I badly need that coffee.
I slump into a booth next to the plate glass windows at the front of the joint and wait for the waitress to come over to test her sex appeal on me. The name tag on her blouse informs me her name is Carla. Carla is a tall, thin-faced bottle blonde who has not paid too much attention to that Clairol bottle recently. Her sex appeal consists entirely of her short skirt and over-ample bosom barely contained by a blouse that came back from the wash two sizes smaller than when it went in.
“Hi, honey,” she drawls around the piece of gum in her mouth, giving me a straight-lipped smile that could be the result of a motor coordination malfunction. “What’ll it be today?”
Her bosom is at eye level. I consider whether it would be rude to ignore this prominent offer of bountiful comfort. I decide to look her straight in the eyes because they are not likely to hold temptation.
“Coffee,” I croak. “Make it strong and as black as my current state of mind.”
A sense of humor is the best defense against waitresses.
“Sure thing,” Carla says with no indication that my wit slays her. “There’s a fresh pot brewing right now. Be no more’n a minute, you can hold out that long. Rough night, huh?”
Sure, it;s been a rough night. It’s been a rough life.
“Chatty, ain’t you,” Carla sniffs when she realizes I am not about to come up with a snappy comeback. She turns around to hand in my order at the service hatch. Outside the diner it is already raining heavily. I stare out at the poor dumb slobs scurrying for shelter like roaches running for cover when you switch on the kitchen light. Well, I have been feeling like a roach myself just lately, hoping to reach safety before the big boot stomps down on me.
Where is that goddamned coffee!
Carla comes up with a cup and a big jug of steaming java. She clunks the crockery down on the table in front of me and pours.
“Here y’are, hon, black and strong like you ordered it,” she says, giving me a sly conspiratorial grin as if we are partners in crime in some top secret subversive plot. This person must have seen too many low budget spy movies.
I grimace and take a mouthful. Hot damn! It is strong. Strong enough to kick my ass for a wake up call. The fuzzy feeling in my head starts clearing away and I can feel the life returning to my weary bones, slowly and with great dragging of feet like a reluctant child called indoors at the end of a perfect summer’s day. Another cup and I might start acting like a human being again.
The other citizens in the diner come into focus too. Ordinary, everyday Joe and Joan Publics with nothing on their minds but the great moral dilemma of deciding to have their eggs fried or scrambled. Do I envy them and their peaceful, uneventful lives? The lives of mortgage loan worries and pondering over how grocery prices rise inexorably week by week, and gripes about goddamn kids today and their lack of respect for their elders. Is it time to trade in the old clunker for a brand new auto, maybe with leather seats and a state of the art stereo system? All these problems and worries, these crises of potentially life changing decisions. These people dress neatly, have clean-shaved faces, neat hair, polite manners. No public turmoil, no public angst, no public presence here in plain sight in front of me.
I bet they look at me and think they see nothing but a gaunt, paranoid looking individual in need of a decent haircut, clean, fresh clothes and a good night’s sleep -- and maybe a good psychologist or the love of a good woman. In no particular order.
Okay, so you’re wondering about me, my story, my total reason for living and all that. Well, career-wise I have the life-affirming job of being an official police photographer which means I get to hang out at crime scenes a lot, snapping lurid full color pics of brutally murdered citizens and of the surroundings their poor dead asses find themselves in. My photographs are vital for the record, to assist with the reconstruction of the crime, and for presentation at the trial of the killer or killers in a court of law should there ever be an arrest and a prosecution. I take pride in my work. There has been praise for my close-ups, my ability to capture the gruesome yet telling details in bright, often sickening, color. I guess it is a combination of a good eye for a composition, careful framing and dedicated dark room work.
As a rookie I often tossed my cookies after a job but lately it’s no sweat having breakfast coming straight off an assignment where I’d photographed a corpse left with only half a bloody face. I guess that’s part of what’s been riding me. My senses are dulled and I think I’ve managed to mislay a real major part of my humanity. Food for thought and these are thoughts I want no part of. Rather be a work-a-daddy worrying about his mortgage than be a burnt-out headcase of a weary-to-death police lensman who can’t even muster revulsion anymore.
