Crazybone

7

If there is one thing I’m not, it’s a party animal.

I do not deal well with large gatherings in enclosed spaces. Give me a job to do and a one-on-one or even a small-group circumstance and I relate well enough; I’m able to think on my feet and hold my own in a conversation. But plunk me down in the midst of a cocktail party where social interaction with strangers is required, and I curl up inside like a worm in a bottle. I’m no good at small talk. And not much of a drinker; too much alcohol in a party atmosphere has the opposite effect on me than it does on most people, making me withdraw even more. The bigger the crowd, the worse I feel. Crush of bodies, too-loud voices, the constant strain... I start out edgy and if I’m trapped long enough I tend to become claustrophobic. Not enough space or air to breathe.

So I knew going in to the party at Bates and Carpenter that it would be a two-hour ordeal. And the agitated mood I was in would only make it worse. But I’d promised Kerry, and if I got through the cocktail party, the dinner afterward would be a piece of cake by comparison. So on the way over to the ad agency I played a little self-psyching game, blocking out the Hunter case and reminding myself that this evening was a small price to pay for all that Kerry had done for me and promising myself rewards for being a good boy and making the best of what, after all, was only a couple of hours out of the rest of my life. The trick seemed to work at first: I was calmly resigned and wearing a half-hearty facade when I met Kerry in her office. She seemed relieved, as if she’d expected me to come in looking like a man attending his own funeral. She even commented on my “upbeat mood” as we went upstairs — Bates and Carpenter had two floors in an old building on lower Geary downtown — to the big conference room where the party was being held.

The psych job, though, began to develop cracks once we arrived. Twenty-five or so people were already there, most of them clustered around a full-service bar and a table of hors d’oeuvres at one end, chattering and laughing noisily. On a quick scan I saw several of Kerry’s co-workers, Jim Carpenter prominent among them, naturally, and two other faces I recognized: Kerry’s crazy friend Paula Hanley, who owned an interior design company and was a B&C client, and her tubby chiropractor husband, Andrew. Terrific. Paula was a magnet for every screwball fad that came along, had a passion for “improving” other people’s lives through prosleytism, and managed to set my teeth on edge in the best of circumstances. In a party atmosphere she might well be lethal.

Carpenter came over first, towing his latest conquest, a sloe-eyed blonde half his age. Handsome bastard, with his silver mane and dark (probably dyed) mustache. He shook my hand and asked how I was in his vaguely condescending fashion. He’d had a thing for Kerry once and his attitude toward her was still irritatingly proprietary; he kissed her — on the mouth, no less — as if he hadn’t seen her in weeks and let his hand linger on her arm. I stood by and watched this and smiled and thought about what his neck would feel like in a circle of my fingers.

Then came Mr. and Mrs. Anthony DiGrazia of DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages. They were both in their mid-sixties, both short and very round and very red-faced; the only physical difference between them, in fact, seemed to be that he was bald and she had a pile of expensively coiffed blue hair. Their personalities, however, were total opposites, like a photograph and its negative. He was smiling, outgoing, voluable, and prone to punctuating his words with hand and arm gestures in the classic Italian manner. She was silent, stiff, and wore an expression that said her shoes pinched her feet, her girdle was too tight, her stomach was upset, and she didn’t approve of occasions like this one or much of anything except maybe the diamonds and rubies on her fingers and at her throat. Dragon lady. And ruler of the DiGrazia roost, I had no doubt.

Mr. DiGrazia pumped my hand in an iron grip and asked in Italian after my health. I said, “Benissimo. Come sano uno cavallino.” He liked that; he laughed and slapped me on the back.

“So, paisan,” he said, “you eat plenty of sausage and salami, eh?”

“Sure. Plenty.”

“My sausage and salami?”

“I wouldn’t eat any other kind, Mr. DiGrazia,” I lied again.

“Tony. I’m Tony, you’re Phil.” For some reason he’d got it into his head that my first name was Phil and no attempt by Kerry or me or anybody else during the evening convinced him otherwise. “New world elegance, old world taste. What you think, Phil?”

“About what?”

“New world elegance, old world taste.”

He was looking at me expectantly. I said, “I’m not sure I—”

“What, Kerry, you don’t talk to your husband? Tell him what good ideas you got?”

“I only came up with the slogan today,” she said, and nudged my arm. “DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages. New world elegance, old world taste.”

“Oh,” I said. “Slogan.”

“You like it, huh. Phil?”

“I like it.”

