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Overview
Transcending the adventure story, John Balaban’s lyric prose conjures beautiful and frightening images, evoking the Golden Triangle’s jungle as well as the complex hazards of the opium trade.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480401259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Coming Down Again
A Novel
By John Balaban
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1985 John BalabanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0125-9
CHAPTER 1
When Prescott and Lacey climbed out of the tube stop near Middlesex Hospital, Prescott cringed at the downtown crowds. He hesitated, hunched over. Once, in Saigon, stoned on acid, he had given Lacey a lift on his motorcycle, roaring up to checkpoints with barbed wire strung across the curfewed streets, where jittery Vietnamese cops jumped to their feet and took aim. But Prescott now knew that if he fell—tripped by some squirmy kid or pushed over by some mother intent on Christmas shopping—he could break a bone, his spine perhaps. His bones were now that brittle and weak. It would mean the end: lying in a hospital bed like a turtle with a cracked shell out on the road.
"I'll run interference for you," said Lacey, eyeing the crowd from the lee of the subway entrance. And he did, grimacing and pressing his fists together at the knuckles and thrusting his forearms and elbows forward like a Philadelphia Eagle posing for a kid's bubble-gum card, as Prescott put one hand on Lacey's shoulder and shuffled behind, at arm's length. They headed down Regent's Street with people veering out of their way, stepping aside and looking at them until other pedestrians barked their heels and hurried them along.
"Why didn't you write me?" Lacey asked, apparently of an Indian woman aiming dead at him who then blinked and looked away and sidestepped into the crowd with the ease of a Bombay stroller.
"I did. Didn't you get my card from Venice?"
"No."
"Well, I wrote you how Josiane and I were in love and how I love you and Louise and all my old pals."
"I didn't get it."
"Oh, come on, Lacey."
"Christ, how far is this hospital?" Lacey had just shoved an old man, who in turning around to glare at him had had his foot stepped on by a tall girl in stovepipe blue jeans and high heels.
"Near Tottenham."
"Let's get a cab."
"We're almost there."
"Yeah, but I don't like this plowing. Why are you going there? Why don't you see Blake? He's a doctor and your friend."
"Saw Blake. He gave me some palfium, but that's all he can do. He said to come here, register at the clinic, show 'em my diplomas, and then they'd send me upstairs to get zapped."
"What'd he say about your going to India and Vietnam?"
"Fine, as long as my stomach doesn't rot out, because when I can't digest my painkillers, I'm fucked. Also he says that if they radiate these fucking knobs—"
They stopped as Prescott pulled open his collar. His face was gaunt, his eyes exhausted. His chest was shrunken. At the back of his neck and on his left clavicle were several fist-size swellings.
"Christ, man, what are they?"
Prescott blew a puff of air as they regrouped into the crowd. "Cancer's plan. Hell, I don't know. Your chest's bone, isn't it? How can it shrivel?" If there was a whine in his voice, he dismissed it. "Sai Baba will save me."
"And who's this Sai Baba?"
"Sai Baba: southern Indian guru who materializes buckets of holy ash and Swiss watches and apparently saves a lot of cancer cases that the doctors have given up on."
"Uh-huh. Have Roberts and Fay met Blake?" Lacey did not want to hear any more about Sai Baba.
"No, no. I'm enough trouble for Blake. Roberts would badger him for dope, and Blake would tell him to buzz off. It'd be a short conversation."
"Good." Lacey turned the corner onto Oxford Street, where they slipped out of the pedestrian trample and leaned against a wall. "I feel," he said, "like a salmon running up rapids."
Prescott waited in a curtained stall among the many in the large room in the hospital basement. Lacey sat outside in the corridor on a tattered leather bench. Despite the number of people in the hall and clinic, the place was quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Lacey could plainly hear Prescott banging off loud farts that percolated from his cancerous colon. The farts were frequent, loud, long, and full of vibrato. The long walk must have shaken them loose.
