Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (9 page)

"I'm all notebook," I said.

Clyde almost smiled. I took that to be a good sign in general.

"Ten down and five to go," she said, removing the cell phone from its little box.

"Anything I can do?" I asked.

Clyde looked up at me and smiled a crooked, seductive little smile. It was a thoroughly disarming smile, and that always worked with me.

"I'll tell you what you can do," she said. "You can hope I'm successful in scamming this secretary. If that doesn't work, we may have to activate
you."

I was still conscious at that time that I was being vectored, albeit willingly, ever more wildly into the morass of criminality. But, as they say, knowing something and doing something about it are two different things. I chose to watch, in growing admiration, as this blond pistol of a woman went about her nefarious work. It started out with Clyde punching a number into the cell phone and, while waiting for someone to answer, winking mischievously at me. You might think I would have said something to stop her, but you've got to remember that I couldn't even summon up the courage earlier to tell her to take her feet off the desk. So I just smiled back. It was a safe thing to do. It probably wouldn't have made any difference anyway. Some things are written in books and some things are written in the saltshaker stars and there's not a damn thing you can do about either one of them once they get past the editor.

"Hi," Clyde was now saying. "This is Mindy from American Express platinum customer service. We have a notation here of a number of charge-backs to your account for last month, but because of a computer crash the records have been lost. You're one of our priority customers, of course, and we just wanted to give you the opportunity to resubmit them."

Clyde gestured to me for another cigarette. As I gave her a light, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that she was a pretty cool customer herself, possibly the coolest I'd ever met in my life.

"Yes," she continued. "I thought that you might. It's no problem at all. We just have to verify your identity. For security we'll need the last five digits of your card-member account number and the expiration date."

A short time later, Clyde terminated the call with a look of pure triumph on her face. Maybe "pure" is not quite the right word to use in this description. To my naked author's eye, there was an almost blinding sexual energy in her countenance as well. As a man, I knew that I wanted her more than I ever had before.

"You got it all?" I asked.

She put her two thumbs together at the tips, raising an index finger on each hand like a small goalpost that she held at arm's length in front of her.

"Touchdown!" she said.

"What do we do now?" I asked.

"Now," she said, "we're going to have a party."

thirteen

The Unicorn was a seedy-looking little Irish pub about two blocks from my apartment. I'd walked past it many times without ever having had the inclination to go in the place. Now, with Clyde by my side, and fully off the wagon, I was totally prepared to walk past it one more time. But Clyde, apparently, had other ideas.

"What a cute little place," she said. "What's it like inside?"

"Don't know," I said. "I've never been in there."

"Only you, Walter Snow, could live a block and a half away from a place called the Unicorn and never bother to go inside."

"You forget, darling, that I haven't been drinking for almost seven years. That is, until I met you and Fox Harris."

"That's right. Blame somebody else. Every alcoholic in the world does that. Can't you come up with an original excuse? For God's sake, Walter, you're a writer!"

"I haven't come up with anything new or original to write in seven years either."

"Until you met me and Fox Harris. Are we your curse or your salvation?"

"Read the book and find out," I said.

But Clyde was already marching, like the general of an invading army, into the little bar. I almost felt like a husband then. A husband who'd had a little misunderstanding with his wife maybe. It was something I had never felt before. I hesitated for a moment on the sidewalk, watching this person I hadn't known all that long and whom I didn't know all that well walk away from me, knowing I would follow. And what if I didn't? If I just kept walking down the street? If I actually took the chance of letting her disappear from my life?

You could say that I thought of that moment as a chance to get away, to break the bonds of our fateful trinity that even then, I knew, like that biblical garden, contained the seeds of its own doom. Unlike Fox and Clyde, I tended to believe what was written on the seed packet, but I did not truly want to get away from them because there was nowhere else I wanted to go and no one else I wanted to be. It was a beautiful friendship the three of us had, actually. None of us dreamed anyone would really get hurt. "Dreams will never hurt you," Fox once told me. "Only the dreamers can."

But for reasons that perhaps I did not clearly understand, there was never any doubt about how I felt about Clyde. At that moment, I reckoned that I could no more walk away from Clyde than walk away from myself. And I couldn't walk away from Fox either, for that matter. It was as if the three of us somehow were children who had taken a blood oath to stand up for each other, always. That kind of love or loyalty has no sell-by date, has no rationale, has only what is written in blood, written in the wishing stars of a destiny that time and the world could not sustain.

"What took you so long, Sunshine?" said Clyde, not waiting for me to answer. "This place is perfect!"

