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  Someone told Ashleigh that Blaise was an alchemist, and she asked what an alchemist was. A scientist, is what she was told, and then Ashleigh went after Blaise balls out and titties turned upward. When Blaise met the guys at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, he told us he was getting married and he bought us drinks, and then he stood there smiling and telling us about how this woman, his love, his angel, his mythological Celtic goddess, made him shoot his wad five times the first night he boned her. Pregnant, we all thought. She milked him, and now he’s had it, the poor son of a bitch.

  We all knew better than to go near Ashleigh, and she’d at one time or another late at night howled at most of our windows—those of us who had good union jobs—and begged us for dick. She even called Ed the Jew and whispered to him, “Please, Eddie, please come fuck me. I’m so wet. Please fuck me, Eddie.” And Ed the Jew, the ugliest of all of us, well, he was married to a beautiful sad woman, long dark hair and eyes that were older than the world, and he treated her like shit, threatening her all the time that he’d throw her out on her ass, telling her that she was lucky, bitch, that anyone would have her. And she believed him, even though any of us would have taken her in a flat second. Ed the Jew went and screwed old howler Ashleigh, not telling her—like he told us afterward—that his pecker shoots blanks, and so there was no way she was going to catch him in her baby-baking snatch.

  It wasn’t long before Ashleigh decided that she didn’t like scientists after all, particularly scientists who are composers, and least of all those of the Blaise variety. Blaise was an Italian—Catholic, that is—and so of course he married her when, a few weeks after the five orgasm evening, she announced the pending arrival of the swelling zygote in her quim. Blaise owned the dead aunt’s house, making him initially double desirable—a landowner—and making him an honorary citizen and another among the whitey minority, and therefore hated and fair and obligatory game for the blacks and Mexicans. Blaise became a local celebrity at Dick’s, showing up at six in the morning when we were having our pre-work vodkas, except Blaise didn’t leave. He’d still be there at noon when we came for our mid-day pop. The baby was almost due, and Ashleigh was going out of her mind because she didn’t want to live in Oakland—as if any of us wanted to live in Oakland, for fuck’s sake. Why’d I marry a nerdy goofball scientist if I’m just going to have to live in this shithole!

  Blaise’s science, she had discovered, wasn’t the science you see on the TV, the Berkeley or Harvard dude in the white smock making a killing designing weapons that melt the eyeballs of billions of gooks and turn their bones into interstellar dust, then coming home to his swanky house with a dock and a rowboat where he stores a ukulele on which he plays his honeypie love songs while he paddles leisurely around at sunset. No, Blaise’s alchemy consisted of a little shed about as big as an outhouse he’d built in the backyard, an ice-chest filled with cheap plastic-bottle vodka, a stack of paper, some pens, a port-a-potty so he didn’t have to ever come out, and a door that locked from the inside so no one could bother him, especially his new bride. What he was working on? None of us knew, and when we’d ask him, he’d just say, “Yes.” We’d push him, we’d buy him drinks, we’d try to get him drunker but he’d just smile, even when his head was hanging, and he’d say, “Yes.” He was kind of fucked up, come to think of it.

  The day after the baby was born, the blacks and Mexicans welcomed Blaise to the neighborhood, Oakland fashion. Some Mexicans stopped their low-rider in front of Blaise and Ashleigh’s house. A black dude was walking past on the sidewalk and they opened fire, Mac-10s and pistols, the black dude a mess of meat strewn all over the yard and guts and blood splattered on the house’s windows and porch. That wasn’t the bad part, though, not for Blaise. The bad part, he told us, was that Ashleigh really hated him after the “multi-cultural exchange,” as he called it. Ashleigh hated him because when the bullets started flying, when they came through the front of the house and peppered the walls, Blaise grabbed the baby out of Ashleigh’s hands and dove, protecting himself and the baby, while Ashleigh, in some kind of chick state of shock, just stood there, motionless. Most of the bullets missed her, but one didn’t. It went through a butt-cheek and lodged right in her asshole. She screamed, “They shot my ass! They shot my ass!” And Blaise laughed. He couldn’t help it, he told us, it was just so fucking funny, at the time. Even at the hospital, when she came out of the anesthesia and asked Blaise if she was okay, if she’d live, Blaise laughed even then, and he said, “You had a bullet stuck in your asshole, but the good physicians have removed it, and someday you’ll shit just fine again.” Ashleigh never forgave him, didn’t forgive him for not helping her out of harm’s way, didn’t forgive him for laughing when she got shot in the ass, and sure as shit never forgave him for making that crack about being able to shit fine again someday. The more pissed off she got at him, the less he gave a fuck. She’d be hobbling around complaining about her asshole, and he’d tell her that someday he’d have the money to buy her a laser-sight bionic asshole, one that would be able to shoot a turd three hundred yards with the accuracy to pop a Mexican square between his beady brown eyes.

