Black Jesus Read online

  ‘I felt like someone was after me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll find you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m fucked-up in the head. Somehow I thought I’d be safe if I could just get back to the Mystery Spot.’

  ‘It’s not there anymore.’

  ‘I know. I came a long way to find out.’

  Here they both breathe and listen. Traffic’s picked up out on the road, it’s Saturday, cars headed up the mountain, down the mountain. Faintly they hear Debbie outside at her noisy old cash register haggling with some shopper over God knows what amazing triviality.

  ‘Can I come sit by you?’ says Lionel out of the blue, as a child might.

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  And like a little row boat with a hole in it, he pushes off from the ladder and gropes his way through the Dairy Queen towards her voice. With a hurting dizzy head and sleep still in her eyes she watches him come. Almost to the couch, he stumbles on a Ken doll and starts to fall. Gloria gasps out loud and reaches and grabs him just under his armpit as he crashes into the dusty arm of the couch.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says, not as embarrassed as she feared he’d be. And she helps him onto the beat-up cushion beside her.

  ‘Mom’s got so much crap lyin’ around,’ he says with a small awkward smile on his mouth.

  ‘She sure does. Some of it’s kinda cool though.’

  ‘You might not think it’s cool if you grew up with it.’

  ‘You grew up here?’

  ‘Yeah. No. Well, in a trailer up the road. But she’s always had the yard sale. It’s our bread and butter. That’s what she calls it. Says she’d rather starve than work for The Man. I never really knew what man she was talkin’ bout till I went to boot camp. Then I learnt quick.’

  ‘Is that where you got your name?’

  ‘Black Jesus?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He nods and says, ‘The Jar Heads named me that. Growin’ up I never fit in, so it felt kinda good to have a nickname.’

  ‘Did you fight in Iraq?’

  ‘Sure did.’

  ‘Is that how this happened to you?’

  The boy nods his head.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  After a pause he says, ‘Don’t be sorry. I don’t want anybody feelin’ sorry for me. A lot worse happened to other guys. If we didn’t fight ’em over there we’d end up fightin’ ’em at home, in our own backyard.’

  The dancer hears this last slogan fall from his mouth as empty and automatic as a parrot, a priest.

  ‘Well, I think you’re brave,’ she says. ‘And who knows, maybe you made it home alive for a reason. Maybe there’s something in store for you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That’s the million-dollar question,’ she says. ‘The big mystery. What happens? Sometimes I think it’s the only thing that keeps us going. If we knew every twist of the movie why would we stick around to watch?’

  Maybe you’ve strolled down Rose Avenue on a summer’s night, when they flock to this place hoping to fix a love, find a love, end a love. When it’s hard to get a table anywhere. When shouts are heard. Or whistles to girls. Or ragged singing on the street corner. When gulls cry. When promises are lost in the mild riot of it all. When the light is dying. Maybe the sea was calm, or maybe it was choppy, or maybe you were too frazzled to measure the wind. No matter. Whatever the details, we can be certain of one thing, you were in earshot of Bebop Billy, the thin junky flutist of Venice.

  Having hocked his good flute for dope long ago it would have been his blue recorder you’d of heard, as soft and thin as the man himself, the long notes, the trilled notes all but gone in the roar of waves and cars and cheap revelry. But it was there just the same. And so was he. With an unusual smile on his mouth, and kind, faded eyes, and the dope balloon wrapped up in his pocket, and the tie-dyed turban on his head, and the sick magic in his veins, same thing tonight as he zigzags through the alleys his kind call the speedway, down Rose Court, up Dudley, down Paloma and over to Brooks Avenue blowing tunes to rock to, tunes to heal you, to bless you, to curse your life and blow your mind. It’s four in the morning or thereabouts and Bebop sways and his music is pure and he’s drawn by a light in the window above. A girl there. Her face in the glass. She’s lost, thinks Bebop and the notes that escape his recorder now reflect this idea. Who’s she talking to? he wonders and stops and cranes his neck to watch. It’s not long before he knows she’s not talking at all. The girl is singing. Silent and lost on the second floor. Not a word makes it out of the locked window, but something about her face and the way she delivers the song breaks Bebop’s heart. It’s like she knows nobody’ll ever hear it. Like her song’s stuck there in the window for keeps, or till all these buildings are claimed by the sea. Not long now. So he blows her a junky’s prayer and scratches his belly and moves on into the night, where a fix awaits, or something holy, or just another sunrise sleep in the sand.