I glanced around to see what Clyde was so excited about. It was one of the dingiest bars I'd ever seen. It was a mom-and-pop place without the mom. But the pop was there all right. He looked like an ancient leprechaun standing behind the old battle-scarred bar and, a mildly disturbing vision, even to an ex-drunk, he appeared to be far more inebriated than the three other persons in the place.

"It's seldom a good sign," I said, "when the bartender's drunker than the patrons."

"Maybe Jesus is telling us to catch up with him," said Clyde.

"This doesn't look like the kind of place Jesus would be caught getting resurrected in."

"I didn't think you believed in God."

"I may not believe in God, but I believe in you."

"That'll work," she said. "Just so you believe in something."

We sat at the bar and ordered two pints of Guinness. It wasn't long before Clyde was chatting up the colorful fellow behind the bar. It wasn't long after that before she had him completely under her thumb.

"I've been on the piss for about a week," he allowed. "Some blokes in suits and ties have been coming around—”

"That's always bad," Clyde put in as the leprechaun set the two Guinnesses down on the bar.

"You're not shittin', lassie," he said. "The bloody bastards are trying to close the Unicorn. I'll never let 'em close the Unicorn. Had this place for thirty-two years. If they close her, they'll have to bury me with her. Then I would never get the opportunity to serve another Guinness to such a beautiful lass with eyes like an Irish morning."

"Who are these people who're trying to close you down?" asked Clyde.

"Wankers," said the leprechaun. "Bloody wankers is what they are."

"I know what they are," said Clyde. "What I want to know is
who
they are."

"Lawyers for some big corporation," he said. "Very dodgy blokes. Causing trouble with the health inspector, the fire inspector, the bleedin' landlord. I don't know who they are, is the truth. They're wankers and they won't tell me who they are. That's why I've been on the piss for a week."

"Sunshine," said Clyde, staring at me with eyes that, indeed, appeared to resemble the beauty of an Irish morning. "I think we need to look into this matter."

"Don't we have enough hobbies going at the moment?" I asked.

"Don't be cynical, darling," she said. "It doesn't suit you."

It was the first time Clyde had called me "darling" and I grasped hold of the word like a drowning man, which, looking back on things now, was not such a bad analogy. (Or was it merely a simile? This is the kind of thing that an author really should know but almost never does. Most of the time it is best left as a question mark for the editor to resolve. This makes the editor feel important and needed and, in fact, is the brick and mortar that justifies his or her existence. Unfortunately, it is never quite that easy for an author to justify his or her existence. That's why they are often such unpleasant or merely unremarkable people. That's also why, if you like the book, you should never meet the author.)

I was oblivious to it at the time, but there was a fine Italian hand pulling the strings and adjusting the mirrors behind the little hobbies of these two new friends of mine who had done their best to fill the emptiness of my own fairly unremarkable life. Again, there is no useful purpose in assessing the blame for what happened. Certainly, we all must shoulder some of the blame for the choices we make and the company we keep. Yet how was I to know that helpful, wholesome concepts, such as friends and hobbies, could lead one down the path to Satan? Of course, if you don't believe in God, it's highly likely that you don't believe in Satan either and, I suppose, I didn't. Today, I'm not so sure.

By the second round of Guinnesses, Clyde was buying drinks for the house, which wasn't really so difficult since there were only three other patrons in the place. By the third round, I felt like I'd known the owner and proprietor, one Jonjo Mayo, all my life. By the fourth round of Guinnesses, I'd lost track of what round it was. That was possibly the main reason I let myself get involved in Clyde's newest little hobby, to save the Unicorn.

"I don't think I'm overloading your plate," said Clyde as we stood by the jukebox listening to music by the Irish Rovers. "You've already promised to help Fox but there's nothing anybody can do until you hear from the attorney. So, in the meantime, all I'm asking you to do is a little investigative work to find out who's putting the squeeze on our friend Jonjo. I mean, you practically live next door to this place. It'd make a perfect clubhouse for us once Fox gets out. Will you look into it for me, Sunshine? Please?"

"Is this how I play my cards right?" I asked.

"No," she said, looking absolutely heavenly in the celestial light of the jukebox. "This is."

Then she kissed me like I'd never been kissed in my life. Her tongue slipped between my lips like a silken butterfly and I felt like I had woken from a lifetime of slumber and into the midst of a fragrant Irish morning even though I noticed that her eyes were closed. I closed my eyes, too, and the silken butterfly seemed to be flitting around inside my head, like pink wings touching places and things and dreams that I'd forgotten I'd forgotten.

