Gun Church (18 page)

I’d missed one turn in the chapel, but had shot once last week. Though the thrill wasn’t gone, it was going. After playing Cutthroat and Fox Hunt, the chapel seemed tame and my rush was a bit less intense. The junkie’s dilemma: I’d hit that wall junkies always hit. No matter what anyone tells you, all addictions are the same. You’ve got to keep upping the dose. Jim seemed to know it without being told.

“Another couple of weeks, Kip, and maybe you can try the real thing.”

“The real thing?” I said, getting hard at the thought of it.

“Vests only.”

“Like you and the fat kid?”

“Yeah, just like that, but don’t say yes right away.”

“Yes.”

He laughed, but shook his head. “It’s dangerous, Kip. You saw what could happen if everything doesn’t go just right. I could just as easily have hit that guy in the throat or eye as his arm. If you get killed, we’re just going to take you out in the woods and bury you somewhere you won’t ever be found. Even if you’re real seriously wounded, that’s what we’ll have to do. We can’t risk everybody else to save one person. You understand?”

“Ever have to do that before, dig a hole out in the woods somewhere?” I asked, smiling.

Jim didn’t answer, keeping his expression cool and neutral. “Just think about it,” is all he said.

I didn’t have to think about it. I wanted it. I suppose I’d wanted it from the moment I saw Jim and the fat kid in the chapel that first time. I could still smell the gun smoke in the air.

“I want it, Jim. I want it.”

And then, for the first time in a month, I saw hints and flickers of that smile. The one that said:
I know you, Kip Weiler; I know you better than you know yourself
. But it quickly vanished, forced off his face by the proud mentor smile. He extended his right hand to me, and his grip expressed more pride in me and more love for me than my father had ever managed in his entire lifetime. Was it odd that I basked in the glow of approval of some twenty-year-old yahoo from Buttfucksville?

“Then let’s start getting you ready.”

But that was earlier and now Meg was on the phone. What she had to say made Thanksgiving seem so much more than an excuse to force down dry turkey and watch football.

“I don’t know how you did it, Weiler, but this book is fucking genius.”

“And … ”

“And Franz Dudek thinks so too,” she said. “It’s a deal. I was going to send the contracts down, but I think you need to come up here next weekend. We should talk face-to-face.”

“What for?”

“I miss you.”

“That’s horseshit, Donovan. If you missed me so much, why haven’t I seen you in seven years?”

“I don’t think you really want an answer to that, do you?”

“I suppose not, but you still haven’t given me a good reason.”

“Because Dudek wants to take us out to dinner and look you in the eye.”

“What, he’s going to read me the riot act?”

“I don’t know, frankly, but it must be something like that. And if he does, you’re going to sit there with your hands folded and take it.”

“For this, yes,” I said. “I’ll take whatever he’s dishing out.”

“The hotel’s on my dime, Weiler. I’ll e-mail the reservation details to you.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You better be.”

Click.

Until Frank Vuchovich stuck his Colt Python in my nose, the toughest thing I had to tackle in Brixton was explaining subordinate clauses to the zombie-faced kids of coal miners and loggers. Well, that and marking their near-illiterate papers. Yet, as the West Side of Manhattan stretched out before me through the towers and cables of the George Washington Bridge, I found I was scared shitless. Suddenly, Brixton County felt like William Blake’s Jerusalem, dark Satanic mills notwithstanding. From the night Meg called with the good news, I thought this was exactly what I wanted. Now, not so much. It hadn’t taken long for the doubts to creep back in—the remembrances of things past, the bad things.

When I came out of rehab, Brixton was an easy place to land. One of the keys to breaking any addiction is to avoid the people, places, and things that help facilitate easy access to your particular poison. Well, let me tell you something about New York City in the 1980s: it was the mother of all enablers. I confronted my weaknesses on a moment-to-moment basis. Not confronted, really. I just sort of acquiesced. Every restaurant, every club and night spot was full of cocaine, cocktails, and willing blonds. And there was always an ample supply of Seven Sisters fangirls at the ready when I got bored of the blonds and wanted to have an intelligent conversation between orgasms.

