Saguaro Riptide

TWO

Johnny Da Nang liked all kinds of people, but he especially liked big blonds who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.

He had one of ’em right now. Down there between his legs, every bit of her mojo workin’ over every inch of his. Johnny leaned back in the Corvette bucket that fit all five foot flat of him like a glove. He stared across the parking lot, through the palm trees, at the rising sun beyond the Luxor pyramid. Sly Stone let loose a screech on the ’vette’s primo sound system. Johnny matched it and the blond’s beaucoup backside shimmied in delight.

Viva Las Vegas. Can you dig it?

Johnny certainly could. He and the blond had left the Casbah Hotel amp; Casino just past six in the a.m. Johnny’s band had a gig there playing soul sounds from the sixties and seventies, which in Johnny Da Nang’s opinion just happened to be the finest sounds on the planet. Well, if you excluded The Fifth Dimension. There was way too much vanilla in that band’s sound for Johnny’s taste, thank you very much.

Johnny was the lead singer and hence the busiest fuck in the group. Damn but the women seemed to go for a Vietnamese boy who could sound like Al Green one minute and Smokey Robinson the next.

Even if he was five foot flat.

In dollars it wasn’t the greatest gig. No cakewalk either- one set after a fuckin’ ’nother, maybe a ten-minute break in between if he was lucky, just time enough for a thimble-sized Stoli over ice at the bar, then back at it, singin’ “ABC” and moonwalkin’ like Michael when he used to be black. Sure it was a tough gig. But a band had to start somewhere, didn’t it?

Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms were starting in the land of the five-dollar slot. The Napalms were Johnny’s brothers and there were four of them, all older than Johnny. Together they worked a small room with a two-drink minimum, and they put the butts in the buckets. Hired ostensibly to lubricate the plentiful but notoriously penny-ante Asian gamblers from LA, Johnny and his boys also drew a sizable crowd of brothers who’d survived the bottomside of the ’Nam experience and wanted to get all nostalgic about their last R amp;R in Saigon. Wow, they’d get drunk and collar Johnny at the bar while he was sucking down a Stoli, buy him drinks he could have gotten for free and tell him how much they missed that mama-san who gave them their very first case of the clap.

Roger that. Show business surely had its downside. Johnny had heard it all before, but he always listened because. . wow, you never knew, you know? Maybe one of the brothers would turn out to be Quincy Jones’s cousin or something, and Johnny and his boys would put the move to the groove, end up with Quincy as their producer, tunes in heavy rotation on MTV, the whole enchilada.

Hey, it could happen, couldn’t it?

Still, it took some serious patience to listen to the brothers go on about the ’Nam. Hey, Johnny had been born in Saigon. And he had to admit that the brothers weren’t really his favorite people, because he’d spent most of his youth in South Central LA, and a good bit of that time he’d been the designated neighborhood punching bag. Johnny much preferred spending time with blonds. The big ones. The ones with two-seat buckets and mouths that put the baddest Dirt Devil to shame.

Hey, it wasn’t that he was racist or sexist. It was just his own personal voice of experience talking. And that voice said, Johnny, not one blond-no matter how big-has ever beat you up.

Can you dig it?

Johnny could and currently was. He and the blond had been heading for his condo, but she just couldn’t seem to wait and neither could he. Wow, it happened every time he closed the show with “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” The way Johnny dug down into that one, the ladies just ate it up. Nail it, not a dry pair of panties in the house. Outta sight and all right.

He’d sure ’nough come a long, long way from South Central. Wow, he could remember his first days in America, six years old in a schoolhouse full of black faces, trying to string those damn vowels and consonants together in the right way so he’d sound like everyone else. No one at home to help him because his old man, an ARVN colonel, was trying to put the muscle to the hustle on the streets of LA and didn’t give a damn how anyone talked.

When it came to conversation, the colonel was concerned with only two things-volume and intensity.

Johnny had to hand it to the old man. The colonel had left Saigon with his family and an entire division’s monthly payroll. He’d used the money to buy several neighborhood markets in South Central and put a kickass corps of transplanted Montagnard scouts in charge.

