Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (6 page)

 
          
 
Through the tinted glass of the BMW's
windshield, he saw what looked to be a woman beating a giant animal.

 
          
 
The passenger's-side door opened, and out
tumbled a flurry of gray fur with a fluffy white tail—and a human head.

 
          
 
Preston
's
mind tried to deny the reality, strove to discern it as a hallucination.
Delirium tremens.

 
          
 
But reality would not be denied. It was a man
dressed up to resemble a rabbit.

 
          
 
The man rolled on the ground and struggled to
his knees. Immediately the driver's-side door opened and disgorged a frenzied
woman—a little sprig of a thing but mad as a hornet and with fists flying like
a cyclone.

 
          
 
“Son of a bitch!” she shouted. "Worthless
bastard . . . stupid shit!"

 
          
 
“But baby . . ."the man moaned.

 
          
 
“Don't 'baby' me, scuzzball!" She kicked
the man in the stomach. He rolled into a ball, furry fingerless mittens
covering his head. She was wearing low, pointed-toe boots, like jodhpurs, and
now she stepped back and aimed for an opening through which she could kick him
in the head.

 
          
 
From the moment
Preston
had been old enough to accept the existence
of hostility (somewhere around three or four years old), he had made it a rule
never to get involved in other people's unpleasantness. He wished he didn't
have to be involved in the unpleasantnesses of his own life. Scenes were tacky,
confrontations to be avoided. If you had something nasty to say, put it in a
letter.

 
          
 
But here he saw the very real prospect of a
man being murdered by a lunatic. He declined to be responsible for another
Kitty Genovese. He had no choice.

 
          
 
He stepped forward and grabbed the little
woman by the arm, unbalancing her, and he said, “Let's take it easy.”

 
          
 
He was almost a foot taller than she, so she
had to look up at him, and yet when she spoke, he had the sense that she was
speaking down to him.

 
          
 
“Who're you?" she snarled.

 
          
 
He smiled, to show her that he meant no harm,
and said, "You don't want to cripple him."

 
          
 
"I don't?" She looked at
Preston
as if he were a gravy stain on her blouse.
Then, without another word, she spun away and—fast as a mongoose—turned back
and kicked him in the balls.

 
          
 
He made a noise like a punctured tire and sat
down, hard, beside the rabbit man. Nausea welled up into his throat, his eyes
lost their focus, and waves of agony pulsed through his groin. Shamelessly, he
covered and comforted his aggrieved balls.

 
          
 
The woman strode back to the BMW and climbed
aboard.

 
          
 
“Hey, Bugs!” she called through the open
window.

 
          
 
The rabbit man looked up warily as the head to
his costume—erectile ears, plastic nose, mischievous eyes with viewing slits
cut through the pupils—flew out the window and landed in his lap.

 
          
 
“Count on it," the woman shouted over the
sound of her revving engine, **that's the last head you'll ever get from
me." She snapped the car into gear and peeled away.

 
          
 
I am marooned with a man who thinks he is a
rabbit.
Preston
looked at the man and then at the sky and
the mountains and the pristine adobe buildings and the curb on which they squatted
like aimless derelicts. I would kill for a drink.

 
          
 
The rabbit man raised one of his paws and, in
poor imitation of Mel Blanc, chattered, “Aaaaah . . . what's up, Doc?"

 
          
 
“Sweet Jesus,"
Preston
murmured, holding his head.

 
          
 
“She's a pisser, isn't she?"

 
          
 
“That midget?"

 
          
 
“Good thing you didn't call her a midget.
She'd've really kicked ass. She can't stand size-ists."

 
          
 
"You're married to that?"

 
          
 
The rabbit man nodded and grinned and leaned
back on his fuzzy elbows. He was taller than
Preston
, skinny as a pickerel, with the sharp beak
of an osprey. His eyes were deep-set and shadowed by a shelf of bone and bushy
brows. Wherever he lived, whatever he did for a living, he seldom saw the sun,
for his skin was pasty white, splotched here and there with islands of gray.