“I like it, too. You like it, Roseanna?”

“No,” Mrs. DiGrazia said.

This nonplussed Kerry. “Well, you know, it’s only a preliminary working—”

“Sure, sure,” Tony said. “Kerry’s good, she’s the best, I’m not worried.” He clapped rue on the back again. “Listen, Phil, they got a whole table of my sausage and salami over there, plenty of wine, anything else you want to drink. You and me, we go over and eat some sausage, drink some wine, let the wives get better acquainted.”

We went and he ordered two glasses of Chianti without consulting me and then loaded up a couple of plates. He said, “Salute,” and clinked his glass against mine, after which he tossed off half his wine at a gulp. “So, Phil, tell me about the detective business.”

“There’s not much to tell. It’s a job like any other—”

“Nah, come on. Pretty exciting, eh? I see your name in the papers sometimes, you don’t get your name in the papers if you got a job like any other job.”

“Well, once in a while there’s some excitement. Mostly, though—”

“You meet plenty good-looking women, eh?”

“Well...”

“Sexy young blondes with big tits. Few of those, eh?”

“Well...”

He leaned close to me; his eyes were very bright. “How many times you screw one on your desk?”

“What? Uh, I’ve never—”

“Big tits, little tits, you never screwed one in your office? Desk, floor, how about a couch you got in there?”

“No. Look, Tony—”

“I always wanted to do that,” he said wistfully. He finished his wine in another swallow-. “Screw a sexy young blonde, bada boom, bada bing, right there in my office. Once I had a chance, this secretary I had, but she was too old, too fat, fatter than Roseanna. Gotta be worth it, you take a risk like that. You know what I mean, Phil?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“You ever screw somebody in your office, you make sure it’s worth it, make sure she’s some sexy young blonde with big tits. And don’t let Kerry find out. I like Kerry, I don’t want to see her unhappy.”

Jim Carpenter saved me from any more of this by bringing up somebody he wanted DiGrazia to meet. I wandered back to where Kerry had extricated herself from the dragon lady. She said, “You seem to be getting along pretty well with Tony. He’s a sweet old guy, isn’t he?”

This was not the time or the place to tell her about Tony’s favorite fantasy. I said, “That’s one way to describe him,” and let it go at that.

Kerry dragged me around and introduced me to some people. That wasn’t so bad because she was right there beside me, but the room was filling up, spilling over into the smaller one adjacent, the noise level was up into the high-decibel range, and it was inevitable the shifting tide of bodies would pull us apart and I’d be on my own. The guy who wrote that no man is an island must never have been lost in the stormy sea of an overblown cocktail party.

The last thing Kerry said to me before we got separated was, “You’ll be fine. Just go ahead and mingle.” Right. I was mingling by myself in a corner, hanging on to a fresh glass of red wine with both hands, when a woman I’d never seen before came sidling up. Sexy young blonde with a well-developed chest — if DiGrazia saw her, he’d probably try to hire her on the spot.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Are you anybody?” she asked.

“...I’m sorry?”

“Anybody. You know, in the advertising business.”

“I’m not in the advertising business.”

“Oh. Well, are you anybody in any other business?”

“I don’t know what you mean by anybody.”

“You know, important. Are you important?”

“Only to myself and my wife, and then not all the time.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Yes. I mean, no.”

“Well, which is it?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought so,” she said, and walked away.

I was standing there wondering what had just happened when another woman’s voice said, “There you are.” Talking to me — and I wished she wasn’t. Paula Hanley, with Andrew in tow.

“We’ve been looking all over for you,” she said in her shrill, breathless voice. “Haven’t we, Andrew?”

“Oh, sure,” Andrew said.

“Isn’t this a fun party?”

“I can think of better words for it,” I said.

As usual Paula was a vision — the kind an acidhead might have on a bad trip. Lemon-yellow hair, pumpkin-colored lipstick, a sea-green outfit topped off by three or four scarves in violent shades of purple and orange. One of the most expensive interior designers in the city and she looked like the survivor of a paint factory explosion. Go figure.

“It’s been months since we’ve seen you,” she said. “Hasn’t it been months, Andrew?”

“Months,” Andrew agreed. He took a sip from a very large glass of what I guessed was gin. That and the mixture of boredom and annoyance in his expression said he didn’t want to be here any more than I did.

“How’re things on the god and goddess front?” I asked Paula. It was the only conversational gambit I could come up with.

“The what?”

