Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (19 page)

twenty-eight

Elephants live a long time and they have long trunks and even longer memories. But even an elephant can't know the future. All he can do is try not to be haunted by his memories. Thus it was that Operation Elephant Dump Numbers One, Two, and Three took a little more time and planning than the array of other puerile pranks performed against our mutual enemy that was Starbucks. The three phases of the Elephant Dump operation would prove to be some of the most ingenious and effective of the entire campaign, but they would also require Fox's being out of the apartment a great deal, rounding up the appropriate supplies and equipment. This was not, entirely in itself, a bad thing. It gave Clyde and myself a chance to explore the possibilities of a career in petty crime together, as well as lending the pretty fair illusion at times that the two of us were keeping house together. That illusion was shattered periodically, however, by Fox's coming in during the early hours of the dawn, usually drunk or stoned or both, and nattering on about his progress regarding Operation Elephant Dump, Numbers One, Two, and Three. But there were lots of times when, for lengthy and very pleasant periods, Clyde and I were alone together. Maybe "alone together" is not the best way to phrase it, for it was better than that. True, we had yet to be sexually intimate with each other.

But with Clyde, and occasionally, the peripatetic Fox, living in a virtual slumber party at my apartment, it seemed to me that the three of us had never been closer. Because it was war, and also for sheer convenience, we had decided to quite literally go to the mattresses. Clyde and I each slept on our own mattress side by side on the floor and Fox slept on the other side of Clyde in his sleeping bag. When Fox was out wandering the night, Clyde and I managed to pursue a good bit of drinking, laughing, cuddling, and some of the nicest pillow talk in my life. The fact that we had not yet technically made love bothered me a bit, but it was more than compensated for by how close Clyde and I were growing to each other. We shared our dreams, our toothpaste, our drinks, and sometimes even our mattresses. Given time, I knew we would make it.

So that's what we were doing. Living together in a very exciting, romantic, bohemian, revolutionary, ridiculous style. Clyde was smoking, having fun, looking beautiful with that twinkling haze of mischief forever in her eyes. I was typing, editing, making notes to myself, all those things that authors routinely do, and it didn't seem to be bothering Clyde anymore. Maybe she had finally resigned herself to the fact that I was going to write the book and that there was nothing anybody, including myself, could do about it. Fox was my lone voice of encouragement. When he wasn't busy filling up the flowchart with little red flags, he would often ask me what page I was on. I would say, for instance, page 187, and he would say "Good. Good. Keep at it." I don't think he ever once looked at any of the words I was writing. Maybe he thought that words were not really all that important. I believe he thought that a man of words is a straw man, a man who spends words like dollars and doesn't really have anything to show for it, not even peace of mind. Maybe he thought that words were pathetic little creatures, cockroaches without legs, particles of sand swirling on an empty beach, until taken together they come to represent vital, shining, immortal things like moments, dreams, and madness.

And how was Starbucks coping with this peculiar onslaught of craziness? Well, Starbucks was Starbucks and nothing seemed to faze it or give it pause or slow its cheerful, inexorable, cancerlike growth. Clyde and I, at her instigation, of course, even went in and had a nice cup of cappuccino together one morning. Clyde always liked to live dangerously and I learned that I liked to be around people who liked to live dangerously. It was, in fact, a pretty good cup of cappuccino. There were no signs of cockroaches, Clyde was relieved to find. There were no video cameras in position. There were still no chess pieces on the board. No players, either, but lots of customers. Phone lines and faxes, I was sure, had already been rerouted and several security guards could be seen loitering about the place, looking fairly bored. It's hard to stop a thing like Starbucks and I don't even know why anybody in their right mind would want to try. It could have been my imagination, or possibly I'm attributing human qualities to dull, corporate entities, but the Starbucks store itself seemed almost stoic in the face of our pesky campaign of persistent harassment. I didn't mention it to Clyde. She would have thought I was crazy. She would have said I was feeling sorry for Starbucks. I might, indeed, have been crazy, but I certainly wasn't feeling sorry for Starbucks. I have too great a capacity for feeling sorry for myself to ever feel sorry for anyone else. Every author who fancies himself worthy of the gutter indulges in this self-pitying tissue of horseshit from time to time.

