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As she spoke she broke a Necco Wafer I’d given her between her thumbs, into smaller and smaller pieces. A feat, I realized when I tried it later, that required a level of tensile power I didn’t have.

  “By the way, I kind of invented this whole style,” she said after a little while.

  “Wait. What? Hang in there, baby? But I, like, remember them from the eighties. Hold old were you, five?”

  I didn’t want to call her a liar. I wanted to believe everything.

  “Well, reinvented. The concept, I mean. I, like, gave them a new iteration. It’s a long story, okay?” Now she sounded hostile again, like she had at the beginning. “The point is, I got ass-screwed out of the credit. Out of the money, too.”

  Iteration? Ass-screwed? I already loved her vocabulary.

  “That sucks,” I trotted out.

  She glanced—maybe glared—straight up at me through her bangs and spat out her words. “You think?”

  There’s a special tang to long-distance bus air. Low-end life and death. Human detritus, confined night-stinks, exhaustion, and plain exhaust. Someone had either passed gas in a nearby seat or passed on earlier in the evening and begun to rot.

  I turned around and saw no one awake. Then noticed a shiny pair of aviator glasses a few rows back. Facing me. What little light there was, from the passing cars and roadside lamps, flared on and off the lenses. There’s something scary about glasses, when you don’t see the eyes. Spectacles had a large square shaved head, trim goatee, and—strangest of all—suit, shirt, and tie, not the least bit loosened. When he saw me he crossed his large hands carefully and laid them on his chest, both forefingers pointing up and out in my direction, here’s-the-steeple style. A gesture meant to convey something, I was certain, I just wasn’t sure what. The bus was a little like prison, where every gesture had to be interpreted. Was that nod from the con with the cross and swastika on his neck meant to convey Jesus loves you or I’m going to hike your legs up and shank you in the shower while I fuck you? (The latter, by the way, was something no one said to me the entire time I was behind bars. Though I could not, I will be the first to admit, stop dreading it.)

  In the slow strobe light of the highway it was impossible to tell if he was deep black or an albino. Just that there was something strange about that square head, and the big face so set and hard that the finger church and the light dancing off his aviators were the only signs of life. The rest was pure dead menace.

  My new almost-friend and heart’s desire caught me staring and pulled a loose, chewed-on cigarette from her jacket pocket. Flipped it in her mouth. I waited, with some kind of fascination, to see if she was actually going to light up. Then she took it out again, plucked a shred of tobacco off her pouty lower lip and put the cigarette back in her pocket. She started to say something. I assumed it would be about the prince of men I’d just been staring at. But each time I thought she was going to speak, she stopped herself.

  NINE

  Was I the Creepy Stranger?

  Something irregular and beautiful was happening outside. Yellow lightning. Burning veins in the sky. It made me conscious of my own non-burning veins. They hadn’t been fed in a while. My seatmate, whose name, I realized, I still didn’t know—possibly because I hadn’t asked—raised an eyebrow at me, then faced the window. She seemed, on first view, the kind of young woman who didn’t care all that much about her appearance. After even a sneaky glance—all I’d allowed myself, out of some sudden flush of discretion—it seemed unlikely those breasts could have sprouted without surgical assistance. But what did I know? I was never one of those guys who drooled over giant bra-stuffers. The truth (possibly more mortifying) is that I was not one who went after any “type” in particular; no, my kind of girl, from teen-hood on, was any girl who liked me.

  It’s like, we were connected. But not. Had not even exchanged names.

  Was I the creepy stranger who wouldn’t shut up—or was I acknowledging a deep and unexpected soul connection? And when, exactly, had I started channeling Oprah?

  “You saw Lurch, right?” she said. “The creep with the glasses?”

  “Hard to miss.”

  For a second she didn’t say anything, then she did.

  “Ever think somebody was trying to kill you?” She spoke without turning toward me, just as some hyped-up semi went flying by what felt like inches from our window. The truck had a high-pitched, unsteady whine that faded in its wake.

  “Somebody’s trying to kill you?” I said over the noise. “Does this have something to do with ‘Hang in There’? The kitten on the branch? Your iteration of it?”

