Jim Gavin: Middle Men: Stories

He came back with the whole team. By this time I was sobbing.

“Jesus Christ, Higginbottom. You’re worse than Weaver.”

“Fuck you,” said Weaver, and everybody laughed because he never cursed. He grabbed a ball and walked out of the locker room.

“I couldn’t find a bag,” said Coach Boyd, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Just take it easy, okay? This is all part of… remember that thing I said on the beach?”

“I don’t want to go out there,” I said.

“Neither do I,” said Tully. “Should I pull the fire alarm?”

“Come on, now,” said Overton. “We can do this.”

“Yeah, it’ll be our one shining moment,” said Tully.

“You’re right,” said Overton, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “I’m fucking high.”

“Hey,” said Coach Boyd, in his sternest voice. “You guys really shouldn’t be getting high before games.”

I sat there for a while, with everyone waiting on me. Coach Boyd kept assuring me that he had “been there.”

“Fuck it,” said Tully. “I’m pulling the alarm.”

“Might as well,” said Pham.

“All I want is a nap,” said Overton.

Coach Boyd looked at all of us. “Are you guys serious?”

Tully disappeared. The next thing I heard was the hammering of a fire bell, and we all evacuated the gym.

The game only got postponed for an hour — I ended up with six points and twelve turnovers and Jelani Curtis dunked twice on my head — but during that hour, in the parking lot, as Coach Boyd apologized to tournament officials, I felt a miraculous sense of relief, because I knew it was all over, my future. Later that night, while everyone went to Sizzler, I sat alone in the room, watching the local news. The plan was to relax and “collect” myself, as Coach Boyd suggested, and I guess that’s what happened, because instead of thinking about basketball, I focused all my attention on the local news anchor, her lips and the curve of her neck. I felt something rising in me, a sense of life maybe, this life, here, in a motel by the sea, and just like that, my Gnostic phase was over. I jerked off three times in an hour. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

I once chased a girl to Bermuda. Her name was Karen and we met ten years ago, by accident, shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. At the time I was twenty-three and living with too many friends in Echo Park. Our apartment resembled a Moorish castle. We were on the top floor, overlooking a courtyard that sparkled with empty beer cans. Ravens nested in the lemon tree and each morning I awoke in the shadow of a minaret. Plus we had cheap cable. My room was one-half of the living room and my mattress was a single, a mighty single, floating on a sea of thin brown carpet, among neat stacks of records and magazines. My rent, including utilities, was $180 a month. None of us were overly employed. I had a great part-time job doing deliveries for Meals on Wheels, which meant I got to drive around the city, listening to the radio and knocking on strange doors. The cripples were always stoned and paranoid, but some of the more chipper octogenarians invited me in and told me stories; some even gave me gifts, bizarre gifts, sad gifts, my favorite a dulcimer, hand-carved by an Armenian man who lived in a North Hollywood motel. He whistled strange melodies and had tufts of knotty gray hair in his ears. One day I knocked on his door and he didn’t answer. I asked the clerk where he went and the clerk said he had left a few days earlier, without paying his bill. This kind of thing happened all the time. People disappeared. There was nothing I could do but cross him off my list.

My verminous roommates included the Brothers Rincon, Javier and Gilbert, who chose to paint houses a couple times a week with their uncle, even though the trustees of Cal State Los Angeles had seen fit to confer on each of them a bachelor’s degree in computer science. The New Economy was still new and the brothers contributed in their own way by destroying each other nightly in marathon games of GoldenEye . After two a.m., when I retired to my mattress behind the living room partition, aqueous shadows flickered on the ceiling above me and I fell asleep to the clicks and taps of their heroic thumbing. Nathan worked as a bellhop at the Chateau Marmont. He was better-looking than the rest of us and made good money on tips, which he spent entirely on himself. Mark, in contrast, was short and bald and extremely generous with his money. After a brief, dishonorable stint in the Navy, he returned to Los Angeles with crabs and a deeper understanding of commerce. He scalped Dodgers tickets, hung around pawnshops, and though he didn’t really sell weed, he knew enough people who did that he somehow got himself administratively involved; also, in a kind of feudal arrangement, every tenant of the castle paid him ten bucks a month for the cable he had spliced from the apartment complex next door. Other people came and went, friends, girlfriends, friends who became girlfriends and the other way around, sleeping on the couch, playing Nintendo, listening to records, leaving dishes in the sink. The dishes. For a while I always did the dishes. If I asked my roommates to do the dishes, they accused me of being a martyr. Eventually I just let their dishes pile up, and they were happy with this arrangement. Their squalor was carefree and strategic. The water bong stains on the carpet, the broken torchères left mangled in the corner, the crumpled bags of Del Taco, all these things helped them appear frail, lovable, and human, when, in fact, they were members of a band. They owned expensive vintage gear — most of it acquired by Mark — and they called themselves the Map. I didn’t think of them as artists, a distinction that belonged, in my mind, to musicians who lost themselves in the creation of sound, rather than in some gilded vision of what they might look like onstage. Nothing inspires obsession like a reclusive virtuoso — my heroes were Harry Nilsson and Arthur Lee — and nothing is more annoying than invoking such names in the face of struggling amateurs. The Map accused me of being a snob. “I know,” I said, cross-legged on my single mattress, squirting Del Scorcho sauce on my quesadilla. The Map wanted to be entertainers, which is not a sin. Nathan could actually write a decent hook. They all worked hard and I marveled at their evolution. Just three years before, they were a righteous hard-core band, playing weeknight shows at Jabberjaw and declaring in their lyrics a grim and lasting solidarity with revolutionary groups throughout the Americas. Eventually they mellowed out and learned to play their instruments. Weed and acid brought a new appreciation for melody and soon their set list consisted entirely of spacey love songs. Because I had no musical ability, or any other kind of ability, they let me load and unload their amps.

It was a happy time and I couldn’t wait for it to end.

• • •

I knocked. Maria Recoba lived alone on a hillside in Los Feliz. It was an old Spanish Revival house. From the street it looked very grand and elegant, with bright stucco facades and arched windows, but the rosebushes along the brick walkway were dead, long dead, and piled on the front steps were several years’ worth of new phone books. I knocked again. Usually, if someone wasn’t home I would drop their meal off with a preassigned neighbor, but Maria was always at home. I was going to leave but then I heard a record playing, something classical on piano. This time I pounded on the door. The record stopped and a moment later the judas window in the front door opened. A stranger stared at me. She seemed young but I saw streaks of gray in the black hair that fell across her face. Her cheeks were red and glistening with sweat.