by Wallace Ford
Although there was more than a foot difference in height between us, he managed to look me directly in the eyes, and at that moment, I knew that my only strategy with Quincy was to play it straight.
I put on my most solemn face and continued, trying to figure out how this conversation could possibly have a positive outcome. It wasn’t looking good for the home team.
“Quincy, it’s a pretty rough time for Kenitra and everyone else. Yes, they are going to take Gordon off life support. Ironically, and incredibly, it’s his only chance to live. That’s the whole, sad story.”
“In that case, I would like to go inside Gordon’s room with you to lead a prayer for his recovery—with my camera crew, of course.” He said this in such a matter-of-fact tone that I had to give him points for sheer nerve, even though he was lacking even a modicum of respect or decency.
“Quincy, are you out of your mind? If the doctors don’t throw you out of Gordon’s room, Kenitra will probably have a cataleptic seizure on the spot. This is a bad enough scene without your becoming the ringmaster of the circus. The answer is no. You cannot come into Gordon’s room, and your camera crew for damn sure can’t film anything.”
I felt myself starting to get agitated with Mini-Meddler, and that is probably why I missed his signal to his crew to turn on the camera lights. Suddenly, the hallway was flooded with the light of day. Looking down, I could still see the reverend, now backlit. And I knew that a video camera was aimed directly at me, and I could see a microphone edging its way into my field of vision.
“Paul, we have always found a way to get along. Let’s not stop now. Things have been a little slow for me lately, and I need to send the wire services and networks some tape of me in action. Now, you can be a part of that tape, standing in the doorway preventing me from giving spiritual aid and support to Gordon Perkins in what may be his last few minutes on earth, or you can let me come in the room there and be just a small part of the proceedings.” Quincy was smiling, but his eyes were not.
I noticed the nurses and doctors moving urgently, and what looked like resuscitation equipment was being moved down the hall and positioned right outside Gordon’s room. They moved with a purpose that indicated a serious turn of events was about to take place. Looking over my shoulder, I could see that Jerome, Kenitra, Diedre and Sture were outside Gordon’s room. Dr. Krishnamurthy was conferring with his colleagues for what was probably one last time before taking the irrevocable act of removing Gordon from the tangle of wires and monitors and tubes that had consisted of his life support system for almost two years. I didn’t have a lot of time to converse with Quincy.
I knew that he was dead serious in his veiled threat to make my colleagues and me look like pagans who were inhospitable to the ministrations of the sincere Reverend Holloway. And I also knew that there were an untold number of ways in which Quincy could make life difficult for all of us if we couldn’t work out some kind of accommodation—and quickly.
I was amazed at the number of corporate titans who would quake in their Johnston & Murphy shoes at the mere thought of the Reverend Quincy Holloway leading a picket line or a boycott in an effort to gain some kind of recognition, a contract for a colleague or a contribution to one of his favorite causes. The Quincy Holloway Crusade being the leading one. Quincy could prove to be a formidable foe on the media battlefield, and as a result of his forays on behalf of innumerable causes, real and imagined, he had a Rolodex that gave him access to clients and investors and contacts who would probably not hesitate to give Morningstar Financial Services and me a hard time if that meant not getting another call from Quincy Holloway for a year or so.
All of this was unspoken, of course. Quincy knew that I knew he was a charlatan and a poseur. And I knew that Quincy knew that he could make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone except Gordon if he didn’t get his way. Right then and there. So I had to make a decision.
“Quincy, you can come into Gordon’s room. You can put your spiel on tape before going in, but no cameras in the room. None of us has any interest in calling the press about any of this, so when we leave the hospital, you can take your tape and your commentary, and do with it as you please. Take it or leave it.”
I tried to give a note of finality to my “offer” to Quincy. I had to look down to look into his beady, hungry eyes. I could see that he knew that it was the best deal he was going to get without escalating the level of threat that he had been insinuating. I held my breath waiting for his response.
“I’ll take it, Paul. And thank you for being so reasonable.” His smile could have melted butter on a stack of pancakes a mile away. “Please let Kenitra and your colleagues know that I will be right there. I assure you that you won’t even know that I am here.”
With that, Quincy turned to a waiting microphone and began what seemed to be a prepared monologue explaining how even the rich and the powerful were in need of his spiritual healing. As I turned to finally head towards Gordon’s room, I heard him mention something about “answering the call of the Lord” once more. Love him or hate him, the Reverend Quincy Holloway was an original. And in some bizarre way, it was only fitting that he would be at New York Hospital with a camera crew for what might be Gordon Perkins’s last few hours on earth.
Somehow, it all made sense.
CHAPTER 31
Kenitra
Body and Soul
Once I had told Dr. Krishnamurthy my decision to take Gordon off life support, I felt a strange sense of relief. Gordon was surely the seventh level of hell in my life, and he always would be the culmination of every nightmare I had had since I was a little girl. Over our years together, he had methodically stripped me of my values, my self-esteem, my confidence—everything but my will to survive.
And it was my will to survive that had kept me alive and relatively sane through the beatings and the cursings and the forced ingestion of too many drugs and too much alcohol. It was my will to survive that had allowed me to pray for relief and to hope for his downfall and my escape.
