Tracey crept up on you bit by bit. Eventually, you’d sense yourself relenting. The fastidious rational brain no longer bothered calculating how much of his rap was mythological, which anecdotes apocryphal, or what percentage of his résumé had ever been legit. Then, once you quit quibbling, credibility concerns ceased curdling your relish for the man’s yarn-spinning.
Recognition, at last: major waste of effort, absolutely futile — toting up and trying to reconcile contradictory time-lines, plotting coordinates on a map of lost locations, encouraging a bent cast of characters to play it straight.
In the restrictive, overbearing, all too ordinary world, no single individual could plausibly have served as soldier, gaffer, bowling pro, cherry-picker, diner grillman, graveyard desk-clerk, mobbed-up dealer’s right-hand, masseur, molybdenum miner, studio musician, meter-reader, shade-tree mechanic, mixologist, convict (county, state, and federal), croupier, travel consultant, toll-taker, talent scout, helicopter pilot (combat and commercial), political fixer, limo driver, palmist and psychic medium, major domo, escort, enforcer, expedition guide, reptile wrangler, ironing- board-cover wholesaler, bouncer, barker, brawler, bookie, boxer, and boulevardier, over the course of several standard-issue lifespans. Why would that dilute the desire to hear Tracey’s stories?
Sure, our boy might never have set foot in Nam, much less been decorated upon return for valor. Still, you could see him, shuddering with swamp fever, plagued by bad dreams, infectious fungus, and malaria. Was he abandoned, temporarily adopted, then in and out of foster homes and juvie? Maybe.
Assume he didn’t compile that not quite flawless K.O. record in the ring. Suppose he hadn’t actually procured product for Jimi, worked the gate for his pal Bill, roughed up the reigning champ (street clothes, no gloves), or seduced a city supervisor (who later ran for governor but lost)?
So what? Tracey expounded eagerly on it all regardless, more engaging and more eloquent than anyone else working that territory. A stray remark of mine, something about post-party disorientation, sparked a typical nostalgic ramble. Tracey’s topic became the aftermath of an undocumented but challenging night on the town.
“Next morning, I felt peculiar and confused,” he languidly recounted. “The hangover alone could’ve killed two or three small children, but it was the least of my problems. You place bets on whichever hand you’re dealt, and I was lucky in a way because the blindfold and gag both had slipped, to the point where I was able to see some, and breathe pretty good. But I couldn’t move my arms or legs on account of being stuck to this ugly, back-broke brown plaid couch, wrapped up pharaoh-style like Tut’s tamale. Maybe Cleopatra’s quesadilla. Either way, they did it right, used, had to be, about 30 yards of duct tape.”
Try and resist a rude-awakening saga like that one, our bound hero snug in a sticky and silvery sarcophagus, staring at a spray-gunned sparkle-finish cottage-cheese ceiling. In short order, the villain of the piece was revealed to be a woman, “who looked a whole lot better the night before, since she still had her teeth in and I wasn’t a tape-mummy attached to her basement-smelling swap-meet sofa.”
An overserved Tracey had apparently been mesmerized, some hours earlier, by the perpetrator’s balcony, on which, he said, “you could meld a double run of pinochle and not spill a card.” That did him little good come morning.
Tracey blearily reckoned he was worse off at that moment parched, pained, and couch-taped, than when he’d pried open his eyes in a family-size cardboard box, smothered with solvent-saturated rags, near the loading bays of a sweatshop.
It was also a sorrier state of affairs, he determined, than regaining consciousness in a track-side railroad station supply hopper, folded fetally atop a jagged ration of rock-salt/sand mixture, at an ice-encrusted train stop without identifying signs. But he had faced down greater danger.
According to Tracey, in early 1970, he’d re-upped with an elite demolition team, kicking off his second hitch in Southeast Asia. One Laotian evening, a detonator fuse proved shorter than its estimated specs.
Two tunnel rats urgently needed to out-run a king-hell fireball roaring through the tube, their personal St. Elmo racing to roast rumps. Only Tracey, sooty and scorched, survived. Supposedly. Same way some mystery benefactor de-ducted him from the chopper-challenged trash-queen’s couch.
A beefy, bulky specimen, Tracey sported massive, meaty mitts. Could be they weren’t splayed arthritically enough, were a bit too well-preserved, to have slugged and jabbed their way through that claimed number of pro bouts. Whatever.
