Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (10 page)

fifteen

From far down the street, I could see already that Fox Harris was lounging on the front stoop of my building. He was smoking a cigarette and he didn't look like he had a care in the world. Certainly he didn't appear to be a man who'd just completed a seventy-two-hour enforced accommodation in a holding cell. He looked like the king of the Village. As I got closer, he motioned grandly for me to take a seat beside him on the stoop. I did.

"Try one of mine," he said, opening a heart-shaped silver locket and grinding the tip of the cigarette into its unseen contents. "It's a new Australian aboriginal brand called Malabimbi Madness."

He held the cigarette-shaped object in his hand for a moment, turning it over and over. He seemed to be mulling over carefully what he was going to say next. I waited patiently until he finally spoke.

"I guess I should thank you, Walter," he said, "for bailing me out. So I will thank you. Thank you kindly. It was you who bailed me out, wasn't it?"

"Clyde's idea," I said. "My money."

"I'd like to say it'll come back to you tenfold, but I'm not sure it will."

"It's not a problem," I said. "Just don't flee the jurisdiction." Fox laughed. "Flee the jurisdiction?" he said scornfully. "No one in the history of mankind has ever been able to really do that, I'm afraid."

"Just see that you're not the first."

"Yes, sir," he said, throwing me a jaunty left-handed salute. "Now let's see if you're ready for some Malabimbi Madness."

He handed the object to me. We were sitting only a few feet away from people walking by on the sidewalk and it made me a little nervous but I wasn't going to let him know.

"Okay," I said. "What is it? Where'd you get it? And what do I do with it?"

"Aren't you the question man," he said. "It's called a one-hitter. I got it from friends in the sneezer as a going-away present. And what you do with it is you smoke it. Just pretend it's a regular cigarette. You can do that, can't you?"

I ignored Fox's condescending tone. I had no idea what he'd been through in the "sneezer," as he called it, as I had no idea what Fox or Clyde had been through during the courses of their lives. They were like waves in a misty sea and I could never seem to quite get beneath the surface of their being. The sea analogy was a good one, I thought, with some little measure of authorial pride. For they were anything but shallow people. And it was their very depth as human beings, I reflected, that made it difficult to discover who they truly were. They were almost easier to write about than to actually know. I did not take out my notebook but I made a few mental notes about Fox's apparent hardening of attitude toward me.

I turned my full attention to the object in my hand, the "one-hitter," which Fox proceeded to describe. He also claimed that just a few puffs on the device would make you so high "you'd need to contact somebody from
Star Trek
to help you find your head."

There has always been a paradox inside my soul. I'm basically a cautious, rather conservative person. On the other hand, there are times when I'm willing to try anything. For whatever the reason, this appeared to be one of those times. I took one deep hit off the one-hitter. It was a pretty amazing device, all right. It looked just like a cigarette, down to the smallest detail, but in reality was a hollow metal tube painted white for the cigarette and brown for the filter and as soon as I took the first puff, all my paranoia and misgivings about smoking dope on the stoop of the building, about Fox Harris, about the world in general seemed to disappear with the smoke of the Malabimbi Madness. I was never sure from that point on whether the euphoria I experienced was on account of the Malabimbi Madness or the idea of the one-hitter itself. All I know is that I was to use the device many a time with Fox and Clyde in the daunting days to come and it often seemed to free me, if only for a while, from the sad and stifling bonds of this tedious and sometimes terrible world.

"See the people on the sidewalk?" Fox asked. "Now take another hit and keep lookin' at 'em. What do you see?"

I took another hit and kept looking at the people. The one-hitter was having a powerful effect on me but the people still looked like people. Just normal people, going to lunch, coming back from lunch, going to work, going wherever normal people go in New York. I was suddenly glad I wasn't one of them.

"Aren't you glad you're not one of them?" asked Fox.

I was too stoned not to be stunned or maybe I was too stunned not to be stoned. Either way, it felt like somebody had hit me on the head with a croquet mallet. Was it possible that I was so shallow of emotion, so transparent in countenance that both Clyde
and
Fox could seemingly read my mind? It was
not
possible, I figured. The guy had merely made a lucky guess. But wasn't that what Clyde had said? That she'd merely made an educated guess? This was really more than I could deal with before my vegetarian lunch.

"They're all so self-importantly going nowhere," Fox was saying as he retrieved the one-hitter from my grasp, took another hit, and studied the passersby. "They just have no idea of who they are or where they really belong. Nothing will ever be enough for them. Nothing will truly make them happy. They all think they've got to get someplace, got to meet someone, got to get to work, got to get home, got to keep that appointment. If they had a hundred million bucks, it wouldn't be enough for them. If they had four cars, they'd need more. If they had four homes, they'd need more. They are organically out of touch with their land and their tribe."

