Dreaming of Babylon. Richard Brautigan

I said earlier: He was one of my friends. You can imagine what the people who didn’t like me were like.

      I looked at the seventy-five cents on his desk.

      Then I remembered a minor criminal I knew who lived in North Beach. As I remembered he had a gun once. Maybe he still had it and I could get some bullets for my gun from him.

      I picked up the seventy-five cents.

      “Thank you,” I said.

      Rink sighed.

      “Get your ass out of here,” he said. “The next time I see you I want to be looking at an employed man who’s eager to repay eighty-three dollars and seventy-five cents to his old friend Rink. If I see anything that resembles you the way you are now, I’ll vag you and make sure you get thirty days. Pull yourself together and get the fuck out of here.”

      I left him playing with the letter opener.

      Maybe it would give him an idea for a lead that would solve the case of the murdered prostitute.

      Also, maybe, he could take it and shove it up his ass.

       Adolf Hitler

      I left the Hall of Justice and walked up to North Beach to see if I could get some bullets out of the minor criminal I knew who lived on Telegraph Hill.

      He lived in an apartment on Green Street.

      Just my luck the minor crook wasn’t home. His mother answered the door. I had never met her before but I knew it was his mother because he had talked a lot about her. She took one look at me and said, “He’s gone straight. Go away. He’s a good boy now. Find somebody else to break into places with.”

      “What?” I said.

      “You know what,” she said. “He doesn’t want to have anything to do with guys like you. He goes to church now. Six o’clock Mass.”

      She was a little old Italian lady about sixty. She was wearing a white apron. I think she misunderstood what type of person I was.

      “He’s gone down to join the Army,” she said. “He can, you know. He never got into any real trouble. Just little things. Guys like you made him do it. He’s going to fight Adolf Hitler. Show that son-of-a-bitch what’s what.”

      Then she started to close the door.

      “Get out of here!” she yelled. “Go join the Army! Make something of yourself! It’s not too late! The recruiting office is open right now! They’ll take you if you haven’t been in the pen!”

      “I don’t think you know who I am. I’m a private—”

       SLAM!

      It was an obvious misunderstanding.

      Amazing.

      She thought I was a crook.

      I’d just come there to borrow a few bullets.

       Mustard

      Still no bullets, and I was getting hungry. The nutrition from the stale doughnut I had cadged from my landlady was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

      I went into a little Italian delicatessen on Columbus Avenue and got a salami and Swiss cheese sandwich on a French roll with lots of mustard.

      I like it that way: lots and lots of mustard.

      It put a forty-five-cent dent in my seventy-five cents.

      I was now a thirty-cent private detective.

      The old Italian who made the sandwich for me was very interesting looking. Anyway, I made him look interesting because I started to think about Babylon, and I couldn’t afford to if I was going to earn some money from my first client since October 13, 1941.

      Jesus, what a dry spell!

      That had been a divorce case.

      A three-hundred-pound husband wanted the goods on his three-hundred-pound wife. He thought that she was fooling around and she was: with a three-hundred-pound automobile mechanic. Some case. She used to go down to his garage every Wednesday afternoon and he’d fuck her over the hood of a car. I got some terrific photographs. That was before I had to pawn my camera. You should have seen the expression on their faces when I jumped out from behind a Buick and started snapping away. When he pulled out of her she rolled right over onto the floor and made a sound like an elevator falling on an elephant.

      “Put a little more mustard on it,” I said.

      “You sure likea the mustard,” the old Italian said. “You shoulda ordera plain mustard sandwich.” He laughed when he said that.

      “Maybe your next customer won’t want any,” I said. “He might be a mustard hater. Can’t stand the stuff. Would sooner go to China.”

      “I surea hope so,” he said. “I go outa business. No more sandwiches.”

      The old Italian looked just like Rudolph Valentino if Rudolph Valentino had been an old Italian making sandwiches and complaining about people having too much mustard on their sandwiches.

      What’s wrong with liking mustard?

      I could like six-year-old girls.

       Bela Lugosi

      I walked back down Columbus Avenue, eating my sandwich and headed toward the morgue. I had remembered another place where I might get some bullets. It was a long shot but everything I did these days was a long shot, starting off when I woke up in the morning. The odds were 50–1 against me taking my morning piss without getting half a bladder on my foot, if you know what I mean.

      I had a friend who worked at the morgue. He kept a gun in his desk. I thought it was sort of strange when I first got to know the guy. I mean, what in the hell do you need a gun for in a place filled with dead bodies? The chances are very slim that Bela Lugosi and some of his friends, like Igor, are going to break into the place and make off with some stiffs to bring back to life.

      One day I asked my friend about the gun.

      He didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

      He was really thinking about it.

      “They brought in this dead ax murderer,” he said, finally. “Who’d been shot by the police after beheading all the participants of a card game that he held every Friday night for twenty years in his basement. He was running around in the street waving his ax when the police pumped eight bullets into him. When the police brought him in here, he sure looked dead to me, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I was putting him in the cooler when suddenly he sat up and tried to chop my head off with his hand. He still thought he had an ax in it. I hit him over the head with an autopsy pan and that quieted him down. He was really dead by the time the police got here after I called them.

      “That caused an embarrassing situation because they didn’t believe me. They thought I’d had a drink or two and imagined the whole thing.

      “‘No,’ I said. ‘You guys brought somebody in here who wasn’t dead. I mean, this son-of-a-bitch was still kicking.’

      “Then your friend Rink who was with them said, ‘Peg-leg, let me ask you a question.’

      “‘Sure,’ I said.

      “‘And I want you to answer this question as truthfully as you can. OK?’

      “‘OK,’ I said. ‘Shoot.’

      “‘Do you see a lot of bullet holes in this bastard?’

      “‘Yeah,’ I said.

      “‘Is he dead now?’

      “We were all standing around the body. He had so many bullet holes in him that it was ridiculous.