Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned

by Kinky Friedman

  "Got a smoke?" said Fox.

  "A smoke?" I asked.

  "Yes, Walter, a smoke. A cigarette."

  "Oh, a cigarette."

  I fished for my pack of Camels, gave one to Fox, and lit it for him. He took a few puffs.

  "This is a smoke," he said.

  Then he opened the heart-shaped silver locket again and ground the tip of the one-hitter into its dark brown contents. I lit him up again and he took a deep pull from the cigarette that wasn't really a cigarette.

  "Now this," he said, "is the smoke of life. It can help you lose yourself or it can help you find yourself or it can help you find out what is, or what is not, or what ought to be."

  "Interesting," I said, watching Fox's eyes spin like roulette wheels and sparkle like stars.

  "For instance," he said, "it just came to me here in the men's room what is really happening here at the Unicorn tonight. Why there's such a crowd here. What it truly feels like."

  "What does it truly feel like?"

  "A fucking wake," said Fox.

  "A wake?"

  "Exactly. A wake for the Unicorn. Everybody's upbeat and full of drunken cheer and nobody's talking about it but I'll bet they all know. I'll bet those guys you were talking about have finally fat-armed Jonjo out of here. I knew something was slightly off when we walked in, but it was just like if you walk into a wake at a certain time you can't tell if it's a party or a wake and maybe that's the point of it all. I didn't know for sure until I came in this men's room and took a few hits of the smoke of life. That's what told me there was death in the air."

  "Wow," I said. It was all I could think to say. Was the Unicorn really going belly-up tonight? Was it possible that one could take a few hits of Malabimbi Madness and suddenly gain the insights into a situation that Fox had just espoused to me? What he'd said had certainly had the ring of truth. Now if I could just manage to navigate my way back to the table.

  Fox and I fairly floated out of the men's room and I followed him, weaving this way and that through the human tapestry until we saw Clyde sitting alone at the table with her head down on her folded arms. She looked up and I could see that her eyeliner or eye shadow or whatever women wear was running and she'd been crying.

  "You look like Alice Cooper," said Fox.

  "I feel like Alice Cooper," she said. "Jonjo's going out of business tonight. All drinks are on the house. By tomorrow morning, the Unicorn will be extinct."

  After a little more encouragement and another round of Guinness, Clyde revealed a few more details about her conversation with Jonjo. She seemed to be taking the matter a lot harder than I would have expected. Indeed, she seemed to be taking it almost personally.

  "Isn't there anything we can do?" she wailed. "Jonjo introduced me to his wife, Moira. She was crying, too. She put her arms around me though she'd never seen me in her life and we both cried. She said the health department and about three other city agencies seem to have gotten together and decided that vast changes must be made immediately and they just can't afford to do it. She also said Jonjo had told her that the landlord has suddenly decided to quadruple the rent, starting next month."

  "It does seem like a concerted effort to get them out of here," Fox said.

  "Isn't there anything we can do?" Clyde wailed again. "I don't want the only Unicorn in New York City to disappear forever."

  We looked over at the bar at this point and Jonjo, appearing more leprechaunlike than ever, gave us all a heartbreaking little good-bye wave. It was a poignant moment and it started up the waterworks again for Clyde.

  "Can't we pull out Trump's credit card for one last hurrah?" I asked.

  "No chance," said Clyde. "The bastard cut us off."

  "Some people," said Fox.

  I knew in my heart, of course, that Trump's money was Trump's money and that it did not in any way belong to us. I knew full well that what we had done was not only a little hobby. In legal terms, it was a felony. I knew as well that life was unfair, that some are born to sweet delight and some are born to endless night. But all these notions had apparently gotten mixed up in my mind and by the time they reached what I like to think of as my conscience the only message they seemed to deliver was that it was okay to steal Donald Trump's money. In fact, anything we did was okay. For all practical purposes, I suppose, you could say that my conscience had been left at the dry cleaner's.

  The crowd was thinning out a bit but the Guinness kept flowing and the mood of our little trio began to get increasingly reckless and fatalistic. I was just on my way back to the table from another trip to the men's room with Fox when I noticed Clyde staring intently at the far wall of the place.

