“I did. It was in Oakland in 1968. Of course, you didn’t see me. You was up on the bandstand posing in the spotlight, I was down in the crowd selling loose joints and nickel bags.”
“I hope you enjoyed the show.”
“I thought you were a crazy motherfucker.”
Jim decided to accept that as a compliment. He eased himself out of fight-or-flight mode and raised his bottle. “Well, thanks. I’d offer you a drink, but this bottle’s all but dead.”
Saladeen shook his head. “I’m okay for the moment. Besides, I’ve got my own euthanasia.” So saying, he pulled a fat, double-corona, three-paper reefer from the folds of his dashiki, and gestured to the sidewalk next to Jim. “You mind if I take the weight off? I ain’t invading your space or nothing, am I?”
Jim raised an invitational arm. “Help yourself, man. I got all the space I need.”
Saladeen lowered his bulk to the wooden sidewalk. “I see that crazy fucking Euclid was hustling you for drinks.”
Jim was puzzled. Had he missed something? “Euclid?”
“The dog you were talking to.”
“That’s Euclid?”
“That’s what he calls himself.”
“Euclid the mathematician?”
Saladeen lit the imposing joint by simply igniting his index finger. For a moment his Afro was so wreathed in smoke that the two were almost a single cloud. “Fuck no, Euclid the dog, man. Euclid the mathematician has to be out somewhere with Einstein and Stephen Hawking by now, helping run the universe.”
“He seemed kind of put out when the bottle started to run dry.”
“Euclid’s kinda short on good manners. Mostly folks let him slide, though, on account of he was executed and all.”
The conversation seemed to be making odd jumps and Jim attempted to slow things down enough for them to make at least minimal sense. “The dog was executed?”
“You think he was a dog in his mortal life?”
“No, but . . . ”
Saladeen passed Jim the joint. “He told you the electric chair in Parchman was banana-colored, am I right?”
Jim inhaled deeply and immediately felt a little solarized at the edges. “Yeah, that’s right. It was his opening line.”
“So how do you think he knew that?”
“I don’t question it. I was talking to a drunken, crazy-looking dog.”
Saladeen’s smile faded. “You got some kinda prejudice against dogs? You maybe think you’re better than a dog?”
Jim wasn’t going to go along with this one. He did his best to avoid conflicts, but the guy was going too far. He passed back the joint. “You may not believe this, but there are times when I really do think I’m better than a dog. I mean, you won’t ever see me catching Frisbees in my teeth.”
Again Jim tensed slightly in anticipation of a possible negative reaction. To his surprise, Saladeen merely laughed. “So you ain’t buying my line of bullshit, huh?”
Jim shook his head. “Not tonight.”
The gems in Saladeen’s teeth flashed in the lights from the cantina. “Just checking, if you know what I mean.”
Inside, Long Time Robert Moore was still rocking the joint.
If I wake tomorrow
I ain’t guessing where I’ll be
Saladeen glanced at Jim. “Cat sings like a motherfucker, don’t he?”
Jim nodded. “He surely does.”
“I don’t figure that his real name’s no Robert Moore.”
“No?”
“You just think about who he sounds like.”
Jim thought about this, but he didn’t feel that any answer was required right there and then. Particularly as Saladeen had already turned the discussion back to the subject of the black dog. “If you’d met Euclid back in the world, back when he was a human, it’s likely you’d still have thought you were better than him.”
“Yeah?”
Saladeen nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah.”
“Low?”
“Real low.”
“How low?”
“Low motherfucker. A piece of sorry-assed white trash that went by the name of Wayne Stanley Caxton. Shot three folks dead in a fucked-up, thirty-five-dollar armed robbery at a corner grocery in Tunica, Mississippi. I figure it was no loss to the world when they fried him. Some of the shit must’ve gotten through to him, though. If he come out of the pod as a dog, motherfucker must have developed some sense of shame.”
“You think so?”
“Lot of folks here got themselves executed. Doc’s real good about letting them settle in his area. Figure it’s because he came close enough to getting hung himself a couple of times. When you get yourself executed, man, you hit the pod feeling about as lowdown and abject as it’s possible to get. A lot of the worst of them just wraith out and become haunts and night creepers. Particularly the serial killers and sex butchers. By the time you make it to the priest and governor and the thirteen steps to the Great Divide, you’re thinking that you don’t got any other option. The man got the system set up so you be feeling like an all-time fucking wretch when they strap you in the chair or the gas chamber or onto the gurney for the lethal jolt. Think about it. You spend years on death row. Eight, nine, ten years, man. Twisting and turning, appealing and petitioning, with everyone telling you that you’ve sunk so low you no longer deserve to live. So, when you land in the Great Double Helix and all them dreams come to you in the pod, they ain’t about you going into the Afterlife as King of the fucking World, I can tell you.”
“You’d know about that, bro?”
“Is that a discreet way of asking me if I was fried myself?”
Jim kept a perfectly straight face. “About as discreet as I could put it.”
“Well, the answer is no. I didn’t go to the chair or the gas chamber or the lethal injection, or even a Utah firing squad or a French guillotine. Me, I was shot by a fucking cop. A small-town, red-necked, Coors-beer, pig son of a bitch who thought he’d pulled over Eldridge Cleaver or some shit. November tenth, 1972, Barstow, California at nine-seventeen in the evening. Just trying to get myself the fuck away from L.A.”
“I guess that didn’t make you feel so good, either.”
“I’m telling you, man. I came out of that pod as mean as hell. After a while, though, when I saw how things were, I started figuring that I was probably lucky.”
“How did you figure that?”
“I never had to trip on no death row contemplation, bro. Or no terminal cancer ward, for that matter. And for those mercies I was profoundly grateful, you know what I’m saying? If you gotta go at the hands of the man, you best make it fast and furious.”
The joint was now down to a roach; Saladeen nipped off the hot coal with a callused thumbnail and ate what remained. “That’s maybe why Doc lets them hole up here. He didn’t go no fast and furious. He did his own share of twisting and turning on them TB blues before he passed over. Fast and furious be the only route.”
Jim nodded. “I can see that.”
“Lee Oswald, man. That’s the only way to go. You’re walking through the door into that parking garage, man. Nothing on your mind except how the fuck are you going to get out of this deep shit and then BAM! Jack Ruby with his hat on and you gone before you even know it, homes. No ten years of lawyers and thinking about it.”
After that, Jim found himself at a stoned loss for words. There was really nothing to say, and for long minutes the two men sat in silence until Saladeen spoke again. “He was here for a while, you know?”
“Who was?”
“Lee Oswald.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“I swear. A wandering soul wandering through. He was calling himself Harvey Hydell, and he’d taken on the physical form of Leon Trotsky, but most everyone knew. And those that didn’t figured it out in time.”
“Leon Trotsky? Are you jerking me around?”
Saladeen looked angry. “Leon fucking Trotsky. Leader of the motherfucker Red Army, purged by Stalin, assassinated 1940, Mexico City. What’s the matter, jerkoff? You think I don’t know what Leon Trotsky look like? You think I’m stupid or something?”