Notes for a detective novel ...

[normzone]

...

Slipping around the cloverleaf ramp just a little faster than the crawling cars, I could tell who had working air conditioning and who had to make do with rolling down the window. One mom in a car full of kids and groceries, with a beer in her left hand was smacking a kid with her other hand and shouting “ You have to share one until we get home – you know the rule! Keep it down! “

Then I was through the metering light and merged into the freeway, and everybody was moving faster than I was. Then again, I wanted to live, and they had important texts to send.

From the 78 to the 15 I did five lane changes in a hundred yards, and then some of us were moving two more lanes over into the HOV lanes – them because they were two-or-more to a car, or had a pay-to-play transponder, and others like me because we were on two wheels.

The guy I was trying to follow began going up the white line and quickly accelerated to 85.

 white fairing - if he was paying any attention to his mirrors, I looked like a motor officer with no lights on half-heartedly trying to keep up with him.

“You have an excellent and unobtainable Swanee fairing” Ralph Glorioso said. He had insisted I bring the bike to him for inspection immediately after riding back from buying it in Arizona. He was closing out his eighties, and had been a serious player in flat track back in his day and had completed a couple of twenty-four hour Le Mans, but that was a long time ago. Now he was retired and sneaking up on the big dirt nap, but he was still riding Guzzis. I’m no tyro, but I would never catch Ralph in a curve on my best day.

[pebra]

 
Thanks! Keep'em coming!

[Chuck in Indiana]

Attaboy, Norman..     

[drdwb]

Norman… keep them coming. Reminds me of Nick Danger stories from The Fireside Theater group. She looked so Helpless there laying spread Eagle on the floor.. so I picked the Eagle off.. or Put down that pickle…

[normzone]

TWO

Beverages: Mirin and store bought liquor

Music: Elvis Costello “ Watching the Detectives “

Reading: Craigslist

Food pairing: Barbecued chicken

Sound effects: Guzzi starter motor engaging

“ You can’t be depressed this time “ my wife said. “ I won’t be able to handle it if you’re all depressed again like you were last time “.

“ Don’t worry “ I said. “ I won’t be drinking – it will be much easier to find another job this time “.  I'd been assured there was a thriving minimum wage job market.

There was nothing in the house worth drinking. I knew this because I’d just taken a slug from the cooking sake bottle to remind myself that they put salt in it for a reason. Sure, I could go out and get something, but then I’d be committed to drinking it. And I’d have to go out. I just wanted it to materialize, and without undesireable effects like calories and sleep loss.

One day there was a sticky note on the front door of our apartment. Not your usual fifty-to-the-pad type – this one looked like the Post Office had left it. Closer examination proved that somebody identifying themselves as an employee of the federal government wanted me to call her regarding one of my neighbors who lived there last year. He was applying for a government job and he said I’d vouch for him.

It took a while before I could remember him. Quiet but not unapproachable. He had a pretty but unremarkable wife, and he barbecued on his patio once every few weeks with a light beer in his hand. He said he was applying for a security clearance, and asked me if I was going to be living there for a while, would I give him a reference?

The sticky note identified her as a Private Investigator (Federal Government subcontractor) and on the phone she said that she could meet me at work or home. I’d just taken on another suicide mission, and since I was working thousand-hour weeks the office seemed like a good idea.

When she showed up I told her all the chairs were equally uncomfortable, and to choose one. Among other questions she asked me if my neighbor indulged in drugs, met with strange people or seemed unreliable. I told her I was sorry I didn’t know him well, and regretted not being able to give her detailed info, but she said that close contacts that would vouch for somebody were a dime a dozen, and it was difficult to find unbiased observers who would speak on behalf of somebody they barely knew.

I mentioned I’d entertained fantasies of becoming a private detective, but the regulations required some time as a cop, or a degree in law. She told me I was mistaken, and there were other avenues to getting a license. She said if I thought I would find it interesting I should try to get into it.

