The Nirvana Blues (7 page)

To boot, he drove a pink Lamborghini.

“Joe's one of our little town's most highly respected sanitation engineers,” Nikita boomed.

“Oh gosh,” Paula chirped. “You mean you're the guy who's gonna try to pull off that big dope deal that starts tonight?”

Joe assumed he had heard incorrectly, excused himself, and, fending off the frenetic bodies, plowed through the crowd until he reached Eloy. “Mr. Irribarren,” he gasped breathlessly, “what are you doing here?”

Eloy shrugged. “I don't know. They invited me.”

A short, simple man in his mid-eighties, Eloy had a weather-beaten wrinkled face and arctic green eyes. His full head of neatly trimmed white hair was slightly mussed when he removed his hat; little wings fluffed out all over. A thin moustache gave his cheerful face a macho tilt. Wide shoulders and almost simian arms, a barrel chest, and small powerful hands completed the picture. A rope instead of a belt held up his loose-fitting dungarees.

Joe grimaced. “It's too loud. All these people are crazy.”

Eloy sipped from his beer. “Every ten minutes somebody comes up to me and wants to buy my land. I'm a very popular man. The zopilotes are circling.”

Joe asked, “What are those things in your lap?”

“Compliments of the house. That lady at the door gave them to me.”

“What are you gonna do with them?”

Eloy smiled impishly. “I think I'm going to don this T-shirt and gorilla mask and rob the First State People's Jug of enough money to pay off all my debts.”

“Ha ha.”

“Don't ‘ha ha' me, muchacho. If I want to, I can do it.”

Alarmed, Joe said, “Wait a minute. What about me?”

“If I haven't robbed the bank by Monday a week from now, and you come up with the cash, it's all yours. If you don't come up with the cash, and I haven't otherwise solved my problems by then, I think I will rob the bank. It's worth a shot, anyway. We could even rob it together.”

“But sir, you can't be serious.” Here it comes, Joe thought frantically. I risk my life to raise sixty thousand dollars, but the day of the closing, Eloy waltzes into the damn bank wearing a rubber gorilla mask and a Hanuman T-shirt and gets himself blown away by Tom Yard (the EAT ME drummer moonlighting as a bank dick during daylight hours), and I'm left holding a bag full of money while the banks, the creditors, the Scott Harrisons, the Skipper Nuzums, the Cobey Dallases, and the Nikita Smatterlings carve it into little pieces.

“I'll tell you something,” Eloy said. “In all my life I never would have thought to rob a bank. I obeyed all the laws. I trusted people and treated them like human beings. In return they annihilated my neighbors with every legal and illegal trick in the book. They cheated me in every money deal I ever made. They robbed me of my insurance money, my Medicare, my social security when Teresa was dying. They have tried to dispossess me at every turn. So sometimes I wake up gloomy and feel like robbing their bank. I been too gentle my first eighty-three years.”

Joe said, “Look, don't worry, I'll have the money.”

“How will you get it? You found a genie in an old well who grants wishes?”

“My grandmother,” Joe mumbled, lying through his teeth. “Her estate—”

“You're lying through your teeth.”

“Hey, I'll get it, don't worry.” A monkey mask hovered near Joe's shoulder—all ears? What in God's name had driven him over to Eloy Irribarren in the first place?

But the monkey mask saved him. It said, “Ho ming no kum chowki.”

“Oh, it's you, Egon.”

Egon Braithwhite being a randy fellow and former flutist with the Cincinnati Symphony. He had arrived in Chamisaville with novel-writing on his mind. His bucks he scammed by giving music lessons, tuning pianos, and making runs to western Kansas, where he bought old uprights for a song, refurbished them, and unloaded them on those of Chamisaville's new upwardly mobile denizens into music. He also held down a part-time job at the bus station four days a week. Part of his spiritual penance as a newly initiated Hanuman disciple was his vow to speak only in an invented Eastern language for six months.

Irritated, Joe replied, “Murasaki shikibu.”

Egon said, “Toyatoami! Hideyoshi!”

“Fukada tanaka kawasaki!”

Eloy said, “Qué es lo que les están pasando, huevones?”

Joe explained, “He always talks like this. He took a vow.”

“What kind of a vow?”

Egon explained, “Shur op chop chitty mai mai!”

Eloy said, “We should send
him
to rob the bank.”

Wearing a be-belled jester's cap and World War II aviator goggles, Ralph Kapansky materialized at Joe's other elbow. At Ralph's side was his enormous, dingleberry-decorated and constantly farting shaggy dog named Rimpoche. “Hey,” Ralph said, “what's up? We been waiting for you.”

