20- James Spader and the Sensory Depravation Tank

            I was laying in bed, watching a movie on TV.  I was on about five Xanax and a half a bottle of Nyquil, and I was trying to follow the plot, but it was a little too heavy for me.  James Spader was a doctor or a medical student, and he happened across the murder of some old girlfriend or something, some chick that looked like a hooker.  I think it was James Spader, anyway.

            This guy, this big, tough-looking guy wrapped a fucking rope around Spader’s neck and strung him up, killing the fucking star of the movie like, twenty minutes in.  The only thing is that then Spader woke up and I didn’t know if it was a dream or what the fuck was going on.  All of this had something to do with some fairly standard Jack the Ripper type who was killing prostitutes in L.A.

            I don’t know.  Like I said: Xanax and Doxylamine Succinate, the active ingredient in Nyquil.  The effect was, lay down on a bed, or a couch, which was where I was, and float.  I was watching James Spader stalk around with a little bit of menace, a little bit of nice guy, a mop of sweaty straw-colored hair hanging all over his brow.  I had a vague notion of what my name was when Vermin called me.

            “Laird,” he said.

            “Who?”

            “Laird,” he said.  “Fuck, I don’t know your first name.  Is that you?”

            “What?” I said.

            “It’s Verm,” he said.  “What are you up to, man?”  There was music playing in the background, something bluesy.

            “I’m on cough medicine and Xanax and watching James Spader have a beer with some chick, but I think he’s already dead.  Why?”

            “Man, I’m at the Tank, and the music here is just…just fucking killing.  Do you know this place?”

            “Verm…”

            “Laird, man, there’s Jimi on the box, and there’s a band playing everything from Otis Redding to James Brown.”

            I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t even see it.  I looked at James Spader and he was starting to give me the creeps.  “Verm,” I said, “it’s late.”  I guessed.

            “It’s not even nine-thirty, man.  The singer looks like Denzel Washington, and he’s got a set of pipes like Otis, man.  I’m telling you.  This is the place to be, man.  Aqueduct, man, near the baseball fields.  There’s a big neon sign that says Live Blues and R&B Shows Every Night.  Call a fucking cab…”

            “I can’t afford a cab.”

“Then steal a fucking car.  You cannot miss this place.”

            I considered my options.  I looked at the clock and it still didn’t tell me anything.  I looked at James Spader, and he was looking right at me.  “What are you waiting for,” he said.  He lit a cigarette and stared at me, big blue eyes.

            “Otis, man,” Verm said.  “I’m sitting on the dock of the bay here, and you’re watching James Fucking Spader.”

            “Do it,” James Spader said.  Everything around him had stopped.  The music, the cigarette smoke, the whole bar.  Every single person was caught in a freeze frame, except for the girl he was sitting in the bar with, a cute little 80s number I’d long since forgotten the name of.  She was looking at Spader, expectantly.  He was looking at me.  “Well do something.  You know, I’m not sure how much longer I can stand the sight of you.”

            I put on a pair of shoes, Chuck Taylor's with holes in the canvas.  I put on my fatigue jacket.  I picked up the shitty little remote control that came with my shitty little TV and I looked at Spader and he looked at me.

            We looked at each other.

            “And I didn’t die, you fucking retard.  That was my twin brother.  It’s a fucking plot device.”

            I was already out the door.

***

            A half an hour later, I was walking past the baseball fields near the aqueduct, and way on up the street I saw a little sign that said Live Blues Music Nightly in bright blue neon.  Ozone Park at night.  Shops were closed up, boarded up with big metal gates covered with spray-painted tags that said things like “Street Thunder is Alive” and “Turk 182” and I hadn’t known that the film students from NYU ever left the big island.  These were covered with padlocked gates.  There were dirty men lurking around in the darkness, huddled against the chill in the air, drinking away the day’s profits and not paying income tax.

As I got closer, I saw the name of the bar, The Sensory Depravation Tank.  It said that Clive “Otis” Owens and the Love Makers were playing all this week.

            I went inside and it was all smoke and mood-lighting.  There were pretty, white waitresses, and a smiling, old, black barkeep, who looked in charge.  At tables, patrons were sitting, smoking, talking, drinking black label scotch and tapping their feet while the band was flying and “Otis” and two back-up singers were singing “I Second That Emotion” by Smokey and the Miracles.

