“God wants to help. God wants to help you. With over four billions years of experience, God can give you everything you 140
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ever wanted right now, and God’s dealers in Miami are the Fixico Sisters.” Who are the Fixico sisters?
Dishonest Dave bounces up. I’m standing by an empty parked police car. “One second,” says Dave. He takes out a mini-mill from a pocket, with which he grinds out some white powder onto the car’s hood. A gold-plated razor blade hastens the powder into two lines; next, a metal snorter in the shape of a vacuum cleaner, with which he hoovers up the first line. He proffers the snorter and when I decline, he polishes off the remainder.
I can’t actually see a police officer around, but it seems insanely insane. This reminds me of being with Nelson, magnified a thousand times. However, I have the courage of the dead.
“I needed that. Have you heard the ‘Varying Latin American Nation Police-Station’ story yet?” asks Dave. “There was this police station out in the countryside. Small police station.
Closed at weekends. One Monday morning, the police come back and there’s no police station. It’s gone, there’s only some foundations to show that there was once a building. The front door, the chairs, the windows, the bricks, the roof, the wiring, the nails, the sign saying police station, all gone. The whole police station has been stolen. That’s a story you’re going to hear in Miami. The location changes, but the story is the same.
The Colombians tell it about the Ecuadorians. ‘That’s how thieving and poor the Ecuadorians are.’ The Ecuadorians about the Colombians. The Uruguayans about the Paraguayans. You get the picture.”
Across the street, I wonder why the preacher has lost his voice.
Tape change? “And he will have no mercy, no mercy on that day,” the voice rebooms. “But don’t forget: carpenters charge…
garages charge… dentists charge… the electric company charges… God works for free… God delivers right to your front 141
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door for free. The Fixico Sisters are God’s dealers.” Great line.
God works for free. That undercuts the Hierophant’s affordable paradise. Basically there’s the carrot-and-stick approach. You offer peace and happiness, but lob in some fear as well.
“I’m introducing myself as your counsel,” says Dave as we enter.
“Have you studied law?” I ask. He looks offended. Inside we discover why Mrs Shepherd has been arrested.
There are some matey, good-natured policefolk. The police in Miami aren’t like that. They frighten me. They’re all huge, and they’ll shoot you without any hesitation. I can’t reproach them for this attitude. There are many evil, mad individuals with automatic weapons at large out there, not to mention the plain stupid ones.
They also have this “we know” look they give you. “We know all about it. We won’t arrest you today, but we know all about it.” And they’re right, because who hasn’t got some tax fraud or dope stashed away? Although, as far as I’m aware, I don’t believe posing as the Supreme Being is an offence.
Mrs Shepherd is unrepentant, but pleased to see me. I introduce myself as the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. Dave introduces himself as counsel for the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. I’m wearing my suit, but I’m not casting holiness. I look, catching my reflection in the glass door, like a failed club owner, which, considering I’m an excessively failed club owner, is a step in the right direction. Dave looks like he should be in a cell for a gangland killing, twenty-five to life.
But the investigating officer is tolerant. He smiles the “we-know-all-about-it” smile to Dave. Mrs Shepherd has been caught in the Woodlawn cemetery.
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We find out why Mrs Shepherd has been such a good source of flowers. She’s been stealing them from the cemetery. She probably would have got away with it, but for the fact that, with Christmas coming up, she had been cutting down a small pine tree with a blunt, battery-operated turkey carver.
I can see Dave, even as a man who snorts coke off the back of police cars, is discomforted by this, as I am. This is bad juju.
In capitals. I don’t believe in God, not in the sense of a sentient force who’s worried about whether you eat shellfish or which hand you wipe your arse with, but if there is anything on the other side, behind the scenes – ripping off the dead, shitting on the grieving? You are in big trouble. If I actually were God, I’d be making a note about this.
They can’t, of course, prove that Mrs Shepherd has been the culprit lifting the flowers for the last two years, although the staff have been logging her and unfortunately she can’t provide the name of even one grave she claims to be visiting in the cemetery.
But like all police forces they’re concerned about clearing up the thefts, so they suggest that if she fesses up to some others some community service can be arranged.
“But the Hierophant told me to do it,” she maintains with a lack of loyalty that is truly remarkable. “You told me to do it, too,” she adds in my direction. I admire the way she can turn on us without the slightest hesitation.
“This is a tragically… tragic case of tragic misunderstanding…
tragically,” sums up Dave. “Officer Blaine, do you like Miles Davis?”
We buy several tickets for Rescuers in the Ring, an annual charity event in which the police box the fire brigade, and we leave with Dishonest Dave promising unreleased Miles Davis out-takes from the period he was pimping his wife.
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“You should listen to more Miles Davis. Yeah. I’ll do you a compilation. Time for a drink, no?”
I list some excuses.
“No, no. It’s my birthday and, as a present, you can come and have a drink with me.”
We make for Dave’s favourite hangout, Three Writers Losing Money. The drawback to not eating much and not drinking is that you become a pushover for alcohol when it makes its entrance. I want a mineral water, but Dave insists that on his birthday we have to drink Barbancourt. After three rums I’m just a Sub-Hierophant-shaped cushion. Dave fills me in on Haitian history from the period 1920 to 1935. He’s quite animated on the subject, but I’m not listening closely. We chat to a friendly woman who has a business selling toe-separators, and Dave harries me into consuming two more rums.
You don’t expect to be handcuffed to the fittings when you’re out for a drink in a trendy club, so when Dave handcuffed me to some cast-iron latticework around our booth, I was slow to react.
I waited to see if there would be a punchline or explanation.
“Admit it,” says Dave. “You were thinking about going home.”
I had been, although when you think of my bed, home is barely worth the effort of going home. I had been waiting for Dave to go to the toilet and then slumping out as fast as I could to get a taxi. I’m not quite sure why Dave needs to secure my company, since he’s of a type that walks into a bar and ten minutes later is chatting to everyone.
“It’s not your birthday, is it?”
“No.”
“Why do you need to cuff me?”
“Generally, you’re good company. Good company is hard to get, although, you are frankly disappointing me this evening.”
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A broad, sixty-something man with a weathered face studies Dave for a moment.
“You were a fighter, weren’t you?”
Dave nods and we are joined by Mike, who has driven down to Miami from Savannah to see the plaque that commemorates the 5th Street gym, which, judging by the way the two of them go on about it, is a very big deal in the boxing world.
What intrigues me is how Mike, in poor lighting conditions, with a savage background din, could tell that Dave, sitting at a table, relating to me the history of trade tariffs in the Caribbean from 1880 to 1932, drinking Barbancourt rum, was a former pugilist. Dave isn’t surprised at all. Dave and Mike discuss the history of heavyweight boxing from 1947 to 1974.
Boxing has this cultlike effect. Golfers can be tiresome about Scotland and the alloys used in their clubs, but it’s different with boxing, perhaps because you have to pay some physical dues.
Some of my neighbours boxed, and they all had the joy of being knocked out, broken noses, stitches. There’s a whiff of human sacrifice about it.
Dave recaps Haitian history from 1780 to 1815, and also speaks knowledgeably about the political history of Colombia from 1920
to 1952. A skinny Chinese man coming in to sell some pirate DVDs moves us on to reflections about which biography of Bob Dylan is best and whether Mike would like a Frank Sinatra compilation.
Dave has a brief row with a Jamaican. “While you were doing your sister in the sugar cane, we were reading Proust.”
Mike works for a small company making putt returners. I wonder whether he’s brought any samples with him, because I’ve never been able to find a putt returner that worked consistently. I hope to manoeuvre the topic of conversation around to this as we’ve now established some rapport, although 145
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there’s an air of sourness about Mike which suggests gifts won’t be forthcoming.
“You here for the pussy, Mike?” Dave asks after a short discourse on Russian absurdists in the 1930s.
“No.”
“Married?”
“Yes. Well, was. My wife passed away.”
“I’m sorry. Is this recent?”
“Yesterday.”
A sufficient intimacy has now evolved for Mike to reveal to us that he’s killed his wife and has her body stashed in his car parked outside.
Dave and I nod sympathetically. We’ve nearly been there. It’s impossible to be married without at least once having considered killing your spouse. The trick, of course, is not to. Round about divorce time, you do hope your partner will walk under a truck, because it would be quicker and cheaper, tidier than a divorce, and because it would absolve you of failure.
Mike is taking a day or two of sunshine before handing himself in or killing himself. Our acquaintance with Mike has been brief, but we’ve taken a liking to him. He’s a straightforward guy who snapped, hit his wife only once, after she broke an umbrella over his head; he is a tortured, remorse-seeping man whose misery has made him confess to utter strangers.
“What do you think Mike should do, Tyndale? Let’s have the spiritual angle on this. Tyndale’s the Sub-Hierophant of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ,” says Dave as if it’s some hard-to-earn qualification, passing the buck, though he stressed the honorifics to give me a second more response time.
“Well,” I say. Hoping some other words will sneak out in its wake. Very occasionally I’ve found myself saying something 146
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clever without it being me. I say “well” again and then I’ve run out.
This is the trouble with setting myself up as a spiritual pharmacist, I now have to unknot an unknottable knot. Mike has been courteous enough not to comment on the fact I’m handcuffed. I don’t know what to say. I know fucked when I see it. Prison will not be kind to an office-warmer in his mid-sixties.
“Prison costs,” Mike considers. “Why should I use up your hard-earned tax dollars?”
All in all, suicide probably is the tidiest solution. Dave counsels going on the run, since every day out of the joint will be a bonus. However, Mike wants the punishment. He wants the punishment especially if the punishment will destroy him.
The only solution would be if I could resurrect his wife.
“Don’t give up,” I say, even though I don’t believe it. If anyone is in the ideal position to give up, it’s Mike, but you can’t let someone go down the drain – well, not unless it’s someone you hate.
“Don’t give up. You never know what’s around the corner.”
“Let me tell you a story about my uncle,” says Dave. “He was a man with severe marital problems. He woke up one morning to find two dead men in his driveway.”
I don’t quite see why Dave tells us this story. The two dead men his uncle found had apparently stabbed each other to death. One he recognized as the contract killer he had hired to do his wife and, judging from his wife’s expression when she saw the bodies, the other body was presumably the contract killer she had hired to do him. This cleared the air and last year they celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary.
At two in the morning, Dave gets a call from a man with a freezer full of lamb chops, three tons of them. “This is 147
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the trouble with having a name like Dishonest Dave. I mean what can I do with three tons of lamb chops? Hang on.” He disappears into the club’s kitchen and on return announces with pleasure: “Our tab’s clear.”
As dawn manifests and I’m unshackled, Dave offers Mike to be his counsel and a compilation of Ornette Coleman. He also recommends South Beach police station as the best one to hand himself in at.
Dishonest Dave and I accompany Mike to his car as he has one putt returner with him. I had got round to mentioning my dissatisfaction with the putt returners I had encountered and embarrassingly Mike now insists I should take it off his hands as he won’t be needing it. It’s easier to agree and allow him this act of generosity as a start on the atonement, even though it’s awkward accepting a gift from a man who’s either going to be dead or locked up for good in a few hours – but nevertheless, a good putt returner…
I’m also concerned that the putt returner might be stuck in the back with his wife’s corpse. Mike has a huge SUV which he has parked on some wasteland three blocks away. Get this. He parked out there to save the parking fee: old habits die hard. He takes a putt returner off the back seat.
“I’m not a bad person, but give me those keys,” shouts a car-jacker with a gun. It’s now that I digest that we’re in a secluded stretch off the main strip, and while someone might take the trouble to report us getting shot, we can’t count on any passing observers to note the robbery.
I’m very nervous that Mike will have a go at the jacker, death by criminal, and I think if he had been alone, he would have; I’m also nervous that Dave will have a go.
“It is you,” I accuse Dave.
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“I told you,” says Dave, shrugging his shoulders.
“You don’t want to take this car, son,” Mike coaxes grandfatherly.
“You’re an expert on what I want, are you? You’ve made a study of me for years?”
Now you can’t really expect to like your car-jacker, but car-jacking is like everything else – it can be done professionally or it can be done imbecilely. Also, while some are driven to crime by desperation, he’s enjoying it.
“I can give you a good reason not to take this car,” says Mike.
“What’s that?” says the jacker. “Crime doesn’t pay? It looks pretty good from where I’m standing. Now, amuse me.”
“Sorry?” says Mike.
“Amuse me. Entertain me. Sing me a song or something or I’ll jink you good.”
Is it really necessary to have this much humiliation in life? It occurs to me that, apart from not being in good voice, I don’t know any songs, maybe a few first lines. Mike launches into something familiar – but which I can’t name – with a confident, practised bass tone. You can see the jacker wants to fuss, but unfortunately he’s got what he wanted.
“What’s that?” asks the jacker pointing at the putt returner.
“A putt returner,” I say. “It’s for—”
“Does it work? I’ve never found one that works right.”
“It’s not very good…” But he’s not falling for that. I hand it over. He gets in the car.
“Don’t you want our wallets?” Dave asks.
“Are you calling me stupid? If I’d wanted your wallets, I would have asked for your wallets.”
“Why don’t you want our wallets? You’re a joke. You forgot and now you’re pretending that you didn’t want them.” I say 149
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nothing. Dave takes a clutch of dollar bills from his wallet and waves them. Mike moves forward to make another entreaty, but Dave restrains him. “Let him take the car.”
The jacker has trouble with the ignition.
“That’s piss-poor, not being able to start the car, for a jacker,”
Dave comments. Mike has to show him how to jiggle the key.
“I’m a wonderful human being,” says the jacker as the engine revs. “But you have to do what you have to do. I have no problem with my self-esteem.” We watch the car move down the road.
“You know,” Dave says to Mike, “when you report this to the police, you don’t have to mention that your wife wasn’t alive when she left you.”
G
“My husband used to cry all the time,” says Gulin. She is making some pancakes, in good spirits. Her observation isn’t spiteful, rather regretful.
I sympathize with her husband. You have to act tough outside, but the main merit of home is to be able to curl up and weep, and there is nowhere to hide in marriage: the soiled underwear, the buckling, the strange habits, the embarrassing and persistent medical condition. They all get repeated, thorough viewing.
Despair. What good is despair? Pain, now the utility of pain is indisputable. Pain teaches you to stay away from fire, indigestible foodstuffs and not to jump out of third-storey windows. Despair gets in the way, an emotional weed that entangles you and that makes things harder by throwing blackness everywhere. I can’t see an upside to it.
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a little down about it, but if she’s in distress, it’s hidden. Most of us catch colds regularly, but there are hardy souls who don’t.
Gulin isn’t one for brooding.
Gulin serves Napalm and me. Her good spirits are partly down to her new job, which requires her to live in. Her new employer is paralysed on one side, terminally ill and already has a rota of nurses but needs a round-the-clock helper for his business. I’d find it profoundly depressing caring for someone that ill, but Gulin is unfazed: “Hey we’re all coming or going.”
Indeed, the prospect of non-stop, well-paid work pleases her.
I’m sure she does a good job too, but what will her efforts earn her? Her employer will be dead soon and she’ll have to look for another position, something that takes time and effort even if you’re good at it. That’s the trouble with that line of work as an assistant, you can’t move up, you can only move along and when the person providing the reference is dead it may not count for much. You want your job to be on a ladder, something where you can move up to be a senior something.
It’s rare for her to cook, because she hardly ever seems to eat.
She’s wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt which look good, but they will have been the cheapest jeans and T-shirt available on the continent. It is a little shaming to encounter someone just much tougher, more frugal, more joyful, more able than you; someone quite simply a better person.
“We’ll miss you,” says Napalm, reaching for his fourth pancake.
“I’ll be back from time to time,” says Gulin. She’s keeping her room in case the arrangement doesn’t work out. Napalm has already volunteered to take care of Orinoco. I take my fifth pancake. I’m too occupied stuffing my face to make much conversation.
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“Why don’t you ask me a question, Tyndale?” asks Gulin.
“Tonight, but only tonight, you can ask me any question you like, and I won’t be offended. I promise. Any question.” This is definitely flirting.
What I want to ask is how can I be like you? How can I make myself like you? I know that there is no answer to that, or rather the answer is no.
“What’s the meaning of life?” I ask.
She laughs.
“Well?” I insist.
“I said you could ask any question. I didn’t say I’d answer it.”
Her face and build are too solid to be considered by most as beautiful for a woman. I suppose pleasant to the eye is the most accurate way of describing her. Beauty, of course, is nothing, but it takes a long time to learn that.
G
“I need to talk to you,” says Dishonest Dave. His tone alone communicates that something’s badly amiss. “I… need to ask a favour. You do this feeding-the-homeless stuff now for the Hierophant. I want you to look out for someone.”
“Sure.” Considering all he’s done for me, I’m delighted to do him a favour. He slides a photograph across my desk. “I want you to look out for him.” It’s a picture of a grinning man holding up a bottle of beer to the camera in a celebratory way.
“Who is it?”
“My brother.”
Now he says it, the resemblance springs out. His brother is much heavier, fat indeed, but the arched eyebrows are the same.
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“Yeah. My brother. He… he… well, he had a lot of problems.
A lot of problems. I don’t know where he is. I lost touch with him months ago. He may well be out there… so if you see him, I’d consider it a big favour if you’d let me know. A big favour.
His name’s Horace.”
“Older brother?”
“Yeah. He… taught me how to box. We had no one else.
He… he looked after me, you know?” On the words “looked after me”, Dave’s voice trembles and he sobs. I pass him a tissue (the Hierophant’s office is always stocked with them). He takes a deep breath and pulls himself together.
“I can’t believe I did that. It’s unpardonable… absolutely unpardonable. What you must think of me.”
He does suspect I think less of him. On the contrary, I know in the league table of hardness he is well above me. He was keen to get into the boxing ring to fight strong, well-trained athletes whose uppermost desire was to seriously injure or kill him. He’s a survivor. I’m not. But these inconsistencies are interesting.
Out there in some corner of Miami will be someone willing to take the life of a stranger for small change, but who would be too tongue-tied to ask a girl onto the dance floor. Of course, if you’re worried about being hard you’re not. The world’s hardest man won’t think himself hard.
“Everyone breaks. And remember, I am a pastor.”
“No you’re not.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Horace was too generous. Most people who end up on the street have made a mistake. His was being too generous. He could have stayed with me, but he wouldn’t.”
Dave then offers to take me to a corrupt doctor, a Brazilian plastic surgeon. I don’t have the heart to tell Dave that, mulling 153
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over my miracle, I’ve changed my mind and concluded that what I need is not a corrupt doctor, but an honest one.
“This guy is so crooked, whatever you want him for you’d better be quick, because he won’t be out of jail long.”
I don’t see the dog until it’s right next to us. If I said to you what would you do if you were attacked by a large, aggressive dog, you would probably come up with some sensible suggestions for self-defence, but when you are actually attacked by a large, aggressive dog you don’t have those seconds of tranquillity in which to consider action.
The dog is four or five feet away from me, barking furiously.
It’s huge, a canine bodybuilder, stuffed with steak and steroids.
I gingerly back off, because dogs don’t like to attack from the front. As I move backwards, the dog matches me, maintaining the same distance. After a few yards of this retreat, I realize that the dog is not vicious or especially dangerous: it’s doing what’s expected of it. It’s got loose by negotiating some gap in a fence or wobbly gate, and now the street is part of its territory.
Dave, meanwhile, I’ve registered out of the corner of my eye, has flown up a tree which I wouldn’t be able to climb with the aid of a ladder.
“This, this is what happens when you leave your gun in the car.” We had parked round the corner and were walking to the Brazilian’s when the dog bounded up. The dog’s barking diminishes and it observes me.
I observe the dog. Its muscles are astonishingly large and defined. It must have escaped from some garden nearby, and to some extent I’m glad that Dave doesn’t have his gun, because this isn’t the dog’s fault. It’s the owner’s.
I like dogs. It’s stupid to say that because dogs have their characters; there are nasty, jumpy, useless dogs. But generally I 154
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like dogs, and not for the most cited reason, loyalty. I like them because most are willing to work, unlike cats, but above all because they’re willing to look stupid, unlike cats. Dogs don’t mind making fools of themselves, because they know it gives the pack a laugh. It’s what you want from your friends almost as much as their support: their folly. Got drunk and bedded someone incredibly ugly? Spent all your money on tatty sports memorabilia (which turns out to be counterfeit) without telling the wife? Rewired your home and set it on fire? We’re grateful for the laugh. Everyone should do their share of jestering.
The dog licks its chops and we regard each other. The dog is bored and neither of us knows what to do. I won’t attempt to go past this monster to get back to our car, and I can’t spend the rest of my life walking backwards.
“When I find the owner…” Dave hisses from his branch. I see his expression and I understand that what I rated as anger in myself isn’t. My wrath is only ambitious discontent: overgrown disappointment. A mountain range of rage is expanding behind Dave’s features. It’s rage you don’t want to be around, because its extremity makes little distinction between its target and anything else in sight.
In the garden to my left, safely behind a fence, a poodle, attracted by the brouhaha, doggedly yelps and leaps against the mesh. Our monster doesn’t even deign to look at it. After a while a woman emerges to lead the poodle away.
“Do you know whose dog this is?” I shout to her.
“No,” she says, dragging her dog inside.
“Could you phone someone about this dog?” I indicate the monster.
“No. It’s not my dog,” she says. That’s how it’s going to end.
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the end of the world. It’ll be someone lazy or stupid, someone not bothering to close a gate, and we’ll all be finished. Because laziness always wins.
As I’m wondering how to deal with the impasse, a cyclist shoots past, having improperly assessed the scene as man with dog rather than man threatened by dog; the monster takes off after him barking, glad of purpose.
For several minutes Dave prowls around in the hope of locating the owner. Just as well for us all, there is no sign of dog or owner. The trip was wasted, since the Brazilian wasn’t at home. Dave chews darkness all the way back.
What is it with the dogs and cats? Is this some code? I give it some thought. If it is a code, I can’t figure it out. On a wall, I see a poster. Two white-haired grannies are peering out at me. They are bewildered, as if they are novices in the field of having their picture taken. The caption reads:
“The Fixico Sisters – God’s Dealers.”
G
“It’s a small village in the East of Turkey,” says Gulin of her birthplace. “It’s the sort of place where you either spend your whole life, or you leave and never go back.” She worked for a while as a teacher in a primary school, then left. “The winters are bad. It can get completely snowed in. I worry about my mother a lot. I’d like to bring her here, but, you know, the money and the visa…”
I’m making that dish that no one can mess up: spaghetti bolognese.
