Limo, page 19
Jackie Jack clawed at the torn pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, searching for a cigarette. His pack of Kools floated in the ice in the plastic garbage can.
“D. Wayne, I’ll come back here to your joint any time, you old outlaw,” Jackie Jack said. “If these cocksuckers don’t want to,” he said, indicating the band, “it don’t make a shit because nobody pays to see them anyhow.”
“Eat a pile of Viet Cong underwear,” the piano player said.
Jackie Jack saw a long cigarette butt near the pointed toe of his lizard-skin cowboy boots. He bent to pick up the butt and fell across his $1,500 inlaid acoustic guitar.
Jackie Jack lay on the crushed body of the guitar. He held the neck of it in his left hand. With his right hand, he put the cigarette butt in his mouth.
Stagg lit the cigarette butt.
Jackie Jack looked at the ruin of the guitar and said, “That fucker hit a bad lick.”
Two of the girls in pioneer-woman dresses snatched pieces of the guitar to put in their memory books.
“There were only forty-eight guitars like that in the whole world, and Jackie Jack’s busted seven of ’em,” Stagg said.
Jackie Jack sat up and said, “I’ll play that old Spanish wood guitar of yours tonight, Jody.”
“I’ll kill you if you touch that guitar,” Jody said. “You know how Willie broke three of your ribs when you sat on his guitar? If you even touch my Spanish guitar I’ll beat you to death with a brick.”
“I didn’t sit on Willie’s guitar,” Jackie Jack said. “I fell on it. There’s a world of difference. Just like I fell on this one.”
“You ain’t touching my Spanish,” Jody said.
“Fuck it then. I’ll just sing. I’m a singer anyhow, ain’t I?” Jackie Jack said.
Stagg had already sent a roadie to Jackie Jack’s rented black Cadillac limo for another guitar. Stagg looked at me and smiled, tight and red-lipped, but with humor. You had to have a sense of humor, he was saying.
Somebody said it was time for the show. The opening band was doing an encore. The place was packed, and the opening band was a hit. Both bits of news were great for Cooper, because the opening band was the headline band for tomorrow night.
We had reserved a table near the bandstand. Naturally there were four guys in T-shirts sitting at our table. These weren’t kids. They were in their middle thirties and had big arms, big bellies, and crewcuts. One of them had eaten the RESERVED sign to educate the waiter.
Cooper slid in and sat down with the four guys. Cooper in his buckskins and jewelry and wasted face and beaver hat. The four T-shirt guys with broken glass expressions and bulldog tattoos. Cooper mentioned the name of the man he had obtained his liquor license from. He mentioned the name of the vending machine company. The four T-shirt guys got up and went to the bar.
Cooper was a wizard in situations like that.
Snowdrift and the Deaf Cowboys did a first set that knocked the walls down. The crowd went goofy. Twice Jackie Jack shambled over and cut the volume off on Jody’s guitar. Jody would cut the volume back up and play on top of Jackie Jack’s vocals. The other Deaf Cowboys grinned, but the audience never noticed.
I had an arm around the back of Sally’s chair. I felt her shoulder blades responding to the music.
Cooper would look at Snowdrift and the Deaf Cowboys, and then he would look at the screaming crowd, and occasionally his pale eyes would hit my eyes and he would do a grin that made me want to cry because I was so glad for him.
Another thing cocaine can do is make you want to talk to somebody like Sally Hawks even if she can’t hear you. We were sitting close to a speaker the size of a phone booth. The sound vibrated my arm against her shoulder. I kept putting my lips to her ear and shouting things that I had to tell her urgently. She would turn her face toward mine and shout back. And we would kiss. A brush-of-the-lips-and-look-in-the-eyes kiss.
Jackie Jack got a foot tangled in some cables during a number and pulled off his right boot trying to get loose. The crowd loved it. He had on a dirty white athletic sock. He didn’t bother with the boot because by then to his obvious alarm he had dropped a cigarette into a full pitcher of Sangria.
