SAL ‘THE KING’ KRAMER’S WORLD OF SOUND IS ON FOLSOM AT Sixth, right across the street from a place called the Brainwash, where you can watch your clothes tumble dry beyond a soundproof glass wall while you sit in a comfortable chair eating a cheeseburger with a beer and pretend to listen to live poetry while in fact browsing the sex ads in the back of the Bay Guardian.
The poet Jim Carroll once observed that, while he enjoyed fronting a rock and roll band, when the gig was over, he wanted silence. The guys in his band, however, would go home and listen to music. He couldn’t figure it out.
What I can’t figure out is drummers who go down to Kramer’s World of Sound and pretend to test-drive the most expensive kit in the inventory, by way of practicing their paradiddles, at ten o’clock in the morning. Another thing I wonder about is how Sal Kramer can stand to smoke a nickel cigar at that hour—or any other, for that matter. Traffic was inexplicably light, so, as we sank down the Fifth Street ramp, westbound off the Bay Bridge, I expressed these concerns to Lavinia.
“That’s easy,” she said. “They’re connected—the practicing drummers and Sal’s cigars, I mean. Plumbers smoke cigars to mask the smell of shit, right?”
“You know,” I admitted, “I never thought of it that way.”
She tapped her right temple. “Vassar.”
“I got another question.”
“Shoot.”
“What about that back window?”
As she made a right at Seventh, broken safety glass rattled over the rear window shelf. It sounded like the percussion instrument known as a rainstick.
“Insurance. Ask me a hard one.”
“Okay, how much dope will be left by the time we get back to Oakland?”
“Any amount of dope divided into a zero like Ivy equals zero dope left over.”
“Vassar,” I concluded.
She nodded.
“Do you think Sal was making it up, insisting that we had to bring his thirty-seven fifty to him immediately?”
“Otherwise Sal would have no choice but to admit to the cops about siccing Ivy onto Stepnowski?”
“Which would force the cops to admit to themselves, disappointing as that might be, that Ivy was under lock and key in their own basement the whole time Stepnowski was getting himself killed?”
“But wasn’t his payment to the bail bondsman in cash?”
“Hundred dollar bills, in fact.”
“Of which Stepnowski had some twelve examples in his jeans when they found him.” Lavinia looked at me. “Right?”
I shrugged. “The paper didn’t say anything about it.”
“How much do cops make?”
“About that much a week, I’d think. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” Lavinia said, grasping the steering wheel with both hands. “Here we are.”
Actually, we’d been in the World of Sound’s parking lot long enough for Lavinia already to have parked and turned the engine off. Immediately to our left, a purple two-story cinderblock wall with yellow flowers and green leaves painted on it emitted deep thuds.
“It was generous of Ivy to allow us a couple of fat bumps apiece before he threw us out,” Lavinia said. “I was really tired.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “Not that I care about the stuff.”
“But it made you feel better, didn’t it.”
“Sure did.”
“Real better.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad we didn’t take the time to make breakfast, too.”
Lavinia shrugged. “What can you do in the kitchen of a man who says food makes him paranoid?”
“Eat his breakfast for him.”
“Isn’t that some kind of business homily?”
“You’re asking me about business?”
The thudding stopped. One minute elapsed peacefully. Beyond the hood of the car, orange nasturtiums bloomed along the base of a chain link fence.
“Hey, Curly, remember what Saint Augustine said?”
“Fuck no.”
“If you can understand it, it is not God.”
Another minute of silence passed.
“That speedball sure is nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell you what.”
“Tell me anything you want.”
“If we manage to navigate through today without getting arrested, let’s celebrate with a little speedball.”
“Good idea.”
“Just a little.”
“Yeah.”
“Couple hits each.”
“Sure.”
“Get us through the night.”
“Yeah.”
“We could even have sex.”
“What did you say?” I asked mildly.
“Let’s get this over with.”
Sal ‘The King’ was sitting at a desk within a glass-walled cubicle in the back of the store, the atmosphere inside of which reeked of an electrical fire doused by soy sauce. It looked that way, too. Invoices, pieces of cardboard, cymbals and drumheads in and out of their cartons, drumsticks and curly cords, packs of guitar strings and styrofoam coffee cups littered every available surface. The fax machine was overflowing faxes into an overflowing wastebasket. A gold record hung among framed and autographed concert posters and band photographs on the wall behind the desk. Everything was askew and covered with dust.
