Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (18 page)

 
          
 
"It ain't what I want, bub. It's what you
want, and it looks like you ain't gettin' any. Not tonight. What's your
name?"

 
          
 
Priscilla said, "That's disgusting."

 
          
 
"May be, honey, but you were the one
kissing it."

 
          
 
Preston
said, "This is absurd. I was kissing my friend good night."

 
          
 
"I don't blame you. What's your
name?"

 
          
 
Preston
paused. "Harry Reems."

 
          
 
The guard thought for a beat, then said,
"Bullshit. Harry Reems ain't here. I'da noticed."

 
          
 
'Scott Preston," Priscilla said
imperiously. "My name is Priscilla Godfrey. And I find this whole business
in very bad taste."

 
          
 
"That's your problem."

 
          
 
Preston
heard the scratch of a pencil on notepaper.

 
          
 
Priscilla said, "What's your name?"

 
          
 
"What's my name got to do with it?"

 
          
 
"I intend to report this incident."

 
          
 
“That's my job!"

 
          
 
'Then we'll both report it, and we'll see whom
the district attorney believes."

 
          
 
“The who?''

 
          
 
Priscilla held out her hand to
Preston
. "Good night, Scott," she said. “Thank
you for the walk." She turned and marched toward the clinic.

 
          
 
The light followed her, and
Preston
in his darkness heard the guard mutter,
"Holy shit!"

 
          
 
Marcia awoke, wrenched from her sexy dream by
the rush of water and clunk of plumbing from the toilet in the apartment next
door. She didn't bother to look at the clock on the bedside table. It was
5:45 a.m.
It was always
5:45 a.m.
exactly when the short-order cook in the
apartment next door exploded in a carnival of excretions.

 
          
 
Marcia had long ago concluded that the man's
peristalsis was run by a quartz movement, and that his toilet functioned on a
Jeep transmission.

 
          
 
She looked over at Dan, debating whether or
not to wake him and use him to finish off her dream with a dash of the real
thing. He slept on his back, his mouth open, his eyes never completely closed.
A sliver of white eyeball showed between the lids. He looked dead.

 
          
 
One appetite soured, others clamored for
attention. Her bladder suddenly felt full. Her mouth yearned for the bitter
balm of coffee. And though the prospect of running made her knees and ankles
ache, she had been clean long enough not to doubt the tonic that exercise would
give her. Get the beta endorphins pumping early on, and she could deal with
whatever the day threw at her. Miss them, and every minor glitch would summon
forth an imp to taunt her from the alleys of her mind, begging her to ease the
pain with just one drink, just one pill.

 
          
 
As she sat on the John, she tried to remember
what time last night she had had her last pee. It seemed that the intervals between
urgent pees were growing shorter, that she couldn't hold her water the way she
used to. Not surprising. Her kidneys probably looked like used Brillo pads,
after twenty years of fighting toxic chemicals. Damage done is damage done.
What would it be like in five years? Would she be peeing every five minutes?
Have to wear a bag?

 
          
 
Probably.

 
          
 
Stupid bitch.

 
          
 
Stop it!

 
          
 
Destructive thinking. Which leads to despair.
Which leads to hopelessness. Which leads to . . . Hell, why not have a couple
of short ones, take your mind off it awhile?

 
          
 
She laughed aloud, amused and amazed at the relentlessness
of the demon that would live forever within her, pleased and grateful that she
recognized all its cues and could parry every thrust.

 
          
 
No. Not every thrust. Never say
"every." Never get cocky, or one day you'll wake up on the floor of
some gin mill and say to yourself. How did that happen?

 
          
 
"Good morning to you too, you devious
bastard," she said to the demon, and she stood up and flushed the toilet
and pulled on her running shorts.

 
          
 
She didn't bother to lock the door as she left
the apartment. She hadn't seen the key in months, assumed she had lost it, and
besides, keys were a sour little joke to the residents of the Montevista
condominium units.

 
          
 
The locks were about as secure as
Sesame Street
lunch-boxes, and every door in the place
could be opened with a harsh word. (Those who had gone to the trouble of
installing dead-bolt locks had found them neatly and completely removed, a
procedure that required no surgical skills since the doors in every unit were
made of two layers of pressed fiberboard with hollow space between.) Security
in Montevista was maintained by a simple principle: If you don't own anything
worth stealing, nobody will steal it. When Marcia had first moved in, she had
owned a Sony Worldband radio, a JVC VCR and a Panasonic color television, as
well as various items of jewelry of some intrinsic (but mostly sentimental)
value. All had vanished within a week, and she had then had to endure the
initiation rite of visits by several cluck-clucking neighbors who recited the
facts of life in Montevista. Now she owned a ten-dollar radio and an old
black-and-white TV, and when she and Dan wanted to watch a videotape, they
rented a VCR with the tape.