  Now she did turn around. Fast and accusatory. “What? Are you giving me shit?”

  Oh man. I knew what she said. But maybe I didn’t. Or maybe she didn’t want to say it just then. Maybe all life, when you boiled it down, was a series of wrong assumptions. Mine anyway. I just didn’t want to be an asshole. Anymore. I’d been off drugs for what seemed like ages—at least a day and a half. Drugs made Lloyd feel like an asshole, and Lloyd needed more drugs to deal with that. Especially when Lloyd was trying to say no to drugs. When Lloyd had promised himself he wasn’t going to do drugs anymore. Which of course just made Lloyd—e-nough!

  If she hadn’t been there I would have banged the heel of my hand off my forehead. Screamed at myself to shut up or stop in much the same manner that famed TV reverend Peter Popoff smacks seekers’ foreheads and yells, “Heal!” when he strong-arms their maladies by letting the Holy Spirit hammer through him.

  “So,” I said, wading into the sullen silence that had descended after the freak lightning and my apparent misunderstanding about why someone was trying to kill her. (It’s the little things.) “Are you suing? Do you have any kind of plan?”

  “Plan?” The way she squinched her face sideways made the word seem vaguely degrading. “That’s a strange idea. But I like strange, if you know what I mean.”

  “Strange,” I said, blocking the words with my fingers in the air before I realized the assyness of it, “when what you want is an adventure you’ve never had before. Then you show a photo of some girl face down on a bed, crying.”

  She sat up straight. “You could do it that way. Or have that same photo with text across the top: MAKE A NEW MISTAKE!”

  “Wow!” I wasn’t normally a wow guy, but I meant it. “Did you just come up with that?”

  “It’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”

  We weren’t touching, but my skin could feel her skin buzzing.

  Everything had happened so fast—the whole exchange—we both kind of froze in place, eyes straight ahead. She may have half-smiled. I didn’t want to ruin the moment and check. Sex was something you didn’t care about when you had dope—and used to kill the pain when you didn’t. Kick-sex was fairly uncelebratory. You—if you were a man—came in seconds. And you could come often. Over and over. You just couldn’t come much. The operative term is “air popper.” It didn’t even feel good. It was relief, not pleasure. Like so much of life. (Well, my life; a junkie’s life.) But. With this person I experienced something. Something unfamiliar. Like that weird yellow lightning. Like chemical refineries that flared in the night, toxic birthday candles lighting the sky right and left for miles.

  TEN

  I Guess This Is What They Call Pleasure

  Or maybe . . . fun? Is that going too far? It was all such foreign territory. The snappy patter. The out-of-nowhere joy of it! I remembered my championship line from Christian Swingles. (And yes, there’s nothing classier than quoting yourself.) Sometimes we wait for God to make the next move when God is saying, “It’s your time to act!”

  This was more intense than sex. More unlikely, at any rate. For the second time, after our “strange” exchange, I found myself cracking open a silence born either of implied intimacy or complete disregard. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she hated me and wanted to fuck me. Maybe . . . you get the pic
ture. The scenarios were endless. And therefore meaningless. So I plunged on in. Where was she going to go? We were on a fucking bus.

  “So . . . you invented the cards? Reinvented. Gave them a new look. Whatever . . .”

  “I took the concept. Made it more now-ish.”

  “Now-ish. Right. And some boss-type guy stole your idea?”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “What? No! I’m commiserating.”

  “Exactly. He screwed me. Trust me on that. I got fucked. Nothing I could do.” She sounded angry about it, as if somehow I were in on this travesty, and she resented me for it. “Now I just want to go after him.”

  “To get the money?”

  “I just told you. I’ll never get the money. I just don’t want him to be happy. I don’t even want him to be unhappy. I want him to be destroyed.”

  “What do you want to do to him?”

  “I want to fuck with him.”

  “How?”

  “The worst way you fuck with anybody. You can think about it but you’ll never guess.”

  I flashed on “creepy-crawly.” The Manson Family’s favorite pastime. Imagine it, insane strangers could be clawing at your carpet right now. Licking your sheets. They did all that shit before the corny stuff, like murdering and writing “PIG” in blood on the wall.

