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Midnight Folk

Lavie Tidhar

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“Bukowski made me writer letters to dead people. “You do what you have to do”,

he said, “and I will do her”; he pointed at the heavy woman in the corner of the bar

and lit a cigarette. We got drunk with Ginsberg in Paris, and passed out under stars

burned out like dripping candles. “You do what you have to do,” Ginsberg said,

“and I will do a little of this acid.” Burroughs was already shooting at the tourists

with his shotgun. He saved the rocket launcher for special occasions, and was

understandably upset when the police confiscated it. “Pigs”, said Bukowski,

smoothing down the betting slip on the table, like a bookmark for a chequered

account of his life. Imaginary conversations, imaginary lives; only the deaths were

real.”

MY NAME IS SAL PARADISE, and I’m a private investigator.

The skies outside my shoe-sized apartment’s windows were like a dull grey

numbing pain that perforated through the urban landscape like a burrowing worm,

eating away at the rows upon rows of identical brick houses. It was winter, and I

was alone.

I wasn’t always a private investigator. I used to be on the road. I’ll tell you

about it later.

I arrived in London, England, one rain-drenched evening in November,

looking for nothing more than a refuge, a safe-house, a place where I could be alone

and where my past could be safely filed away in the great sweaty tumbling reams of

paper that were left behind me in New York when I fled my old life.

I took the train to town, in turns sweating and freezing as the aftershocks of

Benzedrine hit me repeatedly. I was a washed-out boxer getting pummelled on the

ring of life, and the punches were coming in like a pile-up of cars on the Golden

Gate bridge, fast and painful and without an end in sight. The people on the train,

gentle Englishmen and delicate girls with pale, beautiful faces, looked at me in alarm

but left me to my thoughts. I came to learn England is a place where the mad

are—not revered, no, but allowed a quiet respect, a space around them like a shield

of protection and comfort.

I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense, am I. My therapist says I’m getting

better. Making progress, he says, and laughs like a big ol’ Texan cowboy, stroking

his great big white beard all the while. He so reminds me of Carlo Marx sometimes I

want to jump up and hug him and dance around the room with him and talk about

poetry.

But I don’t, anymore. I’m getting off Speed, and Carlo Marx is dead and

besides, this is London, not New York.

So I was sitting in my tiny apartment counting the bricks and watching soaps

on the box and thinking of a drink. It was cold. When I first arrived in London I

stayed with a girl I knew, an American flower transplanted without much success in

this ancient metropolis, held hands and shivered like a madman and dreamed of the

road, and the trip to Italy with my one true love that I’ve never taken and now never

will, and of the secret byways of the world.

“Sal,” my friend said to me one night. We were sitting on her small brown

sofa without our clothes and with the ancient heater working overtime by our side,

eating curry from little silver packets. I dipped a large chunk of Naan bread into my

chicken Madras and bit it and felt warmth flood me for the fraction of a second like

a remote gun shot.

“Yes, darling?” I was affecting a British accent in those days, the kind bad

actors use in Hollywood movies, all upper-class and superior, as if one’s nose is full

of snot through which the words ooze out with difficulty.

“It’s time you got yourself your own place,” she said, her sweet voice

vaporizing in the heat of the room. “And a job, too.” She put her hand on mine,

tenderness in her eyes like the bite of a snake. I was suddenly angry. I wanted to

shout at the moon, berate the unfairness of this life I found myself in, cry for the

road and for friends left behind. I got ready to stand up and leave, as I was, to step

blissfully into the cold calm arms of night, naked and unbowed and unafraid.

But she was right, and I didn’t.

I told you I was getting better, didn’t I.

Instead, I finished my curry in silence, and in the small hours of the night

made love to that strange undemanding creature for the last time. The next day I

packed my bag and left and in a moment of sheer exhaustion walking around Mungo

Park, which never fails to evoke in me thoughts of Old Bull Lee in Tangiers, found

this place and paid for it there and then and moved in.

And found employment the next day as a private investigator.

It wasn’t a bad job, really. I worked for a guy called Little Mo Cohen, a big

barrel of a man, a Jew of the old East End, a former gangster with a love of black

and white movies, a mountain of muscle with the heart of a child.

I did divorces, mainly.

“Para-dise!” Little Mo would shout from his office, a small cramped space in

the basement of a building on Harley Street that did not officially exist and which the

doctors and nurses who worked there treated with a kind of silent horror, that such

an un dignified thing as a private dick could so clatter such a fastidious establishment

in such a dignified setting. But Little Mo didn’t give a damn.

“Para-dise!” he’d call me, and when I walked in he’d thrust a hand full of

papers in my face and tell me to get on with it, and oh-by-the way did I watch the

Casablanca re-run last night and wasn’t Ingrid Bergman wonderful? Listening to Mo,

you’d easily have thought Casablanca was showing on the box every night of the

week.

I don’t know. Maybe, for him, it did.

The papers would almost always turn out to be names, and places, and

photographs: men and women who were married to other men and women who

suspected they were cheating on them, who were coming home later and later every

night, who stayed at the office overnight, who had appointments with their

hair-dresser at strange hours, who came back with a foreign scent on their clothes

and foreign shades of lipstick on their collars.

The usual.

I’d be told where they lived and when they left, and I would follow them

around, a cheap automatic camera in one coat pocket, boxes of cigarettes in the

other.

