consolingly.
Ivy laughed good-naturedly, then snapped the fingers of his free hand twice.
I got myself sitting up straight and counted six one-hundred dollar bills into Ivy’s waiting hand. As I laid the seventh over the other six, I said, “You owe me twenty-five bucks.”
Ivy folded the cash into the breast pocket of his shirt.
Lavinia tapped my shoulder.
I counted nine c-notes into her waiting palm. “You I’ll owe thirty-seven fifty until I find change.”
“Fine.” She tucked the money into her blouse. “Buy me a leather teddy.”
“Now, that brings up an interesting point,” Ivy said, as I counted the remaining cash to make sure I hadn’t shorted myself. “I owe Curly twenty-five bucks, Curly owes Lavinia thirty-seven fifty, and that comes to sixty-two fifty—no?”
Automatically I said, “Whatever you’re thinking, count me out. Plus, you two owe me half of the forty bucks I spent on cab fare to the Stepnowski residence—”
“Forty?” Lavinia yelped. “I told his dispatcher thirty.”
“I gave him forty.”
“Unauthorized expenditure! That’s one’s on you, Curly.”
“Hey, I got the job done, didn’t I?”
She crossed her arms and looked out the window. “I told him thirty.”
“Goddammit….”
“Wait, wait.” Ivy deigned to use both hands on the wheel long enough to swerve left one lane to pass a car and right one lane to pass another, the two vehicles doing a mere fifty-five or sixty, and then replaced his right hand on the back of the passenger seat, pinching the two stainless steel stanchions of the headrest between his thumb and forefinger as if they were some hapless robot’s neck struts. “Hear me out,” he said pleasantly to the rearview mirror.
“And you call this a business,” I grumbled.
“You got a shot at amelioration, hoss,” Ivy assured me. “It won’t take but a little more grease to set us up with an eight-ball and a jock.”
An eight-ball, for the information of those of you who live in Thomas Kinkaid communities, is one-eighth of an ounce or 3.54 grams. An eight-ball could be one-eighth of an ounce of anything, of course, of pea gravel or the pubic hairs of koala bears, but usually it’s somewhere between three and four grams of cocaine.
But a jock? The jock was new to me.
“Not that I’m interested,” I said, as the container cranes of the Port of Oakland streamed toward us, “but is a ‘jock’ when you get some buffed midget to ride your back for three hours while you snort dope out of a dog bowl?”
“Wow,” Lavinia perked up, “whom do I call?”
“Nah,” said Ivy, as uninterested in word play as he was single-minded about his career as a drug fiend. “Jock is short for jockey, which is argot for one gram of horse.”
“Oh, argot, is it?” Lavinia said.
“Heroin again,” I said tiredly to my window.
“But it’s China white,” Ivy explained helpfully. “Different from tarball. Different animal altogether. Purer, stronger, meaner.”
“So the jock is a kind of moral equivalent to an eight-ball. How come I couldn’t guess that?”
“Actually,” Lavinia said, “it was the amount you didn’t know, not the substance. Jock? Horse? Right?”
I threw up my hands.
“So,” Lavinia said to the front seat, “what’s the tab?”
“I can hook us up for a hundred and eighty on the eight-ball and maybe forty for the jockey. Two-twenty in all.”
“Good price,” Lavinia said. “By three that’s….”
Without hesitating Ivy said to the windscreen, “Seventy-three dollars and thirty-three cents. The penny’s on me.”
“It seems a privation, to go without,” Lavinia suggested.
“At the very least,” Ivy agreed. “So,” he continued, “we can take advantage of this unit of fun to square up if I spring for $98.33, Curly rings in with $86.83, and Lavinia gets off, as it were, for a mere $35.83.”
Ivy’s agility with arithmetic seemed remarkably undiminished despite years of desuetude and drug abuse. It occurred to me to wonder whether the perseverance of this skill still coexisted with his no less remarkable and formerly effortless ability to count the most swinging and the most bizarre time signatures alike with an equally formidable dexterity. And, I continued to wonder, so what if he had? These and others of his talents have gone and will go entirely wasted until, one fine day, he dies.
