Plainclothes Naked Read online

  Plainclothes Naked

  Jerry Stahl

  Dedication

  For the anonymous, in all their demented splendor

  Epigraph

  Do you vow to keep your wits among the witless? Do you commit yourself to pondering ceaselessly the uselessness of caring, the uselessness of love, that great reality for which all else must be abandoned?

  —Joy Williams

  Hey Man, let’s dress up like cops and see what we could do…

  —Tom Verlaine

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Epilogue

  An Excerpt from Happy Mutant Baby Pills

  Prologue

  Praise for Happy Mutant Baby Pills

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Jerry Stahl

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Spongy buttocks exposed and wobbling, Tony Zank’s mother piled down the rest home corridor, screaming “Help me!” and “Stop the monster!”

  Her walker clattered off the floor and her Seventh Heaven gown clung half-on, half-off, as though she’d run through a backyard clothesline and the paper-thin garment had caught an arm.

  “Pretty good pipes for an oldster,” said McCardle, Zank’s sullen partner, a Dean Martin look-alike, if Dean Martin had been African-American. He added, when Zank gave him a stare, “I mean, she seems pretty upset.”

  Zank burped beef jerky fumes into his fist and shrugged. “She’s always upset. That’s her job. She’s been upset for fifty years.”

  Zank realized, with a sinking twinge, that hiding the key to his happy tomorrow in his mother’s bed, wedged between the plastic protecto-pad and the mattress beneath, had not been the brightest idea he’d ever had. But this was no time for regrets. He had to get in there and slip the envelope out before the authorities—some breed of rest home police, if there was such a thing—showed up and asked what all the shrieks were about. Asked him why, if the morning went really south, he had decided to visit his mom with a two-time loser who’d showed up on America’s Most Wanted the week before, wanted for a gay shovel murder.

  “Mac, reach in and grab the thing,” Zank snapped. “I’ll cover the door.”

  In passive-aggressive splendor, McCardle made drama of clamping his jaw and squinting as though into a strong gale.

  “What?” Zank hissed at him from the doorway.

  “I’m not gonna go in there and touch bedding, Tony. You can catch all kinds of stuff, reaching in old people’s beds.”

  Zank threw the punch before he knew he was going to, then pushed past his partner and began to tackle the mattress himself. His mother’s screams had faded, but some kind of other business was going on down the hall.

  “That wasn’t necessary,” McCardle mumbled. He tugged his soul patch and worked his lower lip indignantly. “I wasn’t dissing your moms. It’s just, I got a phobia, on account of after her stroke my Auntie Big’n went incontinental. I used to have to tidy up and it gave me a condition. My hands swelled up like catcher’s mitts. It was like havin’ paws, and all the kids used to make fun. I loved my auntie, even though she beat me with rolled-up magazines, but her bed gave me some kind of mitt disease.”

  Zank pounded the nearest wall with his fist. “Jesus Christ, enough! That’s not something I need to hear about right now, okay? That’s not something I ever need to hear about!”

  “Okay! Down Simba…. Maybe you should lighten up on the rock, Cuz. You’re getting cranky.”

  McCardle shook his head and pinched the tiny bulb of his button nose, which looked like it had been ordered from a Make-Me-White catalogue, though he swore his entire family had been born with them. That tiny nose, and his cocoa hue, were the only things that kept Mac’s Martin resemblance from being freakish. This added to Tony’s suspicion that his partner in crime had had some nasal work to keep from being stopped on the street and forced to sing “That’s Amore.”

  “I’m only trying to tell you,” McCardle persisted, “bed stuff gets me tweaked, on account of my childhood abuse. It upsets my little McCardle. I figured it out in therapy, when I was inside.”

  By now, however, Zank had stopped listening. He’d stopped hearing altogether, busy as he was peeling off Mom’s Seventh Heaven bedspread, followed by her blankets, her sheets, and her plastic pad in a frantic effort to retrieve the envelope he’d stashed. The envelope that was going to change everything.

  The envelope, he realized as the sound of clicking heels and agitated female voices drew nearer, that wasn’t there anymore.

  ONE

  Tina couldn’t decide between ground glass and Drano.

  She’d already sprinkled a pinch of smashed-up light-bulb—an easy-reading 40-watter—in Marvin’s Lucky Charms, when she started thinking maybe drain cleaner was the way to go.

  One of the old Jews at the home, Mister Cornfeld, came down with the blood-squirts for a week and finally died after somebody put Liquid-Plumr in his prune juice. Old Jews were always drinking prune juice, always talking about what was going on in their pants. Either their constipation or their prostates or something skanky like that. At least her granddaddy, whatever his other faults, had not spent a whole lot of time boring her with what was happening downstairs. Till he bought the mall at ninety, Pop Lee snored like an idling diesel and still liked to grab ass and talk nasty. When she found the trunk full of Moppets and Barely Legals after the funeral, she wasn’t exactly surprised. But at least the old skeek didn’t discuss his plumbing.

