"Don't forget!" I shouted.
twenty-three
Writing Fox's little diatribe from the mental hospital in what I imagined to be his own words and voice made me laugh and then made me start to feel lonely. I hated to admit it but I missed that visionary troublemaker more than I'd expected. And, if I permitted myself to think about it, I missed Clyde even more than I missed Fox. And most of all, I suppose, I missed that warm, alive feeling I usually had when the three of us were together. Writing about their exploits just wasn't quite the same as doing crazy things with them. What if the two of them had suddenly moved to another city or another country and I never saw either of them again in my life? Maybe Trump had pressed charges and made things hot for them. Maybe they'd just decided to let their Gypsy souls lead them out of town or even across the pond. I would, of course, be out ten thousand dollars on Fox's bail. But also, I thought, I would be out much, much more in the coin of the spirit, the money of childhood that can never truly be saved or counted. They would be free birds flying forever in someone else's sky, and I would be left to pick up the pieces of our star-crossed ephemeral friendship, trying to put it back together one little word at a time. It was a daunting, lonely task but it was a task I would not shirk. It was, I believed sadly and sincerely, what my life had come to. I now possessed what part of me had always wanted, I suppose: a writer's life. A romantic, monastic, lonely, mad, eviscerated, bloodless, empty, vicarious, melancholy, self-pitying, world-weary, futile, tormented, yet oddly glamorous writer's life. If I'd been writing a hundred years earlier, I'd probably have been working in a chilly garret in Paris or in a damp and windswept castle in Scotland. Anything to be cold.
It was very late, indeed, and I was thinking about Clyde. How I felt when she gave my hand a quick little squeeze. When she smiled that crooked, seductive smile that promised things I probably now would never receive. The way my life seemed to always brighten when she called me Sunshine.
Books get dusty. Paper is such a lonely thing. Paper is so sad before you fill it with ridiculous little words. It makes you feel like Dr. Zhivago after losing Lara, gazing out over an endless, aching, snowy plain of nothing but sorrow and empty and white. There is nothing to replace a lover, nothing to replace a friend. But that is where you have to start if you want to be a writer or an artist or a man.
I thought of the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: "It is a better thing by far that the lad should break his neck, than that you should break his spirit." Was it actually in the realm of conceivability that I could cause harm to the spirits of my maybe erstwhile, maybe forever friends merely by capturing their odd little hobbies and their great hopeless dreams and thoughts in a web of words? Clyde could not have been right about that, could she? She was somewhere out there in the rest of the world and I was here alone in the basement with only cigarettes and coffee, a little lamp, and a growing pile of numbered pages for companions on a journey of bleakness and despair. Could the mere mechanics of writing, chronicling, articulating an abstract notion such as love or life or friendship make that very entity go away? Wasn't writing just another occupation like any other, only more futile and perverse? Did Clyde truly have some Gypsy background similar to the American Indian that ingrained in her being, like a flashing railroad crossing sign, not to let anyone take a photograph of you for fear it would surely suck away another small piece of your soul and keep you from becoming an Indian when you grew up?
I was thinking about Clyde. I was writing about Clyde. I was just getting ready to light a cigarette. That's what I was doing when the buzzer sounded for the front door. It startled me slightly. Except for Clyde and Fox, I was not in the habit of receiving visitors in the middle of the night. I walked warily over to the intercom, pushed the button, and said, "Who's there?" It was not a very original thing to say but at that hour of the night I was fresh out of creativity. What creativity I'd had was undoubtedly lying somewhere on a snowy plain in Russia. A voice came back to me through the intercom. It was a warm, familiar, feminine voice. It said, "Let me in or I'll blow your house down." I buzzed the front door open immediately and opened the door to my apartment and in walked Clyde, fragrant and cool as a sailor's dream.
"You've done a lot with this place," she said facetiously, looking around the barren flat. Her eyes at last settled on the typewriter and the stack of pages. "You've done a lot," she said again, softer this time.
Impulsively, she walked around the desk, picked up a page, and casually perused the manuscript. She put it down and picked up another. In the lamplight, her countenance was that of a porcelain poker face and she looked as beautiful as I'd ever seen her. I'd never been very objective, of course, when it came to Clyde. I stood there watching her quietly as she read two or three more pages and put them back on the desk. Then she stared out the window into the darkness and her face seemed to soften, making her slightly less imperial and, if possible, even more attractive.
"Not bad," she said at last. "I like the 'crooked seductive smile.' "
"I do, too," I said. "It's very seductive. Not to mention crooked."