“Fuckin’ junk faxes,” Kramer said to nobody in particular, reading a page as the machine excreted it. “Repair Grandfather Clocks At Home In Your Spare Time for Big $$$!” He threw the sheet to the floor. “That’s my fuckin’ paper they’re wasting, my toner, my phone line—I should pay for this shit and read it, too? I pay some recycler he should cart them faxes away, I pay some kid he should go to the Office Depot to buy me more fucking cases of toner and paper…. I’d like to fax the Federal Tax Code up this clock guy’s ass. This grandfather clock guy’s costing me money! Look at this!” He snatched up another sheet from the floor. “$99 Disney Vacation! Fuck! See that 800 number? Tiny print, right? Tough shit. Buy yourself some glasses. Says, If you feel that you’ve received this fax in error, please call 1-800-HIY-ASAP and request that your name be removed from our database. Right!” He threw the sheet to the floor. “Look at this!” He pointed his cigar at the wastebasket. “How many faxes you think are in there? A thousand? A million? It’s a fire hazard! I got time to call all these jerkoffs? No! They should call me. And beg me—beg me—not to kill them when I catch the cocksuckers. I pick up this phone—” He jabbed his cigar at a telephone hidden beneath a coil of audio cable on his desk. “And right now,” he snapped his fingers, “the guy is dead.” He snapped his fingers again. “Grandfather clock guy is a dead grandfather clock guy.” He abruptly collected himself. “What am I saying? Here I am, raving on and on about junk faxes, for chrissakes—junk faxes! I should kill somebody? For a junk fax? And right here in my office are a couple of musicians, a couple of envoys from the most sensitive tribe on the planet.” He waggled the cigar. “My children, disregard the petty concerns of the workaday world, and take a deep breath. Center yourselves. Now.” He exhaled a gout of fetid smoke toward Lavinia’s breasts. “Tell me what kind of gear you need, and what kind of credit problems you have. And….” He tapped his chest with the forefinger of his cigar hand, “Sal Kramer will show you how you can afford it. They don’t call Sal ‘The King’ for nothin’. Hell, I knew Joe Ellis when he couldn’t even blow out the candles on his birthday cake, let alone hold down first desk in the pit on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Greatest Hits!—that show’s been camped at the Orpheum for, what, twelve years? Joe still had hair when he started that gig.” He pointed the cigar at Lavinia. “You hearda Joe Ellis?” Lavinia shook her head. Sal took one of Lavinia’s hands between his, the cigar protruding from his fat fingers like a zeppelin leaking fumes. “Joe Ellis didn’t have a watch to keep time with when I sold him that horn. On credit, too. One hundred percent financing! But ‘The King’ believed in Joe. ‘The King’, for no money down—”
I suddenly said, “Joe Ellis didn’t buy that trumpet from you.”
“He—What?” Kramer squinted through the cigar smoke at Lavinia. “Who let him in here?”
“Lambert Deutschen sold his trumpet to Joe Ellis in the basement of the Great American Music Hall in 1988 for enough cash to buy an ounce of blow, a thousand bucks, about one sixth what that horn is worth. It was a dark hour in the history of jazz. But if he hadn’t sold it to Joe, he would have sold it to somebody who didn’t know what it was. But you know what, Kramer?”
Kramer hadn’t taken his eyes off Lavinia’s breasts. “Tell him to go away, sweetheart.”
Lavinia got her hand back and said, “What, Curly?”
“If Lambert ever asked Joe to return his trumpet, Joe would give it to him.”
Lavinia frowned. “Didn’t Lambert Deutschen die of a heart attack while snorting cocaine off the dashboard of a car behind a club in Detroit about ten years ago?”
“That’s not the point.” I stabbed my forefinger at my chest and said, “I saw the look in Joe’s eyes when that deal went down. I—”
“What the fuck were you doing there,” Kramer interrupted, “cleaning the toilets?” He smiled lasciviously at Lavinia. “Not for nothing do they call Sal Kramer ‘The King’, baby.” Confused and alarmed, Lavinia looked back and forth between us. Sal ‘The King’ Kramer called me a motherfucker and stood up. I advised Sal that on the contrary he was the motherfucker, and stepped up to meet him.
We embraced.
“Curly.”
“Sal.”
“Long time.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“No you haven’t.”
“Okay, I haven’t. How you been keeping? Let me look at you.” Sal held me at arms’ length.
“Ah, I don’t look as good as you, Sal.”
Sal’s smile faded. “That’s true. You don’t look so good.” His face assumed a pained expression. “Where’s my money?”
“It’s all bullshit.” Lavinia shook her head. “Why should musicians be allowed to talk? Why can’t they just play music and go afterwards to a shelf in a closet away from the rest of us, some place where they can’t make normal people crazy?”
