Posted on August 8, 2008

Karaoke Quintessence: Chapter 1: Juju

Jimmy Pete spent the summer breeding sinners. Eleven women, all of them pregnant, his seed rocketing along on juju he’d picked up from a fat Puerto Rican for a deck of playing cards, a bottle of whiskey, and a blue pigeon feather it’d taken him a week to track down.

“And you know what the shittiest part is?” Jimmy said to the blonde guy next to him at the bar. “It’s the way them chicks call you up, whining and moaning about how you ruined their life, like it’s not their fault they fucked you.”

The blonde guy nodded.

Jimmy continued, “So I said to ‘em, you just go get an abortion, you don’t want the kid. But the funny thing is– You know what the funny thing is? They can’t. That’s right. Those eleven babies will cling on and fight off any drugs you pump in there and if you go in after ‘em with a coat hanger, they’ll just grow back.”

The blonde guy laughed.

“It’s funny, huh?” Jimmy said. “Shit like that makes my goddamn day.”

He stood up, grabbed at the pile of quarters he had to cover drinks, dropped them in his pocket, and picked up his briefcase. He knocked the blonde guy on the shoulder. “You been real good company,” he said.

The blonde guy nodded. He shrugged. Jimmy dropped him a few quarters, smacked his back again, and walked back to the front of the room. He stepped up onto the little wooden stage and set his briefcase down on along the wall under the retractable screen. He put his hands up in the air. “My good, dear folks,” he said. “I’m back to please the hell out of you. Anyone got something in particular they’re just buzzing to hear?”

A table of Mexicans near the front started laughing. One took off his hat. He waved it at Jimmy and shouted a slur of words in spanish.

“Don’t know that one,” Jimmy said. “Sorry, mi amigo.”

The Mexican waved his hat again, a gesture of dismissal this time.

“Anyone else,” Jimmy said. No one was forthcoming. “Come on, folks. I got a repatuar, that machine back there’s got its own, and they overlap in a big sweet spot of musical bliss I’m sure one or two of you have a favorite in. So go ahead and choose.”

Someone near the front worked up courage–or worked through boredom–and shouted, “Led Zeppelin.”

Jimmy grinned. “Yup,” he said, “I think I can do that.” He turned and whispered to the dude running the karaoke machine, who fumbled buttons, digging through the play list.

Thirty seconds and he got a thumbs up: song found, get ready to sing. He looked around, over the heads of the small crowd. Maybe thirty people were sitting haphazardly at the twenty or so tables in the bar. It was a dive, Jimmy knew, but he had the feeling he’d get thirty bucks–if he was lucky, fifty. People always tipped. And his finger had been itching something mad.

Jimmy kicked into Robert Plant. He gave the room a whole lot of love and somewhere in the North African desert, the real Robert Plant stopped paying attention to the native music festival he was attending and hugged himself, feeling like he’d had too much to drink on an empty stomach.

People cheered. Some clapped. One or two coughed. Jimmy hit it harder, drawing the song in, channeling the falsetto. He gave it his all and, when he finished, a table full of ladies–nurses, some with fancy jackets pulled over their scrubs–begged for more. The drunks really liked this short, Italian looking dude who could sing like a Seventies rock icon on cue.

It all ended forty-five minutes later, Jimmy up seventy bucks in tips and grinning huge, the room not quite ready to move on to the typical karaoke experience of brave drunks slurring their adolescent favorites–and shy housewives mumbling lyrics to Shania Twain, while feeling like they were putting one over on their domineering husbands back home.

Jimmy was happy to relinquish his spot.

He grabbed his briefcase, shoved his tip money into it, and jumped down from the stage. He took found a seat at the bar and ordered.

“I can come back,” Jimmy said to the bartender.

“Yeah?”

“Couple a days, I’ll come back and do some more.” He gestured at the drinkers. “Seems good for business.”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna maybe advertise?” Jimmy said.

“No,” the bartender said.

Jimmy nodded, grabbed a ten from his pocket, and handed it to him. “Couple a days.”

“Gotcha,” the bartender said.

Jimmy finished off his beer and left the bar.

He walked a block north, keeping an eye out for street signs. He didn’t know this city, had only come into town a few days ago, and he was still adjusting to the new geography and bus schedule.

Fifteen minutes later he saw a shelter, a gang tag spray-painted on the glass. He sat down on the plastic bench and looked around. There was a black guy across the street, looking both ways, back and forth, but not actually crossing. Jimmy figured he was selling crack–or coke or heroin or whatever people were into now–and was waiting for some BMW to pull up, roll down its window, and a white hand to come out holding a fold of bills.

“Fuck BMW,” Jimmy said.

He took another quick look around, just to be sure. There was no one but the dealer, who was too far away to see anything.