Basically, Ralph was the most exasperating and obnoxious SOB that Joe had ever liked. Around women he was a green chauvinist slime. A self-taught orphan who had had a remarkable rise producing records in the cutthroat rock world, at thirty-one too many acid groups had jarred loose the thread, and five years later Ralph lived alone in a tipi beside Tribby Gordon's Castle of Golden Fools (in which Joe and Heidi also resided). Frantically, Ralph dieted on molasses and lemon juice hoping to shave off a few of his 260 blubbery pounds. And gulped one Elavil and one Pertofrane antidepressant pill every 10:00
P.M.
just to make it through the night. By day, when he wasn't being an expert, part-time maintenance man on the Forest Service's two helicopters, Ralph tried, from a two-hundred-dollar-a-month crib over Peter Caspian's Hairstyling for Men on the plaza, to write pornography, male adventure stories, and gothic novels, while awaiting inspiration for his first serious novel. Since inspiration of any kind rarely arrived, Ralph spent most of his daylight and nighttime hours wandering hepatically around Chamisaville hustling the ladies, and begging his life to begin again. Dying terrified the beautiful slob. If he made no killing on Joe's dope deal, Ralph had plans to move, with Rimpoche, to an ashram somewhere in India, near Raipur. Or was it Darjeeling?

“Where,” Joe wanted to know, “is Tribby?”

“Over there. At our table near the exit.”

“That guy in the gorilla mask?”

“Yup.”

“And who's the female clown with the green rock in her nose?” The woman seated beside Tribby also wore a purple turban, green mascara, chalky powder on her sallow cheeks, glistening passion-pink lipstick, a bulky tie-dyed muumuu, and an acre of powder-blue poppette beads. A Tiparillo in a white plastic holder provided the proper finishing touch.

“She's a roadie I promoted in the Prince of Whales Café this afternoon. Name is Gypsy Girl. She's on her way from Bloomington to Mount Shasta to ‘get a hit of those powerful vibes out there.' She's cool. Her head's a little tipsy, of course—I think she's got a retention span of three seconds. Too much glue before her adolescent years.”

“We're just about to get involved in a major felony operation that is gonna require secrecy and nerves of steel,” Joe rasped, “and you have to pick up some kind of Fellini grotesque with a rock in her nose?”

“Oh don't worry about her,” Ralph said. “She's cool.”

And he forged ahead, pushing across the bar. “By the way,” he added nonchalantly, “apparently news of this coke your friend's bringing in on the two thirty-five bus has leaked around town. And certain parties aren't too happy.”

Joe's heart went off the three-meter board in his chest and belly-flopped somewhere down around his ankles. His pores immediately ejected a gallon of nervous stench. Oh shit, he thought—the cops? Or worse, an incipient drug war? It had never occurred to him that they might be violating somebody else's territory, and that that somebody might take umbrage. But then, it had never occurred to him that anyone else, besides their little group, could ever find out.

In Chamisaville?

They reached the table. Tribby said, “Ah-hah, all the dastardly conspirators are in place, so we can begin.” His voice came out muffled through the rubber mask. Underneath that mask, Custer-length prematurely white hair circled his half-bald dome. Tribby—or Theodore Reginald “Butch” Gordon, that is TRB (phoneticized to Tribby)—was an adventuresome maniac from Kitchener, Ontario. He had received a highly privileged private education in America from the ninth grade through college thanks to his hockey prowess. Next, he had triumphed at Harvard Law School and married a Cliffie named Rachel Parquielli, the cultured daughter of a Detroit Mafia family. Currently, she, like Joe's wife Heidi, taught preschoolers at the Shanti Institute. Tribby himself, somewhat haphazardly, plied a legal trade that had earned him the sobriquet “The Mortician of Marriages.” Physically, Tribby checked in as five foot seven inches and 160 pounds of plump, coordinated murder on the ice, and a daredevil Hotspur off it. With impunity, he switched from hang-gliders to helicopter skiing in Canadian avalanche country. Easily bored stiff, he was one of the few people Joe knew who enjoyed instigating free-for-alls in bars. In Vietnam, in the same outfit as Ralph Kapansky, he had flown Cobra gunships, and piloted little Cessnas that called in air strikes, laying waste the jungle with napalm.

“Aren't we all being just a trifle too blasé about this matter?” Joe said nervously.

“What matter?” Tribby asked.

