Ward Schumaker: July 2010

I’d come down to the waterfront earlier in the evening, to the offices of Walter Landor, advertising man and San Francisco celebrity, a man who carried on his business aboard an old ferryboat, The Klamath, berthed at Pier Five. Landor died recently but his company continues on the boat. Landor had purchased the ferry for a song at auction, had it refitted with offices, a dining room, a bar; and parties have been held here over the years, important parties filled with important names––Princess Margaret, Nureyev, Andy Warhol, The Stones, all kinds of luminaries. Photographs of them appeared the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. This wasn’t one of those parties. This was simply a group of guys I’d lunched with daily during an earlier time in my life; one of them works here and arranged for us to use the dining room. I hadn’t wanted to come drink with them, they’d never been my type; they were gregarious, successful and moneyed, while I was the opposite. To them I appear a loser, I’m certain of that. For years, though, I’d held myself above them and their kind by thinking of myself as an artist. But years had groveled by, I hadn’t produced much, few knew of anything of the work I’d created, fewer still cared, and I wondered, would I ever even make it as an unknown?

I tried to sit through the drinking with a pasted smile but wasn’t entirely successful. All the others looked so good: nice clothes, fairly trim bodies, grey hair looking a bit distinguished––and I could only imagine their cars! Me, I don’t even own a car. And my age broadcasts itself loudly by hair loss, a slight paunch and a terrible case of rosacia; my nose is pocked, bloated and purple. It’s always purple even when I don’t drink and I’d needed more than one drink tonight to get through the lack of a meal. At some point I also needed to take a piss and excused myself and stumbled out of the dining room, into the hallway. Where was the bathroom? I’d been to a number of parties here and remembered a private suite in the center of the ship, down a floor. It had a rather grand bathroom. I would go there.

I clambered down a curved, tightly-walled stairway and discovered that some women were using the suite, five or six of them, drinking wine, slightly tipsy as well––and I realized I, too, was tipsy. Suddenly I remembered that Landor had let no one use this bathroom; it was his Personal Shit House and I’d known about it only because I’d bought to one of his parties one Dixie Flattersly, a lovely peroxided and some-time hooker, a bar maid at the circular hotel that used to exist up on Bay and Columbus. Landor had been a notorious womanizer and Dixie’s beauty had gotten me into his inner sanctum. I had no excuse for being there tonight, but no matter; I couldn’t remember where the other bathrooms were and the women didn’t seem to notice me. I slipped quietly into the john.

Surprisingly, it was a mess. There were boxes all around, cardboard boxes that had once held bottles; since Landor’s death, did no one use his bathroom except for storage? There was a urinal but I thought I might need more so I opened the door to the toilet, entered, sat down and did my number. In Walter Landor’s private toilet. That felt good. In there I could have some privacy, to shit and think how much I hated the guys I was drinking with. Or was it me, did I hate my own lack of success even more than I hated them? Then I heard someone enter the outside bathroom and worried I’d be found. I sat still, frozen, quiet. I wanted to ready myself for exit but did I dare use the toilet paper to wipe myself? Would the noise of that action give me away? It was a man outside. I heard the unzipping of trousers and the whish of urine hitting the porcelain of the urinal. Perhaps he’d piss and leave.

He did.

I sat there a few minutes more, back to feeling sorry for myself, a creep, a loser, and at one point I feared I might actually throw up with self-disgust. I’d drunk a lot more than I should. But in time I felt better, finished my number, cleaned myself and got up to leave.

