Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (8 page)

"Dangerous, yes," said Clyde, taking my hand in hers across the table. "But the most dangerous thing in the world is to run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing suddenly that all this time you've been living without really and truly
living
and by then it's too late. When you wake up to that kind of realization, it's too late for wishes and regrets. It's even too late to dream."

In her eyes, I could easily see her concern for me. It was almost as if she thought that I, not Fox, was the one who was languishing in prison, and maybe I was. She gave my hand a quick squeeze. It worked again. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her smiling at me in a sad-happy way, like a circus clown smiling at a crippled kid. There was such kindness in that smile. If everybody would have stopped what they were doing for a moment to notice, it probably could have warmed the whole city of New York.

The waiter came and I paid the check and we walked out of the restaurant and drifted down Mulberry Street like two shadows in the cold golden sunlight. I had my arm around Clyde now and I had no illusions that I could control whatever was going to happen. We walked together for a while and looked in windows but I never knew if I was seeing what she was.

I kissed her hair in front of the Church of the Most Precious Blood. Then I kissed her precious hands. My "well-grounded sense of judgment" was telling me that something was wrong with this picture but I ignored it with little conscious effort. It was like a still, small voice speaking to me across my alcoholic dark ages with a message something to the effect of this: that this woman was a ticket for the train to hell. I now realize that no other person can truly be considered a ticket to hell. You choose the path to hell right from the restaurant menu. Then you select the person you wish to travel that path with you.

We walked hand in hand down a block or two, past several funeral homes, onto a small street that ran alongside a park. On one side, young black boys were playing basketball. On the other side, old Italian men were playing boccie ball. I recall vividly the image of Clyde standing in that little park feeding the pretzel I'd bought her to the birds and the squirrels.

"Be careful with us," she'd said. "Fox and I are different from other people. We're like two little birds that you hold in your hand. If you hold us too tightly, you'll destroy us without even knowing it."

I held her close to me then and the birds swirled around us like leaves that were singing. And, I could never be sure, but I thought my heart seemed to be singing, too. The still, small voice was silent now. All the roads I'd traveled in my life, I thought, had led me to this little park and this Gypsy woman who was, I noticed, crying on the shoulder of the highway. And the shoulder of the highway, for the moment at least, was my shoulder.

"Don't cry," I said, kissing her face and tasting her tears. "I'll take care of Fox."

"I'm not crying for Fox, Sunshine," she said. "I'm crying for you."

I left her there in the park and headed down the narrow path to the courthouse. When I turned around to look back, she was gone.

eleven

Fox's court-appointed defense attorney looked like Woody Allen. This fact, however, did not apparently surprise Fox. As he confided in me later: "
All
court-appointed defense attorneys look like Woody Allen." Far from holding it against the man, I was just happy to have finally located him. It's troubling enough just trying to bail somebody out of jail without having to witness all the human tragedies occurring in every nook and cranny of 100 Centre Street. I saw a Puerto Rican family huddled together crying. I saw a black family talking to a lawyer. I heard the lawyer tell them: "The best I can get him is five years." Then the black family huddled together and they started crying. Then I saw a small group of Orthodox Jews talking to a lawyer in the corner. The charges, just from what I could tell, had to do with some kind of insurance fraud. The Orthodox Jews were not crying. Maybe they had a better lawyer, I thought.

"Our guy," as the Woody Allen impersonator repeatedly called Fox, was in for criminal trespass, aiding an escape, and resisting arrest. "It could have been worse," said the defense attorney. I looked around me at the scenes of bedlam and despair up and down the long, impassive corridors. I decided the defense attorney may have been right.

"Here's the situation," said the attorney. "The case is before the New York Supreme Court.

That's not as bad as it sounds because New York is the only place where the Supreme Court is the lowest court for criminal charges. That really doesn't help things much. It's just a piece of trivia to file away so you'll know exactly where to go if your friend gets himself into trouble again."

"Okay," I said. "But what do we do this time?"

"Well, our guy's already had the first arraignment. The judge has asked for a seventy-two-hour psychiatric evaluation."

"He has?"

"She
has. Yes. It's not unusual, though. Nothing to be worried about. He'll pass the psychiatric evaluation. Everybody does. You'd have to be Son of Sam having a bad day for New York City to care."

