Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel

by Jonathan Ames

  “That's true. I'm probably not very trustworthy in that condition. We have to come up with a password. Something only my current consciousness would know.”

  “How do we know you're not in a blackout right now?”

  “I don't think someone in a blackout would worry about being in a blackout,” I said, getting exasperated. “That just doesn't happen.”

  “Maybe … but sometimes when I'm dreaming, I know that I'm dreaming.”

  “Well, even if I am in a blackout or I'm dreaming, let's just come up with a password. What's your middle name?”

  “Spencer.”

  “Alan Spencer Tinkle?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like it. That'll be our password: Spencer.”

  “My mother thought I might be the first Jewish president with a middle name like Spencer. That was her hope.”

  “I should have known you were Jewish,” I said. “I can't believe we haven't established our fellow Yiddishness before. There are a lot of Jews here. This place should be called the Rosenberg Colony.”

  Tinkle chose this moment to get a cassette-player/radio out of his closet, and he produced from his desk drawer several tape recordings of Jewish comedy albums. He had Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and Lenny Bruce.

  “You're halfway to a minyan!” I said.

  We started listening to a Mel Brooks album, and half an hour into it, Tinkle said, “What's my middle name?”

  “Spencer!”

  “I guess you're here.”

  “I think so…. If I am in a blackout, then I'm in a blackout within a blackout and so I know what's going on. That's what's key.”

  “That's what I was trying to say before.”

  “Then we're in agreement.”

  “Okay,” said Tinkle.

  At one-thirty, I took my leave.

  “Thank you as always, Alan, for your whiskey,” I said. “I now must go kill myself.”

  “You're joking, right? I'm the one with cancer of the penis.”

  “Yes, I'm joking. And you don't have cancer of the penis. I told you before that all men see things on their penis. I can't begin to tell you the things I've seen. Just lately even … I wonder if anyone has seen the Virgin Mary on their penis. You know how there's always these sightings. This would be a very vulgar sighting, of course, and I'm sure the Church wouldn't recognize it, but anything is possible.”

  “What's my middle name?” asked Tinkle.

  “Spencer. Alan Spencer Tinkle, the forty-eighth president of the United States of America, land that we love to destroy.”

  “You're definitely drunk,” said Tinkle, “but I don't think you're blacked out.”

  “I'll take that as a compliment…. Well, so long. I'll see you in the next life, or tomorrow, whichever comes first.”

  We parted without shaking hands because of Tinkle's hyperhidrosis.

  I went down the stairs to the second floor and I was feeling, despite what I'd said to Tinkle, rather maudlin and suicidal. I had done a lot of things in my life, but I had never broken into someone's home to steal a sculpture of a human head.

  I didn't stop by my rooms. If Jeeves was awake, I wouldn't be able to keep a secret of this magnitude from him, and I'd hate to see the look of disappointment on his face when I confessed that I was about to go commit a crime.

  Thus, from Tinkle's room, I went to Ava's. No one was on the hallway. I knocked lightly at her door. She let me in.

  “I'm off to go murder them in their sleep,” I said.

  “You're totally drunk,” she said.

  “I was totally drunk a few hours ago, too,” I said.

  “You didn't show it then,” she said.

  “I'm sorry, I forgot to,” I said.

  “You better not do it tonight,” she said.

  “If I don't do it tonight, I'll lose my nerve,” I said.

  “You'll fuck it up,” she said.

  “The whole thing is fucked up,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  “This isn't the send-off I was hoping for. I can do this better drunk than sober. Sober, I'd chicken out. I know it,” I said.

  “All right, just bring me back the sculpture,” she said.

  “Can I have a good-luck kiss?” I said.

  Her face seemed to soften. That was the end of our “I said, she said.” We both shut up and she gave me a nice kiss. I held her to me. She felt good in my arms.

  I left the Mansion and went down to the Caprice. I removed a flashlight from the glove compartment, thinking that's what a good burglar would use.

