Chapter 7. Freelancers
I’m on my way up toward the Muni stop with my stuff slung over my shoulder when I notice a familiar looking dude motivating up the hill ahead of me. He’s tall, wearing black jeans and a black sleeveless shirt so I can see the goth tattoos slithering down the backs of his bare arms: “Donnerwetter” on the left and “Fresh Choice” on the right. He’s got his arms bent, rocking his shoulders to some personal funky beat, even though he doesn’t have any phones on. “Hey Fresh!” I yell. He turns around right away and waits for me. I throw him a handshake.
He hasn’t changed much – same blonde hair, which he’s always got trimmed ala mode, same reddish complexion like he’s just finished running a marathon, same jumpy eyes like spastic blue marbles. He’s carrying a blue sports bag, probably got a couple of pairs of his best underwear and some reefer in there, and a small paper grocery bag. I’m kind of glad to see him, although he wouldn’t have been my first choice. It’s been at least a year. “What’s up, dude,” he says. “Where you heading?”
“I’ve got a place for a couple of nights out on the avenues. Dude from my poetry class. Where you off to?”
“A meeting of the minds,” he says. “Maybe you should join me. Want some Fiddle Faddle?” He goes into the paper bag and pulls out a red carton and lets me get a handful, some kind of sugar-coated popcorn. We stand there munching next to the evening sun-swept grass and whispering trees of Duboce Park, where a bunch of happy-ass dogs are sprinting around in circles while their owners stand there yapping at each other like a scarecrow convention. “All right! We got a party,” says Fresh.
“Oh yeah?” My plan is to just head out to this dude’s apartment and crash for the night. It’s November, so it’s already getting dark, I can feel the chill of the outer planets, and I’d like to get settled in. On the other hand, wherever Fresh is there’s liable to be some kind of interesting entertainment at least, and probably something to smoke, too, which sounds better than an evening of network TV, or even cable. “Where is it? Is it near here?”
“Up the hill.” He motions with his head and starts walking again, crunching Fiddle Faddle and rocking his shoulders. I walk with him. Up the hill are houses, the glass and concrete of a hospital sticking up over the trees, and Buena Vista Park at the top, like a bad haircut. Not that I don’t trust Fresh, but he’s always been a seriously freaky dude, and his eyes haven’t lost that intensity he always had, like a little too interactive. I’m thinking that a measure of caution would be wise. “So, where is this place,” I ask him.
He lifts his chin up the hill again, still chewing. “Yeah but do you have an address? Do we know where we’re going?”
“I know where I’m going,” he says. “I’m going to a meeting of the minds.” Fresh, man. I’d forgotten that talking to him is like chatting with the Delphic oracle or something. I’m a little doubtful, but the thought of a party keeps me walking.
“So, is this a party or a meeting?”
He nods. “It’s a meeting.”
So now the question is what Fresh means by a meeting of the minds. It could be what the rest of the world calls a party. It’s hard to tell. He could also be meeting his dope connection, or just getting a blowjob in the park. While I’m thinking about this, he turns into the entrance of the hospital.
“This where the meeting is?” He nods. “Who’s in here?” “Garrett,” he says. He stuffs the Fiddle Faddle box back into the paper bag.
“No shit! What’s the matter with him?”
“Prostate cancer.” He nods reassuringly and lifts his index finger to hold my attention while he finishes his mouthful of Fiddle Faddle. “Metatastisized. He’s history, dude.”
This is a shock. You don’t see somebody for a few months and suddenly they’re on their fuckin deathbed. And Garrett – he’s one of those people you don’t think could even change, let alone die. I’m trying to absorb this. Frankly I’m not sure I want to see it, but Fresh is moving, so I follow him on up there.
“Did I tell you assholes to visit me,” Garrett says as we come in the room, but he’s smiling, with his reading glasses down on the end of his nose. He’s sitting up in the bed, wearing the hospital gown and the plastic bracelet, with various tubes plugged into little green things on his wrists or going under the blankets that cover his legs. The rolling tray is across his bed with an open carton of milk on it. Except for the smile, he looks dead already as far as I’m concerned. He’s the same color as the walls, and he must weigh about 25 pounds. A walking shadow, except he’s not walking. His hair hasn’t been combed and it’s sticking out all over his head. Marnie Kovac is sitting next to the bed with a curly hairdo I haven’t seen before and a book, looking annoyed that we interrupted them.
We drag a couple of chairs in from the hallway and sit down. It’s pretty crowded in there, what with the bed and all the medical equipment and the three visitors.
“Well, we’ve got a regular board meeting going now,” says Garrett. His voice is very hoarse.
“A meeting of the minds. Want some Fiddle Faddle?” Fresh has stopped rocking since we sat down and got pretty quiet, as quiet as he ever gets, like a kid in school. He pulls out the red carton again and offers it to Garrett, but he waves it off.