I produced the wad of hundreds.
Kramer plugged the cigar into his mouth, took the money, sat into his office chair and counted the bills into the styrofoam lid of a take-out carton. “Thirty-seven.” He looked up. I handed him fifty in small bills. He counted those, too, then stacked the lot. “Okay.”
Kramer cleared a windrow of cut-sheets and invoices away from a computer monitor on his desk and began to mouse around. “Receivables…. Stepnowski…. Balance due…. Wait a minute.” He peered at the screen. “There was a synthesizer.” Sal swiveled his chair. “You see a keyboard lying around Stepnowski’s place? Specifically,” he turned back to the computer screen, “a Kurtzweil FX-11? Fifty-five keys? Black?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Nope,” Lavinia affirmed.
“He bought it a month later.” Sal swiveled to squint at the computer again. “Sonofabitch. The guy’s dead, and the account’s still open.”
“Somebody should tell him,” I suggested.
Sal swept the clutch of audio cables off the phone and touched a preset. A woman came on the speaker almost immediately. “Beat me, Bwana, order me about.”
“Invoice number 2381-16,” Sal said. “It’s a synth. I’m moving it up in the cue.”
“I’m on it like brown on rice.” The woman rang off and Sal went back to mousing. “She’s a vegetarian so she gets to talk like that,” he told the computer screen. “The Peavey 1430 Sound Reinforcement System is now … paid in full and … right here we write off … the recovery fee. Save. Okay. Now print, you bastard.”
Tractor-fed invoices began to inch up out of a box on the floor into a printer, which stippled noisily.
“Curly,” Kramer spun his chair, “How the fuck did you get mixed up with Ivy Pruitt?”
“I’ve known Ivy for years, Sal. Same as you.”
“But you’re a working musician.”
“So? If I only hung out with working musicians I’d be as lonely as Nixon after Watergate.”
Sal shook his head. “Ivy Pruitt’s nothing but trouble, Curly. Not only that, you should stick to what you know how to do, which is playing the same ten songs three sets a night five nights a week, and leave Ivy Pruitt to do what he knows how to do, which ain’t playing no music.”
“I’m up to eleven tunes, Sal,” I pointed out, but I could feel my cheeks coloring at the slant the conversation had taken. I didn’t understand it, but neither did I think Sal Kramer had any right to give me this kind of advice. On the third hand, I had no doubt that I was in over my head with Lavinia, let alone Ivy Pruitt, but I had no intention of giving up that information to Kramer. Worse, Sal was right. It was a bad idea to be associating with Ivy Pruitt. Everybody in the business knew he was a junky, and if word got around that I was hanging out with him, club owners might suddenly discover that there is an amazing number of people out there willing not only to play ten or even eleven songs over and over again but to sing them too, all night long, for no money at all.
But I wasn’t about to give Kramer the satisfaction of knowing that I agreed with him about the last twenty-four hours, most of which I’d spent spending money I’d taken off a dead man, getting shot at on a back street in Oakland, not to mention buying, transporting and consuming heroin and cocaine, not to mention playing no music whatsoever; all because of Ivy Pruitt.
“Hey,” I protested lamely, “we all got our troubles. Ivy Pruitt, for example, is a disabled veteran.”
Sal ‘The King’ Kramer closed his eyes and shook his head. “The taxes I pay,” he muttered, “and that fucking guy gets a check every month?”
“Plus,” I added, “he’s a friend of mine.”
“And mine,” Lavinia put in.
“You a musician?” Kramer asked her.
“No,” Lavinia said. “But I love music and the people who make it.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered Kramer.
“Hey,” I said, “She’s catching on.”
The phone rang. Instead of taking it on the speaker, Kramer picked up the receiver. “Yeah?” He listened, looked at each of us, then said, “No. They just left.”
Lavinia and I exchanged glances.
“How the fuck should I know?” Sal barked. “No, I don’t know the answer to that, either.” He sighed loudly. “Look, Garcia, Folsom Street is the only way out of my parking lot and it’s one way going east. You want I should catch them for you, too? Get a move on. They can’t be far. I was going to call you,” he said, exasperated. “They just went out the door, for chrissakes. You’re welcome.” He slammed down the phone. “Fuckin’ cops.”
“Cops?”
“You two kill that guy?” Sal said to the wall in front of him. “Stepnowski?”
I said, “Sure we did. Blew him away for a bad debt. Iced him. Anything for you, Sal. He had it coming.”
Sal spun the chair to face us. “Anything for the money, you mean. Did Ivy at least split the commission with you, I hope?”
