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Chapter FourteenHell’s Hundred AcresChirp, cheep, chirrup… Ah, the harmonium of my juvenescence. The Alps Mountain Singing Radio Canaries. Never thought I’d wind up working for the guy who inherited those crooning, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered vertebrate. But rock ’n’ roll had turned the Radio Canaries into dead pigeons, along with the silly novelty songs that amused the unsophisticated, sexually-repressed nation of my youth. I was now officially out of the radio biz. For years, I’d naively assumed Charlie and I would forever be paired. But in my late thirties I went solo for the first time since he’d tucked me under his enveloping wing. He managed to pull some of his few remaining strings and landed me a job as a scribe at Backbeat, an ultra-hip music periodical with an under-thirty demographic. The magazine was the brainstorm of Roland Stein, artsy heir to his father’s pet products empire. Alps Mountain sold accoutrements to owners of fowl and fish, canine and feline, rodent and reptile. Charlie had appeared in several TV spots for Alps, which was how he came to know Stein, and why the Wingding Man was guaranteed a free lifetime supply of birdseed. If only he had a bird. Stein had ambitious plans for his weekly tabloid. While the headquarters of the Alps corporation perched in Carteret, New Jersey, Backbeat nested in a third-floor loft on Wooster Street in what would become a trendy neighborhood renamed SoHo—but at the time known as the Cast Iron District for its old factory buildings of Tuscan and Corinthian columns, gargoyled arches, dormer windows, mansard roofs, and broken pediments. Painters and sculptors, under lax zoning laws, were stealthily infiltrating the neighborhood’s cheaply-priced lofts. I thought it amusing the Cast Iron District was originally called Hell’s Hundred Acres. Now, I could honestly say I toiled in bowels of hell.When I went for my interview, I saw that Roland Stein’s office occupied a corner cubicle of the sprawling loft, which was crammed with rows of desks, typewriters, telephones, and a dozen or so youngish, blue-jeaned simians with enough facial hair to ward off Jack Frost. Stein’s space was decorated with rock posters, and near his desk stood an arch-topped bird cage in which two canaries flitted and sang. He wore a turtle-neck sweater, snakeskin belt, and alligator shoes.“Charlie Speed got a raw deal, Spence—if I may call you that. He was the best talent I ever hired. Sales shot up eighteen percent when he voiced my commercials on Channel Nine. How’s he doing?”“He seems optimistic under the circumstances, Mr. Stein, but he hides his feelings. He’s convinced he’s going to bounce back.”“Call me Rolly. This payola business is a load of crap. Hay for the politicians. Too bad I can’t use him for my commercials anymore. Had to switch to Monroe Blair.”“Charlie’s bêt noire.”“What could I do? Blair’s rep is unblemished and he’s endorsed by Sinatra. It’s dog eat dog in the pet-food business. Charlie sent you to me because he says you’re a damned good writer, and I’m looking for a damned good writer.”“Not sure I have the facial hair for what you want.”“Charles Antell. The guy made a fortune on the radio hawking the hair-growth Formula Number Nine. Dab his tonic on your face if you ever find bottle. Does wonders. Tell me what you’ve written?” “Scribbled odds and ends for my high school newspaper in Sliberty until the principal fired me for an obscenity that got published purely by accident. How would I have known what the word fuck meant? I was just a kid. Was on the yearbook staff. Wrote the captions under the class photos, although our adviser, Mr. Milne, decided my captions were indecent, especially the one about the hair on Sarah Smoler’s upper lip, and he had to rewrite them. Once, I entered the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph Christmas story contest, and they sent my piece back saying it was obviously a hoax written by an un-baptized, atheistic, un-American subversive who should be frog-walked by J. Edgar Hoover to the gates of Hell.”“You’re hired.”“Big career move for me, Rolly. Need to think about it. I accept.”“Charlie says you’re okay, and if you’re not, remember there are no unions at Backbeat. And no pension fund, no medical, no dental, and forget about long-term disability. But you get free tickets to about any music venue in town. Plus NYP plates.”“I never think about my health, my teeth, or my future, Rolly. But the free tickets ain’t bad and in New York press plates are gold.”“I don’t intend to stay in the birdseed business. When the time’s right I’m going to devote my full energies to Backbeat. I see it as a weekly with verve, style—au courant, if you pardon my French. Right now, our emphasis is on pop music, but the mag is going to move into the mainstream. Plan to add satire, politics, social issues, all with a left-of-center point of view, just like the US of A itself. Maybe even a Washington bureau. Are you on our side?”“Let me put it this way, Rolly. I’d never vote for someone like Richard Nixon, but I’m also not looking for a slot on the Daily Worker.”“Backbeat’s all about fitting in.”“I’ve never fit in before, so I’ll probably do just as well here.”“Your job’s to cover the rock ’n’ roll scene. If some of the music’s featherbrained, your reviews won’t be. Make your writing—how do I put it?—Shakespearian.”“This music mads me. Let it sound no more.”“King Richard the Second.”“I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice.”“A Midsummer-Night’s Dream.”“Ah, you know, Rolly.”“Yale Drama Club, class of nineteen forty-two.”I confessed to Rolly that as a kid, even as I grappled with Shakespeare, I listened, enraptured, to the Alps Mountain Canaries singing from within my mesmerizing box of tubes. I was fascinated by the enchanting possibilities, not only of the birds, but of AM—letters so dry, so uninspired, they might have robbed me of the magic were it not for those feathered songs.“Spence, my dad had the idea of making canaries radio stars. Herr Werner Stein came here from Düsseldorf in the twenties with a single change of clothing, toothbrush, one-dollar bill, and six thousand canaries, which he personally escorted in steerage. How did Dad come to possess six thousand canaries? He’d made a loan to a cousin, a pet shop dealer. But with Germany’s inflation out of control, Dad agreed to take the birds in repayment instead of cash.“Shipped the entire stock to New York hoping to sell the damned things. Didn’t speak a word of English other than, ‘Want to screw?’ which some wisenheimer visiting Düsseldorf from Bridgeport told him meant, ‘How are you?’ Wanamaker’s, Sears, Macy’s, Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, Grant’s. They all snapped up the canaries, prompting Dad to import more birds and launch a line of packaged bird foods to feed ’em.