“Both of their names were on the guest list,” I said, “written in black and white for crying out loud.”
“She said she was going to get him in for helping her get us an audition at Caesar’s. But, God, he wasn’t supposed to sit with our party. Domino got us these tables special.”
“There’s no getting rid of him now,” I snapped. “Sshhh. Live with it.”
“Shit,” Seth said.
Eddy checked to see if any bouncers were walking the catwalk, then I saw him pass Uwe a nose bullet filled with cocaine. Uwe helped himself to several snorts.
“I owe you one, buddy,” I heard Uwe say to Eddy.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Eddy replied. “Have another. There’s a good man.” Eddy stood on his chair and yelled “P.D.! P.D.! P.D.!” at the top of his lungs. Eddy was smashed.
Jay laughed uncontrollably. He reached across their table and snatched the nose bullet from Uwe. Zoe put her finger to her lips and told the boys to shush.
There was a sheet of imaginary glass which prohibited conversation between our two tables. Abbey and Seth continued to say nasty things about Uwe, not seeming to care whether he heard or not. But Uwe was so busy chumming up to Eddy, and Zoe was so busy explaining her new theory to Jay on how to win at craps, that the four of them were oblivious to the animosity. Zoe, Eddy, Jay, and Uwe were having more fun than I was. I felt stuck with sour grapes.
Sly came to the terrace and took our orders for drinks. “Make it quick, gang. The show is about to start. There’s going to be a bloody riot in here tonight. The Pricey Dexters are just super,” she said. Sly glanced around to see if any of the other cocktail waitresses were looking and gave Jay a wet kiss on the cheek.
“All right,” Jay said proudly.
Uwe offered one side of his tanned but still pockmarked cheek to Sly. “What about me?”
“I’m a good girl,” Sly said. “Only Jay gets my lovin’. It’s not for just any gent.”
Uwe turned to Zoe. “What about you? Will you give a poor boy a kiss?” he asked obnoxiously.
“No way, Uwe,” Zoe said. “Why don’t you calm down and mind your manners.” Zoe was not inviting Uwe’s attention, yet he was still a nuisance. He reminded me of a mangy dog, making messes with his slobber, his unsightly red thing hanging out.
“Mellow out, dude,” Jay told Uwe. Uwe was hogging the nose bullet again, and Jay reached across the table to take it from him. Jay offered a snort to Sly. She refused because she was working.
When Sly returned with the orders, I heard Eddy ask Uwe, “What brings you to Tahoe?”
“I decided to bum around a little before I get serious about studying again,” Uwe said.
“College?”
“Law school.”
Eddy nodded. “Do you like to ski?”
“Fuck yes, I can’t wait until the snow falls.”
“No, I mean water ski. I’d like to take you out sometime. Ask Jay, I have a great ship—the Blue Max.”
“I like you Eddy. You have class. How’d you ever get to be friends with a group like this?”
Eddy smiled. “Jay told me you used to play in Bandit. Did you quit or something?”
“Yeah, it was time for me to move on. I have big plans for myself, understand?”
I watched him glare across the table at Jay and Zoe. Zoe looked away. Jay shrugged. “Cheers, dude,” Jay said, gulping some beer. Uwe took a swig of his drink, too, and slammed down the glass. His laugh sounded more like a snarl.
A A A
"Hey teacher,” I say to the bartender, “another straight gin on the rocks.” He looks at me as if I’m some drunk slime ball. “Ah come on,” I say. “I’m no Mario Andretti. I ain’t driving. I’m with a whole bunch of great people.”
Sour images of the friggin’ great people spin by like some movie projector on rewind. The gin has a cold piny bite. It feels good on my throat, which is parched from the big roach Jay and I smoked outside on the dock after the show. Fuck it, I think. Fuck this shit. I slam down the rest of my drink.
“Hey, come on, teacher, I’m thirsty,” I say. The round man who looks like he used to work in a barber shop gives me another. Skeptical, he makes it short. I shove it back at him and say, “Up to the rim. My money buys it up to the rim.”
This bar is in a quiet finger that juts out one side of the Lake Club; the satellite bar is connected to the main floor by a sort of tunnel. I can see the big, blue lake and the private dock through panes of glass. The bar itself is against the windows, but the rows of bottles are kept down low so people can look out the friggin’ view-window when they’re sittin’ here gettin’ shit-faced like me.
