Catalogue Raisonne (20 page)

There'd been a couple of Chile Dogs gigs where I'd launched myself from the stage into the dancers, landing hard when there weren't enough of them to catch me. Our sparse crowds only demanded it occasionally, whether from boredom or exuberance, but in either case it was best to comply. But this flight and fall hurt more than the voluntary kind.

Out in the living room, the others were chasing some leftover pizza with beer. Ramon was rewinding a video of Pink Floyd's “The Wall”. When he was ready to push play, Sean raised his hand and said, “A eulogy.”

“A poem! A poem!” the twins chanted. Probably they had read an elegy in high school.

Sean looked at them and closed his eyes. And when he opened them it
was
a poem, one he pronounced slowly, staring at a spot above our heads.

We observed a brief silence. “To Robert,” Ramon said, and we all repeated it – “To Robert” – and clinked beers. “The Wall” came on. Sean glanced at me. His poem might have been partly an apology, in which case it was written as much to me, and about us, as for Robert's sake. Guilt again. Even at his own wake Robert flitted out of view. I felt the scrap of paper with Neale's poems in my back pocket, but it wasn't the time to ask.

Conversation went on around and over “The Wall”, which we'd all seen many times before. You caught it on bar screens and in people's
apartments everywhere. When I did turn to the screen, some of the familiar images, which I'd never found too interesting, reminded me of my Rick-thoughts. Like the guy bloodily shaving off his eyebrows in the mirror. It was nothing very specific. Just the weird, drawn-out sense of torment. What Ramon called its “sadism vibe”. Sean grimaced in places, barked laughter in others, as if a coarse drunken buffoon had blundered into a verse recital.

Ramon cut up a generous quantity of lines and we did them. Sean's eyes widened and watered, and the twins began giggling softly, but I felt little effect from it, at most a sharpening sensation, a blade whetting. Some metal rods poking into the damp earth of booze, so we could go on drinking and talking without slithering out of shape so quickly, becoming mud.

“It must suck to be dead,” L said. Eyes fright-flick wide: it might have been the first time it had occurred to him.

“No,” his brother said, “it wouldn't. It wouldn't feel like anything. Because you wouldn't know, right? You're dead.”

“You might,” Ramon said. A Catholic, I assumed. By upbringing anyway – but then a friend had told me once the Church granted “separations but never divorces” from itself.

“Indeed,” Sean said. “But I think what we're really talking about” – with a wave at the pizza box, the frosted mirror, the bottles and “The Wall” – “is what it feels like to live among the dead. In the words of Ford, that's Job One.”

One twin said something to the other, and they both giggled, and one said, “Oh fuck off, Mumbles. You're just mind-fucking us.”

“Yeah, stop mind-fucking, Mumbles.”

“Not a lot to fuck
with
, gentlemen. Even for an involuntary celibate.”

The three of them left a short time later, and Ramon turned the sound down low, though he kept the video on. He got us both another beer, and took out his bag again.

“I'm okay,” I said.

“I know, it's weak shit,” Ramon said, but went about preparing a thick line for himself. “Someone stepped on this load big-time.”

“Supply problems?”

“Yeah, man. Getting squeezed a bit.”

“Rick?” I guessed. It might have been the word
squeezed
.

Ramon shot me a sharp look –
Can I trust you?
– but his stone, and just his own passivity, eased it away. Suspicion, I was beginning to learn, took energy.

“Most of the stuff comes through The Tulips. Lately anyway. And now Rick's supposed to be the man.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning how we do things forever isn't good enough suddenly. He wants names of my buyers. Which there's no way, my home town. People I know. So I get this diluted shit. On top of prices go up.”

“What's his problem?”

Ramon gave his shrug. Just one shoulder, the other arm still dicing with the razor. “I don't know, man. Somebody he owes maybe. Or just greedy. Like me and my little girls. Some people, they just want
in
. No matter how good their deal is, it's always, let me in, let me in. Further, you know, man?”

“Tell him to fuck off.”

Ramon looked up from his work. “You've seen Rick?”

“
I've
seen Rick?”

“Oh shit, man. Sorry. I'm pretty gone. How's it feel?”

“Like I'm
in
‘The Wall'.”

“Sorry, man.” Ramon bent down and inhaled his line smoothly, getting all of it in one pass. He closed his eyes for just a moment and then opened them. Like a man tasting a chocolate or a sip of wine. No strong reaction: the essence of cool.

A few minutes later I said, “You don't seem too upset.”

His hands raised, palms up, off his knees. “What's my option?” But then he frowned. “Just about the buyers part. I like working at the gallery. I mean it's okay.”

“Some serious tabs there?”

He chuckled, but that didn't make him sloppy. “Everybody needs to relax sometimes.”

Before I left, we stood at the top of his fire escape for a few minutes, talking in the warm night air. Music coming from an open window
somewhere nearby, a summer sound. Parking spaces and alleys below. Lights from the Broadway Theatre on King William. Tail end of an eventful night, we seemed to fall into a philosophical mood, getting reflective together.