“He means the dope deal you guys are gonna put together with that stuff on the bus tonight,” Gypsy Girl said giddily.

“Oh
no!
” Joe buried his head in his hands. “Who spilled the beans … Ralph?”

“Me?”
Ralph swiveled his head to the right and to the left, looking for somebody besides his innocent self. “My lips have been sealed, old chum.”

“Then who told her? Some stupid little bird in a banana tree?” He wanted to dive across the table and uppercut Ralph in his cynical rosy jowls. Sensing this, Rimpoche timidly growled.

“But I just guessed.” Gypsy Girl's face registered alarm, then cunning. “Nobody told me, honest. I mean, you know, I heard some dudes rapping in the laundromat, that's all.”

“Laundromat, shmaundromat!”

Tribby said, “Relax, it's all over town. Apparently Ray Verboten knows we're going to try and swing a deal in his territory and he doesn't like it.”

Ray Verboten—Coke Kingpin of Chamisaville. What he didn't push, didn't get moved, or so the saying went. Some claimed that Ray reported directly to Joseph Bonatelli: others insisted that Bonatelli would have no truck with the snow—he scorned it for being an aristocratic, snobbish high.

Joe groaned, “But how could he find out? This was supposed to be a secret operation.” Already he could see his house of cards was determined to crumble. He'd be lucky if only the entire army, navy, and air force was down at the bus station tonight. Right now, probably, the FBI, the state police, and local law-enforcement agents were setting up bugs outside the depot. They were arranging spotlights atop the Miracle Auto Supply building next door. And jamming their cameras full of infrared film in order to record every inch of the bust. Last but not least, no doubt they were snapping well-oiled clips bristling with dumdum cartridges into their Colt .45s and M-16 rifles, in case either Joe or his pal Peter made one false move.

LOCAL GARBAGE MAN AND PHILLY WAITER NAILED
AT BUS DEPOT WITH FIVE POUNDS OF UNCUT SNOW
!
STATE'S BIGGEST NARCOTICS HAUL EVER
!

Mimi McAllister, a dippy redheaded lesbian reflexologist who also worked for a woman's construction collective, bent over—in passing—and offered her snotty two bits: “Not to be a harbinger of bad news, boys, but you better steer clear of Ray Verboten.”

Joe said, “I think I'm gonna ralph. Why didn't we just draw up our plans in the town hall, over the radio, during a city council meeting?”

Scott Harrison, six foot three inches of shyster hustler in his early thirties, impeccably attired in his Universal Life Church custom-made velour jumpsuit, landed on top of them for a second. “Hey, hey,
hey,
” he chortled derisively. “Look what we have here—the French Connection brothers themselves!”

Joe shriveled, leered sickly, and attempted bravado: “What are you talking about?”

“What am I
talking
about?” Theatrically—who did he think he was, Kirby J. Hensley disguised as F. Lee Bailey?—Scott placed one hand against his chest, the better to accent his cheap raillery: “Word has it you've become the Meyer Lansky of the Chamisaville drug scene, José. ‘That Joe Miniver,' they're all saying. ‘He's gonna run Joe Bonatelli right out of town!'”

“Very funny, Scott. Go back to your graveyard.”

“No, seriously, my friend. You think that by stepping on and marketing the sugar that's arriving on the two thirty-five
A.M.
bus tonight you can raise enough cold cash to buy out Eloy Irribarren? I'm getting a stitch in my gut from laughing! He owes me that land—every bush, every flower, every mouse turd on the place.”

Joe mumbled, “We'll see.…”

“Well, you better take a Gatling gun down to the depot,” Scott called back over one shoulder. “I heard Ray Verboten and his hippie asesinos are gonna ring your chimes the second that bundle lands in your hot little paws—”

Clapping hands over his ears, Joe prayed, as did little kids, that if he couldn't hear Scott's poison tongue, nobody else could either.

Tribby said, “It appears the entire forces of NATO will be on maneuvers at the depot tonight.”

“Let's change the subject.” Joe knew Tribby was correct, of course. But how could he quash his own tragedy? The die was cast: obviously, he was fated to spend the rest of his life in jail (if he somehow escaped the 2:35 rendezvous alive!). And all because he had wanted a piece of land on which to build a humble little middle-class home for his wife and darling kiddies. In China, he thought, this never could have happened. I would have had an apartment, a job, free medical care, and, most importantly, a role in my nation's history. Instead, he was doomed to perish in incarcerated exile, fending off sado-masochistic fags and lurid rats as big as tomcats.