 
          
 
It was not only abject surrender that had made
the neighborhood quite safe. There was also a pervasive attitude of Enough Is
Enough, as if the community had concluded that it had done its part to
accommodate the Dark Side, and now it deserved to be left alone. One night a
pair of drunken thugs had mugged a couple in front of their building. The
couple's cries awakened some neighbors, and before the muggers could reach the
end of the block they had been bludgeoned senseless with baseball bats.

 
          
 
Marcia walked out onto the stoop in the chill
blue morning, careful as always to avoid the crumbling sandstone of the second
and fourth steps and to check for rats breakfasting on the uncollected garbage
beneath the stoop. She took a couple of deep breaths and began to lope along
the sidewalk.

 
          
 
Trained though she was to ward off black
thoughts, to search for the tiniest thread of gold in every cloak of dross, her
day inevitably began in a mist of gloom. She didn't know why. Perhaps it was
the nature of addictive personalities to look on the down side of everything,
to regard the proverbial glass as always half empty, not half full. Perhaps
that was why they turned to chemicals, to bring them up to a healthy level of
optimism. Or perhaps it was the old cliche that the trouble with being sober
was that when you woke up in the morning, you knew that this was as good as you
were going to feel all day long. Whatever, it always took her several minutes
to slip into the rhythm of running, to get her mind to drift, and those moments
were assaulted by the nasty reality of the 140 units of the Montevista
condominiums, followed by the rest of the dusty, dirty little town of Tesoro,
New Mexico.

 
          
 
It wasn't that this was a poverty pocket, far
from it. It wasn't
Appalachia
or
Harlem
or some
Cleveland
ghetto. There was no unemployment here.
People made a living: eighteen, twenty-two, maybe even thirty thousand a year.
A used car in every garage. They were teachers and mechanics, waitresses and
truckdrivers, bartenders and nurses and shoe clerks and . . . substance-abuse
counselors. The rocks on which the society was built. And the society, in its
wisdom, didn't value them much. Nobody was going anywhere. This was all there
was, this was as good as it got. Live for today, because tomorrow's going to be
just the same. No future to hope for.

 
          
 
What the society seemed to value—from what you
read, anyway—was stockbrokers and bond traders and lawyers and movie stars and
hockey players, people who generated money without producing anything of
substance, people who sat back East and got rich by being limited partners in
tax-shelter scams like the Montevista condominiums in Tesoro.

 
          
 
Stop feeling sorry for yourself!

 
          
 
She turned the comer by the lumberyard and ran
past Manny's Hermosa Cafe, whose huevos rancheros did a better job than Drano
in cleaning out your plumbing. She was beginning to feel suffused with the
crisp, clean air, and the grimy cloud was dissipating.

 
          
 
Nobody had forced her to ingest every chemical
combination known to science, or to drink every liquid fermented from malt,
rye, barley, wheat and potatoes. Nobody had whipped her into being a counselor.
Being a counselor was her life insurance.

 
          
 
She was doing okay: twenty-four thousand, plus
full medical and dental, plus retirement at half pay after twenty-five years.
Dan did about the same. Of course, they'd do better if—as Dan kept
suggesting—they actually moved in together. Save about a thousand a month, what
with cutting one rent and one set of utilities. But— as she kept responding and
he refused to believe—they'd do better for about fifteen minutes, until Stone
Banner (or, just as bad, anyone on his board of directors, a roster of worthies
that included two retired studio executives, two defeated senators and three professional-team
owners, one each from the AFC, the NFC and the NBA) found out about the
arrangement, and then they'd both be on the street and scavenging for food
stamps.

 
          
 
Dan was sweet, but he was an unregenerate
flower child. He didn't realize that peace and love had been nailed into their
coffins by James Earl Ray and Lee Harvey Oswald.

 
          
 
She was cruising easily as she passed the
Senorita Linda Beauty Salon. She had gone a mile. By her training schedule—two
hundred yards for every cigarette she smoked the day before—she had about a
mile and a half to go.

 
          
 
The formula was idiotic, self-deceptive,
self-destructive.

 
          
 
But then, that's what being a junkie was all
about.

 
          
 
When she returned, Dan was in the shower.
Marcia poured herself a cup of coffee and turned on Good Morning America. A
reporter was interviewing a prostitute at a hookers' convention in
Las Vegas
. The topic: techniques of safe sex in the
age of AIDS. All very decorous, the reporter red-faced and squirming as he
tried to construct clinical questions out of euphemisms.

 
          
 
Another thing to be grateful for. When Marcia
was hooking, AIDS didn't exist in humans. Patient number one hadn't yet screwed
the monkey, if that was really how it had jumped from apes to people. If AIDS
had been around, by now she'd be one more Jane Doe rotting in a potter's field
somewhere.