Sock, page 15
The same person had been talking to all the victims about life and literature before they died. And that person had done it for a long enough period before they died that they had talked to their friends about it.
Finally Tommy spoke. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Motherfucker! Fuck! Fuckin’ shit. Motherfucker. [You see? No one can write as clearly as Ed Wood.] Fuck. Motherfucker. Nell was talking shit the last time I saw her.”
“What exactly did she say, Tommy?”
“Oh, thanks for asking. You know, if you hadn’t asked me, I would have never thought to try to remember that.”
“Sorry.”
“Fuck. Moby-Dick! Was Moby-Dick more important to her life, to any life, than the evolution dude and his work, and whether an idea or a concept were more important?” Now we’re sounding a little like Ed.
“Darwin?”
“The book.”
“Origin of Species? The Beagle thing?”
“No, the guys.”
“Darwin.”
“And the other guy”
“Huxley?”
“No, the Moby-Dick guy.”
“Melville?”
“Yeah. She had to pick one, Melville or Darwin, to be her hero or have dinner with or something, and then she was joking about which one she’d rather spend the night with. She was bummed there weren’t any women on the list. She was trying to like the fat dyke, and then joked about spending the night with her.”
“Gertrude Stein?”
“Or Frank Zappa. She talked about Zappa and Dylan and the Geek Love woman. Nell was a lot smarter than me. I got lost whenever she talked to me, but it was usually about law, or movies, or breeder sex or something. She didn’t talk books around me. What the fuck do I know? But she was spacey. She was asking me questions. Heavy questions. What qualities I like most in myself. What I hate. It was weird.”
“A lot of the relatives and friends mentioned having heavy talks with the victims before they were murdered. Fuck. What got her thinking that way? C’mon, Tommy, who got her thinking that way?
“Fuck.” Tommy was no longer thinking. Now Tommy was trying to prove to the Little Fool that Tommy was thinking. Now Tommy was Ronnie in grade school missing a lay-up shot. Tommy knew it was important, but he had nothing else. The Ed Wood moments were over and now it was acting. Now he just said “fuck” and waggled his head around. He squinted up. He even scratched his head and, if he had had a beard, he would have stroked it. He had to prove to the Little Fool that Tommy was thinking, but he was really just waiting for the Little Fool to let him off the hook. Counting flowers on the wall.
Tommy’s thinking act worked.
“Hey, Tommy, stop beating yourself up. Maybe we should go down to the diner and get you a Greek salad. We’re getting somewhere. We’re on it. I can feel it.”
“Okay, if you think that’ll help.”
They went down to the diner, but not before Tommy put on a clean pair of jeans. You had to look good to think in public. The Little Fool would have gone out in the fuzzy bathrobe if Tommy hadn’t stopped him. Did you hear anything? I thought I did. I thought I did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Know Thyself
Tommy got his Greek salad. The Little Fool was in full crime-fighter mode. He was eating an egg-white omelet and a dry, toasted bagel. He was wide awake and thinking hard. Who kills people who are starting to think about literature? How do you find people at the exact moment they start thinking about literature? Gertrude Stein, Melville, Darwin, Jefferson, Vonnegut, Randy Newman, Picasso, Watson, Crick, Zappa, Dylan, even Joan Baez. Okay, not all literature, but all thinkers. Okay, except Joan. Why had the victims mentioned all those names? Why had the victims been talking to their friends about those people, about those things? The victims hadn’t been college students getting their heads together. They were grown-ups. It was admirable, I guess, to think about this stuff. But why think about this stuff and die? I guess if you knew you were going to die, you might start examining your life to make the rest of your life worth living. But these hadn’t been suicides. There was no indication that these people knew they were going to be murdered. They hadn’t known they were going to die. Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.
It’s a creepy idea: People thinking heavy thoughts before they’re killed. What could connect them? Was the killer killing everyone who joined some Book of the Month club? Could it be some book discussion group that he got the membership list for? Could it be some club you join where you talk about all the heavy parts of life, and then someone in the club whacks you? But if the killer were a leader of some cult, the others in the cult would notice the members dying. No one mentioned being scared or being in a creepy club. No one had said a word about that. The murdered people didn’t seem to know what was coming. Were they all suicidal enough to know they were going to die and not tell anyone? People do that. Suicides do that. They plan and don’t tell anyone. But could that be true for this many people? They all couldn’t have known they were going to be tortured and brutally murdered and not hint about it to anyone, could they? Not all of them. I thought I heard her calling my name now. Hush, hush.
