Leave It to Me (12 page)

I first encountered Ham’s old flame Jess in an upscale clothing store on Fillmore near Sacramento. Ham and I’d taken in a matinee at the Clay, and were ambling south towards Japantown for a bowl of
soba
. By then we’d slept together—“pleasured each other” was his phrase—a total of seven times.

If Ham’s beat-up Triumph hadn’t been in the garage, if I hadn’t been leery of riding a bus or taxi that afternoon, neither of us would have thought of dashing into Dahlia’s Divan and trying on pricey silk caftans and harem pants and making nice to the designer, Dahlia Metz, who happened to be one of Ham’s many exes. Keeping the history of Ham’s bawdy relationships straight was tough. Dahlia struck me as a wider-bodied Rosearme in stretch-velvet tunic and pants. She’d discovered her talent, she explained, in a women’s prison in Afghanistan way back when everyone who was anyone put in time in Turkish or Afghan prisons. I wasn’t sure if Dahlia’s talent-discovery experience had come before or after her marriage with Ham. She pulled a layered dress off a rack, and held it against my chest. “Perfect,” she said to Ham’s mirrored reflection. “I call it the Seven Veils Dance, so watch out, Ham!”

I grabbed the wispy end of the outermost layer, and
twisted it around a forearm. “
Bodacious bodywear for audacious amateurs
 …” I caught myself before I’d said, And Frankie, now your turn!

Dahlia experimented on me the many ways of wrapping or draping the Seven Veils dress.

Ham came through. He didn’t have quite the Fong flair, but for a novice he wasn’t at all bad. He said,
“After debauched days and delectable nights, the veiled Virgin of Varanasi whipped out a scimitar and whacked off the ponytailed pate of the perpetrator.”

“The maharani,”
I shouted,
“and the maidservant make out on a mustard-hued mattress while pesky pachyderms pirouette …”

“
Meanwhile the cuckolded codger carries his carbine and takes cracks at crocodiles and cranes, and his cantankerous councillors commit
 … What do they commit, for chrissake?”

“… commit calumny with calamitous consequences
,” I finished for Ham.

Dahlia pulled the wispiest layer over my head and let it cover my nose and chin.

“Hold it!” Ham shouted at Dahlia. “Do it again!”

“What, Ham?”

“Does she remind you of Hedy Lamarr or what?”

He crooked his fingers, making a perfect box, and framed my face. Like Frankie, he was seeing possibilities in me at the most inappropriate, passionate moments. I tried to rescue the Fong word game.
“Heedful Hedy hides her head in a hole hollowed out of …”

That’s when a hard-bodied, graying blonde in a tight
silk T-shirt and linen shorts barged in on us from behind a rack of caftans. “Let me guess, Ham! A long-lost daughter come to collect support money?” Then she hooked her elbow around Ham’s neck, and dragged his face close enough to hers to kiss. Ham did. Long and hard. I didn’t check for tongue positions before announcing, “Hi, I’m Devi. Ham’s friend.”

Ham flinched, then let go his hold. The woman didn’t step away from him. I took Ham’s arm in an undaughterly way. The woman flicked blond bangs off her sun-aged face and, smiling, seized Ham’s free arm. “Aren’t you going to introduce an old flame to Devi?” she said.

I knew not to let her snideness rile me, but I did envy her overmuscled biceps and self-confidence.

Ham introduced the woman as Jess DuPree, the Jess of media escort agency Leave It to Me, didn’t I remember him calling her that first time I stopped by his office? Wasn’t she the one who always came through for him?

“ME,” Jess said. “Media Escort, get the pun?” She gestured towards the fitting room. “Benita Farias, the mystery writer. Needs a softer look. TV’s cruel.”

I didn’t need Madame K’s computerized crystal ball to figure out that Jess and Ham had had—probably still had—a heavy thing going. For a fiftyish woman, Jess could still turn heads. She dismissed me as the newest on Ham’s arm. I knew that because she said to Ham, “I think you’re ready for a red Miata.”

