Gun Church

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Forty-Three

  Fanboy

  And there he was, Jim leaning on the front fender of his F-150, a broad and goofy smile painted across his face. Again, as with Renee and in spite of myself, part of me was joyful at the sight of him. Seeing him there-his quirky, rough-hewn looks, remembering our morning runs, shooting together in the woods above the falls-made me acutely aware of what I’d sacrificed and how lost I’d been since returning to New York. The St. Pauli Girl’s dire warnings notwithstanding, there was a measure of warmth and comfort in Jim’s being here. Although I knew it wouldn’t last, it freed up my limbs enough that I might approach him without completely freaking.

  Yet even as I crossed the street, the warmth and comfort flowed out of me, down through my legs, out the soles of my old shoes, and onto the cold and pitted pavement of Avenue A. As I crossed the street, Jim Trimble’s goofy, boyish smile morphed into that knowing, superior smile of his. From the day Jim first walked into my classroom and tried to be the teacher’s pet, I’d had my niggling little doubts, doubts that I’d willingly, even eagerly, overlooked. But there was that smile again and my doubts were now full blown. I could feel my limbs seizing up on me. I was within a foot or two of him when panic fell like a shroud. Angry horns blared as I stopped dead still in my tracks. I was buffeted by the winds of passing cars and self-doubt. A cab was bearing down on me. I winced, bracing for the impact. A strong hand pulled me out of the way and I thumped into the side door of the old pickup.

  “Are you crazy?” Jim was shouting at me. “Christ almighty, Kip, I didn’t go through all this shit for you to end up road kill.”

  I wanted to speak. I really did, but the panic was choking me, making it impossible for me to string thoughts together. Jim had no such trouble.

  “The way you wrote about this park in BeatnikSouffle,” he said, “I thought it would be a real dump, but it doesn’t seem so bad.”

  I managed a syllable. “What?”

  “You described Tompkins Square Park as a kind of a hellhole. I watched an interview you did once where you said you meant the park to be allegorical. That since Moses Gold’s most famous poem was called ‘Rumors of Purgatory,’ it was only fitting he winds up living here as a homeless junkie.”

  “What?” It seemed to be the extent of my vocabulary.

  “Get in the truck, Kip.” Jim’s voice was inhuman. I’d disappointed him already.

  When he pulled away from the curb, I heard the familiar scrape and rattle of the exhaust. I once again lost track of time and place, my mind racing with myriad scenarios, one worse than the next. I wasn’t conscious of where Jim was driving to or what would come next. I remembered Renee’s warning not to piss him off, how it would be bad for Amy, and I rediscovered my voice.

  “Our books live in our readers’ heads, Jim, not ours. Writers forget their books after they’ve written them.”

  That explanation seemed to meet with his approval and the temperature inside the Ford’s cab rose a few degrees.

  “What’s going on, Jim? What’s this about?”

  “You,” he said. “It’s always been about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, who else?”

  “I’m a little confused,” I confessed.

  He shook his head. “You know, when I set this all in motion, I thought you’d have figured it out by now. From everything I’d read about you, I knew you were a sharp guy.”

  It. This. What the fuck was he talking about? Renee had said something similar about the chapter from Flashing Pandora, that she had hoped I would have understood. I was ready to mention that to Jim, but I stopped the words before they got to my lips. I knew Renee was involved in whatever it or this was. What I didn’t know was the extent of her involvement. She had warned me about Jim, after all, and I wasn’t looking to hurt her anymore than I had already.

  “These days I’m about as sharp as a bowling ball. Too old. Too many drugs. It catches up to you.” I took a deep breath, a long pause and said, “So, you’ve been reading GunChurch?”

  I didn’t think the question was particularly amusing, but Jim apparently found it quite wry and witty. “Yep,” he said, still sort of chuckling. “Started reading it after I borrowed your car that weekend. What a great book. It’s inspirational and-hold it!” He tugged the steering wheel hard right and we skidded to a stop, my head nearly slamming into the dashboard. “Got to belt yourself in there, Kip. I can’t afford to lose you now.”