Carla comes past to take another swing at impressing the hell out of me with her worn-out sex appeal. It must be a slow morning for her. Once again I pass on responding to the vampiness and settle for a refill on my coffee.
“You look kinda beat, hon,” Carla remarks, giving me the once over, trying to win my attention with the age-old sympathetic waitress schtick, “better git your tired ole ass into bed before you fall over in public. It ain’t dignified.”
Dignity! That’s an old-fashioned concept in this post-ironic world. I give Carla the benefit of a bleary grin.
“You pour the coffee,” I reply, “and I drink it. If we can stick to this simple division of status roles, we could just develop a great interpersonal thing here. Don’t you think?”
Carla flounces away in a huff. Some people take umbrage.
Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck Ford to his parents, pre-fame also known as Rice Miller) is probably the last undisputed master of the unamplified blues harp and Little Walter Jacobs is the first harp player to male full use of amplification to make his instrument into essentially a new thing. Walter, the younger man, is killed in a bar fight when he is about forty whereas Sonny Boy’s recording career only starts after he turns fifty-three. He travels around, goes to Europe, but dies in his mid-sixties in bed at home in the Delta. The older man is born down South and he is straight out of the Delta conceptually and sonically. Walter plays with the older, down-home guys, the heavy bluesmen transplanted from the Delta to Chicago but as a solo recording artist he outsells the lot of them. He takes from the Delta sound exactly what he needs to inform and fuel his music but he is not about to get bogged down in that old timey country jive. Walter is a bright lights, big city type of guy. That’s how he lives, that’s where he dies.
So, which of the two is the more authentic bluesman?
These are the questions I grapple with when I’m too tired to go home. There is not much to go home to anyway. Two dreary rooms, bathroom, kitchenette. Sometimes I work double shifts just so I won’t have to go home. Somehow I feel more at home sleeping on a gurney down at the morgue than when I am at my apartment. The shrink says I should take a holiday. She says the stress is eating away at me, I’m facing a nervous breakdown if I don’t take a long break from my professional duties.
Carla is back.
“Another refill?” she asks with a waitress’s timeless generosity when angling for a big tip.
The caffeine is starting to kick in, that queasy, wired feeling I get when I drink coffee on an empty stomach. I need to find a warm, dry spot to crash and I will not be able to sleep if I keep on boosting my nervous system with coffee.
“Pour it,” I say. I can sleep when I’m dead.
Sonny Boy or Little Walter?
Just two nights ago I am called out to a crime scene where some kid has his face carved into bloody shreds and his chest and abdomen slit open, probably with the jagged edges of a broken glass bottle neck, like some mocking street level version of an autopsy. The homicide guys say it is a drug deal gone wrong; the poor dead slob probably tries to burn someone, maybe his dealer, and learns an important life lesson the hard way. Too bad he will never pass it on to his children. Anyhow, I take these close-ups of the bloody mutilations, all lurid red flesh. Afterwards in the lab the prints lie on my work table before they go off to be filed in the case docket and I study them. For a minute or two I do not even know what I am looking at. I cannot identify the subject matter, it might as well be some abstract design by an artist who really likes working in shades of red.
I guess bloody corpses just become abstract-expressionist after a while, especially in close-up. Action painting from the bastard offspring of Chaim Soutine and Jackson Pollock.
At the other end of the diner two young women are having a loud argument. They are dressed like punk rockers, with razor cut short hair, dyed trendily white, and basic black wardrobes. Their faces are very white and they wear no make-up except for thick black eyeliner and a very dark shade of lipstick. The argument gets uglier. It seems to me they’re fighting over a mutual love object. Both of them smoke with furious intensity. I wait for one of them to attempt stubbing out her cigarette butt on the other’s arm or face.
