I did a final sermon on Miss Birdsong, and a page about the glass eyes, and took all these pages and put them in my Talking Box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings to tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do.
I lay half-asleep, listening, and then got up and went to help them, with my typewriter, to go where they most needed to go to do some special wild thing; so my stories got written. Sometimes it was a dog that needed to dig a graveyard. Sometimes it was a time machine that had to go backward. Sometimes it was a man with green wings who had to fly at night lest he be seen. Sometimes it was me, missing Peg in my tombstone bed.
I took one of the lists back to Crumley.
“How come you didn’t use my typewriter?” said Crumley.
“Yours isn’t used to me yet, and would only get in the way. Mine is way ahead of me, and I run to catch up. Read that.”
Crumley read my list of possible victims.
“Christ,” he murmured, “you got half the Venice Chamber of Commerce, the Lion’s Club, the flea circus, and the Pier Carnival Owners of America on here.”
He folded it and put it in his pocket.
“Why don’t you throw in some friends from where you once lived in downtown L.A.?”
An ice-frog jumped in my chest.
I thought of the tenement and the dark halls and nice Mrs. Gutierrez and lovely Fannie.
The frog jumped again.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Where’s the other list, of murderers? You got the Chamber of Commerce on that, too?”
I shook my head.
“Afraid to show it to me because I’m in the lineup with the rest of them?” asked Crumley.
I took that list out of my pocket, glanced at it, and tore it up.
“Where’s your wastebasket?” I said.
Even as I had been talking, the fog had arrived across the street from Crumley’s. It hesitated, as if searching for me, and then, to verify my paranoid suspicions, sneaked across and blanketed his garden, dousing the Christmas lights in his oranges and lemons and drowning the flowers so they shut their mouths.
“How dare it come here?” I said.
“Everything does,” said Crumley.
“Que? Is this the Crazy?”
“Si, Mrs. Gutierrez!”
“Do I call the office?”
“Si, Mrs. Gutierrez.”
“Fannie is calling outside on her porch!”
“I hear her, Mrs. Gutierrez…”
Far away in the sun inland where there was no fog or mist or rain, and no surf to bring strange visitors in, was the tenement, and Fannie’s soprano calling like the Sirens.
“Tell him,” I heard her sing, “I have a new recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute!”
“She says…”
“Her voice carries, Mrs. Gutierrez. Tell her, thank God, that’s a happy one.”
“She wants you to come see, she misses you and hopes you forgive her, she says.”
For what? I tried to remember.
“She says…”
Fannie’s voice floated on the warm clear air.
“Tell him to come but don’t bring anyone with!”
That knocked the air out of me. The ghosts of old ice creams rose in my blood. When had I ever done that? I wondered. Who did she think I might bring along, uninvited?
And then I remembered.
The bathrobe hanging on the door late nights. Leave it there. Canaries for sale. Don’t fetch the empty cages. The lion cage. Don’t roll it through the streets. Lon Chancy. Don’t peel him off the silver screen and hide him in your pocket. Don’t.
My God, Fannie, I thought, is the fog rolling inland toward you? Will the mist reach your tenement? Will the rain touch on your door?
I shouted so loudly over the phone, Fannie could have heard it, downstairs.
“Tell her, Mrs. Gutierrez, I come alone. Alone. But tell her only maybe I come. I have no money, not even for train fare. Maybe I come tomorrow…”
“Fannie say, if you come, she give you money.”
“Swell, but meantime, my pockets, empty.”
Just then I saw the postman cross the street and stick an envelope in my mailbox.
“Hold on,” I yelled, and ran.
The letter was from New York with a check for thirty dollars in it for a story I had just sold to Bizarre Tales, about a man who feared the wind that had followed him around the world from the Himalayas and now shook his house late at night, hungry for his soul.
I ran back to the telephone and shouted, “If I make it to the bank, tonight I will come!”
Fannie got the translation and sang three notes from the “Bell Song” from Lakme before her translator hung up.