“And then,” I said aloud without enthusiasm, “I suppose we all go back to your place and get wall-eyed fucked up.”
Ivy adjusted the rear-view mirror and said to my reflection, “You got a better place to go?”
“No,” Lavinia declared with certainty, “he doesn’t.”
“Not to mention,” I interpolated, watching the eyes of Ivy, “the place to score is conveniently located on the way to your place.”
“Places,” Ivy smiled. “But it’s a true story.” His eyes refocused on the freeway.
“Sometimes,” I said to nobody in particular, “life is a perfectly bowled strike.”
“Nothing more,” Lavinia nodded, “nothing less.”
I sat back, resigned to the joyride. What else did I have to do? The upper deck of the Bay Bridge, overhead since San Francisco, abruptly gave way to night sky. There was fog over only the bay here, its underside illuminated by the mercury lamps surrounding the gantries of West Oakland. The toll plaza whipped past and receded westward. Ivy centered the Lexus on the two lanes that became 580. We rose over The Maze, as are called the multiple lanes and freeways between Emeryville and the Bay Bridge approach, that merge and entwine and diverge there like heartworms in a commuter’s dog, and we veered south.
Merely excepting Sonny Rollins’ immortal cover of Everything Happens to Me, we rode the ten miles to the Fruitvale Avenue exit in silence.
Street level regained, Ivy turned west. A taco wagon rolling slowly east was followed by a large pit bull trailing three feet of logging chain. He trotted contentedly, oblivious of an Oakland squad car behind him with its rooftop lights on. Burger joints and liquor stores alternated with rib stands, a tortilleria, laundromats, bars and convenience stores on either side of the street, all of them shuttered for the night and many of them boarded up for good. Knots of men stood here and there on the corners anyway, each group attended by boys on bicycles or motorized scooters. Despite the obvious lack of commercial destinations, there seemed to be a lot of commerce.
Ivy turned into the apron of an open gas station, a rarity in this neighborhood where, if a door open to the street in broad daylight is an invitation to robbery, at three in the morning it’s a guarantee.
But as soon as I saw the limousines and taxis lined up among the service islands, I realized that Ivy knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing. A crowd of men hung around the vending machines at one end of the service garage, some of them actually consuming soft drinks. Others paced and talked animatedly, while a few leaned over the black hood of an immaculately detailed Mercedes 600SL limousine. Two or three men wore the dark livery of the chauffeur—blazer or black suit, with tie—while a greater number affected the variegated non-uniforms of the taxi or jitney driver, each with a medallion on his breast or cap. Many of them smoked. Few seemed eager to sally back into the night. None of them would have cruised Fruitvale Avenue for a fare in any case.
Since it was handy and I had nothing else to do, I gassed the Lexus and cleaned the windshield while Ivy went into the office behind the pay window. Nobody else approached the window while Ivy was doing his business. Striding back to the car counting his change, he was humming an old pop tune entitled Downtown, “downtown,” among certain people, being yet another of the myriad slang terms for heroin.
He sat behind the wheel and closed the door. “Now.”
Wrapped in the blanket, Lavinia said, without opening her eyes, “You score?”
“Halfway to paradise.”
“This will have been the coke,” she surmised, looking around. “Marching powder.”
Ivy nodded as he put the car in gear. “These folks like to stay awake while they work.”
Next stop was a mile or two further west and two blocks south, where the neighborhood went from charmingly bedraggled to conspicuously worse. Here, most of the street-front commercial façades were boarded up and dark, but even the odd residential building brandished permanent plumes of black soot over plywood-shuttered windows. Rocks or bullets had taken out most of the streetlights and, before I realized what was going on, Ivy had made a turn and the pavement ended. A block later we pulled up behind a row of vehicles parked in front of a low wooden building that might have been on a back street in any cotton town in Mississippi. There were even crickets—a sound never heard in San Francisco, not fifteen miles across the bay. Twelve feet above the dirt lot was the bottom 2×6 of a wood-framed sign with dirty pearlescent plexiglass sides. Three or four fluorescent tubes inside the box, one of them burned out, backlit a corpus of dead insects, windrowed against a lower corner of the frame, and a single row of diminutive sans-serif black capital letters, which announced the place as Emil’s Grotto.