  I walked across the silent, black grounds. Nice starlight and moonlight were coming through the roof of the colonnaded trees; the sky had cleared. Crossing the large colony was like moving through a manicured forest, and there was just enough light to walk by. I didn't want to use the flashlight until I was in Dr. Hibben's. I was afraid the beam might catch someone's eye should they glance out a window from one of the outlying buildings where some colonists were housed.

  My heart was pounding, but I stealthily made my way. I stopped by the pool and sat Indian-style next to its shimmering, black surface. I dipped my hand in and put the cool water to my brow. I felt resigned to my fate, but I decided to pray. I said in my mind, “God, please help me. Please help me to not get into trouble.”

  Then I just sat there for a little while. From watching movies, I had the idea that professional criminals were very disciplined and operated on a tight schedule, so I was trying to be obsessively punctual; and according to my watch, which I shined the flashlight on for a split second, it wasn't yet 2 A.M. Of course, being scheduled is more important when breaking into museums or banks, and not so important for going into a house with an unlocked door, but romanticizing my activity was helping me to go through with it. I regretted now shaving off my mustache. It would have given me courage, made me feel dashing. But I could always grow it back, if I wanted to continue this new career of thievery. That's the good thing about mustaches. If you rashly shave one off, you can always get another just like it.

  Well, at 1:57 A.M., I made my intrepid way over to Dr. Hibben's house. There was a short path through the trees from the pool. In front of the house there was a wide stretch of lawn; behind the house were thick woods.

  A light was over the front door. I hadn't really observed the Hibben structure too closely on Friday night, owing to having arrived in a blackout, but I now saw that it was an attractive, boxy, two-story, modernish affair.

  Not from booze, but from nerves, I nearly vomited as I quietly approached the front door. Just keep going, I urged myself. There was a screen door and then the main door. With a squeak that could wake the dead and the living, I opened the first door. I waited. No response to the squeak. I turned the handle on the front door. Locked! Ava was wrong. The damn Hibbens had locked themselves in. I slowly closed the screen door and stepped back from the house and returned to the shadows.

  Should I quit? Return to Ava, having failed?

  I put my massive intellect to work on the situation. I came up with nothing.

  Then I noticed that there was an open window right where the living room should be, according to my hazy memory of Friday night. The window was large enough for a person to get through. I went and stood in some shrubbery beneath it. A screen was in place, but it was loose. I put my flashlight in my pocket. I was able to get my fingers under the screen and push it up its little runners, and then it clicked in place. I stuck my head in and right below the window was a little table that held a vase of flowers, a lamp, and an ashtray. It was a narrow table, and I would be able to swing my leg over it, once I swung my leg through the window, which was about four and a half feet off the ground.

  I moved the vase to one edge of the table and the lamp to the other edge. The room was dark and I took out the flashlight and gave the room a quick sweep. Directly across was the mantel that held Ava's bronze bust, which glinted gold when the light hit it. I then turned off the fla
shlight and put it on the table. I swung my leg through, cleared the table, but the force of such an action was a bit much, some kind of kinesis was at play, I wasn't fully in control of my body, and so I spastically tried to follow my leg with my head and torso and smashed my broken nose into the window frame, not lowering my head quite enough. I involuntarily let out a loud gasp of pain, slung my other leg through, but it bounced on the table. The lamp was knocked over and made a hell of a racket falling to its death, and the flashlight fell to the ground, lost to me, but the vase held steady.

  The room was pitch-black and I was temporarily insane. Some bone chip in my nose, dislodged by the windowsill, may have shot into my frontal lobe. I ran for the mantel in the darkness, blasting my shin into a coffee table, which I don't think had attended the drinks party. That made some kind of noise, but at this point the West Point marching band was playing in my head and so it didn't register too much. Then Navy scored a touchdown and the Annapolis crowd screamed.

  I made it to the mantel, grabbed the head, which weighed a ton, at least twenty-five pounds, and limbs flailing, got back to the window, tried to kick my leg through, and shattered the vase. Got a leg through after that, and then the whole room was lit up and Dr. Hibben was in the room, wearing a gigantic pair of white boxer shorts but no shirt. His torso looked like something out of a medical text for venereal diseases, and he shouted, “What the hell are you doing, Alan?”

