Price of the Ticket

Jim Nisbet

Description

He's been around the block quite a few times, spending most of his life inside the block. But now, age 52, he's got an honest job making high-class torture racks and other exquisite playthings for an S&M outfit in downtown San Francisco.A His only real problem is he needs a new set of wheels and he's going to pick one up today, a beat up Ford from one Martin Seam. Sometimes a ticket to Hell only costs $600 . . . nonrefundable, of course.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468311983
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY J IM N ISBET
—N OVELS —
The Damned Don’t Die
( AKA T HE G OURMET )
The Spider’s Cage
( AKA U LYSSES ’ D OG )
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Octopus On My Head
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude To A Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
Windward Passage
A Moment of Doubt
Old and Cold
Snitch World
—P OETRY —
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho
(with Alastair Johnston)
Small Apt
(with photos by Shelly Vogel)
Across the Tasman Sea
Sonnets
—N ONFICTION —
Laminating the Conic Frustum
—R ECORDINGS —
The Visitor
For more information, as well as MP3s of “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit
NoirConeVille.com

This edition first published in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] ,
or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 2003 by Jim Nisbet
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1013-9
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Dedication
Thanks to Kate Dezina and Vince Stepnowski, for being themselves. And to Lele, Ingrid and Clementina Cassin, and Erik Gustavson, for their help in Umbria; to Ben Long and Ella Quinn for their help in Paris and Pugnadoresse; to Sally Robertson, for a quiet place to work in San Francisco; to Victoria Gill for her mauve pencil strokes, no less judicious than assiduous; to Barry Gifford, for his friendship and for his Chicago stories; to Tom Raworth and Barry Hall, for their London stories; to Bob Krolak and Jo for their snakes and snake stories: one and all, veritable plunder.
Chapter Six of The Price of The Ticket first appeared–bilingually, yet–in Pangolin Papers, to the editors of which the author extends his grateful acknowledgement.
The author would like to thank the translator of the French edition, Freddy Michalski, and the director of the Collection Rivages/Noir, François Guérif, for their friendship, hard work, and irrepressible enthusiasm.
I’m not worried about going to hell, Ed, but
I begrudge the money the ticket costs.
— Fredric Brown,
The Fabulous Clipjoint
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Also By Jim Nisbet Available from The Overlook Press
Chapter One
T HE DREAM WAS HIS, AND FOR YEARS IT WAS ALL HE HAD . E VEN much later, when he had about two of life’s little extras, he clung to it.
By the same token he never voluntarily woke himself out of it. Certainly its contents never shocked him awake. Even in the big house, when anguish and sex in the surrounding darkness attained the grunting arrhythmia of a stalled circus train, Pauley never awoke from his dream.
Pauley liked his dream.
“Life being what it is,” the artist Paul Gauguin is said to have said, “one dreams of revenge.” Ephemeral, fleeting, uncertain, rarely complete, practically unique revenge. Gauguin forgot to add that, life being what it is, revenge is a full-time proposition. Gauguin preferred pith to despair.
Having once attained revenge, with little or no hope of reattaining it, one re-dreams it. Just like sex, or freedom.
Pauley’s last year inside, an adjacent lifer picked a Sears Roebuck guitar, most nights. He was a farmer from Mississippi with a deep repertoire of what he called lights-out blues.
If you can’t do the time, boy
Don’t do the crime
All a them fine things
Git along fine without you
–so fine without you.…
The old man’s impeccable phrasing, ancient tone and unhurried restraint soothed all who heard him, and he never buzzed a string. The hacks liked his music, the weepers liked it. Even the crazies left him to sing in peace. His peace contributed to their peace, and helped them into the night.
Because life is the crime, boy
That the man done said you done
And living is the time, boy
You better have you some fun…
This hour was their ration of tranquility, watched over by the disembodied voice of an old black man, singing in the dark, who had killed his wife with a pitchfork. The whole cell block settled for the hour, if not the night, opened itself to what possibilities rest or sleep might hold, like a parched flower to dew. The old man was worth five or six hacks’ worth of security. Of all the prison years it was this last one, presided over by the guitarist, that Pauley considered rehabilitating.