You may not make great spag bol, but you can’t make it inedible (unless, perhaps, you’re Napalm). As I watch the water 156
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boil and listen to Gulin, I keep on thinking about the odd memories I’ve been getting.
Really inconsequential memories, things I’ve never remembered once before (as far as I can remember), un-events: walking up stairs, waiting to get served in shops, making my way along deserted corridors, dull, non-essential scenes that have suddenly broken free from the depths of my mind and bobbed to the surface. Extraordinarily vivid dullness. Regurgitated boredom.
Am I dying?
“Sixto says you like feeding people?”
“Me? I hardly ever cook.”
“No, I meant you feed the homeless. You try to help people.”
“It’s rather pointless,” I say with surprising bitterness.
“I know. That’s why it’s charming.”
As we eat, I notice the paper is open at the entertainment page. It occurs to me that I haven’t had a break since I arrived in Miami, an evening off, without plotting, without worrying about miracles: a holiday from myself.
“Why don’t we go and see a film?”
“Sure.”
“You choose,” I say, pushing the paper over. Thankfully, Gulin picks the film I would have. There’s nothing more irritating than spending an hour arguing over which film to see and then someone sulking about being forced to see something they didn’t want.
Getting the company right for a film is very important. One entire relationship I had went down over the choice of film – Carla had the best breasts I had ever got my hands on, but it ended after we went to see a French film. It was a long drive, expensive parking, and a film which I had suspected would be obscenely pretentious and which I found obscenely pretentious and she didn’t – there’s no way back from a disagreement like that.
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As you get older, what you look for is less the film than the chance to forget yourself. It would be useful if there was just a switch at the back of your head you could flick to stop thinking for an afternoon… but there isn’t.
We enjoy the film. “The beginning was a bit slow,” Gulin comments, “but I loved the gag with the table.” I was less enthusiastic about the table gag, but we’re definitely close enough in our assessments for future trips.
As we saunter down Lincoln Road, I see a bearded panhandler.
I recognize him as one of the doyens of the streets – so he is at least destitute, unlike many of the beggars who try it on.
When you’re with a woman, it’s harder to ignore a request for a handout – you don’t want to act callous or stingy. But I never give money. I hate beggars as much as bankers and lawyers, for the same reason – they take advantage of others.
“Drug money, please, I’m suffering from an overdose of reality,”
Beardy asks, in that isn’t-it-funny-I’m-being-frank way.
We walk past, as I concentrate on our conversation about the funniest film ever made. Gulin turns to me and says: “I’m sorry.
I never give. I just work too hard for the money. I’d better get back. My boss likes to start work very early.”
G
Very often I have the conviction that my difficulties stem from my dislike of chocolate. You want to be like everyone else as much as possible. I’ve never met anyone who dislikes chocolate.
I’ve come across several neutrals who can take it or leave it or who don’t eat chocolate because they don’t enjoy it; but no one like me who positively dislikes it. It’s just that chocolate has that chocolate taste.
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Am I the victim of a conspiracy of chocolate lovers? It’d be a subtle thing. No one would ever say: “We’re not going to give you the job because we’ve never seen you eating chocolate.”
And it’s not a subject I’d bring up, because I don’t want to be set apart: but it does keep you at a distance.
It was particularly hard as a kid. As an adult you’re allowed quirks. “I only listen to eighteenth-century opera”, “I won’t eat anything red”, “Monday’s the day I never wear underwear”. But not liking chocolate when you’re a kid is hard.
For Nelson’s sixth birthday treat, a group of us went to the cinema to see a great film with hordes of extras getting blown up. As we went in, we were all given a chocolate ice cream. It was assumed we would all love one. I was sufficiently sensitive to know that this was considered a special gratification, so I couldn’t dump my ice cream in a bin or give it to one of the other kids, because if the supervising adult saw me ditching it that would cause trouble, as the whole point of the exercise was for us to have that famous thing, the “good time”.
Once in the darkness of the auditorium, I considered throwing the ice cream on the ground, but refrained from doing so in case it was spotted when the lights came back on. Even if I’d claimed I’d dropped it, I’d either look like an idiot or worse: I’d be bought another chocolate ice cream.
So I put the ice cream in my pocket.
Instead of enjoying the film, I spent the whole time puzzling how to cope with the melting ice cream. I was wearing my best jacket. This was a jacket that had involved a major shopping trip and a long lecture from my mother about how expensive it was and how carefully it should be treated. Thus I had a premonition of an ugly collision between the melting chocolate and my mother. But instead of being mature enough to act (get 159
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up, dump item in loo), I sat there hoping that the ice cream wouldn’t melt and stain my jacket, in that way we do when, presented with difficult circumstances, we pretend they’re not so difficult.
At the end of the evening I said thank you very much, as I had been taught, and was returned home. I could barely stand up with anxiety, but my mother took my jacket and hung it up without saying a word. Was this a ploy on her part to make me suffer? She made no mention of the ice cream and I welcomed the respite.
The next morning I woke up to an absence of ice-cream harangue, and eventually, unable to believe my luck, I examined my jacket which, to my astonishment, showed no sign of ice-cream seepage. I put my hand into the pocket: no stickiness.
There was no ice cream. There was no wrapper. The whole treat had disappeared. The pocket was dry and snug, everything a superior pocket should be.
Mundaneness has a number of explanations. My neighbour in the cinema snaffled it. I hadn’t put it in my pocket, I only thought I had and it fell onto the floor. My mother swiftly cleaned the pocket overnight and didn’t scold me, as even the most rigorous of disciplinarians has a break every now and then. You could go on.
I, however, have to consider the possibility that it was a miracle which saved me from distress.
The useless miracle.
The small balm. Miracles are always presented as life-shaking events: the dead undeaded, surviving an unsurvivable crash. No one considers the possibility of the micro-miracle, or what I would term the useless miracle, the one that does you no good really.
Let’s say that ice cream had been miracled out of my pocket, but 160
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in reality I was no better off than if I had never been brainless enough to stuff the ice cream into my pocket in the first place.
I know of another one too.
Nelson had a useless miracle. One of the reasons he behaved so badly was his ridiculously indulgent father. Nelson’s abuses were legion, and for years his father accepted Nelson’s version of events. Nelson sold his father’s collection of rare jazz records and claimed it as a burglary. Nelson, when demonstrating how easy it was to make a Molotov cocktail, had burnt out – unintentionally, because it was brand new and he liked it – the family car. The fire was pinned on a passing mysterious stranger.
Like many ridiculously indulgent people however, there came the moment when Nelson’s father became ridiculously angry, when he realized that what everyone had been telling him was true and what Nelson was saying wasn’t. A mighty backlog of chastisement rained down on Nelson, precisely when Nelson needed to borrow his father’s top-of-the-range camera for a school project.
There was a gruelling lecture on the well-being of the camera.
If it hadn’t been a school project (an area where Nelson had been consistently undistinguished), his father would never have agreed. However, it was decreed that no yarn about muggings, bombings or alien abductions would be acceptable if the camera wasn’t returned in perfect working order.
Nelson took his snaps in town, got off the underground to take the train home and as he did so felt strange.
He felt strange because the camera wasn’t in his hand, and then came the burn of stupidity. He had put the camera down on the seat next to him and, engrossed in the blonde opposite, had got off at his stop automatically, habit-trained.
Nelson wasn’t by nature timorous, but now he was terrified.
He knew, compared with most of the fictions he had concocted, 161
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“I left it on the train” had a gloriously simple and compelling honesty to it.
Compare this to his masterpiece: “Dad, I’m telling you it was a puma that trampled your daffodils”, which even got Nelson his mugshot in the local paper. The article headed “Urban Puma?” was classic schlock use of the question mark. It made it clear the story was nonsense and that Nelson was a liar, but by then you’ve sold your paper.
Nelson’s father wasn’t a big man. The prospect of being assaulted by a skinny music teacher might not be so frightening, but when it becomes a certainty then it is daunting. Look how a lone wasp can cause havoc in a confined space or picnic, and a skinny music teacher is harder to stop.
While we all want to leave home, being kicked out onto the streets wasn’t the way Nelson wanted to leave. Choking with terror, he spent hours zigzagging around, chasing the camera, going to lost property, plotting to get another camera through some desperate act of crime.
Finally he gave up and went home to collect his toothbrush and some clothes before his father returned. As he got off the underground, he glanced at the seat next to him and saw a camera. Not just the same model, but the same camera he had forgotten three hours earlier, with his pictures.
Nelson calmed down a lot after this.
G
I fret over the length of my sermon.
This is what makes your mark. You always make more of an impact if you keep it short, and if your congregation wants more they can come back next week. There were unmistakable signs 162
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of gratitude the first time when I released the worshippers after only ten minutes, as opposed to the Hierophant’s customary half-hour. On the other hand, you don’t want it too stunted: if you get dressed up and go to church you want something for your trouble. “You’re good, Tyndale,” Gert remarked, “but you’re no Hierophant yet.”
“Please give a sign of friendship,” I urge.
Smiling, the congregation shake hands with each other.
The faces are all pretty familiar, so this injunction is less for the purpose of ice-breaking: it’s an injunction for injunction’s sake. You have to get the congregation to stand up, sit down, say hallelujah, partly to keep them awake, but also to bond.
Just as when a crowd responds to a nightclub comedian urging:
“Please pinch the arse of the person on your left.” Once you’ve responded, the hooks are in.
I keep my eyes on the rafters, so I don’t take in too much of the congregation. It’s not a good turnout. Nine, and it can’t be said that they are the most affluent or influential citizens of our metropolis either. I get them to stand up and sit down a few more times, to work their cardiovascular systems, but despite my attempt to stir things up a little, Mrs Shepherd in the front row has her mouth so agape I fear an insect will fly in, and her countenance is so inscrutable I can’t tell whether she’s bored, bewildered or peeved by my words.
Behind her is a young guy, his hair gelled erect. I’ve never seen him before. A newcomer should make me pleased, but he is talking to the Reinholds. When I say talking, I do mean talking.
Severe boredom during talks has often compelled me to make a hushed remark or witticism to my neighbour, but the Gel is actually talking louder than I am.
I halt my sermon.
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The stoniness of the Reinholds makes the Gel switch his outburst to the grinny Luis. If smiling could get you anywhere, Luis would have his own country; you could chainsaw one of Luis’s legs without removing his grin. You have to know Luis well (a junior archivist in a Cuban history project, although Chilean) to perceive that although he’s grinning in a manner which would be overkill for most of us, he’s very unhappy. The Gel blathers on, offering a pair of earbuds to Luis: “You see I’m in a band that’s going places. You should listen to this demo.”
This can’t be true. If you are in a band that’s going places you wouldn’t be parking your arse in a church hall three-quarters empty, struggling to convince one junior archivist that you are.
Most of us, when we’re caught doing something embarrassing
– dick hanging out of trousers, etc. – stop. Not the Gel. He eventually notices everyone is glaring at him and he takes advantage of the attention by reaching into his shoulder bag and unfolding some fanzine. “Here’s a review I wrote about our band, which tells you why we are so good.” He reads it out.
Why isn’t he out on Ocean Drive expounding this to some teenage bunny from Des Moines who might fall for it? I persuade the Gel to leave the hall by promising to listen to his demo and to laud his music to the general populace.
“You’re always welcome here, of course. But you know, the service isn’t the proper time to promote your music,” I say in a gentle, pastor-filled voice that surprises me by its mildness. He gets surprisingly nasty.
“What are you going to do about it, you miserable old man?”
This is the first time I’ve been called an old man.
I’ve long got used to not being a young man, but this is the first time I’ve been pronounced old. Doubtless to a seventeen-year-old like the Gel, I am decomposing. By many standards, 164
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over forty is old. It’s also true that I’m not happy. Miserable is accurate, although not a fair comment, because I work hard to conceal my fundamental despair. This is the curious quality of insults: they can be insulting because they’re not true (“you’re a miserable old man”) or because they are (“you’re a miserable old man”), or even because they’re half true. It’s the contempt that the Gel invests in that description rather than its exactitude that makes it so offensive.
“It’s best if you left,” I say with admirable, pastor-like, calm and compassion. I’m getting good at this. But calm and compassion count for deplorably little on the street.
“Make me,” he shouts, unimaginatively, and waves a fist under my nose. Someone does a bad job of raising a child and the rest of us have to foot the bill. It also astonishes me that teenagers think they invented violence. On top of that, the Gel is so skinny if I sat on him, he’d break into pieces.
I put the holiness on pause. Looking him in the eye, I punch him in the gut and he goes down like an obedient dog. My fist has been hurting since the incident with the corgi, and I’ve resisted the impulse to stick on a black eye. The face has too many bones.
The Gel has lost enough fights to know that it would be unwise to get up. He curls up on the ground, although my blow can’t have been that painful. Giving him a kick in the ribs does occur to me, but that would be ungodly. We’ve clarified matters, and I trust it’s been a teacher blow for him.
I’m a little ashamed of myself, but also a little pleased, which isn’t much use to me. Shame or pleasure you can work with, but not the mix.
“Don’t feel bad about failure,” I add. “You’re in good company.”
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Should you get up or stay down? It’s an engrossing question, and one that you can never answer definitively. I reconsider my behaviour during the Japanese Oak Crisis.
“Think positive,” my wife had told me. Wives tend to be very free with advice. Wives commonly believe they can do a better job of living their husbands’ lives than the husbands. Maybe.
So I was thinking positive. I was so desperate I thought positive as I drove off to sort out the Japanese Oak Crisis. I was cheerful. I wasn’t pretending to be cheerful. I was convinced I could go there and find a solution and everyone would be, if not happy, only slightly disgruntled. We could all go home, get a good night’s sleep, and wake up the next morning with the crisis out of our minds.
I hate bankers, and I’ve always hated bankers, but I’d done a deal with a bank who’d built an enormous new headquarters. I’d been delighted about the deal at first, the biggest I’d ever pulled off. Money had been splashed about because the bank wanted marblier marble than anyone else, and instead of getting some big rubber plants and some high-class goldfish for the building’s atrium, they had imported three Japanese oaks.
The trees were, of course, a rare, outrageously expensive species, and after they had been planted in the atrium it turned out their acquisition and importation had contravened all sorts of laws and that agonizing fines and possibly jail was on the way (one of the drawbacks of oak trees is they are quite conspicuous).
The discomfiture over the oaks would have amused me, it would have amused me a lot, but for the fact they had died.
Fried. Fried, it was maintained, by our lights. When I had done the specs no one had mentioned the oaks, and when they had bought the oaks I doubt they had asked enough searching questions about how to care for them.
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It couldn’t be proved that the lights were the killer, but someone had to be blamed, and the fingers favoured me. I had considered raising the argument that the oaks must be contemptibly weak to be frazzled by a few lights, but decided that wouldn’t help matters.
I’d be positive and offer a discount on the bill (which, as they were a major financial institution, they hadn’t yet paid).
My contact at the bank greeted me with a powerful uppercut and a yelp of outrage.
There are only two responses. Nelson and my crew would say never go down. Never go down on the street, because if you do, you’re finished, they’ll come in with the boot next and your skull will never be the same. But there is the alternative: if you’re punched, lie down.
I did lie down, since, as I was thinking positively, I wasn’t expecting an uppercut. Secondly, having grown up in a big city, I recognized someone whom I was incapable of knocking down.
It would have been more embarrassing and awkward if there had been spectators, but it was just the two of us. Also getting up, even if only to get knocked down again, wouldn’t improve matters or jolly the paying of our invoice.
It was more satisfying for all concerned that I stayed on the floor, while my attacker screamed at me about the ruin of his career, and as I was on the premises of a major financial institution I was optimistic about not being kicked to death.
It’s disheartening to see how abruptly civilization goes. During prosperity, most of us are willing to give up a seat to a little old lady on a bus, but to avoid losing our job, the pension, the whole happiness pack, most of us would willingly do some murder.
Giving up a fight damages you, runs one argument, leaves you a little crippled. Did I stay down because of cowardice, common 167
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sense or laziness? Or a mix of all three? I haven’t figured it out and it’s unlikely I ever will.
G
I’ve been ill for two days now. I spent all day in bed yesterday, but despite the rest I’m worse. There’s nothing like illness for making you give up completely. All my plans for making my centrality more central are gone. I care about nothing. I could be boxed up and buried without protest.
I’m making a cup of tea, when Gulin returns. When I want to say hello, a prolonged racking cough comes out, so prolonged and racking that I see stars.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
As I attempt to say yes, another bout of rasping, cruel coughing is unleashed.
“Have you got medicine?”
I nod.
“What?”
“Well… I took some paracetamol.” Gulin regards me with dissatisfaction. I haven’t seen her for weeks. She must be back to check up on Orinoco.
Another distasteful bout of coughing shakes me. Gulin is passing judgement on me. Too stupid to look after himself. She may have a point.
“I’ll get you something.”
“No, I’m fine.”
But she’s already on her way out. I’m too ill to protest any more. I’m too ill to care that much, but I am ashamed about someone who’s been working a twelve-hour day for the last week driving out to get me some medicine.
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Half an hour later I’m handed a packet of throat lozenges.
Gulin refuses to reveal the price or to accept any payment. I know she won’t have gone to the nearest drugstore; she’ll have gone to the outlet in Miami where you can get this packet most cheaply.
The first lozenge I take effects a dramatic improvement.
It’s not just the kindness. Some individuals simply know how.
They know where to shop and how to buy and when to do it.
I don’t.
G
I study the collection basket closely.
With the small flock we have at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ, you can guess which bit of money came from which hand. There are a lot of coins (the Church is a convenient dump for pennies) and only one bill of a significant denomination, from Gert. Gert is the only regular who might be described as successful since, he has a business making para-chutes for champagne corks, so that the corks float down to widespread delight after being popped. What I admire about Gert is that he doesn’t allow his affluence to pressure him into making a large donation. His donation is often the largest, but never large.
What should you ask of your followers? It’s a question of balance I suppose, like everything else. It wouldn’t be any good demanding that they should collect aircraft engines as a path to enlightenment; expensive, and where would you store them?
But you have to ask something, there has to be an admission fee, otherwise the customers can’t see they’re getting anything.
Would you tell everyone or indeed anyone if you had discovered something valuable or important? Why?
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I love those stories about Europeans reaching America long before Columbus, and keeping quiet. It makes perfect sense: if you had found a continent rich in timber, game and fish why tell anyone outside your family? Why tell your family? Even if you had discovered something as minor as a technique for cooking the perfect burger, would you want to share it? As long as you have the technique, you have an edge; the second you share it, you’re roadkill.
Dipping into some studies in the religion section at Books & Books in an attempt to steal some ideas, I read that the early religions were like that: velvet rope. Wanting to keep the riff-raff out, initiates only. Indeed in the famous Mysteries of Eleusis, you risked death if you revealed what was in the box (which leads me to surmise there was probably fuck-all).
That’s why they were wiped out by the do-it-yourself religions.
Inevitably, the priests and salesmen have hung on, but the genius of Christianity is that it basically involves a statement of faith:
“I believe”. It’s a free gift. But the con of paying a lot of money to find out what’s in the box will always be with us.
My guess would be that the best advice is never written down or shared. Those who knew how to get things done probably kept their mouths shut and pocketed the goodies.
“A cold shower is the first step towards paradise,” I announce.
Cold showers are about right. I’m not asking too much or too little here. Sooner or later, we all have to wash. It’s not as if you have to make a pilgrimage to find a shower head. Having a cold shower is quite an effort for me, so much so that I’ve only had one in my life, and that was because the boiler had gone, I had an urgent appointment and I was filthy. I couldn’t believe how hard it was.
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“Taking a cold shower is an act of faith,” I continue. It is an act that sets you apart from those who don’t follow the doctrines of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. It will make you feel you are part of the elect. And it’s pocket-friendly.
Over the long term, your cold showers can save you money.
And it does, and this is important, contain an agreeable vagueness. There is a huge difference between having a cold shower in the open, in a Swedish winter, and in a balmy condo in Miami, where the cold water would be called hot in many other parts of the world.
This admonition has an agreeable vagueness for the preacher too. If the preached whine about not getting the paradisiacal benefits promised, you can always insist that there aren’t enough cold showers being taken or that the cold showers aren’t cold enough. Moveable goalposts are a great invention.
Worshippers coming in late or leaving early are a nuisance you have to get used to.
It’s irritating, but you can never expect to have everyone’s full attention; you have to play the percentages. I’m elated that a group of three has entered the church, a little annoyed that they’re doing so at the end of the service, after the collection basket has done its round.
I have just enough time to be perplexed about why two of them are carrying placards, when a booming voice bombasts:
“I am Dr Liberius Iyambo. I have come here on missionary work. You are vassals of the Devil.”
The speaker is a plump African. Late thirties. Bright purple ecclesiastical garb. It’s a church-jacking.
Dr Iyambo’s two-person mob now elevate their placards and wave them up and down to make them more potent. One reads:
“No Surrender, No Surrender, No Surrender to Satan.” Poor 171
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preplanning in the painting means the repetition squashes the word “Satan” into much smaller letters and is almost impossible to read. The other: “You Are the Cloved Hoof of Evil”.
Iyambo’s mob is one grey-haired woman, a veteran of psychiatric institutions, and a bullet-headed Latino. They barely count as backup. They’re going to stick with Iyambo, but they’re merely stage dressing, froth. Iyambo, though, is a hard case who means business. That’s the drawback to growing up in relative affluence, you can’t compete with people who grew up without shoes and only ate every other day. Iyambo is fightsome in a way no amount of training or self-denial will make me.
“You are not doing the Lord’s work,” he shrieks, pointing his finger at me in an extremely pointing way, and then at the congregation. “This is not the Lord’s work. This is an abomination. This is the work of the Devil.”
It’s flattering that he’s attempting to take over my church.
Suddenly, despite the pitiful flock and the light collection basket, it’s desirable. I wait for my congregation to gasp in indignation, or to jeer Iyambo. A few frowns as a minimum? No, they actually look as if they’re enjoying the floor show.
“I, Dr Liberius Iyambo, have come to show you the error of your ways. I have come to show you the true path and to save you from the pit.”
It’s more likely that my arse has a doctorate than Liberius. To be honest, I thought about titling up, but when you’re going for the top you can’t be bothered with worldly honorifics. Doctor this. Professor that. Field Marshal so-and-so.
