Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (5 page)

six

Sometime later, as we walked through the Village, light rain was falling and it seemed to bring the three of us close together again. Clyde was aiming us toward an Internet cafe that she thought was on a certain street and Fox was ranting that he'd never been in an Internet cafe and didn't want to go in one now because he believed the Internet was "the work of Satan." I was just happy to see us all cheerfully embarking upon a new adventure again. It was almost like old times. Old times, of course, being maybe two weeks ago.

"So what's our next project?" I asked Clyde. "The one you mentioned on the phone."

"'Project'!" Clyde said, laughing rather derisively. "So that's what they're calling it these days."

"I think it's a perfect word for what we do," said Fox, rallying to my defense. "Everybody in this city has a project of some sort or other. In fact, they say when you die in New York, you're not really dead. You're just not currently working on a project. I think it's the quintessential definition of our endeavors on this planet."

"I think you're just trying to suck up to Walter for being an ass earlier, at his apartment," said Clyde.

"Clyde can see into a man's mind like a window," Fox said. "She can bust a guy's chops with the best of them."

"I still think 'project' is the wrong word," Clyde insisted stubbornly. "We're
not
doing what everybody else is doing. They're all just treading water, marking time from cradle to grave without knowing why or having any fun. What we do is more important."

"It's also less important," said Fox.

"Good point," said Clyde. "Sometimes I think what we do is almost an addiction, but really I think it's just our hobby."

"How would you describe today's hobby?" I asked innocently enough.

"Damn you writers," said Clyde. "You're always trying to describe something. Don't you realize that when you capture something in words, you make it disappear?"

"Or someone," said Fox.

"There's not much danger of me describing too much," I said. "I haven't really written anything in years."

"You will," said Clyde. "Soon."

"Windows," said Fox.

The rain had stopped now and the sun was tentatively poking spokes of light between the buildings and walls of the city. Clyde remembered that the Internet cafe was on Bank Street, so that was where we headed. I had a strong urge to take out my little spiral notepad and scribble down a few notes about the previous conversation, but I resisted the impulse. I didn't want to make anything disappear.

"Can I ask a stupid question?" I said.

"There are no stupid questions," said Fox. "There's just a stupid world."

"Okay," I said. "Why are we going to the Internet cafe?"

"That
is
a stupid question," said Clyde, taking my hand and giving it a quick little squeeze. This simple, private, reassuring gesture had a surprisingly visceral effect upon me. It was one of the little wordless things I came to love most about Clyde. It was one of the things, I think I knew even then, that I would miss very much someday.

"We're going there to try to rescue a friend of Fox's," she said. "I'll let Fox tell you about him."

"His name is Teddy M. He's over six feet tall and black as the ace of spades and he looks just like a big, friendly teddy bear. Loves people, loves animals, wouldn't harm a soul. But he's a street preacher, you see. Kind of a wandering park orator who you sometimes see in Washington Square Park or Tompkins Square Park and he's a good one, too.

"I met him some years back. Teddy was in and out of the homeless shelters and we became friends back then because I was in and out of the homeless shelters, too. Of course, that was before I met Clyde, the patron saint of the people of the street."

"And?" said Clyde.

"And so Teddy's got this vision that he lives by, I think he got the idea from the spiritual outlook of Masai warriors or something. It's an African tribal thing, I know. Anyway, Teddy has come to believe that he lives only in the present. To Teddy, there is no past, there is no future. I've come to believe that Teddy may be on to something."

"And I've come to believe," said Clyde, "that Fox may be on to something."

"It's a fucked-up world," said Fox, "and sometimes you gotta just try to unfuck it."

"Where's Teddy now?" I asked.

"Well, that's the problem," said Fox. "He was doing his thing in front of Trump Towers last week and they kept running him off and he kept coming back, so they finally carted him off to the nuthouse, which I know a thing or two about because I used to be there myself. Got out about the time you stopped writing."

I didn't remember giving Fox any time frame for when I'd stopped writing and, though my memory was rather blurry after the tequila binge, I didn't recall telling Clyde either. Maybe I'd told Clyde and she'd told Fox. Maybe he'd been doing some research on his own. Anyway, it wasn't too significant when you compared it to being in the nuthouse so I let it slide.

"He shouldn't have been there in the first place," Clyde was telling me.

"That's what they all say," said Fox.

The Internet cafe was now coming into sight near the end of the block. I wasn't sure how I felt about Fox's revelations that he'd been in a mental hospital and homeless shelters but it didn't really surprise me all that much. It didn't bother me or change anything either. Maybe it was because I believed in Clyde and she believed in Fox. Maybe I, too, believed in Fox. Maybe I was finally beginning to believe in myself.