  I held my tongue, asking instead about the unexpected stop.

  “Look.” He pointed at a red neon sign, Maggie’s Joint, above a bar.

  It took me a second to time travel, to picture the place without the red neon, when its facade was very different, and I was a much, much younger man. “The Hunt Club,” I whispered almost involuntarily.

  He seemed surprised. “You remember?”

  “This was my life, Jim. I’m not likely to forget this place. Most of the stories I told you up in the woods started with me here.”

  “You, Bart Meyers, and Nutly, right? Bet you couldn’t measure how much pussy you got here over the years,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  I kept forgetting about just how much Jim loved hearing those stories of the Kipster’s exploits and how much he loved my books. I’d had so little respect for myself for so long, I found it difficult to fathom his fanboy obsession. Fanboy! Fuck me, so that was it, I thought. Maybe that’s what this had all been about, Jim’s obsession and Renee’s hurt and anger at my abandoning her. Maybe Jim was just as angry as Renee at being abandoned, maybe angrier. It was easy for me to forget sometimes just how young and naive Jim and Renee actually were. Weak with relief, I felt I could breathe again, finally.

  “Come on,” I said, slapping Jim’s shoulder, “let me buy you a drink.”

  You’d have thought he’d just won the lottery, and he was out of the truck like a shot.

  Forty-Four

  eBay

  Maggie’s Joint was pretty empty and pretty much what I expected: an Upper West Side bar dressed up, no doubt at great expense, to look like a shithole dive in Sheepshead Bay. You’ve got to love Manhattan. No wonder everyone was moving to Brooklyn.

  “Barstool or a booth?” I asked Jim.

  He was so wide-eyed, he didn’t answer. I found us a booth by the retro jukebox. Jim ordered a Bud because he didn’t know any better. The barmaid nodded her approval of his low-rent chic. I ordered a Laphroaig neat, to blur the lines between Kant Huxley and me. I figured to play into Jim’s obsession, hoping it would make it easier for him to explain himself to me. I waited for Jim to settle down a little and for our drinks to be delivered before asking him about what he and Renee had been up to.

  “I guess you’re pretty upset at me about my basing some of the book on you guys,” I said.

  He looked at me like he didn’t quite understand what I was saying. “Why would I be upset about that? It’s more than I could have hoped for when I started this whole thing, Kip.”

  And with that, the grip I thought I had on the situation slid right out of my hands. I inhaled my scotch and twirled my index finger at the barmaid for another round. Jim, following my lead, polished off his Bud in a gulp.

  “I’m sorry, but you just lost me. What did you mean when you said it was more than you could have hoped for?”

  “Man, Kip, you weren’t fooling before about being slow on the uptake.”

  “Apparently not.”

  Our second round arrived and I told the barmaid to keep the drinks coming.

  “Okay,” I said, “we’ve established I’m missing something here, but what?”

  He ignored the question, answering one I hadn’t asked. “I liked it better when the book was called Gun Queer. That came from me. How could you change it without asking?”

  My stomach clenched at the subtle malevolence of his tone and the proprietary nature of his question. As the seconds passed, it was becoming increasingly difficult t
o cling to the notion that whatever Jim and Renee were up to was fairly innocent and innocuous. There was nothing innocuous in Jim’s voice, nothing innocent about his expression.

  “Changing it wasn’t my decision. It was about marketing. Writing is art. Well, at least sometimes. Publishing is a business. In that battle, business almost always wins.”

  “You shouldn’t have let them change it.” Jim sucked down his second beer and waved at the waitress for another. He seemed disinclined to continue chatting until he got his third beer, so I finished my drink as well. The barmaid was catching on, bringing over two Buds and my third scotch. Jim made short work of the third can and started on number four.

  “You know, Kip, I get the feeling you don’t appreciate what I did for you.”

  “But I do. Being with you guys, the chapel, it changed my life. I had this book I wanted to write forever, but I never got past the first line. Without you guys, I’d still be at the first line. That’s why I dedicated the-”

  He cut me off. “It wasn’t easy for me to give her to you like that.”

