Lunatics (15 page)

CHAPTER 30

Jeffrey

This was definitely not
what Sharisse and I had in mind, winding up in some rural Cuban shack in some rural Cuban area with a bunch of rural Cubans. What we had in mind was a whole different scenario, which was this:

We would land in Cuba with the two hundred mil. We would make a deal with the Cuban government, give them a nice commission for their trouble. Let's say 20 percent, which is $40 million. Then Sharisse and I would proceed to live like kings, because $160 million goes a long way in a shithole like Cuba, where the average person makes, like, eighty-seven cents a month. We could pay them way better, say five bucks a month, and they'd be like, “Wow! Let's give them excellent service!
Nacho gusto!
” (I took some Spanish in high school.)

This was actually Sharisse's scenario. When she explained it to me on the ship going to Havana, I had a couple of questions, the main one being: Was she
nuts
? Why would the Cuban government go along? I mean, they have an army, right? Why not just point machine guns at us and say, “Thanks, but we'll take the whole two hundred mil. You two can go to prison and survive by eating each other's toenails.” That's what I would do, if I had machine guns, and a couple of bozos showed up with a ship they hijacked with a remote control.

But Sharisse said, “That's not going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're a dangerous international terrorist.”

“But I'm not. I keep telling you that.”

“And I'm starting to believe you. But the United States government says you are, and the Cubans believe you are. So they're going to show you some respect.”

I still had my doubts, but when we got to Havana, everything seemed to go exactly the way Sharisse said it would. Nunez and his men didn't take the money; they let us keep the duffels as they escorted us off the ship to a convoy of military trucks lined up on the dock. We got into the middle one, us in back, Nunez and a driver in front. Then we took off, like a motorcade, which I assumed was going to the presidential palace. So far, so good. (Or, as the Spanish say,
Mi casa, su
casa
.)

We drove through the city for a while, but we didn't see anything that looked like a palace. After about forty-five minutes, it began to dawn on us that we weren't going to the middle of the city: We were heading into the suburbs. The roads were getting shittier and shittier, worse even than the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Pretty soon we were bouncing along what that looked like a yak path.

Sharisse tapped Nunez on the shoulder. He turned around and said, “Yes?”

“Where the hell are we going?” she said.

“I assumed you knew,” he said.

“You assumed wrong. Where are we going?”

He nodded toward me. “To see his comrade,” he said.

“What?” I said. “
What
comrade?”

Nunez smiled. He had those really, really white teeth that some people just naturally have. It pisses me off, because I use whitening strips that cost so much that the drugstore keeps them locked in cabinets, like precious jewels, or nicotine gum. I've used enough of those strips to wallpaper my living room, and my teeth are still more or less the color of the margins of the Declaration of Independence.

What gets me is, I can remember when nobody gave a shit about this. You'd see people on TV, big stars, Johnny Carson for example, or Barbara Eden, and I'm not saying they had ugly teeth, but their teeth were not exceptional. You didn't
notice
their teeth, is my point. Their teeth were
human
. But now, in the entertainment industry, everybody's teeth are the color of a brand-new urinal. There's, like, a miniature men's room in their mouths. When they smile, they're giving skin cancer to people around them from the reflection. But
that's
what we're all supposed to look like now.
That's
why we're paying forty bucks a box for those stupid strips that probably cost eighteen cents to make and sting the hell out of your mouth. And you
still
have yellow teeth. And then you see some guy like Nunez, he lives on this shithole island where they don't even have drugstores, probably brushes his teeth with a sea urchin, and he has teeth like Tom Fucking Cruise. Which is why I was pissed off when he smiled at me the way he did when I said, “
What
comrade?”

“Please,” said Nunez. “You do not have to play this game with me.”

“
What
game?” I said. “I don't know what the hell you're talking about!”

Nunez nodded. “I understand,” he said. “You will trust nobody but Ramon himself.”

“Who's Ramon?” said Sharisse.

Nunez flashed his urinals at her. “So the lady is playing the game also. Fine. We will talk when we arrive.”

“Arrive
where
?” I said. But Nunez had turned away; he was done talking.

We kept driving, and the road kept getting shittier. After a couple of hours, we came to a village, turned down a side road and stopped in front of a shack.

“We are here,” said Nunez.

“
This
is where we're going?” said Sharisse. “An outhouse?”

Nunez only smiled. We got out of the truck, Sharisse and I grabbing the duffel bags. We followed Nunez into the shack. There were some people sitting at a table, including a Cuban guy who I figured was Ramon. He and Nunez said something to each other, but I wasn't paying attention. I was staring, with my mouth open, like a grouper, at another person at the table—the last person I expected to see, here or anywhere else. Horkman. He was with the woman who fell off the ship before he jumped.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“It's nice to see you, too,” he said.

“How the hell did you get here?” I said.

“I swam,” he said. He put his arm around Maria. “
We
swam.”

I couldn't believe it. The asshole fucked up his own
death
.