Adoration is a universal addiction to which I was no more or less susceptible than anyone else. In the Manhattan of those golden years, nothing got the toadies, sycophants, and suck-asses going like success. Regardless of the abject dreadfulness of
Clown Car Bounce
,
The Devil’s Understudy
, and
Curley Takes Five
, I would have continued to be hailed as a genius if those books had somehow managed to do good numbers. When anthropologists and historians want to study the Big Bang moment of our cultural demise, they will look back to 1980s Manhattan, the time and place when the singularity of substance and style exploded into a chasm of universal proportion. Didn’t matter what the essential value of anything was as long as it sold.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I’d loaded a few things into the last vestige of the Kipster, his ridiculous 1988 Porsche 911, and headed for New York City. I’d come close to selling the car a hundred times. I mean, for chrissakes, the nearest Porsche dealership was fifty miles across the state line and simple maintenance cost more than a month’s rent. Plus, in a calloused and chapped-hands place like Brixton, it marked me as a superior fucker and a total outsider. Oddly enough, as I drove out of town, I no longer felt like either one of those things.

And there were reasons for my skittishness about driving back into the lion’s mouth that went beyond my worries about temptation. I’d swiped the .38 from the Colonel’s duffel bag the last time I shot with Jim. I don’t know why exactly. There was no inherent thrill in “borrowing” the .38. I nearly soiled myself at the thought of getting caught and then having to explain myself to Jim. The fear was not that I’d be exiled—it was pretty clear that Jim got as much out of our relationship as I did—but that I wouldn’t have been able to express my reasons for taking it in a way that made any sense.

Fact is, I had gone shooting with Jim nearly every day since the end of September. It was part of my routine and writers dread the loss of routine almost more than anything else. I think I took the revolver because I wanted to carry a piece of that routine with me even if I couldn’t shoot in the wilds of New York City. It was a rosary to pray on, a physical reminder of the thing that had made the book possible in the first place. But who knows? Truth is always more complicated than the rationalization.

And there was Renee. She too was part of my routine and don’t think I hadn’t been tempted to bring her, to show her my old world, a new world to her. Unlike the .38, which would be nothing more than a kind of semi-religious talisman, Renee would bring real comfort. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d sought convenient comfort in the company of a woman. The amazing thing is, I didn’t want to disrespect Renee like that, to turn her back into the St. Pauli Girl. I’d even convinced myself that she didn’t want to go. She hadn’t asked to come, not with words. Yet, as the week unfolded, I could see
Please bring me, please
writ large in her eyes.

In spite of my recent un-Kipster-like behavior, I didn’t fool myself that my default settings weren’t still firmly locked on self-destruct. It would take more than a few months of writing, monogamy, and noble impulses to declare the Kipster fully exorcised. I liked drama. I mean, what else were the chapel, Cutthroat, and Fox Hunt all about if not drama? I liked to complicate things and I was less than confident that the new me wasn’t more a function of lack of opportunity than a reflection of profound change.

No, as much as I liked the idea of having Renee with me, I knew leaving her in Brixton was the right thing to do. The right thing for me. For once, I needed things to be simple. I told Renee that I’d be going back to New York soon enough and that we’d make a vacation of it, over Christmas maybe. It wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, one she seemed willing to go along with so we might both get through the week until I left.

Now, with the first dim rays of the sun filtering through the gaps in the skyline, it occurred to me that this was when I’d normally be wrapping up my first writing session of the day and climbing back into bed with Renee for a few minutes before getting dressed to run with Jim. Okay, so I knew I would miss them, miss my routine, but I didn’t expect it to happen even before I got across the Hudson River. Hell, a few more minutes of this, I thought, and I’d be getting weepy for Stan Petrovic.

