You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semifamous—The Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.
“Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”
We stood in the rear employee-only lot in the winter dark. I watched the cars rushing down Highway 163. The music thumped away inside the club and when someone came through the employee door the music got louder and I saw colored shapes hovering in the air about midway between the door and me.
I’ve been seeing these colored objects since Vic threw me to that sidewalk. They’re geometric, of varying colors, between one and four inches in length, width, depth. They float and bob. I can move them with a finger. Or with a strong exhalation, like blowing out birthday cake candles. They often accompany music, but sometimes they appear when someone is talking to me. The stronger the person’s emotion, the larger and more vivid the objects are. They linger briefly then vanish.
In the months after my fall I came to understand these shapes derived not so much from the words spoken, but from the emotion behind them. Each shape and color denotes a different emotion. To me, the shapes are visual reminders of the fact that people don’t always mean what they say. My condition is called synesthesia, from the Greek, and loosely translated it means “mixing of the senses.” I belong to the San Diego Synesthesia Society and we meet once a month at the Seven Seas on Hotel Circle.
Farrel had a round, pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair cut in bangs, and one dimple when she smiled. Her lips were small and red. Her handshake was soft. She was short even in highheeled boots. She wore a long coat against the damp winter chill.
“Vic tells me you’re a policeman. My daddy was a policeman. Center Springs, Arkansas. It’s not on most maps.”
“How long have you been here in San Diego?” I asked.
“Almost a year. I was waitressing but now I’m doing this. Better pay.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-four years old.” She had a way of holding your eyes with her own, a direct but uncritical stare. “Vic told me all about what happened. It’s good that you’ve become a friend of his. We all of us need at least one good friend … Well, guys, I should be going. I’d ask you in and buy you a drink, but it’s supposed to work the other way around.”
I glanced at Vic and saw the adoration in his eyes. It lit up his face, made it smarter and softer and better. Farrel smiled at him and put her hand on his sleeve.
“It’s okay, Vic.”
“Just so good to see you, Farrel.”
“Vic walks me in and out, every night. And any other of the dancers who want him to. You’re a cop so you know there’s always someone coming around places like this, making trouble for the girls. But not when Vic Primeval is in the barnyard.”
“I don’t really like that name,” said Vic.
“I mean it in a good way.”
“It means primitive.”
“It’s only a show name, Vic. Like, well, like for a dancer it would be Chastity or Desire.”
I watched the inner conflict ruffle Vic’s expression. Then his mind made some kind of override and the light came back to his eyes. He smiled and peered down at the ground.
A hard look came over Farrel’s face as a black BMW 750i bounced through the open exit gate and into the employees-only lot. It rolled to a stop beside us. The driver’s window went down.
“Yo. Sweetie. I been looking for you.” He was thirty maybe and tricked out in style—sharp haircut, pricey-looking shirt and jacket. Slender face, a Jersey voice and delivery. He looked from Farrel to Vic, then at me. “What’s your problem, fuckface?”
I swung open my jacket to give him a look at my .45.
He held up his hands like I should cuff him. “Christ. Farrel? You want I should run these meatballs off? They’re nothing to do with me and you, baby.”
“I want them to run you off. I told you, Sal. There isn’t a you and me. No more. It’s over. I’m gone.”
“But you’re not gone, baby. You’re right here. So get in. Whatever you’ll make in a month in there, I’ll pay you that right out of my pocket. Right here and now.”
“Get off this property,” said Vic. “Or I’ll drag you out of your cute little car and throw you over that fence.”
Vic glanced at me and winced right after he said this. When he gets mad at things he throws them far. People too.
Sal clucked his tongue like a hayseed then smiled at Vic as if he was an amusing moron.
“No more us, Sal,” said Farrel. “We’re over.”
“You still owe me eight thousand dollars, girl. Nothing’s over till I get that back.”
I saw black rhombuses wobbling in the air between us. Black rhombuses mean anger.
“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You think I’m dancing in a place like this just for the fun of it all?”
“Move out of here,” I said. “Do it now.”
“Or you’ll arrest me.”
“Quickly. It’ll cost you forty-eight long cheap hours or two expensive short ones. Your pick.”
“I want what’s mine,” Sal said to Farrel. “I want what I paid for.”
“Them’s two different things.”
“Maybe it is in that redneck slop hole you come from.”
The window went up and the car swung around and out of the lot, the big tires leaving a rubbery low-speed squeal on the asphalt.
“I’m coming in for a while,” I said.
I had a beer and watched Farrel and the other dancers do their shows. They were uninhibited and rhythmic to say the least. Some were pretty and some were plain. Some acted flirtatious and others lustful and others aloof. Farrel seemed almost shy and she never once looked at either me or Vic from what I could tell. She had a small attractive body. Vic stood in the back of the room, lost in the lush plum-colored curtains, his feet spread wide and arms crossed, stone still.
After an hour passed and Sal had not come back, I nodded a goodnight to Vic and went home.
Two days later Vic left a message for me and I met him outside the Convention Center. There was a reptile show in progress and many of the people were entering and leaving the building with constrictors around their necks and leashed iguanas in their arms and stacks of clear plastic food containers filled with brightly colored juvenile snakes.
“Look at this thing,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his aloha shirt and pulled out a huge black scorpion. “They don’t sting.”
Vic Malic had enormous hands but that scorpion stretched from his thumb tip to the nail on his little finger. It looked like it could drill that stinger a half inch into you anytime it wanted. In his other hand was a clear plastic bag filled with crickets. They were white with dust of some kind. They hopped around as crickets do.
“Scorpion food?” I asked.
“Yeah. And they dust them with vitamins for thirty cents.”
He looked down at the creature then slid it back into his shirt pocket. “That son of a bitch Sal is stalking Farrel. That was the third time I’ve seen him. He shows up everywhere she goes.”