And here I was, going too fast between two lines of traffic, following somebody with fewer brains and a narrower bike.

The state of California felt that a private investigators license required six thousand hours of paid experience as the minion of a licensed detective. One of the surest ways to pass that time was doing divorce work, which consisted of surveilling one spouse or the other and taking lots of pictures. All my literary models scorned that avenue, and I could see why.

The other avenue to accruing up enough hours to get your license was doing surveillance for a professional outfit. The Craigslist ad promised to teach you how to work as part of a team, following your suspect on foot, in a vehicle, or by public transit. In an Uber world, the phrase “ Follow that cab “ had gone out of fashion - some of the followees could only afford to take the bus. That sounded like useful experience, but the ad specified “ must have a smart phone and be a morning person “. That left me out.

This day started with me waking from a dream that I was spy George Washington on a mission in Europe, stunned and captured by incomplete robot George Washington. When the stunner wore off, I found that he’d taken my beard and switched it for his false one, and also added an artificial leg to compensate for his incomplete build. I slipped my bonds and we fought, trading blows with a balance that came from both of us knowing the same moves and having the same reach. I was trying a surprise move when the pain from sleeping on my shoulder for too long woke me, and my first conscious thought was “Damn, now I’ll never know how that fight ended”.

Once I dreamed I had been appointed a minor noble, and I still remember the condescending tone as the person in charge explained this was a very minor position, and I was not to let it go to my head. Another time I dreamt I was joining a group going bear hunting on horseback, and the fact that I was riding a borrowed horse I did not know didn't worry me, but I was concerned that the 30-30 lever action I was taking might not be enough gun.

One night I dreamed I was inspecting a subterranean bridge complex built by a primitive Mediterranean tribe, and I found extensive non-compliances to building code, requiring that as corrective action that I lead a mob to kill the prime contractor. And the night before last I dreamed I had a consulting job for a Mexican drug cartel. A zombie outbreak had led the U.S. Border Patrol to tighten security at the border, and the cartel's shipment delivery success rate was falling. I was contracted to help them improve their processes.

One night in my dreams I went from shop to shop in the outdoor mall, discreetly inquiring after anyone who might be interested in buying stolen German bank bonds – the client had been kidnapped in this area engaging in a similar enterprise and I was hoping to locate them in this manner. I stopped at an offer of free sandwich ingredients, and was just picking up a couple of small samples of meat when someone attacked me from behind. My shouting and struggles to turn around woke me, and I needed to pee. Now I’d never know what that sandwich would taste like.

Last night I read detective fiction until bed time, and dreamed that I sold a faux archeological artifact to a tourist. It was a flask, and I presented it as filled with locally made moonshine, but it was store bought liquor.

[pebra]

And here I was, going too fast between two lines of traffic, following somebody with fewer brains and a narrower bike.

Now, if that's not art - - - - - -   

[Scout63]

Great morning read.

[Chuck in Indiana]

 

[radguzzi]

Wonderful reading Norm. I miss our talks... over an IPA. 
rad__

[JL Rich]

Entertaining stuff.  Thanks for sharing it.  It got me to thinking, Hey we need a Zen and the Art book with a Guzzi focus, then I realized, Oh yeah we got Nick and I like his stuff.  You are talented, please keep it up.

[normzone]

THREE

Beverage: Gatorade

Music: Sparks “ Cool Places “

Every so often somebody puts a small Gatorade bottle full of piss under my car tire. When I back out, it pops the bottle and it sprays stale piss over my car and the car next to it.

Piss goes stale. Is that it?

Well, that and a few jobs back one of my associates got his car windows shot out in the parking lot at Ketema. Sometimes you make enemies in my line of work – that comes with the territory. Not everybody understands that I’m on their side. But the bottle of piss I don’t understand.

Sure I had been late a lot. I don’t do mornings well – never have, starting in elementary school, and when you add blood pressure medications and sixty-several years of face-first living, being in the office before eight is a gamblers game.