  "I don't believe it!" she exclaimed, an expression of total incredulity on her face.

  "I don't either," said Fox. "Now what exactly is it that we don't believe?"

  "Trump is on the local news," she said, pointing to the television set high up against the wall. "They're interviewing him about our gala at the armory."

  As if drawn by a magnet, the three of us moved quickly to a spot as close to the television as we could get. Trump's big head was smiling and speaking to the camera.

  "It's just something I've always wanted to do," he was saying. "I saw the opportunity to help those less fortunate than myself."

  "Which is just about everybody else," said Fox.

  "I wanted to show the homeless in our city that New York does have a big heart," Trump continued. "Maybe it was only for one night, but that night was one that over two thousand homeless people will never forget. Of all the triumphs and accomplishments in my life, the dinner and party for the homeless at the Old Armory two nights ago is one of the acts of which I'm most proud. It is a privilege and a duty to give back to the community—"

  "That lying bastard!" screamed Clyde.

  "The one-eyed giant strikes again!" shouted Fox. "What a fucking joke! This guy spends his life acquiring casinos and buildings and yachts and then finally when he's forced into a situation in which a charitable act has occurred at his expense he's shameless enough to stand up and take credit for it."

  "We couldn't have done it without him," I said, innocently enough.

  "Spoken like a true participant-observer of life," said Fox. "What brilliant insights into human nature does our friend the author bring to our table? Of course we couldn't have done it without him. We've always operated strictly on the muldoon. But if it wasn't for fascist capitalistic pigs like him, it probably wouldn't have been necessary to do it in the first place."

  "Sunshine," said Clyde. "You know what I want you to bring to our table? Another round of Guinness."

  I dutifully got up and walked over to the bar, partly to please

  Clyde and partly to discourage further scathing diatribes from Fox. Fox, indeed, was beginning to sound like some kind of dinosaur from the sixties. Maybe Gandhi was right. Maybe Trump was wrong. Who gave a shit? Maybe everybody did. I hoped they did because Fox was a central character now. He was important to me in ways he could hardly be expected to know. And, indubitably, Clyde was important. Hell, if you stopped to think about it, even I was important. We were important because we were important to each other. We were all we had. Three star-crossed characters in the book of life.

  The high point of the evening for me personally came about twenty minutes later when Clyde, either accidentally or deliberately, spilled half a pint of Guinness directly into my lap, immediately grabbed a few napkins, and began a series of rather excessively elaborate, incredibly zealous, but certainly not unappreciated efforts at mopping up the situation. By this time, of course, all three of us were drunk enough to go duck hunting with a rake. But all that notwithstanding, it was one of those delicious, indelible moments that Fox had alluded to, one of those little moments that will live forever. If you've never had a beautiful woman attempt with all her heart to devotedly, dedicatedly mop up the Guinness she's spilled in your lap, you, my friend, haven't lived.

  twenty

  An o
ld friend of mine once told me that when you're writing a novel, it's all downhill once you get past page fifty-seven. Technically speaking, this is not very professional advice. Indeed, it sounds like the kind of thing a person in a mental hospital might tell you. Nonetheless, I was well past page fifty-seven now and it did seem as if the novel was almost inexorably moving toward its climax, conclusion, and resolution. Was it the great American novel? I frankly doubted it. But it wasn't bad. And no author writing a novel is in any position to assess the quality of his own work. Motivation and ambition are worthless to a writer at this stage. If he believes he's accomplishing great art, toiling at some important work, it rarely turns out to be so. The greatest work in art and literature and music in the recent history of man has almost invariably been produced by people who were just trying to pay the rent.

