The Old Turk's Load Read Online Free PDF

to be taken carefully with beers, or rolls of downers imported, it was said, from Mexico, to be taken even more carefully—to lay him back into a deep velvety cushion of the evening, making everything a movie as flawless as his collection of recollections. More often it was dex and bennies—pills crushed and popped like Lik-m-aid. Coke was a high-end rarity in the bars he frequented, though once he got into some with a gracious fisherman friend at Kellehers. Couldn’t snort it, of course, but did his gums sore with it.Then danced all night to Captain Jack Melquiez’s squeeze box, winding up with a chubby, good-humored girl named Audrey who didn’t mind doing all the talking and gave him a good fucking in her place over the Portuguese restaurant across from Pavilion Beach. She was a nurse at Addison Gilbert and he didn’t scare her at all.
    When the sun came up he left her asleep and walked off the last of the coke around the neighborhood called the Fort, then down to Fisherman’s Wharf where he sat under the docks, bathed in the luminous yellow-green of morning sun low off the water of the inner harbor, remembering the fresh vernal odor of the incoming tide, and imagining the cunt smell she’d left on the fingers of his right hand even though he couldn’t really smell it, going back for just one more whiff again and again, as if it were the most exotic perfume or the ultimate no-fault cocaine. He thought he’d see her again after that, but she disappeared. Somebody told him she took a job in San Diego.
    At first his rambles were an idyll, but gradually the weekends stretched from Thursdays to Sundays.The drugs did something else, too. He didn’t have words for it, but the image was of his walkingaround body being offset from the center of himself.The drugs made him feel good when he didn’t feel good, but then, sober, there were moments when he should’ve felt good and felt nothing. He was functional, showing up at the Historical Society four days a week, yet many other symptoms lurked.
    The waterfront junkies could’ve recited them rote—the not shitting for a week, or the yawning gulf of terrible sickness he fell into the time Dr. Paulson took a vacation. With all his might the Mailman resisted, ignored, denied. The junkies—like tentacles of the old Turk’s load—understood it was just a matter of time. Not that they gave a damn.
The Brain in the Jar
A
    fter the clams and Bloody Marys, Kelly began to feel chipper. He was needling Norbert, a die-hard Yankees fan, about the Amazin’Mets when the stool beside him scraped the sawdust floor and a pale face loomed through the underwater light.
    “Lloyd. Is this an office visit?”
“I had some business in the area.”
To Kelly, Lloyd Chamberlain was a man adrift. Blond, fey, and
    smooth, Lloyd was a trust funder from some wealthy New England family, supposedly working as an artist. But Lloyd had gotten into acid and contagious-looking splotches of paint, then speed and no paint at all. He was dealing now, not that he needed the money, and had replaced painting with talking, always talking, only occasionally about art. If there was a genetic predisposition to the low life, this poor bastard had it. Kelly pitied him, vaguely liked him, hoped he’d turn himself around, but saw nothing wrong with using him in the meantime. Lloyd was on the street a lot. Saw things. Knew people.
    As far as Lloyd was concerned, it was Kelly who was the odd man out. Unless you actually were a narcotics agent or a jazz musician, you should not dress in shiny black shoes, dark sport coats, and skinny ties. Still, the private detective was a decent companion— stolid, a good listener. And he could handle himself.
    Kelly finished his drink, and Lloyd proposed they mosey downtown. He and Helen were having people over that night and she wanted him out while she got the place together. The two of them could hang for a while, then Kelly could come over to his pad. That suited Kelly. Prior