Nameless Dame, page 13
“Name?” Randy asked.
I hesitated. “Phineas Newborn,” I blurted, assuming the moniker of the great Memphis pianist, long gone. An esoteric persona.
Randy winked at me. “You don’t say.”
I repeated the name to myself, wondering what its choice said about me.
Old Ezra and the Lymphs
“Mr. Newborn, Mr. Newborn, Mr. Newborn.” I was leaning against the wall and must have snoozed off. Randy said, “First door on the right,” but I’d forgotten where I was going. Once she buzzed me through, I heard a familiar voice looping toward me. “Come right in, Mr. Newborn.”
Sister Everlast turned out to be a masseuse. Here, he was clearly a man, in tight muscle shirt sans breasts. For flash, he wore a pair of red boxing shorts, branded EVERLAST. Standing there barefoot, he looked like a martial arts master.
“Look who’s already seeking anonymity in West County.”
“Sister Everlast.”
“The one and only.” My flamboyant masseuse curtsied. “So, Mr. Phineas Newborn is looking for a massage. Very interesting. Tell me, what’s it been like to live your entire life as a Newborn?”
“Where do I begin? And you go by Jamie?”
“Correct. Jamie Holmes, the given name. Alright. Now, do we have particular things bothering us, Mr. Newborn? Or are we just looking for our basic rebirth?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. A bit of a kink in the left shoulder, some tightness at the back of the neck. I’ve been freezing since I’ve gotten to California. Try to explain leaving a Minnesota winter and freezing in California.”
“I’ll leave the explanations to you, Mr. Newborn.”
“Augie,” I suggested.
“No, no, you’ve come here as Mr. Newborn and you should leave as Mr. Newborn. If there’s anybody who knows that formality has its value, it’s me. For instance, there are certain things I could tell Mr. Newborn that I wouldn’t think of mentioning to Augie Boyer. Why don’t you get down to your shorts and climb up on the table? I’ll be right back.”
I did as I was told, wondering what I was letting myself in for. Down to my jockeys, I sat on the massage table, with the familiar passivity of a patient waiting, half naked, for his doctor.
Sister Everlast returned with a shopping bag and a CD, which he slipped into a boombox across the room. I was a bit horrified to hear the Singing Nun’s hit song “Dominic” blast into the room.
“Can you deny her charm, Mr. Newborn?”
“Not at all, Jamie, but could we please have it quiet during the massage?”
The masseuse shook his head. “You breeders are all the same,” he muttered. “One moment, please.”
After he clicked off the CD, Jamie turned his back and pulled something from the shopping bag that he slipped over his face. When he turned back, I let out a small shriek. His face was covered in a mask that bore an uncanny likeness to Ezra Pound in his dotage. The remarkable mask had been crafted of papier-mâché or the like. Little tufts of white hair grew from the chin. Terraces of bushy, bone-colored Brillo, somehow stitched to the top, gave the wig volume and suggested the pompadour the old man wore in his youth. Pound’s expression was resigned. His cheeks were puckered with age like an old peach going to rot.
Sister Everlast stretched out his arms and proclaimed, in an aged voice full of tremolo:And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
The masseuse pirouetted, his arms high in the air. “That was Pound’s epigraph to Lustra.” It was very odd to see the ancient face attached to the toned body in boxing trunks.
“It’s a striking likeness,” I offered.
“Have you heard about the masks?”
I shook my head.
“Well, Poesy’s commissioned a trio of master mask makers in Graton to create fifty poets. It’s exceptional work. I’m thinking of buying a couple more. And believe me, Mr. Newborn, they ain’t cheap.”
In hopes of overcoming my queasiness, I looked directly at the face of the aged poet. “Might I ask why you’re wearing the mask now?”
“You might ask, Mr. Newborn, but an answer may not be forthcoming.”
Suddenly I was pissed. “How come you’re playing games with me, Jamie?”
