“I didn’t stick around to see. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You wait here.”
“I didn’t get that.”
“Wait here. I’ll be back.”
“How about it on the attitude?”
“I want to buy you a drink or dinner. Don’t go anywhere. That’s all I was saying, for Christ’s sake.”
Tony Zappa went out the back and returned in under five minutes. He was grinning and obviously feeling good and ready to resume the conversation. “No problem. I cranked it up. It’s fine. You had me going there. How about that drink now?”
“No, thanks.”
He seemed to reevaluate, as though he couldn’t free himself of a self-centered fear that had probably governed his thoughts for a lifetime. “One last try. Was there anything different about this guy? Did he have weird-looking eyes, maybe a cut on his head?”
“He looked like a cowboy. I told you. You get into it with somebody?”
“No. There’s a lot of riffraff around these days, that’s all. How about dinner? A nice place, maybe El Cazador if you like Mexican, or Romeo’s if you like Italian?”
There was a beat. “I need to take a shower and change.”
“So shower and change.”
“I’m at a motel on West Broadway.” She gave him the name. “Know where that is?”
“You’re staying there? That’s a shithole.”
“Tell me about it. Room nine. Give me a half hour. If I’m in the shower, the door will be unlocked.”
“You never asked my name.”
“You didn’t ask mine,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Trouble, with a capital T. You think you can handle it, Spider-Man?”
He slipped on his Ray-Bans. His incisors were white and pointy when he smiled. “I like the way you talk, mama. I promise you the ride of your life. Hey, I’m talking about on my Harley. Jesus, you’re touchy.”
THAT SAME EVENING, I tapped on Albert’s office door on the first floor in the back of the house, just past the glassed-in gun cabinets in the hallway. He kept an extraordinary collection of firearms and ordnance, most connected in some way to historical figures or events: several 1851 Navy Colt revolvers, many World War II rifles and handguns, a 1927 Thompson submachine gun with a fifty-round drum magazine, an 1873 Winchester, an AK-47 and an AR-15, disarmed hand grenades, shelves of .58-caliber minié balls and canister and grapeshot. Above his desk were other shelves stacked with bowie knives, glass telegraph transformers, Spanish wine bags, tomahawks, and framed collections of coins and Indian arrowheads and stone tools. Above his work desk, where he wrote both in longhand and on his computer, was a huge photograph of Woody Guthrie holding a guitar with THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS painted on the soundboard.
He also kept a corkboard where he thumbtacked his collection of crank and hate mail, which he received with regularity, most of it written by racists throughout the United States. The centerpiece of the display, and my favorite, was a letter written by a prisoner on death row at Huntsville State Prison in Texas. The condemned prisoner’s mother had given him a copy of Albert’s last novel, narrated by a fictitious former Texas Ranger. The prison censor had expurgated so many passages that the text was unreadable. The inmate attached a copy of the censor’s justifications: Albert’s novel promoted racial divisiveness and a disrespect for authority.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked.
He was sitting at his desk, his reading glasses on, a dozen grade sheets spread before him. “No, come in, Dave,” he said, waving me in.
“What are you working on?”
“The general pain in the ass that made me quit teaching—fooling with grades and all that nonsense.”
“You’re retired. Why are you worrying about student grades now?”
“People I gave an incomplete to years ago finally end up doing the work and want credit for the course.”
I had known some of Albert’s students. They had told me about his method of teaching: He didn’t have one. His classes were chaos. Often he conducted them in a saloon or, if the weather was nice, on the lawn. He didn’t check the roll. He didn’t give grades for assignments. As a rule, he knew the students only by their first names. He told them to forget everything they had ever learned about literature and write about what they knew and remember that in art, there were no rules. The lowest grade he ever gave anyone who completed his creative writing workshop was a B. The only text he ever used was John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. The only critic he ever respected was Wallace Stegner, not because Stegner was a scholar at Stanford but because he had been a Wobbly.