“This man is a pawn of evil,” he elaborates, megapointing me again. The congregation isn’t buying into Iyambo yet, but they’re listening. You really are on your own.
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One thing I learnt from Bamford, though, was how to wrong-foot people. Smile. Say what the hearer wants to hear.
“I had no idea I was working for the wrong side,” I say. “But thank you, thank you so much for coming here to help me. That’s very noble of you. Why don’t we discuss this over a drink?”
“Can’t you smell the sulphuric emanations here?” Liberius can’t just stop, of course. He has the gab and harangues the congregation some more, he has a victory crow, but they, disappointed there has been no liturgical punch-up, disperse.
Leaving his disciples outside, I usher Liberius into the Hierophant’s office in a way he deems sufficiently submissive.
The Hierophant keeps a couple of bottles of Israeli wine. I offer Liberius a slug of this and, rather like the Hierophant, he is tickled by the notion of holy wine “as drunk by our Lord”. The wine is mouthwash in my opinion, which is rather useful.
“God does not love you,” he smiles. “God does not like you one little bit.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because there is something of Sodom about you. God will punish you soon. Very soon.” One doesn’t expect extravagant thanks for a glass of bad wine, but ready abuse is a bit much.
This is the thing about shouting and bullying: they work. They may require more effort, in terms of volume and front, than just saying hello, how are you – but they work. You have to find people who will respond to bullying and shouting, but whatever you’re selling, you have to find those who will buy. Not everyone wants coke, a Porsche or bullying.
Liberius shows me a photo of a gormless twink as I refill his glass. “You see this. This is Robert Caradec. One thousand and three hundred and twenty-six days in hell. This disgusting abominator has been in hell one thousand three hundred and 173
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twenty-six days. In hell, burning every hour. Do you know what eternity is, with one thousand three hundred and twenty-six days deducted?”
“No.”
“Eternity. God does not love everyone. He loves punishment.”
I have to say I’m impressed that even with an audience of one Liberius is giving it all he’s got. Hardcore.
“Among the many great things I have achieved, and the many great things I have achieved are many and great, so many that even I cannot remember them all, perhaps the greatest of all will be bringing true religion to this city,” Liberius says, high on his I, occasionally pausing to condemn me as a “reptile” or a “worthless reptile” or a “thrice worthless reptile”, undeserving of redemption.
He swigs the wine with the ease of a seasoned drinker and scoffs a packet of peanuts I had been saving for later.
“It’s my pleasure to meet the shredder called Queen Mary,” he mumbles only a few minutes later, slumping to his side. Liberius may well be able to hold his drink, but he certainly can’t handle the drug I’ve slipped into the wine. It’s a dangerous thing to do, but he’s a robust figure, and frankly I don’t give a toss. Living the law-abiding, non-drugging way has got me nowhere.
“Time consumers… are not all equal,” continues Liberius face down on the floor, as I strip and handcuff him.
Providence had provided me with a wide selection of date-rape drugs and some magazines of astonishing sickness. Gert had come in the day before, bleating, “I’m horrified by what I’m becoming.” Being horrified by what you’re becoming is one of the most common human experiences. He had come to ditch his rufies and stash of filth in a bid for salvation. I gave him all the unction I could, but there’s a problem with ditching your rufies and porn: you can always go out and buy some more tomorrow.
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I’m worried about Gert, although he insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. He just thinks about it all the time. I thought I’d seen it all, but even I was shocked by his stash. Some things are just plain bad for you. Cocaine. Absinthe. Images of torture.
Decency.
I go through Liberius’s pockets. He has a tragically small amount of money. There’s a notebook with handwritten prayers composed by Liberius: “Prayer for someone disappointed by public transport”. “Prayer when encountering difficulties with a can-opener”. “Prayer on finding it harder to climb a glacier than you thought it would be”. “Prayer for a poorly receiving television set”. “Prayer on being provoked by your lawn-mower”. “Prayer for when your pastor has been framed by his many enemies on completely spurious corruption charges”.
I may crash here, but I won’t go out a cipher ciphering, standing at the back quietly, hoping something will turn up. I phone Gamay.
“I’ve got a job.”
“It’s great to hear from you, Tyndale, it really is, but could we do this later? Someone must have spiked my drink last night because I’m really not up to speed—”
“Right now, and get Muscat.”
“We don’t need him. I can handle it. Imperative.”
“Okay. And bring some female underwear.”
Gamay will regret Muscat’s absence when he finds out what the job is.
I assess Liberius as an evangelist who won’t give up after one drugging and robbery. I don’t want to be one of two dogs fighting over an almost shiny bone. Even if he achieved nothing else, Liberius could be very noisy and unpleasant.
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Liberius’s disciples are waiting for him outside. They’re doormat folk, and would wait the whole day for Liberius. Poor-quality disciples, but disciples nevertheless. I’m envious.
“Liberius’s making a call. He asked me to tell you that you can go.”
The woman is perplexed. “But what about tomorrow?”
“He said to meet him at two.”
“Where?”
“The usual place.” They walk off reluctantly, constantly casting back glances in the hope that Liberius will appear and resummon them to his side. The rich get richer, the unhappy get unhappier.
As I predicted, when Gamay turns up, he’s shy about taking his clothes off, although I don’t know why since, whatever his spiritual and mental shortcomings, he’s in good shape physically.
“No way,” protests Gamay. “Imperative. This isn’t right.”
In order to remove Liberius from contention, I’m gambling on the one sin that is hard to dislodge from your halo. Whatever smorgasbord of evangelism Liberius is touting, buttock villainy is certainly out. Religions, while often being sniffy on the subject of ooohhh, are especially unforgiving on sodomy. You can stray in all sorts of ways and your flock will forgive you.
Spend the money earmarked for the needy on a sharp suit and you only have to look hangdog for a few weeks.
Verily, it could be argued that the traditional coke-n’-hookers fiasco that befalls nearly every preacher strengthens your position – having pulled yourself out of the mire of sin and fallibility, you can orate on it with more zest. You could rob an orphanage, shoot up a town, torch some churches, and even all that, after strenuous breast-beating, wouldn’t necessarily bar 176
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you from the pulpit. But the road back from shirt-lifting is a tough one.
“Tyndale, man, you don’t understand. I don’t want to do this.”
“Yes, I do understand. But consider this question. If you had a major, billion-dollar criminal organization would you make it easy or difficult for recruits to join? Easy or difficult?”
“Couldn’t you, like, kill him instead?” suggests Gamay. This is how it starts. I can understand that Gamay is not eager to simulate sex with a ripe, unappealing African missionary, but I’m still a little shocked; although I have to confess there is a part of me that’s receptive to the idea, if I could be sure Gamay could carry out the disposal without repercussions.
“You’re thinking like an amateur,” I reproach. “Why are you fussing? Your face won’t be in the shots.”
“But, Tyndale, I don’t want to do this.”
My phone rings.
“Why, hallo, Muscat, how are you?” I answer with exaggerated warmth. Gamay is now making frantic whatever-you-want gestures. “No, I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen Gamay for a long time.”
I’ve always enjoyed photography. A black man in a cheap pink bra is a great composition. Naturally, the only thing worse than sinning, is sinning ridiculously. I enjoy the session, working in bottles of rum, white powder, a teddy bear and anything I can think of to heighten the turpitude and humiliation. I order Gamay to drive the still-blurry Liberius to Daytona, and dump him there with some printouts of the pictures. Florida is a big place. I’m confident Liberius will get the message.
“When am I getting some money for this shit?” Gamay moans.
“When I am going to get some disfrooting?”
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“Easy or difficult?” I remind him.
That evening Muscat phones me again. “I haven’t seen Gamay for a while. I don’t want to say anything bad about him.
I don’t want to say anything too clear, Tyndale, that might be misleading, but I caught him looking at a website for the DEA.
He could be ratting us out.”
G
One of my neighbours who used to be a spy told me how to get information. You go to the nearest bar. Or restaurant. Whether you’re targeting an office or a military base, there is always one relaxery where everyone gathers. Usually the nearest. There are a lot of things people don’t need, but everyone needs a drink, everyone needs to eat.
You never approach anyone. You get them to approach you.
You need a prop. According to my neighbour a small child or a dog is ideal for attracting people. “An infant-in-arms is the best tool a spy can have,” he said. Failing that some object that has visual weight, a guitar or a chess set, something that invites comment. I hang around outside the crematorium a few lunchtimes and I finally spot a group of three heading off to a kebab joint.
I enter five minutes later, carrying the most bizarre item I could find at Dishonest Dave’s, a stuffed gharial, an Indian crocodile that has a snout so preposterously thin that it looks like a pipe.
It’s a small one that fits comfortably under my arm.
The waitress refuses to acknowledge my gharial, and I order a classic shish. The three cremcrew are close by, unchatty in the way when you’re having lunch with the colleagues you work with all day and with whom you’ve had lunch every day 178
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for the last month. Sideways, they take in the gharial, but say nothing.
“Is that thing real?” The gharial is working, but not in the right direction.
Some retiree with too much time on his hands interrogates me about the gharial. I outline something about its habitat and the problems the species is facing. I don’t want to give away too much, because I want to save some gharial chat for the cremcrew and also because I don’t know much about the gharial. Without any invitation the old guy sits down next to me and natters about the python epidemic in the Everglades, former pets on the run. “Those suckers are loving it in there. They’re bigger than the alligators. They’re eating up all the alligators.” He rambles on for ten minutes without any encouragement from me.
I can see the cremcrew are finishing up. Patience, I think. No, too late for patience. “Could you pass me the ketchup?” I ask, pretending my bottle’s caked.
It’s enough. “You ain’t going to eat your pet, are you?”
We chat. They’re not in any rush to get back to work. Two of them leave. Man Three with a big beard is extremely relaxed about getting back to work. I explain I’m a salesman, laugh about fixing my expenses. “If I didn’t have that extra on the side, I just wouldn’t make it. Honesty just doesn’t pay.”
“It’s hard to get by,” he says. A skinny Chinese guy comes in proffering DVDs. My target frowns. “I know that guy isn’t getting rich, but it’s wrong.” I explain I’m new to the city, and does he know where I can score some dope.
He ices up and leaves immediately. A law-abiding man. It’s reassuring to learn they still exist. But it doesn’t help me.
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G
Dave calls me and says the Brazilian will meet us this evening.
I have nothing to do tomorrow so I agree to meet since I know we’ll end up burning the night right down.
We meet at an elegant bar, in a shitty area of North-Western Avenue. The waitress gives a squeal of pleasure as she recognizes Dave.
“You were right. You were right. How did you do that? Will you do it for my friend Amy?”
She returns with another waitress. Dave holds her hand, looks in her eyes and says “Jacques Higelin. Insane Clown Posse.
Graham Central Station.” The waitresses jump up and down in excitement.
We’re joined by eurotrashy Eric, who works for his father’s property-development business. Dave explains to Eric that vodou is nonsense. An hour later Dave is explaining to Avi and Macca, two stoners who work in a music store, that vodou is not to be trifled with, and that he once smoked so much dope he ate three light bulbs in a balsamic-vinegar dressing.
The bar looks more like a bar with Dave sitting in it. He should actually be paid for drinking in a bar. He’s a true night-rider. He rides the night, and at the end of it, it’s the night that’s exhausted, not him. He just climbs off and looks for something else to do.
“The Brazilian’s not coming, is he?” I remark after four hours.
“Shall we review the facts? He’s a lying, cheating butcher: a lying cheating butcher several extended families would like to kill. He is what you requested: a corrupt, unscrupulous, unfeeling, money-grabbing scalpel fiend. So it may be that he 180
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is a man who does not feel bound by his word to attend this evening.”
We have more drinks.
“So what do you want to do now?” asks Dave.
“It’s about time to go home.”
“To do what? Sit alone in your room?”
“A few hours’ sleep a night never hurt anyone.”
“What’s your pecker up to these days?”
“Nothing.”
“You need to get laid. No, you need to get married. Once you’re married, you can get laid as much as you want. A wedding ring is the ultimate babe magnet. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, but as soon as you get married they fall from the sky. But I won’t misbehave. I did that a lot.” He stares at a waitress. “And I’m certainly not going to misbehave with her – too skinny.” A fuller waitress crosses our vision. “Now her – I could misbehave with her. But I won’t. I did that a lot.”
Undeniably, it’s a tribute to the growth of our intimacy that Dave stands up and lowers his trousers to reveal his left buttock, which has odd word-shaped welts on it: PIC.
“Pic?”
“Pig. I thought I had the perfect system because I was sleeping with two girls called Stacey. No blurting out the wrong name, or if I did no one would mind. I’m asleep when I dream this incredible pain. I must have levitated three feet off the bed. I’ve got to hand it to Stacey. No clichéd stuff like ripping up my best suit or sugar in my gas tank. It couldn’t have been easy to get a brand made, to heat it up till it’s red hot.”
“What went wrong?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. That was unfair. I mean they had their fun. They could have told me where I slipped up.”
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I want to go home. Dave persuades me to go to a charity event at a golf club. “It’s for kids,” he says handing me a flyer with a picture of a baby with kidney problems. Even I can’t say no to seriously ill kids. You just can’t. I realize it’s going to be an all-nighter and that I seem incapable of learning from experience.
You swear you won’t make the same mistake again, but you do.
Outside, there’s another homeless guy guarding a boombox.
The voice is saying: “We have to choose. We have been put here to choose. You must choose the right path. You must avoid the wrong path.” The homeless guy is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Avoid the Wrong Path”. It makes me angry. Who the hell would choose the wrong path? No one, apart from a few headcases maybe, would choose the wrong path. If a path were clearly marked “the wrong path” who would choose it?
The problems with paths is that they are rarely marked, and certainly never clearly, reliably marked.
“The Fixico Sisters have helped many to find the right path and saved many from the wrong path,” the voice continues.
“Who are the Fixico Sisters?” asks Dave.
“Never heard of them.”
“They must be new to town. They sound like some mean competition.”
At the charity function, I wonder why it is, when you go out drinking, you go to different places to do exactly the same thing.
A waitress comes up to Dave and gives him a big hug. “You were so right,” she says.
“Too skinny, too skinny,” comments Dave, as we settle into a corner; this is the main purpose of waitresses and barmaids it seems, not just to serve beverages and repasts, but to provide debate for the male clientele, as to whether they’d like to mount them or not, and why. Dave produces his mill and starts grinding 182
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out the white powder. I can’t believe he’s doing this in public. “Is that a good idea?”
“I know we don’t go back that far, but do you think I’m stupid?” This is one of the least question-like of questions.
“No, but…”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Well…” I indicate the mill.
“I’ll let you into a secret. It’s aspirin. I get bad migraines sometimes and I find it works best this way.”
“Ah.”
“I may be dishonest, but what I’m dishonest about is being dishonest.”
“And the stolen stuff?”
“A lot of the stuff in my shop’s stolen. But I didn’t steal it.
It’s stuff recovered by the police, and when they can’t trace the owners it gets auctioned off. I know quite a few criminals, it’s true, but I also know quite a few museum curators. I do business with some criminals, that’s true, but anyone who does business is doing business with some criminals. I pay my taxes and at the end of the night, I go home to my wife. You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you?”
“Ah.”
“It may well be that out of the two of us, you are the more dishonest.”
We drink and observe the charity. Why do we do it? Is it to feel better about ourselves, in the way we drink fruit juice after a debauch? Is it to appear better to others? I look at the revellers and suspect that in a few hours they’ll be back to normal: shafting colleagues and customers, failing friends and relatives. And what about the charity? What happens to the money if you really want to spend it charitably? How do you find seriously ill kids? Do you 183
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advertise? How do you decide whether one kid is more seriously ill than another? If I could change this world, I would.
“You know what we really want, life-wise?” Dave asks.
“No, I don’t.”
“Fun you can have easy. You can have fun easily with one of the friendly waitresses of Miami. That you can get anywhere.
What we want is… nagging.”
“Nagging?”
“Nagging. Yes, you can have too much nagging, like you can have too much rum. When your wife goes on about why haven’t you fixed the tap or why haven’t you thrown out your favourite red shirt, even though it’s full of holes. But imagine this: you go out on a three-day bender, you spend all the money and you come home and your wife just says, ‘Never mind, dear. You must have had a good time.’ Imagine how terrible that would be. Nagging is where home is.”
Dave then drags me to an illegal drinking club. “You should see this place. It’s an illegal drinking club.”
“I’ve been to an illegal drinking club before.”
“Not this one.”
I give up. The only difference I’ve ever noticed between legal and illegal drinking establishments is that the illegal ones are much, much worse. You go for the illegality. The decor is Albanian bunker and the other customers are very fat, depressed old men who don’t speak English. Much later I detect some daylight pushing through the shutters over the one window.
What I think is dawn is in fact noon.
We leave and Dave insists on buying me lunch. I have a cramp in my neck and I have to hold my head at an odd angle which makes me want to be out of the public gaze. There is a restaurant opposite.
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“It’s a shithole,” I protest.
“Shitholes are good,” says Dave, skirting two junkies to enter the Miami Restaurant.
I was amused to discover that the quintessential Cuban restaurant in Miami is called Versailles, as opposed to the names you’d think more likely such as Habana, the Well-Lynched Comandante or the Old Country.
One of my neighbours, a chef, told me that the first restaurant in Paris was called the Tavern of London. In London the clubs and restaurants tend to be called Paris this, Bombay that, something Cairo or any word from the Spanish, French or Arabic languages. For some reason, any establishment in London calling itself London, or in Paris calling itself Paris or in Miami calling itself Miami is best avoided.
If nothing else calling yourself the Miami Restaurant is just so lazy. It’s a Vietnamese restaurant. I’ve had some good meals in Vietnamese restaurants, but I’ve never had good service or a trace of a smile. The unhappy history of the country, or the unhappy history of those running the restaurants may have something to do with it, but I’ve always had the sense that the staff were figuring out whether they could get away with killing me.
To my surprise, the soup we order is quite good, and its spicy tang invigorates me.
“You know what my secret is?” asks Dave.
“Which secret is this?”
“To keep the marriage hot, hot, hot.”
“So what’s the secret?”
“Hypnosis.”
“Hypnosis?”
“Every two weeks or so I have a session.” This is rather sweet.
“I went to see this hypnotist to help me give up smoking. It 185
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worked like a charm. I was forty a day, and then, wham. No more. So one day it occurred to me, it might work, you know, dick-wise too.”
Does it work because it works or because he wants it to? Does it matter? On the street, I see one of the junkies getting ready to inject herself between her toes. Having grown up in a big city, I’ve seen plenty of junkies, but not like these. The junkies here aren’t dirty, degraded, they’re no longer human.
We ask for the bill and discover neither of us has enough cash left. The old woman is very reluctant to take Dave’s credit card.
“Is this really your card?” she says coming back.
Dave reaches into his pocket for his ID.
“Is this your name really?” she says. I see the card is in the name of Soleil D. Magny. I suppose Dave has to have a real name.
“My father liked the idea of an unusual name.”
“What does the D stand for?” she asks.
“Dave.”
“This is so weird,” says the old woman. “We have a man upstairs with the same name.”
“Can’t be.”
“We rent out room upstairs. Man has same name as you.
Same middle name too. Looks like you.”
“You don’t meet many Magnys let alone Soleil D.s,” says Dave. “You’re not clintoning us?”
“So strange. Come upstairs and meet him.”
This is very odd. We are the only customers. Even without the junkie signpost, this is obviously not a good neighbourhood.
I don’t like the old woman. She doesn’t seem like a friendly person who wants to engineer introductions.
She leads us into the back and goes up a narrow staircase.
There’s a bad, hard-to-determine smell. Dave falls back, and as 186
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the old woman shouts “Where are you?” Dave coughs loud and long, to cover the sound of him racking his gun which he sticks in the back of his trousers. I’m very unhappy about this. Dave looks scared, and when people who are tougher than you are scared, it’s really time to be scared. Infuriatingly, he’s also excited.
“You know the stories, don’t you?” he whispers.
“Stories?”
“Stories about meeting yourself.”
“No. They all end badly, do they?”
“Very badly.”
I only follow him because I don’t want to be left behind on my own. We move into a dark, narrow corridor where the carpet has been rotting for years.
“Down there,” says the old woman, indicating a weathered door, backing off in a very backing-off manner. All my alarm bells are ringing and I’m faint. If anyone fires a gun in this corridor, it’s going to hit someone.
Dave composes himself for a moment. Then knocks with a force between polite and firm on the door. We wait. The floorboards creak underneath us. No sounds of stirring come from the room. Dave turns.
“He didn’t hear you,” says the old woman. “Knock again.”
“I knocked once. That’s enough.”
Outside, as we look for a taxi, Dave stoops down to throw up in the gutter.
“I had to knock once.”
“What was going on there?”
“Something.”
As a coward and a weakling I admire courage, although it could be argued that being brave doesn’t benefit you much and being a coward can be advantageous. Being a coward and a 187
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weakling can be a nuisance on occasion, but owning a yacht with a helicopter on it can doubtless be a nuisance from time to time. Where do you want the yacht moored? Do you need a third maid? The coward dies running away from the battle, the brave man dies running towards it.
“Does anything really frighten you?’
“There are people in this city who terrify me. I sleep with a Mac-10 under the bed.”
What hope is there for me? I’ve seen better men than me broken. Braver men than me are scared.
“You looked stressed,” says Dave. “Have you listened to the early Sun Ra? It’s much underrated. I’ll do you a compilation.”
Two days later he calls me to tell that he went back to the restaurant. It was closed down. He knocked, rang, shouted, but there was no response.
G
“Freeze!” is what I hear first.
I’ve just opened my car door. “Don’t move, Tyndale,” comes a shout. But of course, I do move. I turn around to see two policemen advancing to me, guns brandished.
I can’t say I’m surprised. There is a flash of burning fear and rage, but there is also calm, because now it’s over, I can give up.
One handcuffs me. I say nothing, because what is there to say? They have so many reasons to arrest me, I’m guilty of so much.
“You’re under arrest, Tyndale,” the policeman says as if it weren’t perfectly obvious. I’m not surprised they use my first name; it’s probably some psychological thing that it’s harder to shoot at someone who uses your first name.
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“You’re under arrest, Tyndale,” says the other policeman. I say nothing. There will probably be a few years of my life left once I’m released from prison; I consider how I feel about that.
“Don’t you want to know what you’re being arrested for?”