 
          
 
"Look at it from her point of view. I'm
at this office party, celebrating our best year ever, sales up like four
hundred percent over last year thanks to AIDS and whatnot—I make condoms, the
whole line, ribbed, pimpled, speckled, French ticklers, reservoir tips, you
name it—and we're all s'posed to dress on a business theme. So I get up like a
rabbit—you know, people are doing it like rabbits, which is why we're doing so
well, like that. Well, she won't go to the party 'cause she says, and who can
blame her, 'What the hell am I s'posed to dress up like, a blow job?' So I'm
driving home and I'm having a little trouble with the old yellow line—I guess I
probably had about a hundred tequila sunrises—so I do the old, you know, one-eye
gambit"— he covered one eye with one hand and mimicked driving with the
other hand—"and it helps, but I guess not enough, 'cause this smokey pulls
me over, and he does a double take when he sees this rabbit driving a BMW.
Well, I tell you, these things"—he raised one of his rabbit
feet—"they sure suck when it comes to walking a straight line, so we go downtown
and I fail the breath test—fail it! I think I killed it!—and they see on the
computer that I've got a couple of other DWIs pending, so they haul me right up
there before the night-court judge, and he asks me why am I dressed like a
rabbit. So I tell him the whole story—I mean, why not? The tequila's got me
nice and mellow—only he's not so amused, and he pitches me in the drunk tank
along with all these other dingbats and fags and weirdos, when all I am is
dressed like Bugs Bunny, not exactly a felony. Like they say, it was a night to
remember. Come the dawn, they give me two choices: ninety to one-twenty in the
slam or a rehab center—which is like no choices, right?—and then they call Clarisse.
She has to take time off from her job to come fetch me—she does Swedish massage
over to the Emerald City spa for the rich and lamebrained, the woman's got
hands like bear traps— which already sets her teeth on edge, but when she
arrives Tm gone because they gave me my wallet back, so she has to search the
whole strip till she finds me in a gin mill where I'm downing a few
eye-openers."

 
          
 
He shrugged and smiled. “See? She's got a
right to be a little . . . miffed."

 
          
 
Preston
was
enraptured by the tale, awed by the man's insouciance. How could he be so
cavalier? If
Preston
had ever done anything remotely comparable
to what this rabbit had just recounted, he would have . . . would have what?
Seen a shrink? Joined a monastery? He didn't know, but he certainly would have
known that he couldn't handle alcohol. He would have quit drinking. For sure.

 
          
 
I am on an alien planet, I do not belong here.
Where is Chuck? If I wait long enough, he will return and take me . . . where?
Anywhere.

 
          
 
“Ever been in a joint before?" asked the
rabbit.

 
          
 
''Me?"

 
          
 
"Me neither." He studied the adobe
building. “Gotta beat jail, though. Gotta be a cruise. Do what they tell you,
say what they tell you. And when you get out, just be careful where you go
boozing."

 
          
 
“You mean you don't want to stop?"

 
          
 
"Drinking? What for? Drinking's not a
problem for me. I'm just unlucky. I get caught a lot." He cocked an
eyebrow at
Preston
. "You do have a problem?"

 
          
 
"People seem to think so."

 
          
 
"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. What
do they know?" He rolled up onto his paws, stood and regarded himself
critically. “She could’ve left me a pair of pants."

 
          
 
Preston
rose and grabbed his suitcase and straightened his tie. He joined the rabbit
before the big black-glass door.

 
          
 
“By the way, Fm Scott Preston."

 
          
 
“Duke. Duke Bailey."

 
          
 
Preston
shook his paw.

 
          
 
“What was it Hamlet said?" Duke asked. “
‘Once more onto the beach, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Something like
that."

 
          
 
“You scared?"

 
          
 
Preston
swallowed and nodded. "Shitless."

 
          
 
“No sweat. They don't torture you. They can't
find out anything you don't want 'em to."

 
          
 
“I guess."

 
          
 
It's what find out that worries me.

 
          
 
He sat on a couch in the main lobby of the
clinic, feeling ill. He had been violated.

 
          
 
First, they had taken him into a gray room
furnished with nothing but a gray metal table, and there the executive director
of the clinic—a cheesy polyester gladhander who wore a button that said,
"Hi! My name is GUY! Have a GREAT day!"—tore up
Preston
's suitcase. Literally. He prized up the
lining and removed mouthwash, after-shave lotion, two rolls of mints
("Sorry, Scott, but some people press cocaine into mint molds") and,
worst of all, the collected stories of John Cheever, the collected stories of
Irwin Shaw and Boswell's Life of Johnson. For consolation
Preston
was given—given? They were bestowed upon
him as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls—the only two books he would be
permitted to read in the next four weeks: a dippy little prayer book called
Twenty-four Hours a Day and the A.A. bible, which, Hi!-My-name-is-GUY! told
him, "everybody calls The Big Book." ("The Big Book!" What
was this, Dick and Jane go to A.A.? "Look, Dick, look at Spot! Spot is
falling on his ass! I bet Spot has a problem?”)