"That's comforting, I guess."

"Yes. Well, there's nothing at all you can do for the next seventy-two hours. I'll call you when it's time to step up to the plate for the second arraignment. The judge will no doubt find no immediate reasons to deny bail. I don't think the bail will be very much. You'll just sign some papers and go home and wait for him and in a little while our guy will be out."

"So I just go home now?"

"That's right. Give me your phone number and I'll call you when we need you."

I gave the defense attorney my phone number and walked down the long corridor past all the troubled and distraught people and went out into the sunlight. It seemed very much like coming out of a sad tunnel of some kind. It was like entering a different land where people laughed and black kids played basketball and old Italian men played boccie ball and if you wanted to go somewhere you could take a cab or a subway or just walk around and look at windows or just look at the sky. Windows reminded me of Clyde and so, for some reason, did taxicabs and the sky and just about everything else. I felt a little guilty that I was so focused on Clyde and not thinking much at all about Fox. But that, I reasoned, was one of the things that happens to you when you're in jail. You find out who your friends really are and, most of the time, the news isn't good.

I went home like the man had suggested. They would call me when they needed me, he'd said. Clyde would call me when she needed to get in touch. She had still not given me her new phone number and I didn't know where she lived, so I had no way to get in contact with her if I wanted to, which I did. Getting in touch with her seemed to be very much a one-way street and the thought rather irked me. My head was also still spinning about Clyde's "educated guess" regarding what I'd been scribbling in my little notebook. If she could truly read minds, she must know how badly I wanted to see her. And, on top of this, she'd pointedly ignored my perhaps crudely phrased question concerning whether she herself had been one of the places and people Fox had been in and out of. This matter regarding Clyde's precise relationship with Fox Harris was beginning to monopolize my conscious thought processes. (This, I realized, was not a particularly healthy mentality for a person to be experiencing on a regular basis.) It was starting to look a lot like jealousy, and jealousy can have a highly corrosive effect upon a human being. Jealousy, however, you must understand, is not necessarily a bad thing for an author.

I began writing like a man possessed. I was starting to connect, I believed, with what I can refer to only as a cosmic creative process. The great writers, the great artists of our time, of all time, I thought, had assuredly been here before. Their unhappiness, their jealousy, their unfulfillment had been the very brick and mortar, the very green fuse by which their great works had been accomplished. Certainly, I did not fool myself into believing that I was a great author or a great artist of any kind. I began to feel, however, a certain emotional kinship with the Great Ones. Of course, I was limited by the God-given talents that God had given me if, indeed, He existed, and if, indeed, He'd given me such gifts. But the circumstances of my own existence were not so dissimilar from Kafka living in his miserable Czech apartment or Poe longing for his long-lost child bride or Van Gogh denied by love; and what of little man Toulouse-Lautrec surrounded by long-legged creatures, to whose world he could never belong; and the sad circumstances of the young girl Anne

Frank, scribbling her thoughts in the secret annex of a world turned upside down. And what of Hitler and Gandhi, polar opposites in spirit, both of whom, it could be said, formulated their ideas and did their best work in prison?

There are many prisons in this world, I reflected. One prison was the holding cell Fox Harris currently inhabited; another was the small basement apartment where I now was writing like a man with his hair on fire. No, I did not presume to be a great author writing his great masterpiece. I merely understood that greatness is the result of little people with big spirits who are compensating for what life and destiny have not given them.

So I wrote about Clyde, and to a lesser extent, about Fox, not only as I knew them but as I imagined, possibly even wished, them to be. I experimented with their characters, and what I discovered was that what I didn't know about them seemed to be the very impetus that was driving me on. I needed more pieces of the puzzle, more paint upon my palette to brush onto the canvas. I was experiencing what I took to be the bane of all writers of fiction. Sooner or later, the work must come from within. And that was an area I was not sure of at all.