Cause that mule be watching you, boy
It gonna kick you number one
Watching you down the line, boy
Gonna kick you fore you done.
That year, the dream came to him twice.
Preliminary scuttlings under the denim jacket folded beneath the ear, as of a trapped scorpion lending its mandibles to the certain prospect of weeviling up and out of the makeshift pillow, straight through the inner ear above: whispers along the seeping stones, breathing curtains, corpses tucking in their shrouds and muttering without embarrassment; freckled gourds with hovering eyebrows and cigar-like protuberances tilting over their cash, large bills first, small bills last–an excruciating unwind, a waning vigilance for someone who finally, rehabilitated, wants only to gamely slit IRS correspondence with measurable élan , if a dull knife, on Monday, even if he barely has the courage to force his metabolism past a coffee nudged with whiskey to stare down a mere bill for the electricity by Friday, unopened; but that’s in real time, outside time, digital time, countable time, future time–the dreamer’s full analog at the moment, sinking down through the barbed wires by which he will have to climb back in the morning, getting emotionally wet but achieving psychic weightlessness, becoming the vehicle fueled by the dream which is itself a product of the combustion of pain and desire.
Until, sometimes with an overture and bucolic transition, as formerly the bluesy prelude, just as often without, but always unpredictable and altogether infrequently–such dreams are only necessary, after all, when you need reminding that there’re some things you can’t erase without doing damage to the medium on which the erasable is recorded, smell of burning meat–perhaps once a year, and that unique year twice, the dream arrives, already in progress.
Not many people smell things in their dreams, but Pauley does, with exceptions by which he is wont to thank his fate for neglecting to impose the rule. For fate read psychic metabolism, that hasty thing half-cobbled at one’s conception, and cobbling thenceforward whether one pays attention or not, whether it’s ever finished or not. Though, as science must no doubt someday prove, if the thing is ever thoroughly cobbled the process will continue cobbling, spinning like a lobotomized spider on the ever-thickening lid, just as inexorably, heedless of and despite achievement, as incomprehensibly as it excreted and stitched and spun the contents –until the chrysalis becomes the grave. Makeup is the term most often used, psychic makeup . As if mere paint can poison as well as poison can paint. Ah: painterly insight, Gauguin again. There’s a fine envelope.
His father has beaten him with the strop. It’s not a strop precisely, though it’s used for stropping. His father was a straight razor man. He used to say, around the barber shop, “Mind the chin.” He’d say, “I’m a straight-razor man myself, and I mind the chin,” speaking to the ceiling through a mound of lather. There were a great many things to hate about him, and that he was from Brooklyn yet affected an English accent was one of them. And your fine son over there, would palliate the barber, absent-minding the chin with the same vacancy of eye congruent to the minding of bodily functions. “The kid?” sneered the father. “Never mind the razor, but don’t spare the strop! Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh…,” and that laugh engendered of tobacco, whiskey, and the fumes risen off the galvanizing tank would quickly veer from its gravelly rattle to a phlegmy spew, flecks of shaving soap erupting ceilingward. From very early on, as Mark Paulos watched the senior Paulos get his face scraped, to the latter a pinnacle of shabby luxury dating from the days when a barber was as likely to perform a surgery as a shave, with not dissimilar instruments, jokes, flourishes, and a vacancy of eye inseparably construed in the old man’s mind with a wobbly revisionism of his own youth, a lambent haze of benevolently tilting architecture wherein goats pastured right next to the garage out of which his own father collected small bets and shined some gangster’s Packard, in the days when gangsters were employers and money was semoleons; from very early on Mark Paulos had waited tensely for the moment when his father would make this stupid joke, hoping, willing against hope that, as the barber leaned away from his work to avoid the flecks of lather he might, indeed, mark the chin deeply, with a red fissure down to its Adam’s apple, and thus spare him, Mark Paulos, the weekly re-seeding of the brutality, and, much later, the dream.
For to Mark Paulos it was no joke, that business about sparing the razor and not the strop.
And it wasn’t really a strop because, as a rule, strops came without buckles, whereas a belt, which the strop really was, came with a buckle, a heavy rect