“New Age tantra. The Holy Sexual Communion.” That had been her grand passion the last time I’d seen her — a sexual enhancement fad based on a 1500-year-old tradition that involved chanting, massages with scented oil, beating on elkskin drums, and providing private parts with names like Wand of Light and Valley of Bliss.

“Oh,” Paula said, “we’re not into that anymore.”

Big surprise; she changed fads as often as she changed underwear. “Didn’t work out, huh?”

“Oh, no, it was a wonderful few months. Spiritual love in which orgasm is truly nonessential. Wasn’t it wonderful, Andrew?”

Andrew took another large sip from his large glass. “One of the crowning experiences of my life,” he said.

She gave him a look, decided he wasn’t being sarcastic, and said to me, “We’ve progressed into other areas of intimacy, with even greater satisfaction. Of course I can’t discuss them in an atmosphere like this, but if you and Kerry are interested...”

“No,” I said quickly. “We’re just fine in the intimacy department. Everything working the way it should.”

Andrew snickered.

Paula asked me, “Have you tried acupuncture?”

“What, as a sexual aid?”

“No, no. As a method of healing.”

“I don’t like needles.”

“I don’t, either. You hardly feel the ones they use. And they’re the disposable ones, of course, so you don’t have to worry about disease.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Acupuncture is marvelous,” Paula said, in the ecstatic tone she reserves for brand-new fads and follies. “It cures all kinds of ailments — arthritis, bursitis, insomnia, allergies—”

“It doesn’t cure anything,” Andrew said. “It’s quack medicine.”

She turned on him. “How can you say that?”

“I can say it because it’s true. It’s in the same class with massage, herbal treatments, and spiritual healing.”

“Alternative therapies, every one,” Paula said with acid sweetness. “Isn’t chiropractic considered alternative therapy?”

Red splotches appeared on Andrew’s puffy cheeks. “Just because the goddamn A.M. A. refuses to recognize the benefits of chiropractic medicine—”

“Or the benefits of acupuncture.” She swiveled my way again. “It really does work. For a while I had serious digestive problems, and they vanished, I mean completely vanished, after only three sessions with Dr. Dong. And what he did for my sciatica—”

“Dr. Dong. My God!”

“Andrew, the man can’t help the name he was born with. Besides, Dong is a perfectly common Chinese name—”

“And he’s a perfectly common Chinese quack.”

“He is not a quack! He has been in business twenty-five years, he’s a graduate of the Shanghai Chinese Medical School and diplomate of the National Board of Acupuncture Orthopedics—”

“Diplomate. What the hell is a diplomate?”

“It’s the same thing as a diplomat, isn’t it? Well, never mind. Dr. Dong has all sorts of degrees and testimonials—”

“Bought and paid for, no doubt.”

“—from satisfied patients like myself. He cured my digestive problems and he did wonders for my sciatica. You couldn’t do anything about my sciatica, could you?”

“I could have if you’d let me use proper chiropractic techniques. But no, you screamed every time I tried to—”

“You were hurting me. The pain doubled every time you poked and twisted—”

“You’re a double pain sometimes,” Andrew muttered. “And not in my sciatica.”

She skewered him with the famous Hanley glare. “How dare you talk to me like that in public. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Gin on an empty stomach. How many times have I told you—”

“Let me count the number.”

“I’m warning you. Andrew...”

I edged away from them — they didn’t even notice — and joined the party flow. Anything was better than listening to the Hanleys imitate that old radio couple, the Bickersons.

I was now a floating island, but nobody paid any attention to me. I looked around for another corner in which to drop anchor, spotted one, and was on my way when two things gave me pause. Both were part of the same individual, a skinny, ascetic type in tinted glasses and a polka-dot bowtie. The bowtie was one of the things that stopped me; it made him even more of a dinosaur than me. The other was his voice, which he was using loudly to an audience of two older women.

“The advertising racket,” he was declaiming, “is a prime example of what’s wrong with modern society. Strip away the fancy veneer and what have you got except hype and bullshit? Same bottom line for the federal government, state and local governments, big business, the media, the entertainment industry, pretty much anything you can name. Hype and bullshit, that’s what the country runs on nowadays. We’re bombarded by it, it shapes everything we see and hear and do. There’s no truth anymore, no sincerity, humility, honesty. All there is exaggeration, distortion, out and out lies. Hype, hype, hype, crap, crap, crap. You remember the Peter Finch character in Network? Saying he was sick and tired of all the bullshit? Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m sick and tired of all the deceiving, loudmouth, self-aggrandizing bullshit. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Every chance I get I’m going to stand up and shout it like it is. You remember the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski? How he kept telling the Steve Buscemi character, ‘Shut the fuck up, Donnie,’ every time he opened his stupid yap? Well, every time I hear somebody shovel up another load of hype and bullshit I’m going to stand up and say—”

“Shut the fuck up, Harlan,” one of the women said.

