The Unexpected Salami Read online

  “The guys needed to be famous? What does that have to do with this?” My voice had gone from loud to shrill.

  “You know, my family is gone, except for me mother’s cousin in Buffalo, New York. I’m the end of the Gibbs line.” I barely listened. I wanted to rip his slimy guts out. “I reckon you want me to lay it all out like on Batman.”

  I knew right then. Stuart had run afoul of his shady circle and wanted out. Phillip—thirty-four, an aging hunky rocker with a we’ll-give-you-one-last-shot recording contract. He’d do anything to prove the naysayers wrong about his being too old to put money into the band. Phillip made films for the Victorian Ambulance Corps. He could have faked a death on film with his medical cronies or his old film-school buddy Doug Lang. And his roommate who got married and was always dropping by the house, the video documentarian, worked for the Melbourne police; he could have helped carry it off. My mind was racing. Who did they know at the morgue? I couldn’t figure out how Phillip could have gotten Stuart a passport, but I was sure I’d find out soon enough. I had been an utter idiot. And whatever the cockamamie plan had been, it had worked.

  “Did Phillip mastermind this or did you?”

  “It was Colin’s idea, Chickie.” At first I thought Stuart was laughing at me, but then I realized he was embarrassed for me.

  Colin? My Colin? I was shattered.

  I opened the floodgates: Stuart slept in my parents’ bed that night. That lying parasite had forty-five cents in his pocket and planned on sleeping in Central Park. He’d get killed for real, or get arrested for vagrancy. Then perhaps Colin and Phillip would get arrested, when I could have prevented that. Stuart Gibbs, the unexpected salami to end all salamis. I’d sort out my emotions in the morning.

  Around one in the morning, I woke up and peeked in the extra bedroom to check on things. Stuart had wrapped a tie around his arm. Dad’s dinosaur tie, a forgotten Father’s Day gift from the American Museum of Natural History.

  “Not in my house,” I said, defeated. “This is my house.” Stuart was naked except for his socks. I tried not to look at his penis, flaccid and uncircumcised; it was about the least erotic thing I’d ever seen. He shivered. I was far too late.

  “You’ve got to get off the goddamn treadmill,” I said softly. I had never seen the “strap” before. Even though I knew Stuart was at it all along in St. Kilda, I never chose to explore what went on behind his door. Like the majority of Manhattan residents who live below Fourteenth Street, at least those that read the downtown press, I was obliged to be a fan of Lou Reed, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker; I’d read plenty about heroin abuse. But there was the fabled strap, in a dinosaur-tie incarnation, bulging the vein of a foreigner lying on my mother’s Bloomies’ white sale Ivan Stanbury flannel sheets in my family apartment, the last bastion of nothing-ever-happens. I sat there in stunned silence for several minutes. Stuart’s eyes were closed.

  “If you had relatives in Buffalo,” I then asked out loud, “why did you come to New York?” I didn’t think he heard me.

  “You told me anyone could get lost here,” he said.

  Frieda rang my buzzer. “Hi,” I said through the intercom, “I don’t think it’s a good time.”

  “Sorry to butt in on you, but do you mind if I crash in your extra bedroom? I left my keys at the office, and the front door there is locked.”

  “Frieda, I have a guy here.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Who is it?”

  “Look, I have to go. Call Janet—she left a message that she was staying home to read. Call me if she’s not there.”

  “Okay. But first tell me who it is.”

  “A friend from Australia—he’s sleeping.”

  Stuart’s thin frame was in a fetal curl on my parents’ comforter. Without Australian sunlight, his angular face, softened only by round eyes, was now the color of uncooked macaroni. Near the bed was our auxiliary bookcase full of secondary books my family didn’t think should be shelved on the living room bookcase with Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain. The Consumer’s Guide to Electronics. The Inner Game of Tennis. The Book of Lists. Under the computer table were Mom’s detective novels.

  “You have so many books,” Stuart said in a dozy narcotic tone. “How can you afford so many books?” He picked up a tattered maroon paperback of The Catcher in the Rye. Frank and I’d both done book reports on it. “What’s this one about? Tell me what the story is.”