"It's comforting to know the book is good."
"Did you ever doubt it?"
"Not really, Walter. It might just be kind of fun to be a literary heroine. And speaking of heroin, don't believe all that gibberish Fox is feeding you about my being a heroin addict. Fox was the heroin addict. I didn't even know him then but he's mentioned it to me many times. He's just trying to stir up a little trouble between us. He is a world-class troublemaker, you know."
"I do know. Were you really in a carnival?"
"The carnival was allegorical. Just about everything in my life is allegorical, now that I think about it. With me, you've got to read between the lines, or, in your case, write between the lines. Whatever you want me to be, you'll probably discover that I am."
"What if I want to make an honest woman out of you?" I said.
"What if I just want to suck your cock?" she replied.
She looked through me then and her eyes flashed like tilt lights on a pinball machine. There was no smile on her lips, crooked, seductive, or otherwise. She was being serious. Even more frightening, she seemed to mean what she said. I held my breath. For that defining moment, all of New York City appeared to have come under a storybook spell. All traffic and sound and belief were suddenly suspended in a vacuum of something close to childlike awe. Then our eyes met, our bodies standing as motionless as statues in a park. When she spoke again, it was in a husky whisper.
"Well," she said, "do we have any takers?"
Somewhere in the night, a statue in the park raised his hand and it was me. That was all Clyde needed. She came around the desk like a madwoman. Soon I was on the floor, my pants were off, and her head was between my thighs devouring my manhood like some carnivorous creature on the African veldt. Occasionally, I could catch the flash of her eyes as her hands tightened around my legs and her head began to bob robotically. She probably would have sent my penis to Venus quite rapidly if I hadn't noticed, on a downward bob cycle, that a figure was standing at the window.
Lying on my back, I was able to get up on my elbows high enough to obtain an unimpeded view on the following clown cycle. Incredible as it seemed, Fox was standing outside the window wearing some kind of night-vision goggles over his eyes. Normally, this would have been enough to have made anybody's pasta at least slightly al dente, but Clyde was doing something different now and it seemed to be keeping everyone in the game. I became suddenly aware that she had taken both of my balls in her mouth and was making achingly slow, ruthless circles with her head, first going in one direction for a few passes, then reversing and going in the other. I laid my head back on the floor and closed my eyes.
Then several things happened at once. My body started to tremble and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before the hostages would be released, yet, at the same time, I could hear an incessant buzzing noise in my head. I couldn't tell at first from what point the noise was comin
g. All I knew for sure was that I was coming. I thought that the sexual act had been so powerful that an auditory hallucination had accompanied the climax. Then I heard a disembodied voice that I gradually realized was emanating from the intercom.
"Walter, are you there?" it said. "Open up! It's me. Clyde."
Like a man in a dream I walked over to the intercom, buzzed her in to the building, and opened my door. Moments later, Clyde came in and appeared to be looking at me rather strangely.
"You seem out of breath, Walter," she said. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," I said. "In fact, I was just-um-thinking about you."
"Only thinking about me?"
"Yes, of course," I said, recovering quickly. "I haven't seen you for a while and I've missed you."
"Let's go for a walk," she said.
"A walk? It's almost two o'clock in the morning."
"What else have you got to do?" she said.
We walked in silence for a while, taking in the nocturnal sights of the city. There were more people on the streets than you would have thought at that hour, stragglers, hell-raisers, lost boys and girls, denizens of the night. At one point, Clyde took my hand and gave it a little squeeze and things were almost all right for a time. Then I started feeling like a man in a dream again. I nearly found myself wondering if I was a man walking with a woman down a street in the night or if all this was merely taking place within the confines of my novel. And as we walked, questions popped into my mind unbidden. Was it possible for a bad man to write a good book? Could a cold, jaded, selfish man, increasingly incapable of emitting even a spark of human warmth, push little words around in such a fraudulent fashion as to fool the world into believing he'd written a decent, serviceable, even compelling novel? The answer to both of those questions I now clearly realized was yes.
And now another question came into my mind, the answer of which I was only vaguely aware: Was I rapidly, hopelessly, inexorably turning into that man?
We came upon the familiar corner where the bar known as the Unicorn had once stood. The sign was gone now, but in its place was another. It read: "Coming Soon. Grand Opening. Starbucks."