I also photograph burn marks. Once I am called out to do a young woman who has burn marks all over her arms. She is stabbed to death by her boyfriend but the cops think she is tortured first. It turns out that she is just a severely unhappy young woman who makes a habit of burning herself when she is in a particularly depressed state of mind. Apparently, she somehow feels that God deserts her. So she imitates the effect of the eternal hellfire on her own body. Maybe she is a performance artist too and has not found her audience yet; nor a reputable art dealer or gallery.
These true-life action artists find only drug dealers and shooting galleries.
All things being equal, I think I’ll go for Sonny Boy over Little Walter. The latter is not deep blues enough for my taste and Sonny Boy just seems to swing that much more because his country ways are less frenetic, more expressive. Walter is a pop music kind of guy where Sonny Boy is an unreconstructed Delta bluesman .
My craft is not a vehicle to fame or fortune even if I am the equal of any fine art photographer you could mention. I read articles in glossy art magazines where art critics blow off steam on their perceived need for reality in art, a grounding in real life they call it, as if artists come from another planet and are incapable of getting a fix on the world they now find themselves in. Well, the images I deal in are nothing if not real. In fact, they are so hyper-real that your ordinary, everyday art critic might find them quite fantastic. But there is an infinitesimal distance between the images and the reality in which they originate, just enough to convince the viewer of the dirtiness of murder without exactly causing more than passing anxiety and a quick, routine grumble about the state of the world today.
The two punkers conclude their acrimonious discussion and get up to leave. Both outwardly unharmed if psychologically scarred. Mad as hell but not physically dangerous. They hesitate at the door. It is still raining and they are not keen on braving the wetness, maybe they do not want their spiky punk hairdo’s ruined. After a few moments they resign themselves to the inevitable and dash out onto the sidewalk, turn left and run like mad.
I am ready for another cup of coffee. To hell with the after-effects of caffeine!
Carla is nowhere to be seen. The short order cooks and the counterman are where they should be, in position at their posts. The other patrons are fully engaged in their designated diner activities. It is only the damn waitress that is missing in this picture. I suppose she’s either having a pee break or maybe she’s stepped out to the back alley for a quick cigarette. This diner does not exactly look like a non-smoking zone but nowadays one cannot tell. With so many non-smokers around you can find yourself in a place where you don’t see anybody smoking and then you don’t smoke either because you figure a smoking ban is operative while all the time it’s nothing of the sort, it’s just that the clientele consists of a preponderance of non-smokers.
So, there are smoking bans in force in public spaces and corporate environments and you see these poor, desperate schmucks who cannot survive their working day without a puff or two on their portable lung cancer facilitators, standing on the sidewalks outside their buildings in little clumps of smoker solidarity, smoking their cigarettes with an outlaw intensity. I bet they all inhale.
Where is this waitress? If she knows just how much of a lifeline the caffeine is to me, she will not torture me like this. On the other hand, maybe she does it deliberately to get back at me for not worshipping at the altar of her sex appeal. She is not bad looking by any means, if you consider the matter carefully. Too skinny perhaps and slightly too long in the tooth but otherwise not too shabby. Good tits if you get right down to it. It could be the Wonderbra.
A lot of men go for waitresses. It must be that waitresses are desperate to escape from this drudgery and so they’re real encouraging if they see a man they think is a viable proposition to carry them off to a life of luxury, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Some theorists, on the other hand, hold that you cannot read anything significant into a waitress’s smile except for the assumption that she is schmoozing in the hope of a bigger tip than you might have left otherwise, assuming, for the sake of the argument, that you had intended leaving a tip in the first place.
The scurrying figures on the rain-drenched sidewalk distract me. Almost none of the fools has an umbrella. If this weather holds, I am going to have a busy night. This is crime weather. When the good citizens stay in to escape the inclement weather, the felons see their opportunity to venture out in pursuit of their trade and cold wet nights somehow make it easier for homicidal crazies to cast off constraints. Somewhere or other there will be a murder tonight, whether it’s committed as a crime of passion with no premeditation, or committed with malice aforethought, or is a killing that is merely incidental to another sphere of criminal endeavor.