  “C’mon, Stuart, you’re high. You must have read The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “I don’t know how to read.”

  If this particular moment was a cartoon, Danny Death’s words would have been above me in a thought balloon: you need to get some fucking perspective.

  Stuart’s eye contact alone terrified. It is scary to be needed by someone you hate. Stuart didn’t have a home left, let alone money.

  “How did you know where to go for heroin?”

  “I knew the people to look for. I asked them where to go.”

  “Great skill you have,” I said under my breath.

  “Help me, Rachel? I want to read …” He zoned out again.

  Another thought balloon: oh fuck, I could jump to the next goodness plateau. “You ask enough favors for someone who’s legally dead,” I said, holding Stuart’s hand, his blackened, shaking thumbnail pushed into my palm.

  4

  Colin: CATALYST

  It was the morning after I gave Stuart the Panadeine to calm him down that the ridiculous thought of “killing” Stuart started to gel. (“It came from a part of my brain I had never used before,” Dad said when he’d discovered that he could knit better than Mum.) I had an old mate, Peter, from my graphics course at Swinburne. He could help me do up a fake ID. Peter could do anything. Paste and scissors is an art form lost in the computer era, now that they have those little icons that you click on to move things around. It’s not the same. Peter once redid a comic book for one of our Swinburne classmate’s twenty-first. He photocopied our faces from photos and pasted them onto the superhero backdrop. All of us fuckwits were characters, even the car-park attendant. Fucking brilliant.

  I rang Peter, who didn’t want to know what the ID was for. He’d always been that way. He’d make a great spy. He said it was easy as anything to pull together an ID, and I sent him old band slicks of Stuart when he was still our drummer. (Later on, with the massive news attention, I saw Peter at a pub and he winked at me. He’s that kind of mate.)

  That same day when everyone was out of the house, I nervously sat down with Phillip on two crates in his room. He was wearing a brand-new green shirt. Everything in the room was green. His wardrobe, his amplifier cabinet, his Stratocaster. If that wasn’t eccentric enough, Phillip kept his things in green spray-painted milk crates, from books and socks to bars of Toblerone. His bedframe was made out of crates. Staring around, I felt more strongly than ever that we needed a major miracle—like Stuart’s death—to push us out of the almost-but-no-cigar category. A fun nutcake bandleader wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to be.

  “You’re out of your bloody mind!” Phillip said, staggered at my plan. This kind of scheme was up his alley, not mine. He kept fiddling with the new edition of Beat, flipping the pages and bending the corners up. But when the day was done, he was in it. I appealed to the actor, the lead singer in him.

  We got it down. Stuart would die. Phillip wanted Rachel in on it, to juice her brain. But Jesus, I did not want her involved. I had other plans for Rachel. I knew that she liked me; we’d had a horny night in the toilet the previous month. But I wanted to ask her to move out with me into our own place. Maybe the scam would get me the money. I would present my new fame as part of the reason she should go out with me, that she’d mistakenly pigeonholed me as stalled. I wasn’t going to be a plush toy for her to squeeze when she needed companionship. From now on, I was going to take hold of the reins.

  Looking back at the moment of birth of this lunatic plan, I can’t chart the bullshit that flowed through my mind.
I’d turned thirty-two a month earlier; I was desperate. We got Doug Lang in on it. His career was also going nowhere; he’d been reduced to helping Phillip film accident prevention clips for the Ambulance Corps. Doug was always harking back to his lost career; he’d done filmwork in the seventies for Countdown and even Paul Hogan’s TV show before “Hogues” hit it big with Crap-odile Dundee.

  The Sunday week, Rachel left to go to one of her Dog’s Bar friend’s poetry readings. Stuart was watching his soap. Phillip sat on the couch watching it, too. This was the only time he ever spent in the same room with Stuart, so it didn’t seem abnormal. I made like I was going to compile a mixed tape, piling my CDs in a stack and staring a minute or two at the back of each one. Then Phillip asked Stuart if he wanted to join us for fish and chips down on Acland Street. His shout: he’d found a twenty-dollar bill that morning in the toilet and didn’t know whose it was, Rachel said it wasn’t hers. My arsehole clenched at this transparent maneuver; Phillip wouldn’t be seen with Stuart these days, and twenty dollars in the toilet? Stuart looked a bit suss over the toilet money story, even though he was still strung out. But he knew that we knew he was hungry. He’d eaten the two bagels Rachel had bought the day before, one of his many selfish habits that was sure to get her screaming at him. She was one to talk; her room could have been condemned.