Suddenly a voice called out angrily, "Will whoever is doing that, please stop. It is very rude."
Prescott's reply, of course, was another helpless burst, followed by a nattering bray. Lacey gritted his teeth and got up when he saw a doctor stamping down the aisle to Prescott's stall, where he threw open the curtain and demanded, "What's your name?"
Prescott looked at the young man in the white coat and could not suppress his smile. "Steve," he said.
"No, your last name."
Prescott was now grinning broadly. "What are you going to do," he asked, "arrest me?"
The doctor snatched Prescott's records from the clipboard on the metal tray. His frown fled as he read Prescott's Mt. Zion reports and Blake's letter. "Sorry," he said. He turned to look Prescott in the eye.
Prescott smiled at him with the good-natured curiosity he seemed to be adopting more and more as he got closer to death and discovered interesting things about the desperations that rankled ordinary mortals. "Not at all," he said. "I know it's awful."
"We'll get you upstairs to the specialists." The doctor scribbled a note, gave it to Prescott, patted his shoulder, which may have been the cause of yet another fart, and called out, beleagueredly, to the desk nurse, "Sister?"
In the elevator, Prescott drew stares as he inhaled and exhaled huge lungfuls of air. A lady in a tweed suit and matching hat knitted her eyebrows and frowned at Prescott. "Breaths of fire," he said in a confidential tone. He winked at her.
Prescott was on a German carrot juice diet, had tried a sautéed lemon rind cure, had drunk an extract of peach pits, had visited a Reichian masseuse, and had recently begun yoga asanas. He was doing all he could to keep from dying, including riding up on the elevator to have his cells ionized. He still was not certain that he was going to die, and he bridled at the suggestion, including any lapse in grammar that introduced the past tense of the verb in respect to his life: "What did you—" someone would start. "What do I ..." Prescott would correct.
At radiology, he was given a form: Stephen Carl Prescott agreed that he would not sue the hospital if his hair fell out, etc. Lacey signed below Prescott as next of kin.
CHAPTER 2Lacey moved in with Prescott, he could see why Prescott preferred the relative comforts of Roberts's place to this dump off Portobello Road, a one-room walk-up that belonged to a guy named "H," once the sound man for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and more recently for a large discotheque in Hammersmith. Two weeks before Steve moved in, H had rented a rowboat in Capri and managed to drown himself. Fay had a key to his place, which was now Prescott's until the landlord got wise. But it was hard to get to, except by cab, and it was just one large room with a sink, and you had to climb three flights of narrow stairs, past landings strewn with garbage bags and dirty diapers, past the single stinking bathroom where if you wanted hot water to shave or wash you had to keep feeding a gas meter with ten-pence coins, and, perhaps worst of all, past the other tenants: a filthy young woman who was always screeching at her whiny little boy on whose upper lip lay a dollop of green snot, two gays whom Steve suspected of having broken in and stolen some of H's records, and an old man in a uniform indicating some sort of public service who stopped Lacey on the stairs once to ask him in a smug, knowing, quiet tone, "What's wrong with your friend?"
Lacey stared at the man.
"He looks pretty sick," the old man ventured with an ugly smile.
Lacey thought of kicking the old fart down the stairs. Instead he turned to walk back up and said, "He's got a bad cold."
"Looks worse than that," the old man called after him.
The room had a chair, a stand-up closet, two bare mattresses thrown on the floor, and a single, bare light bulb that Steve left burning to ward off roaches and neighbors. Prescott's stuff was thrown about the room: books on cancer cures, his manuscripts, unwashed clothes, a hi-tech German juicer. There was also a huge stereo system and stacks of records, all of which had been given to H by record companies. And an electric heater that Fay's friend, Thomas, had given Prescott and that kept them warm on one side or the other as they slept, wrapped in ragged cotton blankets, beneath the bare bulb Prescott would not turn off.