If there is a dead body I will soon be on the scene with the tools of my specialized trade. I ain’t no Richard Avedon or Herb Ritts but I guess I can sure immortalize a corpse.
Snap ‘em and wrap ‘em is my motto.
Last night, or earlier this morning if one insists on a more accurate rendering of the time frame, I go on a bit of a bender straight off the job.
The crime scene is a small walk-up apartment in a less fashionable district. Two flights up and across the hall. A deaf old woman opposite. Facing the rear of the building, there is a family apartment, the address I had been called out to. Two kids, a couple of girls, eight and ten years old the homicide guys say. I guess someone in the building tells them this because I sure as hell cannot tell just from looking at the bodies. The man kills them with a shotgun, obviously fires many rounds at the bodies until they are almost literally blown to bits. The wife is in the bedroom, tied to the bedposts, gagged. The homicide guys say they figure he ties her down so she can listen to him kill the girls and then he comes back and carves her up with a safety razor. They say they reckon he does it slowly so that she takes a long tine to die. The neighbors probably just turn up the TV when the noise from the apartment becomes too much. I do not quite get the exact nature of the relationship between the man and the woman, whether he is a boyfriend or a second husband, but I believe they aren’t his kids. There’s an APB out on him. They will lethally inject his ass if they ever lay hands on him. That is, if he isn’t most unfortunately and regrettably shot whilst resisting arrest.
I take an hour to do my shit. I point and snap, point and snap. And somewhere along in there I guess I snap also. A Kodak moment of my own.
After I develop the film, make the prints, write captions and put them in the envelope for the Homicide guys, I stop off at a bar where my credit is good if I am ever temporarily under-funded. I put whatever cash I have on me on the bar counter and tell the bartender to start pouring and not to stop until I fall over. Many hours later I am still standing and no longer interested in drinking another drop. That is when I get really scared.
This diner is about a block from the bar. Short walk, long distance.
Sonny Boy dies from the consumption, but he plays blues harp right up to the very end, coughs up blood into a tin can. He is tall, proud, tough and mean as a rattlesnake, sly as a back-country bootlegger. Hardly anybody ever messes with Sonny Boy. They say there is a lot of voodoo in him, he has some powerful mojo hand. And he is pretty handy with a blade.
Little Walter is slicker, in some ways sharper, a big city mover but always with the insecurity of the orphan kid who hustles tips from the first day he walks and who sleeps on pool tables just to have a warm place to be in the cold Chicago nights. He is a slight figured man, fragile, and quick tempered, the street bred kid who takes no disrespect from anybody and is always ready to challenge any guy twice his size. Especially if he thinks he can take the man’s woman away from him.
The return of Carla.
“Still doin’ fine?” she asks. “More coffee? Breakfast to go with it? Pancakes, bacon, hash browns, eggs the way you like ‘em, whatever you want. We can fix you up with something nice, take it from me, you look like a guy who could really use some solids to go with all that coffee you’re drinking. You may think I’m just pitching you a line but the breakfast here’s good. Guarantee you that.”
Good sales pitch, kid. Didn’t you ever hear of psychological hunger?
“I’ll stick to the coffee,” I growl.
Carla gives me a look which I do not confuse with a come hither invitation. It more than likely invites me to drop dead, but not on her shift. Waitresses! Will they ever learn that they are supposed to serve and not to suggest.
Anyhow, this has better be my last cup of coffee. Sometime in the near future I will have to go home to get a few hours’ sleep before reporting in, ready to rock’n’roll for another night’s worth of exquisite fun with photography. The prints from last night are products of remarkably high quality because I took good care of that negative. I do not why it was so important to have really high quality prints of this particular commonplace bloodbath. Usually I just drop my film at the all-night police laboratory where the dedicated staff are always happy to oblige. I guess they feel that it is a great honor for them to participate in my art in this technical, mundane but very necessary process. To them the pictures are of even more abstract nature than they are to me. Back at the lab they care nothing about the content as long as the color values and tonal gradations are correct. In my case they have learnt to do justice to my work by cranking up the various tones and shades of red and by getting a really sharp definition on the wounds and abrasions. They do some good shit there.