  “That’d be good.” He headed for my panel van. I felt bigger than him, but Stuart was about two inches taller than me, six one or six two (Australia turned metric when I was a kid, but I still think of height in feet.) He was skittish as hell, eyes darting around for whomever he owed money to. His fear was fine by us; it would make our pitch that much easier. We bought some flake, scallops, and potato cakes, and drove the few blocks to Port Melbourne pier. The wind whipped our skin. There wasn’t anyone around. Phillip said bullshit like “We’re worried for you, mate.” Phillip, in his own way, felt awful. You could see it in his mouth, which never wavered from a straight line.

  Cormac couldn’t be saved, I rationalized to myself, but I could ship Stuart away from Melissa, away from the streets where he’d spent his childhood in poverty.

  Stuart still looked jittery, but he wasn’t saying anything like “Why don’t you two go fuck yourselves?” I gave him an envelope with the fake ID, which had Stuart’s new name, Ian MacKenzie, and the passport we’d gotten through a Vietnamese bakery. Peter had heard the bakery could get you anything for the right price, which in our case was $300.

  Stuart looked over the documents and didn’t say a word. Then Phillip took out $500 and said we’d give him another $1500 to get him off to an okay start. We told him what we wanted out of his death, how he would have to play dead for Phillip’s ambulance mates. He kept my gaze. I imagined him thinking that I was the true prick in the end—the wrong one to have trusted those past few years. But he had money in an arm’s reach. He was a dog who’d do anything for a chunk of stew. “All right,” he said finally.

  The last thing I said before we went back to the flat was “Don’t say a word to Rachel.” Stuart had the money in his hands and stared at me. I saw that he was going to do it, for the $1500 more than anything else, and that he hated us for it, too.

  The Victorian Ambulance Corp staff we clued in were Robert and William, twin emergency techies. They were identical down to their bushy gray moustaches. “The only way anyone can tell them apart is by personality,” Phillip had said. “William’s the big talker, and Robert nods at everything he says. William told me in seven ways over ten pints of VB that he loved the mateship of the plan.”

  The twin techies loved Phillip. He was the Elvis of the Corps, amusing them for hours on end about the girls he fucked behind Kerri’s back. What a beaut idea—help a small-label band get off the ground! William and Robert were going to say Stuart was wounded, not dead, but critically ill. Stuart would have to be whisked away towards the hospital, but they would say he died en route, and subsequently direct the corpse to the Victoria Forensic Science Centre in Macleod. William had a brother-in-law who was a big-shot over at the Forensic Centre. He scheduled himself to be senior staff on duty so when the body was brought in by the twins from the criminal investigation site for analysis he was going to “ask for the case.” He told us to schedule the video shoot for Sunday, when he could see the body alone. William’s brother-in-law would say it was clearly what it appeared to be—gunshot wounds to the cheek and chest—and arrange for a prompt burial. No one would ever be suspicious enough to take another look at the body. In a midnight brainstorm session in Phillip’s Ambulance Corp video suite, more suggestions dovetailed from the existing plan. The twins’ younger brother, Tim, a failed actor, had a blue Nissan we would paint white. Tim would play the role of mobster.

  “It’ll be the biggest role I’ve had yet,” Tim had laughed. “I’m not exactly flat out with work.” Five men besides Phillip and myself were in on my demented, Peggy Lee–inspired plot. Would they keep their mouths shut? But these were five Australian men. Members of the we-have-a-dick-and-we-stick-together club, Rachel might have said. After five beers, the idea seemed possible, even exhilarating. Magic. And it worked. William’s brother-in-law announced publicly that he’d arranged for a simple burial when no relatives came forward.

  Melissa wasn’t even at the funeral. She came over to the house with another junkie who she was obviously bonking, a week after Stuart’s death. They wanted his things. How fucking transparent that she and her smelly friend were planning to score off Stuart’s effects.

