“And how did you feel when it was all over?” I asked, sipping my espresso.
“Blank,” he replied woodenly.
“That’s not a good enough answer.”
“Look, it’s supposed to chill you out, okay?” he elaborated, impatiently. “Turn you into a nice, docile little boy. That’s why they do it. What it did … It made me somebody who got shook easily. I wasn’t before. I was cocky. You couldn’t touch me. But once somebody’s done something like that to you, you lose your nerve, your cool. It took me a long, long time to get that back. Maybe I never have. Not all of it. Part of me … Part of me felt brand-new, like I was tasting everything for the first time. A simple glass of water was the best glass of water I’d ever had in my life. I’d never been so thirsty. Or so grateful for the chance to drink that water. One thing didn’t change though. The hate didn’t go away. I still hated Herb and Aileen—more, in fact.” He paused, weighing his words carefully. “This is something that’s never come out before. I’ve never told anyone. Just Fiona. And she’s never betrayed my confidence. And I ain’t looking for sympathy now. Or excuses. I’m bringing it up because I wanna be understood, okay? As somebody who’d had some weird, strange shit done to him.” He glanced hungrily at my uneaten dessert, licking his lips. “I think the treatment also gave me this incredible need to be in control of my life. Because they took it from me. I need to be in control. And I am.”
“That’s an illusion—no one is.”
“I
am,” he insisted, stabbing the table with a fat index finger.
“Bullshit. A car could crash into this building right now and kill all of us.” At my feet, Lulu began to tremble. She’s always been rather literal. “Just an example, girl,” I assured her.
“Okay, okay,” Lyle conceded. “I need to control what I
can
control.”
“And who you can control?”
The Scowl. “Yeah, maybe.”
“What happened when you went home?”
“I went back to school after a few weeks. And it was totally weird. Kids would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Lyle, what’s happening?!’ And I wouldn’t quite remember who they were. I’d start talking about some album I liked, only I couldn’t think of the name of the band. Or who was in it. I couldn’t remember which classes I was in, or where the rooms were. I didn’t feel like I was totally, one-hundred-percent
me,
which shook me. It also made me want to get away. Start over someplace where no one remembered something that I didn’t remember. More than anything, I wanted to get away from Herb and Aileen, and the hate I felt for them morning, noon, and night. Because they
did
it to me, Hoagy. Their own son. They fucked with my head. Nobody has a right to do that to somebody else. Especially their own child. There should be
laws.
Who knows how I would have turned out if only they’d let me be? Maybe I’d have been a great writer like you.”
“Now there’s a truly horrifying thought. Did you get away?”
His eyes were on my dessert again. “The day I graduated from high school—and I did graduate. I’m very proud of that, considering my fucking brains had been rearranged. I took off. Caught a train for New York. Got a room at the Chelsea Hotel. And I started over. I was seventeen years old.” He shifted his bulk in the chair. He seemed drained by our session. “What the fuck, now you know my deep, dark secret. And why I haven’t spoken to the parents in over twenty years, and never will. I don’t hold a grudge. Ask anyone. But that’s one grudge I’ll hold until the day I die. So how is that?” He meant the profiterole.
I tasted it. “Not terrible.”
“Gonna finish it?”
“Help yourself.”
He devoured it in great, starved mouthfuls. “Man, I love chocolate,” he exclaimed, as some of it dribbled down his chin. “It’s my favorite thing in the whole world to eat—except for pussy.”
“You’re all class, Lyle.”
“Class is strictly for phonies,” he snarled. “And if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a phony. I am who I am. The real me. And proud of it.” He sneered at me across the table. “Besides, you got no class either. Know why?”
“Do tell.”
“Because if you were as classy as you think you are you wouldn’t be working for me.” He smirked at me. “Would ya,
Hoagster?!”
I had to hand it to Lyle Hudnut. He knew which buttons to push. This was a singular gift he had. I told him so. I also suggested he get fucked. I said it in a classy way, of course. Then I walked out of the restaurant.
Papa Bear was sitting in my chair.
