Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (13 page)

Unfortunately, very few in the hall appeared to be listening to Teddy's words. But I could see that Fox was. And Clyde, I noticed, was standing in rapt attention with tears in her eyes. And, I suppose, you could say that I, too, was listening. The problem was simply that then, as now, I knew that I didn't stand for anything.

nineteen

It isn't that difficult for two soulful, mercurial individuals to come along and take over your life, especially if you don't have a life. Or at least if you didn't really have one until they came into it.

Now you suddenly find yourself swept mightily along by currents that flow from places you know not and go to places beyond your imagination. It is not an unpleasant feeling to tumble off the wagon and into the arms of your comrades as you leave the passing parade far behind and learn new ways of looking at things, new feelings you didn't know you could have, and new and exciting hobbies that might very well destroy the world as you know it. But you never really knew it, did you? That's the whole point, I guess. Unless you write it down on paper, it sounds as if you're telling it all to a shrink or something. The truth is, of course, it's fun to be out of control until the shit hits the fan. By then, unfortunately, you've lost whatever nonlife you never had in the first place.

What truly seemed to be anchoring my existence at this time was the fact that I was writing the novel. Events in the casino of fiction, indeed, were hurtling by at a far greater pace than any world progress I'd ever witnessed from my basement window. The novel, incredibly, was taking on a life of its own and, in so doing, was taking me along with it for the ride of a lifetime. There were times, of course, like the period immediately following Teddy's coronation, that I had to virtually type like a madman in the night in order to capture in words the events of the previous day. At times like those, I wrote like a man with his hair on fire, like Oscar Wilde behind bars, to do poetic justice to what was the reality of my experience. At other times, the Land of Counterpane was a far friendlier, more facile place than the world in which we all inhabit. My relationship with Clyde, for instance, was a great deal more intimate in fiction than in actuality. But somehow I managed to remain myself in both areas. I suppose you could say that was my saving grace, if in the end I was actually able to save any. Gracewise, it was just about as bad an ending as you could imagine. The novel itself ended rather cleverly, I thought. In real life and in fiction, in fact, the author came out relatively unscathed by subsequent events. The other characters, both on the page and off, I regret to say, did not fare nearly as well. I do not blame myself for what happened, however. I leave the assessment of blame, as all fiction writers must eventually do, to God and small children.

Two nights after Teddy's grand coronation party, the three principal troublemakers gathered for a cheerful little postmortem celebration at the Unicorn. The place was uncharacteristically packed that night and we proceeded to drink our way through a rolling, smooth brown ocean of Guinness in a very short period of time. If it hadn't been for my two central characters, Clyde Potts and Fox Harris, I reflected as I glanced around the seedy, crowded bar, I wouldn't have been drinking and I wouldn't have been writing. In an odd way, I thought, the two of them had saved my life as well as my career. I never really got to thank them for it, but when you think about it, how can you thank people for being themselves? Also, I said to myself, if the flesh-and-blood Clyde and Fox hadn't run into Walter Snow, they never would have passed into the hallowed casino of fiction in the first place. By the time our little trinity had become undone, however, there would be more than enough gratitude and more than enough blame to go around. Their lives, of course, would be ruined and my career would be established, but believe me, I did not know this as we sat in the Unicorn cheerfully, hopefully, obliviously toasting each other that fateful night.

"Never above you," said Clyde, standing up and toasting Fox and myself simultaneously. She held her Guinness slightly higher than ours as we clinked glasses. Fox and I exchanged rather quizzical glances.

"Never below you," said Clyde, this time holding her glass slightly lower than Fox's and mine.

"Always by your side," said Clyde, clinking her glass square on with the two of us. We drained our pints and Fox put his arms around Clyde and she put her arms around me and the three of us stood there in an intimate circle with our arms around each other in the middle of the crowded little bar. It was a moment to savor, and moments, according to Fox, were the vessels for great and beautiful things. According to Fox, that's why they lasted forever.

"Sunshine," said Clyde. "Should we say hello to Jonjo?"

"Sure," I said. "If we can find him."

It was true that Jonjo was barely visible to the naked eye. The leprechaun was totally obscured by customers crowding around the little bar.

