Nameless dame, p.1
Nameless Dame, page 1
Table of Contents
OTHER NOVELS BY BART SCHNEIDER
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
The Detective Who Found Poetry
Doubling Down
Cul-de-Sac
The Church of Derelict Poetry
Intuition
CHAPTER TWO
Custard, Blossom, and Poesy
The Francophone
Mutual Admiration
To Town We Go
CHAPTER THREE
Coolican
The P.I. for Poets
Herb of Choice
Big Sloppy Tears
CHAPTER FOUR
The Heart
Salamander
CHAPTER FIVE
For Some
A Stinking Macramé
Drifters and Dirty Underwear
The Galley Illuminated
A New Wife
Sister Everlast
CHAPTER SIX
Spud and Derek in the Rain
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Wife and the Bloodhound
A Woman Ready
Roadkill and Porkpie
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eggs, Bacon, Grief
Wild Mushroom Soup
CHAPTER NINE
Priorities
Marriage
Fuck First, Talk Later
What Do You Need?
Kidnapped
Target
CHAPTER TEN
Silk
What a Bargain
Swooning Again
Two Russians and a Whore
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mermaid
Broken Glass
Marked Man
Charades
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Root Is One
Protected Entity
Not the Only Game in Town
Lyrical Homicide
Cuckolds Anonymous
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Manzanita
About the Filly
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Introducing Mr. Newborn
Old Ezra and the Lymphs
Phone Sex
Hunch
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Russian Glory
Sea Ranch Tsunami
Rain or Hail
On the Floor
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Little Character
Big Tipper
A Higher Form of Being
Love Underrated
Dark Deeds
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Detective Sabbatini Returns
Cazadero Castrato
Custard’s Pussies
Black Bart
What Rhymes with Crime
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Je Ne Sais Quoi
Provocateur
Malodorous
Murder, the Theme Song
He’s Alive
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Waiting
Lover Boy
Unlikely Suspect
Inventory
Three Calls
CHAPTER TWENTY
Repent
In the Redwoods
Guilty as Charged
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
What Happened to You?
Irresistible
Showering with the Enemy
Roadkill Bacon and Eggs
Of God and Love
Plenty of Milk
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Talking Murder
It Will Flame Out
The Second Coming
Confession
Thirteen Epiphanies
Food Fight
Fly on the Wall
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Children, Be Nice Now
Infiltrator
Consolidation
Things as They Are
Have a Purpose
Interfacing with Spud
Rain or Hail
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Two Funerals
The Moment in Question
Identity Theft
Drowning in a Glass of Water
Poetry Is Blind
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mardi Gras on Main Street
Poetry Priest
To Touch
Galley Orgy
Sinners
The Cavalcade
Next
Sweet and Harsh
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
What Gives?
Poetry and Prose
American Poet
Moses and Aaron
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
PERMISSIONS
Copyright Page
OTHER NOVELS BY BART SCHNEIDER
Blue Bossa, 1998
Secret Love, 2001
Beautiful Inez, 2005
The Man in the Blizzard, 2008
For George Rabasa, brother in fiction.
Long live the Fiction Factory.
In the first canto of the final canticle,
Too conscious of too many things at once,
Our man beheld the naked, nameless dame . . .
—WALLACE STEVENS
CHAPTER ONE
The Detective Who Found Poetry
I’D BEEN RESISTING this trip for some time.
It was one degree when I flew out of Minneapolis early in the morning, but fifty-nine a few hours later in San Francisco.
My buddy Bobby Sabbatini had been trying for some time to get me to visit him and the family out in Sonoma County, near the Russian River. It was Bobby and Blossom, and baby Milosz. They’d left behind an upscale condo along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and moved to an off-the-grid cottage outside the town of Cazadero.
I wondered which of them favored the seclusion more. Sabbatini, the former homicide detective who’d found poetry, or his wife, the wily Blossom, who’d once been my assistant and whose wayward twenties had included a formidable stint in prison.
Clearly, this was Sabbatini’s adventure. Blossom loved the man madly, and if following his bliss meant opening a poetry karaoke bar in the town of Guerneville, she wasn’t going to stand in his way.
Every Sunday morning, Sabbatini called from California and recited a new poem. They were never his, but I feared those might be lurking.
“Check out this gem, Augie,” he’d say, “from the Monte Rio poet Gail King.”
I will always have
boxes and chairs
boxes like I never
moved in
chairs like where
are all the people.
“That describes our life, the simple glory of it. We have giant redwoods, a gorgeous river, the sweet salt air from the ocean. If there ever was a place made for poetry, it’s the West County of Sonoma.”
