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By Root 736 0

dead until an emergency-room doctor scribbled DOA. I asked the paramedic who’d handed me the Stoop Man’s Queen of Sheba tiara what his name was. “Mine?” He said he’d worked as a paramedic in three different states, he was good, efficient, didn’t steal rings or watches, didn’t go through pockets, had no license, just liked to be in on death and nobody had asked him that question. I needed to know. Grief would be easier for me to bear if I could say, Tom, Scott, Dan, Chris, whoever, lifted my neighborhood friend into the ambulance. “Ralph,” the man said, “Ralph Rinzoni. No jokes about Rice-A-Roni, almost didn’t come here because of it. You can call me Anytime Any … Do you feel okay? You don’t look so good.”

Ma Varuna was a holistic nutritionist, not a psychic. She couldn’t divine my pain at the passing of the Stoop Man. “Ralph to Anytime is a matter of a legal change,” she lectured. “Devi is not a name to find and choose. It has to find you.”

I didn’t have to believe her. Except that the Spider Veloce with the vanities had found me.

“Devi is the female gender of Deva,” Ma Varuna went on.

“Thanks for the explanation,” I said.

“But you are trailing no aura of light. For you Devi is a wrong name, the worst name. ‘Deva’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘shine.’ You are not a shiny woman.”

I hit the brake harder than I needed to at the next light. The monkey leaped off Ma Varuna’s lap and hid in a pile of Fuji apples in the care basket in the backseat. “Master should be strapped into a child’s car seat,” I scolded.

“Master is my mother. Master is my father.”

“It’s a monkey.”

“We see what we are capable of seeing. You see a monkey. I see a guide.”

“Where’s your monkey going to guide you? Back to a forest in Mexico?”

“Master’s going to free me from the throes of bliss and pain.”

For the remainder of the ride to her hotel, Ma Varuna concentrated on noisy breathing exercises.

Ma Varuna took in her first interviewer in gauzy black see-through tunic and harem pants and a brocaded scarlet vest. I hadn’t expected nutrition alone to produce such abs and pecs. Jock Rice, the owner-editor of Astro Sense, an East Bay weekly, must not have either. From the way Jocko squared his shoulders inside his Eddie Bauer flannel shirt and puffed out his chest, anyone could tell that he was turned on. He squirmed in his chair. He couldn’t make embarrassment work for him. He couldn’t finesse his way out of anything coming to him, anything Ma V wanted to dish out. His Adam’s apple bobbed and swelled. A sad little sinner with an Adam’s apple is at a tragic disadvantage. Jocko, I sensed, was going down.

He fumbled in his backpack, but Master was on him, batting away his clumsy fingers and dragging the whole backpack to the center of the interview table and spilling its contents. Out came a tape recorder, cassettes, extra batteries, a pack of tissues, spearmint breath fresheners, herbal nasal spray, condoms packaged like a lollipop, a small papaya and a bottle of Odwalla’s apple-ginseng juice.

Ma Varuna patted her lap, and the monkey sprinted towards her. She scooped the tiny monkey off the carpet, tossed it in the air, caught it and crushed its quivery face against her vest.

Jocko had some trouble with our watching him put his things back in the bag. I practice the Stoop Man Variation on the conventional wisdom that a woman should leave home wearing clean underwear in case she’s destined later that day to be carried by a paramedic into an ambulance. Stoop Man chose his daily headgear with apocalypse in mind. Anonymity governs what goes into my pocketbook as I step out of the Beulah Street boardinghouse every morning.

Ma Varuna waited until Jocko had put away all items except the tape recorder. Then she sucker-punched him with advice. “Ejaculation is an unhealthy phenomenon. Such wastage of sperm is an offence to the Lord of Creation. The virile worship the lingarm, but have no need of condom.”

“Excuse me?”

The afternoon wasn’t heading for a confrontation on Larry’s loco scale, but I was beginning to enjoy myself. I owed it to the agency,