“Oooh, what an aggressive question. Do you suspect me of some sort of duplicity beyond my normal cross-dressing, mask-wearing behavior, Mr. Newborn? Or are we witnessing a blush of homophobia?”
I thought of rising from the table and getting the hell out of McCluhan’s, but reminded myself of my purpose.
“Time’s a-wasting, Mr. Newborn,” my masseuse said. He ordered me onto my back and stood just north of my head. I felt a bit of vertigo. What was I doing on my back? Wasn’t he going to massage my back?
The masked Pound sensed my question. “I’m going to get under you with my hands, Mr. Newborn.”
I looked a little skeptically into the aged face. After barely touching my lower back, the disembodied voice said, “You don’t sweat easily, do you?”
“No.”
“You retain a lot of water.”
I nodded, feeling like I was confessing something very deep about myself that I wasn’t sure I knew.
“We’ll work the lymphs and see if we can drain a little. You should be taking a steam bath every day, or bathing in a hot tub with Epsom salts. Anything to draw the water out.”
I didn’t really know what he was talking about, but as he worked the flab and muscles at the base of my spine, my nose began to run. Then tears ran involuntarily down my face. After a good twenty minutes of this, I became sopping wet. The masseuse shifted to my upper back and shoulders. I opened my eyes very slowly. Old Ezra shook his head dismissively. “My, my, Mr. Newborn, you’ve got some genuine blockages here. No way we can say that your emotional life is squeaky clean.”
The masseuse peeled off his mask and dabbed at the sweat on his face with a towel. He repeated his recommendation about the steam and Epsom salts.
Drained, I sat up, and then climbed off the massage table. As I dressed, I focused on my original purpose. “Jamie, did you know Ruthie Rosenberg very well?”
Jamie didn’t answer at first. He boosted himself onto the massage table and crossed his legs. “Of course, I knew Ruthie. How well is debatable. After a while, I’m not sure that anybody really knew her. Or that anybody really knows anybody, for that matter.
“Ruthie and I worked together at times and she also took a genuine interest in the Sisters. I think it’s fair to say that she had sister-envy. She could see the fun we were having. I told her she’d be welcomed in the order, that it was open to straights. She’d come to our monthly bingo games in Guerneville once in a while. But she couldn’t get it together to join us. You didn’t come here for a massage, did you, Mr. Newborn?”
“Why do you think she couldn’t get it together to join the Sisters?”
“The drugs, of course. And she had a little problem with her identity, which didn’t exactly make her unique. Ask me why people don’t accept that they have multiple identities. Ask me about repression. Ask me what I see in people’s backs. I try to embrace all my identities. How about you, Mr. Newborn? Are you free to embrace all your identities?”
“Embrace? That’s not the word I’d use. But back to Ruthie. What else can you tell me?”
“You had to be jealous of the way men fell for her.”
“Were you jealous of her, Jamie?”
My masseuse gave me a sideways look. “I was using the word loosely.”
“As in ‘loose woman’?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Mr. Newborn. My motto’s ‘Live and let live.’”
“It’s obviously not everybody’s motto around here,” I said.
“No,” Jamie said, solemnly.
“Go back to what you were telling me about Ruthie’s ability to attract men.”
“I’ve known people with that talent. Both men and women. Ruthie could get them to fall, and stay fallen, even when it was clear she couldn’t respond.”
“What about Deputy Coolican?”
“He had it bad. He’d come here looking for her. He’d be off-duty. Ruthie wasn’t always here when she was supposed to be. It’s a wonder they kept her on. I’d see the deputy, anxious in the waiting room. He didn’t want to be seen here. People talk about this place like it’s a whorehouse, but some of us are legit masseuses.”
“Who else had a thing for Ruthie?”
Before Jamie could answer, the intercom buzzed that his next appointment had arrived.
“Can you tell me anybody else who was under her spell?”
