"I don't know if I can hold it down," I said, but it turned out I could. When I'd finished the mug he held for me, I asked for more dope. He administered two very stingy snorts.
"Where'd you get it?" I asked as he tucked the bottle back into a front pocket of the jeans he was now wearing.
He smiled. It lit up his face and made him twenty-five again, with a wife he loved and a young son he adored. "Jamie," he said, "I've been working amusement parks and the carny circuit for a long time now. If I couldn't find drugs, I'd be either blind or an idiot."
"I need more. I need a shot."
"No, a shot's what you want, and you're not going to get it from me. I have no interest in helping you get high. I just don't want you to go into convulsions and die in my boondocker. Go to sleep now. It's nearly midnight. If you're better in the morning, we'll discuss many things, including how to detach the monkey currently riding on your back. If you're not better, I'm taking you to either St. Francis or the OSU Medical Center."
"Good luck getting them to take me," I said. "I'm two steps from broke and my medical plan is convenience store Tylenol."
"In the words of Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow, for tomorrow is another day."
"Fiddle-de-dee," I croaked.
"If you say so."
"Give me a little more." The short snorts he'd doled out were about as useful to me as a Marlboro Light to a guy who's been chain-smoking Chesterfield Kings all his life, but even short snorts were better than nothing.
He considered, then parceled out two more hits. Even stingier than the last pair.
"Giving heroin to a man with a bad case of the flu," he said, and chuckled. "I must be crazy."
I peeked under the blanket and saw he'd undressed me down to my skivvies. "Where are my clothes?"
"In the closet. I segregated them from mine, I'm afraid. They smelled a trifle gamy."
"My wallet's in the front pocket of my jeans. There's a claim check for my duffel bag and my guitar. The clothes don't matter, but the guitar does."
"Bus station or train station?"
"Bus." The dope might only have been powder, and administered in medicinal quantities, but either it was very good stuff or it was hitting my depleted body especially hard. The soup was warm in my belly, and my eyelids felt like sashweights.
"Sleep, Jamie," he said, and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. "If you're going to beat the bug, you have to sleep."
I lay back on the pillow. It was much softer than the one in my Fairgrounds Inn room. "Why are you calling yourself Dan?"
"Because it's my name. Charles Daniel Jacobs. Now go to sleep."
I was going to, but there was one other thing I had to ask. Adults change, sure, but if they haven't been struck by some debilitating disease or disfigured by an accident, you can usually recognize them. Children, on the other hand . . .
"You knew me. I could see it. How?"
"Because your mother lives in your face, Jamie. I hope Laura's well."
"She's dead. Her and Claire both."
I don't know how he took it. I closed my eyes, and ten seconds later I was out.
*
When I woke up I felt cooler, but the shakes were back bigtime. Jacobs put a drugstore fever strip on my forehead, held it there for a minute or so, then nodded. "You might live," he said, and gave me two more teensy snorts from the brown bottle. "Can you get up and eat some scrambled eggs?"
"Bathroom first."
He pointed, and I made my way into the small cubicle, holding onto things. I only had to pee, but I was too weak to stand up, so I sat down and did it girly-style. When I came out, he was scrambling eggs and whistling. My stomach rumbled. I tried to recall when I'd last eaten something more substantial than canned soup. Cold cuts backstage before the gig two nights ago came to mind. If I'd eaten anything after that, I couldn't remember it.
"Ingest slowly," he said, setting the plate on the dinette table. "You don't want to bark it right back up again, do you?"
I ate slowly, and cleaned the plate. He sat across from me, drinking coffee. When I asked for some, he gave me half a cup, heavy on the half-and-half.
"The trick with the picture," I said. "How did you do that?"
"Trick? You wound me. The image on the backdrop is coated with a phosphorescent substance. The camera is also an electrical generator--"
"That much I got."
"The flash is very powerful and very . . . special. It projects the image of the subject onto that of the girl in the evening dress. It doesn't hold for long; the area is too large. The pictures I sell, on the other hand, last much longer."