Awful nights. Each time Lacey awoke, he looked over at Prescott, lying on his back, naked to the waist, chest caved in, ribs protruding, eyes staring at the ceiling. Lacey awoke that way so often he finally thought he was dreaming the scene. "You alright?" he asked once, just to see if he was dreaming or if Prescott was really awake. "Alright," came back the reply, almost immediately, but from a place very far off, somewhere Lacey had never been. Finally, awaking again to see Prescott up and standing before the high sink, stretching up to try to piss into it, Lacey asked him to turn off the light. "In a minute," came the faraway voice. But it took some minutes, for Prescott could stand there and stand there while nothing happened. At last, when Lacey woke again, the light was out. But was Prescott asleep? "Steve?"
"Yeah?"
"Christ, man, go to sleep."
They didn't spend many conscious hours in the hole, at least not Lacey. When they were there, they brightened the atmosphere a bit by listening to H's records: to Jimi Hendrix, to the Stones' new Goat's Head Soup, to Elton John's "rocket man burning up in the air alone." Prescott seldom felt like eating and, knowing how uncomfortable it was for Prescott to sit for long in a restaurant, Lacey obliged by grabbing his food on the run: meat pies at bakeries, sliced ham at the pubs, Wimpy Burgers. One night, leaving Prescott to practice his asanas, Lacey went out just before closing time to get something at a pub near Nottinghill Gate. It was a drizzly, fogshifting evening like the night of his arrival. Portobello Road was deserted except for the odd car that came along sloshing rainwater in a sheen of filthy ripples. He felt rotten and alone. It was rotten leaving Louise alone at Christmas. He should have brought her. Since returning from Vietnam, he left her alone too much in their falling-down farmhouse. He didn't like to think of her alone, amid fields surrounded by rednecks in house trailers, poachers whom Lacey was always running off the land. Christ, he thought, she'd be safer walking down this foggy poorly lit street at night, and then heard, as if on cue, a groan and a scuffle from the dim road ahead. He walked forward quietly, making sure the backs of his heels touched first and his soles rolled forward noiselessly. Through the separating mist he saw two men standing over a third lying on the wet cobblestones. The guy was on his back, his hands up to protect himself—without success—as the two men on either side of him alternated kicks to his ribs. Jesus Christ. Lacey could get by them, but how could he stop them?
"Can I help?" he asked cheerily as he walked up out of the fog.
The two thugs stopped kicking, looked at Lacey, and then looked at each other. They were both about twenty. One of them had a severe David Bowie haircut; the other, a Rod Stewart shag. "'E's aw mate. 'E won't come with us," Bowie explained.
"Bloody lie!" squealed the guy on the ground. His shirt buttons had popped off and his paunchy little belly showed beneath his leather jacket. "They's about to kill me." A bloody front tooth lay on his neck.
One of his shoes—a flimsy yellow pump with a blocked-up heel—was flung off in the gutter. Lacey considered the situation and walked over to pick it up. As he did, through the fog he noticed a car parked by the curb just a bit up the road. Two dots of cigarette light glowed in the rear seat. This was hopeless, he thought, as he walked back to where the guy was still lying in the street. They were all drunk; perhaps they'd had a falling out. Anyway, he had got them to stop kicking and that looked like the best he could do, even if they started knifing the guy in the car.
"Come on, Arnie," one of the assailants was saying, "we'll get you home."
"Yeah, come on, Arnie," Lacey said. "You're pissed. Your friends want to get you home." Lacey smiled at the two. One winked. "Here, come on, now, put on your shoe."
"They ain't me friends; they wanna kill me."
"Naw, Arnie. You wooz startin'. It's over now."
Lacey helped Arnie up, said good night, and walked on. Three blocks up, at the pub, he took a stool at the bar and asked the middle-aged barmaid for a hot sausage roll and a half pint of the best bitters. No point calling the cops, he thought. Either way now, it was settled. He downed his pint and ordered another. He had come to say good-bye to Prescott. He had also come to gather with his Vietnam pals. Probably a mistake. He was playing hooky from his awful job. He sipped his mug.
