The Nirvana Blues (63 page)

“Bradley, we really don't need this kind of talk right now. You're exaggerating anyway.”

“No I'm not, Mom. Honest. You know that. Remember when Rufus was over at our house once, and we were having peanut-butter sandwiches and Kool-Aid for lunch, and Sasha hopped onto the table and pissed in the Kool-Aid?”

Joe slapped his thighs, banged the dashboard, and nearly swooned, rocked by gales of laughter. “Hey, wow, dig that crazy monkey! Oh Lord, oh Lord! I do hope he survives! That monkey should get a medal! Where do I sign up for the healing group?”

“You're welcome to participate, if you want.”

“I
gotta
participate. A whole bunch of people are actually going to meet for the purpose of salvaging the soul of this little monster? Ooo-ee, baby, ooo-ee!”

“First of all, Sasha's not a monster. Second of all, if you're going to mock the proceedings, I'm afraid I can't invite you.”

“I won't say a word.” Joe sobered quickly. “I'll keep my mouth shut, I won't even smirk, nothing. I'll be so good you won't even know me.”

“All right. I guess so then. Well, here we are.…”

“Wait a minute.” Joe blinked. “How did we drive from Eloy's to the parking lot without detouring around twelve thousand construction sites?”

“If you don't want to be hassled by them, you aren't. That's all. It's simple.”

The bus hadn't moved since Joe deserted it. A barrage of parking tickets and traffic citations had accumulated underneath the left-hand wiper. Under the right-hand blade, an evilly scrawled note on scented pink paper said:

Your hours are numbered,

Miniver!

“I already searched everywhere for those damn keys,” Joe said dispiritedly. “We'll never find them. Heidi probably chucked them into the bushes. Or, in her confusion, flushed them down the toilet.”

“The trouble with you, Joe, is that you have a negative mindset. If you really wished to find the keys, and thought about them positively, you could make them materialize.”

“I bet.”

“It works. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.”

Joe climbed through the bus window, and pawed through all the garbage again, wondering as he did so: Why haven't I cleaned this car? Why is it always a mess? Why must I always spend twenty minutes searching for a simple tool? What is the matter with me that I can't maintain order, avoiding all this aggravation? To a T, he resembled that “Peanuts” character, Pigpen, the kid who automatically got dirty even while standing completely still in a sanitized and hermetically sealed room immediately after a bath.

Nancy stubbed her toe against something that jangled. “Oh, here they are.”

“You're kidding!”

They dangled from her fingertips, glittering like diamonds and rubies. Above them sparkled her eyes: beautiful, serene. She licked her lips. Mercury-vapor light gave them a luster evoking nubile high-school girls from a million years ago.

“You're weird,” he whispered, accepting them through the window.

“I'm just an ordinary person. You think I'm weird because you don't understand some crucial truths, that's all.”

“I'll follow you home, Missus Ryan.”

“That would be neat.”

Ay, dig that loving warmth pouring from her eyes and her pursed lips! He had a hard-on and wanted to grab her and fling her down roughly onto the macadam or across her Beetle's hood, letting her know just how grateful he was for the vixen in her that could arouse such vital lusts.

“Mom,” Bradley whined abrasively. “I'm hungry.”

Oh weren't they all!

*   *   *

E
VER THE RELENTLESS
sleuth, on his way out Joe stopped by the hospital's north wing. Only a bed of bedraggled tulips, through which he tiptoed, stood between him and the window of Ephraim Bonatelli's room. Though dropped, the Venetian blinds had not been entirely closed: slits of yellow light fell across his face like inverse jail-bar stripes. Straining for one more inch of height, Joe peeped inside.…

And gulped.

“Holy sh-
tit
sky!”

Joe's nose, pressed against the cool glass, tingled at such a sight. His blood ran icy in veins that had had their fill of nerve-shattering trauma for one day. Beads of chilly sweat sprouted across his forehead. Muscles in his buttocks contracted uncomfortably, as if a sadistic phantom were probing at his anus with a peacock feather. His testicles said, “Ouch!”