Domino is such a good drummer that it embarrasses me. Deep down everyone is laughing at me because I suck eggs compared to him. That’s why Abbey and I had a fight.
“God he’s awesome,” she says to me. “He’s gotten sssooo good. You know, Danny, you ought to try that beat, that lick that solo….”
The show gets over with, and I say, “Go on, run to him. I’ll never be that good. Go on, run to that short sonofabitch.”
“You asshole,” she says, "I hate you.” She’s gone. Right then, she’s out of there.
So I’m sitting here thinking about a couple other shitty experiences I’ve had, times when my friggin’ ego got a rude kick right in the friggin’ balls. The socks, maybe? Ha. Ha. Socks. Oh fuck, I hate myself.
Life can be the shits. Like in high school when I used to be so friggin’ smart, a goddamn Mentally Gifted Minor. Winning all those awards in math, entering school essay contests, joining the honor society, and all that bullshit. The ole parents thought I was a child prodigy or something. They bought me a new car and said I was bound for Stanford.
But the day of the SAT. Man oh man, I looked at that paper and went blank. Suddenly I was all tensed up, sweating. The questions weren’t that hard. I just couldn’t pick up my pencil and fill in the bubbles. When the results came, the old man was disgusted, thought I was a moron, said I didn’t have the stuff. His advice was: “Don’t bother to retake it. For love of Mary, go to a state school. What the hell is the matter with you, Daniel A. Vikker?”
Oh God. Or the time I got popped for drunk driving. Man, I kept that covered up pretty good. Just a few guys in my freshman dorm were the only ones that knew. Didn’t seem fair. I drank just enough to get popped. One too many. That stupid beer party and those dumb, stuck-up chicks that made me squeal out of there and get loose in my car. Doing the public service was the worst part. Painting Avila Pier like I was some chain gang member, having to keep a low profile so that friends on the beach didn’t recognize me.
This time. This friggin’ time. All the humiliation comes from within. There’s no one telling me I’m stupid, no one to watch me. It’s just knowing Domino sounds five times better live than he does on his record. He’s friggin’ fancy, friggin’ clean, friggin’ FAST. It’s so goddamn embarrassing thinking about all the times I’ve played with Jay and Abbey and Seth. I thought I sounded pretty good. But all along they knew my playing was a joke compared with Domino’s. There’s no comparison. No friggin’ comparison. The whole idea of me playing in a band is a joke.
I look out the window at the dark water. It laughs at me, too. Case Johnson strolls by—that arrogant sonofabitch manager. He tells the barkeeper to stop serving. What the hell does Case Johnson know? I’m so fucked up I don’t think I can move off the stool.
I see Abbey walk out on the dock. I know it’s her. I know her anywhere. Oh, Abbey, I think, it’s safe to watch you from here. Where’s Zoe, I think. Or Jay or Seth. How come they’re all not out on the dock talking about how much I suck?
It’s like a friggin’ Sunday afternoon movie. There’s a moon out, a big piece of blue cheese. The moon reflects off Abbey’s hair and makes a white patch on the top of her head. I love you so much, I think. Suddenly I think there might be a cha
nce. “Get a friggin’ camera,” I say to the barkeeper who just told me to push off. “Look out the window at that girl on the dock. Isn’t that some picture? You know I love that girl? I’ll come right out and say it.”
Ah, what a letdown. The little shrimp appears in the picture. Get out of there you friggin’ shrimp. I just got a handle on my problem with you. She told me enough times it’s over with you guys and I believe it; so get out of there shrimp. Domino walks to the end of the pier and stands next to her. Push him in, I think. This is funny. Push him in.
They’re hugging. This is some trick, I think. Some friggin’ optical illusion. I feel sick as he touches her. But I have to watch to find out about her side of it. I make myself watch.
They kiss and I watch his hands go all over her and hers go all over him. I start to cry. This is total evisceration, I think. I love her so much. My tears are hot and silent. They ride down my cheeks like they have wheels, pressing on my skin. Some turn the corner and spill into my mouth. I taste their salt. I press my lips together so tightly to keep the fluttering in my chest and throat from coming out my mouth that my nose runs. I don’t want anyone to hear, to see, or to laugh.
