My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (12 page)

“I’ve got to take a leak,” I said, my heart twisting. “I’ll be right back.” I scooped up my empty half-pint R & R flask and limped up the steps to Lon’s office door. Lights were on in some of the adjacent offices, but I was slightly buzzed and by that point of my West Coast visit no longer gave a fuck—I dropped trou and filled the slender liquor bottle with pee. Someone poked their head out of a door and quickly slammed it shut. A moment later, the Bangladeshi woman from the liquor store came rushing up the steps, shouting at me and waving a cordless telephone. “I’m calling the nine-one-one!” she shouted. “Police come. It’s ringing right now! You must go. You must go.”

“Okay, okay,” I shouted back, buttoning my pants, feeling like a mutant superhero who has only good intentions but is generally viewed as a freak. Quickly, I tightened the cap on the bottle and launched it through the mail slot into Lon’s office. I rushed past the old woman, my ankle flaring with pain.

“Don’t come back here!” she hollered after me. “Only for office workers and their guests. Want to go to jail? No thieves allowed!”

A fuse lit within me. I turned and exploded on her: “Thieves? Lon Hackney’s the thief! Your tenant, Lon Hackney. A criminal! You’re harboring criminals here. You’re sheltering an extortionist. You’re complicit! Look, I’m a fucking police officer. Want me to call the FBI?”

She looked at me tiredly, unimpressed by my wild, nonsensical lies and impotent threats. For a police officer, I supposed, the glasses-nose-and-mustache disguise lacked a certain aura of professionalism. I tugged the rig off my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I fell off a roof and things have been really hard for me lately. I like your liquor store. I think it’s cool that you guys sell stamps. No one sells stamps anymore. And you have a really nice grandson.”

“Thank you,” she said, dropping her hands to her side. “I didn’t really call the nine-one-one. But I guess it is time for us to say goodbye. You can find another place to be yourself.”

Sarah walked me back to Eli’s apartment. My flight was early the next morning. “Text me when you land in Detroit,” she said, “so I know you made it home safe.”

At 6:30 a.m., on the way to SFO Airport, I convinced Eli to shoot past Lon’s office on Mission Street one last time. I’d written a note to slip through his mail slot, to go with the bottle of pee from the evening before, half veiled threat, half last-ditch appeal to his conscience: “
WE’RE WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO. DO THE RIGHT THING.
” But when I got to his office door and poked open the mail slot, I was stunned to see that the pile of mail on the floor was gone. I heard myself say out loud, “What the fuck?” Sometime during the night, apparently, Lon Hackney, stealthy as a ghost, had flitted through, collected two weeks’ worth of contest submissions—or at least the checks from each package—and disappeared again into his bunker. After a week spent staking out his office, I couldn’t believe he’d spirited past me, that I’d missed him by hours. Still, it meant he’d found the bottle I’d left for him, and that thought alone—the eel of spooky unease I was sure now circulated in his belly—kept me smiling the whole way home.

*

Ten months passed. Lon seemed to be lying low. Had my efforts huffed and puffed and blown his house of cards right down? It was hard to say, but all of his lit agency e-mails slipped to a trickle and then fell off completely. Maybe he’d found a new racket, I imagined, and was sticking people with balloon-payment mortgages, or peddling shady investments, or running a three-card monte game on Fisherman’s Wharf—nothing to be proud of, to be certain, but all fine by me. One Saturday in the fall, a guy left his Chevy Silverado parked in front of my house, with Ohio plates and swathed in Ohio State Buckeyes bumper stickers, and I gifted him my remaining bottles of pee in the bed of his truck, with a note that said, “
GO BLUE
.” I spent the winter in Michigan, trying to regain strength in my ankle, with mixed success, and talking to girls at the bar, trying to forget about Sarah, with no success.

In the spring, out of nowhere, I got an e-mail from Lon—not a personal e-mail, but the standard call for submissions for his latest writing contest, the Noble Pen Awards. The bastard was back, and I saw that after his brief hibernation, he’d snaked his greedy paws to every corner of the country, expanding his empire from six bogus literary agencies to twelve, each scheduled to host an awards gala at a slew of far-flung “Future Is Now” conferences, beginning with New York City and proceeding westward. Among other contests, he’d christened his newly hatched brood the Golden Pencil Awards, the QWERTYUIOP Quest (okay, that one was clever), and, with what was starting to feel more like ill will than inattention to detail, the Cormac McCarthy Memorial Challenge.
What the hell?
Couldn’t he at least pick writers who’d already died? I forwarded his e-mail to Ondrea Wales, whom I’d continued to trade messages with here and there, and she wrote back four minutes later: “Oh no! He must be stopped. Come to New York—let’s vanquish him!”

