I thought about how I hated the way I looked, and how I needed a haircut.
I flicked ash from my cigarette on to the sidewalk. I glanced up. The corner of Twelfth and Fifth was about twenty yards ahead of me. Suddenly a guy came careering around the corner from Fifth, walking as fast as I was. An aerial view would have shown us – two molecules – on a direct collision course. I recognized him at ten yards and he recognized me. At five yards we both started putting the brakes on and making with the gestures, the bug-eyes, the double-takes.
‘Eddie Spinola.’
‘Vernon Gant.’
‘How are you?’
‘God, how long has it been?’
We shook hands and slapped shoulders.
Vernon then stood back a little and started sizing me up.
‘Jesus, Eddie, pack it on, why don’t you?’
This was a reference to the considerable weight I’d gained since we’d last met, which was maybe nine or ten years before.
He was tall and skinny, just like he’d always been. I looked at his balding head, and paused. Then I nodded upwards. ‘Well, at least I still have some choice in the matter.’
He danced Jake La Motta-style for a moment and then threw me a mock left hook.
‘Still Mr Smart-ass, huh? So what are you up to, Eddie?’
He was wearing an expensive, loose-fitting linen suit and dark leather shoes. He had gold-rimmed shades on, and a tan. He looked and smelt like money.
What was I up to?
All of a sudden I didn’t want to be having this conversation.
‘I’m working for Kerr & Dexter, you know, the publishers.’
He sniffed and nodded yeah, waiting for more.
‘I’ve been a copywriter with them for about three or four years, text-books and manuals, that kind of thing, but now they’re doing a series of illustrated books on the twentieth century – you know, hoping to cash in on an early boom in the nostalgia trade – and I’ve been commissioned to do one about the design links between the Sixties and the Nineties…’
‘Interesting.’
‘… Haight-Ashbury and Silicon Valley…’
‘Very interesting.’
I hammered it home, ‘Lysergic acid and personal computers.’
‘Cool.’
‘It’s not really. They don’t pay very well and because the books are going to be so short – only about a hundred pages, a hundred twenty – you don’t have much latitude, which actually makes it more of a challenge, because…’
I stopped.
He furrowed his brow. ‘Yeah?’
‘… because…’ – explaining myself like this was sending unexpected stabs of embarrassment, and contempt, right through me and out the other side. I shuffled from one foot to the other. ‘… because, well, you’re basically writing captions to the illustrations and so if you want to get any kind of angle across you have to be really on top of the material, you know.’
‘That’s great, man.’ He smiled. ‘It’s what you always wanted to be doing, am I right?’
I considered this. It was, in a way – I suppose. But not in any way he’d ever understood. Jesus, I thought, Vernon Gant.
‘That must be a trip,’ he said.
Vernon had been a cocaine dealer when I knew him in the late 1980s, but back then he’d had quite a different image, lots of hair, leather jackets, big into Tao and furniture. It was all coming back to me now.
‘Actually I’m having a hard time with it,’ I said, though I don’t know why I was bothering to pursue the matter.
‘Yeah?’ he said, pulling back a little. He adjusted his shades as though he were surprised to hear what I’d said, but was nevertheless ready to start doling out advice once he’d nailed down whatever the problem might be.
‘There are so many strands, you know, and contradictions – it’s just hard to work out where to start.’ I settled my gaze on a car parked across the street, a metallic-blue Mercedes. ‘I mean you’ve got the anti-technology, back-to-nature Sixties, the Whole Earth Catalogue – all that shit… windchimes, brown rice and patchouli. But then you’ve got the pyrotechnics of rock music, sound-and-light, the word electric and the very fact that LSD itself came out of a laboratory…’ I kept my gaze on the car. ‘… and also that – get this – the prototype version of the Internet, the Arpanet, was developed in nineteen sixty-nine, at UCLA. Nineteen sixty-nine.’
I stopped again. The only reason I’d come out with this, I suppose, was because it was on my mind and had been all day. I was just thinking out loud, thinking – what angle did I take?
Vernon clicked his tongue and looked at his watch. ‘What are you doing now, Eddie?’
‘Walking down the street. Nothing. Having a smoke. I don’t know. I can’t get any work done.’ I took a drag from my cigarette. ‘Why?’
‘I think I can help you out.’
He looked at his watch again and seemed to be calculating something for a moment.
I stared at him in disbelief and was on the verge of getting annoyed.
‘C’mon, I’ll explain what I mean,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a drink.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Vamos.’
I really didn’t think my heading off with Vernon Gant was such a good idea. Apart from anything else, how could he possibly help me with the problem I’d just outlined to him? The notion was absurd.
But I hesitated.
I’d liked the sound of the second part of his proposition, the going for a drink part. There was also, I have to admit, a slight Pavlovian element to my hesitation – the idea of bumping into Vernon and heading off spontaneously to another location stirred something in my body chemistry. Hearing him say vamos, as well, was like an access-code or a search-word into a whole phase of my life that had been closed off now for nearly ten years.
I rubbed my nose and said, ‘OK.’
‘Good.’ He paused, and then said – like he was trying it out for size – ‘Eddie Spinola.’
We went to a bar over on Sixth, a cheesy retro cocktail lounge called Maxie’s that used to be a Tex-Mex place called El Charro and before that had been a spit-and-sawdust joint called Conroy’s. It took us a few moments to adjust to the lighting and the décor of the interior, and, weirdly, to find a booth that Vernon was happy with. The place was virtually empty – it wouldn’t be getting busy for another while yet, not until five o’clock at least – but Vernon was behaving as though it were the small hours of a Saturday morning and we were staking our claim to the last available seats in the last open bar in town. It was only then, as I watched him case each booth for line of vision and proximity to toilets and exits, that I realized something was up. He was edgy and nervous, and this was unusual for him – or at any rate unusual for the Vernon I’d known, his one great virtue as a coke dealer having been his relative composure at all times. Other dealers I’d been acquainted with generally behaved like adverts for the product they were shifting in that they hopped around the place incessantly and talked a lot. Vernon, on the other hand, had always been quiet and businesslike, unassuming, a good listener – maybe even a little too passive sometimes, like a dedicated weed smoker adrift in a sea of coke-fiends. In fact, if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought that Vernon – or at least this person in front of me – had done his first few lines of coke that very afternoon and wasn’t handling it very well.