Inherent Vice (56 page)
“Right.
..
then maybe you could just toss me a small tip instead? It’s these cases I’m working on? Puck was kind enough to mention that all that commotion at Chick Planet Massage
that day was really to cover a
hit on Glen Charlock. Said it never was about Mickey. Did you know any of that? ‘Course you did. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Bigfoot smiled. “Did that slip my mind? Jeepers, I’m getting worse
than a doper. Yes, well Mickey just stumbled into something he shouldn’t
have seen, and the boys in the John Wayne outfits panicked and hustled him away for a while. Then the feds found out—here’s an acidhead billionaire about to give all his money away, and of course they had their own ideas on how to spend it. Being tight with this Golden Fang of
yours by way of scag-related activities in the Far East, they got Mickey
programmed into Ojai for a little brain work.”
“Looks like they got what they wanted, too. My bad luck and lousy
timing. Man
sees
the light, tries to change his life, my one big chance to
rescue somebody like that from the clutches of the System, and I’m too
late. And now Mickey’s back to them old greedy-ass ways.”
“Well, maybe not, Sportello. What goes around may come around,
but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record
on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can
be on into a whole ‘nother song.”
“Been doing a little acid, there, Bigfoot?”
“Not unless you mean the stomach variety.”
At the lot, Bigfoot paused in front of the office, went in and came back out with a release form. “You can start this, I’m just going to go check something out, I’ll be right back to sign off on everything.” With
the Glasspack pulsating like the bass line of an up-tempo blues, he rolled
away into glaring mercury-vapor light saturating a lot full of outward
and visible civic annoyance. He wasn’t gone that long, but Doc began to feel nervous anyway. Doper’s ESP again no doubt, which only got more
intense when he saw his car in some totally unreal gesture of civility being brought right up to the office doorsill. “What’s this?” said Doc.
“Drive safely,” advised Bigfoot, touching an invisible hatbrim. He got
back in the Impala, revved the engine throbbingly a number of times, and prepared to depart. “Oh, I nearly forgot.”
“Yeah Bigfoot.”
“Chastity and I had an appraiser over last weekend to look at some
pieces. And that Wyatt Earp mustache cup? Turns out
it’s
real. Yeah.
You
could’ve
kept that sucker and turned it for
big bucks”
Cackling
sadistically, he roared away.
Pulling out of the lot, Doc happened to take a sharper left than he
meant to over a piece of curb onto the street and heard an ominous thump from the trunk. His first thought was that something on the
Vibrasonic had come loose. He pulled over and got out to look.
“Ahhh! Bigfoot, you motherfucker.” How could he have expected the
oP mad dog to be satisfied with only Adrian and Puck? They’d all been
tools in somebody else’s crib, including Doc. Now he had twenty kilos of No. 4 China White bouncing around in his trunk, Bigfoot no doubt
at this very moment was putting word out to that effect, and once again
Doc was bait, with only the keen brainpower of the LAPD between
him and incorporation into some freeway overpass. He had to ditch this
Asian shit someplace secure, and fairly quick.
Keeping to surface streets, Doc headed east, pulled in briefly at a
shopping mall, went around back by the dumpsters and found two card
board cartons about the same size, put Bigfoot’s dope in one and filled
the other with garbage sacks and renovation debris, and then proceeded
to Burbank Airport, parked near a phone booth and used up most of a roll of quarters trying to get patched through a mobile operator to the two-way radio in Tito
’s
limo, on the off chance Tito was working late.
“Inez how many times I got to swear to you, it ain’t the name of a horse,
it ain’t a bookie’s phone number, it’s only this cocktail waitress—”
“No, no, Tito, it’s me!” Doc hollering on account of the connection.
“Inez? You sound funny.”
“It’s Doc! and I need a untraceable ride!”
“Oh, it’s you, Doc!”
“I know it’s short notice, but if you could find me some kind of
Falcon—”
“Hey, I don’t do no pimpin, man?”
This went on for a while, jet takeoffs and landings kept interrupting,
reception faded in and out. Doc was obliged to dig up more quarters and soon found himself screaming through his teeth like Kirk Douglas in
Champion
(1949). But they finally worked it out that Adolfo would be there within the half hour with another ride, and Doc was ready for phase two of his plan, which required rapidly smoking some Hawaiian weed rolled into a joint of a certain diameter and bringing the box full of dumpster trash to the counter of Kahuna Airlines, where he bought a ticket for Honolulu on a dubious credit card he’d taken once in lieu of a
fee, checked the dummy carton in as baggage, and watched it roll away
into what stewardii of his acquaintance had described as a bureaucratic nightmare, hoping it would take the Fang some time to sort out.
“You’re sure it’ll be safe, now.”
“You’ve asked that several times, sir.”
“Call me Larry
...
is it’s only that you guys have the worst reputation
in the industry for losing shit, so I’m a little anxious is all.”
“Sir, we can assure you—”
“Oh forget that. What I really need to know about
now
is the Land of the Pygmies.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have a flight atlas handy? Look it up, ‘Pygmies, Land of the.’”
This being a California airline, with standing instructions to be as
accommodating as possible, somebody in a uniform and short haircut soon
appeared with a flight atlas and stood leafing through it, growing perplexed and apologetic. “Whichever of these it is, sir, it has no landing facilities.”
“But I, wanna go, to the Land, of the
Pygmies
!”
Doc kept sort of whining.
“But, sir, the Land of the, the Pygmies seems to have no, um, runways?”
