Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (18 page)

I met up with Clyde about a block away and we loitered on the corner congratulating ourselves. No doubt we both looked somewhat flushed, pardon the expression, from the excitement of the apparent success of the operation.

"Now where the hell is Fox?" I asked. "This waiting for him is starting to make me nervous.'"

"Don't worry, Sunshine," said Clyde sweetly. "Fox always comes through. In the meantime, there's something I've always wanted to say to you."

"What, darling?"

"Care for a frappuccino?"

twenty-six

Bright and early the next morning, Fox and Clyde woke me up like Huck Finn, throwing stones against my basement apartment window as if I were an urban-dwelling Tom Sawyer. Or was it Tom Sawyer who threw stones against Huck Finn's window? It really doesn't matter, I suppose. As an author, or literary man, as Fox would have it, it's possible that
I
've faulted myself unfairly for not being certain of these things. Fox's little lecture on Herman Melville was still mildly rankling as well, conceivably because I'd learned things about Melville I'd never known. Of course, nobody really knew much about Melville. That was the glory of being an author: successfully creating something that would outlive your own bones. Like a great white whale, a maniacal ship captain, and a first mate someone would someday name a chain of corporate coffee shops after. For all I knew, Huck Finn might have been throwing stones at Melville's window. Anyway, Fox and Clyde awakened me in this prepubescent fashion and I woke up and realized it was six-thirty in the morning. I staggered over to the door and buzzed them in. They seemed to hurl themselves into the room like a pair of human harpoons, both in an arc of constant kinetic energy. They paced back and forth excitedly as I struggled to get dressed, brush my teeth, and comb my hair. Indeed, the two of them seemed so full of life it almost felt as if I were a single adult looking after two small children.

"Hurry up," said Fox. "They're probably starting without us."

"It's going to be great!" shouted Clyde. "If it works."

"Of course it'll work! I'll bet it's already started!"

"Hurry up, Walter! We could be missing the greatest show on earth!"

"Will you two please control yourselves!" I mumbled in exasperation. "I'm trying to brush my teeth!"

About five minutes later, the three of us, bundled up against the chill, damp morning, headed out the door and down the street toward Starbucks to pay witness to the fruits of our nefarious labors. At this hour of the morning, the Village looked almost beautiful, waking up against the dawn with most of the stores still shuttered and most of the people still sleeping. We stopped at a little bakery, got doughnuts and coffee, and walked leisurely up the final block to Starbucks. It was six-fifty when we reached the sidewalk in front of Starbucks and heard the first siren begin to wail.

"Holy shit," I said. "They've called the cops!"

"Relax," said Fox. "No way they've tumbled to it yet. Bet you anything you want that that's an ambulance on the way to pick up a customer who's been inexplicably stricken with some unknown illness."

"I like that 'inexplicably stricken'!" said Clyde. "Maybe Fox should be writing the book." She smiled a wide, amoral smile that connoted no sympathy whatsoever for the possible victim or victims. I was mainly irritated by her remark about Fox writing my book, so I suppose I was equally guilty of feeling little if anything about the victims of our latest prank. It takes an amoral eye to recognize an amoral smile, I thought to myself, taking out my notebook and scribbling down the line.

"Walter is the writer," said Fox, "and I'm the fighter."

"I'm the inciter," said Clyde.

Before anyone could say another word, an obese woman in a canary yellow spandex outfit stumbled out of the front door of Starbucks and vomited on the sidewalk. Other customers continued to enter and exit the premises, generally ignoring the woman and her plight as if she were a homeless person or a dead body lying in their way.

"Good ol' New York," said Fox. "It takes more than a fat lady in neon yellow puking on a sidewalk to give anybody pause around here."

The siren was getting much louder now and as I glanced through the window, I noticed that the tempo seemed to be picking up inside the store as well. There was a guy who looked like a Wall Street type doubled up right in front of the counter, obviously suffering from rather severe bowel cramps. Other customers, however, were still placing their orders on either side of the man, as if he didn't exist.

"Not the best
latte
advertisement I can think of," said Fox, sidling up next to me by the front window. There was a smile on Fox's face resembling that of a small child opening his birthday presents.

"And look at that guy trying to get into the men's room," shrilled Clyde gleefully as she pulled up on the other side of me, encircling my waist with a slender arm.

"Here comes the first meat wagon!" said Fox as an ambulance pulled directly in front of the Starbucks. "There'll be more where that came from."

"The cops have got to get here soon," I said, trying to keep the trepidation out of my voice.

"Not necessarily," said Fox. "They haven't figured it out yet. How could they? Hell, they'll probably suspect it's some kind of weird Legionnaire's disease type of thing before they finally stumble on the truth. The truth, remember, is not only hard to take, it's often hard to find. And when they do find it, it won't make any sense to them. 'Why would anybody want to do something like this to Starbucks?' they'll say."

