The Unexpected Salami Read online

  I’d planned on telling her about the whole scheme a few days after the film clip (and Stuart) was shot, but her mother had gotten her panicky about the publicity and couriered her that ticket to the States. After that, the time never seemed right. Rachel wasn’t the first person I would think of when envisioning a partner, though she was a decent looker. I had always pictured a docile sweetheart who wasn’t going to care about my life compromises. Like my mum and aunties who put up with the slack men in their lives. But after that kiss in the toilet, the month before Rachel flew home to New York, I’d first likened our connection to the relationship I have with my guitar. I didn’t tell her this because she would have spat “misogynist” at me; she has no idea how much a muso can love his guitar. I played bass for the Tall Poppies, but it was my guitar I chose to spend free time with. She was moody and her room was an obstacle course, but I did seem to want to spend every minute with her. And no one else ever thought I could do more with my life. For some mysterious reason, Rachel thought I could.

  I had it pretty good for Australia. Not many people go to uni, I read something like five percent. Rachel had once claimed that in the States, anyone with money gets a spot. In Oz, it’s a privilege. I had a degree, the first in my family—not from Melbourne Uni or Monash, but Swinburne wasn’t anything to sneeze at. And graphics wasn’t rocket science, but it was a full three-year course. I was going okay with the graphics; a few years out I was the art director of a small card company. Then came the big switch to computer graphics, and it was out-with-the-old time. I could have retrained; the company wasn’t so hard-boiled that they’d leave us out in the cold. They offered to pay half of the training course. But I wasn’t interested. Graphics was always tactile for me. I liked selecting the colored Textas and positioning the paper on the waxer, the way I like feeling the strings on my guitar. Most of the others in the firm adapted and learned Quark and Pagemaker, but I got an easy job running a printing and architectural blueprint shop. It was a rut I didn’t know how to get out of. No one ever seemed to question what I was made of. Except Rachel.

  I wrote Rachel about the new recording contract, but I never heard back from her. I had planned to ring her with the full story, but I was afraid there was an outside chance that the police might tap the line. They were centering their investigation on pinning down the mob connection.

  Mum was calling a lot to see how I was. Aunty Grace got it in her head that I might be caught up with heroin, too.

  Mum and Aunty Grace were lifelong best friends. Aunty Grace wanted me and Liam, who was a month older than me, to share the same type of relationship as she had with my mother. I was sad to leave my St. Kilda schoolmates behind—terrified was more like it—but much to everyone’s delight, Liam and I became super close. There was a reason Aunty Grace wanted us to become best friends, Liam confided. He had been caught sticking an exploratory finger up the “private place” of Tina, his last best friend, a classmate who lived in the neighboring town of Carrum Down. Tina’s thumb was missing. She’d told Liam that she might have been born that way because of a “nuclear stream.” She and three other Carrum Down kids talked to a judge in a big powdered wig about their missing body parts.

  Angus and I eventually convinced Phillip to shut up about more suburban gigs. We played to a full house at Lounge in Melbourne, and this gorgeous redhead named Hannah started talking to me afterward. A potter (“a ceramist,” she corrected me)—before the murder we’d get okay-looking banktellers, or a travel agent at best. Hannah had a brain, and shit she was beautiful. And since Rachel was not writing back, after four letters!, I figured she’d shacked up with a New York surgeon or someone of that breeding. Hannah suggested that we go to the Valhalla to see a new print of Pandora’s Box, a classic silent movie. Jen, a friend of hers, had been commissioned to do a live violin accompaniment that weekend. I was impressed as hell. I didn’t have friends who played the violin.

  Hannah and I started going out. Phillip and I didn’t talk much about the plan that had served us so well. It was creepy the way the bad points disappeared.

  5

  Rachel: BATHOS

  The next morning, for the briefest moment, I considered tracking down Will. He’d always kept a clear head, even when I’d pulled the plug on us from a distant land. I hadn’t spoken to Will since that dreaded phone call from Melbourne. Calling him now to steer me through the reverberations of my original wormy sin would be more than vulgar.