I wasn’t having it. I’d come from Northern California and wasn’t anxious to return. Not even for a visit. I had no family left, and my youth and early twenties in the Bay Area had faded into a charmless daguerreotype, blurred at the edges. All my adult life I’d struggled to find a work ethic, and I was afraid that even a short visit to California would turn me back to a full-time slacker.
I’d also been pissed at Sabbatini and Blossom for leaving me alone in Minnesota, with my P.I. business floundering, my meager investments disappearing, and my head filled with verse from that damn poetry-rabid detective.
Sabbatini had surprised everybody, a couple of years earlier, bailing from a career gig with the St. Paul Police Department. I thought he’d gone mad. Newly married, with a baby on the way, he gave up a way of life along with the paycheck. He’d inherited the Cazadero cabin of an old aunt and claimed he had some money set aside. “I’m fifty-five years old, Augie, and I’ve got a dream.” That’s how he described his bonkers notion of the poetry bar.
The night he came over to break the news, he tried sounding reasonable.
“Of course, we won’t be doing poetry all the time. I’ll have to cultivate the neighborhood. But the beauty of it, Augie, is that the folks out there aren’t interested in being socially networked. They’d rather sit down, smoke a doob with you, drink a good local. I’m going to get them breathing poetry. Memorizing it. Living it.”
Sabbatini had become a poetry charismatic once he discovered it after 9/11, but now he’d truly gone crazy.
A year and a half after arriving in Sonoma County, Sabbatini was actually opening the poetry tavern and wanted me there for the gala. Broke, depressed, and clearly in need of some sort of vacation, I gave in, bought a cheap airline ticket to San Francisco, and signed up to bunk with Sabbatini and family for a couple of weeks.
Doubling Down
Although I was starved by the time I picked up the rental car, I pushed on a little past the town of Petaluma, where I found an In-N-Out Burger. At an outdoor table, I roared through a Double-Double so quickly that I had to order another, along with a pouch of fries. I told myself that this was a strategic move—I was heading out to the wilds of West County. Who knew when I’d find my next meal?
On the drive up from Petaluma, I composed a haiku about my meal.
Famished in late winter,
a pair of Double-Doubles
crunched at an outside table.
The haiku had become a recent habit. After years of listening to Sabbatini spout poetry, I’d gotten with the program and had begun memorizing poems. Casting around for some new stuff to memorize after Sabbatini left town, I discovered the haiku, an ideal form for the lazy man. I read a couple of collections of them and prett
Cul-de-Sac
I made it without trouble up the gracious, redwood-lined road from Highway 116 to Cazadero, but that’s when things got crazy. Sabbatini had sent me a hand-drawn cardboard map highlighting the unmarked dirt roads beyond Cazadero that led to his cabin. Big red arrows showed all the turns—right, left, left, right—and I thought I was pretty much on it. But once I turned off onto the first dirt road, indicated by a dotted line on the map, I lost myself in a spiraling maze that led nowhere. I didn’t see the red traffic cones Sabbatini said he’d set out to mark their road. I didn’t see the base of the steep hill, marked by two good-size madrones. And I sure as hell didn’t see a cabin painted the color of Dijon mustard.
I cursed myself for not picking up a GPS device when I’d rented the car. My cell phone had no service out in the wilds and I couldn’t even find my way back to town. After a good hour of going in circles, without another car in sight, I pulled over and got out. It was four in the afternoon and I had half a tank of gas left. Time to regroup.
The web of roads might have been my life in the last few years—a labyrinthine gloom that I’d been unable to shake since my wife left me. Every time I thought I’d steered myself clear, I’d slip back into the muck.
Despite a full tummy
and a nice piss in the woods,
our hero is lost again.
The Church of Derelict Poetry
After I stood in the middle of the road, leaning against my chartreuse Neon for half an hour, a colossal candy-apple-green pickup roared around a curve and pulled up beside me. The windows were tinted dark, and as soon as the driver whizzed one down, I noticed the rifle in his rack.
The man appeared like an apparition in the opened square of window, as the sun bounced off his dark glasses.
“You know you’re on a private ranch,” he said, beckoning me over.
The news bewildered me. I hadn’t driven onto a ranch. I’d just been going around in circles. “I think I’m lost.”
“I know you’re lost. But that’s alright because I can probably get you found. Where are you trying to go?”
“I have a map.” I reached through the window and grabbed Sabbatini’s drawing. Sketched in colored pencil on shirt cardboard, the curious artifact looked more like a third-grader’s treasure map than anything a lummox could follow. I figured that Sabbatini had probably been righteously stoned when he made the map.
