joined the army, too.”
“Dinky joined the army because it’s not the real world. Like everything else he does. To keep from doing anything real, I mean. Like a real job. Like a career.”
Hickory snorted. “What, and you call driving around HelLA a couple hours a day a career? You call that a job even, chucking papers on the curb?”
“He wouldn’t even do that,” I said, “if he didn’t feel so guilty for a life’s worth of mooching off his sugar units.”
“Bitch,” said Basil. “I’m a professional musician.”
“You’re a record company’s bagboy.”
“I’m the mother fucking mover and shaker who’s going to make your ass pay, is what I am. And guess what else? It’s only a matter of time.”
“You’re thirty-five years old, Basil. You know as well as those record people do the kiddies won’t be lining up to see your teeth fall out. Not to mention you could stop kicking everybody out of your band all the time.”
“So I’ll be fat and bald and toothless, but at least I’ll be up there. Sure as hell beats chasing pubes for a living.”
“That’s not even cool.”
“You want to be cool, be cool.”
“Look, you boobs,” Lucille said, “are we still playing or what?”
There was that briefest moment of doubt where Basil and I considered exchanging our knives for guns or throwing the knives away. But really the doubt was feigned. We knew what would happen. The kill was just a dream. The sight of blood was enough. We were only after the blood. This of course was a perversion cultivated over time, like a taste for taboo food, monkey brain or mice. The satisfaction of knowing we’d wounded one another was more than sufficient. In fact, it had become for us a fix of sorts, why our hate for one another always equaled our need. Basil and I were Siamese twins parted only in flesh.
“Hell yes, we are,” he said, “and it’s still my turn.”
“Your turn?” Hickory said.
“To ask.”
Lucille tossed back a shot. “Well ask away then,” she said. “Ask away the doo-da day.”
BASIL WASN’T GOING TO ASK LUCILLE ANYTHING worth her breath. He already thought he knew everything she had to say, a presumption which, so far as I could tell, was nowhere near the facts. And whereas it was true that before she’d become his woman he wouldn’t have thought twice about crushing her at every meal, now that she was his, he’d save his curiosity for the pillow talk to come.
I was absolutely positive, for instance, he didn’t know a thing about the times my ex-wife and I found the cupboards full of empty cereal boxes those three months Lucille had crashed our sofa. And if not cereal boxes, it was milk cartons at the back of the fridge, dry, or garbage cans stuffed with candy bar wrappers and foils from TV dinners. An entire roast would’ve vanished in the night, or a pot of spaghetti we’d just made, or a half-gallon of ice cream, all manner of food all of the time. Basil didn’t know, either, how those very mornings, I’d enter the bathroom to the odor of Lysol and vomit.
And neither would Basil ask why Lucille had slept with each of the three Gladden brothers that crazy summer of ’87, when after munching three grams of shrooms and a hit of blotter our friend Moo-Moo stumbled through a skylight and broke his legs; when our dealer Tony the Tongue invited four girls to the House of Men for a session of free love only to fake an epilepsy fit after two of the vixens tried to pork him with their strap-ons; when in front of the Grand Lake Theater a herd of cops arrested me and Dinky and Basil for having bombed a woman with a fire extinguisher just because she looked, as Basil claimed, like Barney Rubble with tits: while she went ape shit and chased us howling, we burned rubber through a KFC lot full of cops gathered for an ad lib feast. They caught us with three fat blunts, a bottle of wine, and a BB gun, fully loaded.
But Lucille. First she’d taken Bobby, then Benjamin, then Brad. Not one of these brothers knew the rest were boofing her, too. Because with the mornings, with the rising of suns and fungus-eyed friends—whichever friends happened to’ve been in whatever house she and the brother-at-hand had done their boofing in—Lucille would appear all by her lonesome in the crumpled state she’d adopted as style. Back then, the girl wore nothing but Birkenstock sandals and macramé anklets, cutoff Levi’s or OshKosh overalls smeared with the paint of her artistic dabblings—an imitative blend of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley with a hint of Homer’s seascapes—them and her Grateful Dead tees, tie-dyed, of course. When the weather was bad, she’d wear some Tijuana poncho and often even a blanket round her neck, like some queen-of-People’s-Park swaddled in mangy ermine. And this was on top of her feeble attempt at sprouting a noggin full of dreads. The day would begin like habit, bong hits all around, the morning’s wine in homemade mugs. Whichever Gladden brother she’d been with had already slipped through the woodwork like the creeping ferret he was, so that when all was said and done, that, as they say, was that.
Later, after these affairs had caved, we began to crush Lucille with gossip. And though for the next few years shadows kept the details grey, the matter cohered vaguely nonetheless. That’s how these things work: one morning, said Misha, who’d got the scoop from Lisa, who’d pinched it from her boy Sam, whom Bobby himself had told, Bobby bragged about the compliments his lovers all gave his beautiful cock, which, according to Lisa-by-way-of-Karen-by-way-of-Lucille, was hardly the case; as for Brad—Lucille’s last of the brothers—he had caught the clap (someone else had slipped between him and Ben); and Ben had a girl in the east who’d found out about his slick business, then told another friend, who, of course—because, again, that’s the way these things go down—was a friend of mine.
And where I was concerned, what could Basil ask he didn’t already know? How many diseases I’d got by the time I hit twenty, or had I shoplifted as a kid or tinkered with sex? The closest it came to that was kissing my cousin when I was five, beneath a blanket on Christmas Eve. Though my dear old toad had no doubt caught us, he was kind enough to wait till morning, dressed like a Hare Krishna elf, to beat me with his paddle.
Nor would Basil ask why I’d called last year at four a.m. to say something was amiss with his granny. She’d just suffered a lapse in health he and his mom went nutty for, some sort of brain hemorrhage I knew nothing of. At the time I considered my little call a motiveless joke spawned by a five-day binge during which I’d consumed three eight balls, seven quarts of bourbon, five cases of sucky beer, and nineteen or twenty packs of smokes—and that’s forgetting my jaunt through Berkeley’s midnight streets in nothing but a beanie with a propeller on top, ranting about Ezekiel’s wheels gleaming of beryl and the predictions of Nostradamus.
But later, in the clarity of my regret, I saw the canker in the bloom. Basil had “fired” me (that was the expression he used once he started talking smack) from what he obviously had considered “his” band. In a dull autumn noon veined with dull autumn smog, we sat over a mound of pad thai and confessed our interests had suffered a rift. He felt, or so he said, I could do better elsewhere. Get out on my own maybe, he’d been stifling my creativity and such, he said. But even in the midst of these shams we both knew he was wonking through his bullshit tulips, making a farce of protecting my ego while disguising the rage of his own.
That he knew I knew he knew I knew all this made it the more obscene. His head had grown bigger even than Dinky’s, which wasn’t to say my own had shrunk. I’d risen from the glop of my tyro swamp, having