Tommy was just happy with his salad. The Little Fool kept looking at him. Tommy didn’t examine life much; he just lived it. He spent his time examining every forkful of salad he ate and every jeansful of ass that walked by as the bars emptied out and the bountyless cruisers needed comfort food. The Little Fool had stopped examining life when he stopped liking what he found. This killer sure wasn’t going to get either of them. They were as safe as milk. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but it’ll keep you from killing yourself. And it seemed it would keep this nut from snuffing you. I want you to lick my decals off, baby.
None of the victims had been religious. Is that weird? Why didn’t the cops talk about that? Why didn’t the press talk about that? Is that normal? The Little Fool doesn’t know anyone who really believes in god. He knows a few people who don’t call themselves “Atheists.” He knows a few people who were born into the Jewish culture who still call themselves “jews.” He knows some people who had weddings in churches, or went with their grandmothers to xmas masses, but he doesn’t know anyone who really, actively believes in god. But when the Little Fool watches TV, it seems as if all the people in charge believe there are a lot of people who believe in god. Of course, on TV there are witches and talking dogs. Don’t the majority of people believe in god? The meat puppets on TV don’t say “goddamn,” and don’t they cater to the masses? The Little Fool had read that in the sciences, among real scientists, most people don’t believe in god, but the victims hadn’t all been in the sciences. The victims hadn’t been connected by occupation. But, thinking about the Farrah and A-Team books of notes, if the victims hadn’t been Atheist, at least they had all been non-theists. Why didn’t the press pick up on that? Why weren’t these “The Atheist Murders” instead of “Hudson Ripper”? Wasn’t that a big deal? Yoko and me, and that’s reality.
Tommy had stopped pretending he was trying to remember anything else Nell had said. He was all just feta and olives now. It was nice to sit in the diner. The Little Fool felt a spark of life. A diner at night contains all the hopeful sadness of romance. You could meet the love of your life waiting tables in a diner. You could see an old friend, you could hatch a plan for a multi-million dollar company, you could scheme out a Tarantino crime. You could solve some murders. Diners offer all of that. Diners are that lighting. That coffee-shop wood on the walls. A diner is a place to drink sour orange juice in stupid little glasses and drink much too much coffee. A diner is a place to smoke. She’s a loner likes to mingle.
Tommy finished eating. “I think I might do better trying to remember other things that Nell said if I went home and laid in bed for a while.” Our hero just sat there. Crime fighters can eat jelly and drink coffee, he figured. Maybe he was more of a Dirty Harry, lots-of-sugar-in-the-coffee kind of crime fighter. He sat there eating the remains of his bagel with much too much “berry” jam from those little tubs. He saved the grape jelly for last. He ripped off the top, and there it was. Food as skating rink. So smooth, clear, fresh, and full of sugar. He put two tubs of grape jelly on about 2.5 inches of burnt bagel, and he drank coffee. He wasn’t really a coffee drinker, he didn’t really like coffee, but he didn’t smoke and he was in a diner. He had to do something. He was Kinky Friedman’s “Sirhan Sirhan, party of one.” There was a rumor about a tumor.
It didn’t take much to get the Little Fool going. Just talking about the people who had been killed contemplating the big picture reminded the Little Fool that he needed to read all of Dickens. The Little Fool would start that. It was time to reread Atlas Shrugged. Why wasn’t Ayn Rand on any of those lists? I guess there are reasons not to think about her right before you die. Tommy had said that he believed Nell had decided against Darwin. She’d been leaning toward Melville. She’d rather have had dinner with Melville than Darwin. Besides being an odd thing to think about, it was a very odd choice for Nell. That must be a clue. Nell had loved Moby-Dick, but she didn’t love Melville. She always said that Melville hadn’t known what he had. The beauty of Moby-Dick is that Melville tapped into things that he himself did not understand. Darwin knew what he had. Watson and Crick’s original paper on the double helix in 1953 has the big, swinging-dick line near the end, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” James and Francis knew what they had and bragged about it. There’s never been a rapper who bragged more than they did. Of course, this is a brag with the twisting, double, tiny bling bling helix to back it up. And Darwin knew what he had, too. Charles didn’t know his idea was going to explain as much as it did, but he knew he had a very big deal. He knew it meant no god. Nell always said that Darwin had known that. The Little Fool had had the heavy talks with Nell. Nell said that women’s biggest shame was Emma Darwin, Darwin’s wife. Darwin had been Jerry Lee Lewis; he married his first cousin. Nell said she pictured Darwin with long, greasy hair falling into his eyes while he had banged at his writing desk like an out-of-tune, early-Southern-rock grand piano, unleashing the fear of something so much worse than Jerry Lee Lewis’s balls of Satan’s fire. What’s scarier, wilder, and more liberating than satan? No satan, no god, no nothing but us! Emma had been the cousin having sex with the man who had the origin of the tiger by the tail. You rattle my brain.