Faded navy diamonds, crudely tattooed below the middle knuckles of several fingers, weren’t decorative decals. Bootleg ink and whittled wire etched those hard-earned trophies, a gunslinger’s barrel-notches. Each stood for one year inside.
Tracey, always with the body language working: nonchalantly imposing. Appeared as if he was going to seed, but you’d be making that assumption at your own risk. Few were lulled by the voice — deep, deliberate, deceptively gentle, yet packing threat a millimeter underneath the surface.
After a lengthy absence, Tracey showed up without warning at my apartment, sporting a stained and crumpled khaki trenchcoat, lizard lids and puffy features hinting he’d already been well medicated.
Suddenly, in my own doorway, a sawed-off over/under riot gun was pointed somewhere near me. I flinched, then yapped a falsetto protest at him. “Got no shells in it,” he scoffed, as if that explained anything. “Come on, car’s out front, let’s take a drive.”
If you’d passed Tracey’s tests, even an invitation like that wasn’t especially worrisome, and so I went. The monstrous square vinyl-topped 10-ton 20-year-old forest-green Lincoln Continental blocked both of the building’s garage doors, angled in sloppily and illegally.
Tracey popped the trunk, revealing an expansive floor area densely carpeted with parking tickets, uncounted dozens. He laid the sawed-off gingerly atop the deep summons-bed and we climbed into the cabin of the land-yacht.
“Classy ride,” I commented. “Yours?”
“Long-term loan,” he shrugged. “Collateral, more like.”
Hanging open, the stuffed dashboard ashtray held an astonishing quantity of half-inch, resin-streaked Camel straight cadavers. The Continental never traveled faster than zero, to judge by its speedometer, but it felt more like forty.
“What you been doing?” I asked.
“This and that. Freelance collections, mostly.”
Thick pale fingers with the faint blue diamonds kept a casual grip on the wheel. There were smaller indelible messages in the crooks that webbed out from the base of each thumb.
Quarter-inch letters on the left read “F.T.W.,” and on the stretched skin of the right was “D.F.F.L.” Souvenirs of teenaged nihilism, they represented “Fuck the World” and “Dope Forever — Forever Loaded.”
Where the faux-wood shift console narrowed was a spill-proof carafe of iced Gatorade and vodka, an insidious beverage Tracey’d concocted and christened the Athlete’s Foot. He swilled some, pointed it my way; I passed.
We drove to a Hunan joint, the lawless Lincoln left in a handicapped zone. Pouring down Tsingtaos, we talked about baseball, rhythm and blues, some people who had died, good luck, bad manners, and Tracey’s divorce from Wife Number Four, over dishes as hot as our hosts would let us order them.
The unmatchable Tracey patois was either brilliantly imagined or assiduously compiled. Virgin tailor-made cigarettes were “tar-bars,” their discarded butts reduced to “snipe.” A walk was a commute via the old “left-and-right-mobile.” Females of dubious character were branded “split-tails,” and the less enticing of either gender might “make a freight train take a dirt road,” or worse yet, “gag the maggots off a gut-wagon.”
When appliances or vehicles expired, they’d “had the radish.” He'd rinse off in the “rain room,” not take a shower. Associates also tended to have colorful tags. “Big Jack” and “West End Eddie” made sense, but why the “Dead Steve” distinction? As Tracey explained, “the other Steve is still alive.”
At least one nemesis had provoked Tracey sufficiently for him to “stomp a mudhole in his chest and walk it dry,” the result resembling “Coney Island at low tide.”
If he had a particularly tantalizing tale cued up, Tracey might preface it by warning that it possessed the power to “make your baby numb.” Nobody ever asked precisely what that confounding phrase meant, any more than they sought an exchange rate on the price quoted for everything in Tracey’s lexicon: “a buck-three-eighty.”
The patter was fresh, never canned. Near the end of a pie-and-pitcher lunch break in a pizzeria, one of us hooked a thumb at a demented street person across the way.
It was a wretched character, standing statue-still, with one middle finger raised, the rigid digit displayed dramatically.
“Whaddaya think, Tracey? He just flipping off the world, in general, or what?”
“Naw. Looks to me like he’s waiting for his free doughnut.”
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