"That was a hell of a party," I said, sometime later as the two of us stumbled out the door of the Unicorn.

"That wasn't the party," said Clyde, laughing a carefree laugh that sounded to my Guinness-enhanced consciousness like a beautiful crystal bell inside my head. "That was just the mixer. I've already decided we'll have the party on a much more lavish scale. Trump will pick up the tab, of course. There'll be thousands of guests. All the homeless people at the Old Armory where Fox first met Teddy. In fact, Teddy can be the guest of honor."

"If we can find him," I said, a trifle doubtfully.

"Oh, we can find him," she said. "We can do anything!"

Once again, I had to admire this woman, so confident, so charmingly childlike, so appealing to me in her veil of crazy courage. Maybe we
could
do anything, I thought. My creativity, my happiness quotient, my hope for the future all seemed to be redlining because of her. The only thing that nagged at me slightly was the knowledge that, as a former AA person, drunk out of my mind on Guinness, I was clearly backsliding in the sobriety department. But I felt so happy.

"Jesus," I said. "If only my sponsor could see me now."

She smiled that wistful, rueful, stunning smile that could beat the world. She looked me straight in the eyes.

"Don't worry, Sunshine," said Clyde. "She can."

fourteen

You'd think it might be difficult for a newly converted vegetarian living in a basement apartment to cough up ten thousand dollars for the bail of somebody he hadn't even known a month before. According to Fox, however, he and I had known each other for thousands of years. Of course, he wasn't the one who had to cough up the ten thousand dollars. But let's take one thing at a time.

I will admit that I became a vegetarian during roughly this time frame because of Clyde's influence. All of us are influenced by the people around us and the people who are closest to us, and I, like anyone else, am no exception. It was more than just Clyde's earlier comments about not eating anything with a face or a mother, however, that caused me to make this change in my eating habits. "Not eating animal pain," was one way she had described the reasons for being a vegetarian. But, in truth, that wasn't the thing, laudable as it may be, that swung me. The thing Clyde suggested, and the aspect of being a vegetarian that I clearly liked the best, was the undeniable moral superiority you feel toward all the other poor devils who are not vegetarians like yourself.

In time, I came to feel morally superior to a great many people, including, I freely admit, Clyde and Fox. This had little to do with vegetarianism but a great deal to do with what happens when modern boys and girls learn the rules of the road. Today, it's hard for me to believe that I could have been irritated when I first learned that Fox was also a vegetarian. I once considered this to have been merely jealousy on ray part. Now I think it had something to do with every human being's inexorable drive, whether conscious or unconscious, toward moral superiority. Remember, Hitler was a vegetarian, too.

On the morning following our Guinness marathon at the Unicorn, I got the call from Fox's court-appointed attorney. I won't bother you with every little trivial detail, but instead, I'll just try to give you an overview, or should I say underview, of this rather tedious experience. The first thing I did was take a cab to 100 Centre Street, where, after wandering in the labyrinth for a good while, I was able to locate Woody Allen lurking outside a small courtroom. He told me that since Fox lived in New York and was not a violent offender, he thought he could very conceivably get him out without bail. I thought that was good news. Unfortunately, both of us were wrong.

Woody Allen also told me that if a small bail proved to be necessary, I would legally "own" Fox Harris. As long as he didn't flee the jurisdiction and fail to show up in court, any money I laid out for bail would be returned. The attorney nattered on for a good while about what might or might not happen to Fox Harris and myself and other hypothetical defendants and their good angels like myself. It was all fairly boring but I did my best to give the semblance of listening intently. Finally, we entered the courtroom and the proceedings began.

The proceedings proceeded ploddingly along until at last Fox was brought out and Woody Allen went forth and did his thing and the judge said he found "no immediate psychiatric reasons to deny bail." Fox, having already pleaded "not guilty," was thereby ordered released on one hundred thousand dollars bail. I did some quick calculations in my brain and realized that I was going to have to come up with ten thousand bucks. It was just a good thing, I thought, that I didn't have any kids and they didn't have any college tuition. Fox gave me the double thumbs-up, which is not such an easy gesture from the somewhat compromising position of wearing handcuffs, i did my best to smile back. Privately, I realized that ten thousand dollars represented most of the money I had in the world. If Fox Harris decided not to show up in court, I would own him and that would be about it.

The judge banged her gavel for about the fiftieth time that morning and they took Fox away and I waited some more for Woody Allen to file another motion or gather his papers or whatever you do if you're a court-appointed defense attorney who vaguely resembles Woody Allen. I felt a bit sorry for the guy, if the truth be told. I also felt a good bit sorry for myself. I did not, I should say for the record, feel sorry for Fox Harris.

