Mere Anarchy (8 page)

“It’s in a locker at Grand Central,” I said. “Kill me and the
best
you’ll ever decorate that spud with will be sour cream and chives.”

“Name your price,” he said. April had gone into the other room and I heard her place a call to Tangiers. I thought I heard the word “crêpes”—apparently she had raised the money for the first payment on a major crêpe but en route to Lisbon the filling had been switched.

Fifteen minutes after I named my price, my secretary brought over a package weighing 2.6 pounds and placed it on the table. The fat man unwrapped it with trembling hands and, with his penknife, sliced off a slim piece to sample. Suddenly he began hacking at the truffle in a wild rage and sobbing.

“My God, sir!” he screamed. “It’s a fake! And while it’s a brilliant fake, counterfeited to simulate some of the truffle’s nutlike flavor, I’m afraid what we have here is a large matzo ball.” In an instant he was out the door, leaving me alone with a stunned goddess. Shaking off her dismay, April lasered her aqua orbs into mine.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said. “Now it’s just you and I. We’ll track down the truffle and split it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it held aphrodisiac powers.” She let her robe slip open just enough. I came very close to surrendering to all the absurd gymnastics nature programs the blood for, but my survival instinct kicked in.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” I said, backing off. “I don’t intend to wind up like your last husband, at the city fridge with a tag on my toe.”

“What?” Her face went ashen.

“That’s right, toots. It was you who killed Harold Vanescu, the international gourmet. It didn’t take a quiz kid to dope it out.” She tried to bolt. I blocked the door.

“OK,” she said resignedly. “I guess my number’s up. Yes, I killed Vanescu. We met in Paris. I had ordered caviar at a restaurant and had cut myself on one of the toast points. He came to my aid. I was impressed with his haughty disdain for red eggs. At first things were wonderful. He showered me with gifts: white asparagus from Cartier’s, a bottle of expensive balsamic he knew I loved to dab behind my ears when we went out. It was Vanescu and I who stole the Mandalay truffle from the British Museum by hanging upside down from ropes and cutting through the glass case with a diamond. I wanted to make a truffle omelet, but Vanescu had other ideas. He wanted to fence it and use the money to buy a villa in Capri. At first nothing had been too good for me; then I noticed the portions of beluga on our crackers were getting smaller and smaller. I asked him if he was having trouble in the stock market, but he pooh-poohed the idea. Soon I realized he had secretly switched from beluga to sevruga, and when I accused him of using osetra in a blini, he became irritable and noncommunicative. Somewhere along the line he had turned budget-conscious and frugal. One night I came home unexpectedly and caught him preparing hors d’oeuvres with lungfish caviar. It led to a violent quarrel. I said I wanted a divorce, and we argued over custody of the truffle. In a moment of rage I picked it up from the mantel and struck him
with
it. When he fell, he hit his head on an after-dinner mint. To hide the murder weapon I opened the window and threw it onto the back of a passing truck. I’ve been searching for it ever since. With Vanescu out of the way, I truly believed I could finally scarf it up. Now we can find it and share it—you and I.”

I remember her body against mine and a kiss that caused steam to jet out of both my ears. I also remember the look on her face when I turned her in to the NYPD. I sighed over her state-of-the-art equipment as she was cuffed and led away by the fuzz. Then I beat it over to the Carnegie Deli for a pastrami on rye with pickles and mustard—the stuff that dreams are made of.

G
LORY
H
ALLELUJAH
, S
OLD
!

The Internet auction site eBay has gained a new spiritual dimension, with a seller offering prayers for cash. The self-styled Prayer Guy, based in Co. Kildare, Ireland, is selling five prayers, with bidding for each of them starting at £1. Buyers with pressing spiritual needs can buy immediately for £5.

—Item in church newsletter, August 2005

HEN THE RATINGS
came out and
The Dancing Ombudsman
got a minus thirty-four, there was some talk at Nielsen that people who accidentally tuned in the show then put their eyes out like Oedipus. In the end the bottom line prevailed and our staff was assembled in the office of the producer, Harvey Nectar, and each writer was offered a choice between resignation or going into a closed room with a revolver. I won’t downplay my responsibility as a participant in what
Variety
called “a fiasco comparable to the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs,” but I will say in my defense that I was basically a punch-up specialist put in at the last minute to leaven the burn-unit scenes with sight gags.