  “What? Give who to me?”

  “Renee,” he said, his voice cracking ever so slightly.

  “What do you mean, Jim?”

  He chugged his fourth beer, his expression turning dour. “Brixton’s not like here. There aren’t so many beautiful girls everywhere. Anyway, it’s different for a guy like you. Girls, they can’t help themselves with you. I’ve seen it for myself. They get all flustered around you. It’s not like that for me. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to get Renee to even talk to me? I practically had to beg her and I don’t like begging.”

  “No, I bet you don’t.”

  “Fucking A.” He was really feeling the beers now. “The Colonel used to want me to beg him to stop hitting me, but I wouldn’t, not once, no sir. But I gave her to you and now she won’t have me back.”

  “What do you mean you gave her to me?” I signaled to the waitress for another round.

  “You still don’t see it?”

  “Don’t be surprised. The last few months have been more than a little disorienting for me.”

  He smiled, but it was a maudlin smile I didn’t know he had in his repertoire. “She thinks I don’t know about the trip she made to your apartment in Brooklyn the day of the snowstorm and the package she left for you, but she can’t fool me.” His smile drooped into drunken self-pity. I knew that look only too well. I’d seen it in bathroom mirrors a thousand times. “I know how much she loves you. She’d do anything for you, even risk her life by defying me.”

  I didn’t want to go there. The more Jim said, the less I understood. I was having trouble getting my head around any of it. I was light-headed, blood rushing in my ears, and the scotch wasn’t helping. I tried to get him to focus on details, so I could latch on to something, anything.

  “How did Renee get that chapter? I destroyed all the copies.”

  His face turned to stone. Christ, he was all over the place, emotionally. That made two of us. “Renee didn’t get shit.” He slammed his palm on the table, the few people in the bar turning to look. “The only thing she did was steal it from me. I got that chapter. Me! That’s how this all started. Without that chapter … ”

  The waitress brought our drinks. Jim grabbed the can from her hand and not gently. Out of his line of sight, I waved my hand at the waitress to stop bringing drinks. She nodded that she understood and left, rubbing her hand as she went.

  “Sorry. So how did you-”

  “eBay.”

  “eBay what?”

  “I always scan eBay for stuff of yours. I have signed first editions of all your books, signed paperbacks, uncorrected galleys, promotional bookstore posters, videos of your TV appearances, all kinds of shit. One day last March I saw that Moira Blanco’s daughter was selling some of her stuff on eBay and I bought it cheap. It was mostly crap, but there were these envelopes with chapters from your manuscripts. How cool is that?”

  “Pretty cool,” I said, not wanting to set him off again. “But I’m still not seeing the connection between the chapter and-”

  He annihilated his beer and squashed the can against the table. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I don’t like it here as much as I thought I would.”

  “The Hunt Club is gone, Jim. Humans are sentimental. The universe doesn’t give a shit.”

  “Fuck the universe.”

  “Doesn’t work. I’ve tried.”

  He kind of snickered at that. “Yeah, well, we’ll see.” And he was out of the bar as quickly as he’d come in.

  “Your friend okay?” the waitress asked, sliding the credit card receipt and a pen at me.

  “Not sure,” I said, adding a twenty-dollar tip.

  “Not sure of what?”

  “Of anything.”

  I think she said thanks, but I wasn’t even sure of that.

  Forty-Five

  The King of Coincidences

  It had been a long time getting to Coney Island-a long time and a lot of beers. Jim had it in his head to do the stations of the Kipster’s cross. After buying two six-packs of Bud at a deli, we criss-crossed Manhattan, paying homage at sites Jim Trimble had determined were significant in my life or the lives of my characters. The drunker he got, the greater his reverence, the blurrier the lines between the Kipster and his characters, and the longer he prayed at my various altars. The only person for whom these places held any meaning was him. When we stopped at the building Kant Huxley had lived in, Jim nearly wept. Flashing Pandora was his favorite book ever, a point he repeated so many times during the course of our pilgrimage I wanted to scratch my own eyes out. He said he had a particular affinity for Kant Huxley. Did I know why? Did I care?