Jackie Jack sang a ballad:
If I wander, is there far enough
for me to go to make you leave
my mind,
and keep me thinkin’ I’m not thinkin’
of what I left behind.
Or will I cruise the country
like a clever old romancer,
knowin’ answers to other people’s lines,
and remember I’m forgettin’
to love someone somebody else will find.
He had a husky, raw-gin voice that could make the room listen.
Jackie Jack sang:
Runnin’ is a means for me to measure
what I used to treasure while I stayed.
I hope some soul is deep enough
to help me shake the feelin’
that the two of us together had it made. . . .
The two of us together, how we played . . .
the two of us together should have stayed. . . .
We had it made. . . .
Jackie Jack walked off the stage. In one white athletic sock and one lizard-skin boot, Levis with shiny knees, a Hawaiian shirt with a torn pocket, a white cowboy hat with a feather band, and a middle finger thrust toward Jody. Applause and whistles and shots tore up Cooper’s Country.
Back in the dressing room, Jackie Jack was stuffing the bone scoop into his nose, holding a beer in each armpit and pleading for an emergency blowjob.
He went into the shower with a girl in a pioneer dress.
People pounded on the dressing room door. Stagg peeked through the spy-hole and wouldn’t open up.
“Plenty of cunt out there,” Stagg said with his eyes against the spy-hole. “Plenty of fanatic dopers. Drunks. Fans. Nuts. I see some minor celebrities. Wouldn’t be big ones at the door. Too packed.”
Cooper was out in his joint mingling with his public. Jackie Jack had put the antler into my hand when he went to the shower. Sally and I dug in with the bone scoop and passed the antler.
Another thing coke can do is make you tend to dig in deeper as the night goes along.
I heard Sally asking Jody what he found to do while he was staying awake for thirty-six days.
“Visit folks,” he said. “Pick. Play golf. Drove back and forth from Austin to Phoenix three times. Every time I’d get to Phoenix I couldn’t remember what the hell it was I wanted there.”
Sally and I stayed in the dressing room during the second set. I locked both locks on the door. I believe I admitted once again that I was in love with her.
“Say that sober in your real voice,” she said.
“I already did,” I said.
“Say it again,” she said.
I said it again.
She opened her blouse, pulled off her pants, and lay down on the couch. She had on tiny brown silk panties. She had them on for about another minute and a half, anyhow.
After Cooper’s Country closed, we had a few nightcaps at the bar. D. Wayne counted up the take. He didn’t say how much it was, but it filled three bank bags. Stagg watched Cooper put the bags in the safe. Jackie Jack refilled the antler and passed it. The Deaf Cowboys, the girls, and the roadies got up a game in the dressing room. They called it Cluster.
Katherine asked if D. Wayne had spoken to me about being best man at the wedding.
I said no, he hadn’t.
“I assume he will,” she said.
Jackie Jack said he had written a new song he wanted us to hear. He sat on a bar stool and played and sang the new song for us:
Buford and Roy were buddies
They lettered playin’ ball
Buford in the backfield,
Roy in the forward wall
Married Joanne and Alma
Took up the arts
Buford fixed your sink
Roy sold auto parts
Made the suburbs what they are
With cars, boats, and kids
America loved Roy and Buford
And all what they did
Admired their wives, they said
Had real good homes
Buford flushed your toilet
Roy sold you chrome
Cooked in the backyard a lot
Went down to the lake
Danced at the club
Drove to the Homecoming game
Yeah, Roy and Buford did their best
America tipped her hat
Til Roy finally died
And old Buford, he got fat
Thought about Paris, London
Things they might have tried
But Buford, he got fat
and Roy upped and died.
Jackie Jack said it was a song he owed to America. Stagg told him he had a hit.
I was thinking it was funny that Jackie Jack Snowdrift had written a song about a good American who was a plumber. The Big Guy would banish that song from the CBC radio network if he ever learned of it.