  Tina could hear Marvin doing his prosperity chants from the bedroom and knew she had to make up her mind. Since he’d redirected his energy from day trading—which had cost them their condo—to developing and selling his new “Millionaire Mantra,” Marv had been experimenting with the perfect brand of satsang to put up on the Web. He was convinced there was an untapped pool of desperate New Agers who wanted to be rich and cosmic at the same time. His goal was to create the perfect quarter hour chant—ten minutes for Personal Prosperity, five for World Peace and Feeding the Children—then get himself up and streaming so folks could vocalize along with him, and send away for his line of videos, audio-cassettes, and the ever-popular BUDDHA WANTS YOU TO HAVE IT ALL! T-shirts.

  Unfortunately, with each minute of spiritual honking, Tina’s determination to kill Marvin, sell his computers, and quit her job at Seventh Heaven was given renewed impetus. Mostly she just wanted to shut him up.

  “Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, HUNGH-UH,” came the turbulent sounds from their bedroom. “Hungh-uh, hungh-uh, hungh hungh HUNGH!”

  No doubt he was ta
ping himself, too. Marv had the vid-cam on a tripod in front of the bed. Which was another thing….

  Marvin wasn’t a petite man. In fact he was husky. Husky and soft, with a shaved head, no chest hair, and a little red moustache. Just the thought of him in there, cross-legged on a throw pillow, wearing the Gunga Din loincloth he thought made him look guruesque, was enough to set Tina crunching another pinch of glass and dipping into her bag for the industrial-strength Drano she’d pilfered from the rest home janitor’s closet.

  “Oh God, shut up!” Tina yelled to no one but herself. No way Marvin could hear over the din of his chants. By now he’d shifted to nose-hums, which really drove her off a cliff. It was hard to describe the sound he produced. The odd Om alternated with guttural blasts of ersatz Sanskrit and quick, bleated syllables like sneep or snerm, the kind of noise a goat might make if it tried to speak English and suffered from a cleft palate.

  Marvin was always a big planner. After his Chant for Prosperity site was up and running, he told her, it was on to the next big plum: Eternal Life. If he could just cook up the right pitch, maybe mock up some phony interviews with people who looked 120 but healthy, he could charge aspiring eternal lifers fifty bucks a pop for tapes, books, and videocassettes explaining his discovery that certain sound vibrations could keep you young, possibly even ensure immortality.

  “You can’t prove they don’t,” he explained to Tina one morning, sitting at the kitchen table slathered in Indoor Sun, his artificial tan lotion, wearing the turban he’d fashioned from a floral dish towel. “As long as I’m still up on my hind legs, who’s to say I’m not the one guy on earth who’s gonna be here for the Trilennium, or whatever comes next?”

  It was Marvin’s belief that Indian heritage, India Indian—curry, turban, memsahib—made for an effective sales tool. But lately, for Tina’s money, he’d gone too far. These days he went straight from flossing his teeth in the morning to lounging around in turban and loincloth, inventing new and different chants and mantras. A necessary lifestyle, he’d tell her, if you wanted to turn yourself into the first big On-line Money Swami. Every day the cosmos blessed him with another sanctified cash concept.

  Recalling all this made Tina wince. The idea of eternity spent listening to Marvin hum through his nose was so awful that she pulled out the Drano and poured a shot in his cereal before she remembered the envelope. Plenty of residents slid valuables of one kind or another under their mattresses, and the one perk of sheet-and-blanket duty was getting first crack at whatever treasures Seventh Heaven-ites saw fit to hide. Her first week on the job, she’d retrieved a sandwich bag stuffed with clipped-out cake recipes, an autographed photo of Frank Sinatra Junior, and sixteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills wedged in a tattered paperback of Conrad Hilton’s autobiography, Be My Guest.

  What with Alzheimer’s, general forgetfulness, and the simple fact that people who moved into rest homes rarely moved out alive, mattress stashes made for a steady and occasionally fascinating second income.

  Not wanting to miss a chance to poison her husband, but anxious to check out her booty, Tina hollered that breakfast was ready. She pulled the envelope out of her purse and ripped it open. Then she tapped the contents onto the kitchen table, stared at it, and screamed for a solid twenty seconds. It was that kind of day.

  She didn’t even hear Marvin when he stepped behind her.

  “My God, you’re a natural!”

  Delighted, he had flown in from the bedroom at the sound of his wife’s sudden demo of vocal skills. “Put a little more sinus in it and you’re right on target.”

  In jubilation—for his next next project, Marv had his heart set on “His’n’ Her Love Chants,” so Tina’s outburst was pretty much an answered prayer—he snatched the bowl of Lucky Charms off the table with both hands, then leaned back and tipped the contents down his gullet in two enormous, chomping gulps.