Sharisse stepped forward, looking very tense. “What about Mike?” she said.

“Mike?” said Horkman.

“My husband.”

Without saying a word, Horkman stood up, came over to Sharisse and grabbed her in a big hug. Then he held her at arms' length, gave her a big sad moony-face look, and said, “I'm afraid he didn't make it.”

Sharisse relaxed. “Jesus,” she said. “You had me worried there.”

Ignoring Horkman's surprised look, she shoved him away, turned to Nunez and said, “Now that we're here, can you please tell us
why
we're here?”

Nunez looked at Ramon, who smiled. He also had really nice teeth. The prick.

“I assume you know already,” he said, “and you are simply testing me to see how much
we
know. Fine. I will go along with this. I am the comandante of the People's Army of the People, which has been preparing to strike down the regime of the corrupt pig who has sucked the blood out of this nation.”

“Waitwaitwait,” said Sharisse, turning to Nunez. “Don't you
work
for the corrupt bloodsucking pig?”

“He believes I do,” said Nunez. “The old fool trusts me. In fact, he personally ordered me to meet your ship. But by then Ramon had told me the
real
reason you were coming here.”

“Which is what?” I said.

“Please,” said Ramon. “We are not fools. First your comrade swims ashore, undetected by the authorities, and within hours is able to make contact with me, even though my location is a closely guarded secret.”

“Horkman did that?” I said, looking at Horkman, who was looking puzzled.

“He is a highly skilled commando,” said Ramon.

“He owns a pet store,” I said. “Called The Wine Shop.”

“Yes, of course, he has a cover story. But he is an extraordinary soldier.”

“He's a putz,” I said.

“That is a military rank, I assume,” said Ramon. “I am unfamiliar with it. But to continue: Only hours after Señor Horkman swims ashore, you, his comrade, the famous Jeffrey Peckerman, arrive by the brilliant maneuver of hijacking a cruise ship, bringing with you enough American dollars to finance our cause.”

“What?” said Sharisse and me, pretty much at the same time.

“For years,” said Ramon, “we have been secretly sending out requests for help—hoping that somewhere in the world, we would find allies willing to fight with us. We had almost given up hope. But now you are here, Horkman and Peckerman, famous revolutionary fighters as seen on CNN. With your leadership, and with this great financial gift you have brought us, we can finally begin our fight.” Ramon was pounding the table now, shouting, “We have waited long enough! We will not wait a moment longer! The revolution begins now! But first, we will enjoy Ramona's delicious
quesadilla de harina de yuca rellena con camarones y
queso
!”

He shouted something in Spanish, and some soldiers came in and took away our duffel bags. Next thing we knew, we were sitting at the table, me across from Horkman, being served heaping plates of some Cuban glop that looked like they scraped it off the bottom of an aquarium while Ramon and Nunez toasted us. Outside, people were singing and firing guns into the air, getting ready for the revolution, which was going to start right after dinner. And which this asshole and I were supposed to lead.

CHAPTER 31

Philip

“I think we should wait till morning.”

We were sitting in the dining room eating what I could only assume was dessert, for no reason other than it was an orange solid served alongside a cup of brown liquid that I could only assume was coffee.

I hardly touched my dinner, as I wasn't a fan of Latin cuisine. I'd eaten it for the first time about three years earlier when a restaurant called La Casa del Sol opened in the same strip mall as The Wine Shop. So, as a gesture of strip mall solidarity, I gave the place a few tries until it became evident that if I were going to continue eating there, I'd have to surgically line my large intestine with copper tubing to withstand the corrosive torrents careening through it after every meal.

“What should wait till morning?” asked Ramon, looking up with a mouthful of the orange solid.

“The revolution,” I told him.

“But why?” asked Nunez, also with a mouthful of the orange solid in his mouth. Seated next to each other, with their mouths alternately opening and closing, they looked like warning lights at an intersection.

“Because it's been our experience that governments are more apt to fall in the daytime,” I said, with every hope that the omnivore to my left (aka Peckerman) would take maybe ten seconds away from making sure there wasn't a morsel left on anyone's plate to hold up his end of the word “our” and chime in.

No such luck. So I ventured onward.

“It adds to the element of surprise,” I explained.

“But isn't it more surprising to attack at night when everyone's sleeping?” asked Ramona.

“That's done so often these days that there's really no surprise. It's almost expected at this point,” I told her. “But in the late morning, say eleven, maybe even eleven-thirty, when the regime you wish to overthrow is inside the very buildings you're looking to take over, it's so much more effective.”

“At night you're just attacking empty offices,” said Maria.

“Exactly,” I said.

It felt good to hear a voice that wasn't my own. Especially Maria's. And from the nods now coming from the other side of the table, it looked like my stalling tactic, as feeble as it was, had a logic that Ramon and Nunez were willing to consider.

“We will follow your lead,” Nunez said.

“We will go outside and tell the rebels to get a good night's sleep,” said Ramon, as they left the table and walked toward the front door.

