My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (13 page)

I reached for Ondrea’s shoulder and she shied away. “What do you think?” I said hopefully. “Come on. Time to get Lon?”

She looked at me for a couple of seconds, her clear, green eyes widening. It still felt like anything could happen. At last, she took a sharp breath and said, “I don’t think so. I’m late somewhere. I should go.” She took a step back. “It was great meeting you, though. Good luck in there.”

The air whooshed out of me. “I’ll text you how it goes.”

“Do that,” she said.

“I’m here all weekend,” I said. “I mean, if you want to hang out another night.”

“Okay. Text me.” She turned and headed off down Forty-fourth Street, without a handshake, a hug, or even a high five. Then, a half block down, she glanced back at me over her shoulder and flashed a warm, genuine smile, the kind of knowing, intimate smile that, an hour before, I’d imagined she might have had on her face after a long lovemaking session at our castle outside Bratislava.

“I’m gonna get Lon for you!” I shouted, but already she’d flagged a cab and was hopping in. The light at Fifth Avenue slipped from red to green and the cab shot away and Ondrea was gone.

*

“Oh. Yeah. The Future Is Now,” said a guy at the hotel’s front desk. “They’re in the Legacy Ballroom. Fourth floor. You can take the elevator or you can take the stairs.”

I took the stairs, grand and winding, floating up them three at a time, around and around the lobby’s enormous atrium, gazing at the magnificent, six-story crystal chandelier in the center, sparkling like a frozen waterfall. The steps were layered with thick, luxurious carpet and my shoes made no sound. I felt an assassin’s sense of raw fury mingled with quiet, pulsing determination. It was eight thirty, and the Noble Pen awards ceremony had been slated to begin at eight. Outside the giant oak doors to the conference room, I slid my backpack around and rocked it front-pack style, tugging the zipper open; the tips of my Aquafina pee bottles quivered in the heavy, massive silence. I hauled on the doors and slipped in.

The Legacy Ballroom, for all its lofty name, turned out to be a drab and gloomy low-ceilinged hallway in the shape of three batting cages strung together end to end. About thirty-five men and women in their early fifties to mid-seventies, clothed in rumpled suits and faded dresses bearing
Hello, My Name Is
name tags, sipped wine from Dixie cups and milled aimlessly along a row of tables, where red plastic plates of carrots, celery, grape tomatoes, and cubes of cheese had been laid out, along with bowls of Chex Mix, a few boxes of Ritz crackers, and loose packets of ranch dressing. It was like a Super Bowl party for homeless academics.

“Excuse me,” said a perturbed-looking woman with long strands of gray hair, grasping my arm. “Are you Lon?”

“No,” I said. “I’m here to look for Lon.”

She called to an older man a few feet away. “Come here, honey,” she said, waggling a finger toward me, “I think I found Lon.”

The man creaked near and offered his hand. “Lon? Pleased to meet ya. When’s the ceremony start?”

I shook his hand. “Thanks. Not Lon, though. Thanks.”

“What say?”

“I’m not Lon!” I quickly apologized, feeling bad for lashing out at the very people I was there to defend. I’d just rarely been so amped up.

“Well, who’s in charge here?” said the man. He turned to his wife. “He says he’s not Lon.”

She looked at me. “You sure you’re not Lon?”

“Fucking positive.”

She gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, ain’t this a fine mess.”

It only took a few minutes of poking around, talking to people, to piece things together. The “awards ceremony” was hardly a ceremony at all. According to an old woman in a wheelchair who said she’d been stationed there since six o’clock, a giant, hairy, lumpy guy had shown up around six fifteen, carted in a stack of chairs, set up some tables, and spread out the food and drinks, along with the blank name tags, a couple of markers, Future Is Now pins, and certificates for each of the prize winners. He talked to almost no one and was out of there before seven. The old woman had assumed he was a hotel employee, but when I suggested it might have been Lon, the director of the festival, she said yes, that sounded right, she’d heard someone use that name with him.

Fucking Lon. He was an apparition, a wisp of smoke—Sasquatch and Keyser Söze rolled into one. I’d been to both coasts to track him down and still he kept eluding me. I roamed the hall, chatting up one kind soul after another, trying to get a line on our mystery man, but they were all as mystified as I was. For the most part, everyone’s spirits were up—this was a celebration, after all, and whoever they spoke to, mutual congratulations were in order (they’d all been named prize winners)—but beneath their joviality, a creeping sense that all was not right had begun to seep into the room like a rank smell. And this was just the beginning, I knew. The next day, in Tompkins Square Park, the full extent of Lon’s con would slowly become clear.