“One night, listening to music on his table Philco in his bird-filled walkup on Second Avenue, Dad realized his canaries were singing along to the radio. No more in harmony than a drone string on a five-string banjo, but, eureka! He hired church organist Iris Petrie, devout Methodist, who played music on radio’s ‘One’s Guy’s Family’ and ‘Just Plain Joe.’ She accompanied the birds on the organ, and damned if the noise didn’t appeal to the tastes of the non-musical. As Iris keyed ‘La Cucaracha,’ the canaries, all male, sang erotically, hoping in vain to attract the opposite feathered sex. Shrewdly, Dad never added females to the mix.“To advertise Alps products, Dad gathered his singing finches into rows of cages in front of the microphone at WOR, Iris at the organ. Mutual picked up the show and the rest is history. Iris Petrie is still alive and caring for her one-hundred-two-year-old younger brother in Hicksville, Long Island.” Stein reclined in his chair and propped his expensive alligators on the desk. “You dig canaries, Spence?”“I prefer cactus, Rolly. They don’t shit, only have to be watered once a month, and don’t die every week. Cacti are also faithful and loving—but who wants to sleep with a cactus and risk a thorn up the ass?”I owned no pets, outside of the cockroaches under my sink, nor did I plan to, although I’d grown fond of several roaches, particularly one I named Archie. As a kid I once had a dog called Smokey who encountered a bigger dog than he could chew. Smokey wasn’t replaceable in any event.For my shitty attitude alone, Rolly should have canned me before I even started, but based on Charlie’s extravagant recommendation, Rolly assumed I was one hell of a writer. However, without Charlie I was actually fucked-up, friendless, and foundering.“Canaries are bred to make music, Spence, but only the males sing. Females just flutter and fuck—exactly like their human counterparts. When I was growing up, Dad stashed birdcages in every room of the house. Instead of roast turkey for Thanksgiving, he insisted on roast canary, lots and lots to make up for the meat deficit. Our pillows were stuffed with canary feathers. He had me memorize all the mutations. Frills, Lizards, Old Variety, Columbus Fancy, Ivories, Mosaics, Rollers, Waterslaugers. For show ’n’ tell in the first grade, he made me tote two canaries to school and one died on the way and the other on the way back. I told the kids the dead bird was just napping. Spence, I loathe canaries, their smell, their chatter, their constant movement. I’ll be happy if I never see or hear another one for the rest of my life.”I pointed, speechless, at the bird cage near his desk.“Mr. Chirp and Mrs. Cheep are here to remind me where I came from and what I aspire to. Dad would kick a fit in his tomb if he knew how I really felt about the pet products racket. I’ve an Ivy League MBA, but I’m into the arts. I’ve already had a feeler from Pepsi. If the soda pop guys buy Alps I’ll have enough to devote full time to Backbeat, maybe even an opera company I’m thinking about launching uptown, or a repertoire company in that abandoned YMCA on The Bowery. You begin on Monday, Spence.”Thus, I started my job at Backbeat, although with little enthusiasm. The salary was virtual canary seed, but enough to pay the landlord and stock the pantry. Rolly’s tabloid was made up of simplistic music reviews, profiles, and photographs of guitars, drum sets, amplifiers, big-boobed broads, and hairy-chested oafs. Mostly I wrote record reviews, interviewed nitwit musicians who couldn’t read music, and covered performances.My heart wasn’t in it.The major perk was the NYP card and press plates, which got me preferential parking and inside fire and police lines. Sporting a press card was a voyeur’s dream, assuming one got off on charred bodies, the stench of burned flesh, triple homicides, and rivulets of blood. But my job was all about music. I wasn’t passionate about rock ’n’ roll the way Charlie was—although I would never admit it to him. He first started spinning it on the air cynically solely to get ratings, but the music became a mission.Occasionally, I mused about abandoning the Apple for an announcing job in the boonies, maybe even returning to Smoky City. I had a tentative offer from a five-hundred watter in Atlantic City to do morning drive, but Betsy would have no part of it. A.C. was a dump, she said. She was right. Once you made it to Manhattan it was impossible to retrench, especially to some oceanic decay like A.C. I toyed with the idea of writing a novel, but wasn’t sure I had the ideas or the words. Still, I liked the idea of tilting at literary windmills, which was slightly better than combing my eyebrows for nits.SBS-TV fired Charlie the day before I began at Backbeat. It was the net’s chief corporate lawyer Jerome B. Horowitz who carried the bad news, Jerry’s lot in life. He was a man who gave credence to the proposition that killing the messenger wasn’t always a bad thing.I was sipping coffee with Charlie at the station when Jerry felled the ax.He said, “You’re not gonna want to hear this Charlie, but I’m under orders from upstairs. Lemme put it as kindly and delicately as I can because I’m a sensitive kind of guy, and everyone here at the network’s rootin’ for you. You’re gone. History. Outta here. Although we’re going to let you broadcast your final show on Saturday. Sponsor obligations and all that.”Charlie had known he was about to be sacked, of course, but even so he grabbed my sleeve for support.“Christ, Jerry, first WASS sacks me, now SBS—without cause. The so-called payola thing, right?”“Legally we don’t need cause. And we’re issuing an official statement saying your contract is being terminated by mutual consent, that the decision wasn’t influenced by the payola situation, plus at no time did we suspect you of doing anything wrong.”“But it’s not by mutual consent, you prick. And anything I did was with your knowledge.”“Yeah, but that’s not what we’re telling the press. We’re simply going to suggest we had contractual differences.”“Your statement’s self-serving, Jerry, because if you thought I was on the grab while still keeping me on the air, it means you condoned it. You compromised yourselves, as you know damned well.”“Charlie, the Sovereign network’s position is that it had no direct realization you were accepting payola. But let me ask you this on the QT. If someone sent you a Buick, would you send it back?”“Depends on the color.”“Gotcha.”M’god, I could have killed Charlie for being so flippant, so stupid. It summed up everything wrong about the business, and the wisecrack was delivered to some third-tier lawyer who wasn’t his friend.Horowitz said, “Charlie, about your final show this weekend. Don’t do or say anything out of line. It wouldn’t be in your interest or ours. I mean, money’s involved here. If it goes bad we sue.”“You think I don’t know that? Tell him, Spencer.”“He knows that, Jerry.”Charlie snorted self-righteously. “Jerry, I’m a professional. Your crummy network isn’t the last place I’ll be working. I’m not going to blow my whole future, for Christ’s sake. Tell him, Spencer.”