  There were so many things I could have said, at that moment. Words of caution. Concerned, reasonable words. Because, for some irrational reason, this was someone I cared about. Despite the fact that we’d just met. I hardly knew anything about the woman, but I already knew enough to know there were things I didn’t want to know. (In other words, she was a total stranger about whom I was likely delusional; for whom, not to flatter myself, I harbored huge and inappropriate emotional expectations.)

  So, out of all the things I could have said, I said the thing that, I hoped, could make her like me. I didn’t think it out of course. But that’s what I was doing. I said, “Do you know anybody in LA?”

  She asked, “Why?”

  I said, “Maybe we can hang out . . . So, what did you say your name was?”

  “Nora,” she said, like she was ashamed of it. “My mother wanted me to be an old lady.”

  We didn’t speak for a while after that. But I could tell she wanted to say something. Finally she put her cold hand on mine and turned to me.

  “You were right, what you thought before.”

  “About what?”

  I could tell she was used to guys staring at her enormous breasts instead of looking her in the eye. So I made a point of not staring at them. I was, as of that moment, an eye man.

  “About the guy trying to murder me,” she said. “You heard right. He’s back there, right now. Looking at us. He probably wants to murder you too.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why do you think? Because you’re with me.”

  ELEVEN

  Words Made of Cheese and Blood

  Think of all the great murders you’ve seen in TV and movies. The entertaining death you were raised on. Bullets, bombs, knives, arrows. Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower. Sonny Corleone machine-gun twitchy at the toll booth. The shoot-’em-ups. The throw-’em-downs. The great Danny Trejo in Machete.

  Our entire EIC (Entertainment-Industrial Complex) exists as one giant instructional murder video. And we haven’t even talked about the specialty items. The master courses. Gourmet murder shows. . .

  I know, I know. I was trying to come up with shit to say to the CSI people. I was, niche-wise, the designated “edgy” guy, which meant, in my experience, serving up the comfortable cliché: the most beloved commodity in Hollywood. Safe Edge . . . Don’t get me started.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. See, a weird thing happened when we got to LA. We got a little turned around at Union Station. I’d never been there, but I had seen it already, in the first half of a William Holden double bill on AMC. In Union Station (Paramount, 1950), the future dead alcoholic portrays a railway cop whom Joyce Willecombe, played by the world’s most forgettable actress, tells about the two very bad men on her train. Joyce is the secretary to a rich man named Henry Murchison (Herbert Heyes), whose blind daughter, Lorna, has been kidnapped and held for ransom. The station has been chosen as the site of the drop! (Despair in film noir is always cool.) Why this (albeit slow-moving) classic has not been excavated and remade with Ryan Gosling is beyond me.

  Then again, what do I know? I’m no movieland obsesso, just a guy who’s killed a lot of time loaded in front of the TV. Now, pharma trivia—whole different deal. Ask me anything. Did you know marketers invented irritable bowel syndrome because crippling diarrhea sounded too low-end? (No pun intended.) Or that Lomotil, an early treatment, contained atropine? About which narco-titan William Burroughs waxed eloquent in the fifties as a cure for drug addiction. Though, until his final dose, Big Bill himself ended up in Kansas on methadone—originally called Dolophine, named for Adolph Hitler by kiss-ass Nazi chemists seeking cheap, synthetic morphine for wounded Wehrmact.

  I would argue, if I were the type who argued, that pharmaceuticals provide the secret history of Western civilization; and, pharma-copy, my default niche, will someday be recognized as the representational literature of the twenty-first century. Future archaeologists (assuming there’s a future) will dig through our detritus and find more pill bottles than books, iPads, or Kindles—life, in America, now being something you treat, not something you live.

  What are we now, but our symptoms?

  I once had to meet a connection at an all-night poetry slam at Bergen Community College. I had to sit through his “set” before I could cop. Freestyle. That was edgy, too. I know, because he snapped his fingers between lines. The dealer’s name was Bondo and he spoke with a questionable Nuyorican accent. Questionable, because I happen to know he came from Akron. I still remember his highlights.