The entrance to Emil’s Grotto was an unpainted wood-railed screen door with an enameled Red Man Snuff sign for a push bar, rusted almost to illegibility. A nasty rumble from within proved to be Howlin’ Wolf’s I Asked For Water (And She Gave Me Gasoline).
Ivy cranked the wheel, crooked his arm over his seat, and used the Lexus side mirrors to back it into a space between a brand-new burgundy Eldorado, waxed to luminescence, and a twenty-year-old Firebird with a broken rear spring, a spidered windshield, no hood, and two colors of primer.
“Curly?” Ivy put the Lexus in park and turned down the radio. “Whilst I negotiate these premises, would you mind perching up under this steering wheel with the engine running and the passenger door off the latch?”
“Here we go again,” I divined.
“Just a minute.” Lavinia threw off the blanket and sat up. “This is my goddamn car.”
“Now now, little lady,” Ivy drawled.
“Fuck you.” Lavinia batted the back of the driver’s seat with the heels of both hands. “Get out.”
Ivy opened the driver’s door and stepped out. Lavinia pushed the seat forward and joined him on the dirt. “Good luck, babe,” she said, and kissed Ivy full on the mouth, just like she’d done to me just a few hours before, like a pint-sized Athena encouraging her man as he sallies into battle. Ivy pulled away from the kiss, slipping a fat bindle into her hip pocket as he did so. I slid over the seat to get out, too, but Lavinia pushed the seatback into my face. “Stay,” she said, exactly as she’d have said it to a dog. She slid into the driver’s seat herself and closed the door.
Ivy rounded the Eldorado and disappeared into the bar. The screen door patted the jamb softly behind him.
Lavinia leaned over the console, unlatched the passenger door, and retrieved her pistol from the glove compartment.
“Woman,” I said, “haven’t you had enough of that shit for one night?”
“Ivy’s cool,” she said, nosing the pistol between her seat cushion and the console, “but I’m not.”
The Lexus engine was turning over, but I could barely hear it. Even at this hour, headlights and taillights were streaming up and down Fruitvale, a mere two blocks north. No vehicle, however, came down the dirt street to Emil’s Grotto, despite its being wide open long after closing time, where Howlin’ Wolf now made room for Yola My Blues Away.
“Skip James,” I marveled.
Lavinia made no reply.
The spring on the screen door stretched tiredly. From the back seat, looking over the hood of the Eldorado, I could see the black fingers of a large hand with a pink palm easing the hinge stile through its radius, as delicately as if it were parting a lace curtain. A body launched through the door, remained airborne for nearly the entire length of the Cadillac, then folded like so much laundry into the gravel in front of it.
“Good night, Dawg,” said a deep voice from the doorway. The door closed gently against the jamb, bouncing once.
“Ivy doesn’t go by the name of Dawg around here, by any chance?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Why the hell is he scoring junk in this godforsaken joint when he could be buying it from you?”
“Because I sell Mexican tarball. Here he gets China white.”
It seemed like the difference between hydrozine and rocket fuel, but Lavinia put me straight. “It’s the difference between fried rat and poached veal.”
“Oh.”
Emil’s music segued to Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay. “Hey,” I said, still speaking softly, “Otis wrote that in Sausalito.”
“So?”
“It had to have been forty years ago. Maybe more.”
Lavinia made no response.
“I was a bartender then. I—”
“Shh, quiet,” she whispered.
The eighty-sixed customer was pulling himself up by the Cadillac’s bumper. At length he stood, more or less erect, keeping one hand on the car’s trunk lid to steady himself. He wore a rumpled brown suit, a tan shirt, and a yellow tie with a tie tack that twinkled when it caught the light. Despite the relative composure of his dress, it looked as if he hadn’t changed clothes in weeks. With his free hand he brushed at his clothing ineffectively.
“A lifetime ago,” I whispered.
“Yours, maybe,” she answered, her voice nearly inaudible.