It was a living.

I got used to standing in the cold, smoking cigarette after cigarette, a mound

of butts gathering by my side like a tombstone for Old Bull Lee’s wife, who he one

day killed when they were both trippin’ the light fantastic, shooting the apple on her

head like he was William Tell and of course missing the apple but not her. He was a

big one for guns, was Old Bull Lee. Everything that made a loud bang and could

cause lots of big, noisy damage delighted him.

So I’d stand there, watching the Jills and the Johns come and go and do their

stuff, and I’d photograph them in the compromising position and get the hell out of

there, and hand the camera over to Mo and get my money. “Make sure you get them

in the compromising position , Para-dise,” Little Mo would say. I kept hoping he

would take up smoking, I pictured him every day with a small cheap cigar in his

mouth, chewed and chewed and never lit, but Mo was against smoking. Wouldn’t

even touch sweets. “Rot your teeth, they do,” he’d say to me confidentially, paging

through the latest Kojak paperback and scratching his own bald head with his big

meaty fingers that were like five iron bars welded together. “Trust me.”

I did. I worked the old beat up hopeless divorce route at night, slept in my

little cell during the day, and smoked. It was a job.

It’s how I met Lola.

I was hanging out at the Purple Rose, a dingy strip joint in the back of

Shaftesbury Avenue, a black hole for hustlers and whores and the wrong kind of

tourist, where businessmen with no business chilled to the tune of canned music and

wet their pants over the angels of the night who rubbed thighs against crotches for a

minor fee.

Her name was Lola and she was a dancer, sliding up and down gleaming metal

poles in sweat-drenched, smoke-filled underground rooms in which the stale scent of

beer and premature ejaculations intermingled with the furtive smell of Algerian hash.

Pushers would stand in the broken toilets and offer you juice in a veiled language that

had more signs in it than the Highway Code. They always latched on to me, smelling

in their rat-like way my desperation and desire, the convulsions of my soul for the

sweet ol’ death they were offering so cheaply.

I’ll get back to that.

So I was sitting at my apartment counting bricks and waiting for the sunset. It

was business as usual. Or rather, no business, as usual.

One day Little Mo disappeared. His office was left like an insipid cocoon

devoid of its occupant. I doubted Little Mo has become a butterfly, however. I

made a quick search for money, found none, and got the hell out. A large corpse

was found some weeks later drowned in the Thames, discovered strangled in the

reeds by an old couple out for a walk. It could have been his.

I didn’t care. By the time Big Ben chimed twelve for the fourth time, I was in

business for myself.

Sal Paradise, Private Investigator. It sounded good. Real good. The kind of

good you only get after spending a mad night in the Mexican wilderness smoking tea

and whoring and drinking booze in the baking hot sun, and running amok in a

whorehouse with the beautiful young girls with the dark enchanting skin and the eyes

that hide the depths of the desert in them while the cops outside smile and nod and

dig everything. I had a fifth in the drawer, my name on the door, and there was still

hope for a flashing neon light outside the window.

I was waiting for the clock to chime, and turning in my mind the thing Lola

said to me the night before.

“Friend of yours came by earlier,” she shouted to me over the din of the

crowd. We were at the bar of the Purple Rose. It was about three o’clock, and just

as busy as if it were midday in Oxford Street. “Didn’t know you had any!”

Neither did I. I’d left my old friends behind me when I left the States, and now

they were either respectable or dead, and a long way away in any case.

“Did he give a name?” I had to repeat myself twice before the words travelled

through the noise, like bees between lonely flowers, and settled at Lola’s ear.

“No.” she leaned forward and spoke directly into my ear, her breath warm and

sexy on my skin. “Funny bloke, he was. Yank, like you, and fancied himself a bit of

a lady’s man I reckon. Gave me a right once over, I could feel his eyes slithering all

over my body.” But she smiled when she said it, and my heart suddenly beat with an

urgency I thought I had lost forever.

“Did you see his thumb?” I asked, trying to contain my mounting excitement.

“Thumb? No, I didn’t. Anyway, he said he’ll be back tomorrow night.” She

moved away from me with a languid grace, her dark hair streaming behind her like an

oil slick.

“Did he say when?” I finally thought to ask, mouthing the words silently

across the room as Lola worked her expert body in the lap of an aging derelict

whose eyes, rheumy and sad and full of a dying wisdom, looked up at her in hushed

admiration and his fingers played a nervous staccato on the table-top surface, in time

to a tune only he could hear.

“Funny thing, Sal,” she said to me later. “He showed up midnight on the dot.

Said you should expect him tomorrow night at the witching hour .” She grimaced. “

Sal knows time , he kept saying. Sal knows time .” She blew me a kiss and began

walking away again, unconcerned. “Fucking weirdo,” were her parting words to me

that night.

So I sat, and I waited, my mind thinking nervously and doing loops of

excitement that fell into valleys of wonder and chasms of despair, like a roller coaster

ride on Coney Island.

Could it really be him?

I gathered my coat, bouncing on the balls of my feet with a kind of uneasy

excitement, and headed for the door.

Outside was cold, a wet, clammy iciness that clang to clothes and burrowed

under flesh, a feeling of frosty fingers tickling numb skin, of an arctic mouth blowing

fog-encrusted kisses on my disused mouth.

Lavie Tidhar - Midnight Folk.pdf

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