Over
soba
and fishcakes in Japantown I got the Jess & Ham Story, Abbreviated Edition. Yes, they’d been lovers
in Berkeley. They’d co-protested McNamara’s Vietnam, they’d co-organized a takeover of Sproul Hall, they’d co-lobbed rotting fruit at a motorcade that should have been escorting President YankeeStooge NguyenSlime, and for a while they’d cohabited in a commune. The commune living on Derby Street must have been as far back as in the fall of 1967, because by the spring of 1968 they’d moved on to Napa and coworshiped at Baba Lalji’s feet.

Baba Lalji?

Oh, he was a guru guy who set himself up in an ashram before going on to bigger things.

Like what, Ham? Like sex, drugs and prison time?

No, more like gunrunning and Cold War politics. Ham filled me in on Hesse and Hinduism and Holymen with funny names like God-ji and Rishi-ji who came over on tourist visas and when the visas expired founded ashrams.

Ashram?

Ham could have made a living as a teacher or a preacher. He was most inspired when he was explaining. “Devi,” he said, “think of Baba Lalji’s Napa ashram as a B and B in wine country. Pure air, great meditating, tantric fucking, holistic healing, the works, and all of it gratis!” He said he’d lost track of Jess after her abortion.

“Love and abortion in a Napa B and B?”

Ham ignored the dig. “Think Vietnam, Devi. Think big Uncle Sam fucking over bandy-legged little VCs. Think McNamara fucking over bennied-out grunts. Rent the
Apocalypse Now
video if you can’t think. You made your life one continuous flying fuck or you didn’t survive the times.”

“Jess had an abortion?” I was thinking, in spite of everything, I was glad Bio-Mom hadn’t.

Ham changed the subject. “You’re a cheap date,” he said. “That must be why I’ve fallen for you. The one woman who keeps me solvent.” He pulled a fistful of crumpled twenties out of a pants pocket and paid for our fishcakes and noodles with two bills and waited for change. “Got to be back at ShoeString right away, a call’s coming in from Bangkok,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

“I’m not going home.” That part was true. “I’m meeting a friend.”

“I’ll drop you where you need to be. No trouble.”

“I don’t mind taking MUNI.”

“If you don’t want the person you’re meeting to run into me, say so.” He grabbed my wrist, and twisted it, but not hard enough to hurt. “Be straight with me, hon. Otherwise there’s no relationship.”

Relationship
sounded so dated. “It’s nobody you’d be interested in, Ham.”

“Let me be the judge.”

“It’s nobody you’d want to meet. This guy’s weird, really weird. He lives in my building. Loco Larry.” My plan was to barge into the Vulture office and check out the latest fax.

“Loco as in ‘crazy’?”

“Hates immigrants, hates feds. Hangs an
I ‘HEART’ MY ARSENAL
on his door.”

“Is that the guy in army surplus on your stoop?”

“Not surplus. He’s shown off knife slits and old blood.”

“Poor fucker! Guys like him had their brains fried.”

“Was it your baby? Did you love Jess, Ham?”

“What baby?”

“The abortion. You said something about an abortion …” Abortion, abandonment, adoption: all options in Bio-Mom’s era had begun with the letter a.

The waitress came back with Ham’s change, but didn’t stick around for the tip.

“You mean the fetus?” He made expense account notes on the back of the receipt. “I’m no chauvinist, that’s too easy. You can’t be that lazy.”

Embarrassed, I backed off. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

I showed my gratitude by asking for a new favor. Ham liked being asked, so we were trading favors. “Get me together with Jess? It’ll bring me one step closer to your Berkeley times.”

“Just be yourself and she’ll come to you,” he said. But he looked pleased. “How’s Thursday night? Vito’s, after nine.” He made a note of it on the restaurant receipt.

Getting into clubs like Vito’s was a breeze if you had Ham. Hanging with him meant your life was in the commuter lane, no waiting, no hang-ups, zipping right along while taxpayers sat fuming. Clubs were free; movies were seen months before release; musicians worked his name into songs. Everybody owed him. He needed to be owed. He was lonely. The loneliest is the person with the largest entourage.

