Back in Jersey City, he took arms against the sea of junk in his apartment. Opened the windows to the warm air and did spring cleaning. Washed and dried every dish, threw out bales of useless paper, and manually deleted three thousand pieces of spam from his computer, stopping repeatedly to inhale the marsh and harbor and garbage smells of the warmer months in Jersey City. After dark, he drank a couple of beers and unpacked his banjo and guitars, ascertaining that the torque in the neck of his Strat hadn’t magically fixed itself in its months in its case. He drank a third beer and called the drummer of Walnut Surprise.
“Hello, dickhead,” Tim said. “Good to finally hear from you—
“What can I say,” Katz said.
“How about, ‘I’m really sorry for being a total loser and disappearing on you and telling fifty different lies.’ Dickhead.”
“Yeah, well, regrettably, there was some stuff I had to attend to.”
“Right, being a dickhead is really time-consuming. What the fuck are you even calling me for?”
“Wondered how things are going with you.”
“You mean, apart from you being a total loser and fucking us over in fifty different ways and lying to us constantly?”
Katz smiled. “Maybe you can write out your grievances and present them to me in written form, so we can talk about something else now.”
“I already did that, asshole. Have you checked your e-mail in the last year?”
“Well, just give me a call then, if you feel like it, later. My phone’s operative again.”
“Your phone is operative again! That’s a good one, Richard. How’s your computer? Is that operative again, too?”
“Just saying I’m around if you want to call.”
“And just go fuck yourself is all I’m saying.”
Katz set down his phone feeling good about the conversation. He thought it unlikely that Tim would have bothered abusing him if he had something better than Walnut Surprise in the works. He drank one last beer, ate one of the killer mirtazapines that a script-happy doctor in Berlin had given him, and slept for thirteen hours.
He woke to a blazing hot afternoon and took a walk in his neighborhood, checking out females dressed in this year’s style of skimpy clothes, and bought some actual groceries—peanut butter, bananas, bread. Later on, he drove into Hoboken to leave his Strat with his guitar man there and yielded to an impulse to dine at Maxwell’s and catch whatever act was playing. The staff at Maxwell’s treated him like a General MacArthur returning from Korea in defiant disgrace. Chicks kept leaning over him with their tits falling out of their little tops, some guy he didn’t know or had once known but long since forgotten kept him supplied with beer, and the local band that was playing, Tutsi Picnic, did not repel him. On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one. Being free of the Berglunds was proving to be a milder and not at all unpleasant sort of death, a death without sting, a state of merely partial nonexistence in which he was able to go back to the apartment of a fortyish book editor (“huge, huge fan”) who’d cozied up to him while Tutsi Picnic played, wet his dick in her a few times, and then, in the morning, buy himself some crullers on his way back down Washington Street to move his truck before parking-meter hours commenced.
There was a message from Tim on his home phone and none from the Berglunds. He rewarded himself by playing guitar for four hours. The day was gloriously hot and loud with street life awakening from a long winter’s dormancy. His left fingertips, bare of calluses, were near the point of bleeding, but the underlying nerves, killed several decades earlier, were still helpfully dead. He drank a beer and went around the corner to his favorite gyro place, intending to have a snack and play some more. When he returned to his building, carrying meat, he found Patty sitting on the front steps.
She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.
“Well, well, well,” he said.
“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”
His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.
BAD NEWS
