Idiot Wind Read online

  Eight months later, we were standing before a justice of the peace in the Sinatra-haunted town of Hoboken, repeating vows both of us had broken before. This time, though, we’d get it right. We were sure of it. Our failed first marriages had made us wiser, and the bitter lessons we’d learned could only make our second bite of the apple that much sweeter. And for the next few years, it was sweet. While Kate finished up her coursework for a BA in English at the New School – a goal she’d been deferring since her first marriage broke up – I buckled down at the typewriter and began publishing articles in High Times and the SoHo News, as well as a chapbook of short stories issued by Cooper Union Press. We bought a Dodge van that I fitted out for camping and celebrated our second anniversary with a road trip to San Francisco, laughing our way from state to state, with Van Morrison’s just-released Wavelength album blasting from the cassette player on constant replay. At the top of our lungs, we sang along with Van the Man, our voices sometimes out of key, but our hearts in perfect harmony – and as the miles rolled by it seemed nothing could spoil our happiness. But all the while the spoiler was lurking in the wings, and when the idiot wind finally retook the stage during our fourth year together I began backsliding into the same routines that had doomed my marriage to Marie.

  Kate was an occasional coke user herself, so she’d never pressed me to kick my habit. I wish she had. Then at least I wouldn’t have had a running start when things started going downhill. Still, it was no one’s fault but my own when I reverted to form and began hanging out till the wee hours with my cokehead buddies in Tribeca. Come sunrise, I’d slink home to Hoboken on the PATH train with a mouthful of alibis so lame they insulted Kate’s intelligence. Which only infuriated her more. From the start, she’d made it clear she wouldn’t tolerate deceit. She’d lived a lie while she was cheating on her first husband, and afterwards she’d promised herself she’d never live that way again.

  On the eve of our fifth anniversary, Kate kept that promise and told me to pack my stuff and move out. She called it a ‘trial separation’, which left me with a scrap of hope to cling to when I headed across the river to an unfinished loft on Washington Street, around the corner from the Ear Inn. The air mattress we’d put to such happy use on our cross-country trip was now my only piece of furniture, and in the weeks ahead I salted it nightly with my tears as I lay in the dark wondering why the fuck I couldn’t quit making the same damned mistakes. The answer, of course, was as plain as the runny nose on my face, but until I was ready to accept it nothing would change.

  Though I had no doubt which of us was on trial, in the end our separation was a trial for both of us, because, despite all the heartache and acrimony, we hadn’t stopped loving each other. Every few months, Kate would invite me back to Hoboken for the weekend, and the old spark would flare like it always had. But she was looking for more than that. What Kate really wanted was some sign that I’d started to turn my life around – the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Sadly, I kept disappointing her. The only turn my life had taken since we’d separated was a turn for the worse. By that point, I couldn’t hold a job more than a week before getting pink-slipped for poor attendance, and slinging coke in bar-room toilets had become my primary source of income. Yet Kate remained hopeful. How, I don’t know, but she did. The heart is an organ of manifold mystery.

  Two years into our separation, the ongoing gentrification of Hoboken priced Kate out of her apartment on Garden Street and she moved to a more affordable place in Jersey City. It meant a longer ride on the PATH train for me, but I never passed up the chance to spend a weekend with her whenever she extended one of her periodic invitations – the last of which came on a wintry weekend at the start of 1984. When I arrived at her apartment at suppertime that Saturday evening, Kate was bustling around the kitchen in a flour-dusted apron, fixing us a meal of buttermilk fried chicken and homemade biscuits, one of her Southern specialities (she’d been raised in Alabama, before her father moved the family north to New Jersey during her freshman year in high school). After dinner, stuffed and happy, we retired to the bedroom and spent the rest of the night just lolling around, smoking weed and watching Saturday Night Live until we both drifted off to sleep.

  The following morning we slept in late, until Kate finally decided it was time for coffee. She got up to make a pot. I threw on some clothes and hit the streets to fetch breakfast rolls and a Sunday Times. I got back fifteen minutes later, sprinkled with snow from the flurries that were falling, and we sat down to a leisurely breakfast before taking the paper back to bed with us. For the next few hours we lay side-by-side, sharing the paper, until about two in the afternoon, when Kate announced she was feeling sleepy. ‘I think I’ll take a little nap,’ she said. ‘But wake me up in an hour or so. I don’t want to sleep all day.’ I promised her I would – but it was a promise I never got to keep.