  My parents were planning a thirtieth-anniversary trip. They’d talked about it since I got back; they’d never been to Europe together. “Not with you two in college, we never had the money for a proper trip to Paris.” They didn’t need this mess. Sylvia and Joseph Ganelli were hip enough for sixty-somethings, in an updated sitcom way. They recycled. They sporadically used terms like cyberspace or alternative rock. But aiding a heroin addict?

  And I did not want to get my girlfriends mixed up in Stuart’s salvation. Then I’d have to spill the story, and I couldn’t chance that. Frieda knew a Brooklyn-based Aussie filmmaker, and Veemah the Jetsetter—oh boy. Veemah was the warlord of us gossips. We’d spent many an entertaining afternoon together tearing some bitch to shreds. Loose lips sink ships. I imagined a knock on the door from Interpol.

  Janet, a Mayflower descendant, was an outside possibility; she was bred to keep her mouth clamped.

  Other relatives? They’d go straight to my folks. Lord help me if Aunt Virginia got a whiff of this. She’d hail a taxi and a priest to sprinkle holy water over him.

  Weren’t methadone clinics impossible to get into in New York? What was methadone? Did I want this approximately 150-pound weight around my ankle? I didn’t have savings.

  After three morning coffees, I settled on my trustworthy childhood plan of action: whenever I’d been terrified by a creepy-crawler, I’d called big brother.

  “Frank?” I said to his machine, after his beloved soundtrack snippet of Charlton Heston’s soliloquy as the sole functioning post-Apocalyptic survivor in Omega Man. “You there? Frank?” I was going to dial his second number, used mostly for his modem, when he picked up.

  “Hey. Can you drop it a few decibels?”

  “I need your advice.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Tell me everything you know about heroin.”

  “What kind of request is that for ten A.M.? You better not be telling me you’re getting fucked up with that shit?”

  “Not me. A friend of mine is in trouble.”

  “‘A friend of mine’? What, one of your super-achiever friends dropped out of corporate America? Doubt it. What did they try, grass? Flash bulletin—pot ain’t heroin. She’s not going to die.”

  “Please. Listen! I need to know about heroin.”

  “Are you insinuating that I know these things? I’m offended.”

  “You know more than me.” Frank knows that much more than me about everything, except supernovas and PMS. “My friend’s in trouble.”

  “Read Basketball Diaries. Or Junky. Carroll and Burroughs sinned for our entertainment.”

  “I’ve read them already—”

  “Then you know what I know.”

  It is difficult for Frank and me to talk without ironic phrases. Even at Uncle Barry’s funeral, we bantered our way through grief.

  “This is real. Now. I want real advice.”

  “What do you want to know? It’s all about the Man—energy revolves around the Man. Jones is the craving. It’s about the ritual as much as it’s about the drug. You have a jones, you find the Man.”

  “How much does it cost to feed a habit?”

  “I don’t know—ten dollars a bag? Rachel. Lesson over. I’m not a junkie. If you’re so keen to know, snort a tiny bit. You’re not going to get addicted off a tiny bit. Someone who’s got the habit really wants to numb a life. I think you have to try it fifty times before you start to form a habit.”

  “Remind me not to let you baby-sit my kids. Get serious. What do you know about withdr
awal?”

  “Stand outside a methadone clinic on East Broadway and watch people.”

  “Ask a junkie nodding off, foaming at the mouth, Yeah so what happens next? What do you know about it?”

  “You sweat and puke and scream. What else is there to know? Where’s your friend living? Seriously, maybe you should call her parents and get her into a treatment center.”

  “He has no money. He has no parents.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Stuart Gibbs, the guy who got shot.”

  “Come again? This isn’t another sniper on Fifth Avenue yarn—”

  “He’s resurfaced. The roommate I saw dead in Australia.” I started to sniffle. Jesus, hurry up, Frank. Tell me what to do. A few seconds to internal combustion.

  “You trying to bug me out? Get the fuck out of here.”

  And into outright bawling.

  “Rachel? You okay? Take a breath. What the fuck is going on? What can I do?”

