Bosstown--A Novel Read online

  “Cool bike,” I said.

  “Yes. And look at the tits on that thing. Is like that on this street, eh? Everywhere I look is big tits and no heads.”

  “You’re still talking about the mannequins, right?”

  “That’s a joke, eh? Very good. It makes for difficult run with three legs, no?”

  I shook my head but saw his point. Sometimes the pageant that is Newbury Street makes wearing Lycra biking shorts a risky venture.

  “Still, is good day to sweat, no?”

  The man bounced lightly on his toes, worked a kink out of his neck. His eyes were bright, suffused with energy, the towel around his neck already damp with sweat. He shadow-boxed the air in front of him, cleared his throat, and spit through a gap in his front teeth to the base of the store window. “Fuck-ing Newbury Street.”

  I locked my bike to a parking meter, Boston’s idea of a slot machine, and went in past a uniformed guard who tilted me a good morning nod but saved his smile for someone who could afford to tip him for his effort.

  Black Hole Vinyl occupied half the sixth floor in front, three steps from the elevator, behind a glass door with brass handles that vibrated in my hands as I touched them. I’d heard the music coming up, but as I pulled the door open, sonic waves of Foo Fighters hammered the hallway.

  The neighbors are going to love these guys.

  The reception desk was vacant, the air thick with stale smoke, perfume, spilled beer, and some sort of cleaning detergent that had been employed to cloak the stench of vomit and failed miserably. Rugs that once prowled the Amazon sported fresh cigarette burns and crusty yellowish stains that didn’t require CSI Boston to identify. Emptied boxes and moving supplies—blankets, straps, tumbleweed rolls of used tape—led to a closet-sized DJ booth, dual steel turntables flanked by muscular stacks of speakers. A pair of bright red headphones dangled from a hook on the front of the console, one ear marked with the letter “D,” the other “J.”

  Taken in its entirety, the scene might have been lifted from some teenage wet dream: booze, a scent of babes, and just enough stereo to launch a nuclear missile out of the Back Bay; barely 8:00 A.M., the Foo Fighters giving way to the Beastie Boys blasting full throttle out of tiny Bose speakers hung inconspicuously from high corner moldings.

  No! Sleep! Till Brook-lyn!

  In the lone office with an open door, a vanilla vampire sat jabbing at the keys of an antiquated Underwood typewriter with long white fingernails sharp enough to be classified as weapons.

  “Hello!” I yelled, but couldn’t even hear my own voice.

  The vampire had long slender arms a shade shy of Elmer’s glue, a Medusa’s head of dreadlocks twisted stiffly at the ends—blond, natural as NutraSweet. A single bone-white skull dangled off a silver chain just above where I always seem to get caught staring. On the windowsill behind her, a coffee machine pumped out steam, dripped something black and strong into a glass pot. It smelled nothing remotely like an old dish towel.

  When Vanilla looked up suddenly and startled, it didn’t take a lip reader to figure out what she’d said.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” I said too loudly, the music clicking off just as Adam Yauch was proclaiming his love for the outer boroughs and the joys of grabbing his ball-sac. “Nobody was at the desk.” I threw a thumb behind me to clarify I hadn’t scaled seven floors, scrambled in through a window.

  “No worries.” She smiled fangs, replaced a remote in the open drawer. “You need me to sign for something?”

  “I got a call for a pickup,” I said.

  “From here? You sure?”

  I wasn’t sure of anything without a real cup of coffee behind me, but I didn’t tell her that. “Black Hole Vinyl. Thirty-eight Newbury. That’s you, right?”

  “Straight outta Cambridge.” Vanilla playfully flashed random gang signs that would get her shot in half a dozen Boston neighborhoods. “Only I didn’t call you.”

  “Someone else maybe?” I pulled my aluminum case from my bag and scanned the paperwork I’d prepared.

