Good to Be God (18 page)

I’m not angry with Dee either. She wants to be happy. That’s not unreasonable. I didn’t appear like the path to happiness. I’m disappointed, and I feel sad because I have nothing to say to her and we can’t even go out for a quick drink. There are few people I can relive the past with and there are going to be even fewer. I don’t mind that they’re happy. Because the happier the world is, the better off we all are.

The saddest thing is you can’t even make someone like you, let alone love you.

G

Is the problem me? For years now, I’ve been pondering this.

Earlier on you think, when I leave school, it’ll be all right.

When I get that girlfriend, it’ll be all right. When I get that job, it’ll be all right. When I get married, it’ll be all right, and of course it isn’t. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is. Is it bad luck? A rule that no one told me about? That page of the existence manual you forgot to read? Some awkwardness or laziness in me? Will I ever find out?

All you can do: stay cool. Stay cool and wait for the opportunity.

Action is only speeded-up waiting. All you can do is wait.

The Hierophant calls. His mother’s worsening. There’s nothing much he can do: in fact, apart from hand-holding there’s nothing he can do. “She had an infection and they thought she was a goner.”

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He hasn’t reached the stage of saying “it would have been better for her”. What people generally mean is it would be better for them. Sometimes it would be better, but pretend, pretend.

That’s the problem with being decent. It ruins you. More than drugs. Walking away is the universal panacea.

The next call is from South Beach Police Station. Mrs Shepherd, our flower-gatherer, is in custody on theft charges.

I’m really perplexed, but they won’t go into details over the phone.

Before I leave, Mrs Blatt from next door arrives with a basket of marrows. She has some place out of town, apparently a secret marrow farm. It’s very kind of her, but at Sixto’s we’ve already been eating nothing but marrows for a week, and even though I’m fond of marrows, a man can only take so much marrow. Her charity hits the bin.

I phone Dishonest Dave for advice. “I’ll meet you at the station,” he insists.

Outside the police station, I wait for Dishonest Dave. From across the street I hear the rhythms of preaching. I approach the strains of damnation and brimstoning issued by a top spitfire:

“The burning never stops burning. God wants winners not sinners.”

I make a note to steal the line, but it’s only when I turn the corner and lock on to the source that I see it’s not a flesh-and-blood preacher, but a tape coming from a boombox, with the impassive figure of the Prophet, gas-masked, standing next to it as custodian. Generally, the street-corner evangelists are either on the way up or down, either working up a routine or plain insane. It’s rather lazy to hand a tape out.

“God wants to help. God wants to help you. With over four billions years of experience, God can give you everything you 140

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ever wanted right now, and God’s dealers in Miami are the Fixico Sisters.” Who are the Fixico sisters?

Dishonest Dave bounces up. I’m standing by an empty parked police car. “One second,” says Dave. He takes out a mini-mill from a pocket, with which he grinds out some white powder onto the car’s hood. A gold-plated razor blade hastens the powder into two lines; next, a metal snorter in the shape of a vacuum cleaner, with which he hoovers up the first line. He proffers the snorter and when I decline, he polishes off the remainder.

I can’t actually see a police officer around, but it seems insanely insane. This reminds me of being with Nelson, magnified a thousand times. However, I have the courage of the dead.

“I needed that. Have you heard the ‘Varying Latin American Nation Police-Station’ story yet?” asks Dave. “There was this police station out in the countryside. Small police station.

Closed at weekends. One Monday morning, the police come back and there’s no police station. It’s gone, there’s only some foundations to show that there was once a building. The front door, the chairs, the windows, the bricks, the roof, the wiring, the nails, the sign saying police station, all gone. The whole police station has been stolen. That’s a story you’re going to hear in Miami. The location changes, but the story is the same.

The Colombians tell it about the Ecuadorians. ‘That’s how thieving and poor the Ecuadorians are.’ The Ecuadorians about the Colombians. The Uruguayans about the Paraguayans. You get the picture.”

Across the street, I wonder why the preacher has lost his voice.