"Business looks good," said Clyde. "What did you find out about those wankers Jonjo was so worried about?"

"Well," I said, "I have done a bit of detective work but so far I've run into a brick wall. I got Jonjo to give me a business card from one of his enemies—who could be completely imaginary, it's always a possibility. Anyway, I called this guy named Stanton Malowitz at a company called Northwest Properties. They're based in Seattle. But I must say, they did not sound like any real estate company I've ever dealt with."

"You think it's a front for something?" asked Fox, eager not to be left out of anything.

"It's certainly possible," I said. "The woman was almost dismissive of me. More than anything, she seemed to want to protect Malowitz from anybody contacting him. It was strange. I thought those kinds of outfits would be very client friendly. I thought they always tried to keep the customer satisfied."

"Keeping the customer satisfied went out with the buggy whip," said Fox rather cynically. "That's the way big corporations do business these days."

"Maybe," said Clyde. "Still, it
is
strange."

"Maybe I'll go to the men's room," said Fox. "Me and a little bit of Malabimbi Madness."

"Maybe I'll come along," I said.

"Maybe I'll go over and try to see Jonjo," said Clyde.

"Maybe you'll need a periscope," said Fox, as the two of us got up and headed for the head.

The place was packed tighter than a can of smoked oysters, which was odd for the Unicorn on a weeknight. I wondered about it as I followed Fox's lanky form threading its way through the crowd to the men's room. Once I'd gotten in the can with Fox, bolted the door, and had a few rounds with the one-hitter, I didn't think anything more about it. As usual, I didn't think anything more about anything.

"Got a smoke?" said Fox.

"A smoke?" I asked.

"Yes, Walter, a smoke. A cigarette."

"Oh, a cigarette."

I fished for my pack of Camels, gave one to Fox, and lit it for him. He took a few puffs.

"This is a smoke," he said.

Then he opened the heart-shaped silver locket again and ground the tip of the one-hitter into its dark brown contents. I lit him up again and he took a deep pull from the cigarette that wasn't really a cigarette.

"Now
this,"
he said, "is the smoke of life. It can help you lose yourself or it can help you find yourself or it can help you find out what is, or what is not, or what ought to be."

"Interesting," I said, watching Fox's eyes spin like roulette wheels and sparkle like stars.

"For instance," he said, "it just came to me here in the men's room what is really happening here at the Unicorn tonight. Why there's such a crowd here. What it truly feels like."

"What does it truly feel like?"

"A fucking wake," said Fox.

"A wake?"

"Exactly. A wake for the Unicorn. Everybody's upbeat and full of drunken cheer and nobody's talking about it but I'll bet they all know. I'll bet those guys you were talking about have finally fat-armed Jonjo out of here. I knew something was slightly off when we walked in, but it was just like if you walk into a wake at a certain time you can't tell if it's a party or a wake and maybe that's the point of it all. I didn't know for sure until I came in this men's room and took a few hits of the smoke of life. That's what told me there was death in the air."

"Wow," I said. It was all I could think to say. Was the Unicorn really going belly-up tonight? Was it possible that one could take a few hits of Malabimbi Madness and suddenly gain the insights into a situation that Fox had just espoused to me? What he'd said had certainly had the ring of truth. Now if I could just manage to navigate my way back to the table.

Fox and I fairly floated out of the men's room and I followed him, weaving this way and that through the human tapestry until we saw Clyde sitting alone at the table with her head down on her folded arms. She looked up and I could see that her eyeliner or eye shadow or whatever women wear was running and she'd been crying.

"You look like Alice Cooper," said Fox.

"I
feel
like Alice Cooper," she said. "Jonjo's going out of business tonight. All drinks are on the house. By tomorrow morning, the Unicorn will be extinct."

After a little more encouragement and another round of Guinness, Clyde revealed a few more details about her conversation with Jonjo. She seemed to be taking the matter a lot harder than I would have expected. Indeed, she seemed to be taking it almost personally.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" she wailed. "Jonjo introduced me to his wife, Moira. She was crying, too. She put her arms around me though she'd never seen me in her life and we both cried. She said the health department and about three other city agencies seem to have gotten together and decided that vast changes must be made immediately and they just can't afford to do it. She also said Jonjo had told her that the landlord has suddenly decided to quadruple the rent, starting next month."

