Nameless Dame, page 23
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“Oh, you’re good. I’m glad to hear you’re good,” he said with awry smile. “So you’re not sitting here repenting.”
I chuckled. “No, not particularly.”
He turned and looked at the signboard. “It’s a new message today. Someone must have changed it in the night. I like to allow the members of my parish the opportunity to express themselves. You’re welcome to come in for a cup of coffee.”
The reverend, I figured, might have more to offer me than a cup of coffee. “Thank you.”
I followed him into a small office that featured a metal desk and bookshelf. A large crucifix with a bleeding Christ, appropriate for First Christ River of Blood, adorned the far wall.
“I’m Cecil Hyde,” the minister said.
“Augie Boyer.”
The man didn’t seem to recognize my name. We shook hands and I watched Reverend Hyde drop a pre-measured packet into his coffee machine.
“So, are you just passing through, Mr. Boyer?”
“Yes, on vacation.”
The reverend looked at me directly. “That looks like it must hurt,” he said, indicating my nose.
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
Reverend Hyde poured me a cup of coffee, even though the coffeemaker wasn’t quite finished and continued to drip sizzling drops on the base. “So, what’s on your mind?” he asked.
I took his bait. “Well, everywhere I go, people are talking about this tavern that’s opening next week in Guerneville.”
The reverend grimaced. “Yes, it’s called Ginsberg’s Galley. A poetry karaoke bar, whatever that is.” He poured himself a cup of coffee. “It sounds innocuous enough, even silly on the face of it. But the man who runs the place is a threat.”
“Why’s that?”
“I see him as a rabble-rouser. The man comes in here with the intention of shaking up the community.”
“How so?”
“Well, he has a grand design.”
“What is it?”
“To get everybody out here to memorize poetry. ‘What’s the problem there?’ you ask. Well, I’ll tell you what the problem is. He’s putting ideas into people’s heads.”
“How does that make him any different than a minister like yourself?”
“That’s just the thing. He’s not a minister, he’s not a messenger of God. He patterns himself after the Messiah, but all he is is the Antichrist. He’s using the poetry, don’t you see, to practice a form of mind control.”
“Aren’t you giving the man a little more power than he deserves?” I asked.
“‘Poetry,’ you say, ‘who could be afraid of poetry?’” The reverend nodded rhythmically a few times. “I say, along with Matthew, ‘Beware of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’ Poetry. That’s just this man’s scam, his trick to draw them in. He’s misleading people. Like sheep, they follow him. Where is he leading them? He’s leading them away from God.”
The reverend looked at me with a sneer and then nodded meaningfully, as if he’d just recognized a grave truth. “You’re with his church, aren’t you? Look at you, you’re dressed just like him. You’re one of his disciples, for God’s sake. Wasting my time. Trying to trick me. You probably have a mouthful of poetry. You’re ready to deceive. Get the hell out of here. Do not try and infiltrate my church. Do you hear me? I can see through your poetry. I can see the devil!”
Consolidation
As I drove out of Cazadero, a gray mist hung over the redwoods—the atmosphere was a decent reflection of my brain’s condition. I almost pulled the car over at the intersection with Highway 116, the point at which a decision was required. But with no traffic at the stop sign, I sat there a moment and considered my choices. Turning right aimed me toward Jenner and the ocean, left toward Guerneville and the possibility of actual civilization beyond.
Still dressed in Sabbatini’s Sufi-wear, as the miserable Reverend Hyde had reminded me, I decided to drive by Coolican’s place in Guerneville to retrieve my bag of clothes. I doubted there’d be any sign of the deputy. When I had spoken with him the night before, he’d claimed to be in hiding, and Quince had corroborated his story. Once upon a time I’d had decent breaking-and-entering skills, but by age fifty I’d lost most of my nerve.
I saw no sign of Coolican at his place, and a rabid-sounding dog prowling the inside of the deputy’s cottage, discouraged any idea of heroics on my part. There’d been no sign of a dog at Coolican’s place when I was last there, but since then the world had changed.