As I opened the door to the Liars Pub, a gaggle of chattering, Southern blue-hairs poured out past me and asked for directions to Radio City. Their tour bus to Branson must have missed a turn at St. Louis. But who was I to laugh at them, even a little bit? You teach at Brixton County Community College, you lose the privilege of looking down your nose at anyone but yourself.

“One for lunch?” the hostess asked, thumbing a stack of menus.

“I’m meeting someone. The reservation’s under Donovan.”

When the hostess looked down at her reservation sheet, I looked at her. Curvy, petite, and in her mid-twenties, she was dressed in a vintage clothing store cocktail dress—black, of course—over black heels that reeked of credit card debt. Her hair was jet black, her skin a shade of light mocha, her eyes almond-shaped but hazel. Her lips red and thick, her nose upturned, her breasts full, she was the most exotic-looking woman I’d seen in seven years.

“Yes, we have it, but I’m afraid Miss Donovan hasn’t yet arrived. Would you care to be seated or to wait at the bar?”

“Actress, dancer, painter, or writer?” I asked. This might have been the only time I posed the question without a motive more nefarious than curiosity. After all, no one who looked like her came to New York City for a career in hostessing. Nobody.

“Writer.”

I said, “You have my condolences.”

If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Tell me about it.”

“This place used to really be something once.”

She sighed. “So I’ve heard.”

“You would have liked it,” I said.

“Not now.”

“Of course not, it’s a job.”

“It’s a corpse. No one likes working in a place that once was.”

“Almost as unpleasant as somebody who once was. I’ll be at the bar.”

I’d been so exhausted when I drove across the GWB and down to the hotel on 44th Street that nothing had penetrated. Nor did I get teary-eyed and gawky on the cab ride over here. Only when I made my way to the bar did it begin to sink in. Standing there, taking it all in gave me a sense of just how long I’d been away, of how isolated and insulated I’d been, and what this weekend might mean to me.

The Liars—no one who knew better called it by its full name—was a stone’s throw from the Flatiron Building and had been around for about a century. Back in the day, it used to be the kind of place where writers swapped stories about bigger-than-life characters like Runyon, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. But now as I looked around I saw that the place was as artificial as Disneyland. It had become a theme park eatery that sold T-shirts and hot sauce. The banquettes bore the names of legendary writers on commemorative brass plaques. The Liars was a venue where gods and giants had been supplanted by tourists and the talentless. Even before I left New York, the Liars had become a bit of an insiders’ joke. Now it was just a joke. Not so different from me, really.

Given that Meg had booked me into the Algonquin, it came as no shock that she’d chosen the Liars for lunch. She seemed not to know what to do with me, fearing, I suppose, that I’d somehow melt down at the thought of eating or sleeping somewhere not haunted by literary ghosts. And why not? “Literary ghost” was a pretty apt description of me. I might have considered telling her that I would have preferred to stay in a boutique hotel and to lunch at a restaurant that didn’t sell souvenirs. The very notion of a chic hotel and three-star restaurant had broad appeal to someone from Brixton County. And while the Algonquin, a lovely old hotel, was more than several steps up in class from Hendrick’s Motor Court or the Red Roof Inn in New Prague, it wasn’t exactly hopping. The most exciting thing about the Algonquin was the cat that lived in the lobby. Maybe that was the point. Until I signed those contracts, Meg meant to keep me as far away as possible from hot new places and dangerous old haunts like the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t like it, but I guess I understood her reasoning.

I took note of many things as I stood there nursing a pint of ale. Meg was always late for our meetings. She liked drama too, but only of her own making. I noticed too that several additions had been made to the caricature sketches of writers, editors, and publishers lining the walls. I saw the sketch of Moira Blanco that hadn’t been there seven years ago and the one of the recently deceased Haskell Brown. I wondered if the cops had made any headway on his murder, but didn’t dwell on the subject. I wasn’t a hypocrite and it was Brown’s homicide that had cleared my path. I noticed sketches of Bart Meyers and Nutly and Marty Castronieves. Mostly I noticed the one of me that wasn’t there and winced at how much that hurt.