Thinking about the Big Guy, it occurred to me that we had a lunch date at “21.” I needed to go home and sleep a few hours.
Another thing about cocaine. It can make you wonder how the whole night just went by.
I looked out the window of Cooper’s Country and saw sunlight. Not any dawnlike sunlight, either.
It was more like 11:30 a.m. sunlight.
I told Sally what the problem was as I ran toward the door. She ran with me. So did Cooper. Seeing us running, Jackie Jack jumped up and ran for the door, too. When Jackie Jack ran, Stagg ran with him.
The five of us arrived at the Silver Goblet at the same time. Cooper bounced off a parking meter. His eyes looked like fire ants.
“Where we running to?” Jackie Jack said.
I said I had to meet the Big Guy. I said I would drive the Silver Goblet and drop Sally off uptown. I said why didn’t D.Wayne just hang around his joint and have fun.
Cooper at once took this to mean I thought he was too loaded to drive.
“I don’t hear no music to go along with that two-step you’re doing,” Cooper said.
I said I didn’t give a shit what he thought about it, I was going to drive.
“Frank, I love the Silver Goblet,” Cooper said. He did a penguin totter backward and collided with Katherine, who had come out to see what we were doing.
“I love the Silver Goblet more than almost any goddam thing in the world,” Cooper said. “But the honest truth is, I could take that old black rented Cadillac limo over there with the foreigner in the front seat, and I could run the rubber off this silver son of a bitch with you driving, Frank.”
I said did he expect me to laugh at that, or what? I said did he remember the summer when I had a blue Studebaker and he had a black and yellow Chevy? I said did he conveniently forget how we used to meet for breakfast at the Toddle House every morning? I said did he conveniently forget that after breakfast we used to race to the construction job where we worked? I said did he conveniently forget that not only did I usually beat his ass in the car race, I also forced him into two wrecks?
“Well, now, let’s see what we’re talking about,” Cooper said. He reached into a boot and pulled out a fold of green money. “Does five hundred sound about right to you?”
I said five hundred sounded fine.
“I’ll put five hundred on the silver deal myself,” Jackie Jack said.
“You got it down,” Cooper said.
By then I was behind the wheel of the Goblet and had started the engine.
Sally jumped in beside me.
I saw Cooper grab the chauffeur and haul him out of the black Cadillac that Jackie Jack had rented.
“First one to pass them little iron midgets out front of ‘21’ picks up the cash,” Cooper yelled.
As I steered the Goblet away from the curb, Jackie Jack Snowdrift tumbled into the back seat with his guitar and said, “Don’t show D. Wayne no mercy.”
“No, no, get out of there!” Lester Stagg screamed at Jackie Jack.
Stagg clawed for the door handle but missed. He did manage to hurl himself into the back seat of the black Cadillac.
I had a quick glimpse of Katherine in the doorway of Cooper’s Country. And of the Deaf Cowboys looking out. One of them was naked.
26.
THE FIRST LIGHT WAS GREEN. But in the Gotham traffic light coloring code has no more effect on pedestrians or taxicabs than if you hung a neatly lettered sign on the pole that said: FUCK ’EM.
The Silver Goblet slid through twenty jaywalkers at a good speed and didn’t hit a one, but a man in a black turtleneck crammed his nose against the windshield for an instant. Behind us, the black Cadillac burst through a magically parted crowd and was gaining.
“People up here are crazy,” Jackie Jack said, snorting from the antler and looking out the back window.
For a few blocks I kept a tight lead on the black Cadillac. Then I hit a red at Twenty-First Street that some tourist in a rent car had stopped for. A mere toe on the brake of the Goblet stopped us so suddenly that we flew out of our seats and Jackie fell about halfway into where Sally had been.
Cooper squealed the black Cadillac to a stop close to us. He was behind a truck.
“Get out of there! Get out, Jackie!” Stagg yelled from the black Cadillac.
Stagg started to open his door, and two taxicabs shot through the space against the light and disappeared into the pedestrians.