It’s only polite to ask. “What?”
“Tyndale, you’re being arrested for being a miserable bastard.”
I gaze at him blankly.
“You face three charges. Firstly, being a miserable bastard.
Secondly, being a tightwad. Thirdly, and most importantly, you are charged with failing to recognize the genius of DJs Gamay and Muscat.”
I now spot Gamay and Muscat walking up, Gamay grinning like the oxygen thief, the passer of water that he is, Muscat very uncertain about how he should be behaving. I also now notice that the policemen’s uniforms are not quite right: they are stripogram police officers, actors making a few bucks.
“We wanted to give you a laugh, bro,” says Gamay.
I’ve never had a frightening quality, physically, but I can honestly say that I’ve never been so angry in my life. My face makes the DJs quail.
“Tyndale, you needed to loosen up man,” continues Gamay.
“Don’t lose your sense of humour, man. It’s all over when you lose your sense of humour.” I emit such hatred that Gamay turns to Muscat: “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“Me?”
I’m uncuffed, the counterfeit officers give me their card, and Gamay and Muscat scoot. They just run. Fast. I’m so angry I can barely stand up and it doesn’t seem wise to drive anywhere in my present state, when a courier appears in the driveway. He has a parcel for Napalm, so I sign for it (with difficulty as my hand is shaking so much) and take it inside.
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I go upstairs and knock on Napalm’s door – it swings open slightly. I catch a glimpse in the wardrobe of a woman, hiding.
“Sorry,” I say, embarrassed, closing the door. “Sorry, I’ve got a parcel for Napalm,” I announce. There is no acknowledgement or sound. This strikes me as odd. “Is everything okay?” I ask.
Finally, I knock again ostentatiously and peer in. The wardrobe is almost closed, but I realize that the woman is a doll. One of those high-end life-size dolls, with perfect hair, eyelashes and lovingly made openings.
I have to save Napalm.
It’s easy to say that it’s his fault, that he has selected this diversion; but that overlooks his looks and bad luck. We’ve all had dates where, with the best will, we’ve smothered the cupid. Everything’s going nicely and then you say: “You have athletic legs.” You mean shapely legs that you’d like to spend time licking. Your remark is interpreted as suggesting your date’s legs are those of a hairy weightlifter. It’s no use explaining.
Similarly, the momentum can go by trying to sleep with her on a first date. Or not trying to sleep with her on a first date.
Failure can stow away anywhere.
We’ve all had the bungle: unwittingly eating garlic, wearing a purple shirt for a purple-hater, supporting the wrong political party. What if every time you had bad luck? And Napalm is starting with considerable disadvantages.
The basic blow-up dolls are a joke. No one sane could imagine using them. But these custom-built dolls are unsettling, because you can just about imagine being desperate enough to… of course, in nearly every way it’s unhealthy to have an imaginary relationship, but if you think it over, most relationships have an imaginary element to them, sometimes a very substantial one.
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We’ve probably all hugged a pillow, and how many women are half-silicone anyway?
The danger of these creations is that they can give you something. It’s like drugs; the problem is not the drugs, but the world, which often is rarely as satisfying. A life-size doll could give you enough, if you were beaten enough, to give up. Because the only law is: laziness always wins.
I leave the parcel by the door.
G
“How are you?” asks Dr Greer.
This is the social convention, but I always find it odd doctors ask this. “Fucking ill, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?” is the reply I normally have to stifle. But this time, as far as I’m aware, I’m perfectly healthy. Apart, of course, from my persistent and embarrassing medical condition, but I’ve worn out seven doctors on that with no result, so I’m not wasting my time raising that.
“I’ve been having these pains in my arms,” I say going on to list many of the other classic precursors of a heart attack.
Dr Greer is immediately alarmed. Doctors as a group have their deadbeats, chancers, and many of them are in it for the money, but you get quite a few like Greer who actually like their patients and want to help them. I admire him for that; it’s not so difficult to be warm-hearted in your student days, but to make the decency last… for someone in his fifties to still care about the generality is an achievement.
“My doctor back home kept telling me I was going to drop dead,” I continue. I don’t like lying to Greer, he really is one of those genuinely cheerful individuals.
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“Do you smoke?” he asks.
“Yes,” I lie. “Not that much. Twenty a day.” I’m sure like all doctors he’ll multiply that by two. Ironically, with all the holiness, I’ve lost a lot of weight and I look good. But I’ve done my research and I’m ready to fake the tests. And if you say you have the pains, they can’t say you haven’t.
I take off my shirt for stethoscope access and so that Dr Greer can see the tattoo I’ve had done on my chest. It’s large, it’s memorable and above all, it’s easy to copy, even for someone like me with no artistic talent: it’s a fish, the ichthys.
Dr Greer prescribes me all sorts of drugs and tests. I’ll take the tests, but not the drugs.
I’ll see him a couple more times until I’m known as the man bound to have a heart attack.
G
It occurs to me that I can simply walk into their office and declare that the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ has an interest in burial rites and could we get a group discount. What worries me is that I’d be put on to someone at the top. I don’t need someone at the top. Someone at the top wouldn’t be willing to take a risk for what I can offer. I need someone near the bottom…
I’m approaching the funeral home when, although it seems too early for lunch, I spot a quartet of undertakers sauntering out to the diner across the road. On impulse, I follow them in.
They wait for the waitress with a subdued manner, not on account of any professional lugubriousness, but with a countenance I can remember from my days of employment: it’s only twelve o’clock and it’s thirty years to retirement.
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A girl with tennis-ball breasts and a blue top to demonstrate them, sits down at the table next to the undertakers. Out of the four of them, the one who I’d put my money on leans over and says politely:
“Excuse me. You know that costs are rising all the time?”
“Sorry?”
“Funerals are getting more expensive, year on year. Well above inflation. Buy now, die later.” He hands the girl a card. “We put the fun into funerals.”
The girl walks out.
Two of his companions are too weary to be moved by his antics, but one, who has some authority, snaps: “Didsbury!”
“Aren’t we supposed to drum up trade?”
“Yeah, that worked.”
“She’ll be back,” Didsbury insists. I doubt it. Women are very inflexible in many ways. Once they’ve filed you away under
“arsehole”, there’s nothing, but nothing you can do about it.
You can save the world, but you’ll still be an arsehole who saved the world.
At another table, there’s a young mother facing the burger problem. Her kid is six or seven. She’s a stir-crazy single mother who’s meeting a friend for lunch. She’s tired, not merely in the drained-parent sense, but tired of having made the wrong choice.
The kid was asked if he was hungry, because there are no children’s portions. After a lengthy discussion of the menu, the kid ordered the special burger. The burger is spectacular and comes with a fancy salad.
The kid isn’t eating the burger and burgers don’t get better as they cool. He fiddles with the cutlery. He fiddles with the straw of his drink. He fiddles with some electronic toy. The mother 193
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is chatting with her friend and is pretending not to notice the burger problem. She wants a laugh with her friend. She has been a good mother, providing her child with what he wanted. Now if she challenges her son on why he isn’t eating the burger, there will be conflict, spoiling the lunch. She should enforce the law, because the burger is the most expensive item on the menu, and in about two hours the kid will be bleating for food. This is the hard thing, you do the right thing and it’s not enough – you’re always asked for more.
My feeling is she will let it slide, because laziness always wins.
“Didsbury, go and check up on the hearse,” says the ranking undertaker.
“I went last time, Jerry. Why don’t you go and see if the bodrod is still there?”
“I told you if you call the Cadillac that again, you’re fired.”
“Okay. Okay. Stevie, go check up on the deadsled.” Stevie stares at the chilli sauce, decommissioned, preoccupied with the hopelessness of his existence.
“You can’t call it that either, Didsbury.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll have to check out the woewheels myself.”
Didsbury mooches out. He’s what I want. The square wheel.
I wait a moment then tail him out, round the corner to where the hearse is parked in the shade. Didsbury is approachable, but how to approach him on this subject?
Didsbury, despite my efforts to be inconspicuous, has scoped me. As I stealth towards him, he lights a cigarette and beckons me over.
“It’s a fine machine, huh?” he says, patting the hearse. I agree.
“We have to keep a close eye on it. Betcha didn’t know that hearses are the most stolen cars?”
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“Really?”
“Kids love ’em. Goths are turned on by these things like flies n’ shit. We have every anti-theft device on the market, but we still lose a couple every year. But if you want a ride, you don’t necessarily have to die or steal one. Every other weekend I get to look after the heavenly taxi. If someone wants to hire it for a big entrance at a party or some very private excursion, it’s no problem.” He has me down as a ghoul.
“Here’s my number,” he hands me a card. I smile and take it.
“Thanks, Didsbury,” I say. “I’ll definitely be in touch.”
G
Never help anyone. There are a number of reasons. One, the ten minutes you spend helping the little old lady across the road or taking the strain on a neighbour’s grand piano is ten minutes you could have spent furthering your career. Those ten minutes here and there add up. Loyalty is a vice: if a friend is in trouble, drop him. Don’t waste time offering advice, solace or lending money.
Find a friend who is going somewhere. Friends in need impede.
If they sort out their troubles you’ll probably see them down the line and if not… there’s nothing more tedious and time-consuming than struggling to cheer someone up because their spouse has died or because they want to kill themselves. A television is more use to you than miserable friends. The time you squander listening to their woes could be spent ingratiating yourself with your superiors.
Honesty? Honesty: a con invented and promoted by the dishonest. Anyone’s who tried honesty knows that it’s painful and unprofitable. The crooks praise it and nurture it, naturally, because if everyone were dishonest there would be too much 195
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competition. There have to be mugs to be gimplied, they are an essential part of the economic cycle.
As for being public-spirited, it’s fine as long as you’re being paid for it. It’s like charity, if you’re working for a charity (holidays, pension, expenses form), charity is a good idea, otherwise: no.
My proof. How many toppers can you think of who are likeable? Not every big boss is loathsome, but most are. The few who aren’t can be regarded as a statistical aberration. The admirable are usually found wandering around without power or prestige.
I hate the rich. The rich who were always rich I dislike because they have no idea; when you tell them about how hard things are they are as mystified as if you’ve said something in a long-dead language.
The rich who’ve made themselves rich I dislike because they, typically, think it’s something to do with them. It’s like the guy with the winning lottery ticket thinking he controls the lottery.
We’re all trapped by our lives. “Anyone can make money,”
said my one rich neighbour; he was clever and hard-working, he’d made his money doing up houses in an age when property prices had boggled everyone. “Money is nothing,” said my mother, although she had grown up in poverty. She was right in a way.
But it’s different for men. Making money is part of it. For women making children. For men making money.
I hate the poor. No money? No job? No prospects? No drive?
Have four, five, six kids that someone else’s taxes can raise.
Throw more souls into misery. The middle folks aren’t much better; they can be ridiculously pleased about owning a house with a garden.
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G
No calls from the Hierophant for over a week now. Something must be wrong. He was phoning every other day.
You always wonder when you don’t hear from acquaintances, when they fade away. Were they too busy? Too happy? Too broken? Dead? I’m of a generation where we had little death in the early years. One or two lost to motorbikes. We seemed pretty unmortal. Now the cardiac arrests and cancers will be clocking in.
I go round to the Hierophant’s house to check it’s still in good order. I jump a good six inches in the air when I discover the Hierophant sitting there.
For a moment I wonder if he’s dead, because my entrance (and it’s a small place where you can’t miss the sounds of entry) hasn’t registered. Motionless. He stares into space. It’s not the focusless gaze of shock or exhaustion. It’s pure emptiness – everything used up.
“Gene?” I ask. He turns to me. He emits a low, but rank odour.
“There’s nothing you can say,” he says finally.
“I’m sorry,” I say because you can’t say anything else.
“‘There can’t be a God,’ she said to me. ‘Because otherwise I wouldn’t suffer this much.’”
This frightens me. It’s terrifying when you see someone you know for a fact is tougher than you, a lot tougher, smashed to bits.
Our earthly time is mostly a battle to conceal. To conceal our odours, our disappointing features. There’s the physical and then there’s the spiritual, striving to hide the greed, the hate, the weakness. Civilization is spiritual clothing. It’s a pretence that we are better than we are, spiritual garb, spiritual aftershave.
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“Is there anything I can do?”
“Go away.” Misery has this quality: there’s almost always a part of you that doesn’t want to be cheered up. And there is sometimes a certain arrogance in thinking you can help others.
I go out and buy some food and leave it for the Hierophant. I have the feeling it won’t get eaten, but I have to try. I know also that I want to help him somehow. I hate myself for wanting to help him. I’m a millimetre away from sinking into the shit and I want to do the hardest thing in the world: to give faith to someone.
It’s true that I’m plotting to gimpli the public at large, but my plan is to fool the dim and unpleasant, or at least people I don’t know, and I’m not seeking to divest them of their lifetime savings. I’m just asking for a large number of people to reach into their wallets and take out one bill for me. One modest donation for Tyndale, and I believe I’ll be offering something in exchange: a jolt of hope.
G
One of my neighbours was a guitarist. I’d say he was the best guitarist in the world. You could spend a week arguing about what best is, and whether I’m qualified to judge what’s the best, which, of course, I’m not. But he probably was one of the ten best guitarists in the world. His father had been a guitar teacher and he’d started at the age of four. I’ll tell you how good he was.
Several professional guitarists stopped playing after seeing him: his superiority despaired them so completely they couldn’t go on.
They gave up because they could see how good he was, and how, despite this, he was playing in small clubs to small audiences. It wasn’t that he was unrecognized, he was recognized, 198
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but not enough. He had record deals, he went on tours abroad, he had some of the trappings of success, but not the success.
He climbed on the ladder, but couldn’t get off the bottom rung.
Being good isn’t enough: the world has to know you’re good, it has to be explained.
G
“Looks like we’re out of business,” says Sixto showing me a newspaper article about a huge drug swoop in Colombia.
Thirty-five arrests, four shot dead.
“Us?” I ask.
“Us.”
“Maybe they’ll get lawyered up and get off,” I suggest.
“No,” says Sixto. “It’s a business where you might not get arrested, but once you’re arrested and once you’re on the front page, you’re finished.”
Should I mention to him my suspicion that my bad luck has brought down a ruthless, long-established, major multinational criminal organization? There are certain things about yourself you don’t like to admit, but I think I have to admit it: I am bad news. I was in denial for too long. I do a few odd jobs on the peripheries for this cartel and, suddenly, they’re behind bars. Would Sixto be upset if I told him? I worked for the old lighting company in the country. True they fired me, but a year afterwards, they were liquidated. The rot had gone too deep.
Sixto isn’t bothered. “I’d had enough anyway. And this means we get a very nice bonus.”
Sixto thinks that, with the head decapitated, the whole network will simply dissolve. And that the money that should have gone up the pipeline will stay with us.
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“We’ll do nothing for a while. See if anyone turns up asking about the accounts. If they do, we pay up like good boys. If not, keepers keepers. I’ll make sure you get a cut. But I’m selling this place soon, whatever happens. Time to move on.”
Some money would be nice. It could help me help someone.
The only good thing about misfortune is that it can provide an opportunity for kindness. Without trouble there would be fewer opportunities for kindness.
G
“Look, I’ve got to warn you, about Napalm,” I say to Dave as we draw up. “He really does look very funny.”
“Belongs in a circus does he?”
“I’m just warning you. So you don’t react when you meet him.”
“Tyndale. You’re a good friend, but I’ve got tell you, you do talk garbage sometimes. What do you think I’ll do, shout out
‘You’re the ugliest fucker I’ve ever seen’? What you must think of me.”
We get out of the car. Napalm comes down the driveway. Dave doubles up with laughter. He’s laughing so hard, tears brim.
“The baby-in-the-blender joke,” I say to Napalm, referring to a joke he told me a day earlier. Dave’s still laughing so hard he can’t shake hands with Napalm. “Sorry,” he gasps. “Sorry.”
We go to two places I don’t even notice the names of. Dave is very charming to Napalm, introduces him to several women, but I can see my idea of taking Napalm out on the town is a non-starter. A barmaid brings her friend over for Dave to pronounce on. “It’s amazing. He just knows what you’ll like.”
Dave holds her hand and pronounces: “Mose Allison. King 200
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Pleasure. Rammstein.” The two women regard Napalm as if he were our pet monkey.
When Napalm goes off to the toilet Dave turns to me:
“No one’s ever going to believe me. And it’s hard to describe.
I mean, it’s not classic fright-night ugly.”
“No.”
“It’s more weird. Somewhere between weird and funny. There’s not much he can do is there?”
“No.”
“Plastic surgery? Worth a try.”
Dave promises to stock some of Napalm’s waterskis. We go outside.
“What’s next?” Dave muses. “Tyndale and I usually like to round off the evening by getting mugged.”
As Dave says this, a hooded figure walks up behind him and pulls a gun. This time we aren’t in a dark parking lot, but in a brightly lit street.
“Gentlemen, I’m offering you an investment opportunity. I only need two hundred dollars.”
“Wait a minute, are you mugging us?” asks Dave.
“No, this is an exciting investment opportunity.”
“So what are we investing in?”
“Me.”
“And what do you do?”
“I sing.”
“And what do we get for our money?”’
“Double.”
“How do we collect?”
“When I’m famous you can write me and I’ll send you your money. My name’s Slow Joe.”
“Why can’t you admit you’re mugging us?”
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“Because this is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity, nothing else.”
“I warn you,” interjects Napalm. “I have a photographic memory. I’m making a detailed description of you and I’m willing to use it in a court of law.”
“If it’s not a mugging, why the gun?”
“I only carry it for protection. You won’t believe the jealousy my talent stirs up.” I watch a police car drive by, quite slowly.
“Look,” says Dave. “I’ll give you fifty if you fess up that it’s a mugging.”
“It’s fifty each, minimum. Investment. That’s the best I can do.”
To my amazement, Dave reaches into his pocket and counts out three fifties. Slow Joe leaves us with a disc of his songs.
“What happened there?” I ask.
“I’m tired,” says Dave. “I don’t suppose you wanted to disarm him? I used to get trouble every six months or so. Now it’s every week. This city is getting safer, statistics prove it. Everyone says so. You may be unlucky with lines, but I’m the mugger magnet.”
I’m beginning to think he’s right.
“I’m willing to testify,” says Napalm.
“Here,” says Dave, giving him Slow Joe’s music. “Take it. I’m afraid I might like it.”
G
It makes me angry.
The injustice of Napalm’s lot makes me angry. My being angry about it makes me angry. Being angry about Napalm being Napalm doesn’t advance my mission one inch. Anger, like most emotions, is a waste of time.
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My getting this worked up about it is probably another sign of my cracking up. One of my neighbours who went mad spent the weeks before the padded cell obsessing about squirrels eating the nuts in his bird-feeder instead of doing something about his business going bust. Getting concerned about the problems of your fellow man is one way of fleeing your own. There are so many strictly legal, free ways of disregarding your doom; preventing squirrels getting at the nuts, watching television, sleeping, marathon-running, playing the harp, being concerned about others.
Sixto gives me some cash.
“All quiet on the where’s-our-money front,” he grins.
I resolve to make a gift to Napalm. To give him something that will last his lifetime: a great memory.
I decide to consult Dave, but as I drive along Biscayne Boulevard I see an obviously street-walking streetwalker. I had been considering an escort agency, because anyone working a street corner isn’t at the successful, sophisticated end of the market, but the girl has a cute air about her, and indeed her average looks make her more plausible… and laziness always wins.
Our eyes lock as I lower the window.
“How you doing?” I ask, because it seems like an uncon-troversial gambit.
“How am I doing? I’m out on the street letting creeps fuck my butt for small change so I can buy smack. How the fuck do you think I am?”
I raise the window and drive off.
Stopping off for a coffee on Lincoln Road, I find a paper which carries an ad for Gold Starr Girlz:
“We only work with the most beautiful and high-class girls, the champagne-minded elite who have glamorous and chic lives, 203
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at ease in luxury hotels or exclusive nightclubs. Our beautiful escorts, whether models or distinguished scholars, are waiting for high-class gentlemen to take them to superior, internationally known, celebrity-flooded restaurants.”
With a powerful feeling of futility, I enter the premises of Gold Starr Girlz. I sense my mission to enhappy Napalm will fail. I strive to shake off the doom, but it remains.
They are extraordinarily friendly at Gold Starr. They show no disappointment or amazement as I ask for a one-hour outing.
I doubt they would ever show disappointment or amazement whatever I asked for. When I see their prices, I swoon. I came ready to be fleeced – this is a top agency in a city awash with money, but I can’t believe even the rich would pay these prices. With these prices they have no choice but to be extraordinarily friendly.
As I flip through their catalogue, despite the glossiness and the thoughtfully lit curves, there’s something sad about it. Do what you want, earn your money however you want, but there’s a sorrow lurking here. I really wonder whether the clients are that eager for friction, or whether it’s the company. Who would pay these prices for an emission, when you can have a historical re-enactment in your fist for free? I know many of my colleagues ended up paying not because of the ooohhh, but because they were bored in a strange city.
But not with these prices. There’s only one way to deal with sharks asking ludicrous prices.
“Don’t you have anyone more expensive?” I ask.
“We could double our charges if you prefer?”
“Nothing personal, but I need someone higher-class.”
Trying to fix Napalm’s life has wasted half my day and I have got nowhere. Should I quit? Everything is a gamble, and generally when I gamble I lose.
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“Why are you asking me?” snaps Dave when I call him for advice. “Any form of depravity is my province? I’m the spawn of Satan, am I?”
Nevertheless, he recommends the Dreamery and, when he hears that I’m on the case for Napalm’s benefit, offers to make a contribution.
The Dreamery’s brochure: “We welcome you to an unhurried uniting of nations. Ideal for any event, high-school reunions or the opera, our well-interviewed, good-looking beauties can confidently and confidentially flesh your dreams. Our watch-word: anything to anyone.”
I can’t believe the prices. I’m in the wrong business. The beaches here are littered with single women whose first thought is fun. This agency can’t be about emission either. I’ve often suspected that paying a high price is more to do with the sheer pleasure of paying rather than what is purchased.
My goggle eyes betray me.
“We do have a girl du jour.”
I’ve gone too far to back out now. I book an hour with Shy.
Shy is petite, wiry and wears an admiral’s cap which is too large and almost hides her face. Her clothes, however, would function nicely on a six-year-old in a hot climate, so most of her severely tanned body demands inspection. “I’ve got other outfits; if you want I can change?”