“Son of a bitch,” Joe muttered huskily, and he backed off, instinctively hunched.

Time to change his name, grow a beard, scour the tips of his fingers with acid to destroy the prints, locate a skilled engraver to falsify his passport, and purchase a one-way ticket to Rio!

Instead, and more in keeping with his current resources, Joe practically duck-waddled back to his bus, slithered around to the driverside door making sure that his body provided no targetable silhouette, and eased up behind the wheel. But when he reached for the ignition key, a voice said, “You start this thing, dingbat, and they'll hear you, they'll come barreling out of that room like bloodthirsty gangbusters!”

So he wrenched it into neutral, descended, and, grunting inaudibly, heaved with all his might, pushing the bus another thirty yards along the flat pavement before entering, turning it over, and racing uptown to the La Tortuga Bar for something to quiet his nerves and, hopefully, to blot out the latest atrocity molesting his overloaded, ingenuous little brain before he sought further solace in Nancy Ryan's everlovin' arms.

*   *   *

B
UT FATE PROMOTES
strange tricks on her chosen provocateurs.

Bound for Nancy Ryan and, he had thought, for yet one more round of sexual hijinks before calling it quits and retreating to the safe haven of hearth and home, Joe detoured into the plaza for that quick belt of alcoholic stimulant to calm his fraying innards.

Clogged from his ass to his tonsils with qualms, Joe nevertheless tried to hide his blossoming panic by blithely tripping the light fantastic into the La Tortuga. He settled gaily at the deserted bar and ordered a triple daiquiri, straight up, with an extra glass of neat tequila on the side.

And then, in line with the script guiding recent events (and leading, no doubt, to ultimate censure, exile, deprivation, disease, and total humiliation), Joe felt a presence at his elbow, a perfumed breath behind his ear. Expecting eternity, he heard instead a thickly accented voice say, “Hello there. What is a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?”

Iréné Papadraxis.

Talk about the fickle and convoluted motives behind destiny's incomprehensible rationale!

But to then coherently dissect the mysterious logic that could lead a fellow from that apocalyptic near-orgasm with Diana, through those powerful juicy cravings for Nancy, to finding himself in the buff only tantalizing inches away from the rosy nipples of a Hungarian Greek in Skipper Nuzum's heated swimming pool, was beyond Joe's powers of analytical mumbo jumbo.

Iréné said, “Well, here we are.”

Joe nodded, thunderstruck. The exquisitely tiled pool they had to themselves. Underwater lights accented the sensual emerald undulations. The impossibly fluffy grass of a thick green lawn had only recently been mowed; the scent of fresh cuttings was intoxicating. Weeping-willow branches languorously brushed against the manicured carpet. Thirty feet away, a dim row of grottoesque lights glowed through the sliding glass doors of the ballroom area of the otherwise darkened mansion. Sleepy jazz music tinkled through the air: vibes, a husky sax, bass notes that advanced like lion paws carefully traversing the greensward. Naturally, in the obscenely clear and bright heavens, a billion stars laughed silently. The orange moon was so big and pregnant it seemed to have been huffed into being by a mysterious oboe.

There you go again,
Heidi said.
What in hell does that mean?

Mean? Who cared. Here I am, thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Whosa-midig Miniver, snatched from the craw of deadly dangers to suddenly and finally encounter myself at the culminating moment of every
Playboy
-reading pud pounder's macho dreams. Like magic, this wishy-washy Marxist garbage man and roué manqué—in One Fell Swoop—had landed himself at the apex of capitalist erotic expectations. For such an experience as this Sammy Glick had slit throats, Scrooge McDuck had pinched pennies, Citizen Kane had accumulated empire. For such an experience as this a Possum Trot shoe salesman bought a Georgia lottery ticket, a Polish immigrant mortgaged his future to buy a tenement, a big-nosed little boy from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, spent eighteen hours a day spiraling a football through a swinging tire. And yet he, Joe Miniver, after only four days on the prod, had simply taken a desperate turn into the plaza, and toppled down a rabbit hole into a fantasy where the sum total of all his sexual longings collided, delivering up that for which he had often plaintively murmured he would have sold his soul to Satan to obtain. And wonder of all wonderful wonders, apparently it wasn't going to cost him a nickel!