I grabbed a latte at Coffee Bazaar and pondered the possibility of leaving everything behind in Sonoma County. My longtime friendships with Sabbatini and Blossom. Quince, the born-again wife, whom I’d fallen for hard before her rebirth. My spiffy new Swiss Army suitcase, a gift from Rose, filled with the best of my humble wardrobe. It was a lot to give up, but that motley collection of people and stuff hadn’t left me with much besides a broken nose and the gaggle of grief and gloom that seemed to follow me everywhere.
Before I arrived at a decision, a tall, sketchy-looking character, perhaps in his early sixties, approached my table. His hair was tied back in a long, rusty-gray ponytail and he had a yellow pencil planted over his left ear. Rising out of one of his back pockets were a pair of drumsticks. Most remarkably, the man had small seashells braided into distinct strands of his kinky red beard.
“I’m taking predictions,” he said, in such a matter-of-fact way that I played along with him.
“Predictions for what?”
“How long it’s going to take me.”
“Take you to do what?”
“To raise enough money to buy some edibles at Marvin’s Gardens.”
“What’s Marvin’s Gardens?” I asked.
“That’s the dispensary in Guerneville. The good news is I’m legal. I’ve got my papers. I can purchase cannabis in all of its many forms at any dispensary in the state of California. You’re probably like everybody else and don’t want to hear the bad news. It’s not just that I have insufficient funds, I also have a hole in my pocket.”
I looked into the man’s face. His expression was soft and tender and mad. He pulled a little notepad from his shirt pocket. “Care to make a prediction?”
“No, thanks,” I said, but reached into my pocket and fished out a dollar for him.
“Cool,” he said, clearly delighted, “that brings me 20 percent up the road to a Gypsy Gooball.”
“Take care not to lose it.”
“Exactly my thought.” He opened his shirt to reveal a drawstring pouch hanging on a string around his neck. He opened it and stuffed the dollar in. “God bless you,” he said. The man bowed to me before moving to the next table.
How nice, I thought, to have all of one’s desires reduced to a Gypsy Gooball. It reminded me of a jazz trumpeter I met years ago during an investigation. In the course of an hour’s interview, the trumpeter explained the true glory of being a heroin addict. “It’s like you take all the problems you got, you know, problems making the rent, pussy problems, problems with your kids, problems with your gig, or your no-gig, and you roll them all together so you only have the one problem—getting yourself right. And that takes care of all of them. That’s what we call consolidation.”
Things as They Are
I picked up a couple of papers from an empty table. The Press Democrat from Santa Rosa had a story about Ruthie Rosenberg’s murder. Although the sheriff’s department had some fresh leads, everything pointed to the same assailant who’d killed the two kids, execution-style, north of Jenner. It seemed like it was going down pretty much as Coolican had expected. The report made no mention of the pair of small footprints at the probable murder site. The crossbow attacks in Guerneville and Cazadero also managed to fly under the radar.
The local weekly, the North Bay Bohemian, had a feature on Bobby Sabbatini and the impending opening of Ginsberg’s Galley. The article talked about Sabbatini’s far-reaching influence across West County, how poetry groups had sprouted up everywhere, encouraging their members to memorize fresh poems. A shop in Forestville was selling towels embroidered with lines from Emily Dickinson poems, and a Sebastopol healer talked about the holy bell the right poem rings in our bodies. In Sonoma, a dentist befriended by Sabbatini had started piping spoken poems into his office instead of music. “The patients are all positive about it,” he said. “I find if they open up to it, poetry makes them wonderfully docile patients.”
The article featured a sidebar in which local luminaries talked about the poets they were memorizing. Dorothy Allison was in love with Marianne Moore, while Tom Waits was doing Wallace Stevens, just like me. The singer-songwriter had far more ambition than I did. He planned to memorize all thirty-three sections of “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” The very idea of it made me ache to hear Waits bellow:Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.