  When he said my name, the gravity of the situation struck me full on. I had been recognized. My nervous-system response was to suddenly cry out. It was a cross between a wolf howl and the sort of shrieking that has been bouncing off the walls of Bellevue for some time.

  Dr. Hibben took a step back, a scared look on his face. He was about ten feet from me. Then my cry stopped. I was still straddling the table and the windowsill. My shin was gashed, my nose was rebroken and starting to bleed, I was having an insane fit, and I held the sculpture of Ava's head under my right arm.

  Mrs. Hibben came into the room wearing a diaphanous gown and holding a shotgun, pointed in my direction. Beneath her gown, I could see swinging breasts that would have made nice medieval wine jugs. Maybe I was in one of Tinkle's wet nightmares. I did note—despite the trying circumstances—that they were fairly sexy medieval wine jugs; the dark nipples looked rather fecund and erotic.

  Dr. Hibben addressed his wife sternly, “Put the gun down. We don't want that thing going off. It's Alan Blair.” Then to me he commanded, “Get in here.”

  I had some muscle function left, which was a small miracle, and I was able to climb back in and put Ava's weighty bronze head on the table, as if I had just happened to be holding it. Mrs. Hibben put the shotgun on the couch. I stood in front of the window, frozen as a chess piece. At least my parents are dead, I thought. Can't shame them.

  “I'm going to call the police,” said Mrs. Hibben.

  “Don't,” said Dr. Hibben. “We can handle this. He reeks of whiskey. I can smell it from here. He wanted Ava's sculpture.” He looked at me with a disturbing intensity. “What are we going to do with you? You're worse than Goldberg.”

  I wondered for a moment if he was making some kind of general anti-Semitic remark, as if Goldberg was a code word for hebe or kike, and then I remembered that Goldberg was the Brit who had peed in teacups. I felt ashamed that I had momentarily accused Dr. Hibben, in my mind, of anti-Semitism.

  “Do you have anything to say?” he asked me.

  I was mute with shame and terror.

  He walked over to me, all seven long feet of freckles, and his enormous boxer shorts were billowing like a parachute, in fact there was enough material there for a parachute, so if he was ever ejected from a plane unexpectedly, he would probably survive.

  He took me by the back of the neck, the way you would handle a schoolboy, and he paralyzed several nerves, including my spinal column. He pushed me along to the couch and threw me down onto it, and my rear landed on the end of the shotgun. He didn't say anything about that, and I thought I should just continue sitting on it. I was afraid to move.

  “You're a sick person, aren't you?” asked Mrs. Hibben.

  “I think I am,” I said.

  “Your nose is bleeding,” said Hibben. I wiped my wrist across the base of my nostrils. I wasn't bleeding heavily.

  Just then there was a knock at the door. Dr. and Mrs. Hibben gave each other a look as if nothing could surprise them at this point.

  Dr. Hibben went to the door.

  I heard a familiar voice say, “We heard a scream.” It was the commander. Had he come to save me?

  “Might as well come in,” said Dr. Hibben. “We've got quite a situation going on here.”

  In came Mangrove and Beaubien. Looking Neptunish, Mangrove had his bat-catching net with him. He and Beaubien perceived the wreckage on the floor of the lamp and the vase. Then they took in the fact that I was sitting, like a prisoner, on the couch, a shotgun barrel pressed right against my rectum, though this latter detail they might not have exactly registered; they probably only saw that I was sitting on a shotgun poised in the general area of my buttocks.

  “What are you two doing up?” asked Dr. Hibben.

  Beaubien stared at me with incredulous eyes.

  Mangrove said, “Sigrid had a bat in her room, and I caught it and brought it outside and the two of us decided to go for a walk…. We heard this terrible scream. Is everyone all right?”

  “Alan, here,” said Dr. Hibben, “came through the window and tried to make off with the bust of Ava's head.”

  “I want to call the police,” said Mrs. Hibben.