Lavinia said, “He didn’t have much choice.”
Sal was looking at me. “What’s she talking about?”
“Ivy was locked up at the Hall of Justice all day yesterday,” I told him. “We tracked down Stepnowski and got the money back on his behalf. Ivy handed off the job for half the take specifically so he could get himself bailed out.”
“Ivy was in jail again?” Sal assumed a pained look. “How in the hell…? This ain’t your racket, Curly.”
“You’re telling me.”
Sal looked at Lavinia’s breasts again, but addressed me: “This is what’s in it for you?”
Lavinia shrugged ostentatiously. “It was the only way to come up with enough dough to spring Ivy.”
“What was he in for?”
“Paraphernalia,” I said.
“Chickenshit,” Sal snorted.
“That was the Oakland beef,” I specified. “The DA didn’t want to pursue it. That sprung me and it should have sprung Ivy, but they trucked him over to San Francisco for some prior he’d run out on. Driving on an expired license, something simple like that.”
“Expired license,” Sal repeated acidly. “You a special friend of Ivy’s?”
Lavinia stood straight and smoothed the front of her jacket over her breasts. “You might say that.”
“So why didn’t you just bail him out? Loan him the money?”
“Why didn’t you?” Lavinia countered.
Sal shrugged. “I’m a businessperson.”
“Same here,” Lavinia said.
“You’d never see it again,” I suggested.
“He knew better than to call me,” Sal said. He looked curiously at Lavinia. “So he called you.”
“Not for a loan, though.” She nodded. “He made me a proposition. It looked like easy money. I went straight to the address you gave Ivy, but Stepnowski had moved. I tried to get the landlord to tell me where Stepnowski was. No soap. The landlord all but told me that if I’d come inside and fuck him, he’d tell me where Stepnowski was. Right. And I was hatched out of an egg last week.”
“Really?” I said. “He didn’t try to get me to do that.”
“Maybe the guy’s got standards,” said Sal.
“Maybe a girl does, too,” Lavinia countered sharply. “Anyway, Ivy’s next idea was to get Curly to run the brother-from-out-of-town routine. We had to redistribute the action but, hey, without Curly there was no action. Ivy knew Curly looked weird enough to pass for a musician and an enforcer, too, if he kept his mouth shut. And he knew Curly could use the money.”
“Pass?” I said.
“What an operator,” Sal said, “a fuckin’ polymath.” He waggled a flattened hand. “Tentacles in two worlds.”
“Any fool can see the sensitive soul beneath this tattoo,” I suggested.
“A youthful disfigurement,” Sal declared acidly. “Like a war wound.”
“You’re speaking from experience?”
“Fuck no.” He jerked the thumb of his cigar hand to indicate his own chest for a change. “I dodged the draft for my country. It was the sixties. You shoulda been there. But,” he cleared his throat and spit into the trash can, “you weren’t.”
“Please note, Sal,” Lavinia interrupted, “that Curly got the job done? He conned Stepnowski’s new address out of the landlord; we drove over there; we found Stepnowski dead.” Before I could stop her, she went on, “The money practically fell out of the guy’s pocket, but Curly took care of that, too. Personally, I wouldn’t have touched it.”
This elicited a long look from me: I didn’t believe her.
“Give credit where credit’s due,” she persisted, “You ever go through a dead man’s pockets?”
“Not lately,” Sal said.
Him, I believed.
“Stepnowski had plenty of money on him. We took our bite—your bite, too—left the rest, and got out of there. End of story.”
“Left the rest?” Kramer appraised her with a look.
“There was another twelve hundred on the guy,” I said.
Sal looked back and forth between us. “Really?” he beamed. “That’s true?”
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the truth.”
“What about it, Sister?”
“It’s the truth.”
“That’s it, then,” Sal said loudly. “Let’s get this over with.”
I looked around. “Who you talking to?”
With an air of distraction Sal picked up a pencil, inserted the eraser into one ear, and stared at nothing. I looked at Lavinia. She looked at me. We both looked at Sal. Stirring the pencil, Sal looked at Lavinia’s breasts. The office door opened behind us. With a little fresh air came the sound of someone belaboring a ride cymbal.
“Who was that on the phone?” I asked as I turned around. A guy in a trench coat was closing the door. He wore a tie, knotted but loose. He had wavy, jet black hair and smooth, closely shaven cheeks. He was in his late thirties or early forties, almost as tall as I am and half again as heavy. He had tired eyes that didn’t look like they were falling by the World of Sound to score a pair of xylophone mallets.
“Lieutenant Garcia,” the man said by way of answering my question. “Homicide.”