 
          
 
"Focus, Scott," Guy explained when
Preston
protested the confiscation of his books.
"Books are an escape. They take you away, let you forget. We don't want
you to forget, Scott. We want you to focus, focus, focus ... on your disease."

 
          
 
And at the word "disease"—like some
Pavlovian cue—Guy (whose last name, according to the plaque on his desk, was
Larkin, though evidently nobody ever used last names around here) embarked on
the whole alcoholism litany again. When Preston declined to fall to his knees
and kiss Guy's hem and confess to being a hopeless lush, Guy said, "Oh no,
I wasn't an alcoholic either, Scott," and proceeded to recite his whole
tale of woe, some blather about nobody knowing he had a problem because the
only drinking he ever did was at night in his garage, where he'd filled the
windshield-washer container in his car with vodka. One night he didn't show up
for bed, and his wife found him passed out on the air filter.

 
          
 
Why was it that all these people felt they had
to spill their guts to you right away?
Preston
didn't feel like spilling his guts to
anybody, ever.

 
          
 
When Guy didn't find any contraband in
Preston
's suitcase or in his clothes, he said,
"I'm real proud of you, Scott. That's a very positive sign," and he
directed
Preston
to the infirmary. The fun had just begun.

 
          
 
The infirmary was another office off the
lobby, run by a manatee of a woman named Nurse Bridget, who took
Preston
's height and weight and blood pressure

 
          
 
and samples of his several fluids and (of
course) had to tell him about her husband, who was a fireman until the time he
climbed a ladder and rescued a woman from the fourth floor of a burning
building but then, because he was smashed out of his mind, dropped her off the
ladder from three and a half stories up, and about how she and Sean spent his
enforced retirement watching game shows and drinking Reunite until he died of
cirrhosis and she was committed to an institution by her daughter, Bridey.

 
          
 
All the while Nurse Bridget was inflicting her
life story and her sphygmomanometer on Preston, he heard grunts and protests
through a closed door behind her, and at about the time she was launching into
the details of her progress through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous,
the door sprang open and out staggered Duke, looking like a man who had just
been a plaything for the KGB.

 
          
 
He saw
Preston
and said curtly, “You gay?"

 
          
 
"Me? Hardly."

 
          
 
"Too bad. This place is paradise for
fruits." He looked back into the room from which he had emerged, and he
shouted furiously, "Have a nice day!" and then, clutching a
terry-cloth robe around his middle, he lurched out of the infirmary.

 
          
 
A second later, a short, porcine male nurse
appeared in the doorway of the back room. He was forcing his chubby fingers
into a pair of rubber gloves. He reached to the side, then brought his hand
back into view and beckoned to
Preston
—with
a rubber-covered index finger slathered with a clot of Vaseline.

 
          
 
Nurse Bridget was fiddling with the
blood-pressure bulb, and the needle must have jumped off the dial because she
took a step back and exclaimed, “My stars!”

 
          
 
As Nature is kind to human beings and erases
all specific memory of pain, so
Preston
was
spared any physical recollection of the discomfort of having his fundament
probed, not for malignant polyps but for suppositories filled with controlled
substances. He could not, however, expunge the memory of the indignity of lying
face-down on a steel table while the creature took a leisurely journey up what
he called
Chocolate Avenue
and regaled
Preston
the while with the saga of his descent into
the black hole of Valium addiction.

 
          
 
Now he sat in the lobby, beside Duke in a robe
and slippers. They did not speak, did not look at each other. It was as if they
were both ashamed.

 
          
 
There was nothing medical about the atmosphere
in the clinic, no signs pointing to emergency or admonishing SILENCE, no
crepe-soled attendants rushing about on missions of mercy, no uniforms of any
kind. The passersby, and there were many, could have been secretaries or
bureaucrats or doctors or patients, for they all wore casual street clothes.