  “I don't want that kind of publicity,” said Dr. Hibben.

  “What did you do, Alan?” asked Mangrove with concern.

  “I'm not really sure,” I said. “But the police should be called, I deserve to be arrested and shot.”

  “He's very sick,” said Mrs. Hibben.

  “I knew there was something wrong with him,” said Beaubien.

  Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ava's head lift up, as if on its own; then I saw that two inky hands appeared to be grasping it by the ears, and then the head was gone and materializing in its place were a pair of slippers.

  Mrs. Hibben caught the tail end of this supernatural transaction and screamed. This set off a chain reaction of screams. First me, then Beaubien. Mangrove and Dr. Hibben held strong and only grunted in fear. Mrs. Hibben, while screaming, had the presence of mind to grab the shotgun, but I was still sitting on it. So the shotgun lifted up at a strange angle, and as is often the case with firearms, it went off accidentally with a violent explosion, proving that guns are dangerous, though Uncle Irwin would be the first to argue that it's people who are dangerous and not guns.

  CHAPTER 38

  Navy is really putting it to ArmyA bullet woundI'm called a maniac, not for the first time, and I deserve itMangrove and BeaubienAva in my bedIf they hang youI always liked BatmanLoose ends

  The force of the shotgun blast had a catapulting effect on me. I was sent over the arm of the sofa, bounced off a little side table, cracked it in half, and took down with me to the floor a nice antique lamp. The lamp and I snuggled together and dreamed of getting married. The side table tried to intrude, but we told it that three's a crowd.

  While the lamp and I tried to go to sleep on the floor, there was also a lot of noise. Apparently, Navy had scored another touchdown.

  Then Beaubien, single-minded to the end, could be heard definitively shouting through the cheers of the Annapolis crowd, “Those are my slippers!”

  That woke me from my shotgun-blast reverie, and I looked about me. Dr. Hibben, seemingly oblivious to my having been shot, which is perfectly understandable since I had broken into and entered his home, raced to the front door, flipped a switch, and went outside. From my vantage point on the floor, I could see out the window a massive illumination. He had turned on a floodlight for the front of the house, though I could have pretended it was that white light we've hea
rd so much about.

  The commander dropped his bat net and knelt at my side. He seemed rather emotional, and so he shifted his eye patch onto his forehead, the better to inspect me, his fallen sergeant.

  “Where did she shoot you?” he asked, nearly crying.

  It was strange to see two eyes beaming out of his severe, melancholic face. The eye patch, in the middle of his forehead, looked like one of the components of Jewish phylactery—the ceremonial prayer box that Uncle Irwin donned each morning.

  “I'm not sure,” I said.

  Mrs. Hibben was standing erect, in shock, never having shot someone before, or so I presumed. She still held the murder weapon, but, mercifully, it was pointed at the floor.

  Beaubien stood behind Mangrove, peering down at me, holding her slippers to her chest.

  I reached under myself and felt my buttocks through my pants. Then I rolled to my side and put my hand in the seat of my pants—there was no bullet hole or bleeding. If any crabs were left, I hoped they had been permanently deafened.

  “I don't think I've been shot,” I said.

  Mangrove helped me up. My right buttock felt numb as if I had been kicked by a horse, but that was the extent of the damage; well, there was some blackening of my pants in the rear area, but this could be cleaned.

  Hearing that I hadn't been shot seemed to bring Mrs. Hibben to life. “You're all right?” she asked.

  “Yes, I wasn't shot.”

  “Thank God,” she said, which was very kind of her.

  “You could have been killed,” said Beaubien sweetly and sympathetically. This shooting was bringing out the best in everyone.

  We all looked at the sofa. When Mrs. Hibben had lifted the gun, changing the angle of the weapon, my buttocks had been spared, but the sofa had been critically wounded. There was an enormous charred hole in the cushion, revealing stuffing, and down through the stuffing we could see the springs of the sofa-bed mattress.

  Dr. Hibben then came back inside. His face was flushed in between the freckles. He looked as if he might combust from the stress of it all.