Middle of June, I flew to New York, the weekend of the Noble Pen Awards and Lon’s sham “Future Is Now” conference. I claimed to Ondrea that I had other business there, and I guess I sort of did, but mostly I just wanted to meet her in person and dump pee on Lon Hackney’s head. The conference was now spread over two days—an awards ceremony on Thursday night at the swanky Emerald Bell Hotel, and outdoor readings in Tompkins Square Park the following afternoon. Me and Ondrea made a dinner date for Thursday evening, with plans to head over to the Emerald Bell afterwards to confront Lon.

At five o’clock Thursday, I showered and shaved at my cousin’s apartment in Midtown, and transferred a pair of wide-mouth Aquafina bottles to my backpack from the gym bag I’d brought from home and checked on the plane. The blue, plastic tint of the bottles gave the pee sloshing inside them a greenish, radioactive glow. In the subway station, on the way to meet Ondrea at a sushi place she’d picked out, a police dog eyed me with grim disapproval, as though it sensed I had a bomb in my bag.

In person, Ondrea was even prettier than her picture. She had long blond hair, green eyes, rosy cheeks, and a wide, easy smile, and she wore a white lace top and a purple beret that seemed fashionable, not pretentious. The fact that she’d applied gloss to her lips and a trace of eyeliner—and were those
sparkles
dusted across her cheeks?—reassured me that I wasn’t crazy for thinking of this as a date, even though in my e-mails and texts I’d held back from any romantic innuendo and had said only, “Let’s grab a bite,” and, “It’ll be great to hang out.”

What can I say? Ondrea was smart, funny, and inquisitive, entertainingly opinionated, endlessly adorable. For two hours, we tossed back tuna rolls and pounded sake. We talked about writing, our families, our childhoods, our friends, our fears, our hopes, our dreams. I told Ondrea about the old, beautiful, abandoned movie theater with a glorious marquee I’d spotted in the town of Tres Piedras, New Mexico, and how I wanted to move there, fix the place up, and share my favorite movies a couple of nights a week with the locals and whatever road-tripping folks found their way in. Ondrea said she had relatives on her mother’s side who lived in a giant, dilapidated castle in the Slovakian countryside, a hundred miles outside of Bratislava, and had offered to put her up while she worked on her next book. We lapsed into silence, gazing at each other, pondering a home-and-home series: Slovakia, New Mexico.

I ordered another carafe of sake and turned the conversation to Lon Hackney and our impending collision with him at the Emerald Bell, which stirred me with a kind of open-dammed bloodlust. Ondrea wanted to know what our plan would be when we confronted him, and I patted my backpack, on the chair between us, and told her not to worry, I had the whole thing figured out.

“What do you have in there, a gun?” she asked.

I laughed cryptically. “Lon will not forget what happens tonight,” I promised her. “It will haunt him. As long as he keeps it up with all the contest bullshit, this night will haunt him.”

“Cheers to that,” she said. She lifted her sake, and we clinked glasses and downed our drinks. I filled our cups again, and again we downed them. “Might as well finish this stuff off,” she said, with the cutest of shrugs. She poured the rest into our cups and we knocked them back, like a couple of college freshmen on spring break, shooting tequila on Bourbon Street. Ondrea giggled. “I have to pee,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay. I’ll get the check.”

We headed for the Emerald Bell, walking crosstown. I took her hand, and she pulled away to adjust her purse, then reached for my hand again. My heart felt buoyant, hyperoxygenated. It was the most exquisite of gentle June nights in Manhattan. Taxis flared past; the smell of kabobs and sugary roasted almonds wafted from street vendors’ carts; snatches of conversations fluttered through the air from other passersby in Greek, Mandarin, and Jamaican patois. There’s no city on Earth I’d rather walk through filled with drink and holding a girl’s hand. Even my bad ankle, for the first time in a year, felt brand-new.

Outside the Emerald Bell, Ondrea said, “Okay, seriously, what’s our plan gonna be?”

“We’re gonna ambush him,” I said.

“With weapons?”

“Kind of, yes. I brought one for you, too.” I pulled my backpack off, then thought twice before reaching inside, wondering if my urine bottles were too much to reveal on a first date.