“He’s not going to blow his future, Jerry.”Horowitz said, “You’re forewarned, Charlie.”On Saturday, hours before Charlie’s final “Rock ’n’ Roll Rumpus,” the teens began lining up outside the studio. For them, an era was ending. Hyperactive TV reporters worked the crowd with their mics and cameras, ten-second sound bites, please—although if tears gushed, twenty-seconds with the right amount of pathos might make the Eleven, unless pushed out by a three-alarm fire.A boy with a look of both anger and innocence was interviewed by Channel 4’s Gabe Pressman, although teens, like women on the make, are never as innocent as they appear. “Why are you here, kid?” Pressman, a pit bull of a reporter, asked in his Bronx accent.“’Cause we love Charlie Speed.” “What’s your name?”“Bud, daddy-o. What’s yours?”“Say, I’m askin’ the questions. Why do you love Charlie Speed?” “’Cause he’s like a father to us. Someone we can look up to.”“Why do you suppose he’s being taken off the air?”“They wanna get rid of rock ’n’ roll is all. There wouldn’t be no rock ’n’ roll without Charlie. He even invented the name.”“That’s debatable. Ever hear of payola, Bud?”“A lie. Charlie Speed never took nothin’ from nobody.”“They’re replacing him on TV with some disc jockey from Memphis.”“Memphis? Where’s Memphis? No matter who replaces Charlie, it won’t be the same, and we ain’t gonna watch some guy from some state we never heard of.”Charlie, pint-swilling, dawdled in the makeup room until the last minute.“It’s time, Charlie,” I said. “And if you decide to make that speech, which I hope the hell you won’t, you’ll stick to what I wrote for you, okay? I had the words put on the cue cards.”“Got it memorized.” He popped a handful of Sen-Sen. “Don’t worry about me, old son.”“I do worry about you. Your face is…”“What?”“Ashen.”“But I was never fat like you—I mean, fat like you used to be.”“No matter how skinny I am now, to you I’ll always be fat, won’t I, Charlie?”“Wish me luck.”He emerged from the wings wearing his loudest plaid sport jacket and striped bow tie. As he marched under the studio lights, the teens chanted, We want Charlie! We want Charlie! He looked directly into the camera.“Hey, kids, y’all got him. Your ol’ Rajah of Rock, Mister Big hisself, the Boss of Rock ’n’ Roll, the one and only Wingding Man.”Some of them sobbed, unembarrassed by their tears.“Now don’t y’all cry ’cause you’ll have me doin’ it. Us rock ’n’ rollers is supposed to be jumpin’ for joy.”We love you, Charlie!Marcie Weintraub, fourteen, of Jackson Heights, president of the Hollis, Queens, Chapter of the Charlie Speed Fan Club, presented the deejay with a hand-made scroll to commemorate his contributions to the teens of America and to the music for which they stood. Robert B. Trussell, forty-four, Mamaroneck, representing the Tri-state Record Distributors Association, awarded Charlie a plaque in appreciation for his warmth, kindness, and devotion as a distinguished leader in the field of pop. Loretta Peachtree, fifty-six, Park Avenue, presented Charlie with a decorative plate citing his honorary leadership of the Community Chest of Yorkville for two years in a row.A lot of the musicians Charlie championed, including some of those who’d performed in Baltimore the night of the riot, lip-synched their songs: hillbilly rocker Odell Pinkerton, Fico (The Fab) Farrugia, Big Mamma Smalls, Mimi Malva and the Hanky Pankies, Leander Maddock. Even Leander was circumspect, although his motif was destroying cheap pianos on stage, which was getting to be expensive.During the quiet songs, Charlie (sans any sexual innuendo) danced somberly with a few of the bobby-soxers, the mood melancholy despite the anxious beat. He lived up to his professional rep, and the show succeeded with barely a snag, though SBS had poised sixteen security guards in case things got ugly. In the final moments of the broadcast Charlie, smiling, eyes glistening, addressed his audience, staring squarely into the camera’s beam. They were my words and he stuck to my script, although the vernacular was pure Charlie.“Kids, rock ’n’ roll’s a life force that can’t be stopped. It’s not only music for the present but the future. We don’t need the kind of sugar-coated hokum Mitch Miller throws at us or some schmaltzy palaver from a so-called deejay like Monroe Blair, who talks to our parents, not to us. Just ’cause I’m off the air after this show temporarily doesn’t mean the music’s gonna go away. I know I haven’t done anything wrong, other than to champion the wonderful platters we love, so I want y’all to stay calm. A lot of people intend to silence me, but remember, kids, we’re more grown up than the grownups. I love y’all, and don’t forget, this isn’t goodbye. It’s just so long.”As the closing credits scrolled down the screen, Charlie, tears streaming, clasped his fists above his head in solidarity with the fans, who applauded, cheered, and bawled to a teen. The red light on the camera faded, the applause sign dissolved, the pallbearers filed out, and the studio became as dark and soundless as a tomb. As Charlie stood alone, I went to him and put my arms around his shoulders. He’d done good, just as he had at the old Ebony Ballroom in Smoky City when teargas and fire hoses ended his very first wingding before it began. The stakes were smaller then but no less significant.“Great show, Charlie, as usual.”“Gemme out of here, old son. Need a drink at P.J.’s, and bad. I’m so thirsty I might have to lick the ice in the urinals. Look, my hands are shaking.” While I labored laconically at my new job in Hell’s Hundred Acres, Charlie spent most of his days at home in an alcoholic stupor and phoning around for work—when he wasn’t AWOL from Joey Dee for playtime with Blossom Floret, the American Airlines stewardess-trainee with whom he’d been having a May-December fling. She was to drop him, of course, Charlie not so interesting to her now that he was off the air. Blossom was an authentic celebrity fucker, and she kept a detailed list of her conquests (plus a few Polaroids) for her own amusement and that of posterity. Her inventory would become useful to Joey in her divorce suit.As job material, Charlie was too hot to handle for the moment, and no AM station in the country would take a flier on him until the dust settled. Then there remained that ominous other shoe waiting to drop: the Manhattan grand jury investigation into deejays and payola. But an extraordinary coincidence happened proving to be more salutary for the Wingding Man than he or I could have imagined.I was at home sacrificing pawns on my magnetic chessboard when Charlie phoned me.