By the time I retrieved it, the big dude had gotten out of his pickup. In his late forties or early fifties, he wore a tan Stetson and a string tie with a shiny agate. He jiggled a plastic quart of pop in his right hand. The yellow cup had the words First Christ River of Blood emblazoned in red on its side.
I handed him Sabbatini’s sketch.
“What’s this, a fucking treasure map?” The big man chuckled. I could see that he wanted me to join him, but I pulled out a handkerchief and blew my nose instead. He looked me up and down. “Hey, are you Jewish?” he asked.
“No.” I was surprised by the question.
“Funny, you remind me of a Jewish fella I used to know.” The rancher squirted a nasty line of tobacco between us. I wondered if this was a commentary about his onetime Jewish acquaintance or a message to me. In any case, the dude gave me the creeps.
“You trying to get to somebody’s cabin or something?”
I had little hope that Sabbatini would be known by such a local. “Yeah. Guy named Bobby Sabbatini.”
The man chortled. “Sabbatini, the High Priest of Poetry?”
“You know him?”
“Everybody knows Sabbatini. We call him Poesy.”
“Poesy?”
“Yeah, it’s another word for poetry or something.”
“Wow. I can’t believe you know him.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll get you over there. No, Poesy’s much loved around here. Much loved. Don’t get me wrong, there’s those he makes uneasy. Some see Poesy posing a threat,” he said with a cackle.
“A threat?”
“Well, he’s getting everybody in West County to memorize poetry. Some people think he’s taking it too far. That’d be the religious extremists. A couple of the churches . . . they’re frightened.”
“Of what?”
“The poetry virus.”
I laughed hard, but the big dude kept going.
“That’s what they call it. They see it as a strategy for building his congregation and stealing from theirs.”
“What congregation?”
The rancher spit another tobacco stripe in the dirt. “It’s really spread. People you wouldn’t expect. I mean, I’m working on an e. e. cummings poem. It’s not as easy as it looks at first.”
“I know,” I said, silly with glee at the thought of Sabbatini spreading a virus of poetry out West.
The rancher smiled at me. “He got you memorizing the shit, too?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m almost there with my poem. I hope to have it nailed by the end of next week when he opens the poetry tavern.”
The rancher spit out a nasty plug of tobacco and rinsed his mouth with his soda, spewing a fat ounce of it onto the dirt road. Then he pulled an exotic chocolate bar out of his pocket, peeled back the iridescent lavender foil, and took a big bite of it.
“Excuse me,” he said, “my medicine. No, there are folks who think Poesy’s the Antichrist and that he’s establishing a church of derelict poetry out here for all the deadbeats and faggots. My view is I don’t care if he is. Live and let live. If a man wants to memorize poems, let him.”
“Wow.” I found everything the big hombre was saying incredible. I watched him snap up the rest of his chocolate bar and then pull another, this one with a pistachio-green wrapper, from the pocket of his jean jacket.
“I can never get the dosing quite right,” he said, sticking half of the second chocolate bar in his mouth. “Yep, Ginsberg’s Galley’s opening at the end of next week.”
“That’s what he’s calling it?” I asked. “I didn’t know that Sabbatini was that into Ginsberg’s work.”
The rancher shrugged, swallowed the rest of his “medicine,” and then took a few pinches of tobacco from a round tin and wedged them into tight spots between his lips and gums. Then he looked at me seriously for a moment.
“You sure you aren’t Jewish?” he asked, grinning.
“Yeah,” I lied, “what of it?”
The rancher chuckled. “Oh, nothing, I just sort of pride myself on being able to tell the races.”
“Yeah, and what race are you?”
“Me? I’m All-American. Yep, American through and through. You know those Paul Revere brand frankfurters? I’m like their motto, ‘All Meat and All American.’”
The All-American frankfurter reached his meaty hand out toward me. “I’m Gordon Cust. Folks call me Custard.”
I didn’t want to shake his hand, but did. “Augie Boyer.”
“Augie,” he said, grinning, “I know about you. You’re the Minnesota detective, took a couple of bullets in the butt.”
As usual, my notoriety had preceded me.
Intuition
It was campaign season back in 2008. Republicans were stinking up St. Paul as they came in for the convention. To add to the circus, the Republican governor granted right of assembly on the state capitol grounds to an anti-abortion group. Women at full term came from all over the country to give birth in medical tents on the capitol grounds.
Meanwhile my daughter Rose, who the rest of the world knows as the iconic singer-songwriter Minnesota Rose, was appearing across the capitol grounds at the pro-choice rally. I didn’t like the idea of her playing in the shadow of all those anti-abortion evangelicals, knowing there had to be rabid and violent ones among so big a crowd. Rose, with her fame and her attitude, was too easy a target.