There must have still been hope for me because I could feel Clyde's heart explode as she stood beside me. Even had we known it was coming, I thought, there was nothing we could have done about it. Like it or not, it was a sign of the times. But, as we would soon discover, it would prove to be much more than that. It would mean more than societal evolution or corporate greed. It would come to represent the crowning glory of the bond of our little triumvirate, the spiritual high-water mark of that reckless, fragile entity that was Clyde and Fox and myself. Like a noxious vapor, its proud and bland confidence would come to embody the very destruction of us all.
twenty-four
Nothing ever really changes, I suppose, in New York or anywhere else in this tedious, unpleasant, never-ending, nonfiction world. Fundamental change is virtually impossible for our species. Like little chirpies, we build our nests and construct our buildings, which time and terrorists and termites try to tear down. Like leaf-cutter ants, we construct our highways that connect many different places in such a way that eventually they all become so similar there's no point in going anywhere to begin with. Like beavers, we build our bridges so when things aren't going very well people can jump off and kill themselves, which is probably what I should have done the first time Clyde and I saw that Starbucks sign. But, of course, I didn't. I wanted to live. I wanted to paint. I wanted to complete my great Armenian novel. And, to be sure, eventually I did. But completing my literary opus did not bring fundamental changes to my life. Far from it. What it brought, or wrought, I should say, was a series of rather meaningless, superficial changes that everybody, including myself, thought at the time were important. They weren't, of course. They never are. I don't, by the way, believe the compilation of the novel had a thing to do with the disastrous events that occurred in I he lives of Clyde and Fox. Writing a novel is just what is sounds like-writing a novel. It doesn't harm children or green plants or chirpies. It's just putting someone you love between two covers without remembering to kiss them good night. Then you leave them there forever as you move on to your next project. But it can't be too lonely when you're sandwiched between two covers. People usually look in from time to time.
But let me redirect the conversation back to myself again for a moment. I was as much to blame as anybody for what occurred at Starbucks. What started out perhaps as one of our little hobbies moved quickly to a full-blooded passion, and then, in the end, to an unstoppable, unsinkable, unholy crusade.
It had not been precisely clear from the Starbucks sign exactly when the grand opening was to take place. Clyde had suggested that it was a good opportunity for me to do some "legwork." As always with Clyde, I acquiesced. It would not be difficult, she had suggested, especially since I lived in the neighborhood, for me to "sniff around a little bit." Then, she averred, we would bring in the "big guns." The big guns, I was given to understand, were Fox and herself. Though I was mildly piqued by this characterization of my abilities relative to hers and Fox's, I did not at the time let it show. There have been many times in my life when I have not let my true feelings show and I have seldom regretted it. Indeed, there is little in my life that I have truly come to regret, always excepting, of course, the loss of Clyde.
So getting back to that night we saw the Starbucks sign hanging on the old Unicorn, I guess I could say that that was the road-to-Damascus experience that led circumstances to be as they are today.
I did Clyde's bidding the following afternoon and it didn't take long for me to talk to a few workmen on the building and ascertain where things stood with the Grand Opening. As soon as I had the information, I called Clyde.
"The grand opening is this coming Monday," I told her.
"Good," she said. "We've got the whole weekend to get ready."
"To get ready for what?"
"For the grand opening, of course. You didn't think we were going to take this lying down, did you?"
"Well, no, but—”
"This is war! This is the first real chance you'll get to see Fox don his sword and shield!"
"I've seen him don his stethoscope."
"You haven't seen anything yet. This is going to be an extended, strategic, pitched battle of almost military precision. You are about to witness a battlefield genius on the level of Robert E. Lee at work!"
I started to say "Save your Confederate money," but I thought better of it. One of the many charming attributes that had accrued to the persons of Fox and Clyde over the years was their almost total disregard for whether or not they ever won or lost in any of their endeavors. Winning was never really important to them. What was important, Fox had once told me, was the way you selected your enemies. Donald Trump was a worthy opponent, he'd thought. So was taking on Bellevue Hospital. To tackle a big and powerful enemy, he'd said, was a mark of humanity and courage. Fox liked Rosa Parks because she'd single-handedly taken on the institution of segregation. He'd admired Natan Sharansky for going up against the entire Soviet Union. And he'd especially appreciated Don Quixote for taking on all the combined forces of evil in the world. "Who a man's enemies are," Fox had said, "tells you more about the man than his friends." So I did not point out to Clyde that Robert E. Lee's team had lost the Civil War. In fact, I did not point out anything because she was already giving me my marching orders.
Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned Page 15