            Otis looked more like Richard Pryor than Denzel Washington…Prior after setting his face on fire freebasing, as opposed to before.  He did sound like Otis though. His back up singers both oddly resembled Grace Jones and I thought for a moment how weird that was because I’d never seen anyone who looked like Grace Jones, not one single person- ever, and this guy has two Grace Jones’ backing him up on the mic.

            I said hello to a waitress and looked around the room.  Otis was trying to tell me that if I felt like loving him, he’d second that emotion, and I saw Vermin sitting in the front row.

            He was clapping his hands and tapping his feet.  He was wearing a dirty sweater, but with a gleaming white shirt and a tie with a half Windsor knot.  That, and an ugly pink bathrobe.  Nobody was staring at him.  He had a Kool dangling from his lips.  There was a pack on the table next to his drink and a lighter emblazoned with a single playing card- a Joker.

            Verm nodded at me and I sat down.  I took a smoke from his pack without asking, and I used his lighter to light it.  “What took you so long?” he asked.

            “I had to talk things over with James Spader,” I said.  “That and I couldn’t find my way off my block.”  I smoked and he smiled.  The song was upbeat and so was the mood in the place.  Everybody was wearing a smile.  “You gonna buy me a drink?” I asked him.

            “Jack,” he yelled to the white-bearded man behind the counter, “get my man here a double of black label.”  Verm was all smiles.  He took a short drag from his cigarette and spit out a chimney of smoke.

            There was a beat then, a few moments of Verm looking at me and me looking at him, both of us were waiting for the other to say something.  Right about then, I noticed that Vermin had a bruise on the right side of his face, down around his jaw and his cheek.  It was about the size and shape, well, at least the shape of New Jersey.

            “Otis” started singing Brownie McGhee’s “Rainy, Rainy Day” while playing an old acoustic guitar; and Verm was all smiles.  “I wanted to talk to you about your boy Kevin.”

            I smoked.  Jack brought me my double of black label and I took a little swallow.  “He used to fuck Pink and he doesn’t live around here anymore,” I said.  “How’s that?”

            “Where did he go?” Verm asked, his hands intertwined with a cigarette burning in there somewhere.  “Did he tell you anything?”

            “No,” I said.  “Why are you asking me this?”

            “No reason,” he said.  “I just figured I could offer you some good shit at an affordable cost if you had some good info.”

            “I haven’t seen him,” I said.  “Why does everyone ask me about Kevin?”

            He shrugged.  “My man Getch is in the way of needing to talk to your boy Kevin, and I just figured it would score me a few points with his crazy ass if I could tell him.”

            “Getch the one that did that to you?” I asked, not really liking my cigarette.

            Verm shook his head.  “Nah,” he said.  “It was those aromatic bodyguards he’s always rolling around with.  Those motherfuckers wear too much cologne.  Shit, I can still smell it.  I asked him if he’d heard anything about Kevin and he had one of ‘em crack me across the face with his gun.”  He felt around his jaw.  “It could be worse.  I think he loosened a tooth or two though.  I guess I shouldn’t have asked.”

I told him that I was sorry.  “I don’t know anymore than anybody else, man.  You try Pink?  They were fucking for like…years.”
            He smiled.  “She told me that he wasn’t circumcised.  That wasn’t really the kind of information I was looking for, but, well, at least it was information.”  I tapped off some of my ashes and I noticed that there were at least a dozen butts in the tray.  I also noticed that Vermin’s hands were shaking.

“You okay, Verm?”

“Yeah, man, I’m cool,” he said.  “You want some coke?”

            Next thing, the two of us were standing in the men’s room, which was all imitation marble countertops and blue tile and creepy fluorescent lights, the kind that stutter like Daffy Duck when the bulb is a little loose.  Verm put a three by five vanity mirror on the sink with four lines of really good coke and he took down two of them with a rolled up twenty dollar bill. All very cheesy 1980’s all very cheesy Verm. And I snickered and he shot me a “look”.

            “You know,” he started to say as I snorted one line of coke, followed by another, “some day soon, someone’s gonna mention that fuck’s name to Getch and get his fucking skull cracked open.  I just hope it isn’t me.”

            “How much does Kevin owe him?” I asked.

            “Dude,” he said, “I don’t know.”  Outside, “Otis” was playing something by Aretha, and Verm’s feet were dancing underneath him even as he looked so damn serious.  “I think if he woke up with my dick in his ass he’d hate me only a little bit less than he hates Kevin, man.  So I’m thinking it’s a fucking lot.”

            I reached into his breast pocket and I took another of his cigarettes and I lit it and blew smoke at my reflection in the mirror.  “I’m not exactly a big fan myself,” I said. 