Little cousin Emma was also heir to the Wedgwood china fortune. China dishes had made her family rich. Dishes gave Darwin the time to walk back and forth, back and forth, and think about things. Wearing out the dirt above the earthworms that he had loved to think about. Wallace, the vegetarian, women’s-rights, tree-living, psychic-nut-job seemed to have the “natural selection” idea first, and Huxley was mean enough and loud enough to get everyone to listen, but Darwin had the intellectual muscle. He did the work walking back and forth in his garden (what we Americans call the “backyard”). He was the man. The main man. Nell had always said that Darwin proved that there is no god, and his intellectual honesty was going to make him publish that proof, but the power of the pussy with the purse strings made him stop short of announcing that outright. Darwin’s beloved daughter had died a miserable death and Charles was prepared to chuck the whole idea of god. It’s no comfort and it isn’t true. But he didn’t go all the way. Origin of Species leaves room in the margins for god. Even catholics can weasel and embrace it like a twelve-year-old altar boy’s hips. Nell was sure that was Mrs. Darwin’s doing. And Nell was ashamed of that. It’s a place in history where stand by your man overlaps intellectual truth. Where Tammy Wynette and Madame Curie are one and the same. And show the world you love him.
Why had Nell changed to Melville? Why baptizing the sword in fire in satan’s name instead of the perfectly beautiful simplicity that creates all the complicated life in our world and any other? If the Little Fool could answer that, he would find the killer. It was all there. It was all there. Hey, Grandma.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
You Can’t Quit Me. I’m Fired.
The Little Fool stayed up all night in the diner thinking about the big questions. He was contemplating the big picture. Down South that has to be done with liquor. In NYC, it should be done in a coffee shop in the wee Sinatra hours. The Little Fool was ready to die. And he was ready to go to work and lose his job. It was going to be an important day at work and he wanted to look and feel his best. He wanted them to feel good about firing him. When you never drink, it’s hard work to look right to be fired. But a night of not sleeping and crying alone in a diner because Emma Darwin hadn’t had the strength to not act the way she’d been brought up gave him the veiny eyes he needed. All the coffee in his non-druggy body gave him a nice shake and a twitch. Wearing the same clothes gave him a nice little funk, and his hair was just perfect. He was ready. He had killed a woman and knew it and there was no punishment that could hurt more than that knowledge. Bring it on. He loved his job more than anything, but love had been killed. He was now a true romantic. Realists see the world through rose-colored glasses; romantics see the world through sleepless eyes behind cheap sunglasses. Hit that street a-running and try to meet the masses.
He went upstairs and sneaked into Tommy’s room, where it seemed Tommy thought snoring would help him remember the details of what Nell had said. The Little Fool quiedy opened the top drawer next to Tommy’s side of the bed. The Little Fool moved aside the crusted bottle of Astroglide and got the box of latex gloves. The box was a little less than sterile, so he dug down several gloves and grabbed a couple of really clean ones. He waited until he was out of the bedroom to make the sexy, rubber-snapping sound that, if done in the bedroom, would have made Tommy roll over Pavlov-style. With the latex gloves, the Little Fool picked up the note he’d stolen and dug down in the box of manila envelopes to find a clean one. He slipped in the acetate story. He would take the stolen evidence to work. It was 5 A.M. The Little Fool had to be at work at 8:30 A.M. He had time to go home. He held the envelope tightly in both hands like the valuable cargo it was and walked across town to his own apartment. I’ve got the world on a string.
Walking through Manhattan streets in the early morning when you’ve been out all night is one of the best feelings in the world. The Little Fool tried to be depressed and noir, he tried to feel like Jimmy Cagney, but the Little Fool kept sliding gracefully over to Fred Astaire. All the proletariats were just rolling out of bed to go to work, bleary eyed with a whole day ahead of them, and the Little Fool had been up all night and was heading in to get fired. It was a Fred Astaire dance challenge: The Little Fool had to create a dance featuring the manila envelope as the most important thing in the world. The envelope was the girl Fred had to design a dance around. The Little Fool held the envelope like a collapsed top hat in both hands in front of him. He started moving it around in front of his chest. With a hand on either side, he moved the evidence in a circle in front of his chest. He started dancing. Hey, he was definitely about to be fired from a job he loved more than anything. He would be arrested. He might go to prison. He had definitely killed a woman and his life was ruined. It was time to dance. He had his top-hat envelope and his eyes were hung over. He was dancing home from his special friend’s apartment on a busy, industrious Manhattan morning. Top hat. Tails.