  “I doubt it. As if you couldn’t tell, we had our little Welcome to the Neighborhood party last night. I don’t expect anyone for a while.” She stifled a yawn, wedged talons under a fist of keys stuck to the paper. “Sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.…”

  It’s not so much my time is money per se—I get paid by the run, not by the hour—only with business tailing off and new clients harder to land than a Harvard scholarship, a blank start to my day was the last thing I needed.

  “What about that note you’re working on? That headed somewhere besides recycling?”

  “No, I always screw these things up; it’s part of the charm.”

  “And you don’t believe in Wite-Out?”

  “I think I found a better use for it.” Vanilla smiled some of those high-wattage fangs, wiggled her fingers. “Anyhow, Ray Valentine has a thing for old-school, letters especially.”

  “Valentine your boss?”

  “Lord and master of all you survey. Give or take a hungover blonde or two.” Vanilla winked at me lewdly, and I had to move to keep the molecules in my Lycra shorts from activating in my crotch. “He figures people who’re still into vinyl might appreciate a note that hasn’t been edited with a fine-tooth electronic comb. It’s, like, more, I dunno, personal?”

  “No doubt, especially if you happen to misspell a few choice words.” I pointed one out, followed by another, my eyes straying on their own again.

  Bad eyes! Bad!

  “Ooh, yeah, those I’ll have to take care of. So what’s the deal, Speed Racer? I mean, I do have something going out, but, like, I’m waiting on our regular courier.”

  “Which wouldn’t happen to be Gus from Fleet, would it?”

  “Yeah…” Suspicious. “How’d you know that?”

  I explained that Gus and I share an office and dispatcher, not an unusual arrangement for the city’s smaller, independent courier outfits. A couple years ago, we pooled with two other messengers and rented a basement in an alley off Berkeley Street. Martha operates as office manager so if someone gets swamped, needs a day off, or gets hurt, she farms the jobs out on a rotating basis and keeps track of the billing and paperwork.

  “Listen, it’s no big deal.” I presented one of my business cards—Mercury trailing orange flames from the rear wheel of his bike. “Buzz if you want confirmation, only Martha was under the impression this job was chop-chop.”

  Vanilla bent me a wan smile, keeping the teeth in check this time, took my offered card, and tapped it with one of her talons. “So, Mercury Couriers? And you’re—”

  “Zesty Meyers,” I said, saving her the trouble of reading the rest. “Fastest courier on the streets of Boston at your service.”

  “That a fact?” Vanilla made a show of reading the rest of the card. “It doesn’t say anything about that here.”

  “The trophies are too big to put into print. Plus I didn’t want to brag.”

  “You’re not bragging now?”

  “I’m just telling it like it is.” I smiled, humility never one of my strongest suits and consecutive Messenger Alley Racing titles to rest my laurels on.

  “O-kay then, Zesty, think you can cool your heels long enough for me to check on something?”

  Vanilla tugged demurely at the low hem of her shrink-wrapped dress, came out from behind her desk, and sidled past me trailing vanilla vapors. I swear I tried not to stare at her as she ambled down the hall. Hell, I even counted to ten and inspected the ceiling. But it was a long hallway and a boring ceiling, and I guess it takes time to sashay ten yards on cork ramps hijacked from the Olympic ski-jump team.

  “And help yourself to some coffee,” she shouted, rounding a corner out of sight, but I was already in motion unscrewing the top from my thermos, planning ahead for once. Then, from a lineup of mismatched mugs beside the machine, I chose one with a thick red kiss smudged on the rim—what can I tell you, desperate times call for desperate measures—ma
nned up, and drank the coffee black, the lipstick tasting like a morning smooch, something I’d been short of lately, morning, noon, and night. The cat doesn’t count. His tongue’s too rough.

  Outside the windows, Newbury Street shrugged to life, clusters of well-dressed men and women sifting into nearby buildings to do whatever people in offices do all day when they’re not updating Facebook. I had a view of my bike chained to the meter where I’d left it and watched as a trio of white poodles dragged one of the Taj bellhops out for a walk, stopping only long enough to sniff my toe clips and pee on my wheels.

  Note to self: oil chain.