  It was now several days since the night of the closing of the Unicorn. I had not seen or heard from Clyde or Fox since that night and I was beginning to wonder if it had been something I'd said or maybe something I'd written. I was rummaging through the pockets of one of my coats possibly looking for my lost childhood when I came upon a folded slip of paper. The coat, I then realized, was the one I'd worn at the wake for the Unicorn. I opened the slip of paper and found a note written on it in a fine, feminine hand. The note read: "For a good time, call 226-3713." The writer had also included a rather crude, childlike drawing of a broken heart. I was not a great detective or even a detective in any sense of the word, but I did not remember meeting any barflies or even any friendly strangers that night at the Unicorn or any recent night anywhere. My heart, I must report, hoped that the missive had been written and placed in my pocket by Clyde. It was certainly possible, and all I had to do was call the number to find out. But for a reason I do not know, it was not as easy as it sounded. Maybe it was my head telling my heart it was time to play a little hard to get. Or maybe I was feeling guilty about writing the novel in the first place, against Clyde's wishes. Or maybe I was feeling unsure of myself, riddled with self-doubt about the merits of my work. I had been wanting for quite a while to view Clyde and Fox not as what they were, but as what they had become: characters in my novel. Were they compelling? Had I developed them effectively? Had I captured them? There was only one way to find out. I decided that it was finally time to let my former agent and my former editor look over the unfinished manuscript.

  Normally, it is not a good idea to let anyone peruse an unfinished manuscript or a work in progress. This time, however, I felt the situation was different. For one thing, I hadn't taken a meeting with either my editor or my agent in almost seven years. For all I knew, they both might now reside in that great publishing house in the sky. Also, to be perfectly honest, I was starting to vacillate rather wildly back and forth between self-congratulation and self-doubt. I needed feedback. I needed input. So that afternoon I took the pages I had down to a nearby Kinko's, made two additional copies, and FedExed them respectively to my agent and my editor. I wrote a brief cover note suggesting that it was urgent that I meet with them as soon as possible. As soon as possible is not very fast for most editors and agents. They tend to believe that responding to matters in a timely fashion is a sign of weakness. If I wanted to meet with them anytime soon, it was not a good policy merely to wait by the phone. I was not proud. If necessary, I planned to barrage and badger both their offices until I got their attention. This is a rather tedious, not to say humbling, aspect of being an author, but once you become a best-seller, of course, you're the one who tends to believe that responding to matters in a timely fashion is a sign of weakness. In fact, once you get big and powerful enough, almost everything you do becomes a sign of weakness.

  Back at the apartment, I felt a sense of fatalistic calm. I had crossed a professional literary Rubicon of sorts. It now no longer mattered what Clyde thought or what Fox thought or possibly even what I thought. People highly placed inside the industry would very soon be weighing in on things. I poured a cup of coffee and sat down at the typewriter but now I found I could not write. My fingers simply would not move across the keys. I was in full holding-pattern mode until I met with the editor and the agent. It is astonishing how little confidence any of us truly has in our own natural abilities—especially those of us who have determined that fate has called upon us to write. And yet, writing's like chopping wood sometimes, they say. Some of the world's worst writers seem often to excel at chopping wood. Some of the best seem to excel only at lying in the gutter and looking at the stars.

  That night, in a state of total creative thought interruptus, there was nothing to do but pace the apartment, go out and get drunk, kill myself, check into a mental hospital, or call Clyde, and I quite sensibly opted for the latter. Judging from her note, she was primed for a good time, and anything was better than waiting in a near-death state of suspended animation to see what the agent and editor had to say about my work. It was very similar to handing in to the teacher something you've worked at very diligently. It was kind of sad to think how little we grow emotionally from the way we felt in the fourth grade.

  "Is this the number I call for a good time?" I asked, after hearing Clyde's melodic hello.

  "Sunshine!" she said, with the pent-up excitement of a small girl. "I'm so glad you called."

  "So am I," I gushed idiotically.

  "We've had a lot of good times," she said coyly, "but you and

  I have never really had a good time together. I mean, just the two of us."

  I couldn't believe my ears. I couldn't believe how excited I was. I couldn't believe that I suddenly felt like a kid at Christmas.

  "The two of us getting together is way overdue," I said.

  "I agree, Sunshine."

  "Okay. We're on the same wavelength. So is it your place or mine?"

  "Mine would be a little difficult. Fox lives here, too, you know. And if I'm not mistaken, he might have a little fit of pique if he caught the two of us between the sheets. What about your place?"