“Come on, old son, go with me to Enrico’s. For old time’s sake. Besides I’ve gotta get out of the apartment for a while. Things are too tense between Joey and me. I feel like I’m always being watched, the way her eyes follow me around the room. Gives me the spooks. Like she’s about to spring on me with a cutlass. I need some R and R. I’ll pick you up in a cab.”I had my own problems with Betsy, but, unlike Joey Dee, Betsy didn’t give a damn if I went out, where I went, or if I ever came back. While I had been exiled to the spare bedroom, we still used the same toilet and sink and shared the same refrigerator—but that was about it. Economics over endearment.I accompanied Charlie to Enrico’s in the Village. It seemed as though decades had passed since he and I first found our way to the restaurant during our virgin odyssey to Manhattan, although it couldn’t have been more than—what? three years, four? Who can count anymore? Back then, the world seemed to be a place of limitless opportunities, and Charlie, above all, had the conceit of believing he’d make real all his dreams, and there was I counting on the same, clinging to his coattails.What had gone so wrong? Bad decisions, lousy choices, sure, and yet nothing we did at the time seemed to be out of sync. Charlie saw himself as an innovator, pioneer, reshaping not only radio but music itself. His critics aside, Charlie was a communicator, a great one, and his fall was as degrading as it was unfair—or so I believed then.One could gauge Enrico’s decline by the peeling layers of paint on the walls like the rings in a tree’s core. The place had become noticeably shabby, and I suspected it would soon fade like gaslights, but the checkered tablecloths remained starched, along with the fabled photographs on the walls and the Radio Flyer, sagging on its wheels because of the heft of the anvil waiting to be pounded. If the waiters, white towels over their forearms, weren’t the same they had to be clones, sons of sons perhaps. But now the operatic repertoire sounded tired and stale, performed to excess, the voices listless, and no amount of alcoholic stimulus seemed to help. We ordered scotch and Charlie drained his at the rate of three to my one.Then a tallish woman, hair in a swirl, enveloped our table and put her hand on our hero’s shoulder.“Charlie?”I recognized her instantly, although her body and face had filled out substantially making her nose seem less narrow, not so severe. To me, she was eminently more attractive than when Charlie and I first saw her through our youthful alcoholic fogs.“Not sure I…”“Linda O’Farrell. I used to sing in this place.”“Of course. Linda.”She floated gracefully into a chair.“I remember when you came up from Philly,” she said, “and that terrible night we had.”“Long time ago,” Charlie said.“I made an ass of myself, getting so drunk when you took me to the Hickory House uptown.” She shook her head in self-disgust. “You recall. Rickety table, white cloth? ‘Paper Moon’? Cole Porter? Dick Kollmar? Watery booze? My vomit on your tie? Even more barf in the cab? You got me to my flat and I threw you out the same time I was throwing up.”Charlie applied his well-practiced smile.“Puke happens, Linda. I’ve been known to get sloshed myself on occasion. You’re singing here tonight?”“No, I just stopped in for old times’ sake. To say hi to Enrico and the waiters and the rest before the place closes next week. Nothing’s permanent anymore, like it used to be when I was a kid. Then everything seemed to last forever.”“Old times?” Charlie laughed. “Exactly what Spencer said when he insisted I come here with him tonight. Tell her, Spencer?”“Exactly,” I said.“Glad I came, Linda. You’re still performing professionally?”“Gave up singing. I’m now a school psychologist on Long Island.”“You were super when I first heard you. I remember the way you sang ‘In the Still of the Night.’”“I was lousy. What Dick Kollmar said about me at the Hickory House was true. I was shrill, off-key, and drunk. I went back to NYU and finished my degree. Married a lawyer. Have a house in Syosset.”“Nice. Picket fence, husband, kids, dog, two cars, and all that?”“No husband, no kids. One cat, one car. I do have the picket fence. The marriage didn’t work out, Charlie.”“Sorry to hear it.” “For the best. Steve was a nice guy and all, but we weren’t right for each other. Italian-Irish thing, I don’t know. I kept the house and Lewis, our cat.”“Linda, let me buy you a drink.”“Don’t drink alcohol anymore. Went into a twelve step, and so far it’s held. But I wouldn’t mind a tonic and lime. Tastes almost the same without the kick.”Charlie motioned for the waiter, and after Linda’s quinine came we awkwardly nursed our drinks, wondering what next to say.Linda broke the silence. “I listened to you on the radio a lot, Charlie. Loved hearing your voice. I was trained in classical music, as you know, but I somehow found your rock ’n’ roll endearing.”“Me too. Being educated in classical musical, I mean. My dad taught music theory at Pitt, my mother gave piano lessons, and I studied the clarinet, although it didn’t take me long to switch from Schubert to Shaw. Artie, that is.”“That movie you made, what was it called? I remember. Donnie, Bonnie and the Rajah of Rock ’n’ Roll. A riot.”“Don’t rub it in, Linda. I know it was bad, I was bad.”“There was something in the paper about an Oscar nomination?”“Pure PR. Don’t know what I was thinking to make a picture with a schlock outfit like Philistine Films. Ego, I guess. Wasn’t all my fault, though. My dumb pal here signed the deal and got me into it, and he’s the one who put it into the columns claiming I could actually act. Isn’t that, right, Spencer?”“As if you could act, Charlie.”“I read about what happened to you,” Linda said, “losing your shows and all. That payola thing.”“Broadcasting’s a tough racket. It’s show biz, so you got to be above the slings and arrows. And you know something about the industry, singing opera and all.” He put the scotch to his lips. “I still have a lot of irons in the fire, so don’t be surprised when you hear me back on the air before long.”“It must be hard on you, losing your TV show in particular.”“Naw, I’ve been talking to some syndicators in Ontario who are really, really interested in relaunching my ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Rumpus’ show in Canada. Of course, I’ll have to change the name. SBS kept that. And I expect to be taking a new wingding on the road again as soon as I line up the acts. We’re thinking about a tour in the Midwest. Boise to Bismarck. Rock ’n’ roll’s gotten really hot out on the Plains.”“Didn’t I read something about a Manhattan grand jury investigating payola?”“Jeez, they gotta investigate something. Remember that TV quiz show thing?”Linda put her hand over Charlie’s. “Hope it works out, Charlie. Really do. And I wish I could do something to make up for the way I behaved the night we first met. The puke and all.”“I didn’t mind the puke. I loved your puke. There’s nothing to make up.”