“I can’t believe you’re offering me that crap. You want me to get sick?” Garrett laughs, but it’s not the phlegmy smoker’s laugh I remember, it’s more like loud panting. I can’t get over the way his body has changed. For the first time since we met, when I was still a teenager, I actually feel bigger than him. In fact everyone in this room, even little Marnie, looks like they’re bulging with flesh and muscle compared to him. I’m trying to connect this with the hard body setting blind picks that I ran into all those Sundays on the basketball court. I can still feel the bony knee he jammed into my thigh one time I tried to drive around him. That never left a bruise, but it hurt for a couple of months. Garrett sweated a lot on the court and always took his shirt off, so nobody really wanted to guard him, partly because he’d make you look bad, but also because of the sweat, which always smelled like tobacco smoke. This was part of his strategy. I’m trying not to think about what he looks like now with his shirt off.
“Shit, man,” I start to say, but he waves that off, too, like the Fiddle Faddle.
“I’m actually glad you guys showed up. You’re both in my will. But I made Marnie the executor – she’s the only one of you that’s worth a shit. She’ll make sure you get your ten bucks, or whatever it is. The main thing I’m worried about is the art, though. If I can’t get somebody to take that, it’s going to end up in landfill. My life’s work!” He laughs the panting laugh again.
His art. After the Sunday basketball games Garrett would always take some of us kids out to breakfast at Boogaloo’s or one of those places. A lot of us were basically street kids with fucked up families, and we’d be out there on the court hung over from all the beer we’d drunk and the dope we’d smoked the night before, or worse. My father threw me out when I was 17, for example, so I was staying with friends in those days, doing some crank and cutting school and working for one of those organized shoplifting outfits. I was definitely headed for prison at best. More likely getting whacked by some rival gang.
Anyway, Garrett would kick our asses on the basketball court and then he’d buy us pancakes, and after breakfast sometimes he’d take a couple of us, or one of us, back to his apartment, which was actually a converted storefront, and he had this “art” hanging all over the walls. This was the kind of thing: paintings of Wal-Mart with customers wheeling bloody patients around on gurneys instead of shopping carts, or fleets of black oil tankers with antlers cruising across the flat snow of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Or there’d be a big red dick with an arrow through it, instead of a heart. Probably all of it’s still there, because nobody would buy that shit or even take it for free. That didn’t stop him from doing it, but he had to make his living by writing essays about other people’s art. Which he mus
t have been good at, because now and then you’d meet some art person at his place, saying nice things, or at least neutral things, about his stuff. I think he had some kind of reputation in the art world. He’d have a party and there’d be a hundred and fifty friends of his friends crammed into the storefront, some of them very well dressed, although they tried to look cool.
“Marnie’s already agreed to take half a dozen pieces,” he says. “I’m counting on you guys to take a couple each.”
Fresh and I look at each other. Garrett says “I don’t want to hear you don’t have wall space!”
“It’s not that I don’t have wall space, man,” I tell him. “I don’t have walls.”
I’m wondering whether a face that thin can actually have expressions any more. Whatever, I can’t read his. Also, his eyes don’t appear to be focusing all that well, even with the glasses. “You living out of a suitcase again?” he asks me.
I pat my black zipper bag. “It’s all right here.” So then he wants to know what I’m doing to get over. I’m driving cab, and as a matter of fact I’m not at all short of cash. But who can afford an apartment in this town, unless you moved in 20 years ago. Anyway, you can pretty much get by with a smart phone these days. Then he wants to know if I’ve got any reefer in the bag. He always did have a taste for it, and there was generally plenty of it around his place in the old days. Some of it got smoked when us kids were there, which occasionally led to other things. It wasn’t exactly Sunday school.
“Why, you want some?” I ask him, but I’m just laughing it off. I’m not about to admit I’ve got any weed with Fresh in the room. I already noticed he perked up immediately when he heard the question.
“What about you, Fresh?” Garrett’s giving him the look now. Marnie’s watching Fresh, too, but with a different expression. She’s also been checking me out, but not in a friendly way, especially my hands, which are a little dirty, and the black nail polish is chipping.
Fresh is hitting the Fiddle Faddle pretty hard now. “Yuh, I guess I could take one or two,” he says, mumbling with his mouth full. I know he used to have a basement place down the hill from here, with one window out on the sidewalk, so you could watch people’s feet going by. He was cooking up meth down there. Not exactly your ideal venue for displaying art. I don’t know if that place is still going, although he looks pretty clean, at least in terms of personal hygiene. I still can’t read Garrett’s expression, but I have to wonder what he’s thinking about his graduates. He says to me “You can take a couple of the small ones, at least. They’ll fit in that bag. They’re gonna be worth big bucks one of these days.” Well, maybe I’ll take one, I’m thinking, for sentimental reasons. I always kind of liked his ideas. They were pretty wild and interesting, and his colors could jump out at you. But there was still something missing. Talent, I guess you’d have to say. He couldn’t make the paint do what he wanted it to. It resisted him.
