Shadowbahn(40)
echo
As he departs police headquarters, the first thing that Jesse sees is his reflection in a bail bondsman’s window across the street. Then out of the reflection pours the throng of reporters waiting on the sidewalks, television cameras rolling in on waves of the same questions he’s been hearing from the police for the past day and two nights, at greater velocity and volume. Microphones drop before his face like tarantulas from trees.
? ? ?
Dazzled by flashbulbs and dumbfounded by voices, Jesse barely can say anything. “Don’t know nothin’!” he keeps shouting down the block and up the next, journalists and TV vans in pursuit. The continuing chase gathers passersby, people emerging from shops and galleries angrier and more threatening, curiosity transforming into something vaguely vengeful. Jesse is to Soho before he shakes them, ducking into a bar and out its back exit, and doesn’t stop running.
ricochet
His first instinct is to head toward Union Square before it occurs to him that the Factory will be swarming with more reporters. Oh, Andy must surely be lovin’ this here damn tumult. Better to chance his own tiny hotel room on West Twenty-Third, safely slipping in through the side door; at some point a New York Post grabs his eye, and his hand grabs it in return.
? ? ?
Only once in his room behind his locked door does he read, under the headline PANDYMONIUM! and the subhead FORMER W.H. CONTENDER SLAIN IN DEN OF DEPRAVITY, that “by all accounts, and according to the reported statement of the alleged assailant, the actual target of Miss Solanas’s attack appears not to have been the onetime Massachusetts senator but a flamboyant male model identified as part of the Warhol harem and traveling freak show,” uh, wait a minute, wait wait wait, Jesse thinks, mind racing.
imagine
Flamboyant male model? “They wouldna called him flamboyant, mate . . .” answers a voice from the past, five and a half months later, when summer gives way to autumn and the reporters are gone with the curiosity hounds. Jesse hasn’t returned to the Factory since the shooting. At four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, he’s nearly alone but for a clerk in a Third and Macdougal record shop that winds and rambles and tumbles with platters in bins and on shelves. Two other stragglers wander in and out before the clerk behind the counter continues, “. . . would they?” looking straight at Jesse.
? ? ?
It’s the voice that Jesse recognizes first, or maybe the tone more than the voice itself. Jesse has to look closely before placing the Brit, smoking a cigarette and appearing to have aged twenty years in the past eight. Sallow, wearing Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses, and carrying an extra fifty pounds, he either has lost all his hair or cut it off. “Sensational, yeah. Rockin’, I imagine. Maybe even the King,” he says. “But not flamboyant.”
crossroad
Sarcasm as toxic as ever, the clerk says, “Thanks for the review, by the way. Of course nothing it said had anything to do with anything, not anything true anyway, but I’m sure Paulie would have been thrilled if he were still with us, bless his bloody freebootin’ soul. I believe we even sold a copy or two here in the shop to a couple gits, restraining myself as I did from breaking it over their heads.”
“What y’all doin’ in these here parts?” is the only thing Jesse can manage to drawl.
? ? ?
“Well,” Doctor Winston O’Boogie answers, “now that’s one right cracking tale, innit? But not one I’m of a mind to tell, if it’s all the same to you. Doesn’t much matter, really—I’m as outta place here as you, and that’s pretty outta place, since you’re outta place anywhere and, thanks to you, so am I. We’re outta place together, aren’t we. But I tell you what. I been waitin’ for you to cross my path again sooner or later, figuring we were bound to since we’re both so outta place—I think I’ve just been holding on to this job long enough to give you something.” He reaches under the counter. “Something special.”
45
In that moment, there isn’t a doubt in Jesse’s mind that the doctor is going to pull up a forty-five-caliber revolver and kill him on the spot, there in the store that’s empty but for the two of them. Instead the Brit brings up a 45 rpm record in a plain white sleeve. “Don’t review them there single recordings,” croaks Jesse, “not my particular line.”
“Mate!” Winston says in his flat nasal voice, hurt. “And here I gone to all the trouble of setting it aside for ya. I won’t hear of you not taking it,” he insists, “I believe you owe it to yourself and to music fans everywhere to give it a spin and let us know exactly what you think.”
? ? ?
Grateful enough for not having been shot and wanting to get out of the shop as quickly as he can, Jesse approaches the counter, reaches for the record in whatever manner will keep the other man as much at arm’s length as possible, and snatches it from the countertop. Once outside the store and down the street, he tosses the record into a corner trash can before stopping frozen a block away, where he has a funny feeling.
Winston
Within minutes, maybe even moments of Jesse’s departure from the record store, Winston quits the job—although no one else is there for him to quit to—and walks out, the shop unlocked and unattended behind him. Were he to not turn the opposite direction outside the door, he might pass the trash can in which Jesse has tossed what Winston gave him; he might bump into Jesse standing there frozen with his funny feeling on the sidewalk.