  Blaise went to work harder than ever at his alchemy, or his composing, or whatever the fuck he was up to, locking himself away in his shed for weeks at a time, never coming out except to sneak some food or dump his port-a-potty along the fence in the backyard, making a dash back into the shed before Ashleigh could catch him. She was still too fat from the baby and hobbling too much from her injured asshole to start screwing around on Blaise—Ed the Jew told us he wouldn’t even fuck her anymore, not without her asshole, because Ashleigh’s asshole, Ed the Jew assured us, was exactly fifty-one percent of what was interesting about Ashleigh—and so she’d stand in the backyard holding the baby in the air and yelling at Blaise, calling him every name she could think of, screeching, “This is your baby! Your baby, you motherfucker! Some fucking father you are!” One time she even wedged a two-by-four under Blaise’s shed and tipped it over when he was inside.

  She left him. She left him and took his baby, took his baby away, took away his child. They do that, our women. She left him, took the baby, and told him he was a very bad father, pointing and wagging her finger at him like she was scolding a naughty child, which, of course, is the worst thing you can tell or do to one of us. Christ, we know we’re bad men—no one knows that better than us. Hell, we know we’re bad human beings, but what we hope, what we want, is to make some goddamn babies and raise them better than we’ve been raised. We want to make up for our shittiness by producing people, kids, that are better than us, that have it better, that get the toys we did not get, desserts after every fucking meal.

  When Ashleigh left, Blaise lost it. He sold the house and moved into a stucco apartment building that used to be a shitty motel just two doors down. He sold all his stuff. I bought his silverware. Louie, the bartender at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge, bought his velvet Elvis. “She told me I’m a bad father. She took my baby. She took my baby,” and that’s all we ever heard before he stopped coming to Dick’s. “She took my baby,” he’d say. “My flesh and blood, my progeny, my raison d’etre, my soul. My child is going to be raised by that harpy.”

  When he stopped making forays into public, we’d send recon teams to check up on him, and Blaise would just be sitting in the little apartment he’d rented watching CNN, mesmerized, bottle of vodka in one hand and a cigar in the other. There was no furniture in his apartment, not a scrap, just a TV on the floor and a boom-box that played the classical station even while the TV was blaring. No food in the fridge. Not even beer. No dishes. A bar of soap in the bathroom, but no towels, no washrags. What was weird, though, was the floor of his bathroom. It was lined with row after row of bleach bottles, and each time anyone pissed or shat in his toilet, he’d dump in a bottle of bleach. That was one clean fucking toilet.

  Everything that happened on the news was a sign from the gods
for Blaise. A tornado would rip through some dipshit trailer park in Texas and Blaise would know, I mean he’d know, that the government was conducting secret weather-manipulating experiments that would eventually culminate in a cataclysmic weapon that would shear renegade neighborhoods from the map and spread them over the globe like confetti. Some carpet-pilot in the Middle East would mumble about Allah and then blow himself up in the market square in Jerusalem, and Blaise would have visions of angels warring in the heavens. A species of toad would go extinct in the rain forests of Brazil and Blaise would calculate the precise hour of mankind’s final breath. If a sandstorm in Egypt burned a whisker off the Sphinx, a curse had been unleashed and punishment was coming, the wrath of ancient demons rolling across the planet in a wave of sulphurous fire.

  Yeah, yeah. We’d seen this kind of shit before, so none of us was all too worried. It was a stage we all went through once in a while. That’s just the way things work. Louie, the bartender, was used to us having the occasional vision of doom. “It’s just the scaries,” Louie would say. “We all get them, the scaries. But eventually the scaries go away.” And he’d help whoever’d fallen off their stool, prop him back up at the bar, and pour him another cocktail. The scaries? No problem. That’s why God invented booze.

