Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Chapter 8 Can't You See?

By Gary O'Brien

So, again, back to Chris, I judged him to be about the same height, perhaps twenty pounds heavier. Get enough of this booze and over-the-counter shit into his system and he would be putty in my hands.
I had a camera in my car. Whatever I was about to do to him, he would come away from this disgraced, at the very least, and under arrest at best. I would bail him out, of course, dust him off and send him on his way with his tail between his legs. I would mail unflattering photos to Lyzanne in a couple of weeks, detailing our conversation.
I would then accuse her of trying to have another writer muscle in and steal my work from me, and I would sue her ass, finally.
At this point he was blathering something about his divorce. How he had sacrificed a home life of any kind to be a writer, and perhaps that was the only way for writers to survive. You couldn’t live and work with someone glancing over your shoulder all the time trying to read your most intimate thoughts; someone who was afraid a writer might share something intimate with the entire world before it had been sieved through the family filter.
Apparently, his wife’s family was comprised of “stodgy” people. Worse than having a child run through a plate glass window, was the notion that someone would do or write something “unseemly” and his wife was paranoid about it. She never got over being Daddy’s little crumb-cake.
“Honestly, I don’t know how the man expected me to afford the lifestyle we were supposed to uphold, other than by writing, and writing the truth!” he said bitterly, and now I was ordering the drinks, Southern Comfort and Bud chasers.
For God’s sake Naughten had written a true-life account of just about everything he did in the army. How could anything be unseemly after that, I wanted to know?
Daddy’s crumb cake wouldn’t hear it. It got so bad she demanded to edit his work, bit by bit, before it went out to the post. At the time of their divorce, he was busy working on a second book about what it was like to go from army service in South Africa, to polite English society. This was somewhat of a mind fuck to hear Naughten tell it. In his new work he pointed out how acceptable terms in Brit lingo like “Paki” sounded like “Kaffir.” This was concerning, he said. He had seen the end result of that sort of thinking.
He pointed out how English society suffered from the same malaise as far as he could see. And it wasn’t, in his mind, this wonderful catch-all term yanks use for it called “racism” which he considered about the most superficial adjective in the language. No, it went deeper. He said English society, as with American society, suffered from full on xenophobia, the fear of the outsider, the one who is different.
For all the scathing rap lyrics decrying the atrocities of whites, much of blek society, he said; resents Hispanic and Korean immigrants. But it went even deeper, white Hispanics and black Hispanics fight each other in America over squatters’ rights on who has it worse. He had lived in New York as I had, and he saw this as well. As far as he could tell, this xenophobia was a natural trait in most societies and groups; it’s what happened when a society went out of its way to actually stoke those racial fires that was the deciding factor whether or not it would go ape-shit with violence.
What bothered him was neither political party in America seemed to be doing much to prevent the fear and hatred from brewing because that very fear and hatred translates easily into votes.
White society was particularly guilty in America. Aside from their fear of every other race and nationality, rich whites hated poor whites and the reverse. Corporate whites hated bohemian, liberal whites. It went deeper than check balance; it was three-pronged hatred: it went to religion, political affiliation, and education. Four prongs if you counted dress, automotive plumage and other forms of adornment.
He was searching for a central theme that he could use to write a book about all this. It would be a work of fiction, this time; not non-fiction. You could actually get more done that way, he said.
Christ I hated this. For here was more depth to the man, yet. Not a Nazi after all. I wished he would make up his mind. Not very astute socially, in that he hadn’t the capacity to reduce his booming voice, but not a racist as the term is known. What was I doing? Here I was talking to Graham Greene re-incarnated. Could I go through with this?
The man was a mess, worse off than me by far, conflicted and torn in so many directions. His wife and children – he had two daughters before giving up writing his second book and divorcing his wife – were across the sea in London. He was adrift like Yassir Arafat, drunk, drunking drinkier, a lamb on the sacrificial alter of my xenophobic fear and anger. Where were those flaws that I saw so clearly earlier in the evening that allowed me to carry through with my little plan, guilt free?
In my pocket I held the makings for “Speckled Lady on crack.” I had four, full sized bee pollen supplements, eight diet pills, and two tablets of kava kava. By now we had each consumed two pints of Guinness, a shot each of Old Bushmills, then two Budweisers and two shots of Southern Comfort.
I sat and waited for a while. Then I made my move. I removed the baggie from my pocket and extracted the tablets, casually taking them one by one into my mouth.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Oh that’s some shit I take to keep the party going,” I said, explaining the diet pill and the bee pollen had an excellent effect on mental clarity. Then I ordered a drink for each of us. It’s a special libation they only know by name in Vero Beach: Ketamine and tonic; which really wasn’t ketamine, it was Red Bull, Vodka and Tonic.
“Want to keep up?” I asked.
And just like that he said he did. Shit, that was easy.
“Sure, I’m up for it and I have also brought along a little something. Consider it a token of our business relationship.”
“What is it?”
He reached into his hip pocket and partially extracted a cellophane bag containing some of the greenest weed I have seen since college. I had pulled out a rapier and he had pulled out a flintlock. This could get very interesting.
I didn’t expect a piss test for some time. There was no question that I would not be driving home this evening. It was Friday going into Saturday. Leslie and the kids knew I was attending a conference in Orlando and I might stay over.
I had $400 that I fully intended to blow on doing this bastard in, and now since he obviously thought I was the lesser of combatants with this measly display of weed, I was envenomed yet a third time.
We settled the bar tab of $120, vowing to return. I went to my car and retrieved the first three chapters of my manuscript that I wanted him to pass along to Lyzanne called, The Dead Agent.