Jamie vaulted off the massage table, squeezed sanitizer onto his hands, and then rubbed them together. “We should probably settle up. I don’t want to keep my client waiting any longer.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Fifty dollars.”
I was afraid to look inside my wallet. It had been thinning out in such a hurry. I plucked out four twenties and fanned them across the massage table.
Sister Everlast looked down at the money and hesitated a minute before picking it up. “Two other guys come to mind. One lives out by Sister Poesy. He’s got a pretty big pot operation.”
“Cust?”
Jamie nodded. “Yeah, and I think there was a guy from out of town, a Russian. Of course, she always snagged a few from the Bohemian Grove when they had their annual pissing contest. I don’t know if a girl can go any lower than selling her body to those arrogant Republican pricks.”
“Can you tell me anything more about the Russian you mentioned?”
Jamie shook his head. “That’s all I got.” He put his hand on my back and led me toward the door. “Steam, Mr. Newborn, don’t forget to take the steam,” he said, as he opened the door and ushered me out.
Face of an ancient poet—
the multigendered masseuse
opens my pores.
Phone Sex
My head was swimming by the time I got out to the street. Coolican wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I crossed over to the café, got myself an Americano, and walked through the outdoor pottery market, keeping my eyes open for the deputy. By four, an hour past our agreed time, I realized that I was stranded in Monte Rio with a cell phone that had no service. I begged a phone call from the proprietor of the café, who wanted a dollar for the courtesy.
“It is a business, after all,” he said.
I didn’t argue, dropping four quarters on the counter.
Blossom answered and could hear the anxiety in my voice. “What kind of trouble have you got yourself into, Augie?”
“Who said I’m in trouble?”
“The truth is we’re all in trouble.”
“Don’t go deep on me, Blossom. Is our prophet around?”
“He’s down in Guerneville at the Galley. He’s got a phone down there.” She gave me the number. “Wait a minute. Quince wants to talk with you.”
“Augie,” the voice said, surprising me with its tenderness, “are you okay? I’m worried about you.”
“Why?” I asked, intoxicated by her voice.
She made kissing sounds into the phone.
I couldn’t believe the effect the woman had on me. I looked around to make sure the café guy wasn’t watching me and then smooched back into the phone.
“Let’s run away from here,” Quince said.
“Where would we go?”
“Farther west.”
“This is the western edge,” I said.
“There’s always Hawaii. Bali.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Don’t be so practical, Augie.”
“It’s part of my nature.”
“We can change that.”
“I’ve got to go,” I said, and smooched once more into the phone.
Next I dug a coiled dollar out of one of my pants pockets and smoothed it out on the counter. “I need to make another local call.”
“Alright,” the guy said, scooping up the dollar, “but no more phone sex.”
Alas, I got Sabbatini’s answering machine. His message was the first couple of lines of a William Carlos Williams poem, from a recording made when the poet was an old man:I’m persistent as a pink locust.
Once admitted to the garden
you will not easily get rid of it.
Tear it from the ground,
if one hair-thin rootlet remain
it will come again.
I left a message for Sabbatini with the café’s phone number and sat on a stool wondering if I should offer the café guy twenty dollars to drive me into Guerneville, or try to hitchhike over, seeing that it was just a few scant miles through the redwoods.
The phone’s ring saved me. The coffee guy looked at me like he knew all my dark secrets. “You Augie?”
Hunch
Sabbatini drove over to get me half an hour later. In the interim he’d called around but could find no word on Coolican’s whereabouts. He said he wasn’t worried about Coolie, as if the burning of sage had earned the deputy some kind of cosmic immunity.
“He’s probably off somewhere in the redwoods memorizing Yeats,” said Sabbatini. I reminded him that the deputy had almost been killed by a flying arrow the day before and that his presence was likely responsible for the attack à la maison.
I wanted to wake the old detective in Sabbatini because I needed him. But the fucker had gone soft with weed and poetry, with living in Sufi-wear by the Russian River.