CHAPTER 3Lolling about. Drunk. Stoned. On New Year's Eve. They were slumped in the stuffed chairs and sprawled across the two double beds in Prescott's hotel room. In Prescott's room: billed to an American Express card he would never pay; on Prescott's methadone: just as they had smoked his heroin in Saigon, except for Fay, who was prancing about Soho then. In Saigon they tapped 95-percent-pure crystals into half-emptied Marlboros, the skag was so cheap. Now the skag was free, provided by the National Health Service to their dying friend who, after radiation, was looking better, feeling better, and eating again, and who seemed, as he sat in his throne of pillows, in good spirits. Radiant, he said. No pain, no problem.
Just the same old Saigon scene, thought Lacey. Roberts was telling a story from one of the double beds. Prescott was there offering the deft joke. And Whiting had his camera. But the girl now was Fay. Fay, with her auburn, hennaed hair still damp from the shower, sat naked next to Roberts. Her large brown eyes were weary, her features sharp. Big hips, small flat breasts. Her arms terribly bruised.
"Well, don't stare at us," Roberts said, interrupting his own story.
A radiator hissed in a corner. Fay patted the bed beside her, and Lacey shuffled over to sit by them. When Fay helped him off with his jacket, he saw again her jagged, broken nails and, in the lamplight, the left side of Roberts's face, swollen and red and turning black.
Whiting was filming. He sat forward in the dark leather chair just in front of a spotlight trained on the two beds. At the moment he was filming Roberts flipping a clasp knife at the thick heel of Lacey's boot. He missed almost every time and once nearly stuck Lacey in the calf.
"Cut it out, you guys," Prescott said.
Relieved, Lacey pulled back his foot. Stoned mumblety-peg. The advantage, or disadvantage, of drugs was that it turned your puny threats into mythic encounters. Something quite the reverse had once brought them together.
Whiting flicked off both his spot and camera. "Heavy duty," he said in his nasal Georgia drawl. He was short and muscular, sported a wiry blond beard. He was beginning to bald. In Vietnam, he had filmed the war for CBS. Now he shot car ads for some Dallas agency.
"As I was saying," Roberts continued as Whiting switched on the spot, "a party for Thomas's—the guy who owns our house—new discovery, a black blues singer named Preston Jones, a waiter from Detroit who Thomas got a one-night gig at Ronnie Scott's in Soho."
"The best place in town," Fay said.
"Mind if I tell the story?"
"Oh, stop," she said and, hand under the covers, grabbed for his dick with her broken claws. Roberts rolled away. "C'mon, tell the story," she said.
"Well, Preston's gay, about forty, and he'd never had a break like this, so he was in heaven, belting out Bill Withers's 'Lean on Me' and crooning Joe Williams's torch songs. He figured I was famous somehow so I got a lot of his personal attention."
"And didn't you like it?" Fay said sweetly.
"What? When he was sitting at our table? I mean on our table? Christ, he was singing so close to my face, he fogged my glasses."
Lacey started to unbutton his shirt. Fay helped him.
"Anyway, after his last set—Sonny Stitt was the main bill—Thomas took us all to a pub nearby where he bought everybody—the whole pub—drinks. Preston was ecstatic and flirted around, even with some women and these Welsh working stiffs who just glared at us and drank Tom's booze." Roberts pointed to a cigarette pack next to Lacey, which Lacey flipped him. Roberts took the last cigarette and lit it, crumpling the pack and tossing it at Prescott's head, now slumped in sleep in the next bed.
"Toss it again, man," Whiting said, retrieving the pack from the bedcovers in front of Prescott. "I didn't catch it the first time."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Coming Down Again by John Balaban. Copyright © 1985 John Balaban. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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