And so I wrote all that night. Wrote and rewrote. Edited and reedited. I gave Clyde a mouth she didn't have, eyes she didn't have, and, for all I know, dreams she didn't have. I made Fox a mysterious, phantomlike figure, yet a handsome, vital man, consciously keeping my growing personal vitriol out of the equation. And both of them began to materialize before my eyes. They were not themselves, quite, of course. But how many of us can clearly recall numerous times and occasions in our own lives when without any doubt we were not ourselves? It happens all the time. And now, I said to myself, it was merely happening again. Is there anything in our lives so special, so secret, so sacred that cannot be reduced to little black marks like little toy soldiers marching relentlessly like time and war and life itself across the snow-blinded battlefields of blank white pages? How could Clyde say that I shouldn't write the book? It was not only a book about her and her beloved friend Fox, it was a book about every soldier who'd ever fallen on every battlefield and that, my friends, as the years go by, will be every bloody one of us.

Not write the book? I thought. Impossible. The book, it would seem, was writing itself.

twelve

No creature in this world is more smug and satisfied than a writer having written. After staying up half the night before, and soundly defeating white page after white page after white page, I felt like celebrating. The only problem was that there was no one to celebrate with. It was true, I'd never really had many friends in the city. This was due in part to my many years of severe alcoholism. It was also due in part to the years I'd spent doing anything (which quite often included doing nothing) to avoid that out-of-control behavioral pattern reprising itself. It was also true, I suppose, that I was never really a very friendly kind of guy. I mean, you probably wouldn't have known it if you'd met me, but down deep it was true. Maybe that's how and why two odd characters like Clyde and Fox could have become so important to me and so close to me in such a short period of time. They were just city workers trying to fill the pothole in my soul. And they almost did.

There were still a few other people I could call, of course, but somehow I just didn't care to. They wouldn't appreciate what it means when a longtime blocked writer finally breaks through. They wouldn't even understand what it means for a spiritually constipated person to move the neurotic bowels of a lifetime lived in restraint and at last breathe free. Judging, however, from Clyde's recent reticence about my writing the book, I didn't feel that at the moment she'd be the right person with whom I should lift a glass of champagne. She might just christen the whole project by breaking the bottle over the author's head. And Fox, unfortunately, was in no position to celebrate anything.

The book was a very long way from finished, of course. And there were many grammatical errors resulting from my tendency to end sentences with prepositions. Upon rereading a portion of the manuscript, such as it was, I decided to leave all errors as they were and let the prospective editor do his or her job. My job, I reflected, was to not concern myself with plots, or Hollywood, or character development, or pacing, or resolution. What I needed to do, I felt, was to be sure that the book shadowed, or foreshadowed, as closely as mortally possible, the spirit of the truth. I was eager, for instance, to work in a sex scene between myself and Clyde, but I was quite ambivalent as to whether to merely chronicle that steamy scenario when and if it occurred or to write it as I imagined it could be and then wait for life to catch up with art. I did not want the sex scene because it belonged in the movie. I wanted the sex scene, or scenes, because it or they belonged in the book just as the book belonged to Real Life. And Real Life, in a totally unqualified sense, belonged to only two people I'd ever known. And one of them was in the calaboose. And the other one didn't want me to write the book.

As I was drinking my second cup of coffee that morning, the thought of having sex with Clyde Potts came back again to me, recurring unbidden like a vision with a strong visceral component. In other words, I became rather aroused. I hadn't made a conscious effort to think about her. She had, it seemed, come to me. She was unbidden, yet she was certainly welcome. This time I didn't care whether life imitated art or art imitated life. I wanted her in my bed. I wanted her in my book. I wanted her.

I found myself wondering what she would smell like, what she would taste like, and whether a woman with her ultimate street smarts might be equally sophisticated in bed. I found myself wondering if her pubic hair was as blond as the hair on her pretty head. Or did she dye it, as I'd once read that Marilyn Monroe used to do? I also questioned whether my skills at writing sex scenes might exceed my skills at sex or the other way around. Would the basic sexual chemistry that I felt surely existed between Clyde and myself hold up when tested in the lab? Was there an implicit danger in writing about sex with Clyde strictly from my imagination? Would it color, detract from, enhance, or otherwise alter the act itself if and when it was consummated? Would the book reach its climax before Clyde and I would? Only time and the old typewriter would tell.