“What you been doing, Marnie?” I ask, because this whole subject of Garrett’s orphaned art is making me a little uncomfortable, and I’m afraid I’m going to get stuck with a lot of things I can’t use. I can see that Marnie doesn’t really want to talk to me that much, but she stares at me through her thick glasses anyway and says “I’m writing a book”. And she knows I’m going to ask her what it’s about, so she says “It’s about trusting your intuition.” She tacks on in a hurry, before I can ask her what that means, “Learning to have faith in the . . . influences that are reaching us from outside, all the time, and act on them.” I remember she always had some kind of Buddhist trip going, but it seems to have gotten out of hand. I don’t say that, though, just nod. She glances at Fresh, who’s giving her the blue marble stare, with his eyebrows bobbing. I’d have to guess there’s still some crank involved there. And you don’t need any yogic training to sense the influences that are reaching Fresh from Marnie’s direction. She gives him this long look, with the new curls hanging down along her cheeks.
I look back at Garrett. They must have him on some kind of pain drugs. But even though his eyes are half-closed now and like I said not focusing all that well, I know he’s seeing the same thing I am. “You doing anything besides driving cab?” he says slowly.
“Poetry class. I’m still writing that shit.” He nods after a bit.
“That’s good,” he says. “Gotta keep working. I was halfway through a painting when they hauled me in here. I brought it with me so I could keep thinking about it.” He raises his chin toward the shelf across the room from the bed. There’s a small canvas propped up there, about 9 by 12, with a painting on it, the beginnings of a painting. I can’t tell what it is – it looks like half of a pinwheel, with stuff flying out in all directions into a black background. It’s got his usual freaky color scheme, but all in all I don’t foresee any more success for this one than for all the other ones. “You could take that one,” he says.
“It’s not finished,” I remind him. “You need to finish it.” He sticks his lower lip out a little bit and shakes his head, and closes his eyes the rest of the way. I watch him for a minute, still trying to get up to date on the way his body looks. The skin on his arms is loose, with a lot of nasty-looking purple bruises, and his legs are stretched in front of him under the hospital blanket like a couple of dead knobby sticks, spread out a little bit. Hard to imagine him running the court on those things. I can’t help wondering if prostate cancer has any special effect on your sexual apparatus. I’m checking it out, but I can’t even see a lump there. Do they amputate something?
In the old days you could hardly shut him up. He was about the only adult we knew that talked to us like he assumed we actually had a future. We only half believed him, but we hung around anyway and listened, and not just for the smoke and other stuff, because it was a lot better than what you got at home. And a couple of Garrett’s disciples did actually develop something like a career. I’ve run into Marv a couple of times, driving the 22 Fillmore, and he’s got a wife and an apartment and a couple of kids. Hopefully Garrett put him in the will, too. Brent got a teacher credential, but I think he only subs. Brent was absolutely a gang-banger, but now I heard he goes to the damn ballet. Maybe they would have done all that anyway.
I’m getting kind of tired of watching Marnie emanate on Fresh and try to tune in the message he’s sending back, which is basically “I’m high and crazy too.” But she’s got so much faith in her intuition that she doesn’t even notice he’s just freaky, not to mention gay. I don’t generally swing in that direction, so it’s not like I’ve got anything going for Marnie myself. Between the two of them I’d probably prefer Fresh. It’s just them pairing off like that right here, or at least she thinks they are, and meanwhile Garrett is going off on his own trip, too, not opening his eyes at all any more. That leaves me.
So I pack up and pull out. I take the painting, too. I don’t really want the damn thing, but what if Garrett wakes up and sees I didn’t even bother to take it? Fresh gives me the handshake and “Thanks for meeting with us, dude,” but I’m about as meaningful to him as an out-of-service bus. Marnie’s glad to have my negative waves cleared out of the room, so that’s OK.
It’s already dark. Once the N finally comes along, I’m a little worried that I’m too late, and the dude from poetry class will have gone out or something. I don’t really want to end up under a bush in the Panhandle tonight, although I can deal with that if I have to.
I take out the half painting and look at it for minute. I haven’t been to Garrett’s place in probably a couple of years, but I’m going to miss it anyway. It was always this cool little scene you knew you could drop in on any time. The painting’s an ugly-ass thing, but I have to smile a little bit because Garrett got me to take it, and now here it is, traveling with me out into the darkness by the ocean. He’ll get other people to take the rest of his stuff, too, because a lot of people owe him, and it’ll all spin out in one direction or another, and go through who knows what adventures. And then it’ll end up some day i
n that landfill he’s worried about. No Metropolitan Museum for Garrett. But this one piece is safe, for the time being at least, packed away in my black zipper bag.