Another woman stopped me to ask if I was Lon. “I want to switch booth locations for tomorrow,” she said. “I’m in the Self-Help tent, but I asked for Romance.”

I couldn’t bear another second of this. I’d fucked things up with Ondrea, I’d fucked things up with Sarah, and Lon Hackney, I figured, was off counting his riches somewhere, laughing at me and his legion of Noble Pen suckers.

“Well, if you’re not Lon,” said the woman, “you must be an author. What kind of books do you write?”

“Biographies of bellhops.” I was fuming, and trying to sort out my next move.

“Neat.” She reached into her shoulder bag. “Hey, would you like a copy of my novel? I’d like to give you one. I can sign it for you.”

My dad, I knew, if he was in the room, would have been reduced to the same—traveling to New York with hopes of making some publishing contacts, landing an agent, and finding the right home for his book, and before long, feeling lucky just to find a stranger generous enough to accept a free copy.

The woman’s book was called
Aiden’s Quest
; it was spiral bound, with a sheet of cellophane over the cover, and had been printed at a Kinko’s near her home in Bemidji, Minnesota, she told me. She described it as a ninth-century romantic thriller about a faerie held captive on a Scottish isle and the young monk who fights to free her. “What’s your name?” she asked, peeling to the title page to write an inscription.

“You know,” I said, “would you mind signing it to Sarah?”

“Who’s Sarah?”

“My wife.”

She gave a little squeal, and said, “I’d be happy to. Sarah with an ‘h’?”

“Sarah with an ‘h.’”

She signed her book carefully and handed it over, and I thanked her sincerely. Another author approached, offering me a copy of his book, and within a few minutes I’d collected a half dozen freebies before I beat it for the door. I felt my emotions crashing and burning—things with Ondrea were ruined, Lon had blue-balled my pee-bottle siege, and all that was left to do was find a bar and get smashed.

*

Fortunately, I didn’t have to go far. A half-level below the Emerald Bell’s lobby was a hotel bar called Maroon. I sat on a stool and ordered a Booker’s on the rocks and watched the NBA Finals with two middle-aged Orlando Magic fans who said they were Nextel salesmen from Kissimmee. The guy next to me, chugging rum, was the smaller but rowdier of the two—he was rocking a Hedo Turkoglu jersey and waved his arms in the air when the Lakers shot free throws, going nuts if they missed, as though he’d caused them to brick it, while his bulky friend on the far side brooded and nursed a Heineken. “What’s wrong, Big Fella?” I asked.

“Aw, he don’t like sports,” said Turkoglu. “He just wants to smoke weed.”

“I’ve got weed,” I told him.

At halftime, we went up to Big Fella’s room on the twenty-second floor and I passed him a little baggie of homegrown to roll into doobies, while me and Turkoglu found the game on TV and raided the minifridge for airplane shots of Crown Royal and Jack. Soon we were all pretty fucked up. The game was a battle—Hedo and Kobe going toe-to-toe, and before long I was waving my arms along with Turkoglu when the Lakers shot free throws, and eventually we goaded Big Fella into waving his arms, too, as we all laughed and shouted.

During an ad break halfway through the fourth quarter with the score tied, I stumbled into the bathroom to take a leak, and somehow set my glass on the counter and knocked it off in the same motion, and it shattered to pieces at my feet. A second later, I slid backwards on my own puddle of ice and went crashing down—
wham
—to the floor. Something bit the side of my right hand, it felt like, and when I held my hand up, I saw dark-red blood bubbling from a long wound that ran from my wrist to my pinky—I’d sliced myself good on a broken piece of glass. I winced, but had enough drink in me, it didn’t hurt too much, I just didn’t want to have to get stitches. Lying on the floor of Big Fella’s bathroom, I reached for a washcloth and wrapped it tightly around my cut-up hand, then began picking up all the broken bits of glass. Something caught my attention on the floor next to the little waste bucket under the sink—it was one of those long, glossy luggage tags stamped with your final destination that they slap on your bag at the airport before tossing it into the plane’s belly, which you tear off and toss out once you get where you’re going. But there was a name on this one, and it took me several dumbfounded seconds to process it cleanly—
L. HACKNEY
.