            “Dude,” he said, “this whole thing has been going down hill since Kevin left town.”  He looked over his own face in the mirror, checked his teeth with his finger and looked up his nose, clearing a few grains out from under.  “You may not want to listen to that, but it’s true.  Ever since he split with all that debt, Getch is getting crazier and crazier. Like weird fucking crazy. Not even the good kind of crazy. I’m talking dark ages crazy. You hear about that shit he did to Nicky Divine?”

            I said that I had.

            “A fucking shin-vice, man?” he asked.  “Back in the day, Getch’d have one of his cologne motherfuckers put two in Nick’s head and have done with it.  Business, you know?  Two in the head, and a lonely grave, and it was ice cold and a good kind of crazy for that line of work was left in the wake of the event- as a reputation type thing.  That, or break his hand or something.  Business.  He got mean, you know?  Real mean. Like wacky fuckin’ sixteenth century mean, since your boy Kevin fucked him, man he’s been Googling new and interesting ways to fuck people up on the dark side of bizarre…”  Verm shook his head, and he took the cigarette from my mouth and took a puff and gave it back to me.

            “The television keeps telling me that these things are bad for you, you know?”  He smiled and I smiled.

            I thought about James Spader, watching me make decisions, being the nice guy one minute and menacing the next.  I thought about my TV talking to me.  “Shit must be true,” I said.

“There’s a whole lot of check yourself before you wreck yourself going on right here, and I’m telling you Getch is ready to wreck shit.” Verm said, pushing his finger into the center of my chest.

“And?”

“And watch your shit. Getch is a mad dog. He isn’t having anyone else do the dirty work here. He’s gotten very hands-on. He’s boiling. He’ll pop off soon enough, like Krakatoa, all nasty and dirty. And do you want to be in the blast radius of his shit?”

“Well, I can’t just not be. I do what I do. I’m not hiding. I have to make money Verm, you know that more than anyone.”

“I know you’re not hiding. I’m just saying, game is changing- be prepared for change.”

“You know man, “change”, fuck, if you knew half the shit that was going on right now, in my head, you’d understand that I understand change more than any motherfucker you know.”

Verm threw me a quizzical look, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What?” I said.

“In your head, what are you plotting something?”

“What- No.”

“C’mon man, don’t be fucking around here. Don’t think stupid shit. These are stupid times. Getch has a hard-on, a fucking blood lust. If you’re plotting some bullshit, just deep six it, right now.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

White lines…blue paper…and a searing pain right through the center of my skull.

“Then what the fuck is it man?” Vermin asked, and it was genuine too, as genuine Verm could be full of coke and standing in the here and now. He was asking me, as of all things, a friend. And I was taken back a little bit and I threw him the same quizzical look he’d just given me and thought about revealing everything that was going on in my mind, all the details. Thinking about just serving it up to him on a platter. Really giving it to him, the hallucinations. The Aurora Project. All of it. Not knowing if he’d actually buy it, but feeling almost comfortable enough to talk about it because I really didn’t give a shit about his perspective on me, or him, or anything. And I know this fleeting moment of Verm actually giving a fuck was fueled more so by drugs rather than any real concern on my fucking behalf.

“Well, what the fuck is it?” Verm asked.

And now he’s prying. Is this genuine concern? Or was the coke too good to make a rational read on Vermin.

“It doesn’t matter.” I back pedal, because this isn’t the time or the place to get into anything in my head, especially with this guy. Vermin may be being real right now. But in all actuality, fuck him he’s a piece of shit, even more than I am. He’d sell me down the river in a nanosecond, and just like Pink, if I furnish him any information, I’m giving him the means to the end of a transaction and I’ll get fucked for this- some how some way. Plus, he wouldn’t understand it, because he’s just plain old fucking dumb.

“All right then, man. Just have your shit on lockdown. Because Getch is pissed- and you and Kevin are tight.” Verm gives me the eyes of serious.

“Were tight.” I say, deadpanned.

“Ok, “were tight.”

There’s a pause here, the kind of awkward pause that happens when two men are doing pretty decent cocaine in a bathroom and things take a turn from warning your sometimes hustling pal Laird about some kind of impending doom, to the kind of heart to heart you’d have on a camping trip with your father.

White lines…blue paper.

“What now?” Verm says; he feels it’s awkward, too.

“Now, I just want to get the fuck out of this bathroom, enjoy your cocaine.”