We sit down at the News Café.
“I’ve got a special job, if you’re interested,” I say.
“Everyone’s job is special.”
I haven’t met many pros. They’ve tended to be vinegary or victimy. Shy, apart from her clothes, is more like a banker or an engineer. I’m looking into the eyes of someone calm, invincible.
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“It’s a job which perhaps your employers don’t need to know about.”
“OTB, huh?”
“OTB?”
“Off the books. We can talk about that.”
I study her shoes. I know nothing about shoes, but they are so perfect, the leather so lush, they must cost more than my car.
Shy’s twenty-one and I have no doubt by the time she’s thirty she’ll be rich. Her heart has been discarded or maybe was never installed. Not caring about anyone really frees you up.
It’s interesting sitting with Shy. The other customers look at me like I’m something, because I’m sitting with Shy: she’s so unmistakably one of the elect. Whether she’s my daughter, my friend or my purchase, my status is raised. The admiration of idiots isn’t worth much, but it’s pleasant, like a warm breeze.
“I have this friend,” I begin. I outline Napalm’s barriers to progress, and the scenario I want her to act out for me.
“Okay, the GFE.”
“GFE?”
“The girlfriend experience.” Of course: you believe you’ve come up with something new but it’s long been someone’s acronym.
I stare at Shy’s breasts as we construct the plot, because they insist. There is such beauty about young flesh. Is my staring an old habit, or the return of an ageless folly? Mind you, if I want to hide myself in women again I won’t be starting with Shy, who has the warmth of a chopping board.
Some of the successful people I’ve known have struck me like that: intelligent individuals who at a young age assessed life as awful, and never wasted time on happiness. They weren’t unpleasant, indeed they were good company, but you couldn’t 206
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imagine them being greatly upset about anything: one of their family dying or their wife leaving them. They were emotional amputees. Shut-downs. Unexpecters.
I can’t imagine Shy caring about anyone, not even a cat.
Unfortunately, deep within me the desire to be happy still skulks. Who’s the mistaker here? Are decency and love simply masks for arrogance and selfishness? Is rectitude a pledge that eventually we will get something in return?
We construct a plot. Napalm meets Shy, a meek librarian from Iowa on her last-but-one day of holiday. Shy falls for Napalm, spends night with him, but before leaving explains that her fiancé, with whom she split up just before her holiday, has got in touch and begged her to come back and, although Napalm has taken her to undreamt ecstatics, Shy has been through so much with her fiancé that she has to give him another chance, blah, blah, blah. So dumped, but dumped lovingly, wistfully.
Napalm gets a memory of astonishing wriggling and gasping that he can cherish and build on.
“Do you have the right gear?”
“You’d be surprised how often I play the librarian. Everyone wants to do a librarian. CIM.”
I don’t ask. I produce a picture of Napalm.
“You weren’t exaggerating,” she comments. As we renego-tiate the price, I observe her breasts and it occurs to me that the appeal of youth isn’t entirely the tenacity of flesh, it’s its unsoiled quality (not in Shy’s case obviously); when we hit the forties it’s hard not to be a sack of poison, ears dripping disillusion.
We agree a price, a price I wouldn’t have agreed to if I hadn’t already invested so much time in the project. Shy takes the down payment with a minimum of courtesy.
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Back home, I fall to my knees and pray hard. I see no hope. Is that because there is no hope, or it’s just out of sight?
G
I arrange to meet Napalm in an internet café that afternoon.
Shy can engineer contact when I fail to show up.
“You can pretend to be having trouble with your computer, or—” I suggest.
“Hey. I have it under control,” Shy assures. I am worried however. I’m worried that even a toned-down Shy will be too good to be true. That like all of us Napalm’ll miss the opportunity of a lifetime. He won’t believe he can board.
It’s a grim morning. I’ve been asked to conduct a memorial service for one of the congregation’s brother. Heavy traffic caused by a suicide made me late. A guy jumped off the tenth floor of a hotel with his four-year-old son: a lawyer in good health.
That’s what makes it especially sad: someone healthy, well-off.
If you’re old and ill, why not check out at your convenience? But otherwise it’s probably lack of someone to back you, to listen to you, to say to you with sincerity “fuck ’em” and give you a hearty slap on the back. It often is that simple. Just as the right drug can stop an ailment dead, so a few words from the right person at the right time can save a life.
You can’t understand it when you’re younger. But as you age you do understand how you get tired: your existence might not be that awful, but you just get tired. And you understand how you might get so disillusioned that you’d want to protect your child from that.
The memorial service is for Wilson’s brother. I was reluctant to accept the commission because I wasn’t sure Wilson had 208
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ever attended the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. I didn’t remember ever seeing Wilson at the services, but he claims he was. He probably, like most of us, is a crisis worshipper. I agreed, probably because it was easier to say yes than no.
According to Wilson, his brother didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs. He was a keen swimmer, mostly vegetarian and he helped out at a shelter for stray dogs once a week. He was twenty-three and he collapsed changing television channels. Just like that. It’s the sort of incident that makes you feel you should be out raping, robbing, stubbing out cigarettes on kids, because patently there’s no benefit in living sensibly.
The burial that’s finishing as I arrive is another youngster.
A frat boy who let off a fire extinguisher. He was unlucky too, when you consider that at any given moment there are hundreds of thousands of drunken youths letting off fire extinguishers all over the globe, and yet you never hear of a fatality. Of course, he made the mistake of letting off the fire extinguisher into his mouth, so unlike Wilson’s brother he did do something reckless, even if the penalty was unduly harsh. Would Wilson’s family feel better if he had been involved with tomfoolery, say juggling chainsaws as he changed television channel?
“This is a bitter moment for us,” I say, giving a eulogy of someone I don’t know to people I don’t know. “What sort of man was Harvey? A young man.”
I notice two enormous insects on one of the wreaths; they are either wrestling or getting it on, buzzily. Should I shoo them off?
Have the others not noticed? The insects are very large and very noisy. Is this a message from nature – it all continues? “All we can do is lean on each other for solace.” I’m surprised at how emotional I am becoming and how eloquent I sound at my first funeral service.
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“I don’t understand,” Wilson says afterwards. “My brother lived right. There’s this guy who lives opposite us, he does drugs, he doesn’t wash. He’s got to be over sixty. He sits on the porch smashing beer bottles over his head. For hours. He’s here. My brother’s gone.”
There’s no answer. “I don’t understand either, Wilson,” I say, because I don’t, and because I can’t attempt a clever answer to balm his pain. I wonder why I am here consoling someone I don’t know for no money. “But you must make the most of life. Your brother would want you to do that.” I sound quite convincing. I’m getting the voice.
“I don’t understand,” says Wilson.
He’ll be saying this all day so I depart. Then, discreetly using the Burger King opposite as cover, I go to observe Napalm and Shy.
I reflect on the many ways the encounter could go wrong.
Shy might have run off with the money. Napalm might have failed to turn up. The café might have burnt down overnight.
To my relief, I see across the street, Napalm and Shy engaged in conversation. I wouldn’t have recognized Shy at all. Women have this ability to transform themselves, by a new dress and doing their hair. Gone is the hyper-whore of yesterday, replaced by a close-to-frumpy bookworm.
This is what’s so infuriating about life: it occasionally works.
Every so often, you need a loan, you ask a girl out, apply for a job, and you get a yes. There’s just enough compliance to keep you in the game, like the odds in casinos, carefully honed to yield enough to keep punters on the premises.
I buy a burger.
The girl behind the counter is chatting to the server on her right and gives me change for a twenty-dollar bill, whereas I gave 210
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her a ten. I suppose it’s your reflex that tells you about yourself. I hand the money back. She looks at me confused. Tired? It takes her a while to comprehend I’m giving back money I could have walked off with. She doesn’t thank me.
I can’t win. If I’d gone off with the money, I would have felt bad, because she probably would have been given a hard time over the missing bucks. One checkout girl I knew was reduced to tears over a few absent coins. On the other hand, although the sum of money is tiny and, even multiplied a thousand times, would make no difference in the level of my happiness, I’m a little displeased with myself for refusing free money.
Goodness and decency should be punished. What sort of world would it be if good acts were rewarded? Imagine if you spent an hour at the hospital cheering up a lonely, dying patient, and then got your promotion? You give five dollars for famine victims and then you win five thousand on the lottery? Kindness would be a career move, generosity selfishness.
Goodness should be loved for itself, and perhaps the tribulations of the righteous are the proof of a just God. Goodness should cost. Goodness should hurt. Although, personally, I’d prefer a universe where five bucks gets you five thousand and where the lonely and dying would have a throng of well-wishers.
I withdraw and as I spot a florist’s across the road it occurs to me that no one is buying flowers for Gulin. Flowers aren’t that important; they don’t last long. And, of course, Gulin could always buy them for herself, but that won’t do. It makes me angry that she isn’t getting bought any flowers. She’s working her guts out, is the most honest and cheerful of us – she deserves a small gesture like that.
“Hi,” says the florist warmly, but I’m not letting her good nature induce me into spending big. Buying flowers is also one 211
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of the great wastes of money. Buy someone a candle, a box of chocolates or a poster and they get something out of it, but flowers are a blink, and in my experience usually more expensive than the aforementioned items.
“What sort of thing are you looking for?” the florist asks. I don’t want to say the cheapest ones you have, but that’s precisely what I want. It’s the purchasing of flowers that’s important, not the price.
The florist is very friendly (and you always have this question with a very friendly woman: is she merely very friendly, because occasionally you do meet very friendly women and men, or is she being very friendly to you?).
The florist gives me a discount on two sprays of carnations.
While she’s wrapping up my selection, a girl of about sixteen comes in with a squat, older man. The girl carries an elaborate cone of flowers (of a type unknown to me), woven with lengthy fronds.
“I just passed my course,” she says. “I just wanted to show you.”
“That’s fantastic. Isn’t it?” the florist remarks, seeking my agreement.
“Yes,” I say, because it’s easy to say and the bouquet’s not bad.
“I just wanted to show you,” the girl says. “Only three of us on the course passed.” How can you fail a flower-arranging course if you, say, actually turn up? I couldn’t arrange a bouquet as well as the one the girl’s brandishing, but then, if I had the basic principles explained, I don’t think I’d have any trouble passing.
“Only three of them passed,” says the older man, with the pride only a father could muster. He and his daughter are not overloaded with brains or money. It’s hard to know how to react.
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It’s good that she’s passed a course. It’s good she has something approaching a skill. It’s good that she’s close to her father, it’s good that he has pride in his daughter’s achievements, but it’s also somewhat depressing that someone can get quite so worked up about bunching some flowers together.
“I just wanted to show you,” the girl says. Many conversations are, essentially, repetition.
“That’s really fantastic,” the florist says, no longer wrapping up my flowers. I’m all for encouragement and being benign, but not when it’s hampering my purchase. I want to buy the flowers and go. Another day I might have wanted to wallow in the general good cheer, but now I really want to pay and leave.
It’s odd how some of us have no ambition. I went to school with kids like that – kids whose dearest wish was to become a window-cleaner like their dads. I never understood that, because the best thing about ambition is that it costs nothing. Why not aspire to be an astronaut, a wadologist, an idol, why opt for window-cleaner?
On the other hand, there is an advantage to not having a masterplan: if you don’t have a masterplan, by definition you can’t fail in your masterplan, although I doubt if my contemporaries were far-sighted enough to see that.
It’s true I never dreamt in a concrete way, but I had entertained a conviction that my greatness would be acknowledged or that I would have accumulated vast wealth through some vague but inevitable process by the time I was twenty or so.
But then so many of us are passengers. Many of the poor are poor because they’ve not been given a chance, but some because they’re feckless. I realize I’m annoyed with the father and daughter because they’re only an exaggerated version of me. I’ve been unquestioning and rut-hugging most of my life.
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What am I doing here? I’m angry at finding myself stuck in a florist’s. Stuck in a florist’s instead of working on my divinity.
Stuck in a florist’s spending the last of my money on cheap flowers for someone I hardly know, in between arranging for a cripplingly expensive call girl for someone else I hardly know. And on top of it all, I still have a persistent and embarrassing medical complaint.
My lungs are so full of futility I can barely breathe.
“She just wanted to show you,” says the father.
I still have some slim chance of turning it around. I don’t believe that, but I have to. There is such evil within us, waiting to be called upon. If you said to me, “Your happiness can be arranged but your happiness depends on everyone else in this shop dying now,” I wouldn’t agree to it, but I wouldn’t agree to it because, while a part of me would welcome the happiness, another part wouldn’t – in other words I wouldn’t really be happy. Because a part of me still would hope I could reach happiness without a horror like that.
But if you said to me, “You will be in extreme pain until these three die,” I wonder how long I would hold out. Ten seconds?
Ten hours? Ten days?
“Thank you for showing it to me,” says the florist with a smile, still not wrapping up my flowers. I can’t detect any signs of insincerity. She has a business to run and it’s impressive she can stop and be so kind to someone who’s not going to be any use to her. She’s a very decent soul and that’s why she’ll always run a small shop.
On my way back, it occurs to me that I should have checked to see if Gulin will be home that evening. She only comes back sporadically. I fear the flowers will go to waste, but I had to buy them while I had the strength. Gulin doesn’t return that night.
I pray hard. I pray for everyone. Just in case.
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G
The most wearing aspect of being a pastor is that your flock expects you to talk a lot. Being a deity or a sage entitles you to continental silences, but, more than anything else, your audience expects you to talk, to enthuse. Saying goodbye to each and every member of the congregation after the service, fondly and with accurate knowledge of their occupations, dwellings and doings, is expected.
“Acts 11:14,” says Ben.
Is there anything more irritating than quoters of scripture?
He waits for a response. I pretend I know what he is talking about by saying nothing and smiling.
At first I decided that as I was running a Church, I should take a look at the Bible, but then I came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth the effort, since there would always be hordes of pedants like Ben who’ve been at it for years and who could outscripture me. I’ve memorized one or two phrases so general they could be a response to any question from “Would you like a radish?” to
“Is there a hell?” But I save them for ecclesiastical emergencies.
“I’m a pastor as well,” says Ben, thus revealing that he’s irked about a confirmed space-waster like me having charge of a church, however ramshackle, and at the same time seeking to establish consanguinity – we both hover between the deity and the masses.
His complaint is about Georgia, the one attractive member of the congregation, who hardly ever appears, but who has saucer-sized areolae and a fondness for see-through tops. This is one question I have never been able to resolve: are there women who are honestly unaware that see-through tops are actually see-through and that they are a universal invitation to wanking?
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I nod sympathetically, but as far as I’m concerned we need more, not fewer see-through tops in this church. I restrain myself from counselling Ben to go home and ease one out. Self-service is, after all, quite possibly God’s greatest favour to us.
When I shake the hand of Mrs Barrodale, her young daughter comments: “God is boring.” Her mother is embarrassed. She could be embarrassed because her daughter might have said something untrue. But she is embarrassed because her daughter is quite right. Religion, regrettably, like our existence, is mostly dull. Until it isn’t. And then you start begging for it to be dull again.
I shouldn’t be here gossiping with my flock. I should be making miracles. While I’m locking up the church, Gert runs up.
“It’s a miracle,” he pants. He is holding a mug.
“What?”
“I was driving along the Palmetto, drinking my coffee when this truck changed lanes. If I hadn’t have been driving more slowly because of the coffee…”
He’s very shaken.
“What happened?”
“Most mornings I see this homeless guy, and I was always thinking I should buy him some food. I was in a rush, but I said to myself, you’re always in a rush, you’re always thinking you’re going to buy him a sandwich, but you never do. So I say today, today I will. I stop and say, ‘You want some food?’ ‘No man,’ he says, ‘what I need is a latte’. Okay, I buy him a latte, if he wants a latte, give him a latte, I’m already late now. But I buy myself a latte too, and I have it in my own mug, because I hate that styrofoam stuff. I’m not irresponsible. I’m driving real slowly and carefully because I’m drinking a coffee, because I don’t have proper control. Then this truck changes lanes and 216
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smashes into two cars. I slam on the brakes and stop inches from the burning wrecks. The coffee’s spilt, but this face forms on the side of the mug and I understand it’s a miracle – the coffee saved me.”
He shows me the mug. The foam has shaped itself into the face of a bearded, long-haired man. It does look like a work of art. It’s not one of those stains that might be something if you look at it from the right angle and a distance – it’s very much the traditional image of Christ; it’s curious that he’s portrayed that way. He’s never a short, paunchy, bald guy.
“You should tell the papers,” I say.
Gert nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah.” I was joking, but I can see he will. It occurs to me that we could contact the sour chronicler of religious affairs, Virginia. A bit of publicity for the Church can’t do any harm, and if some decoration on a mug was not the sort of miracle I was contemplating, well, we all have to start somewhere.
I let Gert make the call, because I can’t bring myself to recount the incident of the foam Jesus. To my surprise, Virginia comes round immediately. It must be a slow news day.
“So you think it’s divine intervention?” she asks. She looks sceptical and superior, but that’s her default setting. Gert doesn’t notice, or doesn’t mind. He’s a mixture of shock and mania. He regales her with his near miss which killed three people.
Virginia doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be on a big paper working on a big story, covering it a big distance from Miami. Fair enough. She’s smart and she’s ruthless, but even that’s not enough. Doubtless, she’s as smart and determined as most of the reporters who are covering wars, famines or the activities of presidential penises. Hard work just isn’t enough.
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She thinks she’s better than this, because she probably is. Not everyone who graduates from journalism school can make it: there are only so many chocolate bars to go round. That’s one of the problems, there aren’t enough chocolate bars, so people either have to accept something other than chocolate bars or they are going to be unhappy.
Close to distaste, she shakes my hand farewell.
Driving home later, I’m surprised to hear Gert on the radio, now claiming to be a habitual feeder and succourer of the down-and-out.
Napalm is watching the television when I get back home and again I hear a snatch of Gert’s voice as the miraculous mug is picked up by the local television. Napalm is watching television the way he watched television the week before.
I observe Napalm closely. I expect some posturese to signal that he has been transformed. A straighter gait. A bounce. A whistle. He goes to the fridge and takes out some pineapple juice and pours it as if he hasn’t just spent the weekend with one of Miami’s most accomplished prostitutes.
“How are things?” I ask.
“Fine,” he says shuffling off upstairs. Has something gone wrong? But even if something has gone wrong, there should be some debris of despair, some glinting shards of ecstasy, not this flatness. I want to probe further, but I don’t want to act suspiciously.
Everyone, whether they’re a fourteen-year-old living in a dreary provincial town where the greatest danger is aggressive gnats or a world-famous starlet with a stable of bodyguards, has the same weaknesses and challenges: meeting people, and meeting people they like. It’s just scale. We all have our ruts, some smaller, some larger. It just depends which league we play 218
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in. Everyone has done something bad, whether it’s drinking the last of the pineapple juice or murdering their spouse.
I don’t understand myself, so it’s no surprise I can’t understand others.
I call to arrange a meeting with Shy in a diner. I want a debrief.
I’m in bed when Sixto taps on my door to inform me that Gert has made the national channels.
That a simple stunt like this can generate so much hoo-ha surprises me and makes me quite angry. Why am I investing so much time in a major miracle when some spilt coffee can grab everyone’s attention? But I’m not entirely displeased. I repeat to myself that it’s all useful publicity for the church, and thus me.
Gert is merely the warm-up act.
G
I consider how much of my life has been spent waiting, standing outside cinemas, twiddling my thumbs in restaurants, waiting for women. They owe me months, if not years of my life. If you’re punctual what it boils down to is that you’re going to spend much of your life waiting. Similarly, if you behave generously, you’re exposing yourself to ingratitude; but if you don’t help others, you can’t be disappointed, if you don’t lend money, they can’t fail to pay it back. In olden days, I suppose, if you lived in a small village, there was a chance people would remember, or not want to be seen as ungrateful or debtors, but not now.
But I can’t work myself up into a real state, as Shy arrives after ten minutes.
“What happened?”
“With the lights off, it’s never so bad.”
“And you told him it couldn’t work out?”
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“No.”
I get angry. Why can’t people carry out their orders? I paid a fortune for this.
“But we agreed.”
“I didn’t use the sob story, because he dumped me.”
“How?”
“He said, sorry, it couldn’t work out, no hard feelings.”
“And you said?”
“I said I was sorry, but I wished him well.”
This stumps me.
“Now,” she says. “You can do me a favour. Give me a good write-up on my website. Use your imagination.”
She leaves as a large man with a shaved head is chatting with the boss. I now tune into their conversation.
“Come on, give me a chance,” he says. He wants a job.
“Sorry,” says the boss.
“You’d be foolish not to give me a job,” says the man, “and you don’t look like a fool to me.” This line could have been delivered with charm, but it isn’t, and there’s nothing worse than failed wit or fumbled camaraderie. In the right place, at the right time, with the right delivery it could have worked. He’s an arsehole, but is it his fault? If you’re born with big ears is that your fault?
“Sorry,” says the boss. The boss is good. He’s not giving a reason, because if you give a reason, you give someone something to refute.
“Hey, look, this is how keen I am to work in your kitchen: I’ll work for free just to show you what a dynamite cook I am.”
“Sorry,” says the boss, not embarrassed about walking off.
Compassion is a disease. I want to help him. You see lots of people asking for handouts, you rarely see people fighting for a 220
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job. Compassion may also be another form of arrogance. Christ knows I can’t even help myself, why do I think I can help someone else? He’s me. Another forty-something sinker, going down.
It occurs to me that one area where the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ hasn’t made any effort is good, straight, unreligious fun. Why not have a purely social evening? A barbecue? A lunch? Some tasty food to lure pilgrims in?
“I hear you’re looking for work,” I say.
“I’m the original man looking for work. Everyone calls me Saffron.” He shakes my hand and writes down his number for me.
“You’re a man who uses his own judgement,” he says to me.
“That’s a very rare thing.” This is intended as a compliment, but it sounds to me like a flaw.
“Oh, and it’s not true that I’ve attacked every one of my employers,” he assures me.
On the way home, I spot a body lying next to the road. Its posture is odd. The raggedy clothes suggest it’s some wino sleeping it off. But what if it’s not? I drive on for a while. I want to drive on very badly, but I can’t. I turn round, stop and get out.
I search for the old man’s pulse and can’t find any. The skin is cold and waxy.