  “He sold anything of value months ago, thanks to your lot,” Phillip said. He was a beautiful liar. “We gave the clothes to the Salvation Army.”

  “You had no right, he was my boyfriend!” Melissa yelled right near my eardrum.

  “Give her some money for his things, you cunts,” her new boyfriend said.

  “You can have his sideboard,” I said, and that shut them up.

  There were holes we’d left open in our enthusiasm—like which cemetery? But no one realized it was an elaborate scam. I didn’t have journos around shoving recorders in my face. It wasn’t a pressing whodunit. The general consensus was that the Mafia made good on their promise to settle the score with anyone who didn’t pay them back a loan. It fucking worked! Only much later did I feel like Raskolnikov.

  After we honored the bastard Bendigo Institute of Technology gig, our new manager Angus decided that now that we were his boys we wouldn’t be playing any more country-town shows. He wanted us to save up the gigs, not spread ourselves thin playing every bullshit venue in the sticks and outer suburb big-hair pub in Melbourne. “From now on,” Angus said, “the Poppies will play snob gigs every three months. With the amount of publicity you’ve had, you have to watch out for overexposure. You’ll play Lounge or Prince of Wales in Melbourne, or the Phoenician Club in Sydney. Fuck Brisbane and Adelaide, no one lives there.”

  Phillip thought Angus didn’t have a clue. “How long could the fame from ‘Gnome’ last?’ Phillip wanted to milk all the money he could from the song and set up a recording studio like Greg Ham, the sax player from Men At Work, did. I tried to point out to him that Men At Work had the number one album in America for a fucking year, but as far as Phillip was concerned, Men At Work were one-hit wonders. Flash-in-the-pan definition differences aside, he was willing to accept asterisk fate, if he got enough dollars from it. There was a three-piece suit underneath those green seventies polyester shirts and tapered black jeans he’d bought in the secondhand shops on Greville Street. If Phillip was a Beatle he’d be Paul fucking McCartney.

  During the band direction meeting, Phillip kept bringing up that guy Joe, who owns a mod clothing store on Brunswick Street with his wife. Years ago Joe wrote “Shaddup You Face,” the novelty song of the century. It was even a surprise smash in the States: “Whatsa matter you, Gotta no respect, Whatya thinkya do, Why you looka so sad, Itsa notso bad, Itsa nicea place, Ah shaddup you face.”

  “Joe’s fucking laughing,” Phillip said to me after Angus
left the room. “He’s got a great house off those residuals.”

  Unfuckinbelievable. Phillip knew how to piss me off saying things like that. I wasn’t a Eurovision or New Faces contestant; I was a serious rock musician and I wanted to have some impact. I was hell bent on letting our fucking manager fucking manage. We risked jail for our fame. Why did Phillip have to cut us down now? I mean the Beatles had arse luck right? No one goes around citing “Love Me Do” as poetry. They ran with their success. They matured because of the limelight. If we were ever going to be consequential musicians, this was the time to go the elite route. And things were going fine. Stuart, that canny bastard, had kept to his word. As far as everyone knew, he was dead; there wasn’t a hint of his not being dead. Even our drummer Mick-O thought that the murder had happened. And the ultimate test: bullshit-radar Rachel was fooled, though I felt rotten about that.

  But Phillip came to his senses with that EMI Records contract. It took us all by surprise, even Angus. The CNN bit was wild, but it didn’t truly astonish me, that’s the kind of coverage we were going for. But EMI, fuck, that’s the label the Beatles signed to. I thought if all went to plan, we might get signed to Mushroom, the major Aussie label. This was getting bigger than a kick-in-the-arse catalyst. If I wasn’t already shitting myself, I began getting really nervous—like a bandit on the lam. Where the hell had Stuart gone? He had told us he was going to Buffalo. He’d promised to send a postcard from “Aunt Sally” once he got there. I was pretty sure Buffalo’s a city in Canada.

  That Friday we were offered a three-album global contract with EMI Records. The extent of our deceit began to hit me full force. I wanted someone to lampoon Phillip’s lack of business sense with me. Rachel would have had me in stitches.