I enjoy doing internal audits. The outfit I was signed on with was as professional as an old west saloon, and the salaried employees came and went as they pleased. Lucky me - the new president had not reacted well when I asked him questions he didn’t like, and the bar had been raised for a certain employee.

“Quality lives in a fantasy world, and Sales and Production live in the real world. Quality is a tool that Sales uses to reassure customers. You are only to address the management system issues briefly, right before the external audit. If there are any significant escapes, the quality manager is the fall guy. Fix all of our problems but don’t change anything, and don’t spend any money” the president told me.

“ I need you to make an effort to remember that I’m on the same side as you are “ I said – “ If I’m the first QA guy who told you something you didn’t like hearing, then you haven’t been getting your money’s worth “

I fell into Quality Assurance by asking too many questions. At first I’d planned to be a fireman, or an astronaut – but that was before I learned to ride the bus and how to tie my own shoes. In kindergarden I needed additional learning to tie bows, but that was okay, I was in no hurry. The teacher’s assistant was a hot older woman with waist length brown hair, probably all of seventeen, and she was very patient. Eventually I understood the knots.

I’d done the usual jobs a kid does. Although I’d put in four years at three high schools, it was a string of A’s, C’s, and F’s. I owe a big apology to the tired woman in high school who exposed me to algebra and geometry. I wondered why this nonsense was being forced on me, but later I used it to make good money doing dimensional inspection.

A few years later I figured out that learning could be fun and made my way around every junior college in San Diego.

But just like high school, some things I got and came back for more. Other things less so. Black and white photography was a blast, and a writing class taught me that I didn’t know anything but trying was fun. I’d never be a novelist but creating easy to read technical writing paid reasonably.

My first wife’s attempt to turn me into a pharmacist during a period of unemployment failed, but a little chemistry didn’t hurt. If I’d studied more I might have learned drug manufacturing, but I started a few weeks late and left the class in the middle of a test when it was apparent I was in over my head. I got ionic and covalent, but I missed something after that.

My electronics class gave me some basics, but a chance to get paid laying ceramic tile took me out of that. I took a couple of computer programming courses, but once I learned that it worked the way I thought it should I lost interest.

I always wanted to work for someone who knew what they were doing, who would let me help them build a great organization, and reward me accordingly. I never met those people. After a while I figured out that leadership skills were not mandatory for the guys at the top. What they had was the ability to bullshit. Dunning-Kroeger was running the show.

[normzone]

Well, if you insist ... 

[normzone]

 
The cardboard under my butt helped with the cold, and the pipe tobacco somebody was smoking by the street was cherries and whiskey. The first raindrops made little hisses on the parking lot out past the book drop boxes. As bad days went, it wasn’t too bad.

I kept rubbing the nails on my left hand on the concrete – that’s how I filed them down when they got too long. When I got careless with that one fingertip the scab would twinge as it bled again. Maybe I could get a nail file this week.

I could still taste last night’s dinner. There was something stuck under the bridge at the back that if I tried hard to get it out I could taste that weird flavor cilantro has, and when I pushed hard enough with my tongue at the sharp edges between my molars the occasional chile seed would set my gums on fire for a while. I was hoping to eat again tonight, but this was gonna be easier to do sober.
 
It hurt me to look in her eyes. She was going to start crying again.

“I know we’ve been through a lot together – you’ve always stood by me, it didn’t matter how things were going. Hell, you even stayed with me during the times I was camping with Jody, and we both know how hard that was. I suck at telling you how much you mean to me – but you know that. It’s like we grew up together.” She swallowed hard.

She squeezed her eyes shut, and the first tears ran.  I reached out and put both hands in her hair, and bent down to sniff it. Her shampoo and sad sweat blended in my mind, now and for as long as I could keep the memory.