Fox passed the one-hitter back to me. I took another deep hit and listened as his diatribe continued. The more hits I took, the more sense he seemed to be making.

"It's like Gandhi said about the West. He always called the West 'the one-eyed giant.' The West had all the great, important, modern things going for it, like science and technology and money. All the East had going for it was a kind of basic primitive wisdom that had grown up over the centuries, interlocking the land and the people in ways the West could hardly imagine. The people of the East were grounded in that wisdom, while the West was built on a shiny edifice of science. So it's very possible that the people in the East might not understand what really causes an eclipse of the sun. They might attribute it to an act of God or gods or fate, and panic might ensue, almost like the kind of panic engendered by a stock-market crash over here.

"But what's important, Walter, is that the people of the East generally feel an organic belonging to the land and the family and the tribe. They know who they are and have a good sense of where they belong and how they relate to life and land and love. Only the one-eyed giant thinks that one man needs to own two hundred radio stations or a whole string of shitty chain stores or restaurants. Only the one-eyed giant has five houses and never feels at home. These people walking by don't have a clue as to what they want. The only thing you can bet on is that if they ever discover what they want, they're going to want more and more and more, out of all proportion to their true organic need.

"I've known about the one-eyed giant for a long time. So has Clyde. The Indians who lived here before us, right here in Manhattan, knew themselves and their place in their world far better than we do today. So Clyde and I try to think the way they would if they were here now. We try to live our lives according to what we believe are our true organic needs. Am I boring you?"

"Not at all," I said honestly. It was a side of Fox Harris I'd never really seen. If his occupation was that of troublemaker, here was the motivation behind his rather odd career.

"You know what I'd like to see you do?" asked Fox.

"Give you back the one-hitter?"

"No. I'd like to see you meet your own personal organic need. I'd like to see you write another book."

"That's great," I said facetiously. "Clyde tells me
not
to write the book. Now you tell me to write it. Maybe you two should get your signals together."

"Believe me," said Fox, "our signals are together. But Clyde is a very intuitive person. She's also an extremely quick study. She's also a very beautiful and intelligent woman. But she isn't who you think she is."

I thought for a moment about Fox's rather cryptic remark. I, to be totally truthful, had no idea who Clyde really was. I only knew that she was becoming alarmingly influential in my life. Not that I wanted or could have caused her apparent powers over me to cease. Whoever she was, I reflected, I needed her in my world.

"Okay," I said at last. "So who is she? All I know is what she told me. She was telling fortunes in a carnival. You met her at the carnival. Then the carnival left town and the two of you stayed."

Fox looked at me quizzically, almost as if he were sizing me up spiritually. It was not a particularly comfortable feeling. It appeared as if he were trying to decide whether or not to respond. Finally, he did.

"Carnival?" he said rather whimsically. "I guess you could call it that if you wanted to. But it wasn't really a carnival, you see. It was a drug rehabilitation center, Walter, for hard-core heroin addicts. It was outside Tucson, Arizona. I was working there as a counselor."

For some reason, I didn't want to hear Fox tell me anything more about Clyde. But part of me, in a total spirit of ambivalence, wanted to know everything about her. And Fox knew her better than anyone. Indeed, as she'd once told me, Fox knew her better than she knew herself.

"And Clyde?" I asked. "What was she doing there?"

"I think you know the answer to that, Walter."

He had said it not unkindly. As I looked at him then, he met my gaze. Then he nodded, a little sadly.

"You mean," I said, "that Clyde was a heroin addict?" Fox put his thumbs together in front of his face. He raised his two index fingers straight up like little goalposts. "Touchdown!" he said.

sixteen

Her panties were black and shiny and wet and tasted like salt and sugar and cinnamon and some indefinable spice that was far more exotic in its effect upon my senses. I had, quite literally, chewed her panties off, knowing full well that they would only be an appetizer. Her bush was dark and verdant. It was obvious that she did not peroxide her pubic hair in the fashion of Marilyn Monroe. I licked it deliriously, desperately, like a man in a desert lapping up a mirage. I could feel the animal heat emanating from her thighs and burning my face like a furnace. I paused for a mere moment to glance up at her face. Clyde's eyes were flashing like a tiger's. I went back to my delicious work, not daring to gaze up again.

I thrust my tongue deep and I thrust my tongue shallow and lapped her up from stem to stern. She took my head in her hands and held it tightly against her snatch and I toiled away like a prisoner of ecstasy until at last the little man in the boat seemed precariously close to being thrown overboard. I tried to move up on her and mount her but she held me there with the strength of a mad Amazon. Her back arched suddenly and she screamed with a strange, muted, almost feral growling sound and her fingernails embedded themselves deeply into the sides and back of my neck and still she held me there against the molten mouth of a vaginal volcano. find there was nowhere else I'd have rather been. It's a dirty job, I thought to myself. It's a dirty job and I get to do it.