  Within minutes, Kate was snoring softly. I continued working my way through the Book Review. And she kept dozing peacefully for the next half-hour. So peacefully, in fact, she was lulling me to sleep, too. But suddenly the bed began to shake, and when I turned toward Kate I was horrified to see her thrashing convulsively beneath the covers. Immediately, I grabbed her shoulder and shook it, calling out her name, hoping it was only a bad dream. But she didn’t wake up. Her body just kept bucking with spasms.

  In a panic I grabbed the phone and called for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived only four minutes later. By that time, I had scooped Kate up from the bed and laid her on the floor to perform CPR. The paramedics brushed me aside and took over, to no visible effect. Kate’s face had already gone blue, and as I stood uselessly to the side watching them ready her for transport, I knew in my heart I had lost her forever. A brain aneurysm. That’s what the post-mortem report said. For thirty-three years, Kate had graced the world with her smile. Now she was gone too soon – and our trial separation was over at last.

  Two years had passed since that awful afternoon in Jersey City, but Kate’s death continued to haunt my dreams, and it was just such a nightmare that had me in its grip as the bus arrived in Richmond. I was fast asleep when the bus rolled into the station, and suddenly I could feel my body begin to shake. In my dream, I panicked. I was sure I’d just been stricken by an aneurysm and was convulsing like Kate. It felt so terrifyingly real, it had to be true. Until I opened my eyes and saw the Greyhound driver, who was shaking my shoulder and barking some message I was slow to process.

  ‘What time is it?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Time to wake up,’ the driver replied. ‘This is Richmond, son. End of the line for you.’

  End of the line for you – I didn’t like the sound of that. But he’d gotten me to Richmond in one piece, so I said thanks as I stuffed my feet into my sneakers and got off the bus to face whatever Richmond had in store for me. Which turned out to be shock, followed instantly by disappointment when I saw that the parking lot was hemmed in on three sides by mountains of snow! Mountains being raised ever higher by a pair of Bobcat front-loaders that were zipping around in the predawn darkness, scraping and scooping for all they were worth. It was a thoroughly dispiriting tableau. So much for my dreams of putting the snow behind me.

  Inside, there weren’t more than a dozen people in the waiting area. A dozy mix of vagrants and stranded travellers, bathed in fluorescent light. Those who were awake looked weary and stunned into submission, like nighthawks in an Edward Hopper diner. That same look deadened my own face when I spotted the clock above the shuttered ticket window. Three-thirty. A bleak hour, for sure. I decided I’d better sit tight at the station till daylight. Outside, the temperature was well below freezing, and the roads were empty – it was no night for hitchhiking.

  With hours left to kill, I headed to the men’s room and treated myself to a sink bath, taking advantage of the facilities while I had the chance. Come dawn, I’d be entering hostile territory: the realm of ‘Restrooms for Customers Only’. I had five bucks left to my name, so I wouldn’t be a customer
much longer. For the moment, though, I was still a man of means and willing to spring for a ‘Bottomless Cup of Coffee’ in the concourse coffee shop. My body was jonesing for coke. A jolt of caffeine would take the edge off.

  The coffee shop advertised ‘24-Hour Service’, yet there wasn’t a server in sight. No customers either. Which seemed weird, until I approached the counter and peeked into the kitchen through the pick-up window. A skinny young waitress was standing at the stove, with her back to me, stirring the contents of a stock pot with a long wooden spoon. I coughed to attract her attention, and she flinched like a startled squirrel before she spun around to peer through the window.

  ‘No rush,’ I called out, sorry I’d spooked her.

  She mustered a sheepish grin and called back, ‘Just a sec, I’ll be right with you.’ She stepped out to the counter and hurried over with a menu. ‘Sorry, I had to stir the chilli,’ she said. ‘We’re shorthanded tonight. Our graveyard cook never showed. He couldn’t make it in through the storm. The swing shift cook stayed over to cover, but he’s passed out on some flour sacks in the pantry. Claims he’s resting up for the breakfast rush, but that’s a crock. With the roads the way they are, there won’t be any rush this morning. We’ve been dead all night. Till you walked in, anyway. What can I get you, mister?’

