The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Nine: Night Mission to Alcatraz

Joe Bananas rode up front between Lou and me on the way back to San Francisco. We took the Pacific Coast Highway this time, the sun on the rough surf reflecting brilliantly inside the car. When the radio faded out a few miles past San Simeon Joe reached out a foot and began scanning the dial for a new signal. "I think we're out of luck for a few hours, buddy," I told him, but he kept on fiddling until he managed to coax static-free bebop from the ether, Monk and Sonny Rollins playing "Friday the 13th." Joe crossed his legs and traced the rocky coastline with half-closed eyes, his coarse black fur ruffling in the draft, the highway gently rocking him. As my mind wandered I felt myself fade gratefully from consciousness for the first time in days only to jolt to life a moment later, palms slick with sweat.

Lou was silent and still. He didn't so much as scratch his nose or light a cigarette for so long at a stretch, it started to worry me; he'd always been so fidgety. His face was slack, his eyelids at half-mast. It occurred to me that he might have indulged his dependence while I slept.

"That's more like it," he murmured unconsciously as if reading my mind.

"Been a while?" I asked him, hoping to gain insight into his habit.

"Oh, don't get me wrong," he said, "I've had plenty of successes. Everything from three card Monte to the Spanish Prisoner. But that, that was different."

I smiled at my misunderstanding. "It's amazing what people will fall for if you sell it just right."

Lou's eyes remained fixed in the far distance. "It's that moment when the fire catches and leaps out of your control, and all you can do is stand back and watch the flames. You're not making it happen anymore. It's happening to you."

"This is a good thing, you're saying?"

He chuckled. "I'm just saying, it was nice to work together again."

"Yeah, it was just like old times," I said, and then we both fell silent as the lie hung between us. Back then Lou and I had taken for granted that great things lay ahead for us. We'd be filmmakers, rock stars, stock car drivers, fabulously rich and famous. We'd have mansions on the same block and play Euchre beside marble swimming pools with our attractive and classy wives. The richness of our future prospects made everything we did seem part of an ever-unfolding epic. The idea that we would spend the next dozen years on separate paths, not a word passing between us, would have been unthinkable. But that was exactly what happened.

We took up residence in room 14 of the Emperor Norton Arms, a Market Street SRO that made the Chelsea Hotel look like the Ritz. The air was stale with the smoke and body odor absorbed into the walls. The three of us would share a room too small for one, its cracked linoleum cluttered with a sagging bed, a shaky wooden chair, and a washbasin in the corner that would double as a urinal before the night was over. The lone window offered an unobstructed view of the other side of the alley. Someone had left a bottle of bunion drops on the sill. On the wall hung a tattered poster showing the rulers of Spain through the centuries, from Don Pelayo through a few dozen Juans and Alfonsos to the shiny puss of Generalísimo Franco.

Lou lit a cigarette, tossing the match into the alleyway. Joe Bananas spread his lips and bared his teeth a few times as if limbering them up for the long night to come. I poured a few fingers of scotch into a small cafeteria glass and diluted it with rusty tap water. It didn't hurt the taste as much as I feared and for a moment I wondered if it might serve as the new cocktail of choice for an element or two, Yuppie Hard-Boiler for example, or Anemic Epicurean. Old habits die hard.

"All right," I said to the others. "Let's think this through. What really happened in that diner? Why would some ludicrous rumor be more compelling than Integrated Consciousness? And not just to Roy, but to Jerry as well, two completely different types as far as I could tell."

Lou tipped back his wooden chair and propped his feet on the windowsill. "In my experience," he began, no less grandly than if he'd been smoking a pipe, "people respond to two things, desire and fear. Which are of course one and the same. You see, Andy ... hey, check out the chimp."

Joe Bananas had walked over to the wall next to the window, placed a glass to it, and placed his ear to the glass, listening intently, eyeing first me, then Lou, over and over. "What is it, boy?" said Lou. "Trouble? At the old mill?" Joe didn't bat an eye, just stood there with his ear to the glass to the wall.

I tore my attention from the chimp. "You're going to tell me how advertising works? I do know a little about the subject, you know."

"Hey, sorry man, I was under the impression somebody was looking for some help here."

"And I don't know about that fear and desire business. We're trying to narrow this down, not generalize. What human instinct lured those boobs from the IC path and how can we exploit it in the rube multitude? Greed? Was that it?"