“We’re sick and tired of all the bullshit,” the other woman said. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

The two of them left Bowtie standing there with his mouth open. It was one of those pristine little moments, made all the more satisfying by the fact that he seemed to have no idea whatsoever of how thoroughly he’d been squelched.

I took up residence in the new corner, feeling slightly better than I had before Harlan got his. No one bothered me at first, which allowed me to pretend I was a hidden observer, like a spy camera in a potted plant. I spotted Kerry twice; she tried to make her way over to me and was accosted and sidetracked both times. Then Anthony DiGrazia found me and spoiled my peaceful illusion. He bent my ear about the sausage business, then launched into a diatribe on capital punishment. He was in favor of it; in fact, he seemed to believe that all felons, including pickpockets and hubcap thieves, ought to be subjected to lethal injection for their transgressions.

His ten-minute harangue was winding down when we were suddenly confronted by an intense young woman — not, thank God, a sexy blonde but a too-thin individual with brown hair that looked as if it had been cut with a weed-whacker. She fixed each of us with a glazed eye and said, “Which one of you is Anthony DiGrazia?”

“That’s me, little lady. You like my party?”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No. I just want you to know I think it’s disgusting.”

“What, my party?”

“That stuff you make. That sausage.”

“My sausage is disgusting?”

“Absolutely.” She tapped his clavicle with a bony forefinger. “Made out of dead animals. Poor defenseless pigs and cows and goats.”

“Goats? Hey, we don’t use—”

“Blood, ground-up bones, strands of hair—”

“What? In my sausage? Hair?”

“—and all sorts of disgusting organs. Fat, cholesterol, sodium, malonaldehyde, aflaxtons... don’t you know you’re giving people heart attacks and cancer?”

“Cacchio! Heart attacks, cancer? Listen, lady, all I give people is good meat, the best meat. My sausage is so pure you can feed it to a baby.”

“What a horrible thing to say. Isn’t it bad enough you feed your poison to adults? A feast of bacteria! Germ warfare!”

“By God, we don’t allow no germs in my factory—”

“Why don’t you manufacture food that’s healthy and nutritious? Soybeans, tofu—”

“Gaah!” DiGrazia said.

“Soybeans and tofu are healthy foods.”

“You say food, I say crap.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“Hah. You, you’re for shame, you crazy food nazi.”

“Better a food nazi than a mass murderer,” the woman said, and made it her exit line.

DiGrazia watched her stalk off into the throng. “Pazzo,” he said, tapping his temple. “All those vegetarian animal rights food nazis, crazy in the head. Germs, heart attacks, cancer — you know how many times I heard crap like that. Phil? Ten thousand times, I heard it once. It don’t even bother me much anymore. Life’s too short, you got to take the bad with the good. So what’d you think of her ass, eh?”

The non sequitur made me blink. “What?”

“Her ass. Not bad for a skinny cogliona. Not much in the tit department, but a nice ass and plenty of fire. Fire in the mouth, fire in the ass — you know what I mean. Phil?”

“Is that all you ever think about?”

The words were out before I could bite them back, but he didn’t seem to notice my annoyance. Or to be offended by it if he did. “Sure,” he said. “Roseanna, she says I got sausage on the brain. ‘That’s all you ever think about,’ she says, ‘your sausage.’ She don’t know how right she is, eh? I see a good-looking woman, nice ass, plenty of fire, that’s just what I’m thinking about. DiGrazia’s sausage.” He laughed and winked. “I think I go find that food nazi, talk to her some more. Don’t hurt to try, eh. Phil? You never know. Cogliona like that, hates you one minute, you talk to her right and the next minute maybe she changes her mind. Bada boom, bada bing, maybe she ends up sampling my sausage after all.”

He winked again and waddled off, leaving me mercifully alone and wishing I were in Fresno or even wandering in the middle of Death Valley. I moved over against the nearest wall and looked at my watch, with hope at first and then in disbelief and dull dread.

It was only twenty til six. I’d been here less than forty-five minutes.

And the party swirled on.

And on.

And on...