  “Can you come over?” I impaled out of my mouth. “Maybe we can have him go cold turkey here.”

  “Oh shit, you can’t do that there. Are you crazy? I’ll come over but—”

  “I’m in over my head. Stuart was given money to pretend he was dead.”

  “This is the craziest thing I’ve—”

  “He has no money and he’s strung out on Mom and Dad’s bed and he needs to get off of it or everyone I know is going to be thrown in jail.”

  “He’s in Mom and Dad’s bed? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know what you’re getting into? Addiction is vile—this shit’s nasty. Brice went through this hell with his cousin Tim. Quitting cold is a nice concept, on paper. Tim tried shooting up anything he could get his hands on. Coffee. Laundry detergent—”

  “Laundry detergent?”

  “Christ, Rachel, I’m in the middle of stretching canvas—okay, here’s my RX—take everything out of the apartment, install a drain in the center of Mom and Dad’s room, taper the walls, throw meat in, lock the door, and hose the fucker down every two days.”

  I didn’t respond. Frank hates that even more than my high emergency pitch. In our Jewish-Italian family, silence is the ultimate SOS.

  “Oh, fuck, fine, I’ll bike over. You shouldn’t be alone with him. Give me time to shit and shave. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  I brightened a tad. I wasn’t going this alone.

  “If nothing else, I’ll get my comics out of there. I don’t want your resurrected smack addict selling off my Fantastic Four number forty-eight, the first appearance of the Silver Surfer.”

  “Frank, please, we have to get him sober—” In times of true duress, I am known to outright squeak.

  “Don’t make that sound. The guy sounds like a loser—he’s already dicked you around. And this isn’t about getting sober, Rachel. He’s an addict. He could hurt you. Keep him calm. Offer him milk or something.”

  Just about the second I clicked the receiver, Stuart rolled into the kitchen with a rank odor and a three-day stubble. He’d put his greasy jeans back on and a red T-shirt I knew from Melbourne. Christ. This was real. “There’s Raisin Bran and milk, if you want it.”

  “Raisin Bran? You mean Sultana Bran?”

  “Americans eat Raisin Bran.” I stared at him like Elliot the morning after he found ET. I passed him the box, the milk, a bowl, and a teaspoon. He didn’t touch anything.

  “I’m skint. Could I bot a twenty off you ’til I see you next? I’ll be out of your sight this afternoon.”

  Why did I care one iota about saving this cretin’s soul? Where was his fabled relative in Buffalo? Goddamn. “You’re not going to live on twenty dollars. You need help. Remember last night, you asked me for help?”

  “You were good to put me up here, but I’m leaving.”

  “You’re in no position to leave for anywhere. Where are you going to go? My brother’s coming over to help us sort this through—”

  “You talked about this?”

  “Listen to me will you? Frank’s cool. He’s an artist. His best friend’s cousin went through an addiction—”

  But Stuart was already in the living room, packing his army surplus knapsack.

  I yelled from the kitchen: “I’m going to help you, Stuart! Don’t you see I need to help you?” I stood there, pulling my fingers as far back as I could. When I came out to take a look, Stuart was riding my Dad’s rusting exercise bike at about five miles per hour, staring out the window onto Avenue of the Americas.

  The phone rang. Divine intervention? “Glad I got you, Rachel,” Selena from Temp Solution said. “I have another job for you. I think it should last about two weeks. It’s not glamorous, but the pay is seventeen dollars an hour because they’re in such a bind.”

  “What is it?” I said, breathing hard, one eye on the door. I wanted to be sure that Stuart wasn’t going to bolt.

  “At a nice private school, Friends Seminary on Sixteenth Street —the lunch staff’s on strike. They need someone to serve hot food to the students.”

  “Selena, that was the school I went to for eight years, I don’t think I could do that.”

  “You shouldn’t be proud. That’s loads of money for moving some spoons around. We’re in a recession. Everyone needs the money.”

  “Look, I’m not proud, but I won’t cross a picket line.” Bullshit, Rachel, you’d die before being seen in a hair net by one of your old teachers. “But Stuart, a friend of mine who’s visiting New York, he’d take it.” I heard the bike noise stop.