I ripped the page out of the typewriter but I did not throw it away. Sipping a tepid cup of coffee, I read the pages by the light of the floor lamp, pacing nervously back and forth in front of the darkened window. It was almost an embarrassment to read what I'd written. It read like a bad attempt at a steamy sex novel. And yet I'd written it and I felt oddly hesitant about getting rid of these passages.

What if I was crumpling up Henry Miller? I thought. What if I was about to toss D. H. Lawrence into the trash? Who was I, the mere author, to decide what was good or bad or great writing? Let the editor cut it out. Or better yet, fuck the editor. Let the critics decide. And if the critics don't like it, fuck the critics. No kid in the world ever grew up wanting to be a critic anyway. And there's never been a statue erected to a critic. There's probably never even been a penis erected to a critic.

I lit a cigarette and heated up the coffee. It was two-thirty in the morning and here I was pacing my tiny apartment like a man in prison or a wild animal in a cage, both of which I felt great empathy with at the moment. It was crazy, all right. Standing there in the middle of the night railing against editors and critics I didn't even have. But there was a thread of reason governing my thinking. Quality is a very subjective notion; quantity is not. If you have to choose between the two, I figured, always go with quantity. The quality may or may not ever be there, but the chances are that only some bitter, failed writer-turned-critic will ever claim to know the difference. You can't write a novel if you're riddled with self-doubt. Indeed, the quality most precious to an author is the
absence of self-doubt.
It doesn't really matter how talented you are. If you hear a voice in your head saying, "No one's going to like this. No one's going to get this," you're probably never going to complete a novel. You could be Oscar Wilde behind bars with your hair on fire but if you're riddled with self-doubt, it may be time to look for another line of work. It may be time to think about becoming a critic.

I sipped the reheated coffee, lit another cigarette, and reflected upon the paradox I was facing. The two people who now most vibrantly populated my life were advising me to take radically different directions regarding the writing of this novel. Clyde felt strongly that I simply should not write it for reasons she'd previously intimated. Fox, on the other hand, felt that writing the novel was vital to my own organic needs. It was like having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, each whispering their wise sibilance into my ears. And how did I feel about it? For the first time in almost seven years, I couldn't have stopped writing this novel if I'd wanted to, and I didn't want to. Hell, as novels go, I'd only just started. Maybe, I thought, I could write it clandestinely, without Clyde's knowledge. But that wasn't going to be easy considering Clyde's ability to make educated guesses, or read minds. At least she appeared to be able to read
mine.

But it wasn't just the novel that was keeping me up all night. It was Fox's revelation about the circumstances of how and where he'd first met Clyde. There was something almost spiritually incestuous about Fox and Clyde, I now realized. It would be quite a task to determine who was the mentor and who the protégé. Even more important, who was telling the truth to poor, lonely Walter Snow? Was Clyde a fraud? Had she lied to me about everything she'd ever told me? Or was her claim to have told fortunes in a carnival merely a quite understandable cover story for someone who didn't want her nefarious, drug-addicted past to become known? Should I confront her with it or just play along for a while?

With my recently written fictional sexual encounter still redolent in the room, it was time, I felt, to question both of them about their living arrangements and their loving arrangements. It was odd, I thought, that I still hadn't deciphered the true nature of their relationship. Yet, suppose I got differing stories from the two of them? Which one should I believe? Were they partners in some kind of open marriage? Was this the beginning of some kind of sordid love triangle? Was it the beginning of Walter Snow making a fool of himself? Or had that started long before I'd ever met Clyde and Fox? I simply did not know the answers to these questions and yet I needed them desperately if I was ever going to finish the novel.

You might ask, if a novel is a work of fiction, why would I necessarily need to know the truth about Fox and Clyde? The answer is a closely guarded secret that very few authors ever deign to share with their readers. But I see no reason not to share it with you now. And yet, I'm hesitant to reveal any trade secrets, just as any good magician or detective never likes to explain his tricks or articulate his methodology. But what the hell? What on earth could I possibly have to lose? You've probably guessed the secret by now anyway. Why did I so passionately require the truth?
Because all great fiction is true.

You see? That's why Houdini and Sherlock never revealed their methods. Because the moment they did, everyone on the planet would say, "I knew that!" And the next thing they would say is "I could've done that!" But they didn't know that and they
couldn't
have done that. (This does not apply, of course, to fortune-tellers at carnivals.)