  Listening to her babble, I thought she must be starved for company. But my junkie’s radar kicked in when I noticed how she kept pulling a crumpled paper napkin from her apron pocket to dab her runny nose. I realised she was tweaking her ass off. Her dilated pupils – and her spiky crown of black hair – gave her the waifish look of a Japanese Manga heroine. A heroine whose name badge said ‘Charlene’.

  ‘You from New York?’ she asked, pouring the cup of coffee I’d ordered.

  ‘Used to be,’ I said. ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘Soon as you said caw-fee I kind of figured. You an actor or something?’

  ‘An actor?’ I smiled. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Your hat, I guess. Don’t see too many hats like yours in this town, except on TV. I could see you playing a G-man in The Untouchables. My dad used to love that show.’

  ‘I’m a writer, actually,’ I replied. A tenuous claim, I’ll admit. I hadn’t published anything new in years. Still, I figured ‘writer’ was a better profession to claim than ‘homeless junkie’.

  ‘A writer? That’s cool,’ Charlene said. ‘What do you write?’

  ‘This and that,’ I said. ‘Short stories, magazine pieces for High Times.’

  ‘High Times, wow!’ she gushed. ‘You must be famous.’

  ‘Only in my own mind,’ I laughed.

  ‘What are you working on now?’

  ‘Just gathering material,’ I said, feeding her the same line I’d been feeding myself for longer than I cared to admit. ‘But I’m thinking of doing a book about hitchhiking across the country, like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Ever read it?’

  ‘Nope, never heard of it,’ Charlene admitted. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Two road buddies back in the beatnik days, bumming around the country, high on speed.’

  ‘Speed, huh?’ Charlene said, her interest piqued. ‘What, like crystal meth?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘But they were popping Benzedrine pills. They called them bennies back then.’

  ‘So, what, are you a speed freak too?’ A fair question, after I’d just told her I wrote for High Times.

  ‘Not any more,’ I smiled. Twenty-four hours clean and I was already bragging. But it felt good to say it anyway – until my guilty conscience reminded me that I had nothing to brag about. Not after leaving poor Susan and Danny in the lurch.

  ‘Wish I could say the same,’ Charlene said, swiping at her nose with the paper napkin. ‘I’ve been trying to kick, but it’s not that easy.’ And with that the empty coffee shop became a confessional, and in a tone of voice as bitter as the coffee she kept pouring into my ‘bottomless’ cup, Charlene launched into the story of her troubles.

  She said she hated being hooked on meth. But she hated her parents even more for using her addiction against her. They’d denounced her as an unfit mother and convinced a judge to grant them custody of her infant daughter, Kylie. The child’s father had no say in the matter – he’d hanged himself in a jail cell while awaiting trial after his arrest for meth-dealing. Charlene blamed his death on her parents, too. The sheriff in the rural Blue Ridge town where she’d grown up was her mother’s cousin. Family strings had been pulled, and Daryl, the college-drop-out boyfriend, had been taken out of circulation. But not before he’d gotten Charlene pregnant in her senior year of high school.

  ‘Daryl’s blood is on their hands, the fuckers,’ Charlene swore. ‘He never even got to see his baby girl. His sister and I buried him a month before Kylie was born. Then my parents stole Kylie away and packed me off to Bible College in the Ozarks. A tight-assed Baptist school where they told me God would “rehabilitate” me, if I’d just open my wicked heart and let Him in. What a fucking joke. I wouldn’t have lasted a night in that place if I hadn’t scored a bag on the bus ride to Missouri. I stuck it out for a week, till my stash ran out, and then I bolted.’

  ‘Then what?’ I prompted, earning another refill.

  ‘I hitchhiked to a bus station and spent my book allowance on a ticket to Richmond.’

  ‘Why Richmond?’

  ‘Daryl’s sister lives here. I didn’t know who else to turn to. I’ve been crashing in the guest room at her co-op ever since. Taking night classes in commercial art, and then dragging my ass over here to waitress on the graveyard shift. I get so tired some days, crystal’s all that keeps me going.’