"Poor little Starbucks," offered Clyde.

"That's one thing they're not," said Fox. "They've got some of the deepest pockets on the whole planet. They've sucked the lifeblood out of every coffee farmer, every mom-and-pop place, and every yuppie-clone consumer in the country—"

"And they murdered the only Unicorn in New York!" finished Clyde. "They killed poor Jonjo's life's dream. They deserve what-ever's coming to them!"

"And what's coming," I said, "is another ambulance."

A succession of ambulances continued to come and go for the next hour or two, and when the cops finally did show up, it appeared to be mostly in the capacity of crowd control. The largest crowd, of course, was in the immediate vicinity of the Starbucks's rest room. It was a restless and desperate and vocal crowd and it swelled and roiled and surged in front of the rest-room door like the dark and dangerous tides of a distant sea-Moby-Dick's sea, if I may. People were pounding the door, kicking the door, clawing at the door, as if it were some intransigent heavenly portal representing their last and only chance for salvation. In a narrow, secular sense, no doubt, I suppose it was.

A feisty old lady was using her umbrella to push away people who were shitting and vomiting all around her. As she exited the place, she turned in our general direction and preached to the assembled multitudes:"I'm
nevah
going in there again!" she shouted. "There's something wrong with this
kaw-fee!"

The very pavement in front of the store by this time had been transformed into an obstacle course of vomit and human excrement. People were slipping and sliding their way out of the treacherous area, some of them falling down, many others in a determined, hurried state that seemed unusual even for inveterate New Yorkers. It was a scene right out of Dante's
Inferno
all right, but I had to admit there was something genuinely funny about it, too.

"It's a Berlitz cultural-empathy course," said Fox. "There's nowhere to take a dignified crap anywhere on this block. Now they'll discover firsthand a little bit of what it's like to be homeless."

People were now flying like arrows out of Starbucks. Rubberneckers had slowed traffic to a standstill in the area and the cops, who'd finally arrived, had their hands full with the hopelessly snarled traffic as well as moving the crowd of onlookers and kibitzers off the slippery sidewalk in front of the store. We moved on with the crowd, eventually making our way back toward the apartment. As you can imagine, we were all three in a state of high exhilaration. There was no reason then, and, indeed, I see no reason now, to pass any moral judgment upon our behavior. We did what we did for reasons I'm not sure I could explain. Maybe there was no reason. Sometimes in life that's the best reason of all.

Back at the apartment, we passed around a bottle of Jim Beam Clyde had brought, and Fox triumphantly put a little red flag on the flowchart on the wall. Then he broke out the one-hitter and started circulating that around with the Jim Beam. We were beginning to feel pretty good about things. Starbucks, for sure, had taken a major hit that morning and Clyde and Fox had lived to tell about it and I'd lived to write about it. It was not a knockout blow, however, and none of us was under the delusion that an outfit as big and deep and insidious as the Starbucks organization, or even one tiny link in its chain, could ever truly be broken. The one-eyed giant of the West could be bloodied and bowed, according to Fox, but he could never be killed. That was because, again according to Fox, he was part of every one of us.

"Today," said Fox, lying on his back in the middle of the floor, "we bore witness to a thing of beauty."

"And
it was
fun!"
said Clyde almost wistfully. "What did you think of it all, Sunshine?"

I put my thumbs together in front of my face. Then I raised my two index fingers higher and higher toward the sky we could not see.

"Touchdown," I said.

twenty-seven

The next days were a little crazy and a little busy even for this intrepid trio of coconspirators. Clyde, who did not love cockroaches, nonetheless kicked into high gear in a supportive role in the operation. She began making calls to the city's health inspector's office, the same office that the Starbucks people had used to bring down the Unicorn. She complained that she'd seen cockroaches at Starbucks. There weren't, of course, any cockroaches at Starbucks. Not yet.

Clyde also, not wishing to let her antipathy for cockroaches distance her from the campaign, came up with her own plan, which eventually she named Operation Disconnect. It involved calling the
Daily News
on her untraceable phone line and placing ads for help wanted at Starbucks. The ads went out to all union and nonunion workers offering a ridiculously high hourly salary and requiring no past work experience whatsoever. Anyone interested in "exploring the possibilities of a Starbucks career" could call the number provided, which was, of course, Starbucks's number. Operation Disconnect also involved Clyde's going down to her friendly neighborhood Kinko's and making thousands of flyers, which she proceeded to put up on bulletin boards and telephone poles all over the Village. The flyers offered a one-hundred-dollar discount at Starbucks if the customer would only fax the flyer back to Starbucks with his or her address and signature included. Operation Disconnect, as you might expect, was a huge success. In some ways, I must say, Operation Disconnect, in its own quiet, unobtrusive way, was even more effective than Operation Diarrhea, if such a thing were possible. Clyde, in her own ingenious fashion, managed to bill both the newspaper ads and the flyers to Starbucks. Fox, of course, dutifully recorded Operation Disconnect on the flowchart with a little red flag.