  “From out-of-town? Is he American?”

  “No, but—”

  “Working papers?”

  “No—”

  “Sorry, we couldn’t help him. You don’t want the job?”

  “Yeah. Please call me though with other work.”

  “Okay, but I have to tell you that the people who accept every job get called more often.” She hung up. Cow. Stuart was sitting on the couch now. I put on a game show, and we sat there in silence.

  Eventually, I heard the lock turning. Frank propped his bike up in the hallway.

  “Is he still here?”

  “On the couch.”

  “So, you going to introduce me to the French Connection?”

  “Shh!”

  Frank poked his head into the living room. I have a proud feeling when anyone meets my brother. He’s actually very average looking, five nine, brown eyes, a slightly pointy nose. But even when he had his retainer, cats ran to his lap. Sideburns hadn’t come back into style yet. (They’d be in the next year.) But Frank had them now, long black rectangles.

  “Stuart, isn’t it? Frank—Rachel’s brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how’s it going?”

  Stuart shrugged his shoulders.

  “I hear you’re a drug addict.”

  Stuart looked to me to protect him from this strange creature with no mercy. No way, Problem Child. Frank is Easy Street compared to other fates I could have thrown your way.

  “First trip to New York, right?”

  “Yeah—” What do heroin addicts think of between injections? Stuart was so expressionless I thought his head might be empty except for where to get his next purchase. A mindless loop. See worm. Catch worm. Raise wings. Fly. See worm.

  “Rachel tell you I’m an artist? I’m picking up some comics I have in my old desk. I want to be inspired when I start my new piece. Lichtenstein made a million bucks off his comic book collection, right?”

  No response from our mute. Anesthetized existence, no Art 101 under his belt, downright intimidation, all three.

  “Talkative, huh? I was going to take Rachel out for lunch, to calm her down. She’s freaked out over your arrival—and you don’t want her going off the rails, yeah? Want to join us?”

  “I can’t afford any restaurants, ta.”

  “Ta? What’s ta?”

  Stuart looked confused. He was in no shape to comprehend that lower-class Australian is as much a dialect to Americans as No
rthern Territory pidgin is to Melbournians.

  “Ta is ‘thanks’ in Australian,” I said quietly, the UN translator.

  “Ta? Yeah, well, it’s my treat. Why don’t you? I’m not a priest, man. No jive from me.” Frank’s street talk was embarrassing, but as always, somehow he carried it off to great effect.

  “You’re paying? Yeah, sure.”

  “Throw something else on, man—it’s fucking cold out there for April. Let me pick up my comics from the back. I should be able to dig up something warm for you from the closet. My mother never let us throw out anything. Depression-survivor mentality.”

  Stuart slipped on Frank’s old double-layered RISD sweatshirt. My brother carried his precious cargo with him—The Silver Surfer was safe. The three of us went out for lunch at the local Greek coffee shop.

  “So let me get this straight,” Frank said, taking a sip of ice water. “The head of the morgue pretended you were dead?”

  “Yeah,” Stuart said, grabbing a roll.

  “This guy Colin has goddamn chutzpah.”

  “New York for audacity,” I translated.

  “What’s audacity?” Stuart asked.

  “Fucking nerve,” I tried again. That got a small smile from Mr. Gibbs. “What do you want, Stuart?” Frank said when the waitress came over.

  Stuart looked nervous again. His eyes were watery. “Your call.”

  Oh, right. He couldn’t read the menu. At home, he could have faked it by ordering a basic Australian standby, like a hamburger topped with a fried egg. “You can get a great cheeseburger here,” I said, a shield for further embarrassment.

  “Nah,” Frank said. “I know. We’ll have three cold turkey sandwiches.”

  Stuart again raised the slightest corner of his mouth, John Lennon–style. Frank was breaking through, talking to Stuart like a regular Australian mate, ignoring the sheila, the woman, me, at the table.

  “Man, that was some crap you pulled on my sister.”

  “Rachel wasn’t part of it.”