  Is the definition of literature “nothing I actually read”?

  SNAP!

  Would the Bible still be holy if it had been written in bum dandruff?

  DOUBLE SNAP!

  Hemingway on Twitter. @BIGPAPA. Roof of mouth itches. Loading shotgun. Like I told Fitzgerald, always keep Mama Twelve-gauge cleaned and oiled!

  SNAP-SNAP-BOOM!

  The next day I wrote a campaign for Prostex that began: If Jesus had lived to be sixty, even He would have needed prostate relief. It went nowhere. But did failure mean you couldn’t be proud?

  TWELVE

  Bad Houdini

  Union Station had a bang-up ending. I won’t ruin it for you. Union Station itself (the train and bus station, not the movie) also starred in Collateral, (Tom Cruise’s greatest role! He’s great when he plays dark!) and some odd bits of Star Trek: First Contact, which I saw in a motel room in Tulsa when I had to stay out of the Christian Swingles Office and away from my apartment, for reasons that have long since escaped me . . .

  I had no luggage, and neither did my new friend and confidante, the runaway greeting card innovator. She nudged me when the man with the shiny glasses got off behind us. “He’s going to follow us,” she said. “The man who screwed me owns a lot of companies. He’s powerful. He doesn’t like trouble. That’s why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why he sent this freak to assassinate me.”

  We stood and watched the man who’d steepled his fingers at me walk our way. He kept walking, right past us. But Nora only sneered. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “So do I. I’m going to the little bus riders’ room. Try not to get assassinated till I’m done, okay?”

  “You think that’s funny?”

  She went wide-eyed. In all our hours together, I’d seen nothing like this. Since Tulsa she’d been a mask of brunette disdain. Now she was clutching my wrist with two clammy hands. (And they were both hers.)

  “Don’t go.”

 
“I have to go,” I said. Then I quoted myself. Well, my “work.” Listen: Still ashamed to wear a diaper? Imagine the shame if you don’t. (I won’t lie, I still love that.) “Seriously,” I said, “I have to, you know . . . know.”

  “The man is in there . . .” she whispered, and made a steeple with her tiny, nail-picked fingers. I turned in time to see the big man disappear into the men’s room. “Please, Lloyd.”

  It was the first time she used my name. I grabbed her and kissed her and she whispered, “Do him. For me.”

  I quickly let her go. This is the kind of line you hear in movies. The kind that stops you, makes you wonder if it’s just a line.

  I could tell by the way he was walk-running that Steeple Man really had to go. You don’t walk that way unless you’ve hit the urgent stage. Bad enough to pop sweat. When every step is organ-churning torture. In which case all you care about is removing the ferret teeth from your bladder. Our man could have used some Flomax.

  I followed him into the men’s room, where the smell of Lysol and piss-cake industrial-strength cleanser was eye-watering. We interrupted an argument between two overweight, older gay guys washing their underwear in the sink. (They might not have been gay; they might have just been friends with a taste for eye shadow.) They barely took notice of us. A man wearing a pimp hat in a Hoveround scooted in a minute after me and that got the pair’s attention. “Honey,” said the larger queen on the left, “you are so Herman Cain. So how does one relieve himself in that thing?” Hoveround didn’t answer. Instead he tugged his hat down low, hit his toggle switch, and backed out the door. “Quel snob!” the second mirror-gazer snipped.

  Meanwhile, the large bespectacled man from the bus gave no indication that he sensed me behind him. I hadn’t planned on doing harm. I hadn’t planned. I just grabbed his shoulder bag out of his hands as he turned to hoist it on the stall door hook. He was too surprised to react. Or not surprised at all. Up close, his skin shone some strange shade of yellow. I thought black albino. Then, Bhopal. Side effects of the gas leak at Bhopal: thousands dead, children blinded, a generation (this got little press) born a strange shade described in Hindi as vameesa, which translates roughly as “glowing egg yolk.” (Did I think this then, or am I thinking it now? But Bhopal was in 1984, which would have made him twenty-eight, and he might have been twice that. Maybe he was just African American and jaundiced.)