"Imagine Teddy," said Fox, "locked up in a small padded cell. A guy who only believes—only lives—in the present. He could die in there like the Masai tribesmen used to do when the white man put them in jail. Possibly even worse, Teddy could go crazy. And believe me, I know from experience, when you go crazy, the last place you want to be is in the nuthouse."

seven

Now you might think it'd make you nervous standing right next to a former mental patient, looking over the comely shoulders of the beautiful woman you suspected both of you loved, all of you secretly plotting to spring a current mental patient from a psychiatric ward. But that's not the way I felt that afternoon in the Internet cafe. I didn't really feel nervous at all. What I felt was pure, undecaffeinated excitement, because I was doing something crazy with people who were crazy but didn't give a damn because they knew the rest of the world was at least as crazy as they were. I felt as if I was flying to the stars with Peter Pan or fighting in the jungle alongside Che Guevara and I wasn't dead and I wasn't dreaming and I wasn't alone.

Fox and I were newcomers to the Internet cafe scene, with Fox, of course, still muttering that it was "the work of Satan" and I not entirely disinclined to go along with his thinking. Clyde, however, appeared to feel right at home and she quickly got down to the business at hand. The first step, she said, was to discharge me to the back of the room where a mad-scientist type of character was standing who would sell me three cappuccinos. The place was not crowded and Clyde selected the most isolated workstation she could find. By the time I returned with the cappuccinos, she was already hard on the case.

"I like your idea," Clyde was saying to Fox, "of substituting one of our people for Teddy's shrink at the hospital. It's kind of a variant of the ol' switcheroo."

"Everything in life is a variant of the ol' switcheroo," said Fox. We were now sitting in adjacent chairs on either side of Clyde, sipping our cappuccinos and staring dumbly at the blank screen in front of her.

"Why not let Walter substitute for the shrink?" asked Clyde. "He has a nice practical, rational demeanor and he kind of looks the part. Ever thought about becoming a shrink when you grow up, Walter?"

"What did she mean by that?" I said.

"See," said Clyde. "I told you he'd be good."

But Fox was shaking his head. "I don't like it," he said. "He has no mental-hospital experience, and besides, he doesn't know Teddy. Teddy has a quirk or two that perhaps I neglected to mention."

"Such as?" asked Clyde, hesitating with a floppy disk in her hand.

"Such as he occasionally thinks he's the king of an imaginary African country."

There was a silence in the room. The three of us used the opportunity to sip our cappuccinos somewhat reflectively.

"Jesus Christ," said Clyde. "The shit I do for you."

"For we?" said Fox. "It's not for
me!
It's for
Teddy!
I might also add it's for human dignity, justice for all, freedom of spirit, and, lest we forget, good old clean American fun!"

"You're right," said Clyde. "I just lost my place for a moment."

"Happens to the best of us," said Fox. "And you are the best, baby. This is a high-stakes operation, Walter. If you want to bail, now might be the time."

"Walter stays," said Clyde. "If one of us goes down, we all go down. Right, Sunshine?"

"Deal me in," I said, with a cockiness that came from some unexplored territory of the soul.

"Okay," said Clyde. "First we upload the Web page with a photo of Teddy's shrink and a few choice details. What's his name again?"

"Let's see," said Fox, referring to a few crumpled notes of his own. "Here it is. Dr. Stanley Fingerhut."

"Great name," said Clyde. "Now we import a new index. You see, this is the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Web page and I'm simply pretending to have used this account before. I'm going to telnet over to the location where the sex offender Web site is."

"The sex offender Web site?" I asked. "What's that got to do with it?" I glanced over at Fox and he appeared to be equally mystified.

"If Fox is going to take the place of Teddy's shrink, we have to see that Teddy's shrink goes on a little sabbatical. Now since I've telnetted over to the sex offender Web site, it'll think I'm a legitimate state of New York employee and it'll let me make the changes we need to make. Now we put in the floppy disc. Okay, that's one down, one to go. Do you follow me?"

"Of course we follow you," said Fox. "I mean, we may not follow you technologically, but we follow you spiritually. After all, you are our leader."

"I'm not our leader," said Clyde. "In a strange way, I think Walter might be our leader."

"Me?" I exclaimed incredulously. "I'm the new kid on the block. I've never been around people like you and Fox before and I've certainly never before looked at life the way you do or done the crazy and exciting things you two do every day of your lives. I've never even dreamed of doing the stuff you do. I'm the guy who's been busy not writing a book. Remember?"

"We'll see," said Clyde. "There's something you should remember, too. We're not just doing this for Teddy."

The room was silent again. The city seemed to be observing a moment of silence as well. Possibly it was a gesture of respect for the passing of the staid, colorless existence full of quiet desperation that had once been the life of the old Walter Snow.

"Where were we?" asked Clyde.

"One down and one to go," said Fox.

"Right," said Clyde. "Now there's no security on the NAMBLA site. You know what that is?"