  *

  Even though she walked in and found him carving up his face in the mirror. Even though he spat blood onto the tiles and called her a brainless whore and smiled and danced like a rabid gypsy into the next room with the razor aloft. Even though he hasn’t showered now for a week and stinks. Even if he’s locked the door. And taken the phone off the hook. And doesn’t really talk to her much. But talks strange. And into thin air. And mostly it’s just other people’s songs he parrots, some she’s heard and some she hasn’t. Even though something inside tells her this might not be the safest scene in the world, Tracy, the would-be next Jewel from Florida (the Panhandle), has remained in this loft with the tastemaker Ross Klein like some breed of attending angel if angels took off their pants and did anything on earth for a shot at the big time.

  Maybe this is just his process, she thinks as she hunts through the cupboard for the last box of pasta, last tin of paté. He’s inspired. How else could he write those mind-blowing pieces he’s so famous for? This is how real artists get their feelings out. A bit of madness to spice up the broth. Wow, I like the sound of that, did I come up with that myself? Must be rubbing off. Here I am right on the front line. I wouldn’t be surprised if he writes me into his next blog. If Daddy could see me now. ‘Don’t you know that you are a shootin’ star?’ we’d sing in his truck when I was a tadpole. ‘All the world will love you just as long as you are a shooting star.’

  And the vintage Motown ceiling fans he bought from Berry Gordy’s accountant spin round and round. And the false breezes they conjure play at the hair and face and torso of the man lying there on the floor, his spine against the oval rug, his robe wide open. Eyes wide open.

  Having laid his spooky razor aside in favor of other charms, Ross has cultivated a fairly impressive beard, high to the cheekbones, all down his throat, and tawny in color. Yesterday in his pacing he passed a framed photograph of John Lennon and Phil Spector in some black-and-white control room somewhere in time, and passing them he saw his own face in the reflection of the glass and was startled. Because at that angle, obscured in the light that way, it was also his father’s face. The mean eyes. The beard. The same way he knew him when they spent that long month on his yacht. November 1984. The date seared in the boy’s mind on account of how his dad kept him up late election night by the loud crackly radio in the cabin waiting at the edge of their seats for each state to weigh in on the triumph that was to be the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s second term in office.

  ‘An actor,’ said his father in the harsh light below deck after all the votes were in. ‘A Californian. One of our own. A hero straight outta storyland. That’s just what it’s gonna take to win this country back its balls. You know what I mean when I say balls don’t you, son?’

  Here the boy loo
ked the man in the face and it seemed to him that the dark blond beard he wore was a disguise, something from a picture book, something to hide behind, beyond which might lie a fantastic world, maybe where the wild things are, maybe a place where all fathers are good fathers and wise. Then the boy looked down at his little penny loafers and started to cry.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Your mother’s molded you into quite the pussy, hasn’t she?’

  ‘You still didn’t tell me where she is,’ wept the child.

  ‘She left us.’

  ‘When’s she coming back?’

  ‘Coming back? She’s not coming back. Not till hell freezes over. Not till a field of roses grows all the way down Sunset Strip. There’s Jew lawyers making sure of it.’

  ‘Where’d she go?’

  ‘You really wanna know?’

  ‘Yes,’ sobbed the child into his hands. This child eight years old. This thirty-foot Hatteras rocking in the cold night waters.