"Long enough so she can show it to her grandchildren? Really?"
"Well," he said, "no."
"How long?"
"Two years. Give or take."
"By which time you're long gone."
"Indeed. And the pictures that matter . . ." He tapped his temple. "Up here. For all of us. Don't you agree?"
"But . . . Reverend Jacobs . . ."
I saw a momentary flicker of the man who had preached the Terrible Sermon back when LBJ was president. "Please don't call me that. Plain old Dan will do. That's who I am now. Dan the Lightning Portraits Man. Or Charlie, if that's more comfortable for you."
"But she turned around. The girl on your background did a complete three-sixty."
"A simple trick of motion picture projection." But he glanced away as he said it. Then he looked back at me. "Do you want to get better, Jamie?"
"I am better. Must have been one of those twenty-four-hour things."
"It's not a twenty-four-hour thing, it's the flu, and if you try leaving here for the bus station, it'll be back full blast by noon. Stay here and yes, I think you'll probably be better in a few days. But it's not the flu I'm talking about."
"I'm okay," I said, but now it was my turn to look away. What brought my eyes back front and center was the little brown bottle. He was holding it by the spoon and swinging it on its little silver chain like a hypnotist's amulet. I reached for it. He held it away.
"How long have you been using?"
"Heroin? About three years." It had been six. "I had a motorcycle accident. Smashed the hell out of my hip and leg. They gave me morphine--"
"Of course they did."
"--and then stepped me down to codeine. That sucked, so I started chugging cough syrup to go with the pills. Terpin hydrate. Ever heard of it?"
"Are you kidding? On the circuit they call it GI Gin."
"My leg healed, but it never healed right. Then--I was in a band called the Andersonville Rockers, or maybe they'd changed the name to the Georgia Giants by then--this guy introduced me to Tussionex. That was a big step in the right direction, as far as pain control went. Listen, do you really want to hear this?"
"Absolutely."
I shrugged as if it didn't matter much to me one way or the other, but it was a relief to spill it out. Before that day in Jacobs's Bounder, I never had. In the bands I played with, everyone just shrugged and looked the other way. As long as you kept showing up, that was, and remembered the chords to "In the Midnight Hour"--which, believe me, ain't rocket science.
"It's another cough syrup. More powerful than terpin hydrate, but only if you knew how to get at the good stuff. To do that, you tied a string around the neck of the bottle and twirled it like a mad bastard. The centrifugal force separated the syrup into three levels. The good stuff--the hydrocodone--was in the middle. You used a straw to suck it up."
"Fascinating."
Not very, I thought. "After awhile, when I was still having pain, I started scoring morphine again. Then I discovered heroin worked as well, and at half the price." I smiled. "There's a kind of drug stock market, you know. When everybody started using rock cocaine, horse took a nosedive."
"Your leg looks fine to me," he said mildly. "There's a bad scar, and there's obviously been some muscle loss, but not that much. Some doctor did a fine job on you."
"I can walk, yeah. But
you try standing on a leg that's full of metal clips and screws for three hours a night, under hot lights and with a nine-pound guitar strapped on. Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don't tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they're on the inside."
He nodded. "As someone who's suffered . . . losses . . . I can relate to that. But here's something I bet you already know, deep down. It's your brain that's hurting, and blaming it on your leg. Brains are crafty that way."
He put the bottle back in his pocket (I watched it go with deep regret) and leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine. "But I believe I can take care of you with an electrical treatment. No guarantees, and the treatment might not cure your mental craving forever, but I believe I can give you what the football players call running room."
"Cure me the way you did Connie, I suppose. When that kid clotheslined him with a ski pole."
He looked surprised, then laughed. "You remember that."
"Of course! How could I forget it?" I also remembered how Con had refused to go with me to see Jacobs after the Terrible Sermon. It wasn't exactly like Peter denying Jesus, but it was in the same ballpark.