"The rube multitude?" Lou smiled like a proud father before going on. "Nah. All your customers care about is feeling like a million bucks. They don't care about money. Jesus, Joe, what is your problem?"

"No, really, Joe, come away from there. You're giving me the creeps," I said. Joe's face contorted as he aped a series of reactions from shock to delight at the things he was hearing through the wall.

Lou lowered his chair and leaned out the window to inspect the grim alleyway. "Nothing," he said. "No Spider-man, no G. Gordon Liddy, no pods."

I took a look for myself. There was nothing on the side of the building but the faded paint of a piano company ad and nothing but padlocked dumpsters and rats below. The wide bricked sidewalk to the north was populated by crackheads and runaways idling in clusters of two or three in the orange glow of buzzing sodium lamps. Mariachi music swelled through the window as a car approached slowly and parked.

"Maybe he can hear something we can't," I said. "Like dogs and cats."

"Maybe he's propping himself up because he's sleepy," said Lou. "But it raises an interesting point."

"Which is?"

"We both looked, didn't we?"

A smile crept across my face. "It's not something you see every day."

"And we couldn't rest until we got to the bottom of it."

The pipes leading to the cold iron radiator moaned with phantom steam. Joe Bananas had left his post and sat Indian style on the floor. He put the glass on his head like a fez and regarded Lou through slitted lids. "And if there is no bottom?" I said.

Integrated Consciousness sang to sleep the nagging enigmas of consciousness and made existence as elementary as footsteps painted on a playground path. Everything makes sense and everything comes naturally. My former customers would never willingly wake from such a lovely dream, but perhaps we could rouse them. A strange noise, a bump in the night, a whistle in the wind that broke the spell. The sound of something on the other side of the wall that wouldn't let them sleep until they'd hunted it down and learned its secrets.

It was already two a.m. when we left the Emperor Norton. We had to move fast. We dropped Joe off at the farmer's market, made a quick stop at Goodman Hardware, swung by an all-night fireworks stand in Chinatown, and took the Cutlass around the wharf to the St. Francis Yacht Club. Lou parked alongside the fog-shrouded Marina and we prowled the docks in silence. I found a small fishing boat with the keys left in the ignition and the two of us set out into the Bay toward the winking red beacon of Alcatraz.

The water was calm for such a blustery night, for all the difference it made. I didn't care much for boating, or for bodies of water in general. "Where in Indy did you end up living?" I asked Lou to keep my mind from wandering.

It seemed like we were about a third of the way to the island. Gusts of cold, fishy air assaulted us relentlessly. Lou disappeared inside his jacket to light a cigarette. "We really could have gone places," he said when he re-emerged. I couldn't tell if he had heard my question. "The Explorer's Club was a great start."

"That was a good time, all right," I said. "We ruled that school."

"The show itself I mean. We worked well together. We had the perfect setup. There's no telling where it could have led."

I smiled. "Right where it did, sooner or later," I said. "That kind of thing never does last. But I'm glad we did it anyway, you know?"

The boat crashed rhythmically across the wake of an unseen ship. It seemed to me that the fog was clearing though the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge still sounded every few moments, a single flat note rather than the descending fourth they always used in movies. The wind had eased and I felt almost warm. I wondered if a front might be coming through.

"It'll be interesting to see how this goes tomorrow," said Lou.

I shivered. "I just hope it works."

"You're not looking forward to it just a little?"

"I'll tell you what I'm looking forward to. Getting rid of Integrated Consciousness, getting these clowns out of my dreams, and getting into a position where I can access my assets again."

The violet fog had lifted to reveal a moonless sky that gave no light. The ember of Lou's cigarette glowed brighter, then traced an arc over the side of the boat. "You've changed," he said.

"Since I was eighteen? I hope so," I said. "I'm not afraid of the dark anymore either."

"We'll see about that soon enough," said Lou.

Water shushed past the little boat's aluminum hull. Integrated Consciousness didn't seem so fearsome this far from land. The lights of Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina diminished behind us and I saw Lou only in silhouette. In the distance the white lights of the Bay Bridge arced their way from San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island. The East Bay Hills were awash in glitter like the Milky Way, the vault of the sky beyond infinitesimally darker. To our left, the Marin Headlands loomed dark behind the winking red lights on the Golden Gate Bridge. Our little tub toy bobbed along through the middle of it all, drawing closer and closer to Alcatraz.

Chapter Ten: Pyromania