“Well then, they’ll just have to
build
one, won’t they—gimme that—”
He seized the PA microphone from behind the desk, as if it were on some
shortwave frequency being attentively monitored by Pygmies waiting for
a message just like this. “All right, now listen up!” He began barking
orders to an imaginary Pygmy construction crew. “Is it a what? of course
it’s a Boeing, shorty—got a problem with that?”
Security people began to drift into Docs visual perimeter. Supervisorial personnel were hovering in a sort of sick fascination. Customers queued behind Doc found reasons to step out of line and wander away. He
unplugged the microphone, set his hat at a jaunty Sinatroid angle, and in a
not-totally-embarrassing lounge voice began to work the crowd, singing,
There’s a skyful of hearts,
Broken in two,
Some flyin full fare,
some non-revenue,
All us bit actors
Me him and you,
Playin our parts,
In a skyful of hearts
...
Up there in first class,
Ten-dollar wine,
Playing canasta,
Doin so fine,
Suddenly, uh-oh,
Here’s at No Smokin sign
That’s how it starts,
In a skyful of hearts
...
[Bridge]
To the roar of the fanjet.
..
You went on your way
...
I’ll sure miss you, and yet.
..
There ain’t much to say
...
Now I’m flyin alone
In economy class,
Drinkin the cheap stuff,
Till I’m flat on my ass,
Watchin my torch song
Fall off the charts,
But that’s how it goes
In a skyful of hearts
...
This tune had in fact been on the radio briefly a couple weeks back,
so by the last eight bars there were actually people singing along, some
lead, some backup, and stepping in rhythm. Enough witnesses to keep the Fang busy for a while. Doc meanwhile had slowly been making his way toward the exit and now, tossing the mike to the nearest customer,
slid away out the door and ran back to find Adolfo behind the wheel of a
442 Olds with the motor idling in the space next to his own car, and on the radio Roc
í
o D
ú
rcal with her heart about to break.
Doc got in his car, and they pulled out of the lot, drove till they found
a reasonably dark street in North Hollywood, and quickly shifted the twenty-kilo inconvenience from Doc’s trunk to the Olds. Doc handed his own keys to Adolfo. “They’ll have this plate number and the car description, all I need’s like an hour or two, try to keep
’em
busy as long as you can—”
“I was going to switch after a while with my cousin Antonio ‘Bugs’
Ruiz, who the word
‘
peligr
o
’
is not in his phrase book, plus he don’t give
a shit,” replied Adolfo.
“More than I can repay,
vato.”
“Tito thinks it’s him that owes you. You guys work it out, don’t bring
me in.”
This Oldsmobile didn’t have power steering, and well before he
reached the San Diego Freeway, Doc felt like he was back in PE class
doing push-ups for Mr. Schiffer. On the bright side, nobody seemed to
be following him. Yet. He still had to work out the interesting question,
how does one keep twenty kilos of heroin hidden and safe for a short
period of time, when vast resources are being mobilized to discover it,
repossess it, and exact retribution for ripping it off?
Back in Gordita, looking for someplace to park, he happened to pass
Denis’s place, which was still decorated with heaps of soggy plaster and
splintered laths and wiring and plastic pipes, like somebody had spilled a giant bowl of fucked-up novelty cereal. And with Denis, Doc knew, living somehow down in the middle of it, bootlegging the power he needed for the fridge and TV and the lava lamp off of the neighbors next door. Until the landlord, who in any case was vacationing down in
Baja, could figure out how to collect enough insurance to pay for repairs, nothing was likely to change here. “Psychedelic!” exclaimed Doc. A per
fect stash site. It was about this point that he noticed he was wearing only one huarache anymore.
The bars hadn’t closed yet, and Denis didn’t seem to be home. Keep
ing an ear out for funseekers in the vicinity, Doc brought the carton with the heroin inside it down into the remains of Denis’s living room and hid
it behind a section of collapsed ceiling, draping the giant plastic rag of what had been Chico’s water bed over it. Only then did he happen to notice that the carton he’d pulled out of that dumpster in the dark had once held a twenty-five-inch color TV set, a detail he had no cause to think about till next day when he dropped in on Denis about lunchtime and found him sitting, to all appearances serious and attentive, in front of the professionally packaged heroin, now out of
it
s
box, and staring at it, as it turned out he’d been doing for some time.
“It said on the box it was a television set,” Denis explained.
“And you couldn’t resist. Didn’t you check first to see if there was something you could plug in?”
“Well I couldn’t find any power cord, man, but I figured it
could be
some new type of set you didn’t need one?”
“Uh huh and what.
..
” why was he pursuing this? “were you watching, when I came in?”
“See, my theory is, is it’s like one of these educational channels? A little slow maybe, but no worse than high school.
..
”
“Yes Denis thanks, I will just have a hit off of that if you don’t mind
...
”
“And dig it, Doc, if you watch long enough ... see how it begins to sort of.
..
change?”
Alarmingly, Doc after a minute or two did find minute modulations of color and light intensity beginning to appear among the tightly taped layers of plastic. He sat down next to Denis, and they passed the
roach back and forth, eyes glued to the package. Jade/Ashley showed up
with a giant Thermos full of Orange Julius and paper cups and a bag of Cheetos.
“Lunch,” she greeted them, “and color-coordinated, too, and— Whoa, what the fuck is that, it looks like smack.”
“Nah,” said Denis, “I think
it’s
like a
...
documentary?”
They all sat there in a row, sipping, crunching, and gazing. Finally
Doc tore himself away. “I hate to be the bad guy, but I’ve got to do a repo
on this?”
“Just till this parts over?”
“Till we see what happens,” added Jade.