The bartender asks, “Where’s your friends, pal? We gotta get you out of here.”
I can’t face anybody. I stumble out a side door before he can come around the bar. The bartender does not follow. I have no coat. It’s dark and cold outside. My face turns icy. I smell rotten garbage in my dark hideaway alley. I crouch next to a dumpster, intending to stay there until my guts have turned to stone.
A A A
After Domino and the Pricey Dexters played out their gig at the Lake Club and returned to L.A., Bandit’s routine continued somewhat as it had before. We went on playing at the Lone Star, but grew increasingly tired of it. In time, the novelty of a place wears off—even a place with Mr. Clobber. Bandit’s sights were locked on the casinos and, as ever, the Lake Club.
And what of Abbey and me?
I told her what I saw that night, and her response made me go limp. Like so many other aspects of her life, she said Domino was none of my business.
Our midnight rendezvous ceased; our conversations grew more and more polite and timid; and I continued to love her despite everything. Yet there was nothing I could do with our problem: we were prime numbers with no divisor. How could I persist without answers, in a relationship where one plus one doesn’t equal two?
Abbey and I were sitting at opposite ends of the room ignoring each other, when Zoe and Seth entered the cabin, after having gone into Tahoe City on errands.
Jay got off the couch and helped them carry in some groceries.
“Thanks for letting me use your truck again, Danny,” Zoe said. She threw me the keys.
“What’s up, you two?”
“Nothing,” I said, not looking at Abbey.
“I have something for you,” Zoe told her. She took a letter out of her briefcase. “I checked our P.O. box, and you received a letter from Izy’s boyfriend.”
“I can’t wait to see what they’re up to,” said Abbey. “You know all the times you and I have gone to make calls lately. I don’t know where on earth Izy’s been the last couple of weeks.”
“You know what I think?” Zoe offered. “I’ll bet they’re getting married.”
“You know what I think?” Abbey replied. “I think you’re right.”
Both girls let out excited screams and Abbey tore open the letter. Abbey was much happier now than she had been stirring around the cabin with me.
After reading the letter, she said nothing. Zoe kept saying, “Well? Well?” But Abbey didn’t seem to hear her. The muscles that controlled her face quit functioning; her eyes became cold, wide ovals; her skin took pale; her beautiful mouth hung open like a wound.
The rest of us sat outside the door to the girls’ bedroom, waiting, feeling helpless as we listened to Abbey and Zoe weep. The weeping of the two became the weeping of one, and Zoe solemnly joined us. Her face was swollen and red. When she tried to speak above a whisper, her words became chopped sobs, so she whispered to us: “Something awful has happened. Izy and her boyfriend, Carmen, were in a car accident. A drunk hit them head-on. Carmen was lucky. Abbey’s mother is dead.”
Chapter 11
Hector
When the facts surface and, finally, one plus one equals two, wise men throw their Boolean algebra out the window ...
Zoe and I were driving south from Lake Tahoe to Santa Barbara, when she finally told me the whole story about Abbey and Isabella Butler. With no abridgment of Zoe’s insistence upon detail, and with all of her passion for events giving historical perspective, here is what Zoe Cleopatra Hash said:
A petite seven-pound, eleven-ounce baby girl was born March 21, 1960. If the little girl had been born one day earlier, she would have been a Pisces rather than an Aries. Astrology is terribly inexact, however. Abbey had acted like a Gemini ever since Zoe had known her.
Another significant point—at least as far as studious Zoe was concerned—was this: March 21, 1960, was the same day a man by the name of Jethrow R. Tunnelson patented the “Genohydraulific Link,” a design for the primary mechanical linkage between a carrier vehicle and track in a bigger design, also Tunnelson’s brainchild, for a state-wide mass transit system for California. Tunnelson’s idea was ingenious. Later on, it ended up being cited in many socio-technological textbooks. But in 1960, his brilliant proposal for the “California Mass Transit,” or “CMT,” featuring the Genohydraulific Link, was shot down by a corporate board of directors. They said Tunnelson’s proposal was unrealistic and impractical—one director even went so far as to call Tunnelson and his CMT, “a ludicrous dog ‘n’ pony show.” Several years henceforth, Tunnelson died of a heart attack. Twenty-one years later, it was too late for a lot of people like Isabella. Everyone—including drunks— continued to drive their smog-bellowing automobiles everywhere. Oh my.