Jimmy opened the leather brief case, a gift from his mother when she’d thought he was heading off to college, and rooted around for a transfer. He found one tucked inside his Heather Graham novel. The transfer’s ink was smudged, the edges ripped, the date a few months passed. Jimmy ran his thumb along the surface of the paper and the smear of ink reformed as numbers and locations, changing an expired Omaha RTD transfer into one that’d work locally. He stuffed it in his pocket, closed the brief case, and waited for the bus.

When it arrived, Jimmy got on, handing the transfer to the driver, who took it, gave it a once over, and slid it into the metal box to the right of the steering wheel.

The driver smiled at him. Jimmy smiled back. He stepped over outstretched feet on his way to an open spot to sit.

He sat quietly, tapping a beat into his briefcase. There were supposed to be three stops until his hotel but, for some reason, when that third stop came, Jimmy didn’t get up. He thought his finger was itching. He couldn’t be sure, but the bars were closed and he wasn’t in a hurry to get back.

Jimmy rarely knew exactly where he was going. Rather, he followed a faint left/right sense, a tingling in one hand or the other that, when obeyed, usually led him to good money, free drinks, and, on one or two occasions, a warm bed and someone to share it with.

The bus did two more stops before Jimmy knew it was time for him to get off. He couldn’t tell where he was–he hadn’t been paying attention to passing signs–but it seemed residential. He pulled the metal cable and the “Stop Requested” sign dinged red.

The bus stopped along a strip of grass and sidewalk. Jimmy worked his way back up to the front and climbed out. He stepped onto the wet turf near a parked Honda, looked around, and headed in the direction he figured was south.

The streets were empty. It was nearly three. Jimmy walked a quarter mile before his patience with his itching fingers began to wear out and he thought maybe he’d just picked up an indecisive rash.

Then it came on strong. He was standing at the mouth of an alley formed by the backs of the houses in a long row. He could see parked cars and trash cans lit up here and there by lights above one-car-garage doors. Jimmy didn’t particularly want to go down there. The houses looked nice, the kind likely owned by young couples on their first mortgages, and he knew those sorts of homeowners were terribly prone to dialing 911 at the first sign of anyone walking anywhere near their love nest palaces at the wrong time of night.

Jimmy had been arrested before. He didn’t feel like going through that again, but he’d never ignored the itching before, not at least since he’d figured out what it was good for. He shrugged and headed into the gauntlet of garages.

He’d walked about half the alley, trying to stay out of the circles of light, when his foot caught on something and he looked down. A Chicken of the Sea tuna can had flipped over when he kicked it and now rested upside down against his shoe. He bent down, picked it up, and turned it over. Inside, a few pieces of salted fish stuck to the corners and a beetle with a blue shell crawled around, seeking cover.

He put his thumb in front of the bug, letting it crawl onto his nail. It stopped as soon as it touched skin and waited. Jimmy stared at it, then flicked it at some bags of garbage to his right.

“That’s a special bug.”

Jimmy whirled. An old man, mid-seventies maybe, was leaning against the brick wall along the back of one of the lots, filing his fingers with what looked like a long screw.

“It was?” Jimmy said.

“Still is.” The old man pushed himself off the wall and walked a couple of paces closer. “I’d try and find it, I were you. You might be needing it.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh huh.”

The man was black and had a grizzled look. His skin was shiny and scars covered his cheeks like cresting worms. A long, grey scarf was draped over his neck, its frayed ends stopping just above a wide, yellow belt clasped with a huge bronze Scooby-Doo logo.

Jimmy said, “This about my singing?”

“Your singing?”

“The way I can sing like people? I figured it for big mojo when I found it, bigger than the other stuff. I figured that might put me on somebody’s radar.”

“Oh, that.” The old man looked around. “Don’t rightly know. I was just told to make sure you get this stuff. Don’t know what it’s all for.” He screwed his lips to one side. “Though, I suppose it could have something to do with you belting out the tunes.”

Jimmy said, “Who are you?”

The old man grinned all big and stuck out his hand. “Name’s Ellison. Like the guy invented the light bulb.”

Jimmy reached out and they shook. “Jimmy.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jimmy. Hope I’ll be seeing you again.”

Ellison let go of Jimmy’s hand. He turned around and walked away down the ally. Jimmy didn’t bother to follow.

When Ellison was gone, Jimmy dug through the garbage bags. The blue beetle was on top of one of them, its legs going in circles on the plastic like it was treading water. Jimmy picked it up carefully, found the tuna can, and searched around some more until he came up with a piece of aluminum foil and a rubber band. He made a little cage for the bug, poked holes through the foil, and slid the whole deal into his coat pocket. He hoped the tuna would keep the thing from starving until he needed it. Because he knew he’d be needing it someday. He’d learned, over his years of exposure to the world’s more odd secrets, that people like Ellison, people with that sort of wise vibe, were best paid attention to.

He shrugged and walked back to the bus stop.

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