“Do me a favor, Bobby. Take me out to the River Rose.”
“All the way to Jenner?”
“Take you twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, twenty minutes out and twenty minutes back, and who knows how long waiting for you.”
“You can just sit in the car with a fatty of Fuck Face.”
“What kind of hunch are you playing, Augie?”
“You owe me, Bobby. You got me into all this bullshit.”
Sabbatini was right. My desire to go back to the River Rose was nothing more than a hunch, a hunch that the Rose was the rendezvous point and a few of the players in this bad dream were about to show up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Russian Glory
ON THE DRIVE back to Jenner, I asked Sabbatini to fill me in on the relationship between Coolican and Indian gaming.
“He’s got no relationship, far as I know. They kept trying to throw money at him, but he wouldn’t have any of it.”
“So, he didn’t take the money, but you did.”
Sabbatini tapped a finger on his cheek. “Quince told you about that?”
I nodded.
Sabbatini cleared his throat. “It was a tactical move on my part.”
“I’m not judging you, Bobby.”
“Sure you are. But that’s okay. So you’ve probably heard about the Russian principals of the company falling in love with the Russian River area.”
“Yep. And who the fuck are these Russians?” I asked.
“They’re named Dmitri and Boris. They came out here, got five cents’ worth of feel for the locale, and realized that I was a pretty popular guy with the locals. I told them I wasn’t interested in pimping a casino. They said they heard I was opening a poetry tavern, and Boris recited some Mayakovsky in Russian.”
“That’s what got you, a hunk of Mayakovsky?”
“Hell, no. For all I know, he was reciting some jive manifesto. Dmitri asked if I could use fifty grand for the tavern tout de suite. I said, of course I could use it, but I wasn’t interested it endorsing their joint until the environmental impact studies were complete and the project was approved by the county. I’d endorse it, I said, after that. And they bought it, Augie. I’d call it a minor miracle for the sake of poetry. I got the dough and there’s no way in hell that a fucking casino with an 180-room hotel is going to cut the environmental mustard anywhere along this river, especially not in Monte Rio.”
“But they got their hearts set on Monte Rio?”
“The Russians are dreaming. It’s hard to run a septic system for a mid-size restaurant in Monte Rio. And how do the people get out there? They’d have to build new roads, log out miles of redwoods. It ain’t going to happen, Augie. The fucking Rooskies got blinded by some sort of bullshit chauvinism. The return of Russian glory to the California coast. I read some local history. There was no Russian glory out here. Bunch of Russians came down in the 1820s or something. Settled north of Jenner. Slaughtered all the seals and otters till the area was fished out. Couldn’t figure out how to farm in the fog. The fuckers couldn’t survive and left with their tails between their legs. That’s the Russian glory these jokers want to return to.”
The Russian River—
Russians coming,
Russians going.
Sea Ranch Tsunami
When we arrived at the River Rose, I asked the retired detective to pull around the side of the building as Coolican had. There were only a few cars in the parking lot. Sabbatini proposed dropping me off at the River Rose while he went down to the beach at Goat Rock to look for some driftwood. “I’m looking to create a little more ambience for the Galley.”
I wasn’t ready to go into the Rose. “Hang out a few minutes, Bobby, if you don’t mind.” I glanced at my watch as if I expected it to offer a clue. It only revealed that it was five to five.
I dozed off in the car beside Bobby, drifting into one shadowy, waking dream after another about Quince. I called up her lovely face, the hollow under her eyes where her soul seemed to reside. But then my reverie turned to a horror show—the lovely likeness of Quince dissolved and I was left with an image of charred skin hanging off Ruthie Rosenberg’s left jaw. My body shuddered in the front seat and Sabbatini grabbed me.
“What’s going on, Augie?”
I shook my head. “Funky dream.”
Sabbatini regarded me suspiciously. “You okay, man?”