“I think there is.”Charlie got back together with Linda, and it would prove to be, yep, a good thing.While Charlie’s romance with Linda was taking bloom, a man in a Bogey-style trench coat called on me while I was toiling sleepy-eyed in Hell’s Hundred Acres. I was slumped above my letter-rendering machine, pondering over a brilliant appraisal of a garage band in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, made up of three acned adolescents who called themselves the Mock Turtle Eggs. Inspired, I pecked out a masterwork of music criticism. Pulitzer, here I come:Your reporter found himself dazzled and in awe while witnessing a personal concert by the Mock Turtle Eggs in founder Benny Drozd’s family garage, a venue that also serves as the trio’s New Jersey rehearsal hall. The blend of electric, acoustic, percussion, and wind was awesome, although Drozd occasionally forgot the D chord while fingering his guitar; Eddy (Rabbit) Coyner, on saxophone, was unable to play a low C and below without squeaking; while Sean Felucca sometimes lost the beat on his snare drum. But these minor imperfections were eclipsed by the band’s brilliant originality and groundbreaking artistry. In their canny innocence, the Eggs supersede the artful decadence of their elders and surmount the genre. Indeed, one may find lush and melancholy, and, yes, opiated suggestions of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Batman. Imagine, on a microcosmic scale, the explosion of a billion suns, transcending the universe, which carry one to new and unmet horizons. The Eggs display the dreamless possibilities of a never tomorrow, a millennially tuned expression of a bravura prehistory that overshadows the obsolete. For my taste, some of the band’s numbers, such as “Dotty Flunks Gym,” may be a trifle slow and fundamental, or with “Eighth Grade Shame” a bit melodramatic, but I cheer the momentum of their idiosyncratic but vibrant “Lois Loves her Loafers.” To what heights the band will go once its members graduate from high school is the projection of a seer, rather than the petty observations of one accustomed to witnessing the daily, humdrum music scene. For now, however, the members of the Mock Turtle Eggs are content to stand their ground defiantly, explore new territory with phosphorescent virtuosity, defy convention, and enchant the disenchanted. The band is considering any number of recording offers (Rabbit refuses to say how many) but is not willing to compromise its musical foundations. “We ain’t goin’ to rush into nothin’,” Rabbit tells this reporter.It is clear the Eggs are attempting to rewrite rock ’n’ roll history with their unflagging mix of melodic madness, mad melody, anguished harmony, harmonious anguish, tormented joy, and joyful torment. In some far-flung future too distant for mortal projections, the Mock Turtle Eggs may be written off as nostalgic antiquity, prehistoric, and passé, but for our generation they are fecund with watershed implications. I neglected to write that the Eggs’ inspired grandeur was hampered by Sean Felucca’s curfew, imposed after he wrapped the fender of his Dad’s Pontiac around a street sign. Sean now had to be in by eight.“Mr. Summers? If I may interrupt…”There was an undefined something about the man, and his features seemed filmy as if I needed thicker eyeglasses to sharpen them. He identified himself as Detective Arbeiter, investigator with the district attorney’s office.“May I speak to you privately outside? We prefer to handle our interviews in our offices on Centre Street, but you’ve not returned our calls.”He was correct, and it was no accident I hadn’t. We rode the lumbering freight elevator to the ground floor and stood awkwardly on the sidewalk, watching convoys of cars and trucks on the cobblestone street while the wind swept the gutter debris like pocket-sized cyclones.“Am I in trouble?” I asked.“Wouldn’t put it exactly like that, sir. Our Mr. Goldner, who heads the DA’s complaint bureau, is leading the grand jury’s investigation into various aspects of the radio and recording business. He wants me to ask you a few questions, a sort of pre-interview. You worked with Charlie Speed, isn’t that correct?”“I’m not in radio anymore, detective. You know I work for Backbeat now. And Charlie’s off the air. So where’s this going?”“We believe a number of improprieties involving disc jockeys occurred under the jurisdiction of New York County.”“If you’re referring to so-called payola, Charlie Speed told a congressional committee everything he knew.”“I read the transcript. He never completed his testimony. He suddenly became ill, as I recall, and had to be rushed to a hospital.”“No matter, payola’s not against the law.”“Federal law, sir. However, in New York, there happens to be a statute against commercial bribery, and a conviction on a single count could lead to a six-month jail term and a five-hundred-dollar fine. And if there are multiple counts… Mr. Goldner would like to hear everything you know about money exchanged for playing recorded music on Mr. Speed’s radio and TV shows.”“What makes you think I’d tell Goldner anything, detective, even if I did know something?”“You’d be subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, sir. You can either talk to him or talk to the panel. If you testify before a grand jury you’d be under certain, shall I say, legal obligations. You may be familiar with the term perjury—although I don’t mean to alarm you. There’s also another term that might interest you. Immunity. With immunity, whatever you say truthfully under oath regarding Charlie Speed wouldn’t be held against you even if you yourself broke the law.”“Wow, what a deal. I might be a criminal of the worst kind, yet I’d get off just for testifying against Charlie.”My mind was spinning like a centrifuge. The duplicity he proposed: making me into a betrayer, a traitor, and stoolpigeon—as if exposing my best friend would somehow spare me from a lifetime of shame for which no jail sentence would ever compensate.“There’s nothing I could possibly tell the grand jury, Arbeiter. I was just Charlie Speed’s producer, a sort of glorified gofer.”He referred to a notepad, which he had taken from his coat pocket.“Did you ever hold a telephone conversation with Ralph Pittaro, vice president and general manager of WASS, in which you admitted to him you had, in fact, engaged in payola and were ready to own up to it publicly? A conversation during which you mentioned to Mr. Pittaro that dozens of recording companies had you on their payroll. That you created a personal sliding scale for the so-called spotlight songs Mr. Speed played every week. That Mr. Speed never knew about it. That you were completely responsible.”I took two steps back, which wasn’t enough to distance myself from the miasma of the man.“Who blabbed this stuff to you? Pittaro? Or was someone tapping my damned phone? Jesus, why don’t you go after commies, Mafia, mad bombers, child-molesters, necrophiliacs, or something? Or is your hit list just the guys who spin rock ’n’ roll on the radio for a living?”“You don’t have to answer my questions, sir, but I must warn you that being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury can be a humbling experience.”It occurred to me that Arbeiter and his accomplices might have the power to take away my coveted press plates, which, unlike common automobile owners, was a minor status symbol.“I’ve had lots of conversations with Ralph Pittaro, detective. He was our boss. I can’t remember one from another.”