On the morning of the second day after Operation Diarrhea, Fox walked into the apartment carrying a cardboard box of the size and shape and variety that might well contain a computer or a printer. It did not. What it contained, according to Fox, were thousands of live cockroaches he'd just purchased at the local pet shop. It also contained a net bag that secured a large and hungry gecko lizard. The bag and lizard were secured by two strings emerging from the top of the box, which, when one was pulled, would release the lizard into the population of cockroaches. Fox described all this in great detail to his audience of myself and Clyde, who appeared to be turning a whiter shade of pale.

"This weapon," said Fox, "falls into the category of organic binary munitions. Binary munitions, as you may well know, are entities that are perfectly harmless in their self-contained states. When, however, the two entities are combined, an explosion or reaction of great force takes place. Are we clear on this?"

I was fairly clear and Clyde looked so clear she was about ready to pass out. Fox bummed a quick smoke from me and continued on blithely with his narrative.

"To be fair to the cockroaches," he said, "the duct tape across the bottom few inches of the box conceals three small holes through which an avenue of escape for them is available once the tape is removed. The string is pulled first, of course, releasing the gecko; then, when the tape is removed, our little insect friends should rather quickly begin pouring out of the three holes in prodigious numbers. Clyde, for obvious reasons, will not be involved directly in Operation Cockroach Bomb, but I'd like to ask you, Walter, to participate in the same diversionary capacity in which you performed so famously before, distracting the counter people from what's going on in the center ring."

"One for all and all for one," I said. "When do we start?"

"In about five minutes," said Fox.

As Fox, his box, and I trudged down the street toward Starbucks, I began to get my first mild feelings of foreboding about the wisdom of Operation Cockroach Bomb. Maybe it was just what anybody would feel going back to the scene of his crime after only a couple of days had passed. It wasn't even really a crime, I reflected. In a world full of jury- and witness-tampering, tampering with a few sugar and syrup containers in a gourmet coffee store was pretty low on the Richter scale. Nonetheless, I must have looked a bit nervous in the service because Fox hastened to reassure me as the two of us walked the final block.

"Just be cool about it, Walter," he said. "Just do what you did last time, talk to the counter people—"

"Baristas," I corrected.

"Baristas. And I'll take care of the rest. As soon as you see me getting up to leave, you get out of there, too. Staggering our departures ever so slightly, of course."

"Of course."

"Now there is one thing you should be aware of, Walter. Starbucks by this time has for sure connected the sabotage to the dumper with the tampering with their sugars and creamers and syrups and shit. By now, they'll probably have security guards and very possibly security cameras all over the place. All this may make our job difficult but not impossible. This may, however, be the last time we can safely do any work inside the store. Operation Elephant Dump Numbers One, Two and Three, you understand, do not require our entering the store."

"Thank God for Elephant Dumps One, Two, and Three," I said.

"If God is going to be involved, Operation Cockroach Bomb is where we could really use her help. This is high-stakes poker, Walter."

Whatever Fox thought it was, it was sounding more and more like a death wish to me. The people who ran Starbucks were not idiots. They didn't know who the culprits were and they didn't know why anyone would visit this kind of sophomoric mischief upon their establishment. But surely they had been alerted by now. Surely they would never let this sort of thing happen again.

"The stakes are
too
high," I said. "Maybe we should consider folding our hand."

"History demands," said Fox, as we came upon the coffee giant, "that we ride into the Valley of the Shadow of Death sporting a large erection and a box filled with cockroaches."

With those immortal words, Fox marched into Starbucks carrying the cardboard box, with me left trailing in his wake, following along like the Village idiot. I don't contend that there was any high-minded existential credo motivating Fox or Clyde. They made no demands of Starbucks. They did not care whether or not Starbucks used nonorganic creamer. Like their true motives for doing almost everything else, I think they went to war with Starbucks just for fun, just for the hell of it, just because somebody somewhere, perhaps a very long time ago, had told them they couldn't do it

Possibly because Fox had his hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore wire-rimmed John Denver glasses like some kind of technogeek, the new security guard at the door hardly gave him a second glance. Maybe the guard thought that a big computer box was too obvious for someone to be carrying who had his mind bent on creating havoc. There did not appear to be any security cameras installed yet, so Fox put in his order and put his box over in a far corner under an empty table. Moments later, after paying for his order, he returned to the table, sipping a
latte
and reading a magazine. I walked up to the counter, which was now manned by two men and two women, none of whom I'd seen before.