  “Still crunchy,” he observed happily. “I hate when they sog up.”

  Until he said it, Tina’d all but forgotten about the Drano and glass. It wasn’t the first time she’d spiked his food, just the first time she hadn’t scraped it into the trash at the last minute. Before this, it had been a tease, something she’d done to entertain herself. A little ant killer here, a dollop of furniture polish there. All in nuptial fun….

  Tina was about to say something when Marv dropped on all fours and started frothing. What looked like dirty yogurt bubbled between his lips. It gushed out in a steady splurge, reminding her of the foam they sprayed on downed passenger planes. Tina’d never told anyone, but she always got weirdly excited by footage of houses with jets sticking out of them. Burning metal on lawns. The way the news cameras honed in on a single purse or tennis shoe. It did something to her. All those burly firemen with no faces wielding giant, spewing hoses….

  When the foam-splats stopped, Marv grabbed a table leg and heaved himself to his knees. He began to claw at his throat, craning his head sideways like the RCA dog. His eyes met hers bulging with questions.

  “I better shower,” Tina said, to the room at large, as she slid the item back in the envelope. It hit her, with the kind of wanton clarity the Almighty grants in moments of high emergency, that when the paramedics came, she wanted to look like she hadn’t even been in the kitchen. Like she’d been showering and had padded out, dewy fresh, to find her husband dead from a toxic breakfast.

  “Howg gum?” Marv managed to sputter, a far cry from the disciplined mantras he’d perfected in the past few weeks.

  “Accident.” Tina shrugged, feeling she owed him an explanation, however insincere.

  But Marv was beyond replying. The convulsions had knocked his turban off, and Tina could see his artificial tan line, a complete circle around his skull where his headgear started and the application of Indoor Sun had stopped. He was perfectly two-toned: toasty brown below and mottled pink above. The line cut just over his ears, lending his head a peculiar, makeshift quality, as if the top screwed off.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Tina said, and almost meant it. If she hadn’t bothered to pilfer Mrs. Zank’s mattress, things might have turned out differently. But it didn’t matter now. Marvin’s tongue had swelled up like a purple sock with a foot in it, and he seemed to be chewing. Blood leaked out of his mouth onto the linoleum.

  It was Marvin who’d selected—without consulting her—a cow-jumping-over-the-moon pattern for the kitchen floor. The cows had polka-dot pants on. And from the moment Marv worked the first self-adhesive tile out of the Home Depot box, she’d hated the sight of them.

  So it was with a certain satisfaction that Tina realized a sea of clothed and smiling linoleum cows might well be the last sight her husband ever enjoyed on earth.

  “Say good-bye to your friends,” she said.

  TWO

  Detective Manny Rubert hated the idea of policemen almost as much as he hated himself for being one. He always figured there were people who chose their fate, and people who had a fate they’d more or less ended up with. He thought of himself as the “ending up” type.

  Scant as it was, his early interaction with law enforcement had been uniformly grim. When he was little the cops would break up Wiffle ball games in the street and keep the bat. Later on, security guards would twist his collar or smack him when they caught him shoplifting. Still later the police were back, knocking on his parents’ door to warn them that their pride-and-joy was jail-bound. Once inside, they’d hand his nervous mother and defeated little dad some Polaroids of him smoking dope with the other losers in the Marilyn High parking lot. To this day he’d never discovered the narc, though the cop who’d come to his house, Officer Chatlak, was still on the squad at seventy-something.

  The worst part, for Manny, was that Chatlak never actually arrested him. He seemed to prefer keeping him out of jail so he could continue hassling him. Things were more touchy-feely in the late seventies. The public hadn’t yet developed a taste for sending boys with no armpit hair to San Quentin.

 
After the dozenth time Officer Chatlak took it upon himself to tell Manny’s father, man-to-man, that his only son had the makings of a “drug-addled degenerate,” the old mill-hunk showed some tough love and threw him out of the house. He was seventeen, and thrilled. It wasn’t like nothing positive had ever come out of his mild police problem. He got to leave home and move in with a dope fiend named Harvey he met at the Greyhound station.

  Why Manny became a cop he didn’t know—or maybe he did and didn’t want to think about it. Near as he could figure, on those rare occasions when he bothered to try, it broke down to two possibilities, equally pathetic. First, being a policeman gave him a reason to feel as badly about himself as he tended to feel anyway. At twenty-two, and coming off his season on heroin, happiness was not part of the package. Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job. (Though, oddly, in that capacity, the police never seemed to hassle him at all. He became a daily shooter, thanks to his bus station roomie, and never once got so much as a parking ticket.) On some level, he believed, he needed a life that offered as much borderline insanity as the one he’d left behind….