A Mexican lady mama-ducked through the library doors with a bunch of kids, the older ones holding the younger ones by the hand, and the younger ones all magnetized by the “FREE BOOKS” cart a few steps past my corner. There was nothing worth taking in there.
 
Somehow they all squeezed into in the gray SUV parked in the closest space that wasn’t  handicapped. When the door closed it didn’t slam like the finger killing machines we all grew up in – It just hissed like a screen door closing. I wonder how they solved that.

 “We been through this before – you don’t want to go, and I don’t want you to. There’s nobody else, and you know that. I’m just trying to do right by you, ‘cause … because you deserve better.”

The gray-haired guy coming out of the library was juggling an armload of books and losing them – he stopped and thumped half of them onto the free book cart. He started rearranging his armload like a kid shuffling his first deck of cards. He looked over at me, and I gave him the ‘I’m busy here’ look.

He thumped some more books down, picked up different ones, stacking them by size or color and said ‘How you doing today’ like he couldn’t help it. I told him “I’m doing okay – it’s kind of a tough evening” and habit spoke “You got a dollar you can spare?“

The guy set all the books down carefully on the “FREE BOOK” cart and patted all his pockets, first pants and then jacket, like some kind of pattycake but missing a partner.

The exit door hissed and the security guard stepped out, gave me the once over twice and followed the cherry whiskey to light his own cigarette. The guy with the books pulled out a bill he’d already put back in his pocket, folded it in half then half again, and handed it to me. “That’s a ten” he said, like I might spend it without looking at it first.

 “Thank you, I appreciate that”, and pocketed it. “I’m breaking up with my girlfriend tonight. She lives in my head, and we get along just fine - she’s been with me for fifteen years now, but she deserves better than a no-good low down dog like me”.

The gray haired guy was trying out different facial expressions as he stacked his books one more time. “Don’t be too rough on yourself – This life can be hard, and it’s not easy to make things turn out the way you want them to.”

 Balancing his books he turned and walked out into the rain, which was coming down for real now, drops plopping on his book covers.

(from a conversation with a guy I met outside the library)

[Chuck in Indiana]

Awesome.  I'll keep coming back..

[krglorioso]

Norm has made me more famous than my provenance deserves.
Thanks, buddy
Ralph Glorioso

[pebra]

Norm has made me more famous than my provenance deserves.
Thanks, buddy
Ralph Glorioso

Says the guy who was a serious player in flat track and has completed a couple of twenty-four hour Le Mans!
No need to be modest here!

[normzone]

Thanks for checking in Ralph. PM me if you have any more tales I can pirate.

And thanks for checking out the Bassa, she's still motoring along.

How is your Stone doing?

[krglorioso]

Says the guy who was a serious player in flat track and has completed a couple of twenty-four hour Le Mans!
No need to be modest here!

The part about competing in AMA pro flat track is true.  1962-68 minus 7 months total hospital time during 1965 and 1968.  Flat track is a cruel sport, not for the faint of heart.

The only time I did anything for 24 hours was driving across numerous time zones to distant races, hoping I made enough money for gas back to Maryland.  This was "back in the day", when pro flat track racing was a very small slice of motorcycling and before Camel and other sponsors started pumping cubic yards of money into the sport.  We slept in our old  trucks, ate poorly and irregularly.  Now American Flat Track has become NASCAR-Lite and all competitors (18) in the top class have big rigs pulling 53' trailers with telemetry and technicians.  I miss the old way, but then I'm a dinosaur.

 

[normzone]

Ralph, I've been increasingly slipping across alternate time lines over the last twenty years - the you I met circa 2014 had more adventures than you, but he was just as gracious a host as you are.

As they say in the afterward of all the best novels, thanks to my friends for all the technical help and any errors are my own.