“Abbey Irene Butler” hadn’t been sixty seconds out of the womb, before the head obstetrician at U.C. Berkeley Medical Center said two things one right after the other, which Isabella Butler would never forget: “I’ve never heard a more delightful little cry…. I’ve never seen a newborn with such devilishly cute eyes….”
Abbey lay on her mother’s stomach; a funny audience of elves dressed in surgical garb encircled mother and newborn child. When little Abbey started to wail, it was as deafening as the sound of cracking ice, but the small crowd around Isabella didn’t seem to mind. There was something magical about the tiny girl’s twinkling, tear-filled eyes that made the doctors and nurses stand at fond attention.
Young Isabella was full of ethereal happiness as she swaddled her child in the recovery room. Motherhood suddenly felt right to her, and it seemed her life had taken a turn for the best. Actually seeing her baby—actually touching, smelling, and hugging the warm rubbery flesh—was wonderfully reassuring. Although Izy was an optimist, and found such solace in her music, art, and in her passion for the Society Pages of the Los Angeles Times, up until that point, her existence had been all but charmed.
When Isabella left her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, to attend University of California, Berkeley, the Cool-daddy-O Fifties were in full swing and about to collide with the Tune-in-Turn-on-Drop-out Sixties, and young Izy, who was sick of her parents—and their droning television, cigarettes, and emphysemic coughing—willed herself to become a raving beatnik/musician. She was tired of life being dull.
Her first two years at Berkeley, Izy tried drugs, the next step beyond heavy petting, and various other forms of madcap adventure, all for the first time. Izy was popular around campus because she was pretty, and could sing and play the guitar. She wrote her own songs and sang them on the steps of the Administration Building. She could also play the piano and the violin, even better than she played the guitar, but those instruments weren’t in at the time.
Unfortu
nately, the girls in Izy’s college dormitory became jealous of Izy’s popularity and started a rumor that she had gonorrhea. There was a V.D. scare going around campus at the time.
“She’s a tramp,” the dorm girls said in the halls as they passed by Izy.
The young men in the dorms were nicer than the girls to Izy’s face, yet behind closed doors, the boys’ meanness exceeded the girls’. “Izy’s got a scabby cunt! Izy’s got a scabby cunt!” they chanted like football players breaking a huddle. And the walls to the dorm were very thin.
For the record, Izy did not have gonorrhea. Yes, some dorm girls did see her at a free clinic, but she was only there because she had a yeast infection and didn’t have enough money to be treated privately. Oh my.
But Izy was a survivor. Her junior year in college, she got a job at a small dinner club playing piano, and she moved off-campus into an apartment. More and more, she fell in love with her musical studies. Her professors at Berkeley greatly encouraged her. They told her that when she applied herself she was a virtuosa.
Then one night at work, Izy met Ethan Chamberlin. He was handsome, worldly, and very complimentary of Izy’s piano playing. Since leaving the dorms, Izy had been lonely, and she found Mr. Chamberlin’s affections flattering. They went to a play the next night and consequently shacked up in Izy’s small studio apartment.
There were several things Izy didn’t know about dashing Mr. Chamberlin: (1) his real name was Jeff something, (2) he acted suave and sophisticated because he’d found this to be an effective guise for getting pretentious young skirts into bed, and (3) he was an Army clerk on two weeks furlough from a military base somewhere in Arizona.
Jeff something, a.k.a. Ethan Chamberlin, left no address when he returned to Arizona. Izy never saw him again. He also left her pregnant.
Isabella’s mother, Irene, died of lung cancer during Izy’s first trimester of pregnancy. Her father, Jack, died the year before from the same disease. Shortly before Isabella Butler received her bachelor’s degree, she gave birth to the by-product of her torrid, deceptive affair with Mr. Chamberlin. Wary of beaus and cigarettes, yet truly pleased and content with her baby daughter, Izy proceeded on with graduate work at Berkeley and received her Ph.D. in music when Abbey was four years old.