Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“What I’m suppose to take, the SamTrans? That’s a hour. And I have to get downtown to the bus stop first.”

“Get another job. Here in the city. Sunday paper’s full of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s just for a while.”

“Popeye. Besides. What’s my landlord going to say he sees you at my house?”

“‘Sir.’”

“Ha-ha. Really.”

“Why you always have to think about some contingency ? Why, Jesus?”

“I have to think about getting to work when the clock says eight-thirty.”

“Eight fucking thirty? I thought nine to five is the general rule.”

“Maybe someplace. Not at DFW Corporation.”

“What’s that? Dumb Fucking Whitey?”

“Popeye. You bad.”

“You know it.”

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why you want to stay at my house?”

Because … Popeye shakes a cigarette out of the pack on the dash and lights it with one of these here Cricket lighters. Flick, flick, flick, small flame briefly illuminating the interior of Popeye’s car, the small woman gazing at him from the passenger seat, like bursts of light from the muzzle of a gun. The story. A woman. Old gray-haired lady Sara Jane Moore. Woman was a strange damn woman. Worked as a bookkeeper for that People in Need. While all the time she’s also working for the FBI, informing on the Left. Like what could she know? They pouring whole milk on cornflakes instead of skim? Sneaking they garbage into the neighbor’s cans? The FBI probably could learn more just reading the San Francisco Bay Guardian every week, but whatever. FBI never know nothing, just like to make up they files. Anyway, Sara Jane begins bringing Popeye glad tidings from Henry Billionaire Galton who has got it into his head that Popeye maybe can put in a word with his daughter Alice. Who Popeye never laid a eye on or said a word to but so what. Anyways, they fuck up his parole with that fucked-up smack bust, and what does Popeye sit down with his a.m. Postum to read? A Examiner editorial extolling the United Prisoners Union and singing his praises as if he was Martin Luther King. So basically Popeye will be putting his ass in the driver’s seat of a little motherfucking airplane and skywrite a motherfucking valentine from Daddy to his daughter if that’s what Henry Galton want. Back and forth they go, Popeye paying out his line, getting his hook into the man.

He knew the SLA, sure.

Donald DeFreeze was this kind of man, see. Not smart, but not too dumb, either. Not crazy, but the dude was not all there, know what I’m saying.

The rest, they just followed along.

They all dead now, though.

Alice is someplace nearby.

This was all conjecture, see, but the Parole Board reinstated his parole.

Play him long enough Galton could get Popeye elected to Congress.

Then Sara Jane Moore came one lonely day into the sweet-smelling room where Popeye had just vipered down a joint and something about her desolate earnestness so impetuously stirred Popeye that he thought he’d itch her gibs just for the fuck of it, and it fucked her up good. Coming around all the time practically saying ahh. Sorry, bitch. One taste is enough.

Turn it to the left. Turn it to the right. Sara Jane now’s officially a revolutionary. The FBI are the bad men, get caught holding the bag with a bunch of bullshit files full of bullshit courtesy Sara Jane about whether Venceremos is adding Downy to its laundry suds. But guess the fuck what? Guess who is a “informer” against the “Movement” now? Guess who’s “betraying” the “revolution” by “getting too close” to Henry Galton?

Suddenly it’s all alarms and Fourth of July and shit. Nobody give a rat’s ass that Sara Jane is walking down the corner phone booth to ring the pigs that Huey Newton poured his used motherfucking motor oil down into the motherfucking storm drain but if old Popeye tries to work out a accommodation to keep his ass out of stir it’s time for a turkey shoot.

He’s getting death threats. Signs indicate that they are for real. Like, he left this shirt laying on the bed and when he got home it’s not there. Like they took it away and shit. Get a sample of his cellular structure do some weird shit to him. And some glass on the table still filled with ice cubes. How they’re not going to melt while he be out? Someone in there, waiting. He felt the shadow of a murderous presence. Good thing they got bored.

Which is why Popeye is sitting in his car on a cold San Francisco night trying to convince the beautiful Deandra Booker to swap apartments with him.

The glow in the southwestern sky is suddenly diminished; the lights ringing the parapet atop Candlestick have been doused. Popeye leans forward and rubs some of the condensation off the windshield in front of him, peering out into the murky gloom. “Well, look at it here,” he says.

“What?”

“Fog. Gets into my bones, makes ’em achy. Big mildew crawling up the shower curtain. Bottom of my shoes turning green in the closet.” This is true. Pulled some dress shoes out for another bullshit hearing and found a delicate mold, the color of lichen, spreading across the soles. “My age, that ain’t good. Turn into a asprin junkie.”

“What do I want with green shoes?”

“Maybe some Irish in you.”

“Ha-ha.”

“We going to do it?”

“Let me think about it.”

“Don’t be thinking too long. I’ll get someone else. Lose this exclusive opportunity.” Popeye is joking, but he is sweating, nervous. He would like to be on the Bayshore right now, heading down to Menlo Park. “Popeye Jackson, police informer.” How tight that snitch jacket is once they get it on you. And here comes somebody, fuzzy and indistinct in the light pooled around one of the lampposts up near the corner. Popeye watches the figure approach, vague and misty, through the little clean patch of windshield just in front of him.

“I don’t know if I’m buying what you’re selling.” She reaches out and takes the pack off the dash, shakes a smoke out, and lights it. “Too smoky in here,” she says, cranking down her window a few inches. “Open yours too.”

“No,” says Popeye.

“Popeye, open it!” Deandra leans across him and begins to turn the crank.

“I fucking said no!” Popeye grabs her by the shoulders and throws her back into the passenger seat, where she sits staring coldly at the foggy windshield, cigarette snapped in two like a Benson & Hedges ad. “Fucking said no, bitch,” Popeye adds, quietly.

Footsteps are audible as the figure passes the car. Popeye sits perfectly still, quiet, tense. Then Deandra says, “Popeye, what?” The footsteps stop. Popeye is in the act of raising his index finger to his pursed lips when the first shot shatters his window, catching him in the left shoulder. The second shot hits him in the back, ricochets inside his chest, where it severs his aorta, and then exits under his left nipple, lodging in the upholstery of Deandra’s seat. The third shot enters the back of his skull and tears through his brain. For the fourth shot the killer rounds leisurely to the other side of the car and shoots Deandra in the right eye through her open window. Just to prove that some people take things seriously. Popeye’s last thoughts? Righteous righteous self-righteous pain.

ON THE MORNING OF the seventh day, Trout’s suitcase lies open on the coffee table, his clothes piled haphazardly inside. Trout sits on the couch in his T-shirt and undershorts, meditatively dipping a piece of toast into the yolk of a soft-boiled egg whose shell balances in an eggcup improvised from a shot glass. He is alone in the big room below the sleeping loft, having already bid goodbye to Tania and Joan, who’ve left early to go to town and run some errands. Before him is a stack of cassette tapes. Seven of them bear numbered labels reading “T.” Others, also numbered, read “Y.” or “Tk.”