  When a line on the phone console lit up, I walked my coffee into the lounge and killed some time leafing through the DJ’s impressive collection of Boston vinyl, two full crates that included some pretty hard to find 45s, limited pressings, and rare independent releases from outfits and recording studios that no longer exist. The only person I know who owns a collection anywhere near this size is my brother, Zero, only he would never allow anyone this close to his prized discs, his diamond-encrusted stereophonic needle forever off-limits to my careless hands.

  I let my fingers coast through alphabetized stacks—the Atlantics, Willie Alexander, fronting dozens of other local legends who’d rocked the city proud. A few even tasted a sliver of national fame or notoriety before flaming out or just fading meekly from the scene. I’ve been to hundreds of shows over the years, and I’ve seen a lot of these mostly obscure bands up close, even though arguably, by the time I was of legal drinking age, the Bosstown Sound was running on fumes, the city’s heyday as a chart-busting rock-and-roll breeding ground fading into the rearview mirror.

  My father, whose musical tastes straddled a generational and racial divide—he was a Chess Records and Motown devotee, a huge jazz and gospel fan—ran a speakeasy in the South End for a couple of years before moving on to manage a few rock bands in the early seventies.

  The most successful of these groups was the band Mass, their claim to fame a muscular debut album that garnered the attention of Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, who’d slated Mass to open for Zeppelin in the winter of seventy-five as they toured in support of Physical Graffiti, released just weeks earlier and already topping the US charts.

  It was the opportunity of a lifetime. But as it happened, fans allowed inside the old Boston Garden’s normally restricted advance ticketing areas due to brutal February weather bum-rushed the turnstiles, trashed the Bruins rink ice, and grabbed every souvenir they could pry out of the old building. Zeppelin, not even on the East Coast at the time, was subsequently banned from playing any local venue for five years; not even my father’s extensive contacts in the mayor’s office were able to convince the city council that the combination of black light and velvet Zeppelin posters posed no long-term threat to the city and its inhabitants.

  In a fit of pique, Grant cut Mass off the bill, and the band never realized their dream of sharing the stage with their heroes. And shortly after that debacle, with record sales fizzling in the wake of fan backlash over Zeppelin’s Boston ban, Kirko “Kid” Klaussen, Mass’s lead singer and songwriter, disappeared following a show at CBGB—stumbled out the back door of the famed New York club and has never been seen or heard from again.

  I don’t know if Klaussen’s disappearance had anything to do with my father quitting the music business altogether, but shortly thereafter, he began parlaying his connections with local rock promoters and club owners, renting their spaces after hours for his Nathan Detroit–style poker games. Less a businessman than an opportunist, my father recognized a need and filled it, organizing and hosting cash-heavy games that brought together would-be or existing club owners with city hall operatives who could tug on the levers of local government and clear the way for any number of related transactions, from fire marshal approved capacity, to zoning regulations, to liquor licenses.

  For the majority of these games, my father just dealt the cards, preferring to take his commission—usually 10 percent of the buy-in—up front and to save his considerable card skills for larger cash games where nothing more than money was at stake.

  Take notice, Zesty, I can still hear my father saying to me, his yin yang grin firmly in place, how smoothly things can run in this city after a night of winning poker by the right people.

  Whether this meant my father was manipulating the cards and therefore the outcomes of these games is unclear. Certainly nobody to my knowledge has ever accused my father of cheating, and I never witnessed any in-game sleight of hand—yet issues brought to his green felt docket were almost uniformly resolved, and the wheels of industry did in fact keep turning as they were meant to.

  Of course, there was often a darker side to these games and backroom powwows when forces beyond city hall came calling for their cut of the pie, when men representing the interests of certain carting or construction companies with Irish or Italian surnames laid out the terms of tributes or protection fees with all the subtlety of a ball-peen hammer. These negotiations usually required a more nuanced approach by my father, who often assumed the role of mediator because the danger, everyone understood, far surpassed monetary ruin.