"Sure," said Fox. "It's the North American Man/Boy Love Association. They're a sick group of fucks, but I always knew they'd come in handy someday. By the way, here's a good one. Two pedophiles were at a playground one day and they were both looking at a little six-year-old girl on a swing. So one pedophile says to the other: 'She was a stunner in her day.'"

Clyde looked at me and we both laughed. Then she leaned back in her chair, took a deep breath, and ran her fingers through her hair. It was an attractive, natural gesture and it did not fail to go unnoticed by Fox or myself.

"Sony to be so serious about this stuff," said Clyde. "The Internet always does this to me. It's so easy to superficially change and rearrange things. It's not like life at all."

"I tell you," said Fox demonstrably, "it's the work of Satan!"

"Well, it's good to have someone on our side," said Clyde. "Now we FTP a new index page to their Web site host. And now let's check. Okay. Both locations now list Stanley Fingerhut. That's Megan's Law. Registered sex offenders have to be available to the public. So Dr. Stanley Fingerhut, Teddy's shrink at Bellevue Hospital, is now, at least temporarily, a registered sex offender. Now we send both sites to the printer. You see, the Internet
can
be fun."

"Wait a minute," said Fox. "I'm starting to feel sorry for Dr. Stanley Fingerhut, though I never thought I'd ever feel sorry for a shrink. Have we destroyed his reputation? What's going to happen to him?"

"Nothing's going to happen to him," said Clyde. "We'll just fax these two pages to the hospital with a little anonymous note—”

"How about this," said Fox." 'Just thought you might want to know that your Stanley Fingerhut has his finger up a little boy's butt.'"

Maybe the Internet was the work of Satan or maybe Fox Harris was Satan himself. All I know is that Clyde and I became suddenly convulsed with raucous laughter and could not seem to stop ourselves even when the mad scientist looked over with a baleful stare. It was just one of the funniest things I've ever heard in my life, and even after all that happened subsequently, I have to confess that it still ranks right up there.

"That's perfect!" said Clyde when she could finally speak. "The hospital will figure this out, of course. But they'll have to lay Fingerhut off for a day or so while they look into it. That's when we make our move. We'll just call in the morning to see if Fingerhut's there, and if he's not coming in, we are."

"Great!" said Fox, with unbridled enthusiasm. "I've always wanted to wear a stethoscope around my neck."

"Shrinks don't usually wear stethoscopes," I pointed out.

"This one does," said Fox.

"You see," said Clyde. "I told you we weren't just doing this for Teddy."

eight

When you're not writing a book, you usually have no idea what it is you're not writing about. Or maybe your mind will fly off in a thousand different directions at once to a million scenes and locations and conversations between contrived characters of invention who have no intention of being remembered by anyone. To attempt such a ridiculous task is to practically guarantee that the result will almost invariably miss the mark, not to mention the wastebasket. In the world of fiction, it is a rare thing indeed for characters to spring up full-blown from the earth and offer their innocence, their nakedness, and their careless suicidal courage to your desperate art. When a novelist who has long suffered the slow death of writer's block is served up these oh-so-human morsels upon a silver tray, it is his blessing and his curse to devour them, lest, no doubt, he himself becomes, inevitably, consumed with eternal regret.

Whenever you introduce live flesh and blood into the secret machinery of fiction, it is bound to become something more than merely a literary procedure. I, of course, did not fully appreciate or understand at the time the nature or the depth of my feelings for Clyde. Nor did I totally comprehend the nature or depth of her feelings for me. I did not know how Fox H. truly felt about me, nor, I must admit, how I truly felt about him. And I still did not have an inkling as to the precise content of the brick and mortar that held so tightly together the relationship between Clyde and Fox.

It is also accurate to say that I had no idea back then exactly where the story was going. All I knew for sure was that I was part of it. And I was proud that I was part of it, and, in a way, I suppose I still am. For I was not merely along for the ride. Though the story flowed wildly like a river over its banks, and I had no control over it really, I was able to capture it. Even in the end, when it lurched terribly out of control, I was able to confine it to those blank white pages, which I would soon observe were no longer intimidating and no longer blank. A typewriter can be sharper than a scalpel sometimes, however. And Clyde, as usual, had not been wrong. When you describe in livid detail a wild, natural thing of human beauty, it does tend to disappear from your life. Maybe every beautiful living moment in your life was meant to disappear anyway. Maybe that's why they last forever.

