By the time I’ve finished, Tito’s eyes are shut and his breathing is heavy. When I step closer to see if he’s asleep, he blinks and says, “If this is a joke, it ain’t so funny. You’re saying they got Janet?”
“I’m not sure. She’s gone and it doesn’t look pretty.”
“Fuckers.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” I say.
“What’s the difference? I can’t prove nuthin’.”
“Let’s start with what you gave the cops.”
“Can you pour me more water—sorry, what’s your name again? More ice, too.”
“It’s Jack.”
He takes the cup and gulps at it wolfishly. Soon the tips of his Pancho Villa mustache are dripping.
“All I tole the cops,” he says, “is what I can say for a fact: I walk in the front door and some asshole puts a gun in my ribs while another asshole turns the place upside-fucking-down. Meanwhile the one with the gun keeps saying, ‘Where is it? Where is it?'”
“Where is what?” I open my notebook.
“That’s what I wanted to know. Where’s what? And the asshole says, ‘You know damn well what.’ And after maybe an hour of this shit they tie my hands and put me on my knees. Then the one with the machine gun says he’s gonna blow my head off if I don’t tell ’em where it is—did I mention they shot my fucking fish? I could use some more water, you mind?”
After the refill, Tito tumbles ahead: “I had a hunnerd-gallon ‘quarium full of tropicals. Fact, Jimmy helped me catch a few. I had angelfish and triggerfish and sergeant majors and clown fish—you know anything about tropicals? Oh yeah, I had some cool rock shrimp, too.”
Painkillers are one of the miracles of modern medicine, but cogency is not among the documented side effects. I lead Tito back to his account of the home invasion, but not before sitting through a monologue on the mating habits of the orange wrasse.
“The shooting,” I remind him. “What happened?”
“Oh. Right. These two bastards scoop all the fish outta my ‘quarium and toss ’em on the floor. Then they shoot em! It took like two dozen goddamn rounds, too, ’cause they’re floppin’ and squirming all over the tiles, plus they’re real small… ”
“And then they shot you?”
“No, man,” Tito says. “First I got up and ran. Then they shot me.”
“That would explain—”
“How I took two caps in the ass. But I hit the door and kept on runnin’,” he says. “These fuckers, on their way out, they stole a DVD and three Rickenbacker 4004s. But I know that ain’t why they broke in.”
“Do you know who they were?”
“Naw,” Tito says, “but here’s what: They knew me. Called me by name. ‘We gonna kill you, Tito,’ they kept saying in Spanish—these were Mexicans. Local wets, by the accent. And I believe they did mean to kill me, too, and make it look like a robbery.”
“What do you think they were after?”
Tito grunts as he reaches for the call button. “I need another shot. Maybe three. You in a hurry?”
Briskly I step outside as a beetle-browed nurse prepares to re-medicate the wounded musician, cleanse his wounds and change his dressing. A stroll around the floor yields no glimpses of other bedridden celebs, though a detour to the vending machines leads to a casual chat with an orderly who claims once to have swiped a bedpan from beneath Robert Mitchum. “I sold it for seventy-five bucks to a memorabilia shop on Sunset,” he says matter-of-factly.
No such market exists, I suspect, for Tito Negraponte’s used personal effects. The databases I’d scanned yielded only meager biographical material. He was born in Guadalajara and as a teenager made his way first to San Diego and then to Los Angeles, where he bounced between rock and Latin jazz in a series of obscure groups. In a 1985 interview, Jimmy Stoma said he recruited Tito after seeing him play drums with a bilingual punk band called Canker. Jimmy tore through drummers like barbiturates, but he liked Tito’s furtive smoky presence onstage so he kept him on as a second bass man. “You can never have too much bass,” Jimmy explained to the San Francisco Chronicle.