"It does seem like a concerted effort to get them out of here," Fox said.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" Clyde wailed again. "I don't want the only Unicorn in New York City to disappear forever."

We looked over at the bar at this point and Jonjo, appearing more leprechaunlike than ever, gave us all a heartbreaking little good-bye wave. It was a poignant moment and it started up the waterworks again for Clyde.

"Can't we pull out Trump's credit card for one last hurrah?" I asked.

"No chance," said Clyde. "The bastard cut us off."

"Some people," said Fox.

I knew in my heart, of course, that Trump's money was Trump's money and that it did not in any way belong to us. I knew full well that what we had done was not only a little hobby. In legal terms, it was a felony. I knew as well that life was unfair, that some are born to sweet delight and some are born to endless night. But all these notions had apparently gotten mixed up in my mind and by the time they reached what I like to think of as my conscience the only message they seemed to deliver was that it was okay to steal Donald Trump's money. In fact, anything we did was okay. For all practical purposes, I suppose, you could say that my conscience had been left at the dry cleaner's.

The crowd was thinning out a bit but the Guinness kept flowing and the mood of our little trio began to get increasingly reckless and fatalistic. I was just on my way back to the table from another trip to the men's room with Fox when I noticed Clyde staring intently at the far wall of the place.

"I don't believe it!" she exclaimed, an expression of total incredulity on her face.

"I don't either," said Fox. "Now what exactly is it that we don't believe?"

"Trump is on the local news," she said, pointing to the television set high up against the wall. "They're interviewing him about our gala at the armory."

As if drawn by a magnet, the three of us moved quickly to a spot as close to the television as we could get. Trump's big head was smiling and speaking to the camera.

"It's just something I've always wanted to do," he was saying. "I saw the opportunity to help those less fortunate than myself."

"Which is just about everybody else," said Fox.

"I wanted to show the homeless in our city that New York does have a big heart," Trump continued. "Maybe it was only for one night, but that night was one that over two thousand homeless people will never forget. Of all the triumphs and accomplishments in my life, the dinner and party for the homeless at the Old Armory two nights ago is one of the acts of which I'm most proud. It is a privilege and a duty to give back to the community—"

"That lying bastard!" screamed Clyde.

"The one-eyed giant strikes again!" shouted Fox. "What a fucking joke! This guy spends his life acquiring casinos and buildings and yachts and then finally when he's forced into a situation in which a charitable act has occurred at his expense he's shameless enough to stand up and take credit for it."

"We couldn't have done it without him," I said, innocently enough.

"Spoken like a true participant-observer of life," said Fox. "What brilliant insights into human nature does our friend the author bring to our table? Of course we couldn't have done it without him. We've always operated strictly on the muldoon. But if it wasn't for fascist capitalistic pigs like him, it probably wouldn't have been necessary to do it in the first place."

"Sunshine," said Clyde. "You know what I want you to bring to our table? Another round of Guinness."

I dutifully got up and walked over to the bar, partly to please

Clyde and partly to discourage further scathing diatribes from Fox. Fox, indeed, was beginning to sound like some kind of dinosaur from the sixties. Maybe Gandhi was right. Maybe Trump was wrong. Who gave a shit? Maybe everybody did. I hoped they did because Fox was a central character now. He was important to me in ways he could hardly be expected to know. And, indubitably, Clyde was important. Hell, if you stopped to think about it, even I was important. We were important because we were important to each other. We were all we had. Three star-crossed characters in the book of life.

The high point of the evening for me personally came about twenty minutes later when Clyde, either accidentally or deliberately, spilled half a pint of Guinness directly into my lap, immediately grabbed a few napkins, and began a series of rather excessively elaborate, incredibly zealous, but certainly not unappreciated efforts at mopping up the situation. By this time, of course, all three of us were drunk enough to go duck hunting with a rake. But all that notwithstanding, it was one of those delicious, indelible moments that Fox had alluded to, one of those little moments that will live forever. If you've never had a beautiful woman attempt with all her heart to devotedly, dedicatedly mop up the Guinness she's spilled in your lap, you, my friend, haven't lived.