  As the night wore on, it got more difficult for me to keep a lid on my emotions. Clearly, something was going on with Jim that was straying pretty far from the center line. I kept cycling through a spectrum of feelings, from anger to worry, from disappointment to fear, from boredom to disdain. At points, I even felt pity for Jim that he was so heavily invested in a writer whose time had come and gone. Still, there had to be more to it than this magical and miserable tour. Renee’s warning was never far from my thoughts, but by about one in the morning, I’d pretty much had it. I was so drained and so tired of indulging his fanboy adventures that I exploded.

  “That’s it, Jim!” I yelled, slamming my hand down on the dashboard. “I want some fucking answers and I want them now. If you don’t start explaining what you’re playing at, I’m getting the fuck out of this truck.”

  But if I thought my outburst would push him to melt down or to give me the answers I wanted, I was wrong. He just floored the truck, flew through a red light, and turned down Chambers Street.

  “Amy’s loft is beautiful. I really like the portraits she’s done of the two of you.”

  Words formed themselves in my head to say, but they caught in my throat like shards of bone. Fuck, he’d broken into the loft.

  “You don’t want to yell at me,” he said, his voice feral and menacing. “The last person to do that to me was the Colonel. No one’s gonna do that to me again. Stay or go, it’s up to you, but all sorts of bad things happen when pets go off leash.”

  Fuck! Now he was quoting Satan to me, literally. Although what I’d said to Jim earlier in the evening was true, that I’d forgotten my books once they’d been written, I hadn’t forgotten everything of my old work and I certainly remembered that line. In a chapter in The Devil’s Understudy, Satan discusses the dangers of free will with his future replacement, a young investment banker. I never thought I’d have it thrown back in my face. Where only seconds ago I’d been nearly paralyzed with fear, I was now furious. If Amy weren’t part of the equation, I might have smacked Jim across the jaw for using my own words to compare me to a dog on his tether, but Amy was involved and getting in one good shot wouldn’t have been worth it.

  “Staying?” It wasn’t a question, not really, and ten minutes later we were
across the Brooklyn Bridge, heading to Coney Island.

  Jim was insistent. “Which bench was it that Romeo used? I want to sit on that bench.”

  We’d come to the end of the line, the terminal station of the Kipster’s cross. In Romeo vs. Juliet-as Jim kept reminding me on our way here-Romeo bones his divorce lawyer on a bench in Coney Island. For reasons known only to Jim, he’d chosen this as our last stop.

  “It was that bench,” I said, picking one out at random.

  He didn’t question it and sat down on the cold moist slats, a beatific smile on his sloppy, drunken face. For all his bluster and menace, he’d believed me like a lost little boy believes the nearest grownup. I didn’t join him on the bench. It was damp and raw by the ocean, a cold fog hanging over the boardwalk like a gray veil. The wind blowing in off the Atlantic had jagged edges, the salt air cutting right through my sports jacket and sweater. I turned my collar up against the cold and damp to no avail.

  “So this was the bench Romeo fucked his lawyer on, huh? I loved Romeovs. Juliet too. I used to jerk off imagining what it would be like having a hot girl like Romeo’s lawyer straddling me, her panties torn and her skirt flared over my lap. I asked Renee to fuck me like that once, just like in the book, but she wouldn’t. She thought it was weird. Did she ever fuck you like that, Kip?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I bet you can’t.”

  “You in the mood to talk now?” I asked. “I’m freezing to death out here.”

  “I don’t … feel so … good. I got … to … puke.”

  He ran unsteadily across the boardwalk and down onto the sand, fell on his haunches and emptied his guts. I stood at the rail on the boardwalk above him, facing the last vestiges of the amusement park. Those rides that remained were ancient beasts, hibernating through another brutal winter. Coney Island was a hopeless place, a place for dying. Jim trudged back up onto the boardwalk, a sheen of sweat covering his ashen face.