Tape change? “And he will have no mercy, no mercy on that day,” the voice rebooms. “But don’t forget: carpenters charge…

garages charge… dentists charge… the electric company charges… God works for free… God delivers right to your front 141

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door for free. The Fixico Sisters are God’s dealers.” Great line.

God works for free. That undercuts the Hierophant’s affordable paradise. Basically there’s the carrot-and-stick approach. You offer peace and happiness, but lob in some fear as well.

“I’m introducing myself as your counsel,” says Dave as we enter.

“Have you studied law?” I ask. He looks offended. Inside we discover why Mrs Shepherd has been arrested.

There are some matey, good-natured policefolk. The police in Miami aren’t like that. They frighten me. They’re all huge, and they’ll shoot you without any hesitation. I can’t reproach them for this attitude. There are many evil, mad individuals with automatic weapons at large out there, not to mention the plain stupid ones.

They also have this “we know” look they give you. “We know all about it. We won’t arrest you today, but we know all about it.” And they’re right, because who hasn’t got some tax fraud or dope stashed away? Although, as far as I’m aware, I don’t believe posing as the Supreme Being is an offence.

Mrs Shepherd is unrepentant, but pleased to see me. I introduce myself as the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. Dave introduces himself as counsel for the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. I’m wearing my suit, but I’m not casting holiness. I look, catching my reflection in the glass door, like a failed club owner, which, considering I’m an excessively failed club owner, is a step in the right direction. Dave looks like he should be in a cell for a gangland killing, twenty-five to life.

But the investigating officer is tolerant. He smiles the “we-know-all-about-it” smile to Dave. Mrs Shepherd has been caught in the Woodlawn cemetery.

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We find out why Mrs Shepherd has been such a good source of flowers. She’s been stealing them from the cemetery. She probably would have got away with it, but for the fact that, with Christmas coming up, she had been cutting down a small pine tree with a blunt, battery-operated turkey carver.

I can see Dave, even as a man who snorts coke off the back of police cars, is discomforted by this, as I am. This is bad juju.

In capitals. I don’t believe in God, not in the sense of a sentient force who’s worried about whether you eat shellfish or which hand you wipe your arse with, but if there is anything on the other side, behind the scenes – ripping off the dead, shitting on the grieving? You are in big trouble. If I actually were God, I’d be making a note about this.

They can’t, of course, prove that Mrs Shepherd has been the culprit lifting the flowers for the last two years, although the staff have been logging her and unfortunately she can’t provide the name of even one grave she claims to be visiting in the cemetery.

But like all police forces they’re concerned about clearing up the thefts, so they suggest that if she fesses up to some others some community service can be arranged.

“But the Hierophant told me to do it,” she maintains with a lack of loyalty that is truly remarkable. “You told me to do it, too,” she adds in my direction. I admire the way she can turn on us without the slightest hesitation.

“This is a tragically… tragic case of tragic misunderstanding…

tragically,” sums up Dave. “Officer Blaine, do you like Miles Davis?”

We buy several tickets for Rescuers in the Ring, an annual charity event in which the police box the fire brigade, and we leave with Dishonest Dave promising unreleased Miles Davis out-takes from the period he was pimping his wife.

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“You should listen to more Miles Davis. Yeah. I’ll do you a compilation. Time for a drink, no?”

I list some excuses.

“No, no. It’s my birthday and, as a present, you can come and have a drink with me.”

We make for Dave’s favourite hangout, Three Writers Losing Money. The drawback to not eating much and not drinking is that you become a pushover for alcohol when it makes its entrance. I want a mineral water, but Dave insists that on his birthday we have to drink Barbancourt. After three rums I’m just a Sub-Hierophant-shaped cushion. Dave fills me in on Haitian history from the period 1920 to 1935. He’s quite animated on the subject, but I’m not listening closely. We chat to a friendly woman who has a business selling toe-separators, and Dave harries me into consuming two more rums.

You don’t expect to be handcuffed to the fittings when you’re out for a drink in a trendy club, so when Dave handcuffed me to some cast-iron latticework around our booth, I was slow to react.

I waited to see if there would be a punchline or explanation.

“Admit it,” says Dave. “You were thinking about going home.”