The last few seasons working on the tube have been a little rough on me, and it seems the many flop series my name has appeared on proceeded one after the other with the relentless consistency of carpet bombing. My agent, Gnat Louis, was taking longer and longer to return my phone calls, and finally, when I collared him over salmon cheeks at Nobu, he leveled with me and pointed out that to the industry the credit Hamish Specter on an end crawl was a synonym for potassium cyanide.

Unbent by the turn of events yet requiring a minimal ration of caloric material in order to remain amongst the living, I scoured the want ads and happened to come across a curious one in
The Village Voice
. The proposition read: “Bard wanted to write special material—good pay—no atheists please.”

Skeptic that I was as an adolescent, I had recently come to believe in a Supreme Being after thumbing through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Figuring this might be the yellow-brick to a little fresh scratch, I shaved and donned my most solemn attire, a black three-button number that would have been the envy of any pallbearer. Computing the tariff for private transportation versus the subway, I made a beeline for the IRT and jiggled to Brooklyn, where, above Rocky Fox’s Stick Academy, a green felt parlor with the usual cast of unsavories nursing their cue balls, existed the national headquarters of Moe, the Prayer Jockey.

Far from ecclesiastical in feel, the offices I entered bustled with the whirligig energy of
The Washington Post
. There were
cubbies
all over where harried scribes were banging out prayers to meet what was obviously an enormous demand.

“Come in,” a corpulent presence beckoned as he laid waste a covey of rugelach. “Moe Bottomfeeder, the Prayer Jockey. What can I do you for?”

“I saw your ad,” I wheezed. “In the
Voice
. Right under the Vassar coeds who specialize in body rubs.”

“Right, right,” Bottomfeeder said, licking his fingers. “So, you want to be a psalm scrivener.”

“Psalms?” I queried. “Like ‘The Lord is my shepherd’?”

“Don’t knock it,” Bottomfeeder said, “it’s a big seller. You should be so lucky. Any experience?”

“I did do a TV pilot called
Nun for Me, Thanks
, about some very devout sisters in a convent who build a neutron bomb.”

“Prayers are different,” Bottomfeeder said, waving me off. “They gotta be reverent, plus they gotta give hope, but—and here’s what separates the truly gifted minter of supplications from your Hallmark hacks—the prayers have gotta be worded in suchwise that when they don’t come true, the mark—er, that is, the faithful—can’t sue. You follow me?”

“I think I do. You’d prefer to avoid costly litigation,” I bantered.

Bottomfeeder winked. His bespoke threads and Rolex suggested a crackerjack business mind not unlike Samuel Insull or the late Willie Sutton.

“Believe it or not, I began as a lower-class drone like your
self,”
he said, launching unasked into his formative years. “Starting out selling neckties from an open valise à la Ralph Lauren. Both of us hit it big. Him in fashion, me by skinning the flock. Let’s face it, most people have pressing spiritual needs. I mean, every cretin prays. Using the old dreidel, I knocked out a couple of plaintive invocations on my laptop and the ginch I was bouncing at the time got the lightbulb to auction them off on eBay. Pretty soon the demand got so great I had to put on a staff. We got prayers for health, for love problems, for that raise you want, the new Maserati, maybe a little rain if you’re a rube—and of course the ponies, the point spread, and our hottest item: ‘O Heavenly Father, Lord God of hosts, let me abide in the kingdom of glory forever and, just once, hit the lottery—oh, and Lord, the Megaball.’ Like I say, the wording’s gotta be such that should the heavenly request tank, we don’t wind up getting served.”