The morning drifted on, and after several cups of coffee, I disappeared into the little bathroom to gratify myself. Always before, my imagination had employed a smorgasbord of prurient images drawn from personal experience, porn flicks, wet dreams, and general sordid notions involving many little aspects of many different women, some being fiction, some not-so-fiction. Now the images that inflamed my mind were all of Clyde. It was a feverishly fervent and exciting sensation, almost like being monogamous, as much as that word might apply to your masturbatory fantasies.

I had barely exited the bathroom when the buzzer began buzzing, indicating that I had a visitor. About fifteen seconds later, I saw who the visitor was: the object of my affections. When I saw Clyde, I was glad that I'd just freed the hostages; I might not have been able to contain myself otherwise. To say that I was surprised to see her this soon was an understatement. To say that she looked terrific was also an understatement.

She came into the room oozing so much molecular character that virtually any thinking man had to be captivated. She entered like a field commander, her mind in a more important place, barely acknowledging the room or my presence in it. She was wearing jeans and some kind of plaid lumberjack shirt, carrying a briefcase, wearing no makeup, just an imperious expression that led one to believe she might be high on rocket fuel. Her hair was a mess. She looked like she'd quite possibly slept in her clothes. She looked as tough and sacred as nails on a cross. No one was going to mess with this woman, though anyone who saw her would have liked to have died trying.

"Coffee," she said, placing the briefcase on my desk and then making herself comfortable in the chair behind it. Fortunately, I'd put the manuscript away in a drawer.

"Cream or sugar?" I asked, walking over to the coffeemaker, feeling a bit like a flight attendant.

"Black like my men," she said, without a smile. "Why isn't Fox out of stir yet?"

I stared back at her in disbelief. She held my gaze calmly.

"Because I'm not Matlock," I said as I brought her the coffee. "The judge has ordered him held for the next seventy-two hours for a psychiatric evaluation."

"Well, fuck," said Clyde. "They're finally going to nail him."

"Not according to the defense attorney. He says New York City doesn't care."

"He's right about that," said Clyde as she sipped the coffee. "Got a smoke?"

I lit a cigarette for her and she held my hand, tapping it once gently with her finger. I found this simple gesture oddly comforting, especially in contrast to her rather brusque, oblivious demeanor.

"The attorney says we should have him out in about forty-eight hours," I said. "He'll call me the minute he knows anything."

Clyde inhaled deeply on the cigarette. She leaned back in the chair and ran her fingers absently through her hair and stared at the ceiling in exasperation.

"That bastard," she said.

"Who?" I asked. "The attorney? Fox?
Moi?"

"Donald Trump," said Clyde.

I poured myself another cup of coffee and pondered that crazy, yet righteous, logic that often emanated from this creature called Clyde and that, just as often, I did not understand.

"So you still have it in for Donald Trump?" I asked.

"Shit yeah, bitch. You bet I do. I have it in for anybody who's crass and un-Christian enough to put their own name on a building or a stadium or a casino. Hell, even a hospital wing isn't loo cool. The best gifts always come from that person named Anonymous."

"Couldn't agree with you more," I said. "But that's hardly a reason for a holy war with Donald Trump."

"Don't worry, Sunshine. It's no holy war. It's just a hobby, remember? Sometimes I just get a little overzealous in the pursuit of happiness. That's all. We're just going to have a little fun with the Donald and the best part of it is that he won't even know it. The poor man doesn't realize that he's really a nobody at heart. Remember when he got married and he invited several thousand guests to the most lavish wedding anyone could recall? And the society columnist for one of the papers wrote: 'There wasn't a wet eye in the house.' That was rich, no pun intended."

"All I'm saying is that these little hobbies of yours can sometimes get a bit out of hand. Fox is currently in jail because of the last one. Now you want to go up against one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet—"

"It's more fun that way. Anyway, Walter—if I may call you Walter—I've always believed you should pick your enemies very carefully because who your enemies are tells you more about yourself than who your friends are. What do you think of
that,
Sunshine?"

"I think everything you say or do is divinely inspired."

"I think you might make some lucky girl a fine personal assistant someday. It might even be me if you play your cards right, which you haven't yet, even though I know you're trying."