“Wouldn’t you like to assist your friend, sir? If you were the one who actually engaged in a conspiracy with the recording companies, not Mr. Speed, wouldn’t it help to formally clear his name? Frankly, however, we think your admissions to Mr. Pittaro were a grandiose effort to keep your pal out of trouble. And he’s in a lot of it. Should you be called before the grand jury you’d be required to testify under oath about your conversation with Mr. Pittaro.”“If I told Pittaro everything you said I did, I exaggerated. Nothing I said was literal. My way of trying to sound like a big shot. Besides, I was drunk. I say lots of stuff when I’m drunk.”“So you’re telling me it was Mr. Speed who entered into certain arrangements with the recording companies, not you.”“Arbeiter, why don’t you guys leave us alone? Especially Charlie. He’s lost his radio job, his TV show, his name’s been dragged through all kinds of crap, and now I get the idea you’d like to throw him in jail. Fuck it. I ain’t gonna talk to you or to your guy Goldner. Besides, for Charlie, it’s all over.”“Hardly, sir. It’s within our statute of limitations. We get no pleasure in putting people away, but when they violate the regulations of the state of New York they must be punished as an example. It’s what the taxpayers expect. That said, not every perp, say, such as yourself, needs to go to jail. In this case, one or two big fish may be enough to make our case against corruption in the radio business.”“Big fish like Charlie, you mean.”He dug into his pocket for a crumpled pack of Luckies.“That’s all I got to say for the moment, but if you’re called before the grand jury, I hope your memory’s very, very good, and a hell of a lot better than it is right now.”The gumshoe swiveled on his oxfords, lighting the Lucky, throwing the wadded, empty container into the gutter. Fucking litterbug. So much for law-abiding.As I watched the lumbering gumshoe disappear through the crowds on the stingy sidewalk, I wondered what more they could do to Charlie. He was a quarter in his coffin, and they couldn’t wait to drive a stake through the lid. A damned disc jockey, that’s all he was. A rock ’n’ roller. Failed classical musician. They were investigating him like some serial killer.I decided not to tell Charlie about my visit from the DA’s proxy. It would only have driven him battier.Back at my desk, I finished my Mock Turtle Eggs article and turned the copy in to the editor, an odiferous beatnik named Bukowski (who as it turned out would eventually shower and shave and go on to big things at Time-Life). Within the hour I was summoned to appear before the man in the alligator shoes.Rolly waved the story in my face, scaring his canaries and making them flap in their cage.“What the fuck is this, Spence?”“The profile I just wrote?”“You call it a profile? Damned band doesn’t exist. There’s no such group as the Mock Turtle Eggs. Bukowski assured me.”“There’s probably a group like it.”“You know what they do to reporters who make things up?”“Make ’em listen to bands like the Mock Turtle Eggs?”“Dammit, Spence…” Stein’s mouth turned into a grin. “I should give you the boot. But, hell, this is a delicious piece of parody. Just the kind of writing I want at Backbeat. That’s what I told Bukowski. Lots of pretension, powerful analogies, colorful similes, literary allusions.”“Thank you, Rolly. I think.”He opened the canary cage and lined the birds’ floor with the pages of my story. “Maybe they make up stuff like yours at The New York Times, but we’ve got standards at Backbeat. Your piece and the paper it’s written on is only good for absorbing bird shit, even though it’s super work. I can’t make money on shams. Spence, so find me a real band to profile. Track down the Everly Brothers, maybe, or Chubby Checker. The Hollywood Argyles.”Perhaps something in me made me want to get the ax. Maybe I was expressing my contempt for the music. Possibly I needed to show solidarity with my maligned friend Charlie. Only Freud, Jung, Honig, and Adler could tell me for sure, but they were all dead.The only hope left in Charlie’s life was his clandestine but deepening relationship with Linda O’Farrell. After one night with her, he crept home late, and, assuming Joey Dee was asleep, tiptoed to the refrigerator to quench his thirst with a night-capping Rheingold. He sensed a movement behind him and realized it was Joey, as he told me in a blow-by-blow description. The bulb in the open refrigerator cast fierce shadows on her face, like a flashlight under the chin, and her hair seemed to be made of snakes. She was frightening.“You’re a cocksucker, Charlie.”“Jesus, babe, where’d you come from?”“Been waitin’ for you, you bastard.”“Are your eyes all bloodshot? Hair’s a mess You sick, babe?”“Sick of you.” “Why do you have that… that… Babe, put it down.”She’d filed the butcher knife’s blade perilously sharp, and her Mediterranean menace was something I’d warned him about back in Philly.“Know all about you, you son of a bitch. Had you followed for weeks. And I’ve got the goods on you.”She flung a bundle of grainy photos at him. As they fluttered to the floor, he saw they were pictures of him in compromising situations with Blossom Floret. A telephoto lens managed to capture a number of dark, but suggestive window shots of Charlie and Blossom mattressed, with one particularly excellent picture showing Blossom using her mouth to their mutual advantage. “I also got this.”She threw a stapled sheaf of paper into the air. Charlie saw enough to know it was a surveillance report.“You been shackin’ up with every whore in town. And to think I trusted you.”“You got it all wrong.”“No, Charlie. You got it all wrong.”“Back off, babe. Put that thing away. We can work it out.”She lunged at him. He dodged, but in his alcoholic malaise he was uncoordinated. She cornered him between the Frigidaire and the Amana stove. I’m uncertain if she actually meant to kill him, but she left his face looking like a roadmap of New Jersey, including the turnpike exits, airports, golf courses, boardwalks, nature preserves, and the Dairy Queen on Route 4.By way of the plasterboard walls (through which voices, sobs, asthma gasps, and television babble were transmitted clearly), the neighbors heard his cries and dialed the Nineteenth Precinct. After the cops broke down the door they found Joey, mouth foaming, squatting on the linoleum, pissing her pants, licking blood from her fingers, babbling incoherently. Charlie was fighting for breath, his face covered with blood. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital.From my guest room, where I was nearly asleep, I heard the phone ringing in the hall. I clumsily rolled out of bed to answer it, but Betsy had already picked it up.As she handed the phone to me, she said, “It’s someone about your so-called friend Charlie, as usual, and whatever happened to him this time he deserves it.”“You despise him, don’t you, Betsy?” My mouth was full of cotton and my tongue sleep-engorged. “Maybe someday you’ll tell me why.”