  ‘So, you had no problem making a connection here? Does Daryl’s sister use?’

  ‘God, no,’ Charlene said. ‘Amanda’s a nurse. She’d never mess with crank. I score from my art school friends. Half those people are hard-core tweakers. Keeps their creative juices flowing, they say. Maybe so, I tell them, but you’re all still junkies, same as me.’

  ‘How are the art classes going?’ I asked, steering for calmer waters.

  The sheepish smile returned. ‘Not bad, really. Twenty more credits and I’ll earn my certificate. Then I’m going to find a job in advertising. One that’ll pay me enough to hire a lawyer and start fighting to get Kylie back.’

  ‘Think you can win?’ I asked.

  ‘If I can pass a piss test, yeah,’ she said, but with little conviction. ‘Getting clean’s the hard part. I kick for a few days, and then I relapse. Every time. Amanda offered to get me into an inpatient rehab programme, but I keep putting it off. I want to finish my degree first. At least that’s what I tell Amanda. Truth is, I’m scared I couldn’t handle it.’

  ‘When the time comes, trust me, you’ll find a way,’ I said, and even as the words left my mouth I thought, Bullshit! Who was I to be acting wise and avuncular? So far, all I’d done to change my life was to put a few hundred miles between me and Bobby Bats. I could fool Charlene, but I couldn’t fool myself. I was just as afraid of what the future might hold as she was. The hard work was all still ahead of me and, like Charlene, I wasn’t sure I could handle it.

  Tears welled up in her Manga eyes, and Charlene dabbed them back with her napkin. ‘For Kylie’s sake, I hope you’re right.’

  I hoped I was right, too. For both of us.

  Two Richmond cops walked in just then and settled on stools at the far end of the counter. Charlene gave her eyes another quick dab and hurried off to take their order while I headed for the restroom. Call it junkie paranoia, but when I finished in the bathroom I was reluctant to return to the coffee shop. Not with the cops still at the counter. So far, my gangster fedora hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention, but why press my luck?

  I was biding my time in the waiting room when it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t given my wallet a thorough going-through before I left New York. When I was on a tear, I’d sometimes squirrel away cash in the wallet’s hidden crev
ices and then forget all about it. I didn’t have much hope I’d get lucky, but I had nothing better to do, so I pulled out my wallet and rifled every cranny. Alas, my search produced no squirrelled twenties, but it wasn’t a wasted effort, because I discovered a business card I’d forgotten I was carrying – one that might prove more valuable than any cash I might have found.

  My friend Tanner had slipped it to me at Christmas time, when he’d stopped into the Raccoon for a few drinks before heading to the airport to catch a flight back to his new home in San Francisco. In his heyday in the early eighties, Tanner had made a pile in the drug trade, using his cover as an importer of Himalayan handicrafts to smuggle high-grade Nepalese and Afghani hash into the States. Unlike most drug dealers, Tanner was smart enough to quit while he was ahead, and when he closed shop in 1985 he took his profits to San Francisco and began investing in real estate. Now he was buying old commercial warehouses and converting them to luxury condos. When I’d seen him in December, I’d half-jokingly suggested I might head west and hit him up for a job one of these days. It was only drunken blather on my part, but Tanner took me seriously.

  ‘Can you hang drywall?’ he asked.

  ‘As a matter of fact . . .’ I said, and told him about the weeks I’d spent hanging drywall for a buddy of mine who’d been contracted to build a new sound room on the top floor of Jimi Hendrix’s old Greenwich Village recording studio, Electric Lady. Every wall on that job had to be triple-hung – three layers of wallboard sandwiched together to ensure the room would be soundproof. So, yes, I had hung a bit of drywall.

  ‘Well, then, I’ve got work for you if you turn up,’ Tanner said, and handed me his business card.

  It was two-forty-five in the morning in San Francisco, but Tanner had always been a night owl, so I wasn’t worried my call would rouse him out of bed. Tanner picked up on the second ring and sounded wide awake as he dealt with the operator, who asked him, in her Southern drawl, whether he’d accept a collect call from someone she dubiously called ‘a Pete the Hat’.