Of course I didn’t tell him the title, only that it was a proposal for a new book that she asked to look at. It was encased in manila, all ready to go, taped up and addressed to her.
“I’m surprised, what with all the legal threats going on between you two,” he said taking it under his arm as we rode the elevator.
“No. We have a love-hate relationship. You know how these things go sometimes,” I said. “Plus, our contract stipulates she gets first right of refusal on my next project, and so far the gloves haven’t come off between us legally. So I’m stuck. Legally I have to let her see this, unless I want to sue to get out of my contract.”
He said nothing to all this. He merely opened the door, slung the manila envelope on the bed, promising to hand it personally to Lyzanne and began scrounging in a little shaving kit for something. Then he pulled the weed out of his pocket allowing the odor to permeate the room even before it was lit. The aroma heightened when brought to flame.
It smelled like those maple leaf fires we used to make when my family lived in Pennsylvania; that and sugar-frosted Cheerios. Yeah, we burned some. And I haven’t done it in a while. I tell kids everyday about the dangers of doing drugs and here I was inhaling the devil weed like I was spending Daddy’s tuition money on it.
There’s a familiar trick I use to hedge against the effects of weed. You opt for expression and humor. It tends to keep your mind on center, like a keel. Talk about something humorous that happened to you and fixate on the funny, the absurd. It keeps you grounded. I mentioned the fact it took me a year to see my name posted on her website. If it had happened sooner, I might not have been so pissed off at her, and wasn’t this stupid and egotistical of me? Chris didn’t hear or listen to a word of it.
He scrubbed his face in cool water, doused himself in Aramis, then he asked for another caffeine pill, and another bee pollen tablet. I honored the requests.
“It’s not working,” he said.
“Careful. They take a while to kick in. But when they do you’ll be sailing,” I said.
“I could use a good night out,” he said, grabbing the brass pipe and refilling the bowl, which he handed to me.
The brass bowl gleamed at the end of a tortoise shell handle in the light from the Bic cheepo. It was rich herb, indeed. It made the world feel sparkly. After a second of holding in the smoke, I exhaled a purple cloud and said; “why?”
“Why what?” he asked. He stood down the room from me, about a quarter mile away, but still numbly, warmly right there in the room, sort of like a school crossing guard waving me over. In fact, he was fanning the air. Too much smoke. He went into the bathroom and doused a house towel then snugged it under the crack in the door to absorb the wiff of pot.
I laughed. All we needed was a room full of Hendrix, or Frank Zappa; perhaps a poster on the wall that read; “The Police World Tour 1981: The first International Police Action since Vietnam!” and I was back in college.
“Why do you need a night out? Have you been cramped up? Are you blocked?”
“You might say that; blocked,” he answered, giving away nothing. Well, obviously I was asking too many fucking questions here. He needed a night out because his wife was hounding him for cash. He was blasting oodles of dollars and pounds out both ends, on both sides of the pond. He needed a night out every night of the week to take his mind off what was happening to him.
Yeah, I could smell it all now. He had an agent but at what cost? That suite, those drinks; all that weed, the limousine. I knew he wasn’t lying. This was precisely the kind of thing a guy like this would do. How much had that set him back? What child support payment in London went missing just so he could hook up with an agent? Then there were lawyers, obviously, that had been paid to handle the divorce, now three or four years out. Yet they still hadn’t been paid off in full, had they? Odds were no. Then there had been an immigration attorney for all his troubles. I mean, who the fuck was this guy, a South African, a Brit or an American? What mountain of red tape needed to be trimmed and winnowed so a khaki-panted hunk of human, this smelly blur of nationalities can stay here and work? How much does that cost? Then there were school bills, surely; now that Pappy-in-Law has been told to go fuck himself blue for meddling in the marriage that went belly-up.
Yes, Chris Naughten was a wagon of debt that threatened to collapse under its own weight the moment it stopped rolling. Not a published word in book form in more than twelve years. And what might a man like this be up to in his spare hours in a place like New York City? Was there a bookie camped outside his door? Was there a cursed pony somewhere being led to a glue factory carrying one of this man’s many bets on its back? Was there a Jai-alai player walking around with a target on his head and some Santero vexes chasing in hot pursuit?
Affirmative to all of it. Yes, yes, and yes again.
Why does Mr. Hot Shot come down to Orlando, Florida? Is it to chew the fat with the author of Rape Flight about seriously collaborating? No. Because it’s the end of the line for him; because he likely offered Lyzanne Shnedz his body at that fucking party he paid for, and with weepy eyes in some soiled bedroom after quick and limp sex, he said this to her; “…anything, Lyz. There must be something you can get me. Help me. There’s got to be something you can do?”
“Well, there is one project I am representing that’s stalled…”
And in the end he agreed to hop on the first flight out of town knowing that the bookie would be there by his door every night he returned from “work” at the travel mag.; work that consisted of him pestering editors to be paid on spec for story ideas.
Oh this was fucking rich, too rich indeed. Now I had the trick of it. Look at all this top-of-the-line, Sharper Image, bullshit knick knackery the man had all tossed around the room; the PDF, the Imac Powerbook; the cell phone with voice and picture functions, fucking games on it like an adult Tamagachi toy; the pressed slacks on the arm of a chair, the rumpled Polo Oxford and throwaway khaki he had been wearing, now in a ball on the bed. Did he think a team of Chinese maids was going to come in and clean all this shit up for him in the middle of the night, not to mention salvage his expensive clothing for him?
Christ, he even brought a leather jacket with him, a double-breasted number with a belt on it, hanging in the closet. Did he know he was in Orlando, fucking, Florida and it was the middle of August?
And the weed: let’s look at that. The fucking dealer in Washington Square Park was THIS guy, not someone else. Likely as not THAT was how this bastard kept all the ducks, chickens, knives and flaming torches in the air.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said.

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