“Screw you.”The call was from Milton Chicane.“Spencer, taxi to Lenox Hill Hospital now. Charlie needs you.”Jesus, how many times had I gone through this? Summoned in the middle of the night to race to Charlie’s side. It was my calling, Charlie being my god, I his lone disciple. The lawyer was waiting in the ER, as well as Linda, plus a quartet of cops with nothing to do but gawk at the Filipino nurses, guzzle vending-machine coffee, and calculate their overtime.“He’s going to be all right,” said Chicane, present for damage control.He was coiffed and slick just as when he confidently strode across Foley Square to confront the congressional payola probers on Charlie’s behalf.“Charlie’s cut up pretty bad, but the doc says it appeared worse than it is because of all the blood. He actually has more cuts on his hands trying to stave off the attack. A few stitches and a little plastic surgery and he’ll look almost as good as yesterday.”Linda was red-eyed and tearful.“He’s so vulnerable, Spencer, and in pain.”Linda put her hand to her face, and I noticed her fingernails had grown out. The first time we had met they’d been gnawed to the quick.“Spencer, that woman will pay for cutting him.”Chicane said, “Joey Dee went off the deep end. She’s in Bellevue for observation. They could formally charge her with attempted murder, but chances are she’ll be held as a mental case. I’ve talked to the precinct captain, and I think we can keep this out of the papers. It’s going down as some sort of domestic dispute, of which there are hundreds every day in this city, and this one involves a Mr. and Mrs. Claude A. Spiegler. No one knows him other than Charlie Speed.” “I’m not talking like a psychologist,” Linda said, “but I hope that crazy bitch gets what she deserves.”Chicane said, “Even if she snapped, the doctors could pronounce her well in a matter of days or weeks and release her.”I said, “Joey’s not only sick, Linda, but angry. I saw it building a long time ago. I warned Charlie.”“What do you mean, you warned Charlie? That almost suggests Charlie brought it on himself? You’re blaming Charlie for getting maimed?”“Linda, I’m just saying…”“Only the kids believed in him. You call yourself his friend. But you’re like the rest. None of you understand Charlie. Everyone thinks he’s a bastard, but he isn’t. They think he’s arrogant. Not true.”“Of course I don’t—”“It’s only a defense mechanism to hide his insecurities. I know these things. I’m trained for it. He wants, wants… great things. For music. For radio. For the world. I’m going to take care of him when he gets out of the hospital.”“His face…”“I don’t give a fuck about his face.”Linda saw me as her competitor, just as Wanda Jean had during Charlie’s abortive first marriage, and Joey too. I didn’t want to press it, and I was grateful Linda would be taking charge of him instead of me. I was just barely managing my own life.“He’s going to need somebody, Linda. I’m glad it’s you.”I turned to leave. She dabbed at the tears in her eyes with her wrist.“Wait, Spencer. He wants to see you, although I don’t know why.”“Linda, don’t give up on me.”“I don’t give a damn about you. It’s Charlie I’m not giving up on.”Milton Chicane, his lips tight, said, “Linda and I will wait out here, Spencer.”Chicane didn’t mind hanging. The meter was running, Milton clocking every digit click, the dollars piling up. A freshly pressed Brooks Brothers suit to replace the one he was now wearing was hanging in his closet for an easy, lucrative, morning court date, a divorce case. The easy cases were the best because they paid the same as the hard ones and could be drawn out. I crept into Charlie’s room. His eyes were closed, Claude Raines-style bandages wrapped around his head. It reminded me of when he’d had his mastoidectomy and I’d sneaked into his room at Allegheny General in Smoky City. We were in our early teens. Then, a massive bandage covered half his head with a drainage tube from his ear into a wad of cotton. He’d been asleep, reeking of ether, but tonight he was awake although visibly woozy.“I’m here, Charlie.” He waved into the air for my hand and found it.“I really fucked things up, didn’t I, old son.”“Yeah, you did.”“And I was the guy who was supposed to take care of you.” He chuckled, sort of. “Since we were kids I always took charge. Remember when I pounded the shit out of Billy Bob Gentry? And the time I took you on the trolley to see ‘The Uncle Max Show’? When I got you on ‘The Boy Scout Buckskin Scout-A-Roos’? Let’s not even talk about your fuckin’ dad.”“Nothing’s permanent anymore, like it used to be when we were young.”“Hey, Linda says that. That’ll be the title of your next poem.”“I’ll keep it in reserve.”“Spencer, how the hell will I look when I get out of here?”“The doctors say you’ll look okay with a little plastic surgery.”“What’s it gonna do to my TV career? What if it makes the papers? And what woman will ever want me in bed now?”“Linda for one. You’re going to be all right. The important thing is you’re alive. It could have gone the other way.”“About Joey Dee… They’re not going to be too hard on her, are they?”“For an aggrieved woman there’s always sympathy, especially one who’s mentally ill.”“What do you mean, aggrieved?”“An adjective defined as being treated unjustly, such as in the phrase, the aggrieved party. Mistreated.”“Then why didn’t you say mistreated instead of aggrieved?”“Because aggrieved is a better word. Don’t you remember when we were kids, and you told me to expand my vocabulary so I’d sound smarter?”“What did Joey have to be aggrieved about? That’s nuts. I always took care of her. I loved her.”Yes, he did, in his way, as much as he could love anybody, but vulnerabilities and insecurities aside, he also believed he could get away with all sorts of crap thanks to his nonpareil charm. I was sure, despite his face swathed in bandages, that he wasn’t completely aware of how low he’d fallen or that a criminal indictment might be in the offing.“Charlie, you should phone your kids in Delaware.”“Not yet. I don’t want the twins to find out what happened until my face is better.”“Wanda Jean’s bound to hear about it and tell them.”“She’s poisoned them against me. They hate me, both of them. That fisherman guy she married wants to adopt them, and I told Wanda Jean okay, whatever you want.”Which was news to me.“But you’re their father, Charlie. How can you just give them up like that?”“Christ, I haven’t seen Wanda and Gene for two years at least. I was supposed to have them for a week last summer and they never showed up. No explanation. I cut Gene a fifty-dollar check for his birthday and I never even got a thank you. I’m not made to be a father. So let the fisherman take ’em. He’ll do a better job than I ever could.”“Maybe so, Charlie.”