I guess it makes a difference if all you have to go by is a scientifically calculated color chart and you never come face to face with the subject matter. There must be something to be said for creative distance. That reality check interface may just mess with your artistic integrity in ways even your personality actualization books will be at a loss to explain.
The paparazzi have nothing on me. Someone has to stalk the celebrities, I guess, and get those images of unguarded decadence and secretly invaded privacy. It is difficult, even dangerous work but at least the subjects are generally on the hoof, so to speak, unlike mine where I am seldom called in if a live one is found. Sure, I do assault victims, people who survive car crashes, and such like. And part of the job always is to take pictures of the crime scene itself, the physical surroundings with all the scattered inanimate objects, some of them displaced in a life and death struggle. These photographs have the quality of still lifes. The shots might have been styled. The difference is that I know different and so do the detectives who investigate the case and study the pictures as aides memoire of what the scene looks like when they first step into it. All of us know of the violence that precedes the deceptive serenity of those photographs.
Somehow breakfast starts sounding like a good idea. Pancakes and syrup may turn out to be just the ticket I need to get me out of this state and into a new one where the trains of thought run on dimes. And some fried eggs, sunny side up, once over easy. The smells from the kitchen don’t hurt my nose. There’s rumbling in the pit of my stomach. I guess the engine room has just woken up and has decided that if it is feeding time, it had better let me know it is still alive, if not completely well, down there.
I beckon Carla over.
“Pancakes and syrup,” I say, “and plenty of it. And two fried eggs, sunny side up, once over easy. Please. My appetite is big and ugly.”
“Oh you!” Carla simpers. “You are such a kidder! I’ll bet a big boy like you can put away plenty. Won’t be but a minute if you can wait that long.”
Is there any choice but to wait for as long as it takes?
I give my fellow diners a once over once more: still nobody of particular interest or intrigue. No mysterious, beautiful women or sinister looking men with hats pulled low over their eyes. No down-at-heels gunmen, cheap hustlers, or flashy pimps either. This world is not all that romantic. The sleaze happens elsewhere, carefully concealed behind securely locked doors, out of sight of these work-a-day men and women whose only, remote, contact with that world is by way of the scandal sheet tabloids, and even that reportage is so veiled and glamorized that the real life protagonists will never recognize their own world if they are not mentioned by name in the stories. Every now and then the tabloids cover a particularly lurid and sleazoid crime I photograph but of course they do not have access to my pictures so they rely on archive prints or on images from the photo banks. Anyway, the tabloids prefer action pictures of the once living, taken when they are very much alive and sexy, doing whatever it is that they do that makes them media darlings in the first place. Close-ups of messy exit wounds are not actually all that titillating unless perhaps you are a blood junkie or a forensic specialist.
Otherwise I can have a lucrative, if illegal, side-line income from selling prints of my own modest efforts in the celebrity photography field, albeit of dead, messily killed celebrities. As it is I earn a standard cop’s salary which is just about enough to keep the very real wolf from the flimsy front door of my apartment. These werewolves are really something, let me tell you.
The breakfast arrives and looks and smells good. Carla musters a bon appetit and leaves me alone to devour the food. That is just what I do. It is good and there is plenty of it. A man will not starve on this diet.
“That as good as I said?” Carla asks as she leans over my table to refill my coffee cup.
“Not bad.” I say. Unqualified praise does not come easy.
“Not bad, huh!” Carla snorts. “Way you were shoveling it in, I’m surprised you tasted any of it. Want anything for heartburn? Food is gonna settle in your stomach, one big ole lump, take hours to digest. You gotta chew, you know.”
Momma! I’ve found you again, after all these years! It has been a long time, hasn’t it?
“I’ll chew next time,” I say. “If I ever come back here.”
Carla seems to want to share something with me, then decides not to and flounces off, breasts straining even more unwillingly against the tight blouse. Such a pity to waste all that sex appeal on an unreceptive bastard like me.
FINIS
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