 
          
 
The decor was simple and understated. A
visitor might have discerned only two hints about the purpose of the place.
There were ashtrays every whereon stands, screwed into walls and on practically
every flat surface. Smoking was not merely tolerated, it was encouraged as an
acceptable replacement crutch while the afflicted learned to maneuver without
the braces of booze. And there were two semiabstract posters, which, after long
study, appeared to contain the messages "One Day at a Time" and
"Easy Does It."

 
          
 
Duke crossed his legs, uncrossed them, crossed
them the other way, uncrossed them. Preston couldn't tell whether he sought
comfort or modesty, and he didn't much care, for he had locked his mind on to a
vision of a hand opening a freezer door and withdrawing a bottle of Stolichnaya
and pouring the gelid syrup into a tulip wineglass and swirling it around and
raising it to his lips and—

 
          
 
A commotion approached across the lobby. There
was no reason for
Preston
to assume that it would home in on him and
Duke, but he did. And it did.

 
          
 
It was a Hispanic behemoth, wearing sandals
hewn from truck tires, jeans so often washed in such virulent detergents that
they were flayed and gray, a black T-shirt whose mesh fabric strained against a
cylinder of suet and each of whose sleeves was rolled up around a package of
cigarettes, and enough tattoos to recount the entire history of the discovery
of the New World. All
Preston
could see of its head was a drooping Zapata
mustache, for the rest was enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke.

 
          
 
It greeted everyone it passed: "Hey,
man!" "What's goin' down?" "How they hangin'?"

 
          
 
It stopped before the couch and proffered its
hand to Duke. On the extended arm
Preston
made out the legends "Born To Hang," "Fuck Death—I'll Take
Dishonor" and "The Only Living Abortion."

 
          
 
"Hey, man," it said, a cigarette
crushed between its front teeth. "Hector . . . junkie . . . lulu."

 
          
 
To
Preston
's
amazement, Duke brightened. He held out his hand and allowed himself to be
yanked to his feet. “Duke,” he said. "DWI . . . lulu.''

 
          
 
Hector pumped Duke's hand, discarded it and
took
Preston
's. His teak-colored eyes waited for
Preston
to speak, but
Preston
didn't know what to say. It was a foreign
language.

 
          
 
Duke rescued him. “His name's Hector. He's a
junkie. And he's like me, a lulu: He's here in lieu of going to jail."

 
          
 
“I see."

 
          
 
“You?" Hector said to
Preston
.

 
          
 
“Scott,"
Preston
began. Then he stopped. He refused to say
the word “alcoholic." Or “rummy." Or “lush." He was not these
things. But what could he say? Social drinker? Hardly. Then a word occurred to
him, a word from his last connection to the real world.

 
          
 
“Juicer," he said.

 
          
 
Hector nodded. “Kinda name's Scott? First or
last?"

 
          
 
“First. Scott Preston."

 
          
 
“Poor WASP bastard. Parents who give their
kids two last names oughta have their balls cut off." Hector squashed his
cigarette in an ashtray, unrolled a sleeve and let a pack drop into his hand.

 
          
 
He offered a cigarette to Duke, who snatched
it and said, “I’m s'posed to quit."

 
          
 
Hector lit it for him with a denim-burnished
Zippo. “We're all s'posed to quit everything alla time. Piss on 'em. something's
gonna kill us. Might's well be something fun."

 
          
 
He offered one to
Preston
, who declined, then lit one for himself,
sucking so hard on the weed as the flame touched it that by the time he closed
the lighter, a third of the cigarette was ash.

 
          
 
Duke was smiling at the cigarette in his hand.
Color suffused his face, wiping away the wan and pasty look. “All right.” he
said.

 
          
 
“Okay, man," said Hector. “Let's
boogie."

 
          
 
Hector led the way down the corridor. Duke
shuffled behind in his paper slippers.
Preston
brought up the rear, carrying his suitcase.
The procession looked like a cartoon: the Pillsbury Doughboy leading a demented
invalid who was followed by a worried porter.

 
          
 
“Happened to your clothes?" Hector asked
Duke. “Lice?"

 
          
 
Lice! What kind of world do these people live
in?

 
          
 
“Long story. The old lady'l send me
some." Duke paused. “Maybe."

 
          
 
“I’ll lend you some,"
Preston
said.

 
          
 
Duke shook his head. "They won't let me.
They say I gotta wear this thing, and everybody I meet I gotta explain why I
don't have any clothes."