Count Geiger's Blues Read Free Page B

halves and flows virtually unimpeded from the Phosphor Fog Mountains on the Tennessee-Oconee border south to the Gulf of Mexico.
    When the Salonika Urbanite hired Xavier Thaxton away from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , he moved from Georgia, his home state, to Oconee, the Sun Belt’s heart, soul, and nerve center, as a bachelor in his early thirties.
    He had heard of Salonika all his life, but he had never visited it, not even as a reporter on the Atlanta papers. The moment he first laid eyes on its flamboyant buildings, lofty “skybridges,” landscaped parks, and shamefully nasty river piers, he was startled to discover that he felt vaguely unreal—like a character set in motion to carry out a series of dot-to-dot plot machinations. In a few months, this feeling passed. Xavier began to learn the city. Salonika had theaters, bookstores, art galleries, concert halls, libraries, the world-renowned Upshaw Museum, and a choice of fine restaurants that made even Atlanta’s admirable array of eateries seem provincial.
    EleRail rapid transit and several fleets of dependable private cabs made it easy to go wherever he wanted to without owning a car. Owning one struck him as a real mental and financial drain. Free of that burden, he delighted in Salonika’s user-friendliness and began to explore it.
    He found that, in addition to bookstores and concert halls, the city had pornography outlets and all-nude bistros, rock clubs and X-rated theaters, baseball-card collection centers and tacky import emporia, comic-book shops and junk-food franchises, floating flea markets and brothels. It had poke-weed dens, speaksleazies, crack houses, dilapidated hangouts for the homeless, and so many whores, addicts, sots, grifters, hoods, and hoboes that Salonika rivaled Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, and Alabama’s once-fabled Phenix City all rolled into one.
    Most of this “sin” was concentrated in an enclave of tenements northwest of the Chattahoochee popularly known as Satan’s Cellar, but pockets of depravity existed all over, some even in lovely Le Grande Park, the “urban wilderness”—twelve acres of neat grass, Japanese bridges, dogwoods, azaleas, topiary hedges, Cherokee-marble gazebos, and artificial waterfalls—visible from Xavier’s twenty-second-story high-rise apartment. On almost any evening, he could look down and watch sinister human shadows sprint from grotto to glade in the park, preying on one another.
    Satan’s Cellar lay across the river, but the city’s criminals could deliver it to you almost anywhere. Early on, Xavier often despaired over the prospects of turning the city’s population from stinging flies into travelers on the bridge to the Übermensch . It was folly, thinking that writing about a Satyajit Ray film or a Bartók string quartet could uplift the masses. In fact, hoping for his writing to amuse , much less improve , a single person was also folly.
    Quixotic nincompoopishness.
    “What a fool I am!” Xavier said to himself (he thought) a week after his promotion to Fine Arts editor.
    “Buck up,” Donel Lassiter, his music reviewer, said, startling him. “A buddy and I are going out tonight. Come with us.”
    “Where?”
    “A surprise. Come on, sir, even though you’re my boss man, it’ll be our treat.”
    Pippa Wiedmeyer, the art reporter, sidled up behind them. “You could eat Mexican,” she said. She lifted her arms like a flamenco dancer, swayed her hips, and began to croon a jingle that Xavier had heard twice—two times too many—on his favorite classical music station:

    “If you want a taco,
    Don’t drive to Waco.
    Go straight to Ricardo’s downtown.

    “For a big, hot burrito,
    It’s definitely neat-o
    To visit rakish Ricardo’s downtown.

    “Taste the Holy of Holies,
    Our refried frijoles—
    At roguish Ricardo’s downtown.

    “For an elite enchilada,
    Don’t be persona non grata.
    Come to Ricar—”

    “Pippa,” Xavier cried, “why’re you repeating that