Off the Road - 27

a jazz novel on a typewriter

7

The door closed behind us. It was a white room with scattering and spattering of posters on the walls with the one from the Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. It was signed in black. There was a tall mirror in the hall for reasons I did not know.

Dean spoke: “Prof, we have come to take back the hookahs to their rightful owner because they increase the rate of the rock in its quiescence.” There was an easiness to how being spoke the word prof, as if he had done so many times in the past and would do so many times in the future.

The professor nodded but did not move except to quake and rattle. “You know I need them to extract the poison from the stash I have it is the only way to extricate myself from the living world and project myself into the world numbers and signs.” Then he shivered as if he were cold though it was almost 30° centi-grade even inside the house which he lived in. I wondered if he actually owned the house or was just staying here to work on the paperwork and questionnaires that needed to be done.

 And I could tell that he too had his colored girls singing, but not for someone but something to arrive somewhere somehow. The realization cracked the edges of my lips into a smile. Miles would smile even though Miles was the most innovative, influential, and acclaimed on his albums, songs, and newsreels with a timeline and photos. Try not to feel disappointed in Mile’s presence, because it happens to the worst of us in real cool shades and cheap Sunglasses along the birth of the cool which one has to dig to find.

Finally, the prof sat down on a mahogany chair. His eyes opened wide to Dean.

And so, Dean took the Q on the screen: “You know who we come from and what she wants.”

The prof nods. The prof nods. The prof nods.

“And I suspect you understand that anything we have to do we will do to do the do.”

The prof nodded, and then said: “I assume you mean that violence is on the table.”

“On the table, on the chair, and into the rug, and all the way down to the floor if need be.” Dean was as black as I had ever seen him be and with twice the threatening for a clean look to white sheets.

The prof nods. Then he settled himself down into his chair like a holy roller in drag.

I caught myself in the mirror and felt as if Armageddon was casting me as one of the extras. I looked into the mirror and saw the person I was becoming. A vision of me on Market St. in San Francisco handing out templates declaring the “20 Common Mistakes about the End of the World.”

 Dean then went over to the desk and looked at the pile of papers then looked up quizzically and said: “I’m afraid that what you get from the hookahs is coming to an end the only question is how it is going to complete.”

The profit searched for one of the hookahs and then pulled from his shirt pocket a rock that was the largest eye had ever seen. It glistened in the night like a white star.

“Do you have a light I can use? I really don’t want to feel the pain.” And again he winced.

“We don’t need to do anything extreme.”

“Whether it is you or someone else there is extreme interest in what I am doing. And some of the sources of funding are definitely not quite legal.”

I watched both the prof and Dean and wondered how I got myself into the world of sex and violence and rock ‘n roll. And then it hit me that I was the driver in a collateral montage. It was like the theory of déjà vu: these things happened before in our mind and we called them from the depths of our nightmares. I am definitely experienced. Cue the drum rolls and pace with the Pharmakeus making the logos quite obscure to the QT.

 His hands were quaking. He knew that this was the end at least of his little world and the things in it which made it special to him. Otherwise, Dean would do something wet and porous, and he did not want to know what. I finally saw that he was small and out of proportion from left to right and his eyes did not line up exactly so. He was physically disfigured while he was mentally figured.

 The pipe went into his mouth with a rock in place.

And so, we watch as the prof heated up the pipe and eased back to inhale the last bit of consciousness he would experience as if it were the Vietnam War and he knew his bleeding was not going to stop.

 But remember he wasn’t going to be depressed but accelerated as if by an opioid with cocaine. I was worried that he would launch himself at one of us hoping that the rock would do its work, and he might just be able to dispatch and call the guard and say that his house had then broken into.

 But no, we just watched as his blood overloaded his face and a smile left him like a joker’s grin. Then a stream of blood flowed from his nose and he was overdosed and underwhelmed.

And that is the way the guard found him: looking at the ceiling with his eyes glazed open and looking into the white noise from after the Indian head test pattern faded into cross-haired blackened oblivion. And then the mirror cracked from side to side from ennui.

The paper published for Malibu merely stated that a drug overdose had killed the prof who was staying with a friend. It mentioned that the friend was taking his boat down to Mexico and would be back when the sky would ring like bronze.