  Blaise’s ravings about gods and goddesses, his references to stuff we didn’t know shit about, his high-falutin cosmopolitical geoconspiratorial gulash—we chalked it up to all that education he’d got himself at his fancy community college, all the crap he’d been served by his goofball hippie professors with more degrees than common sense. Hell, Blaise didn’t sound any more out there than the nutcases you could hear at any rally, in any bar, on any street corner in Berkeley, the Bay Area’s no-man’s hive of screwed-up whacked-out pot-head acid-freaked zombies with degrees that were good for nothing but rolling their marijuana cigarettes and wiping their educated assholes. The Berkeley freaks all sounded just like Blaise—everything was a conspiracy, the government was out to get them, the end of existence was coming. They were as goofy as the Jesus freaks, only they didn’t believe in God, they believed in all the gods, and a bunch of other weird-ass shit besides. Berkeley is filled with faggots that don’t even know they’re faggots, that won’t admit it. San Francisco faggots aren’t so bad, really. They’re smart as hell, and they run a good city, clean, tidy, and lots of good music. San Francisco faggots have good goddamn taste in lots of shit. Berkeley faggots, though, they’re a different story. One time I was doing a construction job on the Berkeley campus, guniting a swimming pool, lining it with concrete, and at lunchtime I went outside and sat on the lawn with my can of raviolis to watch the college girls. First of all, that was a big mistake. They all wore baggy clothes, nerd glasses, and had hairy legs and armpits. Man, their legs were hairier than mine. But as I sat out there scooping raviolis with my fingers, my face crusted with concrete dust and my hardhat spackled and weighing a ton, I heard a bunch of chanting, and so I walked toward it to check things out. I went around a building and what I saw was a group of about fifty students, guys, sitting around in a circle and they weren’t wearing shirts and they were beating their sunken pussy chests like gorillas, in rhythm, chanting and beating their chests. They were some weakling little shits, by the way, flabby and white, their hairless bony chests red from the beating. I watched for a while—there was a group of onlookers—and then I asked the chick next to me, a normal looking chick wearing a skirt and heels, what the hell these guys were doing. She had this look, watching them, this look in her eyes like those audiences in TV preachers’ shows, those glazed eyes that stare like a pigeon in love. She told me they were asserting their maleness. What? They’re asserting their maleness, their gender identity. Well, that was too many for me. “What time is it?” I said. She held out her arm to me and showed me her wrist. “Here,” she said. “You can tell time, can’t you?” Cooze. Berkeley. Maleness. You want to assert your maleness, you little faggots? Get a fucking job.

  Blaise had always talked like one of them and when he flipped out, when he started up his own personal Church of Incomprehensible Bullshit, when he started sounding like he’d been sucking on an exhaust pipe, we still checked up on him. But when he went over the edge, when he lost it utterly and went beyond what any of us had ever seen, we said fuckit. What’s the point? Not only was he gone into Berkeleyland, sailing away on some fumes none of us wanted to inhale, but instead of just floating away, he made a spectacle of himself, and even though we tried to bring him back down to earth, nothing we tried could tether him. He was gone.

  At first, there were merely Blaise sightings. Someone would spot him wandering the neighborhood, shaking his fist at the sky and ranting lines from Shakespeare or the Bible or some shit like that. Glenn said he spotted Blaise one time on the top of the bleachers at Castlemont High School, a piece of re-bar ten feet long in his hand and pointed like a lightning rod, and it was raining and Blaise was laughing so loud Glenn could feel the laughter rumble his feet as if a train were going past. When Joey Polizzi spotted Blaise, Blaise was face down in the gutter on 98th street, right in the heart of darkest Oakland dark. Not that this was a big deal, someone face down in the gutter. Hell, we’d all been there. But on that street? Where the nearest white man was miles away and where even in daylight the blacks would gut you at a stoplight if your work truck’s door was unlocked? What the fuck was Blaise doing there, anyway? Polizzi hoisted Blaise into his truck and started back toward Dick’s, where people would take care of Blaise and Louie would pour him one of his fancy expensive vodkas, but when Polizzi got to the corner of 98th and East 14th Street, while the truck was moving, Blaise unlocked the door and tumbled himself out onto the street, rolling. Polizzi stopped his truck, but by then Blaise was off and running, howling and reciting some of that college shit of his, disappearing over barbed wire and into dark. After the Incident of 98th Street, we agreed to send Shapiro to Blaise’s empty apartment to check up on him, because Shapiro had been to that fancy Jew college in New York City, and because Blaise was obviously not right. Shapiro wasn’t right either, and so maybe they’d have some kind of college boy fucked up simpatico karma going on.