Three black kids lope past. “He’s dead isn’t he?” they laugh. I can comprehend the lack of interest in offering help, but is there any need to laugh about it? I call for an ambulance.
The crew arrive after fifteen minutes and walk up suspiciously.
“You called it in?” They ask accusingly. They look around constantly as if they’re expecting to be ambushed. Reluctantly, as if under duress, they circle the body. I feel obliged to stay.
They fiddle with him, and after a few minutes his eyes blink into life. He’s not some heart-attack victim but a wino sleeping it off.
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“This gentleman was worried about you,” the medic indicates me. The wino’s face is gratitude-free, and will remain so. The boys were right. They were right and I was wrong. Walk on and laugh. That’s the way.
G
I’ve arranged for Gert to come in on Sunday to talk about his mug. Late Saturday night, minutes before I close up the Church, he phones me to tell me he can’t make it.
“Nothing personal, Tyndale. But with a miracle like this, I need a bigger church. I’ll be working with the Fixico Sisters.”
“Who are the Fixico Sisters?”
There’s no answer, Gert’s hung up.
I walk out and I see that, outside the huge building next to the church, despite it being so late, there are still workmen fiddling around.
The building’s of such a size and style it must have been a theatre back in the Twenties, and was last an unsuccessful camping-goods shop. Until recently it was derelict, and I had considered the possibility that when my act took off, it could be turned into a new, larger home for the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. But then dozens of men in hard hats turned up to renovate with an astonishing, round-the-clock will. That’s Miami, blocks go from stone-dead to swinging in months. I’m curious who our new neighbours will be.
A foreman gives an order and a giant neon sign lights up.
The sign says in blue, “The Temple of Extreme Abundance”.
Underneath, now made legible by the dropped light is a large poster on a noticeboard: “Wish large. The Fixico Sisters are God’s dealers”.
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G
This time I invite Dave for a drink.
“I’m not lucky.”
“Everyone thinks that,” counters Dave. “Everyone thinks they’re dynamite in bed and that they haven’t had enough luck.”
“But I am. I’m not unlucky in the sense that I break a leg every six months, or that I come home and find the house burnt down and my family eaten by wild animals. The really ugly stuff stays away. I’m just not allowed any luck.”
“Don’t moan. Your lack of dignity is starting to pain me.”
“Okay. I can prove it you.”
We go to Publix where I pick up two cabbages. I tell Dave to choose a checkout for me and for him to go to another one.
We both have two carts in front of us. Dave goes through the checkout with his cabbage in three minutes, while I haven’t moved an inch, and the lady at my checkout is arguing determinedly about the validity of the discount coupon she’s hoping to use.
Dave beckons me to another checkout where there’s only one cart. The cash register goes down and the assistant looks in vain for a supervisor to sort out the malfunction. On the other side I study a mother and daughter: the daughter’s around eighteen, the mother forty. How your tastes change. I choose the mother for erotic speculation to while away the time. Fifteen minutes later I manage to pay for the cabbage.
“What does that prove?” sneers Dave.
“We can do it again.”
At McDonalds Dave is served in two minutes thirty seconds.
The server at my counter disappears for a full five minutes and it’s ten minutes before I get my burger. At the Sears in the Dadeland Mall it takes Dave thirty-five seconds to purchase a 223
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canary-yellow T-shirt. It takes me twenty-two minutes. I get Dave to choose numbers and buy two lottery tickets. Dave doesn’t win anything, but he has two numbers. The ticket he gave me has no hits.
“You’re sure you’re not doing it deliberately?” he asks. “This is very interesting.”
The next day we take a trip out on the gambling boat. I’ve always found gambling boring (unless you’re losing or winning huge sums of money, stakes I’m not prepared to play for). For most of us it’s about losing small sums of money steadily, in not very interesting circumstances.
We sit at the roulette table. I bet on black. Dave bets on red. I put down dollar chips to stretch my loss. Dave plays five dollar chips. I win twice, because as Dave says, no one can be unlucky all the time, and because it’s not just about my luck, but the luck of the others at the table. Dave wins sixteen times.
“We have to be careful with this,” he says. “We need an either-or bet. Basketball. The Miami Heat – we can have a bet on them when they play. But we can’t go too wild, because then your bad luck wouldn’t be bad luck any more, it would change to good luck so we wouldn’t win, if we had a massive bet.”
I think I understand him. We start betting on the matches. I choose the good odds, Dave takes the long shot. I lose, and Dave wins – modest amounts. He wants to give me half, but I tell him that will jinx our betting. Slipping me ten per cent seems to allow the system to work. I have an income.
G
“Okay, yes, so I have a history of uncontrollable violence. Let’s talk about that. I’m not going to hide that. But it’s a history, you 224
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know what I’m saying, a history, like in the past, when I was young, and I only did it for recognition and respect. It’s not like I did it for laughs or I enjoyed it. That uncontrollable-violence shit is draining. And people talk, people talk, they blow it up like a great big Zep balloon, know what I’m saying? What you’ve heard, you’ve got to divide by ten,” Saffron assures me.
I’ve decided we need more fun at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. You can go overboard on the holiness. What we need is an evening of fun, good food, barbecues. Barbecues with see-through tops. Now that I have some money in my pocket, I can hire someone to knock up food for the homeless, and entertain the congregation in style.
“I haven’t heard anything. Honestly,” I assure Saffron. He has an amazing number of tats.
“You must have heard about the blancmange?”
“No.”
“You must have heard about it. But remember, divide by ten.
At least. As a minimum.”
“When can you start?”
“I’m ready to go-go. This old ex-armed robber loves to work.”
“Tomorrow, say eight?”
“Man, I’d love to but it’s my anger-management group. And it’s important to manage that anger. It’s controllable anger, but you know, it needs to be controlled.”
“Friday?”
“Man, I’ve got this hospital appointment. I’ve got this funny feeling in my ankle, kinda hard to say what it is exactly and I’ve been waiting months to see a doctor. My ankle’s never been the same since that time, well, this is another thing you’ve got to divide by ten, cos even if I tell you it’s going to sound worse than it is.”
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“Saturday?”
“Normally, most weeks, no problem, but I’m waiting for a delivery of a new fridge and those delivery guys they lie worse than politicians, you never know when they’re going to turn up.
And you need a fridge in Miami.”
“You need a fridge in Miami. Sunday?”
“Well, I could do Sunday, but that’s the day I normally have my kids. Now, I don’t have to see them, but it’s the only chance I get to see them, and those young boys, they need a father to make sure they stay away from uncontrollable violence and armed robbery and shit. But if you want to insist, for you—”
“Monday?”
“Okay. Monday. Monday’s cool. I can’t wait to get started.
No, fuck. Wait. You’re not going to believe this. The electricity company’s coming Monday to reconnect the supply. There was a misunderstanding about the payments, and that company remembers what happened years ago. They never forget. It’s no use telling them that I’m reformed. Those utility guys, man, they’re worse than the delivery guys. There’s just no telling when they’ll turn up. Oh, wait, don’t give me that look. I know that look.”
“Look?”
“I can see that look in your eyes. I’ve seen that look before.
It’s that this reformed armed robber, he’s talking, he’s talking but he’s not serious about being a chef. See, something like that, when I was younger, man, that would have been like a demand, like a plea for uncontrollable violence. But I’m not that young man. I’m forty-four, I love my freedom, I love being out on the streets, so that’s why I’m not going to smash your face into the desk until the look is well and truly gone. Because that ain’t me.”
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“Saffron—”
“No. No, I can see you have doubts. No, I don’t want a man of God to tell a lie, I can see you have doubts. So here’s what I’m going do. Next Tuesday, I’m going to turn up, as long as my Mom’s feeling okay, and she hasn’t been feeling too good lately, you know, she hasn’t had an easy life. What with my history and all, but, but next Tuesday I’m going to cook you some dynamite food, and I’m going to volunteer. I’m volunteering my services, that means you don’t have to pay me, you’re just going to thank me.”
“See you Tuesday.”
“See you Tuesday.”
Saffron doesn’t turn up on Tuesday, or any other day. I was quite sure he wouldn’t. I’m pleased to be right, but as usual it doesn’t do me any good.
G
I buy Didsbury a beer.
We’re down in Coconut Grove, in an undistinguished bar. I don’t want Didsbury to think I’m made of money, but he should be able to help me pull off a miracle. What I need is one big stunt. Just one. Coming back from the dead should get me noticed. If that doesn’t get me some respect, I’m giving up.
“So when do you want the woewagon?” he asks.
“The woewagon’s not what I want. I have another business proposition to put to you. There’s something else I want you to help me with.”
“You’re not a body-jumper are you?” Didsbury gets up to leave.
“No. I’m not. All I need is to borrow a fresh corpse, one careful owner, for a few hours.”
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“What do you want the body for?”
“So I look dead.”
“Couldn’t you hold your breath or something?”
“I need a death certificate. There’s no rush with this. I’m willing to wait until you have a client who looks like me, more or less.
Then it’s just a question of getting a doctor to examine him.”
“Man, do you know the trouble I could get in for that?”
I name a price. It tells him I’m serious. His expression tells me that he’ll dither about it, but that he’s going to say yes.
He names another price. It’s not much higher than my figure, but negotiation isn’t just about the money – it’s about feeling you have the power to change things.
“I wouldn’t even think about this, but my mother’s ill, and those doctors.” This may be true or it may not. It makes no difference to me. Didsbury has huge hands – and he has the longest thumbs I’ve ever seen. His thumbs look as if they’ve had another pair of thumbs grafted onto them, long thumbs to boot. He’d make a great monkey, never falling out of the trees.
“And you promise you’re not into any sick stuff? I’m dextrous on the morals, but I ain’t going that far.”
“I promise; and you can be around to chaperone me.” Didsbury’s straining to convince himself, but he’ll succeed.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You sure I can’t interest you in the choking chariot for an evening?”
“No.”
“How about some solar-powered gravestones? I’ve got a load of those.”
“Not for me,” I say. “But I know a man who could take them off your hands.”
G
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When I walk through the sombre entrance of the funeral home, I ask myself how I will remember this moment. Will I remember walking through this entrance as the prelude to an exciting chapter of my life or as the descent to an even greater misery? Why couldn’t I like chocolate?
“Relax,” says Didsbury. My trepidation must be dangling.
“No one’s coming round. It’s total quiet. People don’t die during holidays.”
I’m going through with this although I’ve now reached the stage where I don’t want to, where I no longer see how it can help; I’m doing it because I feel I should. I’ve never taken a really big risk with a long, painful fall to the ground, and maybe this is why I’ve never got on. Plus chocolate.
I meet Mr Yates. Geologist new to Miami. New to death.
Don to his friends and embalmer. I can’t say he looks like me, but he definitely doesn’t not look like me, and he admirably does the job of being my height and short on hair.
We load him into a lightweight wardrobe, and I succumb to a momentary guilt about what we’re doing. Don can’t mind, but his family members might. Really, taking the body for a tour isn’t immoral or indeed illegal (it occurred to me if we were caught, there’s nothing they could actually charge me with since Don is being treated with respect).
Then we place the wardrobe in the van. The wardrobe is there to dispel notions that we’re carrying a body. I’ve always been a little disgruntled about being average: average height, average build and, for a while, average income (how I miss that). I always wished there was something outstanding about me, just one thing: able to put up straight shelves, cooking a great rack of lamb, knowing all the capitals of the world, having a fine tenor voice.
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Now as Didsbury and I struggle with Don, I’m very glad I’m not six foot two. We wheel the wardrobe most of the way on one of those wheely things, but some good old-fashioned shunting is required – Didsbury is beefy and is used to carrying heavy loads, but I’m not. I’m positively faint from the strain. It passes through my mind how comic it would be if I dropped dead in the middle of a bodysnatch.
“How do you like your job?” I ask as we drive off, to pass the crime cordially.
Didsbury shifts gear. “It’s okay, I guess. It’s pretty much like anywhere else. We all pretend to get on, but really we hate each other.”
I expect to be challenged, but we aren’t. That’s it. One of Didsbury’s colleagues could have come back to pick up a book he’d forgotten, but it didn’t happen. We might have been stopped by the police who might have insisted on searching the van, but it didn’t happen. You either get away with it or you don’t, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.
We carry the wardrobe in as Didsbury whistles and I gasp and moan. He’s perfectly calm, although he’s the one who stands to lose something substantial. We lay Don out and I make a note to do something nice for him, send flowers or donate to his favourite charity.
“Remember,” says Didsbury. “Don doesn’t leave my sight.”
Didsbury’s a farmer’s boy – I don’t know why farmers are cast as simpletons or fools, because they’re not. To make it as a farmer you’ve got to be switched on: you’re dealing with nature, a very unforgiving employer.
Some adjustments have to be made. Don has bushy chest hair, so that has to go. He also gets a severe haircut. After I’ve hennaed a tattoo of a fish on his chest, and fitted Don with a 230
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pair of Miami Dolphins shorts, I leave in different clothes, with a baseball cap, dark glasses. Who was that you saw?
“You got six hours,” Didsbury reminds me, checking that the air conditioning is on full. Now Sixto, as a concerned friend, phones for an ambulance and the doctor. I’ve spent a fair amount of time cultivating Dr Greer, who has a reputation as the only doctor who makes house calls in Miami. Will he come? Or will it be some uninterested locum?
I go round the block to a bar and sit down. The portering and the nerves have made me desperate for a drink. The bar is empty and the barman is fussing with something round the back. I let out a couple of “hallos”.
“Have a bourbon,” urges a voice behind me.
“A water’s fine, thanks.”
“I didn’t say I was buying. I said have a bourbon. I can’t stand drinking alone, and Stan here’s barely human.”
The speaker is a wizened boozehound, and Stan is an even more wizened boozehound, who lets off a snotty snort of a laugh, revealing a mouth with two teeth. Stan slaps his thigh, in that well-known gesture, to confirm to any casual onlookers that he is suffering from hilarity.
Their pastiness suggests they belong in some chilly northern city, they look like third-generation lushes whom fresh air would kill: utterly out of place, like trouts in an armchair.
“A mineral water, please,” I say to the barman who has come within hailing distance. He is confused by this and stands in a contemplative pose.
“Stan. Stan! Stan! What we have here is a coward. What we have here is someone who wants to live… for ever.”
“No, I’m someone who wants to have a glass of water.”
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would be wetting himself by now. Another lengthy foghorn laugh rips out.
“No, I know your type,” continues the alpha boozehound.
“You want to live for ever, you want to temple your body. You’re a weaselly little wanter of immortality. You drink water and you nibble celery like the rabbit you are.”
The barman is taking an incredibly long time to manage the task of opening what I am sure will turn out to be an expensive bottle of mineral water, and finding a glass to pour the water into. I have a powerful urge to leave, but I badly need a drink.
“You don’t have the cojones for bourbon. You’re not man enough to raise a glass to the grim reaper. Stan and me, we just don’t care. We’re booze braves. Our balls are bigger than watermelons.” The force of his mirth tosses Stan around: he needs a seat belt to prevent himself from injury.
The barman has now wandered off, very slowly, presumably to look for a glass. All I want is a glass of water, for which I am prepared to pay, promptly. I’m here, the water is here: why can’t we be united? To be a good barman requires more ability than the wages suggest.
“I bet you’re thinking here’s some miserable old drunk, who has fucked up doozily and is crawling into a bottle. Here’s a bozo, unhappy in love, no money. He’s drinking because he has no future, no friends, no one who’ll listen to him but a worthless leech like Stan.”
“Well,” I say, not in the mood for charity.
“But you’re wrong. I’m happy. I bet I’m happier than you. I’m not drinking because I’m unhappy; I’m not drinking because I want to forget. I am drinking because I love it. I love boozing, and if I drop dead today I don’t care. I’ll go out grinning because I’m happy, and you, you mineral-lapping rabbit, you, 232
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you’re miserable. I can tell it. You’ve got boo-hoo-hoo plastered all over you.”
The barman, having absconded in his quest for a bit of lemon, finally achieves the union of water and glass. I seek the point furthest from the blotto brothers and turn my back, to signal that conversation is not desired.
“You think I’m some delusion-prone delusion-lover… off on a delusion masterclass, sitting here, saying I’m happy when I’m not, unliving my life, but I am happy, pal. Let me tell you why: I own the bar.”
Stan falls off his seat and can’t make it back.
“That’s right: this is mine, all mine. It’s a fascinating story.
You’ll want to hear a fascinating story, right? I had this cousin, Barry. Barry was never very happy. He didn’t drink and he hated me, mostly because I was happy. I didn’t really care because I was happy, but I did notice how he made comments about my drinking and doing nothing and letting my women pay for everything, because he did it very loudly and very often.”
Here Stan high-fives him from the floor.
“Barry didn’t drink, and he worked hard. He worked hard though it didn’t do much to make him happy. He started poor like me, but had all sorts of crappy jobs, busboy and junior dishwasher to get through school; he got two degrees, one in electrical engineering and one in computing, I think it was computing, although I can’t remember exactly, because I didn’t really care. Then he started up a business, some computing shit, doing I don’t know what because I don’t give a shit. He explained it to me once but I wasn’t listening and he made a pile. Not rich enough to get his face in the magazines, or not in magazines worth reading, but you know, nice. Now Cousin Barry never had a wife or any children, whether that’s because 233
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he was too busy, or wasn’t into it or was simply too stingy to have any offspring, who knows? I don’t give a shit. But he didn’t have any other family but me.
“Now the idea that I might end up with his money terrified him, cos although he was sure the drinking would take me first, he was worried one day, you know, his plane might nosedive, he might munch on a sickly shellfish and through a terrible twist of fate the old booze filter here would be left with the cash. ‘The otters,’ he’d say to me, very loudly and very often, ‘the otters will get everything.’ He wanted to set up some ottery or whatever you call a home for, you know, otters with sad stories. He’d tell me that very often, although he hated me. He kept in touch, mostly so he could tell me about the distressed otters. He was waiting for me to get angry about the otters. Did the old booze filter here give a shit? No, I was happy. Suddenly, Cousin Barry gets a rare parasite, probably from his otters, is a sensation in the medical journals and drops dead. I was sad, family’s family, and actually I enjoyed the calls about the otters, those graduates of the school of hard knocks with paw ailments. But, but it turns out that there’s a tiny problem with Barry’s will. The problem is that Barry did it himself. As I said he started poor and he hated spending money. Barry would have picked a nickel out of a dungheap with his teeth. I’d guess even at the end he was boosting toilet paper from hotels. So he saved himself a few hundred bucks. The end result: the otters get dick. The otters go boo-hoo and I get a bar where I’m my own best customer.
But I don’t want you to conclude I have such a sunny disposition because of the money. Ask me what I’d be doing if I didn’t have the money, if Barry had made some otters very happy?”
“What would you be doing?”
“I’d be drinking. Just more slowly.”
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Stan foghorns again although I’m sure he’s heard this one before. I make for the door.
“Hey, you’re not going to live for ever. Have a bourbon and show cirrhosis who’s the boss.”
I wonder how to kill the time while I’m dead. I considered making an appearance at the church or somewhere where I’m known, as bilocation is always an impressive trick, but I feel somehow it could be used against me. He couldn’t have been dead because he’s on camera at Publix.
I sit on a bench and take in the sunshine. It truly is one of the great pleasures in life; it’s very hard to be worried or unhappy.
My phone rings. It’s Didsbury.
“Man, you’re deader than a doornail. You’ve joined the great unbreathing, the motionless majority. You’re ready for the soil nap.”
It’s a very strange business getting what you want. First of all it’s a very unfamiliar sensation. You have doubts that you’ve got it. Then you’re not so pleased to have it; it doesn’t look quite as great as it did.
Don is relieved of his duties as a part-time me and returned to bereavement central (with the accompanying desperate grunts from me). Then I wait a few hours and have the resurrection. I felt very bad about calling Dr Greer.
“Look, sorry to bother you, but I don’t think I’m dead.”
“This I have to see.” I sit there in my Miami Dolphins shorts (not the ones Don was wearing), with my tattoo on display.
“You look… very much different than earlier.” Is there a trace of suspicion in his eyes? Nothing he can do about it if there is.
“How do you feel?”
“A bit tired, but otherwise okay.” I’m uneasy about wasting the time of someone so decent and professional.
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“You remember anything?”
“No. Went to bed last night and just woke up.”
“That’s what I call sleep. Remember you need to lose weight.
Man, I’ve never got it so wrong, but everyone gets a resurrector once. Sure someone didn’t slip you some zombie juice?”
G
It’s no use doing something remarkable if word doesn’t spread.
Well, some remarkable things are rewarding in themselves. Sleeping with the hundred most beautiful women in the world in a month for example, though most of us would still like the news trumpeted. But what if you can hold your breath for nine minutes?
Or really speak a dozen languages fluently? You’d want others to know, you’d want some whoops for your talent and dedication.
Virginia has a scowl of mild disgust. I remind myself the scowl is all-purpose, so I don’t take it personally. She’d rather not be here, interviewing a loser spat out by death, and who can blame her?
“So, all sorts of exciting stuff happening around your church.
You died?”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“And how long for?”
“No one’s sure, but a day or so, earth time.”
“So Mr Corbett, tell us all about it?”
I’ve considered this carefully of course.
“It’s hard to describe,’ I start. “It’s very hard to describe. You’re trying to put something unearthly into earthly terms, it’s like…”
I hesitate as if I’m thinking, but I’m merely holding back the line, “trying to turn mayonnaise into music. What I experienced was too… wide to be fitted into words.”
“Did you see light?”
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“No. You see, light is a physical term, something we know physically. It was like light, but not light.”
“Hmm. Is there anything you can tell me about that time?”
“Well,” and here I’m willing to dispense free hope. Hope is the one drug that does nothing but good. “As I say, I can’t describe it in physical terms, but it was… comforting.”
“What brought you back?”
“Me. I decided that my work here wasn’t finished.”
“Uh-huh. What is your work exactly?”
“I have some teaching to do, and many people to help.”
“Hmm. What is your teaching?”
“Don’t expect any reward.” For some reason this now sounds stupid, and my honed wisdom falls to the ground like a dead, repellent insect. Virginia keeps writing for a long time without any more questions. A photographer takes my picture with a loud yawn. He only takes one picture and leaves.
“When do you expect your article to run?” I ask.
“Soon. But it isn’t my decision.”
