“It showed up in the eastern Mediterranean in 1793,” declared Thutmose, “right after the revolutionaries up in Paris desecrated Notre Dame cathedral—they deliberately stored grain there, in the place that had already been holy to the vine for thousands of years before any Romans laid eyes on the Seine River—and then they—filled the gutters of Paris!—with the blood of the aristocrats who had been using the holy wine’s debt-payer properties too freely. ‘It is not for kings and princes to drink wine, lest they drink, and forget the law.’ Proverbs 13. So the Zinfandel grape all at once and appeared and started growing wild in all the god’s old places, in Thebes, and Smyrna, and Thrace, and Magnesia. The Yugoslavian Plavac Mali grape is a strayed cousin of it. And the disrespected vine took its new Zinfandel castle right across the water to America, tossing the bad root-lice behind it like the Romans sowed salt in Carthage. A mondard of the new world now.”
Halfway through the little man’s speech, long before even the word mondard, Cochran had nervously realized that Thutmose was somehow involved in the season’s Fisher King contentions, and that he must be here at the Losers Bar for reasons related to those of Cochran’s party; clearly too the dwarf had at least guessed that Cochran and his friends had been concerned in it.
As if confirming Cochran’s thought, Thutmose said, “You’re the people who had the red truck, and the undead king.”
But it’s all over now, Baby Blue, Cochran thought helplessly. The red truck’s blue now, and the undead king is deader than a mackerel. Kootie will be king now, and Kootie isn’t here.
“Do you know what sin-jan-dayl means, in classical Greek?” Thutmose went on, in a wheedling tone now. “A sieve, washed clean and bright and joyous in the noonday sun.’ Drink the sacramental Zinfandel and become the sieve—all your loves fall right through you to the god, and you’re cleansed and cheered in the process—you’re refreshed, even under the harsh eye of the sun. ‘Give wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.’” The little man was practically declaiming now, and Cochran hoped Plumtree hadn’t heard the bit about the eye of the sun.
Again the dwarf rang the wok with his spoon, and it dawned on Cochran that Thutmose wanted him to acknowledge the rusty bowl, refer to it.
It’s a half-ass Grail, Cochran thought suddenly; and Thutmose is some sort of near-miss, fugitive, underworld Fisher King—crippled by God-knows-what unhealing injury, and clearly hoping for some kind of vindication, some salvific Wedding-at-Cana miracle from Dionysus. This terrible New Year has probably brought hundreds like him to San Francisco. And now he’s seen the “Dionysus badge” on my hand—maybe he even saw it when we were in this place back in L.A., and he’s somehow found me again.
At the Li Po bar on Sunday, Mavranos had told Cochran how Kootie had asked the wrong question when first confronted with the red Suburban truck—Why is it the color of blood? instead of Who does it serve?
“Why,” asked Cochran gently now, “is your bowl the color of blood?”
Thutmose the Utmos’ sighed, and seemed to shrink still further. “When he was a baby-god, Dionysus was laid in a winnowing fan. You’re being a dog in the manger.” He shook his head, and there were tears in his red eyes and the word dog seemed to hang in the air. “It’s rust, what did you think? Goddammit, I’m an ex-junkie, trying to turn my life around! I used wine to get off the smack, and now I just want to find the god’s own forgiveness wine.” He tapped the wok with the spoon again, miserably. “A heroin dealer used it to mix up batches, step on the product. When it got too rusty for him to use, he gave it to me. I scraped some of the red crust off and cooked it up in a spoon, and, I slammed it, even though I was sure I’d get lockjaw. It did do something bad to my legs—but I didn’t die, and this red bowl kept me well for months.”
“None of us here can do anything for each other,” interjected Plumtree. Cochran saw that she had shifted around and was listening in. “If we could, we’d be in a place called the Glad Boys Bar, or something, not here.” She slid out of the booth now and stood up. “Come talk to me over by the phones,” she told Cochran.
Glad to get away from the unhappy dwarf, Cochran got up and followed her across the sandy floor.
Cochran hadn’t heard the front door squeak while he’d been listening to Thutmose, but there were a lot of people in the long barroom now, though they were all talking in low whispers. Cochran thought they looked like people tumbled together at random in an emergency shelter—he saw men in dinner jackets or denim or muddy camouflage, women in worn jogging suits and women in inappropriately gay sundresses—and none of them looked youthful and they all looked as if they’d been up all night. Cochran reflected that he and his friends must look the same way.
As he and Plumtree passed the bar, Cochran saw a man pay for a drink by shaking yellow powder out of a little cloth bag—and before the lady bartender carefully swept the powder up, Cochran was able to see that it was some kind of grain, perhaps barley.
We walked in here through a door in Los Angeles once, he thought, and now through a door in San Francisco—how old is this place, and from what other places has that door opened, perhaps on leather hinges, over the centuries and even millennia? Boston, London? Rome, Babylon, Ur?
Cochran was relieved to see that the pay telephones were the same modern pushbutton machines he and Plumtree had used to call Strubie the Clown.
“Listen,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “What we’ve got to do? Is escape.”
“Okay,” said Cochran. “From what? To where?”
“You remember,” said Plumtree in a near-whisper, “who the he on the menu-specials paper referred to, right? After he was on in ‘89, I ached in all my joints, and had nosebleeds. And in Holy Week of ‘90, when he tried to win the Kinghood in that poker game on Lake Mead, he was on for a day and a half, and I had a nervous breakdown so I can’t remember what I felt like. But this time, ending yesterday morning, he had me for almost three full days, and I could hardly even walk, yesterday and today.” She touched her jaw and the corner of her mouth. “And I swear he shaved while he was in this body!”
Cochran winced, and nodded. “Probably meaning—like you said—that he had to.”
“Right. He’s not a ghost, he’s not dead—he imposes his natural form on this body when he’s in it for any length of time, so it’s…like I’m taking steroids. I grow fucking whiskers, and I’m sure he screws up my period.” She was blinking back tears, and Cochran realized that she was frightened, and possibly struggling to stay on for this flop. “I think if he was to occupy me for too long—” She slapped her chest. “—this would turn all the way into a man’s body—a clone of his body, the one that got smashed when it fell partly on me, on the Soma pavement in 1969.”
Cochran spread his hands. “What can you do?
“God, I don’t know. Figure out a way to kill him, don’t tell Janis. Hide out, in then meantime, and stay away from that Kootic kid—he is very interested in that Kootie kid.”
“We can go to my house,” Cochran said. “You remember it, you were on when we were there last week.”
She pushed back her ragged blond bangs and stared at him. “You don’t mind living with a murderess? Or even maybe one day a murderer?”