He was drinking my Bass Ale and leafing through an old volume of newspaper columns by Jimmy Cannon, which is something I read every couple of years just to remind myself what good writing is. I didn’t bother to ask him how he got in. Vic Early was always good with locks. He was a balding, sandy-haired giant in a knit shirt and slacks, six feet six, about two hundred fifty pounds and quite mild-mannered, provided you didn’t get him mad. Once, he had anchored the offensive line for the UCLA Bruins. Would have been a first-round NFL draft pick, too, if he hadn’t come back from Vietnam with a steel plate in his head. By trade he was a celebrity bodyguard. I brought him to New York to protect Cameron Sheffield Noyes, the best-selling novelist. Maybe you read about that one. Lately, he’d been keeping an eye on Merilee and her farm in Connecticut. Lulu whooped and jumped into his lap, happy to see him. Me, I wondered what the hell he wanted. I didn’t bother to ask him that either. He would tell me.
The air conditioner was wheezing away in the window, but the living room was still stuffy and smelled more than faintly of Nine Lives canned mackerel for cats and very strange dogs. I stripped off my jacket and went to the refrigerator for a beer. There was none left. I poured myself two fingers of twelve-year-old Macallan instead. My sofa was buried under a pile of newspapers and unpaid bills and chew toys. Those were Lulu’s. I sat. I waited.
“She has a favor to ask of you, Hoag.”
I waited some more.
“She’s having a pretty rough time of it, emotionally,” Vic went on, in his droning monotone. “And she could really stand to spend some time around someone who loves her.”
“Why doesn’t she try calling the father of her child?” I suggested, trying to sound casual about it.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Hurt?”
“No, it’s not Bill Hurt,” I snapped. “Or John Hurt. Or John Heard. Or Garfield Heard. Or—”
“I meant, does it hurt?”
“Oh.” I sipped my drink.
“I don’t know who it is, Hoag. Honest, I don’t. Neither does Pam.” Vic was referring to Merilee’s elderly British housekeeper. Another of my choice finds. “Merilee won’t say a word to either one of us. We’re baffled. Nobody, but nobody’s been around. She’s had no dates. No phone calls from men. No messages.”
“Flowers?”
“The occasional bouquet. I figured those were from her agent.”
“You ever know an agent to send flowers?”
“I never had an agent,” Vic replied gravely. “This one guy was maybe going to represent me when I turned pro, only he sent me a Pontiac Firebird and two tickets to the Hula Bowl.”
“I don’t think I qualify anymore, Vic.”
“As what, Hoag?”
“As someone who loves her.”
“Actually, I wasn’t referring to you,” he confessed, shifting uncomfortably.
I stared at him a second. “Oh, no, you don’t …”
“She needs her, Hoag.”
“She can’t have her. Lulu’s my dog.”
“Merilee feels she belongs to both of you.”
“She does not belong to both of us. She belongs to me.”
Lulu let out a low moan of consternation and slunk into the bedroom. And very likely under the bed with the dust bunnies. She hates being fought over. It’s true what they say—divorce is always hardest on the little ones.
“Merilee tried pulling this on me once before, Vic,” I explained. That was in London. She succeeded, too. “Lulu is
mine.
Merilee got the apartment, the Jag, the furniture. I got Lulu.” I drained my single malt and got up and poured myself another. “ And she has a lot of nerve asking for her after all of this shit she’s put us through.”
Vic’s eyes widened. “Wait, she doesn’t even know I’m here, Hoag. Honest. This was all my idea. See, I was around the corner at Sometimes A Great Lotion picking up some stuff to rub on her feet and I just thought I’d … I’m worried about her, Hoag. The publicity’s been a real strain, and it’s been a rough pregnancy. She’s no kid, and it’s her first. She’s got the heavy ankles, the bloating, the heartburn, the hemorrhoids. Plus, she’s still vomiting every morning.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“You sound bitter, Hoag.” His brow furrowed with concern. “That’s not like you.”
“Say hello to the new me.”
“It would just be for a few weeks.”
“Forget it, Vic.”
“Oh, well,” he said heavily. “I tried.” He got to his feet, filling the small, dingy room. Lulu reemerged to oversee his departure.
“We’ll walk you back.”
“That’s not necessary, Hoag.”
