MORNING SERIAL
A SMALL man wearing nothing – not even on his feet – but a pair of green denim cut-off shorts, and a green denim truckers cap pulled right down over his eyes, walked gingerly past the bar.
He looked, even at some distance, like he was experiencing the street through a veil. His small naked torso was covered in ill-defined tattoos that went up his neck and presumably under his hat.
He walked with a bit of a trot, there was something bird-like – no, lizard-like – about him. He looked cold, like a razor’s edge. I watched him passing, halfexpecting him to beg for coins in his cap from passers-by, or go through the bins of the bars and stores that piled up in the alleys, but he just went on, lightly bobbing on the balls of his feet. I knew even from this distance that there was something not right about him, something unkind about him.
I was thinking about Francis – he knew Napa; Prostakov had said he had found him here. Francis had not been a ‘debauchee’, as he liked to call them – as he had sometimes called me. He enjoyed drinking, and could do it long into the night if the accompanying conversation held him in sway. He had dabbled with drugs in the forties and fifties, so far as I knew, but he claimed to never have found a state that suited him aside from liquor. Something about the medium of the drug, he used to say; liquid has nobleness to it, unlike powder and weed, which if you rubbed it between your fingertips would smudge like charcoal.
Chemicals were another thing altogether. In his day, popping pills was a Californian way to drop out. He had been over there in the forties, in Los Angeles, at the pool parties, declining the waiters who held out trays of barbiturates like they were hors d’ouvres, avoiding the girls that he knew on sight were too young, too strung out. That’s what chemicals did, he told me once; they make you do unclean things. He knew how to read people, how to watch them. Napa would have interested him.