I ran for the bank.
Graveyard fog, I thought, don’t get on the train ahead of me, headed for Fannie.
If the pier was a great Titanic on its way to meet an iceberg in the night, with people busy rearranging the deck chairs, and someone singing “Nearer My God to Thee” as he rammed the plunger on the TNT detonator . . .
Then the tenement at the corner of Temple and Figueroa was still afloat down the middle of the barrio, with curtains, people, and underwear hanging out of most windows, laundry being churned to death in back-porch machines, and the smell of tacos and delicatessen corned beef in the halls.
All to itself it was a small Ellis Island, adrift with people from some sixteen countries. On Saturday nights there were enchilada festivals on the top floor and conga lines dancing through the halls, but most of the week the doors were shut and people turned in early because they all worked, downtown in the dress lofts or the dime stores or in what was left of the defense industry in the valley or in Olvera Street selling junk jewelry.
Nobody was in charge of the tenement. The landlady, Mrs. O’Brien, came to visit as rarely as possible; fearful of purse snatchers, terrified for her seventy-two-year-old virtue. If anyone was in charge of the tenement it was Fannie Florianna, who from her second-floor opera balcony could singsong orders so sweetly that even the boys in the poolhall across the street stopped preening like pigeons and roosters and came, cues in hand, to wave up and cry “Ole!”
There were three Chinese on the first floor along with the usual Chicanos, and on the second floor one Japanese gentleman and six young men from Mexico City who owned one white ice cream suit, each got to wear it one night a week. There were also some Portuguese men, a night watchman from Haiti, two salesmen from the Philippines, and more Chicanos. Mrs. Gutierrez, with the only phone in the tenement, was there, yes, on the third floor.
The second was mostly Fannie and her 380 pounds, along with two old maid sisters from Spain, a jewelry salesman from Egypt, and two ladies from Monterey who, it was rumored, sold their favors at no great price, to any lost and lustful pool player who happened to stumble upstairs, uncaring, late Friday nights. Every rat to his warren, as Fannie said.
I was glad to stand outside the tenement at dusk, glad to hear all the live radios playing from all the windows, glad to smell all the cooking smells and hear the laughter.
Glad to go in and meet all the people.
Some people’s lives can be summed so swiftly it’s no more than a door slammed or someone coughing out on a dark street late at night.
You glance from the window; the street’s empty. Whoever coughed is gone.
There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible-small.
In and around the tenement were various such invisible or half-visible people who lived but did not exactly live in the tenement.
There was Sam and there was Jimmy and there was Pietro Massinello and there was the very special blind man, Henry, as dark as the halls he wandered through with his Negro pride.
All or most of them would vanish in a few days, and each in a different way. Since their vanishing occurred with such regularity and variety, no one took notice. Even I almost missed the significance of their last farewells.
Sam.
Sam was a wetback wandered up from Mexico to wash dishes, beg quarters, buy cheap wine, and lie doggo for days, then up like the night-prowling dead to wash more dishes, cadge more quarters, and sink into vino, toted in a brown-bag valise. His Spanish was bad and his English worse because it was always filtered through muscatel. Nobody knew what he said, nobody cared. He slept in the basement, out of harm’s way.
So much for Sam.
Jimmy you couldn’t understand either, not as a result of wine but because someone had stolen his bite. His teeth, delivered gratis by the city’s health department, had vanished one night when he was careless enough to dime himself into a Main Street flophouse. The teeth had been stolen from a water glass by his pillow. When he woke his great white grin was gone forever.
Jimmy, gape-mouthed but convivial on gin, came back to the tenement, pointing at his pink gums and laughing. And what with the loss of his dentures and his immigrant Czech accent, he was, like Sam, unintelligible. He slept in empty tenement bathtubs at three in the morning, and did odd jobs around the place each day, laughing a lot at nothing in particular.
So much for Jimmy.
Pietro Massinello was a circus of one, allowed, like the others, to move his feast of dogs,