Outside the toilette, there was a sink and even though I feared alerting the women in the next room, I‘m the kind of guy who must clean his hands after either one, pissing or shitting. So even with the chance they’d hear and complain, I turned on the water and, using a still-wrapped soap next to the sink, washed. Then I looked around for a towel. Nothing. I was not so drunk I would dry my hands on my suit pants. If I’d been wearing jeans, yes, but not in my good blue suit even if it were a bit old; the moisture would show.
There was an empty towel rack mounted on plywood (good plywood, a fifties rec room look) and I opened the door beneath it. Nothing. Looking around again, I noticed a louvered door on the other side of the room: a closet? Perhaps it was a service closet, storage for things like toilet paper and hand towels. I opened the door and there was nothing but a footlocker on the floor, a trunk. There was a padlock on it but the lock had been left open. I opened the thing and inside I found a pile of suits, apparently the staff kept their uniforms here, or so I assumed, at first. But no, these were nicer than uniforms, and different. The suits did not match: some were blue, some brown, a couple black (it was a pile of perhaps ten suits). I thought guiltily: I could wipe my hands on one of these. Who’d know?

Then I got the notion, I don’t know from where, that the pile of suits was actually the ferry owner’s, that these had been Walter Landor’s suits. And, because Walter Landor had been hugely successful and because I hated him for his fame, his money, his success with women, (including I supposed, Dixie Flattersly); and because I therefore connected him with the creeps I was lunching (and drinking) with, I grabbed the top suit and dried my hands. I turned around, almost fell over (had the boat moved or was I drunker than I’d realized?) and feeling very powerful (I was using Walter Landor’s clothes to dry my hands, for God’s sakes) I began to look around the bathroom for somewhere to place the soiled suit-coat-cum-towel.

There were photos on the walls, many of them, each similarly framed, and I recognized many of the people: first and always there was Walter Landor (who’s suit I thought I was holding in my hands), Landor with Jayne Mansfield, with Herb Caen (SF gossip columnist), with a vice-president, with Mick Jagger, with…well, with almost everyone. There was even one with his wife, who I recognized because I’d been at one of the parties here and she’d drunkenly propositioned a friend, or so my friend thought. Me, I’d rather doubted it.

Feeling suddenly guilty for misusing Landor’s suit coat, I turned back to the closet to replace the thing in the trunk and there just outside the door, on the floor, lay a photo of Walter Landor and Dmitri Shostakovich. Really. Shostakovich. Shostakovich? Had the composer even ever visited San Francisco? I didn’t think so. Of course the picture could had been taken elsewhere. But what was it doing here? I remembered the noise of something falling when I’d opened the footlocker and realized the photo must have been inside the trunk and had fallen out when I opened the lid. I picked up the framed photo while I half-consciously replaced the coat on top of the pile. Absently I closed the lid while I studied the photo.

I love Shostakovich’s music. I listen to it almost everyday. His quartets, not his symphonies. I’m not into symphonies, too much bombast, but I love the give-and-take of a string quartet and to my mind, Shostakovich has no match in such matters, except of course Beethoven. I placed the photo reverently on top of the locker. On top of the brass nameplate. Brass nameplate? It was too dark to in the closet to make out the name. I opened the door wider and there I read: Dmitri Shostakovich.

Was this Shostakovich’s locker? It now dawned on me that it was actually an old-fashioned piece of luggage, the kind one might take on an ocean voyage, on a big ship, say, the Queen Elizabeth or the Cunard Lines. Had Shostakovich visited San Francisco? Perhaps to conduct? From Vladivostok, Kiev, Siberia, or…? There were only a few city names in Russia I knew besides Moscow and wasn’t Moscow on a river, not the sea? I smiled. The guys upstairs, the guys I was drinking with most certainly didn’t know Shostakovich or his music and had they come here, not a one of them would have recognized his name, how important this nameplate was, how valuable. Perhaps Landor wasn’t all-bad, perhaps he loved Shostakovich. I’d been hating Landor (again, the money, the women, the celebrity) but perhaps I’d have to rethink that.

But wait. If this were Shostakovich’s locker, why was it filled with suits? Unless, of course, they were his suits. Shostakovich’s suits.