Hard-ons?

Don't make him laugh. What was that thing twanging straight out from his groin down there in the undulating emerald if not something comparable to the best baseball hickory that North Carolina could supply, and pointed with the unerring instinct of a blue-chip field retriever at the holy grail waiting there behind her tangled bush?

Oh no, not to worry. Now that he was miraculously
here,
this boy was not about to blow it, not on your life, not for all the tea in China, no sirree!

This one was as good as signed, sealed, delivered, cashed, receipted, stuffed, and hung on the wall.
Oh my God, Joe, you're incredible!

You better believe it!

It was so corny, he laughed. Peals of his happy tune scattered like doves with whistling wings into the fragrant night.

“Why are you laughing?”

“I can't help it. This is a fairy tale. I feel ten years old.”

Her hand, a hungry cruising trout, glided through the water.

“
This
doesn't feel like you're ten years old.”

Joe wished to savor it as long as possible. He needed to absorb this most perfect body he had ever seen. He wanted the mere sight of her to caress him until he could stand it no longer. He wanted it to be like abstaining hungrily from attacking a marvelous dessert. A fine mist rose off the warm water. Joe remained immobile, but for the hands at his sides that lazily paddled the tepid water, just as a fish laconically moves its fins while balancing in one place.

When her fingers closed over his enormous war club, Joe didn't budge.

“Nice,” she said.

“Mmmm.”

“How come you're grinning so wildly? I've never seen anything like it.”

“I can't help it, Iréné. This is incredible.”

HUMBLE CAMEL DRIVER RECEIVES AUDIENCE
AT THE WHITE HOUSE
!
KING DESERTS HIS THRONE
FOR COMMONER
!
IMPOVERISHED SHEPHERD
DISCOVERS BABY JESUS IN BETHLEHEM MANGER
!

For how long—call it forever?—did they stall, her fingers softly clutching his dork as the mollifying waters of this dream lapped against her ripest bosom?

She cocked her head. “Are you all right?”

“Am I all
right?
”

“You seem strange.”

“I'm happy. I'm euphoric.”

“I'm so glad.” Her voice lacked a little something, though her eyes seemed friendly enough. Faintly, Joe suspected that the intensity he felt for the moment was not totally mutual. She'd been here before. She was accustomed to the setting, and to that mammoth thing in her hand. Quite possibly the experience was old hat.

Such thoughts dissipated with the mists. After a ten-minute eternity, Joe ceremoniously lifted one hand and cupped one breast as if it were a sacred chalice. Her nipple nibbled at his fingertip. And Joe feared that all the hunger and anticipation of pleasure accumulating inside his humble salt-of-the-earth body might cause him to burst.

Or else lightning, inadvertently released from his penis before they reached dry land, might electrocute them both!

“My God,” he murmured.

Speaking inaudibly, Iréné dropped her eyelids and began to rhythmically squeeze his prick. They drifted together, embracing. Eyes wide open, Joe tilted his head, scanning the heavens. He expected comets, shooting stars, a rare silver night bird, the explosion of a leftover firework that had been hanging in weightless ether for a year anticipating this moment.

Urgently, she clasped him tightly and rubbed his erection between her straddling legs. He tried to crush her against him so that she couldn't move. “Wait, Iréné… just a few more seconds … we've got plenty of time.”

“I need you.” Her hips were grinding. “Come on, let's go inside.”