“I can give you fifteen, but that’s it. And you might want to find a different shirt. LAPD is our escort to the airfield.”
“Yeah,” she says and gets up and goes back to the bathroom. She shuts the door again, locks it again, and then she opens the toilet lid and pukes until there’s nothing in her left to puke, until she’s only dry-heaving. The Signalman leaves her alone to be sick in peace and clean up after, because that’s the only shred of dignity he has to offer her, the only stingy scraps of generosity. Today, that’s pretty much loaves and fishes.
2.: Ballad of a Thinner Man
(West Hollywood, June 1969)
It would be a gross understatement to say that Maxie Honeycutt is a nervous man. Cat gets out of bed every morning, he checks his shoes for bugs, and not the creepy-crawly sort, but the sort he imagines the DOD and CIA and the goddamn FBI leave there while he sleeps. Cat sits down to breakfast, he’s digging in his box of Wheaties to be sure no one’s planted a microphone at the bottom. One day or another, he’ll be walking down Sunset Boulevard or Ventura and a car’s gonna backfire, and Mr. Maxie Honeycutt’s gonna shit himself, then drop dead from a coronary. This will happen, sure as pigs make little baby pigs, this or some other equally histrionic ending for the skinny little man his friends—such as they are—call Paranoid Jack. No one quite remembers why people started in calling him Jack, though the paranoid part is obvious to anybody who’s spent fifteen straight minutes in this cat’s company. So you’d think he’d do his best to steer clear of weird shit and questionable business ventures with nefarious individuals. You would, however, be wrong. For example, tonight Maxie’s in a booth at the Whiskey a Go Go, trying to be heard over shitty acid rock and a hundred stoned motherfuckers talking all at once. Across from him, Charlie Six Pack is rolling a joint, some primo shit just come in from Panama. Charlie Six Pack is a good example of the company Maxie Honeycutt keeps. Cat spent seven years up at Folsom for robbery and a concealed weapons charge. Says he didn’t do it, but what the fuck else would he say?
Maxie leans across the table, not quite shouting, but it’s not like he can hear himself think over the noise. And he says, “I don’t give two shits and a crap what the damn thing’s worth, man, cause I ain’t gonna hold it, not for love nor money.”
“Don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six Pack. “I thought you were my go-to guy, right? I thought we was tight, and you were the guy I could go to when I can’t go to anyone else, right?”
“Well, no,” replies Maxie. “No, not this time. This time, you’ll just have to find someone else. I ain’t holding that thing. I don’t even like to look at it.”
Now, what he’s talking about is the little jade figurine that Charlie Six Pack came back from Nevada with last week. There’s a brown paper bag on the table between them, and inside the bag is the figurine. The bag’s rolled closed and there are what appear to be grease stains on it, like maybe it held fried chicken or churros before it held the jade figurine. Charlie, he calls it an idol, claims it was carved by the Apaches or the Incans or some shit like that. For all Maxie knows, it was made last month in Tijuana or by some Buddha Head down on Magdalena Street. Whoever made the thing, that cat must have been having just about the nastiest magic carpet ride since Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself back in 1943. It’s almost big as Maxie’s fist, the thing in the bag, and when Charlie pulled it out and showed it to him, Maxie got this queasy, tight feeling in his gut and goose bumps up and down his arms.
“Yo, man, don’t be like that,” says Charlie Six Pack, and he scowls fit for a Greek tragedy and lights the doobie. “Forty-eight hours, right? Hell, probably not even that long. Just until the Turk comes back from that thing in Catalina and I don’t gotta worry about my place getting tossed before I can make the handoff, okay? Pigs toss the place and find this, then nobody gets a payday.”
“What the hell the pigs gonna want with it?” Maxie asks, eyeing the greasy paper bag even more warily than before. “You steal it?”
“If I’d have stolen it, I’d have told you up front.”
“Then what do the pigs want with it?”
Charlie Six Pack sucks in a lungful of Panama red, and he squints at Maxie through the haze. “Pigs don’t want shit with it,” says Charlie, and he blows smoke from his nostrils like a Chinese dragon. “I’m just saying, is all. Why take chances?”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Maxie Honeycutt tells him.
“I ain’t asking you to like it, man.”
“What’s the Turk even want with something like that?”
“Jesus, Jack, what the Turk does and does not want ain’t none of my business, and it sure as hell ain’t none of your business. One night, maybe two at the outside, you get five percent of my cut, just for babysitting a paper bag. And don’t tell me you can’t use the bread. I know you, and I know better.”
“Ain’t the bag that bothers me,” says Maxie, Mr. Paranoid Jack himself, he who swears it was aliens working with the Mafia, the Bilderberg Group, and the RAND Corporation had John F. and Bobby Kennedy killed. Same cat will talk for hours about how fluoridated water, filtered cigarettes, and artificial sweeteners are an Illuminati plot aimed at pacifying the masses. Point being, the cat is given to flights of fancy.
“Man, you’re one for the books,” says Charlie Six Pack. “Why don’t you just simmer down and stop freaking out on me.” He takes another toke, shakes his head, then offers the joint to Maxie. Now, normally Maxie’s fine getting high with the likes of Charlie Six Pack, but right at this particular moment, well, he’s thinking he’s better off trying to keep a clear head. So he says no thank you, and he asks again where the thing in the bag came from. Not that he actually wants to know, mind you, or thinks he’ll get any sort of an honest answer, but Maxie figures he keeps this up long enough, Charlie’s bound to grow discouraged and go looking for someone else to hassle.
“I told you,” says Charlie, “Indians made it. You ever heard of the Donner Party, those folks got lost in the mountains and had to eat each other to keep from freezing to death?”
“Yeah, man,” Maxie replies, “I’ve heard of the freaking Donner Party. Who the fuck hasn’t heard of the freaking Donner Party?” And he sits back in the booth and takes an unfiltered Pall Mall from the half-empty pack in his shirt pocket.
“Okay, well, so the dude from whom I acquired this little objet d’art,” and Charlie nods at the paper bag, “this dude’s a professor out in Salt Lake City, this Mormon dude—Brigham Young University—and he claims the doodad there belonged to one of the survivors of the Donner Party, one of those didn’t get eaten, but did the cannibalizing. Professor, he tells me that this guy—”
“What was his name?”
“What’s who’s name? The Mormon dude?”
“No, man. The Donner Party cat.”
“Fuck if I know,” says Charlie Six Pack, and he takes another hit. “Who cares what the guy’s name was, man? Do you want to hear this or not?”