happened.
Meet her in the boathouse? Who am I kidding, of course I‟d meet her in the boathouse. I‟d walk from
Pittsburgh to meet her in the boathouse.
Shit.
I got in bed with a copy of Donleavy‟s Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule and read myself to sleep.
At two a.m. the phone woke me up. I put the book on the table and turned off the light.
The phone rang twelve times before it finally quit.
Fuck it, it had to be bad news.
16
BAD DREAMS
I had the dream again that night. The first time in four or five years. It had been so long I had
forgotten it. It had started a year after I got back from Nam. 1 understand that‟s normal, It‟s called
delayed nocturnal shock or something like that. At first it was just this one persistent dream. I could
never remember all of it, just bits and pieces. After a while it was such a familiar nightmare that I
knew I was dreaming and it didn‟t bother me as much.
Then it changed.
The way it starts, I am in a hang glider soaring over a city. It could be Saigon, but I don‟t recognize it.
Suddenly people on the ground are shooting at me. I can‟t see them, but the bullets are tearing through
the wings of the glider. Next the bullets are hitting me. They bounce off as if my skin were bulletproof.
I don‟t feel the bullets. I don‟t feel anything. I don‟t hear anything either. „This is a silent dream. The
next thing I remember, I see Teddy. He is on top of a ridge and he‟s running. I don‟t know what he‟s
running from. Maybe he‟s running toward something. He starts waving at me. I try to soar down to
pick him up, but the glider won‟t move up or down. Teddy starts screaming at me, this soundless
scream. I feel desperate to get to him. Finally I get out of the seat of the glider and I hang over the side
and let go and I fall. There‟s no ground, just me, falling through an empty space.
Then I wake up.
After a while it began to get more complicated, after I got used to it and it didn‟t bother me anymore.
There were other hang gliders trying to collide with me. The other gliders were black and the pilots
were all masked. It was like an obstacle course in the sky. Before I got comfortable with that version,
the people in the other gliders started taking off their masks. One was my mother. Another was a fifthgrade schoolteacher whom I had not see or thought about for fifteen years. Another was my father,
only a face in a photograph to me. Then the parish priest in the New Jersey town where I was born. I
couldn‟t remember his name; all I could remember about him was that he had “silent collections”—
that meant folding money, no silver. It used to make me angry. And there was also a captain named
Grant, a martinet Teddy and I had served under in Nam when we were still second lieutenants.
They were all yelling at me, but of course I couldn‟t hear anything. It was a silent horror movie that
never ended.
A couple of years later, when I was working the street in San Francisco, I became friendly with
another patrolman who had served in Nam. His name was Winfield. He was a black guy and he was
taking college courses in psychology because he thought it would help him make detective.
One night over too many beers we started talking about dreams, so I told him mine and he gave me a
nickel‟s worth of Psychology 101:
“Your values are all fucked up, Jake. One thing is, you think you‟re different. Shit, join the club. I
figure it like this: it was one way here, the other way over there, okay? You get a lot of guilt over such
shit. Gets so you‟re afraid to trust anybody because you don‟t want them to find out. It happened to us
all, man. What you do, see, you decide what makes sense to you. Settle for that and fuck everything
else.”
After that we talked a lot. The dreams got fewer and farther between. Finally they stopped.
That night in Doomstown I had the dream again, only this time it wasn‟t Teddy running on the ridge.
It was Franco Tagliani.
17
PLAYING BY THE BOOK
The Palm Room of the Ponce Hotel was big, cheery room, as bright as a hothouse and decked out in
as many hanging plants, ferns, and potted flowers, it was decorated in soft hues of green, yellow, and
pink, with windows down one side that faced the hotel courtyard. Once, in summertimes past, the
cream of Dunetown society had sunned itself and gossiped around the pool. it had since been
converted into a giant fish pond spiked with lily pads, and while there were still a few old deck chairs
scattered about the area, the place had a forlorn, faded, unused look about it. The restaurant, however,
was breezy, cheerful, and buzzing with early morning conversation.
I showed up the next morning at a few minutes after eight with my head pounding and the taste of old
overshoes and amaretto in my mouth. I put on my sunglasses and groped my way through the
restaurant.
Francisco Mazzola, the peerless leader of the Freeze, was seated near a window overlooking the
courtyard. He had half a dozen vitamin pills of varying sizes and colors lined up in front of his plate
and was gulping them down with orange Juice. He pumped my hand, threw an arm around my back,
and slid the morning paper in front of me as 1 sat down.
“1 ordered your breakfast,” he said. “Fresh orange juice, a dozen dollar pancakes, one egg over easy,
no meat. Your system needs a break, I‟m sure. She‟s bringing your coffee now and I got some great
vitamins here for you.”
“If I eat all that, I‟ll die,” I said.
“Cot to keep up the old strength.”
“There are enough vitamins here for the whole room.”
He ignored the complaint. “Vitamins do great things for the brain,” he said.
Mazzola did vitamins like a speed freak does amphetamines. He was also fighting a losing battle with
his hair. He spent an hour every morning weaving what few strands were left over a pate as bald as a
kitchen table. To compensate he had grown a beard which made his dark Mediterranean looks and
intense brown eyes more intimidating than usual. He slid a handful of vitamins across the table to me.
“These are yours,” he said. “This stuff‟s from China. Incredible, has all kinds of—”
“Cisco, I‟m not into vitamins, okay? 1rn into coffee and a little booze, an occasional lay, rare steaks,
wine, mashed potatoes and gravy..
He looked like he was going to throw up.
“I‟m not into vitamins and weird herbs.”
“In two days you‟ll notice an improvement.”
“If I got a good night‟s sleep I‟d notice an improvement. I was tip half the night thanks to the sudden
departure of half the Tagliani clan.”
“We‟ll get to that,” he said, digging in to his breakfast, a plate of health food that looked like it had
been dredged from the bottom of a swamp.
“Besides,” I said, “I read where overdosing on vitamins makes your hair fall out.”
He looked up, aghast.
“Where did you read that?”
“In the paper. One of those health columns. Rots out the roots of the hair.”
I tried to keep the gag going but I started to laugh. He leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes.
“No more jokes about the hair, okay? Do 1 yoke about your knee?”
“It‟s my ankle.”
“See, you‟re touchy about that.”
“I‟m not touchy about it. I happen to have shifty ankles. Great wheels, shifty ankles; otherwise I
wouldn‟t be here, I‟d be a retired millionaire football player living in Tahiti. On the other hand, you