And just when it seemed as if I were at the bottom of a hole that would soon be my grave, Gordon met his downfall in New Orleans. It seemed a cruel twist of fate that he would fall into a coma but that he wouldn’t die, that he would not completely disappear from my life. Instead of becoming a dead, dusty memory that I could shelve away in the attic of my brain, Gordon persisted in being a part of my life by remaining alive.
Going to California, living in Venice Beach, enjoying life with friends, having affairs in the open without fear or suspicion—none of these aspects of real life could rid my days of the reality of Gordon. As long as he lived, he would haunt my dreams and my consciousness. As long as he was alive in that Special Intensive Care Unit, there was a chance that he would awaken. And so, there was a chance that one day, while I was walking down the street or brushing my hair in the morning, I would feel his bear paw of a hand grip my shoulder from behind, and I would be dragged back into the maw of misery and shame and pain that had been my life until his fateful day in Louisiana.
It was the not knowing that was so maddening about Gordon’s condition and my own situation. Not knowing, when I woke up in the morning, if this would be the day that he died and I would finally be free. Not knowing, when I woke up in the morning, if this would be the day that he would awaken from his coma and recover to haunt my life and hunt me forever. Not knowing, when I went to bed in the evening, if it would be my last peaceful night on earth, because if Gordon recovered, the nightmare that had been my life would become my life once more.
When I was at the Waldorf-Astoria earlier that night lying in bed with Sture, when the phone call from the hospital came I felt the kind of fear that I knew as a little girl, when the bogeyman in my bedroom closet was always close at hand in the deepest hours of the night. And as we dressed and got ready to go to the hospital, I somehow knew that a simple ending, culminating in Gordon’s immediate death, was just not in the cards. There was never a chance that anything i
nvolving Gordon and me would be so cut-and-dried.
In another place and time, with someone else as the main character, all of this would have been some kind of bizarre and semifunny tragicomedy. But this was, of course, me, the formerly abused and now estranged wife being awakened in her lover’s arms by her comatose beast of a husband’s doctors, summoning her to the hospital in the middle of the night.
And there was me, the formerly abused and now estranged wife daring to believe that the dream that she had been harboring deep in her heart of hearts, the dream that her comatose beast of a husband would die, was about to finally come true. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly simple dream and a perfectly attainable dream.
And then, at the moment of absolute truth, the beast of a husband doesn’t simply die. Rather, the formerly abused and now close-to-liberated wife is given the life-or-death decision over the beast—finally holding the life of her tormentor in her hands.
It seemed like some kind of bizarre comedy written by a madman with too much time on his hands. At the time, I remember looking into Sture’s eyes and seeing the reflection of the dawn of laughter in my own eyes. Of course, there was absolutely nothing funny about anything that was happening. But since I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the possibility of my finally being free from Gordon, I preferred laughing.
CHAPTER 32
Sture
In the Wee Small Hours
As we all walked away from the alcove, the doctors and nurses hustled and bustled into Gordon’s room. You didn’t have to be a medical expert to know that something important was about to happen.
And now that we had learned the cause of the late-night distress signal, and now that Kenitra had made the most important decision of her relationship with Gordon since she decided to marry him, there was nothing left to do but wait. So we did. Right outside Gordon’s room, with Diedre and Jerome and Paul standing nearby.
We were waiting now to see if Gordon would live or die. But I knew in my heart of hearts, and I knew from looking into Kenitra’s eyes, that this wasn’t quite true. She was waiting for Gordon to die so that she would be free of the specter of Gordon somehow materializing in her life again. She was waiting for Gordon to die because that was the only way that she could be sure that he would truly be gone from her life, if not from her nightmares, forever.
And I was waiting for Gordon to die as well. There was no denying that I was in love with Kenitra, and I was beginning to believe that she loved me, too. And there was no room in our romance for Gordon and his monstrous aura.
Every man probably has something more than a passing interest in the men that his lover might once have loved. Since speculating about past lovers can lead a man into the land of the truly mad and distracted, with no known escape, it’s usually best to leave that particular brand of history alone.
But as long as he lived, Gordon was not in the past. He was very much in Kenitra’s present, and in mine. When I was with Kenitra, when she was in my arms, when we were making love or taking a shower together, it was like Gordon never existed. And the rest of the time, he was like some mythical chimera that may never really have existed and who certainly had no place in everyday life.
But then there were those times when I could see the pain bubble to the surface of her consciousness, occasioned by the most innocuous remark or occurrence. I could see the fear in her eyes every now and then when the phone rang or when there was an unexpected knock on the door.
It was as if Gordon was lurking somewhere deep in the shadows. But like any predator, he never really went away. He hunted. And he hunted patiently. And now that I was Kenitra’s lover, I was also his prey.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling. And I wanted him to die. So he would be gone. Forever.
“Do you want to take a walk, get some coffee or something? Waiting right here can’t be the best thing to do.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Sture.” Kenitra looked up at me and removed her sunglasses, and I could see the fear that even being on the same floor with Gordon made her feel. “But I want to know—I need to know—what’s next in my life. If Gordon dies, I will never have to be in this hospital again. So I want to wait for him to die, so that I can walk out of here and never look back, or come back.”