Because of the time constraints, and because I don't want to kill too many trees in America, I have arbitrarily decided to condense Operation Elephant Dump, Numbers One, Two, and Three into one rather abbreviated chapter. My editor, Steve Samet, later complained bitterly about this, insisting that each elephant dump was unique and essential and should therefore be properly framed in its own individual chapter. I wouldn't hear of it, of course. The novel had to be reined in somewhere, I maintained. Otherwise, it might become as wild, orgiastic, and out of control as some of the characters who lived and breathed, loved foolishly, and did many famous and impractical things between the sheets we've come to call pages. ("Personally, I'd never read this shit," I told Samet. "It's bad enough I have to write it."

"At least," he said, "you don't have to edit it."

"Don't get me wrong," I continued. "The only reason I denigrate my own work is because it shadows life too faithfully. If
The Great Armenian Novel
sucks, it's simply because life does."

"I agree," said Samet. "Why do you think I live with three cats and wear a bow tie?")

Anyway, enough about little people and their silly jobs. An army of authors, editors, agents, publishers, copy editors, lawyers, publicists, and critics would never have the madness and courage required to wage battle with the one-eyed giant. Well, maybe certain authors would have tried such a stunt but they're all dead, most of them choosing to die in gutters, arranging for pauper's graves in which to be buried, hoping for the immortality that eludes us all in life. But Fox and Clyde were characters in every sense of the word, characters with character. They leaped off the page with a reckless life force right up the asshole of America.

Fox walked into the apartment late one night while Clyde was holding both my hands and searching my eyes for something I don't think she ever found. Fox's pockets were making little clinking sounds like many tiny Lilliputians toasting a damned fine effort by Jonathan Swift. Fox extracted a number of small bottles, each filled with a clear liquid. He proceeded to commandeer from under the kitchen sink a spray bottle that I'd forgotten I had, empty the contents, and pour each of the little bottles into the larger receptacle.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Elephant Dump Number One," he said. "Butyric acid."

"It certainly smells like an elephant dump," observed Clyde.

"You have no idea what this stuff will smell like once I spray it on the front wall of Starbucks," said Fox. "People will be avoiding the entire West Village. Intrepid or misguided tourists will be dropping like flies. Flies ought to like it, though."

"When does this operation get under way?" I inquired.

"In about five minutes," said Fox.

"Good," said Clyde. "That's some nasty shit and I'd like to get it out of here."

"I don't really need any help on Dump Number One," said Fox. "But you two can come along as UN observers if you like."

"Might get some good material," said Clyde facetiously, looking at me still.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," I said.

By the time we got to Starbucks, it was almost three o'clock in the morning, a good hour if you were spraying butyric acid on the front of a Starbucks. Clyde and I served as lookouts for Fox and the whole operation took slightly less than three minutes. There was, I must report, not much to see. There was, however, a startlingly appalling amount to smell. As we walked away from the scene, the malodorous aroma seemed to almost pursue our rapid footsteps down the street. We could still smell the horrible stench a block away.

"That ought to give a few soccer moms a second thought about going in for their morning
latte,"
said Fox, with a wickedly happy smile.

"Jesus," said Clyde. "That'll give the hunchback of Notre Dame a second thought."

"They'll have to close down tomorrow," I said.

"You'd be surprised," said Fox. "They're pretty enterprising. Maybe the baristas will give each customer a gas mask so they can avoid going without their indispensable, wonderful, fucking favorite gourmet blend."

"Do I detect a bit of bitterness in your tone?" asked Clyde sweetly.

"Not bitterness," said Fox. "Only sadness and rage. There are elements of sadness and rage behind everything that's ever been funny in this world."

"Then the joke's on all of us," I said.

"Good. Good," said Fox. "Keep writing."