“What would you do if the little girls stopped visiting you?” I said. Neither of us had spoken for a couple of minutes. We were leaning on the steel railing.

“You mean what
will
I do? They don't visit anybody forever.”

“Yeah. Then.”

“I'd be sorry. But maybe I'd get going on something else. Start looking anyway.”

What?
I thought. Didn't say it.

“I'm a good DJ,” he said. “I give the people what they want.” The same boast he'd made, a very modest one really, the night of the Gala Preview.

“Did you ever give Barbara what she wanted?”

As soon as I asked the question, which entered my mind out of nowhere, I knew the difference between my usual pawn probes and what Armin did. Something equally mysterious perhaps, the results maybe even more unpredictable, but focused and purposeful.
Deliberate
.

Ramon shrugged. But his shrug had more dimensions than many people's vocabularies. This one was a slight, almost slow-motion lift of his shoulders, with an equally slow, slight smile above. Ultimately, and beauty aside, I didn't think anyone over twenty would be able to stand that shrug for long. He was stuck with his little girls.

Two of whom, sure enough, arrived just as I was leaving. Crotch-cutter jeans, halter tops, nipples perking as the night cooled down toward dawn. Giggling as I turned sideways to squeeze past. I looked back up at Ramon, standing by his back door with his hands up again in that helpless gesture.

“Follow you, man,” he called down.

Hearing that, the girls giggled louder, heels clacking as they climbed.

Angela screamed in the middle of the night. That and the light snapping on jolted me awake. She examined the bruised, skinned face she'd glimpsed in the dark.

“Oh, poor baby. Who was it?” Then: “Just a minute.”

She hopped out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom. The pause gave me the time I needed to configure things correctly. Even on Robert's account I couldn't mention The Tulips. Angela was against strip clubs. It seemed to be a weight issue more than a feminist one. She'd admitted as much in a tearful “body image” session.

“Just a bouncer with some bad memories of the Dogs,” I said when she came back with her supplies. Alcohol, swabs, antiseptic cream.

“I'd like to bounce
him
.” She stoppered the alcohol bottle with a cotton puff, upended it. “Or is he too bad?”

“Too bad for me, apparently.”

Sting of the alcohol, then cool air. Soothing cream rubbed in with good, gentle fingers.

I
'd mostly sucked as a guitarist, but I did have one useful skill. I could often find the missing chord. Usually, with our songs, that meant the third chord. We'd have got the first two, working by trial and error from someone's scratchy tape, but we'd be stuck on the third. After we'd exhausted the chords that other well-known songs had used in that progression, we'd have to fall back on more esoteric methods. Such as casting back to high school music class to figure out what the seventh would be, or the minor third, assuming you knew the key. I could stumble along this way, and did sometimes, but I had a more occult method I preferred. Letting my hand stray up and down the neck of the guitar, an absent-minded caress except that I was trying to sense presence within absence. Letting my fingers curl into chord shapes, some known, some not. Sometimes, when it felt stronger, pressing the strings down for a closer feel, but still not strumming yet. I imagined I was using a dowsing wand, or reaching out with a telepathic tentacle into the songwriter's mind. I never
really understood how it worked. But it was as if, by stepping out from what I did know, concentrating – not too hard, relaxation was key – on what I didn't, after a while the space would want to complete itself and my fingers would close on the missing shape and I would strum with complete confidence. My bandmates would stare at me open-mouthed, as if I'd been Hendrix all along and had only been messing with their heads. We seldom had money for coke, but pot was always in good supply. Blotter acid, too.

Of course, on the rare songs we tried with four or five or even six chords, the possibilities grew in number and my Zen trick suffered accordingly. Often I was reduced to mere random searching, hacking bar chords up and down the neck in mounting frustration. Flailing.

Maybe every tactic, every strategy, was a pawn probe. Some just more successful than others. Or maybe with practice you upped your success rate. Pawn probes on better odds – was
that
strategy?

Robert. Mrs. Soames and Claudia's painting. Piccone in art rental. Peter in the vaults. My office tour.

Rehearsing the known chords until they became automatic, nothing you had to think about or remember, just markers in the deep background pointing to the shape in the fog that would complete them – that had been crucial to the method. But now, trying out my gallery chords, I saw there was a problem. The events and people I was seeing in my mind were just glimpses of things, isolated facts, not known parts of any song. They were single notes, not chords. And I'd
never
tried to build a chord from a handful of scattered notes. We would have picked another song.

And then there was the question of which note even
belonged
in the chord. Robert, for instance. The loudest note, the starting fact, but that didn't mean he belonged with the others. He might just be one trumpet blast.

My faith in the method collapsed. This was the point at which a joint should be rolled, but there wasn't any pot in the apartment. There hadn't been for a while, I realized.