G
The Hierophant isn’t in a coma, but he doesn’t move and he doesn’t say anything. The doctors are getting bored with him. They like to make a judgement and issue a prescription, and there isn’t a medication to combat capitulation, when you have decided that the game just isn’t worth it any more. Also, doctors aren’t much interested in the elderly: it doesn’t seem worth the effort. When you’re in your twenties and you go to the doctor with anything less obvious than a broken leg, they tell you you have a virus: go to bed, take a pill. When you hit forty they blame everything on your age (what do you expect? You’re on the way out).
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The Hierophant hasn’t eaten anything and he hasn’t washed.
He doesn’t smell good. He has to my knowledge been wearing the same blue shirt for three days, and I can assume the same goes for the other articles of clothing.
“Can I get you something to eat?” I ask. The eyes register my request, but there is no response.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask. Obviously he’s not, but I hope this might provoke an utterance.
“Would you like a drink?” No response. I left a glass of water yesterday and it’s been emptied, but he must be in danger of dehydrating, which won’t help putting him in a more dynamic frame of mind.
When my marriage collapsed I went to a party with a neighbour I barely knew. After a trip to the loo, I found my companion had vanished and I was in a room full of people I didn’t know.
They were jabbering away and it was as if everyone there was a couple holding an intense conversation in a language I didn’t understand. I had no way of breaking in. I’d been in situations before where I was awkward, or didn’t have much to say, but this was different: I didn’t belong. No one was unfriendly, but just as blue isn’t orange, there was a gulf between us. As if I was wrapped in inch-thick cellophane. I wonder if this, the chocolate aside, is something everyone feels sometime. You’re in the wrong room, on the wrong planet.
But I understand the Hierophant. I’ve been close to this as well. Not speaking because you don’t see any value in communication.
“Okay,” I say. The Hierophant is barefoot. I place a couple of matches between his toes, and I light them. The Hierophant watches them burn for a few moments. He fidgets slightly. I snuff out the matches.
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Five minutes later. “Hell, Tyndale, that really hurt,” he says.
But then nothing more.
I resolve to shake the Hierophant out of this. He wanted the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ to be on the list of the most happening churches. It will be. With a resurrection to boot.
What the hell has happened to my miracle?
G
I chase Virginia with no result.
However, one of the few benefits of having a small congregation is that it’s easier to make it larger and more happening.
Just getting Gamay and Muscat in the hall is about a ten-per-cent increase, and their bulk really eats up the space. They have brought four “friends” with them who look like scared skateboarders forced off the street, because they are; but bodies count, not audience enjoyment, and a morning in church won’t do anyone any lasting harm.
“Tyndale, man, you mustn’t think we’re afraid of getting our hands dirty. Couldn’t we off some vatos for you?” whines Gamay.
“That’s not the job. You have to do the job given. The job given is to get ten more worshippers next Sunday.” I explain again the importance of discipline, and how failure to deliver will mean failure to join.
“How about torching some competitors?” continues Gamay.
It’s more and more evident that Gamay isn’t just primed to commit violence, he’s itching to do it.
“Get more people for next Sunday.”
“You know, Tyndale, we’ve spent a lot of time at your bidding and we have nothing to show for it. If I’d worked at Publix packing bags, I’d have been better off; even a dollar an 239
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hour would be better than this, because we’re getting zippo an hour.”
Gamay stares at me and the hatred is unmistakable. It’s like that when you have a pet alligator or python, one day it’s too big to be flushed down the toilet. One day you see it’s big enough to harm you, one day you’re aware it doesn’t like you very much.
“Do you have a problem? Because I’d like to make it clear if you do have a problem that’s too bad.” I really should be afraid of Gamay because he could pulp me, but if he hit me it would be the perfect excuse for disqualifying him from membership.
There’s going to be ugliness, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t use that old technique of putting off finding a solution. Only now that Sixto’s employers have gone kaput, does it occur to me I could have got rid of the DJs by putting them on a plane and sending them to a real multinational criminal organization.
“No, there are no problems at all, Tyndale, how could there be problems? There are just, you know… things we could be happier about.”
“Welcome to life.”
The next Saturday afternoon I’m in the office wondering why nothing has appeared in the paper about my miracle, and to which restaurant I will take the chief head-counter. The most-happening-church assessors have secret visitors who come and go mysteriously, but this is an official, preannounced check.
Bribery is like flattery. It works. Even if you know the flattery is totally insincere and ulterior, the mere act of someone taking the trouble to flatter you is flattering. Similarly, bribery always works – it might not work as well as you would like, it may not get anywhere near what you want, but it always gets through.
However, there has to be a discretion and a decorum to greasing palms. The head-counter should have a memorable meal, he 240
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should be pampered; but, but you don’t want to go somewhere where his conscience might be niggled by an absurdly priced bottle of wine.
Muscat bursts in and pulls out a gun from the back of his jeans.
I’m going to die.
I don’t have much time for regret or fear. Tears start to poke at my eyes and I notice that Gamay is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Hotties Expertly Fucked Here”, a slogan that will doubtless preclude that remote possibility of him becoming acquainted with a member of the opposite sex.
Despite the hurdle of his monumental stupidity, Muscat has figured out that I’m taking him for a ride, that I’ve been using him as slave labour (even though the results have been unsatisfactory in the extreme, and frankly if he had been my slave I would have sold him or traded him for any espresso machine). He is too dim and angry to foresee the consequences of murder and he’s going to kill me. I thought it would be Gamay, but wrong again. Muscat is going to shoot me, it’s in his eyes. Fair enough.
Then it isn’t. He’s lost his murder.
“I’m a bona-fide person, Tyndale,” he announces. I try to say something, but my voice is absent.
“I’m a bona-fide person, Tyndale,” he repeats. I welcome the repetition since I am unable to contribute anything to the conversation. “I have rights. You’ve got to let me go.”
“Whatever,” I croak, probably too faintly to be heard. I’d always hoped that I could confront danger without embarrassment, but my voice is really letting me down.
“You’ve got to let me go. I don’t want you coming after me. It’s over, okay, you’ve got to understand that, you’ve got to promise 241
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that you won’t come after me. Don’t try and drag me back. I promise I won’t squeal about your organization. Watch, my lips are sealed, I’ll never say a word. I just want to be happy, I’m going anyway, and I’m never coming back, so don’t try and stop me. Okay, just don’t stop me or I’ll have to hurt you.”
“Muscat, I’ve always liked you,” I say, as my voice has reassembled. This is a line that always works a little even if both parties suspect it’s not true. “If you can give me your word that you’ll leave, and that you’ll never, never come back, I should be able to square it with the powers up top. After all, you were never formally signed up. If you had been in on our secrets, well, that would be different.”
“Thanks, Tyndale, man, thanks, you’re a hero. I owe you big, I ain’t kennedying you,” he says, lowering the gun. He looks tearful. “Maybe we should stay in touch somehow, we have a very special relationship.”
“I’d like nothing more than to stay in touch, but that would be dangerous for you.”
“Okay. Cool. Cool. I’m sorry, Tyndale, I know you’re losing a unique soldier and you must be disappointed, but I’ve found something much better than ass-kicking wealth and respect on the streets. Wait.” He vanishes.
I’m hoping he might not come back, but he does, with a short, dark-haired girl. Young, but, actually, legal.
“This is Maria.” She shakes my hand with a genuine smile.
She seems perfectly pleasant – why she’s adopting Muscat is beyond me, but that’s her affair.
“I’m moving to Idaho to be with Maria. It’s the chicken business for us. It’s really interesting. The public doesn’t appreciate how interesting chickens are—”
“Muscat, it’s not a good idea for you to hang around.”
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“Sure. Have you ever tasted an egg from an old-school chicken that’s eaten plenty of nature?”
“It was nice meeting you, Maria.” As he ushers her out, I wonder if I should ask about Gamay, but I don’t want to delay him for a second on his trip to Idaho. It’s a rare occurrence, but sometimes your problems evaporate.
However, two minutes later Muscat returns:
“Tyndale, man, I just wanted to explain that this is the real thing.”
“No. I understand. I really do,” I say giving him a gentle push towards his new future.
“She’s just everything. I mean your cleaner, Trixi. Man, I had the hots for her. I was spanking the monkey like… like a monkey.
But this is different. She’s changed me, she’s in charge, and it feels great. She chooses my clothes, she made me understand about chicken-farming. I wish my mother was still here to meet her, but I’m sure she’ll be looking down on us from a pearly seat when we get married.”
It’s remarkable how the deceased are supposed to be hovering around when there is a happy event: a wedding, a birth, a football match won, but no one ever contemplates the ancestors hanging around when you’re beating up someone much weaker than you, stealing a bottle of vodka from a supermarket, or rimming your best friend’s wife.
I’m now steering Muscat out the door, but he pushes back in.
“Tyndale, there’s one other thing, you might as well know.”
He gazes at his shoes. “Gamay, he won’t be joining your organization.”
“Farming chickens too?”
“No. He’s definitely in a real no-chicken-farming situation.”
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“Which is?”
“He’s kinda dead.”
“What happened?”
“That’s a reasonable question, Tyndale. It all depends on how you look at it. It’s funny you mentioned chickens. Basically, he won a game of chicken. You know, like nothing to do with chickens, the feathery things, but being chicken. He was jawing on about being badder than me etcetera. I was in the SUV and he was in the road. You know, I just wanted to see him jump, jump out the way, cos I thought he would. I mean if you had an SUV powering towards you, what would you do?”
“Get out of the way.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t. He’d driven first and I’d jumped. I jumped out of the way cos I could see for sure he wasn’t stopping. So I said to myself, I ain’t stopping either. He stood there. Looking sure I’d stop, real confident. Went right under the wheels looking real confident. Real confident to the end. Looked real confident after the end. Man, I was so furious with him. I had to spend the whole day with the police, explaining what happened. If he hadn’t been in the middle of the fucking road, where he had no business being, pumped full of coke n’ acid, I’d be in jail, for real. It could have been goodbye to my Idaho disfrooting.”
“That’s… unfortunate.” I choose my word carefully, because I find it hard to express any real regret. It’s dishonest to lie any more than is absolutely necessary. How much truth is Muscat telling me about Gamay’s accident?
“Yeah, he may have been tougher than me, but he wasn’t tougher than General Motors.”
I shake hands manfully with Muscat in a have-a-good-life way and he leaves. Cherishing that strange feeling of things going your way, I settle back in my chair.
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Incredibly, five minutes later, Muscat’s back again, clutching a picture of a chicken:
“Rhode Island Red. Seriously, you should try it.” Then he’s really gone.
G
There are huge lights. It looks more like a concert or some gala, red-carpet award ceremony than a church service. I am astonished by the numbers of the crowd streaming in, many of them openly affluent as well as the no-hopers and doormats who are the staple of any religion. I check out the sound system and the lighting, which alone cost more than the entire worth of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ.
There’s something outrageous about this, especially as it’s only twelve yards from our front door: it would be impossible for it to be closer or more in our face. It would be worth throwing open our church, I reflect, since some of their worshippers would certainly spill into our place by accident.
I squeeze through parked cars and join the flow inside.
“Luxury for free”, says one sign. This isn’t the hard sell, this is the hard giveaway. As I enter I see the Locketts seated at the front, with their daughter, Esther.
I have to admit I thought of getting in touch with them, but was too afraid of bad news. Esther looks well, but the darkness cut into her parents’ face suggests that the problem is still there. There are four wheelchair-bound invalids placed up front next to the Locketts, and several others who manifestly aren’t full of the life force. The Fixico sisters have gathered a couple of hospital wards of the infirm.
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You can’t lose really. If they peg out, you’ve been a big-hearted wheelchair-lover, a comfort to the afflicted, and ill faces are quickly forgotten. If, on the other hand, someone overcomes their paralysis or terminal cancer, you’ve got an earner. It works on a percentage basis, the way you used to ask as many girls to parties as possible because at least one would get drunk, bored or stranded and decide on you.
As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing wrong with misleading healthy, employed individuals and taking their money in exchange for illusions, because a good illusion is a beautiful thing, but it’s wrong to feed off the sick.
I wave to the Reinholds. They return my greeting with that artificial naturality of those caught with their pants down.
Virginia scowls there with her notepad. She hasn’t returned my calls. I waited a day or two for her article to appear. Nothing.
Did I give up? No. I phoned. I caught her once, she said she didn’t know when it would run. Her editor wouldn’t give her an answer, she said. Surely a stock fuck-off.
I left three more messages for her. One message can easily get waylaid or forgotten about. In stressful times so can two.
Four messages: you’re desperate or a nuisance. So I left three.
Nothing.
Did I give up? No. I introduced myself to local radio and television. I talked to a couple of people who sounded interested in the story, but nothing. I had a leaflet printed up about my resurrection, which I distributed to the handful of parishioners at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ: nothing.
It’s as if the Fixico sisters are giving away free money. I now catch a glimpse of Georgia a few rows ahead. The Temple of Extreme Abundance has no problem with see-through tops.
Luis is next to her.
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I’ve lost. My miracle has had less coverage and impact than a missing dog. My flock has deserted en masse. I’ve lost, I’m finished, but I don’t mind. I don’t mind, because I have enough character and backbone to be manful for a few hours. Tomorrow, I’ll be sobbing and suicidal.
Very often when you look at things with hindsight you can see where you went wrong, but sometimes you look at things and you can’t see where you went wrong. Why couldn’t I achieve even a fifth of a congregation like this?
Which is worse? To lose badly or to lose by a whisker? Even as a connoisseur of failure I can’t make up my mind. Being thrashed is especially humiliating and painful at the time, but you can put that out of your mind by consigning the whole episode to oblivion, but losing by just one point can give you the twinges of if-onlys in perpetuity.
Some guy beckons me over. I recognize Fash, the homeless guy who didn’t look homeless, because he had a self-awareness instead of the out-to-lunch sign the others displayed.
His hand, I notice as we shake, is immaculately clean. I sit next to him because it’s the holy thing to frequent the unfortunate.
Although he’s not doing unfortunate tonight. He’s very smart, looking distinctly unstreet. His shirt, on closer inspection, looks like silk and a distinct, appealing aroma of soap or moisturizer wafts around him.
I sit next to Fash although I can’t help thinking that who you hang with tells you who you are. Look at who sits opposite you at your dinner party and you’ll have a good idea of who you are. One of my neighbours was really successful and I kept on inviting him over for supper but, while never actually refusing, he never made it.
Fash is definitely too groomed, and his shirt has shop-newness 247
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– he can’t be out on the street any more. I’m about to ask about his change of fortune when the show starts.
As the music swirls around us, I concede that there’s no way we can even attempt to compete with this; the Hierophant and I are not outclassed: we’re not even good enough to be outclassed.
The preacher comes out and starts his stuff. Great diction, great teeth, great suit. The two Fixico sisters, Margi and Argi, are enthroned behind, watching him. I suspected that the two old dears might have been recruited by a more unscrupulous version of myself to act as a white-haired-granny, crochet-knitting, tea-pouring, everything’s-fine front, but I can see I was wrong and it’s the other way around.
The preacher is the froth, and the ladies are the power. However rarely, there are those individuals you come across, even if you only exchange a hello, whom you immediately sense are decent, they seep goodness (and it is heartening that you will get to encounter some decent people who, nevertheless, being decent, will be unprosperous and unpowerful). The reverse of this warming phenomenon is that, equally, there are souls who simply sprout evil.
The Fixico sisters scare me.
Clichéd little old ladies, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, their eyes have an insect glint. They would eat you alive, and they wouldn’t even show any pleasure. They aren’t just here to bamboozle the invertebrates, there is something not merely dishonest, but very unwholesome here. What’s also interesting is that no one else but me is aware of this.
Rapture and respect are all I witness around me, and I begin to question my judgement as you always do when the herd goes against you.
“God spoke to Margi and Argi,” says the preacher.
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This is a good one. God spoke. The ultimate name-dropping.
The supreme being, a close personal friend of mine, always dropping round for a chat. The supreme being giving me tips.
Telling me to tell you what to do. Of course, the most beautiful thing about a sound bite from God is, while you can’t prove he did, no one can prove he didn’t. It’s like bumping into a celebrity at your deli. Always possible.
“God told the sisters they had a special gift. God told them they had the gift of helping others.” I am tempted to get up and shout, “No. I didn’t.” But I don’t think this will be a fruitful tactic and then my career as a deity is over.
“The Fixico sisters had neighbours like many of you once,”
the preacher continues. “Worried about bills, worried about their family, worried about their health. They began helping their neighbours by using their faith. Now their neighbours have everything and they want to share their secret with you.”
Having explained that the Fixico sisters are aching to share their secret, as is very often the case with those who claim they have an important secret to share, the secret doesn’t actually get shared, just advertised. The preacher sits down and we get some music: live choir, five musicians. They’re very good and my foot taps along.
Then Gert waltzes up to talk about his coffee mug. He evinces no guilt at having switched churches. He’s very happy. “Because of the Fixico sisters my business is thriving and my heart is full of joy. I can’t thank them enough.”
Fash leans to my ear: “They’re evil,” he whispers. Fash is now my friend. My close friend. I admire the judgement. I admire the confident, succinct way he transmits his verdict. We stay another half an hour, and as we walk out Fash says:
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place?” I agree because I have nothing else to do. Fash has clearly changed fortunes big time – we get into a car (a dull, old car, but still a car), and drive down to one of those little man-made islands off the beach. A guard in a little box raises a barrier to allow us in. What’s going on?
We pull up outside a fancy house. Fash must have some job house-sitting or toadying for some moneybags, either that or he’s taking it in the arse for a living. I wouldn’t say it’s the most opulent house I’ve ever been in, but well to the top of the list.
Three bedrooms, but cavernous ones, large, expensive, flashy art on the walls, a garden with a jetty at the end and a boat. If I had this, I’d lock the door and chuckle for the rest of my life.
“So whose place is this?”
“Mine,” he says, as a maid offers us drinks. “I hope dishonesty doesn’t bother you too much.”
“Not too much.”
“In my defence, from a technical point of view, when I was homeless, I was genuinely homeless, I only bought this place last month.”
“Lottery?”
“No, I was born loaded, I had money even when I was out on the streets, I just didn’t have it… on me. I cut myself off.
I’ve always been more than well-off, rather painfully rich. You’ll find this ridiculous, but I was curious how I’d be treated if I didn’t have any money.”
“Like shit?”
“You know it. But it was… educational to get away from my life.”
“You actually lived out on the streets?”
“Oh yeah. For two months,” Fash sips on what I’m sure is a very well-made cocktail. Mine certainly is. “It could have been 250
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worse, you ain’t going to freeze here, and I had a Kevlar jacket, but it was very tough at first. One night I woke up, someone was pissing on me. Another homeless guy. The whole of Miami to relieve himself in, he had to straddle me. That’s what you had to deal with. A couple of times I cracked, if I’d had a credit card or any money on me I’d have walked into a hotel. I cried after I gave you back your wallet. But I tell you what was enlightening.”
“What?”
“How fast you get used to it. You get used to it fast. Not washing. The dirt. When I had my first proper bath, there was a crust on the water, I turned the tub into a swamp, there was vegetation. All in all, I prefer to be liked for my money. But what I wanted to talk to you about is this: to offer you a job. I hope the offer of a well-paid job won’t offend you?”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to, how shall I phrase this? From a compassion and helpfulness point of view, it might jar against your position on compassion and helpfulness, all that forgiving stuff. I want you to… what’s the right word? I want you to destroy the Fixico sisters.”
G
“Driving a car,” says Dave. “Most of us don’t think about what driving a car means. For most of us, a car is a necessity, not a luxury. Without a car, most of us would be finished, but no one really considers how a car is as deadly as a pearl-handled Colt .45. No I take that back, as deadly as the M16. A Colt can’t cut someone in half. The deaths and the maimings. Take the Vietnam War. Five-star war, tanks, planes. A decade of war, 251
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fifty thousand dead Americans, all the hoopla, razzmatazz about it. The roads of America have that many fatalities every year.
Where are the sit-ins about the automobile?”
We are walking down a quiet stretch of Collins Avenue towards an art exhibition put on by Dave’s second cousin’s girlfriend when a solitary figure comes around the corner. There’s no one but us on the street for three or four blocks, and I fear that we’re in line for another mugging, but I see that the figure is tiny, a hunched old man with a walking stick.
When we get closer I see that he is wearing a singlet. Fashion is, of course, a personal statement, but when you get to eighty you shouldn’t be choosing clothing that highlights your roasted, wizened arms. Put it away, pops. We’re about to pass him, when he snaps:
“I’ll be taking your money, wimps.”
Dave looks at me.
The he-hag is having trouble standing up, his right eye looks blind.
He’s toothless. He can’t be far from ninety, and he was a small, thin man before he shrivelled up. We go round him, when he shouts:
“Give me your money, pussies. If you don’t give me your money I’ll tell the police you mugged me.” He produces a pair of dentures from his pocket, cracked as if by force, falls to the ground and shouts for help.
Dave reaches into his jacket, pulls out a wallet and hands it over.
“Tell me, what is it about me?’ he asks.
“You’re bitches. You’re not men enough to laugh about beating up an old fart.”
We walk on.
“What?” says Dave. “You were expecting me to beat him up?
Thanks. My wife she says I’m asking for it. ‘What do you mean, 252
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I’m asking for it?’ I say. ‘You’re always getting mugged you must be doing something to attract it,’ she says. ‘How?’ I say.
‘What exactly am I doing to attract it, dear wife,’ I say. ‘Please tell me.’ ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but you must be doing something. Or it wouldn’t happen would it? Stop it before you get hurt.’”
“Acceptance is important. But it’s also dangerous because it’s very close to surrender. It’s standing right next to surrender. You have to look carefully. You have to accept certain things though. I have to accept that I couldn’t save my brother. I have to accept my face makes me muggee of the month. Yeah.”
Dave explains that from now on he will carry a dupe wallet, which contains out-of-date credit cards and some Haitian banknotes, street value, two cents top. “I thought about getting one of those booby-trapped attaché cases, give the thief an electric shock or blowing off his fingers. I liked that idea a lot.
I really did. Those fingers just flying away. But I’m putting this in the wallet instead.”
He hands me a card.
“You’re on the wrong path. You think you’ve got ahead just now. You’re not stealing from others but yourself. You’re stealing your future. Go to the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ for true help.”
“Finding a card like that would be freaky.”
“Hey, you wanted a higher body count.” Dave stares out at the waves. One or two big ships are on the horizon, almost erased by distance. “Survival. Survival is overrated.”