What the fucking fuck?
I scrambled to my feet and charged out of the bathroom. Turkoglu turned his head from the game to look at me. “What the hell,” he said. “Holy shit, you’re all bloody, dude.”

I looked past him, at Big Fella, and held the luggage tag high above my head, shrieking wildly,
“What the fuck is this shit?”

“Whoa, man,” said Turkoglu, rising to his feet. “I think you got overserved.”

“Is this true?” I howled, waving the tag, shaking drops of blood onto my neck and chin.

“Yeah,” said Big Fella. “I flew into JFK. So what.”

“For what?”

“What?” His eyes were glazed and red.

“You flew in for what?
Why
are you here?”

“For the Future Is Now conference, man.”

Three hours before, when I’d first walked into the Emerald Bell, the righteousness of my mission had sharpened my focus to a fine, deadly point, but now, caught off guard, drunk and stoned, I felt confused and frantic, like a man swarmed by bats. “I thought you said you sold cell phones!” I cried.

“Phil sells cell phones,” said Big Fella. “I run a literary agency. What’s it to you?”

“I don’t ‘sell cell phones,’” Turkoglu piped up. “I get retail stores to carry Nextel products. You make it sound like I’m hawking ’em out of my trunk.” He turned back to the TV and cranked up the volume.

I was losing it. “But I thought—I thought you guys worked together.”

“Who?” said Turkoglu. “Me and him? Naw, I just met Lon downstairs, an hour before you showed up.” He leapt to his feet, cheering a blocked shot by Dwight Howard, and shouted at the TV, “Our house, baby! You’re in our motherfuckin’ house now!”

I stared at Big Fella—Lon Hackney—feeling sick with adrenaline, herb, sake, and bourbon. He looked like Jabba the Hutt dressed as a burned-out music producer for Halloween—long, scraggly hair, a wide, splotchy face, in a black turtleneck and black jeans. Not a salesman at all—what had I been thinking? He eyed me through hooded lids, warily, high as hell but aware that something dangerous had been set into motion. “Your name is Lon?” I asked him over the TV’s roar, with a bleat of hysterical laughter.

He nodded.

“Lon Hackney?”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

I said nothing, struggling to fend off a strange rush of unexpected tears, and reached into my backpack with my unbloody hand. One at a time, I drew out the Aquafina bottles of pee. “Here, Lon,” I said. “Catch.” I lobbed them across the room to him, quickly, one-two, and he caught the first and fumbled the second; it bounced into his lap, gently fizzing.

Slowly, in his weed-dwindled, morally rotted, pea-sized Jabba brain, he began to put two and two together. His face went slack, and he slumped a little, took a deep breath, and said in a flat, low voice, edged with both fear and menace, “I know who you are. What do you want from me? Why are you here?”

The quiet, eye-of-the-hurricane drama of our long-awaited face-off was lost on Turkoglu—Phil, from Nextel—who couldn’t understand why we’d stopped paying attention to the game when the score was so close down the stretch. “Hey, you guys, shut up and focus! We need a bucket here!”

I felt like the German shepherd tied to a stake in the yard who for years barks ferociously at the little poodle next door, and then, when he finally breaks loose from his chain, races over, sniffs the poodle’s ass for a second, and then wanders off, directionless, down the road. All of life’s urgent pursuits are rendered meaningless once they’re actually in your grasp—I wondered why I’d thought confronting Lon Hackney would be any different. I still had to pee. I could pee on him, I mused. I could empty the bottles of pee over his head. I could shout at him and call him names. But what, in the end, was the fucking point? Here he was before me, a washed-up fat-ass, hiding from his own conference’s participants, lighting joints in a lonely hotel room, his two best friends a pair of dudes he’d just met that night, watching basketball with us though he didn’t even like sports. There was nothing I could say or do to knock him any lower. Still, I’d come to New York to make him stop, to end his writing contest scam. For my dad. For Ondrea.

“Lon, you fucker, you supreme fucker,” I said. “I know your fucking scam inside and out, so listen to me, you don’t have to deny anything, ’cause there’s no point in that. I know the scam exactly. Okay? I know. I know it all.” I kept my right hand raised high toward the ceiling, clutching the washcloth, and it’s possible that with all the blood dripping down my arm, I seemed crazier and more dangerous than I really was. “Here’s the thing,” I growled. “You got to quit. You got to quit this shit.”