  Shapiro heard classical music playing through Blaise’s door. It was loud, as if Blaise had hired an entire symphony orchestra and all two hundred musicians were right there in his apartment. Who listens to classical music loud like that? Blaise was obviously a madman. Shapiro knocked and knocked, beat on that door, and a black chick came out into the hallway and said, “You go, boy. Shut that crazy-ass honky motherfuck the motherfuck up. He crazy,” she said. “And shit.” And Shapiro beat on that door, and finally Blaise answered and his eye was leaking, blood rolling down his cheek and neck and staining his shirt, not fast bleeding but a steady leak like a brake line, the red fluid oozing in visible pulses. Blaise held a 1.75er of vodka. He held it out to Shapiro, uncapped. “Have a drink, good sir?” he said. Blaise had jabbed his eye with an ice pick—Shapiro saw it on the floor, bloody—and when Shapiro took him to the hospital, dragged him there, actually, all Blaise would say was, “Mine eyes seeth not the evil of the world,” over and over again.

  After the Incident of the Eyeball, we knew things had gotten out of hand, so we decided to sic Owen Jorgensen on Blaise. Jorgensen was a retired Navy SEAL, and he was a serious person, Jorgensen. Jorg became one of the Dick’s crowd after he got discharged on a psych for mowing down a dozen Columbians when on a special op. The SEALs were crawling through the jungle an inch an hour to avoid motion detectors and their C.O. told them they couldn’t shoot back even when shot at—they weren’t supposed to exist. The bullets were coming in, tracers like flares peppering all round them, and finally Jorgensen lost his nut and stood up like Rambo and mowed until the jungle was silent.

  We always told him he’d done the right thing. Hey, someone’s shooting at you. You’re from Oakland. What the fuck you do? You shoot back at the fucks, that’s what. Take the niggers out. Now Jorg worked
for the Concrete Wall Sawing guys, demo—demolition. He loved blowing shit up, anything. Fourth of July he’d bring out all the stuff he’d swiped when he got discharged, his footlocker filled with sticks of dynamite and plastic explosives and detonators and all kinds of other goodies that made a statement, and he’d dance in the alley and we’d drink beers and duck for cover and laugh hysterical when he blasted a tricycle into the air or blew a crater into the asphalt. Buildings, though, buildings were his favorites, tearing them into rubble. There’d been half a dozen houses filled with Mexican gangs that’d been mysteriously blown to smithereens since Jorgensen came home to the neighborhood. None of us minded, because those scumbags were nothing but trouble anyway, pothead lowrider fucks. Jorgensen was the Concrete Wall Sawing metal and explosives man, doing what he loved best, running the torches to cut the iron, and, when not showered in sparks and fire, destroying. “It’s better to destroy than to create,” he’d say. “And the effects are more permanent and more sublime. Eternal.”

  Every time one of us had a problem, every time someone at Dick’s got fucked over by his boss, every time someone’s wife was fucking some Mexican or San Francisco lawyer faggot, Jorgensen would practically beg us to let him take care of the problem. “Address,” Jorgensen would say, and he’d put on his sunglasses and stare at us through them, expressionless.

  And we knew Jorg was absolutely serious, that if we would just give him that address, our problem would be solved, and solved utterly—utterly and without repercussions. We loved him, and he loved us all, Jorgensen. He’d do anything for us, and he’d be able to take care of our problems without getting caught, because that’s what he’d done for a living. We needed someone tougher and smarter than us to get Blaise straightened out, and Jorgensen was the man for the Blaise problem. He’d been asking us to send him all along, telling us that he could take care of this shit, but we’d not wanted to send him, for obvious reasons. Now, though, now it was time for Jorgensen, and so we assigned him to the case of Blaise.