  For the most part, as far as I could tell, things worked out with a minimum of bloodshed, though truthfully I wasn’t paying much attention back then, distracted by the hi-fi buzz of a city that seemed wide open for the taking. After all, this was a period in our lives when Zero and I never had to pay a cover charge at any club, never had to produce any fake IDs and stand there sweating some bouncer’s half-witted scrutiny (even though we were underage, and I definitely looked it). Clubs closed or burned seemingly every month, and just as quickly, new ones sprung from the ashes to take their places.

  Boston rocked, and Zero and I drank and brawled our way through many a night, secure in the knowledge that if things ever truly got out of hand, we always had a rock-solid Get Out of Jail Free card—courtesy of our father—for just about anything that fell below a felony.

  Of course, this was before the city began its conversion into a corporate and academic mega-mall. Gone is the black box of the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square, where bands like the Police and the Pretenders played their first Boston gigs to crowds in the dozens. Gone too is the Channel in Fort Point on the edge of South Boston, the club serving as a demilitarized buffer zone between one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods (certainly one of the whitest) and the outskirts of the Financial District. The Channel could hold close to seventeen hundred people and often did as home-grown bands like Jon Butcher Axis, the Neighborhoods, and Mission of Burma played all-ages shows or opened for larger national acts. Same fate for Bunratty’s in Allston, also known as Scumratty’s for reasons that were, at the time, self-evident, where bands like the Lyres and the Real Kids gained their loyal followings.

  There were too many to count really. The city is a haunted playground of clubs that went under as real estate skyrocketed and rents increased: Jumpin’ Jack Flash in the Fens, the Penalty Box in the North End, Jack’s on Mass Ave. Hardly a single bar Zero or I weren’t justifiably kicked out of at some point, banned until new management took over or the bouncers forgot how hard Zero could hit.

  Good crimes.

  I was still waiting on the caffeine to kick in, lost in the liner notes of a Sex Execs single, when Vanilla returned clutching a heavily taped manila package between razor-tipped fingers. Maybe it was my imagination, but somehow her berry lips had lost their shine, as if the juice had been drained out of them.

  “Sorry that took so long. How’s that coffee?” she said.

  “Awesome, thanks. There a problem?”

  “Not if you like decaf there isn’t.”

  Decaf!

  “Easy now, Speed Racer.” Vanilla shielded her grin with the envelope. “Contrary to the mess, we adhere to a strict no-spitting-in-the-office policy around here. Sorry.” She winced. “I should have told you.”

  “Nah, it’s no biggie,” I lied, rallying past the urge to claw
at my tongue. “Only I consider caffeine, like, one of my basic food groups, and today’s just one of those days I need it bad.”

  “Which makes the two of us, then, only I’ve been on something of a quitting kick lately. Real coffee and cigarettes are down for the count, leaving only late-night junk food and trashy novels holding on for dear life.”

  “The last of the vices are last for a reason,” I offered, sagely.

  “Meaning…”

  “Like maybe they’re just not meant to be given up?”

  Vanilla seemed to like that explanation. Not enough to unwrap herself from her dress maybe, but enough to recover her smile.

  “Here, let me take that.” She handed me the envelope and relieved me of my mug, where the smudged remnant of her kiss was still visible. “Dior Rouge, in case you were wondering.”

  “I knew that.”

  “I bet you did.” She swiped her finger across the rim and dragged some color back to her puckered lips. I waited a couple of beats before following her into the office, holding the thick package down low in front.

  “So, Mercury Couriers,” she mouthed, cutting me a check. “That’s a good name for a courier company. But refresh my Greek mythology for me. Mercury wasn’t the one who flew too close to the sun, was he?”

  “No. That was Icarus. Mercury’s the god of commerce, dexterity, and eloquence. Not to mention speed, of course.”

  “I’m assuming you know where that is.” She extended the check over the desk, pointing it toward an address scrawled across the front of the package in black marker. It was safe now to stow the envelope, slinging my bag to the small of my back.

  “So, Zesty, was there some kind of course you had to take to get that name for yourself? You know, like some sort of dexterity and eloquence exam. Touch your toes, recite a poem? I mean, you claim to have the speed part of it down—”