  ‘She started fucking some gypsy faggot of a singer. Bobby something. Some B-rate Donovan she met at a party in Laurel Canyon last year when I was away on business in New York. Shame on me for trying to make an honest woman out of her. I guess this is my penance for making a kid with a go-go dancer. Sheila. Stock name for any low-life rag doll from any old shithole in the Midwest. My mother, your grandmother—rest her soul—said it best: Love is a fairy tale, let’s leave love to Hollywood, when it comes to marriage the trick is in the breeding, and that girl isn’t fit to scrub our floors.’

  What hidden savagery can live in the hearts of the painfully rich. A secret saved for the country club toilet. And Ross Klein, lying pale in his open robe on a sweaty rug, growing the beard his father handed down to him, is heir to such things. Should he wish to be.

  But how could he forget the quiet beauty with the black braid? The scared and haunted mom he’d not see again. Sheila chasing songs. The faint patchouli she wore. The lisp when she talked, first voice he knew, and for the first few years of his life he would have sworn the billion other tongues on earth were flawed, not hers. She played him her best tapes on the 8-track player in the porch window of their place in the Hills. Van the Man and Jackson Browne and Tim Buckley and Joni and The Byrds. Carole King and Sweet Baby James and Judy Collins and Earth, Wind & Fire till the tapes broke. Songs that told of the life she gave up to live in this gigantic house. The boy in her lap rocking softly in the piney air when she’d sing along and they’d watch the city traffic struggle in the twilight down there, all the lights of Los Angeles blinking on through the haze like phosphorous life in a nameless sea of want and pending disaster.

  But boys turn to men. And men litter their worlds with pain. Ross on the floor. His world a falling world. His glassy eyes on the ceiling. His ticking heart, blue-black and hidden like a mine.

  Joe’s pants are on the floor of Debbie’s bedroom in the back of the Dairy Queen. A dusty broken walk-in cooler six months ago, this ten-by-twelve space, got to through a heavy metal door behind the old kitchen in back, has since been reinvented as a veritable love den complete with candles, vaguely Eastern tapestries above a twin futon, baby oil on the nightstand, Rite Aid brand. It’s just barely dawn, a Greyhound bus passes out on the main road in the half-dark, Deb snores lightly by his side and the cell phone in the pocket of his Dickies on the carpet sings a muted We will, we will rock you.

  ‘Joe here.’

  ‘Joe boy?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Who else calls you Joe Boy?’

  ‘Why you callin’ so early, Mom?’

  ‘I want to go to the drive-in one more time before I die.’

  ‘You’re not gonna die, Ma.’

  ‘Oh yes I am. I hate to be a party pooper but so are you. And that strange big bird you’ve shacked up with. And every other blessed creature in the universe one day or another. And my day’s just around the bend, whether you like it or not. No sense moping about it. That’s why I’m singin’ in the rain,’ sings Bea Two-Feathers.

  ‘But isn’t there something we can do to—’

  ‘Singin’ in the rain. I’m not gonna be one of those sad sacks who fights tooth and nail for nothing. I sincerely hope I just clap off like the clapper the day he comes knocking.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy with the cycle. Death. The Boatman. Ferryman. Whatever you wanna call him. All I want is to go to the friggin’ drive-in movies one last time and that goddamn Director Steve won’t grant me a day pass.’

  ‘Why the hell not?’

  Debbie stirs beneath the sheet. ‘Who you talkin’ to, baby?’

  Joe covers the phone with his long hand and whispers, ‘My mom. I think she’s losing her marbles.’

  ‘I heard that.’

  ‘Shit. Sorry, Mom. I’m just worried about you.’

  ‘So then get your ass down here and have a talk with this Nazi director.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll be down, just let me get my pants on,’ says Joe and hangs up.

  ‘Don’t you dare put those pants on yet,’ says fat Deb. ‘You hear me, Tonto?’

  Just upstairs in the crow’s nest, the young Marine sweats in his blanket with his knees drawn up to his chest, his maimed eyelids twitching, his pale stoned head host to a shifting slideshow of horrors not seen on CNN. Not seen on FOX. Babar crushed against his armpit where elephants can’t forget.