“Really, Spencer? Fuck. You’d didn’t have to agree with me.” “On second thought, you’re the greatest dad on earth.”The morning Charlie was discharged from Lenox Hill it was my duty to claim him, even as Linda was slaving at his apartment trying to make it livable: clean sheets, odor-free toilet, moldless refrigerator, bloodstains washed from the kitchen floor. I hoped Linda knew what she was taking on.As Charlie and I stood on East Seventy-seventh, me waving for a cab, an apparition, fierce at first then familiar, materialized in the exhaust of a TA bus. Red robe, stovepipe hat, wrist and ankle bracelets of metal, sword and scabbard.“Yo, Mister Charlie Speed. Always gettin’ yourself in trouble.”“Dammit, Mojo Mann, I don’t need you right now. Why the hell are you bothering me?”“But you does need me. I come to see you off.”“How’d you know I was getting out of the hospital today? Must have been in Variety, huh?”“No, my man, Variety seems to be ignorin’ you.”“Billboard then.”“Not a word about it in Billboard.”“Good. Chicane kept it out of the papers.”“Folks is forgettin’ ’bout you now that you’re off the air. But Mojo Mann ain’t. I notices you is cut up, Mister Charlie Speed. You got some bandages on your face, which wasn’t that pretty to begin with.”“You’re fuckin’ blind, Mojo Mann. How can you tell what my face looks like?”“Mojo Mann not only knows all, he sees all.”Charlie said, “Where’s that damned cab, Spencer? I don’t have time for all this sidewalk mojo bullshit.”“You got time for me,” Mojo Mann said, “on account of I got somethin’ that’s gonna help you, and you does need help.”“Then make it quick ’cause I gotta get home to piss.”“I has a special new charm for you.”“If it’s anything like the last one I bought from you, forget it. Your fuckin’ buckeye-juju conked out on me. Never gave me a decent hard-on until the day I lost it.”“You mean the same juju that some brothers stole off of you that unruly night in Harlem when you was beat up?”“How’d you know about that, dammit?”“Mojo Mann knows all about you and your juju, Mister Charlie Speed. The juju worked fine. You just had to want it to. The buckeye only needs to be re-energized. If you lose faith in it it’s no good. That’s the way all charms and jujus is. You gotta trust in ’em. Kind of like God. He only exists for those who believe in him, like the Tooth Fairy, Santa, the Easter Bunny, and UFOs. Folks who don’t believe ain’t got to waste their time. But this new charm I’m talkin’ about ain’t about erections. It’s about peace of mind. You take it and keep it on you at all times, even when you’re on the crapper.”He thrust a mojo bag into Charlie’s hand, which Mojo Mann surrounded with both of his, the effect like great hands clasped in prayer.“What’s in this damned thing?”“You don’t need to know, Mister Charlie Speed, but I’m gonna tell you anyway ’cause I made it special for you. Inside this mojo bag is the skeleton of a frog, a spider’s web, shell of an egg, five acorns, wax of a burnt candle, fluff of wool, a splinter of wood, ace of diamonds, pinch of marjoram, two peach pits, stick of charcoal, vial of urine. My very own, pissed just for you. You carry this charm, sleep with it, and I guarantees you’ll have total peace of mind before you leaves this vale.”“I’m broke. My wallet’s at home.”“For you, Mister Charlie Speed, no cost. I figures you needs all the help you can get after all you put yourself through. Faute de mieux, if you pardon my French, which means you ain’t got nothin’ better. I doubt nothin’s ever gonna work for you one hundred percent, but I’m tryin’. And may the power of lubrication go with you.” He gave Charlie the bird.Mojo and Phoebus, vanished as inexplicably as they’d appeared, leaving behind only the noxious fumes spouting from the ass of a city bus rattling down Lex. In a Checker heading uptown, Charlie, shivering and holding the mojo bag, said, “Driver, I got the chills. Turn the damned heat on.”“Screw you, jack.”“Spencer, tell that guy…”“Easy, Charlie. It’s just a short ride. Home in minutes. Here, take my jacket.”He scrunched into his seat, looking small and defeated. Then he held out Mojo’s gift as though it was something repulsive, like a turd.“I don’t need this damned thing because I have something better in mind. Toss it for me. Or use it yourself. Don’t want Linda to see it. She’ll think I’m superstitious or something.”“So you no longer have faith in the power of mojo. You were sorry after you threw away the mojo that ancient gypsy woman gave you back in Smoky City.”“That was a long time ago, and it was bullshit. It was supposed to keep me from dying before my time, but I’m still here, right? So I never needed it after all.”“Then Mojo Mann sold you a buckeye-juju, which you claimed worked sexual miracles.” “I lied. Don’t believe in charms. I never got a hard-on on account of that juju. I got all my woodies on their own. Anyway, now I trust in God, the one true God.”“You believe in the notion of God, and you think you’re not superstitious?”“Spare me your usual atheistic shit, Spencer. Thanks to Linda, I’m gonna convert.”“To what?”“Catholicism.”“Jesus, Charlie, that’s nuts. Of all the mystic entities on the planet the Catholic Church is the most militantly regressive, irrational, and ridiculous. Even Catholics ignore the Vatican.”“Cut me a break. You haven’t been inside a church since your mother died and your father turned himself into a drunk. You’re cynical and heretical.”“Hey, you make the words cynical and heretical sound like negatives.”“See what I mean? I had time to think while I was in the hospital. Linda wants me to change. I’m gonna take Catholic lessons, study the catechism or whatever the hell they call it, and then confession, the Eucharist, the Hail Marys, and everything else the pricks want you to do. That’s why I don’t need Mojo Mann’s stupid charm.”“The Catholics have their own stupid charms, Charlie. Saint Christopher medals, plastic beads, crucifixes, statues of virgin mothers, votive candles. And taking lessons from priests who know no more about God than you, probably less, is just plain dumb. All they offer are rituals and pedophilia.”“Not all of them are pedophiles, for christ’s sake. And what’s wrong with rituals? You can find peace of mind with rituals. That’s why they made the damned Church in the first place. Rituals don’t have to be rational as long as they work.”“Like mojo bags?”“I’m also thinking about joining AA, same as Linda. She’s insisting.”“AA’s also ritualistic with piss-poor results.”“So what? If it gets the job done.”“It won’t.”“Spencer, even if you’re right that it’s all hocus pocus, I haven’t lost anything but time, and time is all that matters.”“Time runs out.”It would happen that Charlie did convert, but when it came to time, Charlie was losing it faster than he knew. Maybe his mistake was giving me Mojo Mann’s so-called peace-of-mind charm to destroy. When I got to my apartment on West End Avenue, mephitic haze fording the Hudson from Jersey, I chucked the thing down the building’s incinerator shaft. They had incinerators in those days—before they were banned for stinking up the air and polluting our lungs with carcinogens.As I turned away from the chute I heard from below a pronounced poof—as if the charm had caught on fire and exploded. ................
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