I had been, although when you think of my bed, home is barely worth the effort of going home. I had been waiting for Dave to go to the toilet and then slumping out as fast as I could to get a taxi. I’m not quite sure why Dave needs to secure my company, since he’s of a type that walks into a bar and ten minutes later is chatting to everyone.

“It’s not your birthday, is it?”

“No.”

“Why do you need to cuff me?”

“Generally, you’re good company. Good company is hard to get, although, you are frankly disappointing me this evening.”

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A broad, sixty-something man with a weathered face studies Dave for a moment.

“You were a fighter, weren’t you?”

Dave nods and we are joined by Mike, who has driven down to Miami from Savannah to see the plaque that commemorates the 5th Street gym, which, judging by the way the two of them go on about it, is a very big deal in the boxing world.

What intrigues me is how Mike, in poor lighting conditions, with a savage background din, could tell that Dave, sitting at a table, relating to me the history of trade tariffs in the Caribbean from 1880 to 1932, drinking Barbancourt rum, was a former pugilist. Dave isn’t surprised at all. Dave and Mike discuss the history of heavyweight boxing from 1947 to 1974.

Boxing has this cultlike effect. Golfers can be tiresome about Scotland and the alloys used in their clubs, but it’s different with boxing, perhaps because you have to pay some physical dues.

Some of my neighbours boxed, and they all had the joy of being knocked out, broken noses, stitches. There’s a whiff of human sacrifice about it.

Dave recaps Haitian history from 1780 to 1815, and also speaks knowledgeably about the political history of Colombia from 1920

to 1952. A skinny Chinese man coming in to sell some pirate DVDs moves us on to reflections about which biography of Bob Dylan is best and whether Mike would like a Frank Sinatra compilation.

Dave has a brief row with a Jamaican. “While you were doing your sister in the sugar cane, we were reading Proust.”

Mike works for a small company making putt returners. I wonder whether he’s brought any samples with him, because I’ve never been able to find a putt returner that worked consistently. I hope to manoeuvre the topic of conversation around to this as we’ve now established some rapport, although 145

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there’s an air of sourness about Mike which suggests gifts won’t be forthcoming.

“You here for the pussy, Mike?” Dave asks after a short discourse on Russian absurdists in the 1930s.

“No.”

“Married?”

“Yes. Well, was. My wife passed away.”

“I’m sorry. Is this recent?”

“Yesterday.”

A sufficient intimacy has now evolved for Mike to reveal to us that he’s killed his wife and has her body stashed in his car parked outside.

Dave and I nod sympathetically. We’ve nearly been there. It’s impossible to be married without at least once having considered killing your spouse. The trick, of course, is not to. Round about divorce time, you do hope your partner will walk under a truck, because it would be quicker and cheaper, tidier than a divorce, and because it would absolve you of failure.

Mike is taking a day or two of sunshine before handing himself in or killing himself. Our acquaintance with Mike has been brief, but we’ve taken a liking to him. He’s a straightforward guy who snapped, hit his wife only once, after she broke an umbrella over his head; he is a tortured, remorse-seeping man whose misery has made him confess to utter strangers.

“What do you think Mike should do, Tyndale? Let’s have the spiritual angle on this. Tyndale’s the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ,” says Dave as if it’s some hard-to-earn qualification, passing the buck, though he stressed the honorifics to give me a second more response time.

“Well,” I say. Hoping some other words will sneak out in its wake. Very occasionally I’ve found myself saying something 146

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clever without it being me. I say “well” again and then I’ve run out.

This is the trouble with setting myself up as a spiritual pharmacist, I now have to unknot an unknottable knot. Mike has been courteous enough not to comment on the fact I’m handcuffed. I don’t know what to say. I know fucked when I see it. Prison will not be kind to an office-warmer in his mid-sixties.

“Prison costs,” Mike considers. “Why should I use up your hard-earned tax dollars?”

All in all, suicide probably is the tidiest solution. Dave counsels going on the run, since every day out of the joint will be a bonus. However, Mike wants the punishment. He wants the punishment especially if the punishment will destroy him.