At this point the door clicked open and a troubled head popped in. “Hey, boss,” the confounded author yelped, “a guy in Akron wants a prayer so his wife should bear him a son. I’m stymied for a fresh approach.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Bottomfeeder said to me, “I recently added a service where we customize prayers. We fashion the text to the unworthy’s individual needs and mail him some personally tailored begging.” Then, turning to his minion, he barked, “Try ‘May the broad lie down in green pastures and drop foals abundantly.’”

“Brilliant, M.B.,” the writer said. “I knew if I was stuck for a sacred phrase—”

“No, wait,” I interjected suddenly. “Make that ‘May she multiply fruitfully.’”

“Hey,” Bottomfeeder said, “you’re cooking with gas. This kid’s a pheen.” I was basking in my compliment when the phone rang. Bottomfeeder pounced on it.

“Holy Moe Bottomfeeder, the Prayer Jockey, speaking. What? I’m sorry, lady. You have to talk to our complaint department. We do not guarantee the Lord will grant whatever it is you’re on about. He can only give it His best shot. But don’t get discouraged, sweetheart. You still may find your cat. No, we don’t give refunds. Read the tiny letters on your prayer-confirmation contract. Spells out our liability and His. What we will do, though, is send you one of our complimentary blessings, and if you go over to the Lobster Grotto on Queens Boulevard and tell ’em the Lord sent you, you’ll get a gratis cocktail.” Bottomfeeder hung up. “Everybody’s on my case. Last week I got sued because we mailed the wrong envelope to a woman. She wanted a little divine assistance to make her face work turn out swell, and I accidentally sent her a prayer for peace in the Middle East. Meanwhile Sharon pulls out of Gaza and she gets off the operating table looking like Jake LaMotta. So what do you say, chuckles, in or out?”

Integrity is a relative concept, best left to the penetrating minds of Jean-Paul Sartre or Hannah Arendt. The reality is, when winter winds howl and the only affordable dwelling shapes up as a cardboard carton on Second Avenue, principles and lofty ideals have a tendency to vanish in a whirlpool down the bathroom plumbing, and so, postponing plans for a
Nobel,
I gritted my teeth and leased my muse to Moe Bottomfeeder. For the following six months, I must confess, a myriad of those pleas for divine intervention you or yours may have requested or bid for on eBay were knocked out by Mrs. Specter’s onetime prodigy, Hamish. Among my gold-leaf texts were “Dearest Lord—I am only thirty and already balding. Restoreth mine hair and anoint my sparse areas with frankincense and myrrh.” Another Specter classic: “Lord God, King of Israel—I have tried but in vain to shed twenty pounds. Smite my excess avoirdupois and protect me from starches and carbs. Yea, as I walk through the valley, deliver me from cellulite and harmful trans fats.”

Perhaps the top price ever paid at a prayer auction was for my moving plea: “Rejoice, O Israel, for the stock market hath arisen. O Lord, can You do it now for the Nasdaq?”

Yes, the Benjamin Franklins were falling into my account like manna from heaven until one day two swarthy gentlemen, heavily invested in Sicilian cement, dropped up to the office while Bottomfeeder was out. I was at my desk, debating the ethics of a prayer for some new home owners pleading for the castration of their contractor. Before I could ask the visitors how I could help them, I found myself making the same sound a fife makes as the one named Cheech lifted me by the scruff of my neck and dangled me out the window, high above Atlantic Avenue.

“There must be some mistake,” I squealed, scrutinizing the pavement below with more than a vested interest.

“Our sister won a prayer here last week,” he said. “She bid high on eBay for it.”

“Yes—yes,” I gagged. “Mr. Bottomfeeder will be back at six. He handles—”

“Well, we’re here to give you a message. That co-op board better accept her,” Cheech explained.

“We hear you wrote that prayer,” the brother with the ice pick added. “Let’s hear it—and loud.”

Not wanting to deny their request and seem a spoilsport, I trilled the material in question in the manner of Joan Sutherland.

“Blessed art Thou, oh Lord. Grant me in thine infinite wisdom the two-bedroom with the eat-in kitchen on Park and Seventy-second.”

“She paid twelve hundred bucks for that prayer. It better come true,” Cheech said, snapping me back inside and hanging me on the coatrack like a duck in a Chinatown window.