  "If you like getting bull-fucked in a basement apartment, it's fine."

  "I think we're breaking up."

  "I'm not on a cell phone."

  "That wasn't what I meant."

  There was a silence on the line while we both considered our options. Apparently, I stepped over the line. In a rush of testosterone, in fact, I had very possibly stepped on my dick.

  "In a rush of testosterone," I said, "very possibly I've stepped on my dick."

  "I like a man who can step on his dick. What I don't like is a man who keeps standing on it."

  "I'll keep that in mind."

  "Good. Then at least you'll have something on your mind besides the great American novel you were writing."

  "Great Armenian novel," I said. "And there's no past tense to it. I'm still writing it. In fact, I've already sent copies of the unfinished manuscript to my old editor and my old agent. Later this week I hope to be meeting with both of them."

  "Oh, Walter. I want you to write. That's what God, whether you believe in him or not, intended you to do. I just want you to write about something else. Something besides the three of us. What we have is fun and beautiful and real. Relegating us to characters in your novel is like pinning Fox and me to a butterfly board. It will surely destroy what we all have together."

  "But Fox likes the idea of my writing the novel."

  "That's not true. Fox likes you maybe more than you realize, and he wants you to become more of what you are and could be. But he thinks writing about us as characters in a book is very bad karma. He's just too shy to tell you."

  "Fox?" I said. "Shy?"

  "Maybe you don't know your characters as well as you think you do."

  "Look. If it makes you feel better, I can finish the book then change the names to protect the innocent."

  "By the time you finish the book, there won't be any innocence left to protect."

  "Surely you're being unrealistic and melodramatic."

  "Walter, this may surprise you, but I'm a
very private person and so is Fox. We've taken you into our lives with open arms. We've taken you into our hearts. I see things you don't see. I see tragedy if you continue along this path. As a fiction writer, you can write about any subject you choose. You're only limited by your imagination, Walter. Walter, you can write about anything under the sun and I sincerely hope you do, but I'm begging you, for all of our sakes, please don't suck the magic and the humanity out of us to sell to the public. Let Fox and me be what we are. Free birds who choose to be in your sky."

  "Ask me anything else and I'll do it for you. I've done everything you've asked of me since the day I met you in the bank and I helped you put the dead fish in the vault."

  "You didn't know it was a fish."

  "That's my point. I trusted you."

  "And now you betray me."

  "I told you. I'll change the names."

  "The only change I care about, Walter, is the change I'm seeing in you."

  "What the hell are you trying to do? Destroy my career?"

  "Even if that were true, it would be a far better thing than to destroy someone's spirit."

  Neither of us said anything for a few moments. Neither of us, I suppose, had anything much left to say. Finally Clyde broke the silence.

  "So long, Sunshine," she said.

  "So long, Clyde," I said as both of us hung up simultaneously.

  We had both done many things together, I thought as I stared at the ceiling. Now we were hanging up together. Saying goodbye together. Suddenly, the ceiling looked very lonely and the room seemed very empty. Then, just as suddenly, there came the silver lining: I was now unhappy enough to become a great writer.

  twenty-one

  Less than a week later, I walked into the midtown office of my agent, Sylvia Lowell, sat down in the chair in front of her desk, and looked out over the city. Sylvia had a lavish, much-sought-after corner office and the only trouble with the view was that it was one of a great number of large office buildings all teeming with agents in corner offices. I looked into Sylvia's cold obsidian eyes and she looked into mine and, I suppose, neither of us much liked what we saw. She was a power agent who represented a large, rather unwieldy stable of many writers, a small handful of whom were highly successful mainstream wood choppers with only narrow, formulaic talents, and the great mass of whom were unsuccessful, unhappy authors who, though most of them were far more talented than the mainstreamers, spent most of their time silently damning Sylvia Lowell. I don't know how much of it was really her fault. After all, I was a man who hadn't written a book in seven years. All I blamed her for was having cold obsidian eyes. The first thing you have to do," she said, "is get rid of that title."