"I'll have a double espresso," I said.

"That's a
doppio,"
said one of the women to the world in general.

"Right," I said. "I noticed this table over here is designed like a chessboard. Does anybody ever play chess here?"

The four baristas or whoever the hell they were did not beat each other to death answering my question. They continued to grind and pour and mix and serve their customers, one of whom was me. The woman who'd said
"doppio"
looked at me a bit quizzically, then took charity into her own hands and answered, "Not yet." This sounded like it might be my opening.

"I used to be quite a prodigy myself," I said, engaging as many of the personnel as possible or at least partially engaging them. "When I was seven years old, I played the world grand master Samuel Reschevsky in Houston, Texas."

"No kidding," said the guy on the far right with the closest view of Fox. He didn't sound very excited about my childhood accomplishments but at least it was a human response.

"No kidding," I said, moving closer to the guy and partially blocking his field of vision. "Reschevsky played fifty people simultaneously around a huge table and he beat all of them. I happened to be the youngest of the bunch by far, and as a result I got my picture on the front page of the
Houston Chronicle."

"Whoopee!" said the guy as he handed me my
doppio.

"It was quite a thrill for a seven-year-old, I can tell you. Of course, it's been mostly downhill from there. One interesting thing, however, was what Samuel Reschevsky said to my father after the match. He told my dad he was sorry to have to beat his son, but he had to be very careful when he played seven-year-olds. If, by chance, he were to lose, it would be headlines. His career would be over."

"Then maybe he could come here and play at Starbucks," said the woman who'd earlier taken my order. She had such a positive tone that I could only hope she was being facetious. At least, I thought, she'd been listening.

"That might be a little difficult for him," I said. "He's been dead for thirty-five years."

"Stranger things have happened," said the other female barista. "Right here at Starbucks."

I didn't like the way she was looking at me. It was making me nervous. It was as if she knew me from somewhere but couldn't be sure. I did not dare glance in Fox's direction. Technically, I told myself, I had done nothing wrong. Whatever craziness Fox or Clyde had been up to, all I had done was tell boring stories to busy people. There was, I dimly remembered, a name for that. It was called, in legal parlance, accomplice to the crime. The woman was still looking at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

The next thing I knew I saw a ponytail heading out the front door and I knew Fox had completed the necessary steps and was getting the hell out of there. I paused for a moment or two and then turned and started to walk out of there myself. It was at just about that time that the security guard grabbed me by the shoulder. I froze physically, but my mind was running a hundred miles an hour. That's the way it happens, I thought. The main perpetrator gets away and they always catch the accomplice. Then they try to squeeze him for the identities of his cohorts. Would I rat on Fox and Clyde? It was an open question. Was I, at this very moment, sorry I'd ever met them? That was an open question, too. The only thing that didn't appear open to me was the way to get out of there. This was it, I thought bitterly. Fox was long gone and the security guard was now turning me around and firmly directing me back into the store. He let go of me then and at last he spoke.

"Hey, buddy," he said. "You forgot to pick up your
doppio."

By the time I got back to the apartment, Fox and Clyde were already in high spirits, some of which were contained in three bottles of champagne that Clyde had procured. The celebratory mood was infectious and soon I'd forgotten all about what
I
'd perceived to be my close shave with Starbucks security. Fox, I noticed, had already positioned a tiny red flag on the flowchart for Operation Cockroach Bomb. Now he proceeded to provide us with a blow-by-blow account of the final stages of the operation. Clyde was squirming in her seat and looking pale again and swigging large amounts of champagne directly from the bottle, but Fox pranced along obliviously.

"When I got the box situated under a table in a corner, I pulled one of the strings, effectively removing the net bag from the box. This action, of course, released the gecko among the thousands of cockroaches and suddenly the whole box began to vibrate like—"

"A vibrator?" suggested Clyde.

"Yes. Vibrated like a vibrator. An organic binary reaction was definitely taking place. I reached down as surreptitiously as possible and pulled the duct tape off the bottom of the box, exposing the three small holes that provided escape routes for the dear little cockroaches. I wished I could have stayed longer to watch the show but, of course, I couldn't. All I can tell you is that they poured out of those holes almost with the incredible force of being shot out of a fire hose. It was a proud moment in my somewhat checkered life and it was a thing of beauty to watch. Unfortunately, I'm a very busy man and I had to get on to my next project."

"Which is?" I asked.

"Operation Elephant Dump, Numbers One, Two, and Three."

"Good!" said Clyde enthusiastically. "Finally something I can get in to."