The Little Fool could hear Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” the tune that’s used in Warner Brothers cartoons to indicate busy, industrious, and modern. The cabs felt squatty and claymated like
Wallace and Gromit. Garmentos were carrying big packages like ants with breadcrumbs and the Little Fool was dancing. Dancing. He had his hate letters from a murderer as his top hat. He untucked his dirty button-up shirt to give him those folded-beetle-wing tails. The first big, honest smile in two weeks slid onto his face. Been down so long it looks like up to me. He hit the bottom like Orwell in London and Paris. The Little Fool was smiling. Deep. Alone. The lack-of-sleep sweat under his armpits was cooling in the breeze. He could smell himself, like an animal. Like Fred Astaire as an animal. Man, it was good to smell his own funk. It was good to be tired. He blinked his eyes and held them shut just to feel the sting. He was dancing to work to get fired. He’d lost all he’d worked for, lost all he had loved. It was time for fun. You must be at least this lowdown to ride this ride. It might be his last morning not in prison. It might be his last chance to hate himself full out without the cheesy defensiveness that would come when others hated him, too. It was a solitary, personal self-hatred that was liberating. He was free. He was dancing. He was dancing in morning Manhattan. He smelled exhaust, coffee, and his own overnight funk. In the serious moonlight.
He didn’t take the elevator. He danced up the stairs to his apartment. He unlocked the door and spun in place before he went in. He had all the guilt of Michael Jackson dancing into Neverland. The Little Fool never looked or felt better. With exaggerated fastidiousness, like Oliver Hardy adjusting his tie, the Little Fool put down the envelope on the counter. He picked up an umbrella that was by the door (he never used umbrellas. Tall people hate umbrellas. They’re tools for little Asian ladies to poke the big freaks’ eyes out), opened it inside his apartment, and danced with it. Even bad luck would be a step up for him now. He needed to break the mirror to keep this feeling for seven years, but he had more looking to do. He walked into the bathroom and urinated. When he was finished, he didn’t shake it at all, just flipped it right back through the fly and let the last few squirts of early morning coffee urine trickle into his pants. A pee stain would make him easier to fire. He even smelled crazy. He went into his closet and got the briefcase his Mom bought him on his first day of law school. She shouldn’t have spent that much on him. It was real leather. It wasn’t a briefcase he was ever going to use. When she died, there was no chance of ever getting rid of it. It sat on the shelf with its stupid little golden keys still in an envelope still in the leather business card pocket that had never been used. He rhumba’ed back into the kitchen and put the precious manila envelope in the virgin mother briefcase. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked almost perfect. He felt like Jack Lemmon after a night of multiple-sex-partner confusion in some ‘60s screwball, leering sex comedy. Trying to be tidy. He looked at the pee stain on the front of his pants—abstract art. He smelled his armpits—love-in incense. He grinned ear to ear. He picked up the bottom of his shirt and blew his nose in it. He did a spin in front of the mirror and blew himself a kiss. He made that Little Richard/Paul McCartney/Lee Michaels/Michael Jackson “woo” sound. He jumped straight in the air, dropped as near as he could get to a split, and left the briefcase on the floor while he ran into the bedroom. He had a bumper sticker that a biker friend had given him. It was in a file folder with lots of pictures of the past. The bumper sticker was a precious souvenir he’d been saving for the right time. He looked in the file cabinet and found the bumper sticker right away. He pulled it out of the envelope and walked into the other room. He peeled the back of the bumper sticker, did the W.C. Fields thing of it sticking to one finger and then another, and carefully stuck it across the brand-new, expensive, Mom briefcase. He looked at himself in the mirror: He had done pretty well in one night. His hair looked filthy, he had snot on his shirt, piss stain on his pants, armpit stains, and a brand-new briefcase with a bumper sticker that said in bright red letters: “Fuck Jesus Hard in the Handholes.” He broke the mirror with his fist. In the movie the mirror’ll break the first time, but it took him three tries. He danced out the door to be fired. Puttin’ on the Ritz.