FOUR

Beverage: Negra Modelo

Music: Cumbia, banda, narco corrida

Reading: Samuel R. Delany – “Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand”

Food pairing: Pollo, arroz y frijoles, cebollitas asadas

Sound effects: Crowd buzz

I paid my dollar and turned right inside the swap meet gate searching for a good meal. The older sister outside the booth at the end of the culdesac answered my que hay with a list of options and her younger brother scribbled my order on a piece of scratch paper. I tried to give them money but they said I could do that when I was finished with my meal. Their mom inside the kitchen trailer handed me a beer through the little window and I found a table facing a small slice of sunset between trailers. I stretched out as much as I safely could in the wiggly plastic chair and nodded my head with the music that was slowly building up somewhere deeper in the rows and columns of vendors. When she brought the food the chicken was excellent, made a little

burned the way I like it, and even the beans tasted like somebody who knew how cared about making them just right.

After cleaning my plate and drinking a second beer, I paid and tipped like I was wealthy, and started searching for the source of the music.

It got byzantine quickly - the labyrinth of aisles and a few subtle intersections masked transition zones between aisles of old tools, special bricks meant to sharpen knives on and sponges derived from industrial leftovers. One stall a contained a shrine to beauty products, bottle after bottle arrayed in artistic configurations that would have made the Egyptian pyramid builders smile in approval. These products were theoretically for sale, but no one was in attendance at the booths, as if the risk of disturbing the presentation could be avoided until just the right moment, and that time was not here yet.

Darkness filtered in faster than seemed normal, and the season’s toys glowed like pink blacklights , feathers, spinning toys with leds and strobing colors repeated at booth after booth after booth, children running ahead a few steps of their parents and then retreating so as not to get their leashes shortened.

The paths converged in a dance area, with nobody in it except the old guy doggedly dancing by himself in a large open area in front of the stage trying to get something started, while abuela sat in cheap plastic chairs watching. The old guy reminded me of the scene in the erodrome in Chip’s book, the very short man dancing under a wire headmask, the net of linked wires with hundreds of colored pieces on them, some of them curving down as far as his ankles, a couple of steps forward, a couple of steps back.

Retracing my steps, I must have missed a transition zone, because when I thought I was on his way out I found myself in a cellphone sales deadend, surrounded by bored men who knew he either already had a phone or that it would be a waste of time to try to convince the gringo to buy one. Back and forth I went between the dance stage with the dogged old man, strutting like by doing so he was recharging the batteries that ran the music, back to the cell phone zone, the vendors now beginning to eye him as though maybe he really didn’t have a

phone, still no way back out he could find, until he slipped behind the stacks and hanging displays of denim jeans, the logos and cut clearly speaking to a different ethnos than mine, and found myself back in the toy aisle, now glowing like some memory of LSD at a concert decades ago, Blue Oyster Cult or Emerson Lake and Palmer, and the children’s leashes getting longer as the adults fell into conversations with merchants and neighbors unexpectedly met, hails and greetings shared, the women standing close and exchanging confidences, the men further apart and boasting or complaining about life and the ever rising cost of trucks. He made his way slowly through the amused children, who recognized him as new to this game and possibly clueless to their language. He dropped the occasional hola and perdoname to keep their dashing and darting across his path in check.

The toy aisle led him back to the still lonesome tool booths, and cooking smells led him down a trail all the way to the entry gate, where he wandered out into the parking lot and began hunting for his car.

[normzone]

"We slept in our old  trucks, ate poorly and irregularly."

Reminds me of my first wife's grandfather's tale of gold mining ...

"a dollar a day and all the beans you could eat"

[Chuck in Indiana]

Cue Rod Sterling.. "just another day in the Normzone.." 

[bacongrease]

  Sex...and stories.

My cuzzin started writing bodice rippers, (none had Fabio on the cover.).  A religious lady, They did not sell well, until she included sex in the story.  Success.  Women like to read about f***ing, but subile, not in the crude cuzzin and graphic way of men.
 Some stories start with the sex scene, to grab attention, then very little  more in the book..  oops, gotta make another pot of Joe.