He gives me my cut of our latest winnings.
G
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My first job for the Fixico sisters is standing in front of the Omni, playing their tape and handing out leaflets. I keep wishing some policeman or authority figure would stop me or move me along, but, unfortunately, when you’re religious you tend to be ignored.
“Do you believe this stuff?” says one recipient.
I restrain myself from replying, “Of course not. You’re quite right, it’s the most outrageous rubbish and the paper’s too hard to wipe your arse with.” I reply:
“Have a good and profitable day, sir.” I mean it too. I’m in a good mood. I like the idea of most people having a good and profitable day. Just not the Fixico sisters.
It’s very tempting to openly sabotage the Fixicos at grass roots, but you never know who’s around.
Calvin, my team leader, for instance. Calvin’s a born crawler and a natural number four or five. Anything higher up the chain of command would be too much, but he likes belonging and mild responsibility. He’d be happy working in a bank or shooting captives in the back of the head in some ethnic dispute, but somehow circumstances have brought him to work as one of the Fixicos’ enforcers, checking up on us, the rabble, the street soldiers.
“You’re not standing right,” was one of the things Calvin carpeted me for. I straightened up, assuming I was being accused of slouching. “You’re not standing right,” he continued. I’m now so unslouched I am bending over backwards.
This is one of the golden rules of management, of course: you have to make it clear what you want. “You’re not standing right,” he shouts in my face again. Getting louder is often seen as a means of being clearer. I long to hit him – but this is the most important skill you have to have in life, working with people you hate.
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He points at my left leg. “Straighten that leg.” I’m standing on my leg, so by implication it’s straight. I will my leg straighter, but nothing happens, because it’s physically impossible to make the leg straighter. “Will you straighten that leg?” he screams again. I can’t make my left leg any straighter, and as far as I can tell – and I should know – it’s no more crooked than my right leg.
I smile. Always smile. I don’t understand why Calvin is screaming at me. The homeless who worked for the Fixicos at the beginning not only had very poor deportment, they flopped on the sidewalk, they fiddled with their balls and were encrusted in vomit. Is this a new order in the Fixico regime or is it directed at me? Are they trying to get rid of me? The sudden fussiness is ridiculous. No army would be this bothered about straight legs.
It would be very easy to get angry about some failed lawyer called Calvin, a wimpy failed lawyer ten years younger than me, a wimpy failed lawyer ten years younger than me who is stupid enough to take the Fixico sisters seriously, shouting in my face: very easy indeed.
But I don’t hit Calvin. I don’t protest. I smile. The smile is a genuine smile because I’m promising myself when this is all over, I’ll take the time and trouble to find Calvin, and kick the crap out of him, vicious-style. It’s important to reward yourself.
I really don’t want another person to hate, I’m quite full-up, but sometimes you have to rise to the challenge. As Calvin tells me I’m not using my hands properly, I soothe myself by imagining his cries for mercy.
Calvin, though hard work, is easy to spot: very tall and he’s addicted to dark suits even in this heat. There’s no sign of him so I’m content for the moment.
I’m standing there watching the buzzards circle, some spread out to sun themselves on the roofs, being relaxed by them, when 255
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a black limo pulls up opposite. A window slides down and I can make out one of the Fixico sisters scrutinizing me.
I think it’s Margi, who’s the older one, although even close up it’s almost impossible to tell them apart as they dress and style themselves identically. Margi’s just that bit fatter and looser round the jowl.
Am I imagining it, or is she suspicious of me? Is she wondering why I’ve agreed to be one of her minions? She’s right to wonder, why has this sub-hierophant gone renegade and joined her ranks? But I’m doing the job to the letter. I must be the least-mad, most qualified leaflet-distributor in her empire. Her cunning is alerted, and she might want to find fault with me, but she can’t.
I’ve always been a good employee. Maybe not a great employee, but a good one, and this time I’m making a special effort.
The limo drives off. She smells danger, but can’t see it.
The Fixico sisters can’t know that if I have one talent, it’s for destroying the organization I work for. But happily, this talent is well hidden.
I can’t prove this, of course, but the results speak for themselves. Emptying the pews of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ isn’t much of an achievement, but pulling down a long-established, major multinational criminal organization in the space of a few months isn’t bad. Those felons in their cells in Bogotá will be wondering where it went wrong. Were they weak in their bribing of politicos? Did someone grass? Did they tread on someone’s toes? They’ll never be thinking that one of their unknown, part-time delivery boys in Miami was the cause of their downfall. Of course, the lighting company took several years, but I was probably struggling against the good fortune of others.
I’m in no rush. I really have nothing much else to do.
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So now I’m giving up. Giving up can be quite enjoyable. I have to accept I’m not going to make it as God. What exactly I will do I don’t know, but I’m putting off acting by acting (action is often only speeded-up waiting). My preoccupation now is to deal with the Fixico sisters. Hatred can be as sustaining as love, even if there can be unpleasant side effects.
Los Angeles was where the Fixico sisters started. Then they moved east, through New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Tampa and now Miami, mysteriously acquiring money and influence along the way. Fash was appalled by how he saw them treating the homeless, and their philosophy of “give to receive” which concentrated, for the subordinates anyway, on the giving and not the receiving. Fash, who had worked for a few days as a boombox escort, was asked to leave. “They claimed I was asking difficult questions,” said Fash. “I only asked one: where’s the money going?” A vagrant, he added, who failed to return a boombox (they’re very basic so the resell value would only be almost nothing) was found dead. Of course, if you live out on the street your life expectancy’s not great.
“And, I trust I don’t need to mention that if you help me in this, as they say, I’ll make it very much worth your while…”
Fash said.
“I have no idea what they say, because I’ve never been urged to accept a well-paid job.”
“So you’ll take it?”
“No.”
I explained to Fash that he shouldn’t involve me directly in his plans to block the Fixico sisters. I would go solo, as the jinxer, and web myself into the Fixicos.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter. We pride ourselves on being unorthodox 257
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at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. But I’ve got some good ideas for your money,” I continued. His money would be better used to build up the Hierophant, buy some advertising and above all to remove the Locketts and Esther from the orbit of the Fixicos. Fash found a leukaemia specialist in New York who’s supposed to be the best in the country, who might help, and in any case New York is a long way from here.
I make a point of standing in the sun. I really like it.
G
“Do you want to talk about it?” asks Sixto.
“No,” I reply.
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I can offer some suggestions.” Sixto has now qualified as a psychotherapist, whatever that means. He is packing his best crockery away, meticulously, into boxes and is eager to practise.
“I don’t need suggestions. What I need is a new life.”
“Maybe I could make you see your life in a new way.”
“Sixto, I appreciate the offer. I have a problem – I’m not stupid enough to believe in nonsense.”
Sixto considers the empty boxes and his remaining bric-a-brac. We rarely go home. What we do is return to a collection of furniture to sleep with. A selection of objects to dust. That’s what centres most of us – our favourite dust-gatherers. Of course, I’d like my own collection of objects to come back to; it’s more comforting than one would like to admit.
Failure gets a bad press. Naturally, you have to fight the laziness for a while before you give up, but failure is the norm.
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It’s a big club. Most attempts end in failure. And all success ends in failure, eventually. Success can make you forget that. One of my neighbours had a mail-order business. I can’t remember the exact figure but I think she said as long as they got a 0.1%
response from their mailshots, that was fine.
Napalm comes in. I study him. Nothing.
“Hey, Napalm,” says Sixto. “We were just discussing the human race. There’s no hope.” Anyone who says this usually doesn’t mean it. Who says, “Have you noticed my nose is in the middle of my face?”
Napalm checks the fridge. He pours himself a large pineapple juice and goes upstairs. Nothing.
“Tell me about your mad love?” asks Sixto. I don’t know why I reply. Perhaps Sixto does have a skill.
“It was mad.”
“Who was she? What did she look like? Why and how did it end?”
“She was beautiful. Clever. Great nose. A great nose.”
“And?”
“She moved. I wrote a long letter, detailing the madness of my love. On very expensive paper. I wrote, and this was the killer line, I had chosen her out of the billions of people on this planet.”
“What happened?”
“The letter didn’t reach her – her mother was forwarding her mail. It ended up in the glove compartment of her mother’s car. A year later her mother discovered it and passed it on. The recipient of my madness got in touch and said how moved she was by the letter.”
“And?”
“I was married by then. I got married two days before she called.”
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“You gave up too easily.”
“No, I didn’t. I talked to her mother. ‘Has my letter arrived?’
‘Yes.’ ‘Have you given it to her?’ ‘Yes.’ I thought she had received it, but wasn’t interested.”
“That’s infuriating.”
“I used to get angry. You always wonder about those roads you didn’t take. How it would have turned out? But now I console myself with the thought that the roads untravelled would probably have been just as disaster-strewn as the ones I took.”
“That’s consolation?”
“Works for me.”
Sixto pulls out some long steel device from a drawer, some costly culinary tool. “You know what’s frightening? Not only do I not remember buying this, I don’t know what it’s for.” He tosses it into a box. I’m glad I travel light.
“So what important truth have you learnt that you would be willing to share with others?” I ask.
“You mean, if I had to distil the wisdom of my thirty-two years on this planet into one sentence? If I had ten seconds to transmit only one important universal truth, as my message to mankind?”
“Yes.”
Sixto pauses. After deliberation, “Most cats don’t like to be microwaved.”
G
“Inexpensive perversions. You have inexpensive perversions, you’re laughing,” says a passing woman, who looks like the last woman to make that remark. Perhaps her husband’s are expensive.
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“We all need a moral code to ignore,” her companion agrees.
As I have succeeded in collecting more in donations than any of the Fixicos’ other street representatives, I’ve been promoted to South Beach.
Calvin is unhappy about this, but cash is cash – and he doesn’t know that I rarely collect any money from the public, I simply hand in a few bills from my pocket. I’m not up against any serious competition: many of the others are so disturbed they would be as likely to eat a dollar bill as spend it.
And the money I am feeding into the Fixicos will do damage
– it’s been Tyndaled. Will I be lucky in being unlucky? Or will I be unlucky in not being unlucky? How should I look at it?
Calvin is desperate to find fault with me, but can’t. Doing your job is often one of the subtlest but most satisfying ways of needling your employer. It can drive them mad when you do exactly what you’re told.
I haven’t been wasting my time completely. My tan is bone-deep and, in my shirt pocket, on a folded piece of paper, is Calvin’s home address. That I know where to find him is very comforting.
If you have to spend hours hanging around a street corner, Lincoln Road is definitely the place to do it. Intriguing pedestrians and good restaurants. An elderly man wearing only a white dressing gown and white slippers comes up to me. I doubt his outfit is a fashion statement.
He is brandishing two huge cigars and a box of matches. He cheerily offers me one of the cigars, saying something in Spanish I don’t understand… I refuse. He persists in a good-natured but firm manner. I accept.
We smoke the cigars while he yacks vivaciously, in Spanish, about the past, I assume. I can’t work out whether he knows 261
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I don’t understand a word or whether he has me down as a listening addict… My guess is he’s some Cuban who’s climbed out of a window at his daughter’s house or a hospital where he’s not allowed to light up. He maintains the gestureful monologue (although I can see he’s ill) for half an hour. Then he shakes my hand, thanks me and shuffles off.
I continue to watch the style warriors trooping by and mentally munch another grouper sandwich. Yesterday, I had a grouper sandwich at Books & Books, and I embarrassed myself by how much I enjoyed it. The grouper must have been swimming around a few hours earlier, it was that fresh. It was fried with mastery by someone who truly cared – although it was the accompanying aioli that made it so out of this world.
My pretensions of holiness have been dropped, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t enjoy a skilfully made grouper sandwich, but it’s bad for a grown man to be so moved by a sandwich. I am a little ashamed of myself for being preoccupied by the sandwich all day, and returning to this end of the Lincoln Road solely to have another.
But when I take my lunch break I discover it’s gone from the menu. I now see how wise I was to over-enjoy the grouper sandwich yesterday. Pig it up while you can. I settle for a tuna ceviche and my phone rings.
“You haven’t heard, have you?” says Dave.
“Heard what?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” he continues. “Do you want to guess what’s happened?”
It depends a great deal on who’s saying to you you’re not going to believe something; some people’s unbelievable is, actually, very believable and not interesting at all. Dishonest Dave’s unbelievable is certain to give the definition a good kicking.
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“Tell me.”
“No, no. You have a guess.”
“Just tell me.”
“News like this, you’ll have to beg. I want to hear some begging.”
“No.”
“Beg.”
“No. I’d say you want to tell me this news more than I want to hear it.”
“You want to hear this news.”
“So tell me.”
“No, you have to guess first.”
“Ludwig van Beethoven, Elvis Presley and Pablo Escobar are alive and well and running a dry-cleaning business with astonishing success in New Jersey.”
“Better than that. The Fixico sisters.” He pauses for me to say, “Yes?”
“The Fixico sisters…” He gives another long pause. “Have been arrested.”
I laugh loudly. For a long time. I can sense Dave is twitching to be asked what for, but I don’t.
“Do you want to guess what for?”
“Fraud?”
“We’ve got fraud. What’s better than fraud?”
“I don’t know, what’s better than fraud?”
“Murder.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I laugh uncontrollably.
“Wait. Wait,” says Dave. “I haven’t finished yet. What’s better than a murder charge?”
“I give up.”
“Twelve counts of murder.”
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In fact there is a bewildering armada of charges, from unpaid parking tickets through tax evasion to murder. The juiciest revelation was that the Fixicos’ start-up capital came from collecting on insurance policies. These insurance policies had been taken out on the homeless of Los Angeles who had a series of fatal accidents under the wheels of cars that didn’t stop and which were driven by drivers unknown. I find it hard to believe they managed to collect money like this, since I never managed to get my insurance company to pay for genuine holes in my roof.
“One charge of murder,” says Dave. “Any blockhead can dodge. Two or three charges of murder – a fancy lawyer can money you out. Twelve? Twelve? You’re kissing goodbye, saying sayonara, auf Wiedersehen, aloha and adieu to the world on the other side of the bars. Yeah. How long have you been working for them?”
“Almost three weeks.”
“Tyndale, you are too dangerous to know.”
Of course, you’ll say to me, Tyndale, my old china, the police must have been on their trail for years, building the case. Okay, but I know the truth.
I dry my eyes. Bitch all you want about life, we all get a few laughs. I drop the boombox and the leaflets in a bin. They’re not needed any more.
I reach into my shirt pocket. Calvin.
G
“Tyndale, how are you?” asks the Hierophant. He was always thin, but he’s still managed to lose some weight. However, the old marine swagger is back. He squeezes past the boxes in the hallway.
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The house has been sold and Sixto has crammed everything into boxes. He wanted a change of scenery and moving away will also help avoid awkward questions about money, should any emerge from Latin America. I don’t know what to do.
Having someone to destroy was nice, it provided a reason to get out of bed.
“For someone who died,” says the Hierophant, “you’re looking good.”
My resurrection made no incursion into the world. Only a few dozen people know about it: Sixto, Didsbury, Dr Greer, Virginia, the various journalists I pestered. I can’t see what I did wrong. Even now, every other day or so, there is a reference to Gert and his mug in a paper, magazine or website somewhere; but I’ve never found one line about me. Perhaps I should have tried to keep the whole thing secret, but you can’t appeal. I pulled off a miracle and no one cared.
“You’re looking good too, Gene,” I say, because it’s mostly true.
“I’m okay. I’m an old man. There’s no getting away from it.
You tell kids how tough old age is, but they won’t listen to you –
they keep on getting older. You get old, you get maudlin. I don’t watch television any more. I don’t read the papers any more. I can’t bear news, because it’s all about the suffering. I can’t take it any more. I see a poster for some kid’s missing dog and it breaks me up – that’s how old I am. I can’t even enjoy the sports channels any more, because sport at its worst means someone breaks a leg, and at its very best even sport means someone loses.”
He pulls out a copy of Scientific American from his jacket.
“This is all I read now. Science is safe. Muons don’t moan.”
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medical condition. What I don’t have is any idea of what I should do next.
“We miss you at the Church, Tyndale,” says the Hierophant.
“What a man does with his time is his business. I don’t know why we haven’t seen you lately, but I came round to let you know that I’m not sore or disappointed with you for giving your services to the Fixicos. Lots of people were taken in. You’re always assured a warm welcome at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ.
And we are now the seventy-second most happening church in the country.”
Fash’s money has helped of course. Air conditioning has been installed. Youth activities established. Mike runs a boxing club which has proved popular. “Kids love organized violence.” The Hierophant has a science club, basic physics and chemistry (blowing things up). A weekend barbecue has provoked a huge turnout from the older worshippers, and the cakes at the new Bible-study class have received rave reviews in the local press and have helped a number of former muggers change their lives.
The Locketts have very publicly expressed their thanks to the Church for getting treatment for Esther, who seems to be in the clear.
“We’re looking at bigger premises,” explains the Hierophant.
“The Temple of Extreme Abundance will probably be moving on.”
“Gene, it was great working with you. I learnt a lot from you
– you helped me a lot, but I’ve got other plans now.”
I’m worried for a second that he’ll ask what my plans are, as I couldn’t make up anything convincing. He gives a smile and leaves.
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but it’s always disappointing when you’ve extended your hand to someone and it isn’t noticed. I shall take time to explore that disappointment more fully later on.
The door to Gulin’s room is opened, and her stuff is all neatly boxed up. I don’t have much in the way of packing to do, but it occurs to me it’s time to do it and to make a decision. I’m wondering whether I’ll see her before she leaves, when I hear steps and she appears.
“Hi,” she says, pleased to see me. It is a small, but real pleasure, to see that someone is pleased to see you. “How you doing?”
“Okay,” I reply. “When you moving?”
“Soon. Why don’t you ask me if I have any news?”
“Do you have any news?”
“Yes. I’m a millionaire.” I wait for the punchline, but there isn’t one. “My boss has left me a ranch. Fifty acres.”
I laugh. I don’t know why I find it so funny, but I do. I laugh and laugh. She’s beaten the system. It’s the best news I’ve heard for years.
I can see why he left her something so generous. He left his family in Illinois when he was sixteen, never had contact with them again, he came out to Florida on his own, built up a chain of movie theatres. That he was gay might have been a factor, because it was a different era, the Forties, when having a fruit for a son was worse than having him eaten by wolves, but maybe it wasn’t that. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. He saw himself in Gulin, someone who was completely unsupported, completely on her own, because very few of us are without some backup, some family, some membership, some savings. Very few of us have the courage to step right out into the unknown. I don’t.
I came here because I had nothing to leave behind. I spoke the language. I had some money.
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“I’m a millionaire,” she says, “but I’m broke.” Gulin’s got the ranch, fifty miles outside of Miami, but no money to pay all the overheads. I’d sell the whole caboodle immediately, but as has been observed, I’m often in the company of the wrong decision. “I need to find a way of making money. There used to be a chicken farm on the property.”
One of the great shortcomings of life is the lack of captions, that there is no punctuation, no musical sting to warn you when something important is happening. The very important events usually appear as indistinct from the unimportant events.
Friends or relatives put on their coats and leave, they close the door quietly, as they have done hundreds or thousands of time before and you have no inkling that that will be the last time you’ll see them, that that particular walking-out, number three hundred and sixty-two, will be the one that will change everything, even though it looked exactly the same as the other three hundred and sixty-one.
I’m glad I have a chance to say goodbye to her properly.
“I could use a lodger. You interested, Tyndale?”
G
Orinoco is put on the back seat. Being boxed up upsets some cats, but Orinoco, as always, is calm and, while cooperative, dignified, like a celebrity signing an autograph. Orinoco has to be the reincarnation of some wisdomist. Every time I look at Orinoco I feel inferior – because the cat has clearly got things figured out.
Keep cool. That’s all you can do. Keep cool and wait. Wait for your opportunity. There’s always a danger that coolness can collapse into capitulation, but all you can do is keep cool 268
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and wait for your opportunity. Maybe I’ve missed some, and maybe the ones I’ve taken wouldn’t have been the ones I’d have chosen, but I’ve had some fun. Crusher of lighting companies, destroyer of multinational criminal organizations, swatter of sanctimonious swindlers, that’s me. At least one was a mission, and it’s nice to have a mission accomplished.
Keep cool. Or at least sham cool. Sham cool and true cool, they’re almost the same. What’s our future? Orinoco and I, we laugh. I finger the diamond I’ve had fitted in my left ear as a memento of Miami, and the lesson I hope I’ve learnt here: be cool, be hard, be patient as a diamond waiting in the ground.
“Is Orinoco any special breed?” I ask.
“Just your black cat. I got him from a rescue centre. Some heartless person had abandoned him,” says Gulin.
As I manoeuvre my suitcase in the car, I have a strange sensation, something I haven’t experienced for so long, I’ve almost forgotten it: I’m home.
We’ve said our goodbyes. Dishonest Dave gave me a compilation disc which we play as we head south towards Florida City. A singer I don’t know sings about being lucky. It occurs to me that perhaps bad luck, the nasty, unscenic sibling of good luck, can shepherd you to your destination too.
“Idiot,” comments Gulin, as an idiot cuts in front of us, but it’s an observation not a curse. Gulin is a gifted driver, effortless but masterful. There’s nothing like driving in a comfy, powerful car, in sunshine, to give you the feeling that you’re getting somewhere. Despite my persistent and embarrassing medical condition, I ponder my future and eternity with amusement.
My future? I’m wearing a sharp, short-sleeved silk shirt that Fash gave me, appropriate to an upender of realms, a man who has taken out entire empires single-handed, not that anyone 269
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will know or believe it; but I don’t care. The sun is shining, I don’t care. This might be extremely superficial, but the extremely superficial, like a tissue, can often get the job done.
I ponder eternity. If you think about it, eternity can’t be a long time, because time has been removed from the mix. Eternity might feel momentary, like putting on a pair of sunglasses, or like a drive in the sunshine, while you wear a sharp, short-sleeved silk shirt. Honestly, what good is the world? Why does it have to be so big, crowded and messy, when it boils down to a handful of characters, and maybe just one?
Somehow Gulin always cheers me up. There’s an infectious optimism about her. No, not that, not optimism, because it’s not that everything will be fine. She’s not that foolish. No, there’s a can-do will about her. Whatever comes, it can be managed
– and you really can’t ask for anything more than that.
Keeping her eyes on the road she asks:
“So, Tyndale. Have you ever thought about children?”
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