The man muttered curses steadily and incoherently, but also calmly and quite deliberately. He batted at the creases in his pant legs and tautened the lapels of his jacket. Dust motes circulated in the air beneath the fluorescent sign. As he turned in the light, not six feet away, we could see that the whites of his eyes were yellow and webbed by exploded capillaries. His face was ghastly, its high cheekbones accented by emaciation, its skin aged and lined and sufficiently dessicated and taut as to render its features skeletal. Abruptly he leaned against the Cadillac. He took a careful look around. His eyes passed over the windscreen of the Lexus without betraying any recognition of our presence. Then he stood nearly erect and ambulated past the hood of the Lexus. When he leaned forward, his feet sped to catch up, and when he leaned back, they slowed down. Though neither Lavinia nor I had any reason to fear this man, we both held our breath as he passed.
Three cars down the line he stopped at the trunk of a two-tone brown Oldsmobile and began fumbling in the side pocket of his jacket.
The spring on the screen door stretched and the door opened and closed again, patting its stops. Lavinia and I turned as one to watch Ivy walk briskly along the length of the Eldorado. He rounded its trunk but at the gap between the Lexus and the Cadillac he froze in his tracks. As one, Lavinia and I followed his gaze.
The trunk lid of the Oldsmobile stood open, and the man in the brown suit was breaking down a double-barreled shotgun.
I leaned over the passenger seat and carefully gripped the passenger door armrest. Lavinia watched me curiously.
“We’d best be leaving,” I hissed.
She pulled the transmission lever into gear, and our brake lights lit up the entire front wall of Emil’s Grotto, in scarlet. As the car idled past Ivy I released the door and he tumbled into the passenger seat. “Go,” he rasped hoarsely.
The man in the brown suit heard our tires on the gravel, closed the breach, and looked up. I slapped the back of the driver’s seat. “Go, go!”
Lavinia stomped the accelerator. A mistake. The poor girl had probably never driven a car on an unpaved surface in her life. The front wheels of the Lexus began churning gravel up along its own undercarriage. As she cranked them to the right, as if hopefully, toward the lights of Fruitvale Avenue, the left rear of the Lexus banged the right front fender of the Firebird, parked to our left.
“Back off!” I shouted. “Back off!”
“Steer toward the skid!” Ivy shouted. But he grabbed the wheel.
“No more drivers!” I yelled, and chopped the side of my hand down between Ivy and Lavinia, breaking his grip. Ivy knew I was right. But this was Ivy Pruitt. A smile stole over his features and morphed into a grin. “It’s on you, baby….”
Lavinia straightened the car before it ran into a willow tree in the yard of an incongruously cute bungalow directly across the road from Emil’s Grotto, but not before she scythed a rut through its lawn. The Lexus regained the street but its front end continued coasting toward Emil’s Grotto while its tail wallowed the other way, the entire machine rotating slowly if loudly over the gravel like a coracle adrift in white water. Lavinia recovered from this course, too, however, sawing gamely at the wheel without, unfortunately, backing off the throttle, so that gravel alternately sprayed the row of vehicles in front of Emil’s and the rustic clapboards of the bungalow as she corrected her over-corrections, with agonizingly little forward progress. Finally she got the car aimed properly at Fruitvale Avenue, but with still no more than thirty yards separating us from the man with the shotgun, who by then had been granted all the time he needed to bring the stock up to his shoulder, to close one eye, and to sight along the gun’s length. He pulled both triggers, and the back window of the Lexus abruptly disintegrated.
Lavinia screamed. The tires got a grip and screamed, too, as they suddenly found pavement under them, at which point Lavinia gamely floored it again. We accelerated as fast as that car would accelerate until we made the corner at Fruitvale, where Lavinia remembered to brake slightly before she ran the stop sign and took a right. We hadn’t gone a block before Ivy calmly told her to slow down. She slowed down. Ivy took a look over the back of the passenger seat, then he looked down. There, he found me on the floor, jammed between the seats and flocked in safety glass, looking back up at him. I would have called him a choice motherfucker, but I didn’t feel like swallowing glass to do it.
Ivy shifted his eyes toward the hole that used to be the back window and sucked a tooth. “I used to score my shit in a penthouse in Pacific Heights,” he said. “But you know what, hoss?” He grinned at Fruitvale Avenue, unreeling behind us, and shook his head. “I just couldn’t get along with those people.”