The Painted Gun. Bradley Spinelli
thought about having a drink myself. I had finally gotten over Alcoholics Anonymous, a habit almost as hard to kick as the bottle itself, and had simmered down into a quiet, occasional drinker. I cut off all my old drinking buddies when I first got sober, none of my cronies from AA would speak to me after I started drinking again, and the old drunk crew certainly didn’t know that I had jumped off the wagon running. But between a bunch of guys in a church basement drinking bad coffee from Styrofoam cups and a group of career drunks facedown on a barroom floor in a pool of whiskey-flavored vomit—a man can do worse than to shake them all.
I went to the vanity in my closet and reached for the musty bottle of Old Crow, got a glass from the kitchen, and poured myself two thin fingers. I took my shot down to the garage, pulled a dusty folding beach chair off the wall, and sat down facing the painting.
I was pictured sitting in a chair in my kitchen, a barber’s blouse draped over me with hair all down the front. I had an intense, boggled look on my face. Standing directly behind me, peering down with clippers in hand, was the barber; I recognized him too. He was an old Italian barber from the neighborhood who’d been cutting my hair since I moved to South City, and he made house calls. He looked as elegant and charming as I knew him to be, a glint in his eye illustrated by a skillful touch of the brush. In the background I could see the clutter of my bachelor’s kitchen—unwashed dishes, cupboards in bad need of a paint job. The image was exceptional, exquisitely detailed in the folds of the barber’s blouse over me, the clumps of freshly shorn hair that fell onto the floor, the gentle illusion of the buzzing of the clippers in the barber’s hand, the subtle touch of intention, as if he really were about to lean in and touch up beneath the ears.
Maybe it didn’t look exactly like me—it wasn’t photo-realism, but it wasn’t abstract expressionism, either. It looked like me. It was evocative of me. Fuck, it was me. Anyone who so much as knew me from high school would get a creepy recognition vibe coming off this painting.
I downed the shot. What was most disturbing was the fact that it seemed to be a scene from my life. The barber was a dead ringer for my barber, who had just given me a trim a few weeks before, and the shirt I was wearing in the picture—the collar visible under the blouse—was a recent acquisition.
Casually, without meaning to do so, my eye wandered down to the bottom edge of the painting. Written clearly in the corner in black, over the dingy yellow of my kitchen tiling: 8/18/97.
I nearly coughed up my drink.
* * *
I checked the fax machine and saw the three slim pages passing for McCaffrey’s background information. It was nothing. One page was a photocopy of a California driver’s license with all the pertinent information—last name, address—blacked out. The photo was so blurry and distorted from being photocopied and faxed that it told me nothing at all. Ashley ________, five foot two, black hair, blue eyes. No help.
The second page was a form from McCaffrey’s agency, a kind of catch-all client information page, also left mostly blank. It told me that Ashley was born somewhere in Los Angeles County in 1976, had grown up primarily in Anaheim, and in her late teens had moved to San Francisco with her mother. Last known address: Unknown.
The third page was a copy of a check from the McCaffrey Agency, made out to me, to the sum of $25,000. The memo at the bottom said simply, Advance on services and expenses. It was a goose chase, but a well-paid one. I hadn’t seen that much money since—well, maybe never.
I reluctantly turned on my ancient Power Mac and got online. This always gave me a twinge of guilt. Were it not for the accursed Internet, and its recent rise in popularity, I might still have a steady income. At first the older, wealthier portion of the population shied away from the Internet, and as they represented the mainstay of my clientele, I managed to hold on to my niche. But as the baby boomers became Internet-savvy, my income dropped off as steadily as Yahoo! stock rose. The bottom line is that the information superhighway made the renegade job title Information Broker completely obsolete—almost any piece of information I could obtain could be easily found with a cheap PC, a 14k modem, and a keyword on AOL.
I started with a simple word search on Ashley and was bombarded with hits. It would take me a decade to comb through them all, and without knowing anything else about my subject, I wouldn’t recognize the right one if I found her. I went to the Social Security site and learned the truly devastating news: from 1983 to 1995, Ashley had been one of the top four most popular baby names for girls in America—top two since ’85. Most of them were too young to drive, but there were enough Ashleys in California that I could never hope to wade through them all.
I was cursing McCaffrey’s name when he called again.
“Itchy, what’s the good word?”
“There are no good words, McCaffrey, you’ve given me exactly dick.”
“Hey, I know it’s loose, but if anyone can make somethin’ out of nothin’, it’s you, right?”
I grunted and reached for a cigarette.
“You did get my fax, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, exhaling a fountain of smoke, “I got it.”
“I know you could use the money.”
“McCaffrey, I can’t cash a fax.”
“I know . . . I FedExed you the check, you’ll get it in the morning. I just wanted you to see the kind of money we’re talking about. If you can find the girl, you’ll get that much again.”
“You wanna tell me why this girl is worth fifty grand?”
“I’m telling you everything I know. I’ll tell you anything I hear when I hear it.”
“And the check’s in the mail, right?”
“Itchy, if you don’t see that check in the morning you call me, all right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I gotta motor. Keep me posted.”
He hung up. I gave up, turned off the computer, and went downstairs to pull my car out of the garage.
Delores, a 1965 Mercury Comet Caliente convertible, carnival red, 289 v8, four-on-the-floor Hurst shifter, Holley quad-barrel carburetor. I got her for less than three grand back when I was working at the Chronicle. I dropped a lot of dough into her and spent many an hour flat on my back underneath her or leaning over the engine with grease under my nails. While she might not be a neck-breaker, I’d pitch her against any car out there for sheer cool cruisability. Old cars are a dime a dozen in the Bay Area, but mine always catches glances.
It’s possible to live in San Francisco without a car, surviving on the BART and the Muni and the buses, making it a rare city in America. But the lure of California is predicated on the mythology of the Old West—a horse for every man, the freedom to wander—and owning a car became essential when I moved down to the peninsula. Being freed from the forty-nine-square-mile bubble that is the City of San Francisco opens one up to the full pantheon of locales that make up the larger Bay Area, from Sausalito to San Rafael, from Oakland to Walnut Creek, from Daly City to Redwood City, and all the way down to San Jose.
I always keep my top down, so I hopped in, rolled out of the garage, and took a deep eucalyptus whiff of the red flowering gum trees that line the sidewalk on my street. I drifted down to Magnolia and onto Grand toward the 101 and seated myself at the All Star Café and wolfed a burger with some overdone fries. I thought I’d take a drive down 280 to Pacifica, but as soon as I got onto Old Mission I was done for, and pulled into Molloy’s. I parked Delores around back—that .08 blood-alcohol level in Cali scares the hell out of me, and I fully intended on blowing it. I sucked down half a dozen Jamesons, thinking about some twenty-one-year-old babe named Ashley, and before I knew it I was in the back of a cab, nodding off on the way back to Palm Ave., stumbling into my house, and still sitting up at four in the morning, Saturday drunk but feeling sober as Tuesday, staring confusedly into my own reflection on canvas.