Eventually, Woody Allen emerged from the courtroom and directed me to a small office down the corridor where I would supposedly be separated from my ten grand. I'd had a little time to think about it and I now didn't require Woody to tell me that paying bail for anybody was a fairly dicey thing. Maybe I "owned" Fox Harris, but, in a sense, he also owned me. On any crazy whim of his, I'd clearly be out the whole ten thousand. I knew how impetuous and unpredictable Fox was as a human being, and it did not give me great comfort. Those qualities helped to make him a colorful, spontaneous character, but they also made him a bad risk for bail.

I waited in a long line. I asked myself why I was doing what I was doing. I knew it had to be either a humanitarian gesture or simply for Clyde. I decided I
was
doing it for Clyde, always with the stipulation, of course, that I was doing a lot of things these days that I never thought I'd be doing and I didn't know why. One of those things was writing a book, and it mildly grieved me that I could have been home writing if I Hadn't been forced to stand here waiting in line to be fleeced of ten thousand dollars. But nobody was forcing me, I reflected. And if I hadn't been involved with Fox and Clyde, I wouldn't be writing the book. I decided it made its own peculiar sense for me to be waiting in this line. As Fox would later tell me: "Everything comes out in the wash if you use enough Tide."

At last I got to talk to the court officer and I gave him Fox's case number and I started to pay with a check but he wouldn't take a personal check so I had to max out my credit card. Then I had to sign some papers. Then he told me that Fox would be released shortly and that I could go home, which I did. But I didn't go directly home. I stopped, oddly enough, at the Unicorn.

I figured there was time for a little of the hair of the dog that bit me before a fox got out of jail and bit me again. The Unicorn was empty, as usual. This time, only Jonjo was there, polishing a few glasses rather wistfully. I ordered a Guinness and thought I'd listen to his sob story for a while. It was the least I could do for Clyde, I found myself thinking. Was I just a chemical puppet doing everything for Clyde? I tried not to think too hard about it. I tried just to concentrate on drinking my Guinness and listening to Jonjo's sorry tale.

"Been on the piss since you last came in with that lovely lass," he said. "Where the hell is she, by the way?"

"Probably having brunch with Donald Trump," I answered, gulping the Guinness.

"It's gonna take Donald Trump to keep me little Unicorn alive," he said ruefully. "Those wankers came back again."

"Who are those wankers, Jonjo? They're not from the mob, are they?"

"Sweet Leapin' Jesus," said the leprechaun. "If they were from the mob, I'd've paid 'em off already and been done with it. The mob at least gives a bloke a chance. These wankers won't stop until they kill the Unicorn."

"You mean they're not after a payoff?"

"Hell, no. They're out for me blood. They won't be happy until me and me dear little Unicorn fly back to Limerick together. They won't take money. What they're after is me lease. The health department came by again yesterday after you left. Now the zoning authority is paying a visit this afternoon. No, me lad. These wankers are not from the mob. These wankers are from corporate America!"

I ordered another pint of Guinness and reflected darkly upon the nature of the people who would threaten a modest little establishment called the Unicorn. A few regulars began to drift in but it appeared as if all the harassment was starting to atrophy what precious little clientele the Unicorn had to begin with. In a way, I admired Clyde's strange brand of courage and humanity in standing up for the underdog. In examining the complex nature of her character, I recalled a comment she'd made during our maiden visit to the Unicorn. I'd mentioned in passing that I thought the place looked like a hopeless cause. Her response, delivered quite archly, had been: "Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for." Her judgment might be somewhat askew, but you had to admire her spirit.

"Here's the card one of the blokes left," Jonjo was saying, pushing the business card across the bar. "He said if I decide to sell him me lease, to just give him a call. I'd just as soon sell him me bloody lease on life!"

I looked at the card. It read: "Stanton Malowitz, Northwest Properties, Limited." There was a phone number with an area code I didn't recognize. I wasn't much on detective work, but if I was going to run down any leads for Clyde regarding the fate of the Unicorn, this looked like a good place to start.

"Keep it, me lad," said the leprechaun. "I'll not be calling him."

I had one more Guinness, told Jonjo I would return, and toddled off toward my apartment. I'd forked over ten grand for Fox's bail and done some snooping at the Unicorn, and the nagging feeling that I might be being used by Clyde had vanished in the light of my good works and, very possibly, the Guinness. Would I have done these things for anyone else? Probably not. Without Clyde's encouragement, I doubt if I would even have done them for myself.