I joined the debtors. That’s as far as I could go in the commitment business.

“I’m not saying you aren’t special, Devi,” Linda, my psychic neighbor, warned. “But so’s everyone. Take anyone in our building, take anyone in the universe. You think that poor schmuck from that Van-whatever place isn’t special when there’s a bounty on his head? And how about the little girls who traipse up our stairs to get their cunts sewn by the resident charlatan? Let me tell you about a client I’m counseling.”

We were sharing oven space. I was heating up the last slice of a soy-cheese, artichoke and clam pizza, and Linda was roasting herbs guaranteed to lower blood pressure. Loco Larry was in our upstairs kitchen too, defrosting the fridge with a mallet and a spatula, but he had on his Walkman. Like the blonde with the
DEVI
vanities at the state line, Larry knew to make himself the center of the world that mattered.

“Just a normal kid,” Linda went on. “Pacific Heights. Nice parents, nice siblings, decent grades. But in his previous life he was an Indian from India. The kid threw bombs, shot up cops, gave the British Raj a tough time. Such a hard time that the British shipped him off to a convict island and hanged him. Last winter the family finally took a trip to this island. The Andamans? Heard of
it? It’s a tourist trap now. Lots of fat Germans with fancy cameras checking out the empty prisons. But here’s the thing. This kid from Pacific Heights found the spot on the wall of his old jail cell where he’d scratched his name with his fingernails. The kid leads his folks straight to the wall and reads off his name as though Indian’s his mother tongue!”

I accepted Linda’s chastisement. Every life is special. Some wondrous events transpire without making tabloid headlines. Linda was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, spoke her first word (
cuidado!
) in Argentina, married a Japanese doctor in Brazil and divorced him in Chile, then found fulfillment as a psychic in the Haight.

So here’s my not-so-special history as Fred Pointer told me in installments during early-morning runs at the Golden Gate Park.

In a small-town courthouse in Rajasthan, India, Mr. Raj, the Bombay associate of Vulture, located files of cases going back further than fifty years. The files were bundled into bedsheets and cloth squares by year and month by court clerks and stacked on tops of cabinets by sweepers. Mr. Raj has also heard Hari, the oldest resident of Devigaon, a village now in danger of being swallowed by the town with the courthouse, tell lurid tales of a sahib and his memsahibs who smoked hemp, danced naked and made human sacrifice.

Hari, half blind and long retired as watchman of the courthouse, won’t give up his broken stool to younger
gatekeepers who can read and write but who can’t remember as far back as Hari can.

Here’s a transcript of one of three conversations Mr. Raj had with Hari, though something may have been lost or doctored in Mr. Raj’s translation.

This happened some time ago, I was working as chief chowkidar in tourist bungalow where rich ladies from foreign came for spotting birds in every bush, shrub and tree
.

How many years ago, Hari? Ten years, twenty years?

I answer your question with my own question. I ask you, sir, I ask you who wear expensive watch bought in foreign, what is time when our universes rise many times and fall many more times within one eye-wink of God Brahma? When this event came to pass, I was a fit fellow, I was carrying three-four suitcases on my head and running from the train station to the tourist guest house with no stop, no drop, no cough. No arthritis in neck nor knees, and my teeth … my teeth were so strong I used to chew sugarcane stalks …

So what was the crime you witnessed, Hari? What did the foreigners do?

The sahib and memsahibs? The ones who danced naked before they sacrificed one mem and one baby?

Here Mr. Raj resorts to summary. It was a cold night, because Hari was wearing a wool vest, a scarf and what the PI identifies as a “monkey cap” with slits for eyes and lips. Hari and three cronies were drinking country liquor in a dead rajah’s palace ruins when the sahib drove into view in a huge, fancy automobile. The sahib looked like a Bombay film “hero,” only more handsome. Hari described him as wearing blue jeans like Bombay film stars, and moving the way a cheetah springs for the kill.

Then it’s back to transcript format.

Hari, did you witness the killings?

I am saying a killer’s hands began a job. Whether the hands were guided by the killer’s head or by the killer’s fate, who can say?