Have a Purpose
Without spending much time deliberating, I decided to drive east toward Santa Rosa and the interstate. I could get down to San Francisco in little more than an hour and, with any luck, hop a plane back to Minneapolis, chalk up my California vacation as a bust, and say the hell with it.
Just before I turned right to cross the river bridge, heading out of town, I saw my old buddy with the seashells braided in his beard, standing by the side of the road. He was hitchhiking, though, in a different direction than the dispensary he mentioned. Had he given up his ambition for a gooball? I pulled over and cleared the front seat for him.
“Thanks, man,” he said, pulling his drumsticks out of his back pocket before sitting down. You heading to Sebastopol?”
“It’s on my way. What about the Gypsy Gooball?”
“Ah, man, my fund-raising went dry. I figure I’ll pan for gold outside the Whole Foods in Sebastopol. And the dispensary in Sebastopol has a very nice compassionate giving program.”
“But do they have gooballs?”
My companion regarded me for a moment. “I must say that for a total stranger, you have a good feel for the contradictions and dilemmas that riddle my life. If I go in the direction I want to go, I starve. I go the other way and I thrive.”
“It’s the human condition.”
“If you say so.” The man stuck out his hand toward me. “I’m Redbone.”
“Augie Boyer.”
“Augie Boyer. Augie Boyer,” he said, chewing on my name as if it were a gooball. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I shook my head.
“Whereabouts are you staying?”
“Cazadero.”
“In town or off the grid?”
“I guess you’d say off the grid.”
Redbone nodded his head approvingly. “Whereabouts?”
I took a long look at my interrogator and told myself to chill, to not get irritated with the questions, that this was probably the only time in my life I’d be grilled by a hitchhiker with seashells braided into his beard. “You know Poesy?” I asked.
“Of course, I know Poesy. I love Poesy. Poesy treated me to a whole gooball a couple of months ago.”
Suddenly my one-dollar contribution to the Gypsy Gooball fund seemed awfully cheap.
“Yeah, Poesy got me to memorize a Theodore Roethke poem right on the spot. He told me I had a rare facility. But last time I saw him, he handed me a Robert Lowell poem.” Redbone got an embarrassed look on his face. “I haven’t learned it yet. It’s not that I’ve got anything against the confessional school, per se, but Lowell’s blue-blood weepiness just kind of rubs me the wrong way. How about you, Augie Boyer, how do you relate to the angst of blue bloods?”
I had to pause before answering. That was one of the more curious questions of a curious week. “I think angst in general is overrated,” I said.
“No kidding,” Redbone agreed. “You’d think it had some particular nutrient, that you could build a diet around it.”
“The Angst and Gooball Diet,” I suggested.
“No, thank you. Where there are gooballs, there’s no need for angst.”
I gazed over at my wild hitchhiker, not quite believing I was having this conversation.
“Funny thing,” Redbone said, “you kind of remind me of Poesy. Maybe it’s the clothes. So, you’re staying with Poesy?”
I nodded.
“Wow. Staying with Poesy. That must be intense.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“So what happened to your nose?”
“I kind of bumped into a redneck.”
“You’ve got to be careful, Augie, they’re the mad dogs of West County.”
I nodded. “Tell me something, Redbone, did you know a woman named Ruthie Rosenberg?”
Redbone bunched his lips together as if to say, mum’s the word. Then he hung his head. “I knew who she was, but I didn’t know her. The sheriff had me over in Santa Rosa for four hours of questioning. They weren’t very friendly.”
I thought about Coolican’s idea that the sheriff’s department would be out trolling for drifters to pin the murder on. Redbone fit the bill, though he didn’t seem capable of hurting a flea.