"A dubious cure at best, Jamie. More likely the placebo effect. I'm offering you an actual cure, one that will--or so I believe--short-circuit the painful withdrawal process."
"Well of course you'd say that, wouldn't you?"
"You're judging me by my carny persona. But that's all it is, Jamie--a persona. When I'm not wearing my show suit and making a living, I try to tell the truth. In fact, I mostly tell the truth when I'm working. That picture will amaze Miss Cathy Morse's friends."
"Yeah," I said. "For two years, anyway. Give or take."
"Stop dodging and answer my question. Do you want to get better?"
What came to mind was the PS of the note Kelly Van Dorn had slid under my door. In prison a year from now if I didn't clean up my act, he'd written. And that was if I struck lucky.
"I got straight three years ago." Sort of true, although I had been on the Marijuana Maintenance Program. "Did it righteous, went through the shakes and sweats and the Hershey squirts. My leg was so bad I could barely hobble. It's some kind of nerve damage."
"I believe I can take care of that, too."
"What are you, some kind of miracle worker? Is that what you want me to believe?"
He had been sitting on the carpet beside the bed. Now he got up. "That's enough for now. You need to sleep. You're still quite a long way from well."
"Then give me something that will help me."
He did so without argument, and it helped me. It just didn't help enough. By 1992, real help came in the needle. There was nothing else. You don't just wave a magic wand over that shit and make it gone.
Or so I believed.
*
I stayed in his Bounder for the best part of a week, living on soup, sandwiches, and nasally administered doses of heroin that were just enough to keep the worst of the shakes at bay. He brought my guitar and duffel. I kept a spare set of works in the duffel, but when I looked (it was the second night, and he was working the crowds at his Portraits in Lightning shy), the kit was gone. I begged him to give it back, along with enough heroin so I could cook and shoot up.
"No," he said. "If you want to mainline--"
"I've only been skin-popping!"
He gave me an Oh, please look. "If you want that, you'll have to find the proper equipment yourself. If you're not well enough to do it tonight, you will be by tomorrow, and around this place I'm sure it wouldn't take you long. Just don't come back here."
"When do I get this so-called miracle cure?"
"When you're well enough to withstand a small application of electricity to your frontal lobe."
I felt cold at that. I swung my legs out of his bed (he was sleeping on the pullout couch) and watched him take off his show clothes, hanging them up carefully and replacing them with a pair of plain white pajamas that looked like something inmate extras might wear in a horror movie set in an insane asylum. Sometimes I wondered if he might not belong in an asylum, and not because he was running what was essentially a carny wonder-show. Sometimes--especially when he talked about the curative powers of electricity--he got a look in his eyes that didn't seem sane. It was not unlike the way he'd looked when he preached himself out of a job in Harlow.
"Charlie . . ." This was what I called him now. "Are you talking about shock treatment?"
He looked at me soberly, buttoning the top of his white inmate pajamas. "Yes and no. Certainly not in the conventional sense, because I don't intend to treat you with conventional electricity. My spiel sounds unbelievable, because it's what the customers want. They don't come here for reality, Jamie, they come for fantasy. But there really is a secret electricity, and its uses are manifold. I just haven't discovered all of them yet, and that includes the one that interests me most."
"Want to share?"
"No. I gave several exhausting performances, and I need sleep. I hope you'll still be here in the morning, but if you're not, that's your choice."
"Once upon a time you would have said there are no real choices, only God's will."
"That was a different man. A young fellow with naive beliefs. Will you wish me goodnight?"
I did, then lay in the bed he had given up so I could use it. He was no longer a preacher, but still of the Good Samaritan stripe in so many ways. I hadn't been naked, like the man who had been set upon by robbers on his way to Jericho, but heroin had robbed me of plenty for sure. He had fed me, and given me shelter, and propped me up with just enough horse to keep me from going out of my fucking mind. The question now was whether or not I wanted to give him a chance to blast my brainwaves flat. Or outright kill me by shooting megavolts of "special electricity" into my head.