At any rate, I don't blame myself for what happened. And I certainly don't blame Clyde P. or Fox H. or even Teddy M. I blame the publisher. I blame the editor. I blame the copy editor and the guy who binds the pages together in some factory in New Jersey. I blame the guy who reads the book on a beach in Hawaii. Or the woman who reads it on the plane bound for a trade convention in Indianapolis. Or the guy who sells flowers in the little shop on the corner. Or the guy who buys the flowers for his wife, who's not really on her way to a trade show in Indianapolis but is busy rubbing suntan lotion on the guy reading the book on the beach in Hawaii. Or the people who aren't doing what they ought to be doing, aren't saying what they ought to be saying, aren't living the way they ought to be living, all because they aren't doing what they're doing with any heart at all. If you're going to blame anyone for what happened, you've pretty well got to blame everyone. In fact, you might as well blame the human spirit for flickering each time and looking like it's going to die just before it comes back to life.

I wasn't blind, of course, and I wasn't deaf. I'd taken some notes and these scribblings tend to come alive late at night when you live in a small basement apartment and you find yourself wondering whether to kill yourself or go bowling and, possibly instead, you decide to write. And you observe things, of course, when you find yourself flying perhaps too close to the souls of beautiful, doomed people who embrace you with an open honesty that almost makes you ashamed. The writer of fiction, it would seem, is sometimes like a small child at a formal occasion and he doesn't truly comprehend if it's a wedding or a funeral and in the end, I suppose, it doesn't really matter because the child will soon learn to see and hear and think like everybody else and maybe someday he'll write it all down and make it disappear.

There is another school of thought, of course, probably the prevailing one, which contends that literature and art do not make things disappear but instead make things last forever. Both schools of thought are correct and both are wrong, just as you or I may be correct or wrong and sometimes a little bit of both at the same time. There is no doubt art can cause the idea, likeness, or interpretation of the subject of that art to endure in the minds of men. It is also true, though there is little empirical evidence to prove it, that the very process itself of transmogrifying the muse into the art may mean that the muse has no more further reason for being. These are not thoughts, however, that a writer should be thinking. Not if he wishes to write.

Actually, I wasn't thinking only of metaphysical matters that night. I was thinking of Clyde P. and Fox H. and hammering furiously on my Smith Corona electric typewriter when something happened that gave me quite a turn. I saw a face at the window. When you live in a basement apartment, you realize this may come with the territory but at one o'clock in the morning it can still be a rather frightening event. Someone had not only been watching me write, I had the distinct and highly disturbing feeling that someone, indeed, had been watching me think.

I walked cautiously to the window, acutely aware that I was backlit perfectly for some rambling psycho to blow me away for no rational reason. For no rational reason, I felt a twinge of guilt about the fact that I'd just been engaged in the process of transforming my two new friends into little black etchings in my war against the blank white page. Why did I not view writing about them as a tribute to them? Why did I feel I was somehow using them, changing them forever from people to characters? And what was a character, anyway? It was people, only more so. And I had been doing nothing wrong-only practicing my desperate art, which had been rusting away for many years. Nothing wrong with that, I thought. Everything right. The face was gone, of course. Like all faces in the windows of our lives, it didn't hang around long enough for me to become accustomed to it. And now I wasn't even sure I'd seen it in the first place.

At that time in my life, perhaps understandably enough, I did not have a great many friends. People do not like to hang around with a writer who doesn't write, and the unfortunate soul himself does not much enjoy hanging around people. If he can just avoid hanging himself, he figures he'll be slightly ahead of the game. What I'm saying is that the face in the window, if it had been there at all, and if it didn't belong to the swarthy, crepuscular body of a traveling psycho, must have belonged to either Clyde or Fox and I much preferred that it belonged to Clyde. Yet I did not think that Clyde lived anywhere near the Village. I at first had refrained from pointedly asking where she lived because, I suppose, I did not want to hear that she and Fox were living together. I knew from what she'd told me at the bank that he was her "roommate," but that could mean a lot of things. Maybe she'd met him in his homeless days and literally taken him off the street out of the kindness of her heart, and I believed there was a great deal of kindness in her heart. Now that I knew her better, I still hadn't pursued the nature of their relationship with her because I could never get her away from Fox. Basically, it would have pained me more than I would have liked to have admitted, though it wouldn't have surprised me, to have discovered that they were lovers.

Many thoughts can go through your mind in the brief time it takes to walk out a door and look for a face that isn't there anymore. I found myself hoping that the face had been Clyde's and that she'd now be waiting at my doorstep. This, of course, did not happen. In fact, nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. No one was out there. My author's eye for detail did, however, observe a fat orange cat walking away, toward Seventh Avenue. There was one other thing out of the ordinary. Between the two garbage cans, on the ground directly in front of my window, lay a single red rose.

If the cat hadn't placed it there, then it must have been Clyde, I figured. It is enough to say that I hoped very much that it was Clyde. I took the rose inside and put it on my desk next to my typewriter in a coffee mug filled with water. It smelled of ice cream and perfume and sadness, and I knew that in time, like everything else in this nonfiction world, it, too, would disappear.