At this point, she placed one foot on either side of the desk and leaned back in the chair, thus spreading her blue-jeaned legs wide apart directly in front of me. This body language, I thought, was hardly a subtle nuance. She was either signaling that she was available to me sexually or she was teasing me because she knew she would undoubtedly never be available. I tried to remember what it was that she'd been saying. I couldn't for the life of me. And if I stood there gazing down into the canyon of my dreams much longer, no doubt it would be the death of me. For her part, Clyde remained leaning back in the chair, sipping casually from her cup of coffee, holding that quite natural yet highly suggestive position until it made me certain that the whole thing was an erotic dream and I was going crazy and the only way to preserve my mind and body was to go outside immediately and bang my head against the ground until I started laughing or at least stopped looking. If I stayed there, I was in mortal danger of falling to the floor in an old-fashioned swoon. Could it be possible she did not know the effect she was having upon me? Of course she knew. If I'd only known then where all this was heading, I would simply have asked her to take her feet off my desk, which, after an eternity or two, she finally did.

"Let's get crackin'," she said as she opened the briefcase on the desk. "Do you know what this is?"

"I have no idea," I said. "But it looks a bit like it wants to be a garage-door opener when it grows up."

"That's a good one, Walter. Fox may be right. He says you're developing a sense of humor. At any rate, this is the new thing in Europe. It's called a 'phone in a box.' All it is, really, is a cell phone with time on it. You can buy it for a couple hundred bucks. It's virtually untraceable back to the caller."

"Okay," I said warily.

"And this you may recognize as your standard laptop personal computer."

"So we're movin' on up from the Internet cafe," I said. "Where'd you get the laptop?"

"Bar mitzvah present," she said.

With the author's fine ear for detail in dialogue, I felt like correcting her. It was
bat
mitzvah for a girl,
bar
mitzvah for a boy. In Clyde's case, however, she was older than thirteen and she had more testosterone pumping through her than most men, so maybe her little gender bender wasn't such a technical error after all. Nonetheless, I made a note of it in my tiny Jack

Kerouac fiction writer's notebook. A fine ear for dialogue is very important.

"Now, traditional methods like Dumpster diving aren't going to work to find what we're looking for. We'll have to contact information brokers. We'll have to pull credit reports."

"And exactly what is it that we're looking for?" I asked.

"Donald Trump's American Express platinum card."

I suppose I knew, even before that time, that these little "hobbies" were someday going to land us all in some very hot water. With Fox still in jail, it now seemed as if the hobbies were Clyde's brainchildren. It was possible, of course, that Fox was running the show even now, like some Mafia don in prison. But all this notwithstanding, the more salient point was why I didn't bail out when I still had the chance. One reason, no doubt, was my fascination, well, maybe mesmerization, with Clyde Potts and Fox Harris. But an even stronger explanation, I now believe, is that if you're a writer of fiction and you go to the well of non-fiction, your wish will come true whether you like it or not.

"I see you're still joined at the hip to your little notebook," she said disapprovingly.

"Yes," I said. "But what did I just scribble down?"

"How the hell should I know? I'm not a clairvoyant. I just have my moments. And in just a few more moments, I'll have the first ten digits of the Donald's credit card. Then all we'll need are the last five."

It didn't take her much more time than she said it would to come up with the first ten digits of Donald Trump's American Express platinum card. She accessed an information broker, pulled up a credit report or two, and, as if by magic, the computer spit out the first ten numbers on the card. I Took copious notes in my little Graham Greene travel notebook and every once in a while she shot me a dirty look, but otherwise, the first part of the operation went very smoothly.

"The first ten digits are a lot easier to gain access to than the last five, of course," she allowed.

"Of course," I agreed. Not only did I not know how she was doing this, I wasn't exactly sure why she was doing it. But it was interesting. I got her another cup of coffee and we went through the now-familiar cigarette ritual a few more times. Then she was ready to attack the last five digits.

"The easiest way to get the last five numbers," said Clyde, "is to scam Trump's secretary regarding his monthly charge-backs. These are routine errors, mistakes, and erroneous charges that the credit-card company pays back to the client's account each month. You and I could possibly receive charge-backs, too, but we don't really give a shit. But it's a funny thing about these big shots like Trump. And I've found that it's almost always the case. The richer they are, the cheaper they are. Charge-backs, even if they don't add up to much, are probably the kind of thing he's instructed his people to stay right on top of. That's how I plan to nail him."