Five times, maybe ten or a dozen, I thought I would get up and drag the midway until I found somebody who'd sell me what I needed. That need was like a drillbit in my head, boring in deeper and deeper. Nasally administered sips of H didn't cut it. I needed a big blast direct to the central nervous system. Once I actually swung my legs out of bed and reached for my shirt, determined to do it and get it done, but then I lay back down again, shaking and sweating and twitching.
Finally I began to drift off. I let myself go, thinking Tomorrow. I'll leave tomorrow. But I stayed. And on my fifth morning--I think it was the fifth--Jacobs slipped behind the wheel of his Bounder, keyed the engine, and said, "Let's take a ride."
I had no choice about it, unless I wanted to open the door and jump out, because we were already rolling.
VI
The Electrical Treatment. A Nighttime Excursion. One Pissed-Off Okie. A Ticket on the Mountain Express.
Jacobs's electrical workshop was in West Tulsa. I don't know what that part of town is like now, but in 1992 it was a forlorn industrial zone where a lot of the industries seemed to be dead or dying. He pulled into the parking lot of an all-but-destitute strip mall on Olympia Avenue and parked in front of Wilson Auto Body.
"It was standing empty for a long time, that's what the Realtor told me," Jacobs said. He was dressed in faded jeans and a blue golf shirt, his hair washed and combed, his eyes sparkling with excitement. Just looking at him made me nervous. "I had to take a year's lease, but it was still dirt cheap. Come on in."
"You ought to take down the sign and put up your own," I said. I framed it with hands that were only shaking a little. "'Portraits in Lightning, C. D. Jacobs, Proprietor.' It would look good."
"I won't be in Tulsa that long," he said, "and the portraits are really just a way of supporting myself while I conduct my experiments. I've come a long way since my pastoral days, but I've still got a long way to go. You have no idea. Come in, Jamie. Come in."
He unlocked a door and led me through an office that was empty of furniture, although I could still see square clean patches on the grimy linoleum, where the legs of a desk had once stood. On the wall was a curling calendar with April 1989 sh
owing.
The garage had a corrugated metal roof and I expected it to be baking under the September sun, but it was wonderfully cool. I could hear the whisper of air conditioners. When he flicked a bank of switches--recently modified, judging from the makeshift way the wires stuck out of the uncovered holes where the plates had been--a dozen brilliant lights came on. If not for the oil-darkened concrete and the rectangular caverns where two lifts had once been, you would have thought it was an operating theater.
"It must cost a fortune to air-condition this place," I said. "Especially when you've got all those lights blazing."
"Dirt cheap. The air conditioners are my own design. They draw very little power, and most of that I generate myself. I could generate all of it, but I wouldn't want Tulsa Power and Light down here, snooping around to find out if I was volt-jacking, somehow. As for the lights . . . you could wrap a hand around one of the bulbs without burning yourself. Or even heating your skin, for that matter."
Our footfalls echoed in all that empty space. So did our voices. It was like being in the company of phantoms. It just feels that way because I'm strung out, I told myself.
"Listen, Charlie--you're not messing with anything radioactive, are you?"
He grimaced and shook his head. "Nuclear's the last thing I'm interested in. It's energy for idiots. A dead end."
"So how do you generate the juice?"
"Electricity breeds electricity, if you know what you're doing. Leave it at that. Step over here, Jamie."
There were three or four long tables at the end of the room with electrical stuff on them. I recognized an oscilloscope, a spectrometer, and a couple of things that resembled Marshall amps but could have been batteries of some kind. There was a control board that looked mostly torn apart, and several stacked consoles with darkened dials. Thick electrical cords snaked every whichway. Some disappeared into closed metal containers that could have been Craftsman tool chests; others just looped back to the dark equipment.
This could all be a fantasy, I thought. Equipment that only comes alive in his imagination. But the Portraits in Lightning weren't make-believe. I had no idea how he was making those, his explanation had been vague at best, but he was making them. And although I was standing directly beneath one of those brilliant lights, it really did not seem to be throwing any heat.