“Yes, it is. You drank my last beer.” Broadway was almost totally quiet, empty cabs prowling up and down the street for fares. It was barely eleven, but a light rain was starting to fall in warm, greasy drops, and Yushies can’t go out in the rain. They melt if they get wet. Even in good weather I was seeing fewer and fewer of the young urban shitheads around than I had back in the go-go years, when they had overrun my neighborhood and nearly ruined it. The crash had hacked a lot of them off at the knees, sending them scuttling back under the baseboards from whence they came. Only a handful of their trendoid boutiques and garish, overrated eateries were still in business. The rest were shuttered. Happily, my neighborhood was even starting to recover. The old merchants who had been crowded out were moving back in. I could buy fresh fruit again. Possibly someday soon I’d even be able to get my shoes resoled without having to walk sixteen blocks. That’s one of the best things about New York. You can’t kill it. You can’t kill something that doesn’t have a heart.
“Hear you’re doing the Lyle Hudnut book,” Vic mentioned as we walked, Lulu ambling along ahead of us.
“I am.”
“What do you make of him?”
“He’s an eight-hundred-pound sitcom gorilla. He sits wherever he wants and on whomever he wants. He’s crude, abusive, belligerent, and erratic as hell. I haven’t known him for long, but I hate him intensely. He has that effect on most people. In his defense, he told me some extraordinary stuff about his childhood tonight. He had it rough.”
“Standard celebrity cop-out,” Vic said gruffly. “They all say, ‘You have to put up with my selfishness and cruelty because I had it rough when I was a kid.’ I’ve heard that from a million stairs, and it’s self-indulgent bull. We all had it rough as kids. But we learn how to deal with it, and we get on with our lives. There’s no excuse for their rotten behavior. Either somebody’s got class or they haven’t.”
“I’d rather not talk about class anymore tonight.”
“A bully like that,” Vic droned on, “that’s a guy who is trying to prove he’s not vulnerable. So he goes and makes everyone else feel like wimps so he’ll feel better. I hate guys like that.”
“Like I said, he has that effect on most people.”
We waited for the light to change at Amsterdam, where there was traffic, the cars’ tires hissing on the wet pavement. The rain was falling more steadily now. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Or it may have been a subway train. It’s always hard to tell in the city.
“What do you know about shock treatment, Vic?”
He glanced at me sharply. He had done heavy trank time twice at the Veterans Administration hospital. Sometimes he just sees red and wigs out. I don’t know if it’s the steel plate or the pieces of shrapnel that are still in there. He looked back at the street. “They don’t call it that, Hoag,” he said quietly. “They call it ECT, short for electroconvulsive therapy. Know a couple of fellows who had it. Did Hudnut?”
“When he was seventeen.”
“That’s young. That’s very young.”
The light changed. We resumed walking.
“He claims his parents had it done to him because he was a rockhead.”
“A what?”
“A rebel. Always in trouble, from day one.”
“Tell me more.”
I told him about Lyle biting the mailman when he was three. About his fights with the other little kids, his trouble with authority. About burning down Herb’s ham shack. About Allen. About the drugs he’d been put on, and put himself on, and sold. I told him what I knew. “What do you think?” I asked him when I was done.
“I think it makes for a very nice story,” he replied. “I myself am a big fan of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Terrific book, and the movie is one of my all-time favorites. Nicholson’s best performance, in my opinion. Only, that’s fiction, Hoag. In reality, they don’t administer ECT as a disciplinary tool. It’s not there to zap the rebellion out of people. It’s strictly for patients who aren’t responding to any other forms of therapy. And in teenagers it’s a last resort. Used only in the most acute cases.”
“What kind of acute cases, Vic? What are we talking about?”
“I’m no shrink,” he replied grimly.
“He said his head was fine. Totally together.”
“No way, Hoag. Not if they gave him ECT.”
“He also said they knocked him out so he couldn’t object.”
“They knocked him out because they have to,” Vic countered. “We’re talking about a massive convulsive seizure. If he wasn’t put under and given heavy doses of muscle relaxants, he’d have broken bones from all of the twitching that goes on. Sounds horrible, I know. But like I said, it’s only used when all else fails.”
“He mentioned something about memory loss.”
Vic nodded. “The guys I know, their memories were definitely scrambled. Especially about recent events. But a lot of that comes back. Or it’s supposed to.”
The newsstand at Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam was bustling,
“MY DADDY IS AN ALIEN”
screamed the current
Weekly World News,
which was claiming that the father of Merilee’s love child was, well, a Martian. They even had a photograph of him. Or it. Complete with tentacles.
Vic’s jaw muscles tightened as he lumbered past it, but he didn’t mention it. “What did Hudnut tell you about his parents?”