We pulled around the car and truck ahead of us when the light changed and suddenly we were side by side going up Park Street at about fifty miles an hour a few minutes before noon.
“I never thought I’d die in such a stupid way,” Sally said.
“Hell, I knew I would,” Jackie Jack said.
He had turned on the televisions and picked up a phone.
“Operator, this is Jackie Jack Snowdrift, and I want to call my old lady and sing to her one more time,” Jackie Jack said. “Hurry, will you, hon?”
The Goblet and the black Cadillac approached Thirty-Third Street.
“My god,” Sally said, realizing what was about to happen.
At Thirty-Third Street the tunnel goes underground to Fortieth. Or you can take the street around the tunnel and rejoin Park later.
But because of the traffic only one lane was open, and the Goblet and Cadillac couldn’t go through the tunnel at the same time.
I mashed the pedal and the Goblet surged a half length ahead and reached the tunnel first. At an even fifty, Cooper swerved right and skidded between the outside tunnel wall and a delivery truck.
There was a whining, singing, spacy noise in the tunnel, going fast.
I thought Cooper was probably dead.
“Operator, I think who I’d rather talk to instead is Darrell Royal,” Jackie Jack said. “I got the number here in my shirt pocket.”
The Goblet sailed up out of the tunnel and missed by inches crashing into the black Cadillac.
Wheel to wheel, we went up the ramp that goes through Grand Central Station and curves around by the Commodore Hotel and comes down onto the real Park Avenue at Forty-Sixth Street.
Maybe I don’t need to mention that there were thrills connected with this. Honking. Quick turns. Near head-ons. Distorted faces. Screams. Flying briefcases and shopping bags.
“That’s right, I don’t have a fucking pocket,” Jackie Jack said. “I wish we were goin’ down to Chinatown to see a sword fight.”
The next time we had to stop was for traffic and a light in front of the Waldorf Hotel.
There was a third limo between us. It was black with Japanese flags on the front fenders. The driver was Japanese. A Japanese man in a gray suit sat in the back with his wife. The man had a small mustache and glasses.
“Operator, forget about Darrell Royal and call the Navy Department in Washington. We done trapped Hirohito,” Jackie Jack said.
With a grand slalom through trucks, cabs, pregnant women, and marchers with signs protesting the soil bank, the Goblet and the black Cadillac did incredible left turns onto Fifty-First Street. St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then Rockefeller Center spun past.
We arrived at the corner of Fifty-First and Sixth. Radio City on the left. Tall gray buildings full of loonies. Sam Goody’s record store on the right.
“My album’s in the window!” Jackie Jack shouted.
We arrived at that corner going twenty-five miles an hour, which on a crosstown Gotham street is like doing a hundred and thirty on a highway. The light was against us. The northbound traffic had started up Sixth.
Cooper had the inside lane on me. He wheeled onto Sixth and did a screaming right just ahead of the northbound traffic. I twisted the Goblet into the traffic and we caromed to the right off an air pocket or something—I would never attempt to explain it—and we reached the corner of Fifty-Second and Sixth with the black Cadillac ahead by maybe five feet.
But this was the final block of the race. I might as well lose by the length of Manhattan as by five feet.
Cooper made a great sharp turn onto Fifty-Second, hugged the right side of the curb, and struck through an opening between a United Parcel truck and a bunch of Hare Krishnas.
The left side of Fifty-Second was blocked. If I followed Cooper through the right side opening, I was beaten.
So I said hidy, Lord, and took the Fifty-Second Street turn wide left.
I mean wide enough that the Silver Goblet ate up sidewalk in front of the CBS building for a few yards before we cut back onto Fifty-Second with a four-foot lead on Cooper in the black Cadillac.
Then I saw the Big Guy walking across Fifty-Second Street in front of “21.” The Big Guy had parked his Plymouth at the opposite curb. Two military chiefs walked with him. The Big Guy was waving his two index fingers. He was leading a band. I assumed he was singing, “Consider yourself . . . one of the family.”