I don't know if Starbucks opened or not that morning. I had to hand it to them, however. They took a licking and kept right on ticking. As for us, the three partners in crime, we slept in until well past noon. I lay there on my mattress on the floor watching Clyde sleep like an angel next to me and listening to Fox snoring in his sleeping bag on the other side of her. The devil in his sleeping bag. Sometimes your mind can be so clear when you first wake up that if you just lie there half thinking, half dreaming, you begin to think you're a different person. It's almost like seeing yourself and your life and your friends for the first time. The shenanigans we were foisting on Starbucks, I thought, were juvenile, inane, and futile to the extreme and yet the whole ludicrous campaign seemed to shimmer in my mind with excitement and danger and fun. No one could ever have talked you into something this crazy. You had to want to be a part of it. Ours is not to reason why, I thought. Ours is just to do or die. Was Clyde an angel and Fox a devil, or had they both simply become internalized living parts of myself?

Why were we doing what we were doing? That was a question the cops would have to ask if they ever caught us. I'm still not sure there was really an answer, but I'll try to give you one. Fox was doing it mostly on principle. Clyde was doing it mostly for fun. And my motives, I'm afraid, were not quite as pure. I was not doing it for the hell of it, a notion that drove practically everything Fox and Clyde ever did in their lives. I was scheming against Starbucks for cynical, vicarious, practical reasons, and almost all of them by this time revolved around what Clyde had once called "that bloody book." She had not been wrong. More blood would soon be poured onto its pages than any of us could have suspected.

I did not see Elephant Dump Number Two. I stayed home writing that night, but Fox and Clyde told me all about it when they got back just before dawn. It had been, apparently, at least according to Fox, "a thing of real beauty." Clyde had come in the door looking as if she'd just had an orgasm. Maybe she had.

"Oh, Sunshine!" she gushed. "You really should have been there!"

"We could've used you for a lookout," said Fox. "The cops were all over the neighborhood, like flies."

"So were the flies," said Clyde.

"We had to wait until almost Tour-thirty to bring in the truck," said Fox.

"What truck?" I asked.

"Septic-tank truck I sort of borrowed," said Fox. "Holds five thousand gallons of raw sewage."

"I got to ride shotgun!" said Clyde.

Starbucks, indubitably, now realized that these pranks were far from random acts of vandalism. They well knew that a concerted campaign of no-holds-barred, rather sophomoric insanity was being diabolically waged against them for reasons, I'm sure, they could hardly fathom. But they, assuredly, as we learned from occasional reconnaissance missions in the following days, did not plan to go down without a fight. More security guards, more cops, more sanitation people, and always more baristas were brought aboard to replace those who had succumbed to the stench. Customers had to choose on any given morning between their desire for
mocha latte
and their desire not to gag before they walked in the door. But after a few more days, the place was amazingly right back to its sanitized, antiseptic, spiritually cauterized self. Fox, who could walk out on a limb in a hurricane with the best of them, felt it was time to stand down for a few days. The attacks had been coming fairly fast and furiously and we couldn't expect to get away with it for much longer. Unmarked squad cars could now be seen cruising by the front of Starbucks in twenty-minute intervals, twenty-four hours a day. We had to change our tactics or it would be only a matter of time before the game would be up. But Fox's sense of completion got the best of him. He wanted to work in Elephant Dump Number Three before we took a hiatus.

"Of course, we can't get
real
elephant shit," he said one afternoon as the three of us shared a large pepperoni pizza in the apartment. "I've contacted the circus and it's just not practical. In order to get enough, we'd have to follow the circus from town to town with an elephant wheeler."

"It's probably highly perishable, too," said Clyde, favoring me with a broad wink.

"So I've talked to a stable in Westchester and it looks like we're going to have to settle for horseshit."

"I hate it when that happens," I said.

"We'll requisition a Ryder truck," said Fox. "We'll line it with heavy canvas. We'll go to the stables and fill it up. Should hold, if my calculations are correct, a little under a ton. Then one night later this week we'll deposit the load in a lightninglike maneuver on the sidewalk right in front of Starbucks."

"How do we do that?' I asked. "It's not a dump truck."