“They kept asking me where I lived and I kept answering, no place in particular. That didn’t seem to satisfy them. They asked how I knew Ruthie Rosenberg, and when I said I never met her, they asked the same question over and over again. They asked how often I frequented prostitutes and when I said I’d never been to one in my life, which is the truth, they wanted to know how I got my sexual satisfaction. That’s when I made the mistake of saying, ‘That’s none of your business.’ We went round and round like that for hours. I think in the end they just got bored with me.”
When I smiled at Redbone, I could see that he was already off somewhere else, clicking a rhythm with his tongue on his palate and gripping his drumsticks as if he were getting ready to attack a drum kit.
“Are you a drummer?”
“Yep, a drummer without skins at the moment. But the cool thing I’ve discovered is that the world is filled with surfaces to drum on. Mind?”
Before, I could respond, he’d executed a perfectly controlled drumroll on the padded dashboard.
“You’re good, man.”
“Yeah, I try not to let it go to my head.”
I watched him drum for a while. He settled into a nice, medium tempo, four-four. You could see his left foot working an imaginary bass drum pedal.
“Jazz you’re playing, isn’t it?” I asked.
Redbone winked at me as he doubled time, and then clattered a roll on the door handle, as if he were attacking the hi-hat. Once we drove through Forestville, he started really driving the beat and scatting a brisk bebop tune.
“Sounds like the band was falling behind a little there,” I suggested.
“It’s my job to keep them honest,” he said. “Sometimes that feels like my only purpose in life.”
In Sebastopol, Redbone directed me to the Whole Foods in a small strip mall. “It’s the best spot in town for fund-raising,” he confided. “Maybe I’ll load up like a squirrel in winter. Hit the dispensary like a fully leveraged trust fund bambino. Chow down on a Sesame Smoke Cookie and take a River Rust Rugala for the road.”
As he was getting out of the car, Redbone paused and regarded me with so penetrating a glance, I was forced to look away. He shook my hand and said, “You look a little lost, Augie Boyer. Have a purpose, little brother. Have a purpose.”
The mad drifter suggests
that, perhaps, it’s me
who’s drifted across the center line.
Interfacing with Spud
After parking in downtown Sebastopol, I realized that I needed to take a whiz. As I strolled up Main Street, I still felt stunned by Redbone’s admonition. I lacked a sense of purpose. Nearly fifty-five years old and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was, however, alive, which distinguished me from Gordon Cust, who I figured by now had gone off to sample edibles on the other side.
It must have been the siren I heard, followed by the sight of the ambulance stuck in Main Street traffic, that made me realize that Palm Drive, the hospital where I’d taken Custard and Sabbatini, was only blocks away. It was worth a shot.
It turned out that Custard had not yet died. He was in intensive care, however, and visitors were not allowed. I’d been to the emergency room but hadn’t seen the rest of the small hospital, so I made my way up and down a couple of hallways, surprised by the relative dearth of staff. At the end of the second hallway, I discovered the tiny intensive care unit. A pair of sheriff’s deputies stood outside the room and I was happy to see that Spud, of the great red Idaho-shaped birthmark, was one of them.
“Hey, Spud, Augie Boyer.”
“Augie.”
We shook hands.
“What the hell happened to you, man?”
“Gordon Cust showed me why he was once a Golden Gloves champ.”
“Ah, that’s right, and you’re the guy who brought Custard and Poesy into the emergency room. Isn’t it just like Poesy to walk out the next day, while Custard hangs on by a thread?”
“Yeah, it’s his luck that he only had one of the toxic bonbons. Custard must have chowed down on a dozen.”
“He loved his edibles. You didn’t eat any of them, huh, Augie?”
“No, Sabbatini had got me so ripped on Sea Ranch Tsunami that I wasn’t looking for anything to top it off. I’m not in shape like you folks out here, so I have to pace myself.”
“And look at you,” Spud said, “you’re dressed just like Poesy.”
I didn’t bother to explain.
“Tell me something,” Spud said. “How come you and Custard interfaced?”
Spud’s choice of verb amused me. But Custard had clearly interfaced with my nose.