I really didn’t know what to do at that point. I wanted to hold her and comfort her. But there would be no real comfort until Gordon was dead. I wanted her to know that I would protect her with my life, but Gordon had taken on the stature of a force of nature in her life. My offering to protect her would have made as much sense to her as my promising to shield her from crashing meteors or cancer or earthquakes. There was no protection that I could offer.
“You know what’s so crazy about all of this, Sture?” Her question took me by surprise.
“Everything?” My answer wasn’t far from the truth, as far as I could see. Everything about this night seemed to be coming straight from the pages of a madcap celestial script that just kept us all guessing.
“Yes, everything. But I have to tell you, in a strange but very real way, I am glad that everything is coming to a head. If Gordon dies tonight, I’ll be free ... we’ll be free. If he lives past tonight, I will make sure that he never sees me again, and that will be fine with me also.” She put her glasses back on and squeezed my hand yet again. “I’m just so tired of living on the razor’s edge, Sture. I want to live without worrying about Gordon, without thinking about Gordon, without being afraid of Gordon.”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn ... about Gordon. I only care about you. So, let’s make it up as we go. That’s all we can do anyway.” I held Kenitra in my arms and gave her a light kiss on her forehead. It was all I could say. It was all I could do.
“Let’s go down the hall and get some coffee. Let’s hope sentry duty doesn’t take too long.”
CHAPTER 33
Gordon
For All We Know
The Dark Lord was just getting ready to leave when all the fuss started. At first, I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, and I never liked that feeling. We had just gotten back from my very successful meeting with Duke.
I was very sure that I had picked the right guy to get my new business operations going. Duke was going to make a lot of money, and I was going to make a lot more. No question about it. All it was going to take was some time, and G-Perk was going to rule the drug trade in Harlem—at least, the cocaine trade. When we got that far, I would see whether that would be enough for me. It probably wouldn’t be, but that would be something to deal with at another point in time.
I was about to relax and savor the memory of the rest of the evening after I finished my business with Duke. I had asked Ernie Argentina to get a couple of the miscellaneous bitches who always hung out at the Purple Dragon to ride with me and the Dark Lord on our way back downtown to the hospital.
But first we went in the private backroom, which Ernie had opened for us, and we had some fun with several grams of coke that the Dark Lord put on a small dish along with a straw and a bottle of Rémy Martin that Ernie considerately provided.
Ernie Argentina was an interesting guy. Late one rainy evening when there were only a couple of customers, I asked him what a seemingly intelligent and seemingly educated guy like him was doing working as a bartender in a total dive like the Purple Dragon.
It turned out that Ernie was indeed an educated guy—a very well- educated guy. He was from Ohio, just outside of Akron, and he had gotten a basketball scholarship to attend Duke University. Although he hurt his knee in his freshman year and never was a real contributor to the Duke basketball team legacy he worked real hard at his studies and wound up going to Harvard Law School.
And then his story got real interesting. Ernie decided that enlisting in the United States Marine Corps would be a good career move. He didn’t take into account the exigencies of the Vietnam War, however, and, even though the war was coming to a close, he found himself stationed at the U.S. embassy in Saig
on.
And so he was there for the madcap, insane and truly apocalyptic abandonment of Vietnam, with American helicopters evacuating the final contingent of U.S. personnel from the roof of the embassy. Incredibly, Ernie had a framed news photo of the last helicopter leaving the rooftop, and upon careful examination with a magnifying glass, he pointed himself out, frantically pushing a Vietnamese woman and child out of the door of the helicopter.
When he returned to civilian life, he tried to make a living selling phony penny stocks to his Duke and Harvard classmates. But to hear him tell it, after his experience on the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, he wasn’t really into scamming.
And so, he made acquaintance with “the boy who makes slaves out of men,” as Marvin Gaye once put it. Ernie became a godforsaken heroin addict for about ten years. And then, he said, he simply got tired of being a down-and-out junkie, and he kicked his habit and tried to find some way to work and support himself. And that was how he wound up as the bartender at the Purple Dragon. It was a great story for that rainy night, and I filed it away. Someday, Ernie might be useful for something besides lining up tackhead bitches that wanted to snort coke and give head.
As usual, the Dark Lord took my clothes and put them away, and helped me get situated back in my hospital bed. Getting all the tubes and wires hooked back up had gotten to be a pretty routine thing for us, and within minutes, I was back in my comatose condition. As far as anyone knew, I hadn’t moved an inch. I had all these motherfuckers fooled. As usual, I would have the last laugh on all of them.
That’s why I never liked not knowing exactly what was going on around me. And that’s why I didn’t like all of that unanticipated hustle and bustle around my bed without anybody saying a damn thing, not a fucking word. It was like they were carrying out some well-thought-out plan that had already been decided at some other point in time. And that’s when they started removing the wires and cords and tubes that the Dark Lord and I had just put back in place. Since I still couldn’t say a damn thing, all I could do was watch.
