The little shit almost smiled when he brought me the envelope from Corporate.
“No deviations, Howard. It is to be read exactly as written.”
I’d been with KGIM since the Nixon administration, working my way up from cameraman to morning sports and weather to the Big Slot, the daily six-and-eleven newscast.
I’d won countless awards for most trusted newsman in the region.
Sure, modern news was flashy, horrifying and fluffy in turn.
People are spending so much of their lives doing things they’d rather not be doing. I’m not sure if all of history has been like this, but now at least it seems that a big chunk of the populace is being forced to do things for which they have no passion.
In fact, the very word “passion” has begun to take on a slightly pejorative quality: fit of passion, overcome by passion, passionate love affair, and so on. It’s as though passion itself has been designated an uncontrollable force, a dangerous and all-consuming state of mind that endangers stability. the subtle message is one of danger and we are educated to avoid dangerous things as much as possible.
This has a blanching effect which is insidiously demoralizing. after all, white slaveowners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were quick to outlaw drums and dancing among their chattel because the slaves were passionate about these things and the influx of such energy among the subservient was a very dangerous thing.
Slowly, it seems, the spirit goes out of people as day after day their lives spool away behind them leaving a trail of tepid action exchanged for money. hobbies are looked at as something extra, and even those who show passion in their extracurricular activities are looked at as kooks. Slowly, it seems, the spirit drains away like lukewarm water swirling lazily down a bathtub drain.
Yet the passion remains, albeit untapped. in the post-victory celebration of an important game, a riot is liable to break out, especially in the pent-up inner cities and torrid television drama is as popular as ever. Day upon day the untapped passion like water into a balloon.
Disclaimer: this story is based on real events, but is no way are a journalistic recording of what actually transpired. Harvey High was a real person and we had this conversation. That’s all I will admit to.
I heard Harvey High died a few months after this story took place, but I might be wrong.
I sure hope I am..
February 1998
“Harvey High is dead. From now on it’s Harvey Golightly.”
He was serious.
I asked if he was still involved in the Scene.
“Look at me!” he said. “Look at my eyes. Do I look like I’m still involved?”
He said he was clean, had been for three months.
I mentally subtracted half of that, but for Harvey it was still pretty good. And I had to admit that he did seem healthy. The skin around his eyes looked less drawn, and though he still was stick-skinny he didn’t have that death’s door vibe so common to him in the old days.
“Look at me!” he kept saying.
Last time I had seen him was around Christmas. He was shaky sick from some bad shit he got from somebody he didn’t know. God only knows what can end up in your spoon when it passes through so many hands. Baking soda, laxative, even drain cleaner. Harvey was never a careful consumer, especially if he was edgy.
My guess was that it was some kind of cleaning product. He said he had scored from a tweaker, and tweakers have lots of cleaners around so they can scrub the bathroom floor with a nail brush at four in the morning.
Harvey’s skin was yellow then, covered with so many sores it was as though he’d been ravaged by a swampful of mosquitoes and left to scratch all night. He was scratching, too, eyes glazed with that far-off junky look. Mostly he just looked sick.
“You look like shit, Harvey High,” I said as I walked into the living room.
Jae and Fresno were playing fast rummy, slapping the greasy cards onto a board which lay on the carpet between them. Every so often Jae would yell out a curse as she took a trick, a grin of gloating triumph across her sallow face, Fres hissing hatred through his mouthful of scummy teeth.
They had been together longer than anybody. It was a longstanding mystery why. They loathed one another.
“Jae is a rat cunt whore,” Fres would say when she left the room. “Fucking filthy twat bitch cunt.”
Harvey said he was now living on his own.
“I’m making some money playing happy hour at Ted’s joint,” he told me.
He held out his hands, fingers splayed. The nails were clipped and clean, his eyes clear and blue as he talked.
“I was walking out of Hung Far Low on Tuesday and I heard a woman running up, so I turned. She came up and said ‘You don’t know me, but I saw you a bunch of times and I gotta say you look really good, Harvey!’ I mean, she was a stranger. I tell you, that’s some validating shit.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say.
“Harvey High is dead. Harvey Golightly. That’s me.”
Jeff always liked to quote Mike Tyson: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
And we didn’t even have a plan. How could we, for something like that?
It was so unreal that I couldn’t admit it was really happening until I saw Dolly lying there, blood soaking the bright yellow dress. She wasn’t moving. The wall above her, where the kids had tacked their drawings of the Easter Bunny, was pocked with holes.
That’s all I remember. That and the ungovernable rage that has consumed me ever since.
She awakes again to the thrumming of rain on the patio tiles, her stomach clenching as she ties her robe.
She goes to the window and hears the beating of the surf more than a mile away, so it isn’t exactly a surprise when she arrives at the cafe to find that yet again the sea has washed over the jetty and everything on it.
Donol is already here, mop and bucket working against the standing water.
“It’s only just gone down enough for to start,” he says.
He doesn’t say what they both are thinking: it’s only getting worse.
The head custodian rode me hard from the minute I punched in right to the end of my shift, night after night.
The son of a bitch moved as quiet as a cat and had the nasty habit of popping out like a jack-in-the-box in places you’d least expect—a stall in the ladies’ room, a file cabinet in some executive’s office, a steel-clad shutter of the boiler room.
How he managed to be everywhere and still get through his own considerable workload was an ongoing mystery.
Even now I am not convinced that there was only one of him.