He made a half-assed living doing that. With the invention of the VCR the colonel moved into the electronics business, renting players and TV sets by the month. By that time he’d done some recruiting of his own “in country,” appreciating the fact that he was drawing on the native population of South Central the same way the Americans had drawn on the South Vietnamese. Most of the guys he hired were at loose ends since coming home to the ’hood-they needed that military discipline in their lives, and the colonel gave it to them.

The colonel forged an elite corps of repo men from former badasses who’d done tours as LURPs and worse in ’Nam. Get behind on your payments to the colonel, those bastards showed no mercy. They’d repossess the TV, the VCR, and take any damn thing that wasn’t nailed down to sweeten the pot. You complain, suddenly your dog’s dead and the repo men are out back cookin’ it up on the barbecue. You call your brother in the Crips, your cousin in the Bloods, suddenly you’ve got a telephone cord wrapped around your neck and that percussive sound you hear is fists rat-tat-tatting on your face while your white and pearlies rain down on the floor.

Yeah. Colonel Da Nang was one bad-mother-shut-your-mouth. Isaac Hayes would have said so himself.

It was funny how the whole music thing happened. One day Alonzo the LURP-a big bald Earnie Shavers lookin’ bro who’d lost an ear to some honkies at Fort Bragg but hadn’t received one scratch in ’Nam-anyway, Alonzo goes after a cokehead musician who’s three months behind on a big-screen TV. Turns out that the cokehead had shot out the TV, which didn’t make Alonzo very happy. So to smooth things out the cokehead offers Alonzo his guitar. Pretty good for openers, but Alonzo, he’s a born negotiator.

That night Alonzo shows up on the colonel’s doorstep with a truckload of amps and guitars and drums. The colonel says. We sell this stuff easy. But Johnny’s mama, she says. We keep it. Why the fuck we do that? the Colonel wants to know. You got five sons, his wife says. Jackson Five make big money.

So, in the tradition of Joe Jackson (the psycho paterfamilias of the Jackson clan). Colonel Da Nang locked his boys in the garage until they could play. Well, that wasn’t exactly right. He did let them out to eat and piss and shit, but that was about it. And while they hadn’t gotten anywhere close to that Jackson Five money in the seven years they’d been playing professionally, they were doing all right for a pack of twenty-somethings. Living in Vegas. . making good money. . gauging what exactly was what on life’s experience-o-meter, if you wanted to get philosophical about it.

And they were making music, too. You could bet your last money it’d be a stone gas honey, and it was. The music was the heart of it as far as Johnny was concerned. Because when push came to shove Johnny didn’t really care about the money. Only the colonel cared about that. Johnny cared about The Temptations and The Four Tops and Otis Redding and Little Milton. He didn’t want to end up like the old man, owning a repo man empire and telling stories about how his troops had busted the kneecaps of half the Lakers’ retired players and shit like that. Who needed it?

All Johnny needed was his music and a big blond now and then.

And friends. Friends were good. You helped them and they helped you and you never had to beat anyone up or break any arms to get what you wanted. Hell, the more people you knew, the more people who’d buy your CD when you finally got a recording contract. And Johnny Da Nang knew a hell of a lot of people. He had made good friends in Vegas. He knew most of the tenants in the condo complex where he lived. Some of them were crooks, sure, but what the hell. Johnny’s old man was a crook. And there wasn’t any law against crooks buying CDs or concert tickets. Johnny didn’t walk around with his nose in the air. He was a people person. Wow, what was the use of being alone?

Johnny leaned back and settled in, enjoying life, celebrating the fact that he was hardly ever alone. He watched the morning sun tip the point of the Luxor pyramid. Ran his fingers through the big blond’s long hair, let his hands settle down around that big caboose and gave it a good squeeze.

“Un-guh,” said the blond.

“Baby,” Johnny said, “I second that emotion.”

Afterward the only classy thing to do was buy the blonde breakfast at the Luxor. Most guys wouldn’t bother with that, especially when they found out that the blonde was in town for a three-day dental hygienists’ convention and had a flight out later in the afternoon. But Johnny didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially when that anyone was a blond who gave good head. Besides, his oldest brother’s girlfriend was a waitress at the Luxor. If she was on duty (which she was), Johnny wouldn’t even see the bill.

Hey. That’s what friends were for, right?