I turned back to the closet, reopened the locker, rubbed my hand across the top suit. A pin stripe, brown with a slight fleck. My fingers ran over the material, pretty nice, but wait. I took the suit outside and held it up to the photo of Landor and Shostakovich. The photo was black-and-white but I could tell anyway (or thought I could): this was the suit Shostakovich was wearing in the picture! Which suggested (to me at least) that the suits in the trunk were truly his. I’d fallen on a trove of Dmitri Shostakovich’s suits.

How did Landor get them, and why did he keep them here? With Shostakovich now being dead (he’d died in 1975) they constituted something in the way of, I don’t know, a legacy.

I knelt down by the trunk, a bit prayerfully (though I might not have knelt that way had I not been drunk). I began fingering each suit, working my way down the pile, wanting to touch every single one with attention. I might not be a Big Man like the guys I was lunching with thought of themselves (and some actually were) but at least I knew enough to realize the importance, the grandeur, of touching Shostakovich’s suits.

As I worked my way down the pile I began to feel a little silly. What’s the big deal? They’re suits, not music, not forgotten unknown recording or undiscovered manuscripts. They were just suits. Half way down the pile, I fell backward. (I was still feeling the booze.) In doing so, I knocked over the pile, and it was while I was righting myself that I noticed it: a hole in the chest of one of the coats, just to the right of the lapel. The hole was not just a hole, as in a moth hole, or a hole from wearing. It was frayed at its edges and the edges had a friable quality. I recognized at once the burnt edges. And the brown stains. Not just any brown, but a bloody brown, the brown of dried blood. And suddenly I recognized that this was a bullet hole. Of all things! A bullet hole in the chest of one of Shostakovich’s coats. How had that gotten there?

And as drunk as I was, there was still nothing that could keep me from the obvious conclusion: Shostakovich had been assassinated, no one knew it (or at least acknowledged it) but Shostakovich had been assassinated. It made sense; he’d gotten in trouble with Stalin a number of times. But wait, he died long after Stalin’s death. Could some one else have done it? Who took over after Stalin? I couldn’t remember. But wait once again: if Shostakovich had been assassinated, why was it not known? Reportedly, he’d died in his sleep, a victim of emphysema or something. There’d been a state funeral. Thousand had lined the streets. Or so I imagined. I didn’t know, actually, how he’d died. I just knew, suddenly knew, that he‘d been assassinated, that it had been kept a secret, and that somehow Walter Landor had learned of it, had held Dmitri sacred in his personal pantheon of musical geniuses, and had obtained and kept this suit in this locker in his private bathroom on the ferry boat Klamath, docked next to Pier Five in San Francisco.

And I was holding it in my hand. The clothing worn by Dmitri Shostakovich the day (or night) he was murdered. No. Assassinated.

And though I might not now hate Landor the way I’d hated him just moments before, somehow I knew he did not deserve to be the guardian of this Holy Grail. Alive or dead. His success precluded it. No one that successful could also be sincere enough to own Shostakovich’s suit coat. Not the one he was wearing when assassinated.

I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t simply leave. I could hear the women in the next room, drinking, laughing, talking and smoking, and I couldn’t just walk out and leave this treasure trove with them. Or with a bunch of advertising men who could not possibly understand.

I’m not a thief. I’m a mid-westerner moved here by accident (that’s another story) so I’m not like a lot of Californians; I’m honest, I don’t cheat on my taxes, I don’t even swear that much. But.

I pulled the suit coat to my chest, embracing it, thinking of it as a child who needed saving and me, I was Father Flanagan of Boys Town. I started to stand and leave—with the coat—when I realized half a suit is not enough. I knelt down and scavenged through the pile until I found the matching pants. I hid both, folded clumsily, inside my sport coat. Then I quietly stole out of the room. One of the women heard me, cried out—did she ask for a refill, did she assume I was a waiter? I ignored her, climbed the curving stairs and, turning left instead of right, departed from the ferry without taking leave of my friends, who I was certain, were bragging to each other of their various and many successes. I didn’t care. I was no longer a loser. Not while I had Shostakovich’s suit.