  He can hear shells falling three miles to the west, a dull simple rhythmic barrage he’s come to regard as an unlikely comfort in this alien land. He’s not supposed to be here. Not in this country and not in this empty lot. He’s slunk off to hide awhile, to sit with his back against a wall, his gun on his lap and his head tilted back in an uneventful corner of this ruined capital where he might find a little rest from the fight, the shrill finite stabbing in his temples, the grinding of his jaw, a built-in standard of confusion, the whole of his half-hearted liberating force getting nowhere quick.

  They’re building a Burger King here. See the signposts they drove into the ground. It boasts the name of the contractor awarded the job, ‘Liberty Corp.: Working hand in hand with your community to build a brighter tomorrow’. A lean yellow dog runs from the shadows and rattles a paint can and it scares Black Jesus half to death. The slightest unexpected thing. The smallest crash nearby. A bottle breaking. Kids throwing stones. Maybe a Datsun backfires. All these things will make him gasp, make him shake, send the coldness up his back.

  He’s not supposed to be here. Not supposed to see what he saw.

  ‘Mike London here with your 98.9 FM, The Hawk morning weather. Unseasonably cool today but sunny and clear in the higher elevations. Highs in the upper sixties. Not a cloud in the sky. I see a warm front moving up the coast from the Carolinas but we won’t feel the effects of that till the weekend. More updates every hour, on the hour. Now it’s time for On This Day as we take a quick ride down memory lane with some fun facts from the internet. It’s the 11th day of August. So let’s start this one off right. On this day in 1956, Elvis Presley releases ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, hell yeah. On this day in 1971, construction begins on the Louisiana Superdome. On this day in 1978, the world mourns the death of Pope Paul VI and legionnaires’ disease bacteria was isolated in Atlanta, Georgia. On this day in 1866, the world’s first roller rink opens in Newport, Rhode Island. On this day in 1991, space shuttle Atlantis 9 lands back to earth. On this day in 1982, the US performs a nuclear test in the Nevada desert. On this day in 1976, Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, collapses and is hospitalized in Miami. On this day in 1980, the Yanks’ Reggie Jackson hits his 400th home run. On this day in 1999, the Salt Lake City tornado tears through the downtown district killing one. And on this day in 1965, The Beatles movie Help opens in New York City. So I hasten to add that this day is as good as any to say something from the heart, in these tough times we could all use a little Help, so here you go Catskill region
, and remember: I really appreciate you sticking round.’

  ‘I lost my virginity to this song,’ says Debbie White to a bewildered customer, an old lady in a platinum blonde wig who’s come to declare that one of the antique rings for sale in Deb’s jewelry case is indeed her wedding band and she wants it back.

  ‘You gotta be kiddin’ me,’ Debbie tells her. ‘I traded a pair of 180 Dolomite skis for that ring with a kid from up the mountain, musta been last November.’

  ‘When Harold left me I didn’t know what else to do,’ says the woman. ‘I was all alone with the kids and the bills piled up so I took it to a pawnbroker in Albany.’

  ‘Ain’t that a shame.’

  ‘So quick bright things come to confusion,’ says the woman, looking off in the distance.

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It’s Shakespeare, you dimwit. Harold was so fond of poetry. It’s how he weaseled his way into my pantyhose.’

  ‘That’s funny, we got a Shakespeare’s right down the street, and there you’ll find comedy,’ Deb takes a pause for dramatic effect, ‘. . . and tragedy.’

  ‘And maybe a busted lip if you mouth off,’ chimes in Lionel.

  The octogenarian looks at the kid in the rocking chair, smiles a wry smile and says, ‘Cupid is a knavish lad, thus to make poor females mad.’

  ‘Okay lady, listen,’ says Deb, ‘I’ll give you a ten per cent senior citizens discount. That’s the best I can do.’

  ‘What if I could prove it was mine?’

  ‘Finders keepers.’

  ‘Have a heart,’ pleads the woman.

  ‘Thirty-one fifty-five. Take it or leave it.’