So they were eating lox and bagels in Cleopatra’s Barge, which was a little restaurant next to a faux Nile, and Johnny was sure that the whole experience made the blond feel very continental because she was from Iowa and Johnny figured that, forget the Nile, lox and bagels were probably a pretty rare commodity in the land of Ma amp; Pa Corncob. But he didn’t say anything about it because he wasn’t sure about the blond’s sense of humor and didn’t want her to get the idea that he was being mean.

Because you never knew, you know? Maybe someday he and the boys would be touring, end up in Iowa. He’d look up the blond. They’d spend the afternoon together, laugh about those lox and bagels and that wild, impulsive morning in Las Vegas. She’d tell him that she’d bought all his CDs, too. Talked all her friends into buying concert tickets when she heard Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms were playing the Corncob Dome.

Hey, it could happen, couldn’t it?

Sure it could.

“Before I forget,” Johnny said, pushing a napkin her way. “How about you write down your address and phone number for me?”

She looked a little surprised. “Are you planning a trip to Sioux City?”

“Not right now,” Johnny said. “But you never know, y’know?”

There were downsides to having lots of friends, of course. Like when Johnny got home. Seventeen messages on the answering machine.

He opened his filing cabinet and tucked the blonde’s napkin into the folder labeled IOWA.

The phone rang. He snatched it up. “It ain’t Memorex,” he said.

“Johnny.” It was a guy on the other end, but Johnny didn’t recognize the voice until the caller clued him in. “It’s Jack. . Jack Baddalach.”

Baddalach lived on the other side of the complex. Johnny knew him from the pool. The guy was always down there reading paperbacks that were about thirty years old. Seemed like he always had a couple of bruises or a black eye, but that was because he was a boxer. Actually, he had a pretty friendly disposition for a guy who beat the shit out of people for a living. And he was always ready to share a bottle of beer from his ice chest. Besides that, he’d been on TV. He knew people at HBO, suits who handled pay-per-view, too. Johnny considered him a good contact, someone he could consult about matters of fame when such matters became an issue.

So Johnny said, “Jack, how you doin’, buddy?” as if he didn’t have seventeen messages on his answering machine. He always liked everyone to feel real special when he talked to them, and notching up the old enthusiasm meter didn’t really do any harm, did it?

“I’m doing okay, Johnny. Hey, I got a favor to ask you.”

“Shoot.”

“Well, I’ve gotta go out of town for a few days. In fact. I’m already gone.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. Mostly. I mean, the whole thing with the promoter is still pretty wacky, but everything else is pretty much cool.”

“Where are you going?”

“Town called Pipeline Beach.”

“Oh,” Johnny said, because he didn’t have a clue.

“Anyway …” Jack paused because he was getting to the meat of it. “I was wondering if you could feed Frankenstein.”

A chill traveled Johnny’s spine. Friendship was one thing, and greasing potentially good contacts was quite another, but this-

“Johnny? You still there?”

“Yeah, Jack. . Hey, it’s not gonna be like the last time, is it? I don’t have to yank out any stitches or anything, do I?”

“Honest, Johnny. Frankie’s all healed up. You can’t even see the scars anymore.”

“Okay, but-”

“Great,” Baddalach said. “Thanks a bunch, buddy. You’ve still got the key from last time, right?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Get my mail too?”

“Sure.”

“Great. Hey, I guess I’d better go-”

“Wait a minute. Where can I get a hold of you? In case there’s an emergency or something?”

“Hold on,” Baddalach said. “I got an ashtray here from the place I’ll be staying. It’s called the Saguaro Riptide Motel. You got a pencil? I’ll give you the phone number.”

“You’re telling me you picked your motel from an ashtray?”

“It's a long story, Johnny.”

“Most people use a travel agent.”

Baddalach laughed at that one, and Johnny felt a little better. Then the boxer gave him the specifics, and he scrawled a phone number on a note pad, along with Jack’s name and the name of the motel.

They said their good-byes. Johnny cradled the receiver, dug through a drawer that contained spare keys for nearly half the condos in the complex until he found the key to the boxer’s pad.

Johnny stared at the key.

Wow. Frankenstein.

One of these days Jack Baddalach was going to be buying a whole shitload of Johnny Da Nang and the Napalms CDs.