Ondrea saw me hemming and hawing. “What’s going on?” she said, laughing. “What’s in the bag?”

I thought about how humiliated Ondrea told me she’d been in Golden Gate Park the day she’d set up her booth, about her anger at a guy who would take advantage of struggling writers, folks who had the least money to burn. It was what made a pee-bottle attack so appropriate—we’d be fighting fire with fire, lashing him back with the shame he’d splashed remorselessly on so many others.

I pulled out the Aquafina bottles and shook them up, green brew bubbling like a magic elixir. “This is gonna be the night I’ve been waiting for for a long-ass time,” I told her. “We’re gonna give Lon an extremely memorable shower in front of everybody. In the middle of the awards ceremony.” I passed her one of the bottles. “Are you down or what?”

“What’s in these?” she asked.

“Well. It’s pee.”

“Pee?”

“Like, urine.”

“
Your
pee?”

“Yeah, I filled these,” I said, with drunken pride.

“Tonight?”

“In Michigan.”

She stared at me. “Oh my God,” she said. She seemed to recognize my plan’s sinister brilliance.

“We’ll dump these on his head,” I went on, light-headed, filled with glee. “You first, me first, at the same time, it doesn’t matter. We’ll let him know what we think of his scams. We’ll let everyone know. Then—and this is just my suggestion—we should walk up to Central Park and climb in one of those horse-and-buggies, and kiss each other for like an hour and forty-five minutes. I really can’t wait to kiss you.”

Ondrea peered at me, her face frozen into the most curious expression. Over the course of the next couple of seconds, I swear I saw each tiny muscle fiber in her face—from her eyelids to her nostrils to her jaw—drop, one by one, like coins in the Plinko game on
The Price Is Right
, until she’d reached a look of confused, horrified revulsion. A dagger of instant regret gutted my insides, and I felt all the hopefulness and joy gush out of me, like a gooey knot of intestines.

“No,” she said. “No! I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.” She looked at the pee bottle she was clutching with trembling, fearful disgust, like an accident victim coming off morphine, discovering a hook where her hand used to be. “You don’t even know me!” she cried. “I’m seeing someone right now. I’ve been seeing someone. Did you think this was—oh my God, take this from me!” She thrust the bottle back into my hand.

“I was kidding?” I said, feeling a great sadness rush in. “This is just lemonade. But Lon, he’ll think it’s pee!”

“It looks like pee,” she said.

“That’s the genius of it!”

“It’s pee. Am I right? It’s pee!”

“Okay, it’s pee—but doesn’t he deserve pee? A lot of pee? We’re letting him off easy here!”

Two young West African bellhops, in their trussed-up, tasseled attire, heard our commotion and came trotting near. “Everything okay here?” one of them asked.

“It’s fine, thanks,” I said. “Except she’s breaking up with me.”

He looked at Ondrea. “Everything okay, miss?”

She nodded, but retained her look of distress.

“You two guests of the hotel?” asked the bellhop. His cohort headed away to unload luggage from the trunk of a town car.

I shook my head. “Just here for the Future Is Now conference.”

“Oh, cool, man. You guys authors?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of stuff? Biographies?”

“Well, this is Ondrea Wales, she writes teen novels. They’re really good—I mean, I think older readers get something out of them, too.
Girl of the Century
, check that one out, it’s awesome.”

Ondrea’s withering gaze softened. “You read
Girl of the Century
?” she peeped.

“I read all your books.”

She smiled despite herself, and looked away.

The bellhop edged between us. “Well, if you know anyone who writes biographies, if they want a crazy life story, I know someone they should write about.”

“Who’s that?”

“Me!” For the next several minutes, while Ondrea stood with her arms crossed, sighing and scowling, the guy outlined the strange, unexpected turns that his life and career path had taken, from a nickel mine east of Dakar to a falafel shop in Hamburg to the bellhop stand at the Emerald Bell Hotel near Times Square. His partner kept shouting for him, urging him to get back to work, to which he’d holler back in French,
“Deux minutes! Deux minutes!”
I tried to gauge Ondrea’s mood—on the one hand, she seemed to think I was a fucking psycho, on the other hand, she hadn’t left yet. Finally, me and the bellhop traded cell-phone numbers and shook hands, and he hurried off. I realized I was still holding the pee bottles, and quickly stuffed them deep into my backpack.