Dealing with Peckerman was another story. While Maria and that silicone-infused bimbette he was traipsing around with helped Ramona clear the table, I was off in a corner trying to knock some sense into him.

“I'm just trying to buy us some time so we can figure out how we can get out of this mess, Peckerman. Don't you get it? They think we know what we're doing and that we actually
want
to do what they think we're doing.”

“I know that. But it's you who doesn't get it, Horkman. I want them to think that you've got the brains and that I'm the dumb one—like those guys Lenny and Squiggy in
Of Mice and
Men
.”

“You mean Lennie and George.”

“Lenny and George?”

In the millisecond between the time I heard him say that and when my lips got into position to respond, I was somehow able to mentally scroll down the list of the biggest imbeciles I've ever met and saw Peckerman's name sprout wings and fly to the top.

“Peckerman, Lenny and Squiggy were the goofy sitcom characters who lived upstairs from Laverne and Shirley. Lennie and George were the migrant farmworkers in the novel
Of Mice and Men
by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Steinbeck. I pray you can appreciate the difference.”

Maria and Sharisse came back to the dining room table and grabbed some more plates. Apparently Peckerman caught my gaze that followed Maria back to the kitchen.

“Fuck her yet?”

“Excuse me?”

“The nun. A word to the wise, Horkman. Nuns consider themselves married to God, so I'd watch my step if I were you,” he said, pointing skyward. “That is one jealous husband you don't want to piss off. He's God, for God's sake! Fucking guy can turn your dick into a fried wonton just like that,” he said while snapping his stubby little fingers.

“Do you have to talk that way, Peckerman?”

“What way?”

“Your choice of words. Effing this. Effing that. Especially when you're talking about nuns and God . . .”

“I never said ‘effing,' Horkman. I said ‘fucking' . . .”

“I know what you said.”

“So if you're going to quote me, I'd like for you to quote me accurately.”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Then say it, Horkman. Say ‘fucking.'”

“No.”

“No? You just said fine.”

“Cut it out, Peckerman.”

“Come on, Horkman. You're an adult male who has a mortgage and a pet shop, so there's no reason whatsoever for you to say ‘effing' like you're some choirboy who's going to get cornholed by a priest who thinks that if you say ‘fuck' it's a request. Now say it, damn you! Say ‘fuck'!”

And then, without warning, he lunged and wrestled me to the floor like I was a rodeo steer and proceeded to pummel me while yelling, “Say it! Say it, you weasel!” until Ramon, now with a rifle slung over his shoulder, came back into the house also yelling “Say it!”

“Huh?” Peckerman and I said in unison, as Ramon pulled him off me and helped us both to our feet.

“You heard me!” shouted Ramon. “Go out there and say to them what you said to us. That we should wait till morning before we go to the capital city, because they're ready now, but maybe they'll listen to you because of who you are.”

He then motioned us out the front door, where we suddenly found ourselves staring into the face of a mob of maybe a hundred excited rebels who were raising rifles and torches and upon seeing us, much to my horror, began cheering
“Vive El Horkman!”
and
“Vive El Peckerman!”

“Well, I guess they think you're a more important terrorist because they said your name first,” whispered Peckerman, with a tone that simply reeked of jealousy. “Either that or they're chanting in alphabetical order.”

“Yeah, that must be it,” I said, with just enough sarcasm to make him even more jealous.

“For the most part, they speak Spanish,” Nunez told us. “So let them hear your voices and I will tell them what you've said.”

“. . . Okay,” I heard myself saying, and then felt the two of them staring at me and Peckerman as we each fell silent with hopes that the other would speak first.

“You first,” Peckerman finally said.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because they're not chanting in alphabetical order,” he said, like the whiney turd that he was.

I then looked out at the mob, extended my arms, and patted the air downward as a signal for them to be quiet. They did.

“Big shot,” I heard Peckerman say under his breath.

“All people should be free!” I shouted before Nunez shouted its Spanish translation to the crowd, who became vocal again upon hearing it.

“They should be free because they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!” I proclaimed with every hope that very few of the people in this raucous mob had recently taken a look at our Declaration of Independence.

Apparently they hadn't, as Nunez's translation stirred them even more so.

“And toward that end, every government should be dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal!” I went on to say with every hope that the mob hadn't recently taken a look at Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

This time Nunez's translation caused them to cheer louder.

“So, give me liberty or give me death!” I shouted with every hope that Cuba's public school system didn't deem it important to spend an inordinate amount of time teaching their barefoot students about Patrick Henry.

And this time Nunez's translation managed to bring the crowd's passions to a glorious crescendo as the very thought of their impending freedom simultaneously ignited a celebration of singing and dancing combined with the mounting cries of
“Cuando? Cuando?”
which even I knew meant
“When?”
and was the actual reason that Ramon had brought us outside to begin with.

“Cuan-do? Cuan-do?”
The crowd's single voice kept growing louder.

“Well . . . ?” Ramon asked.

“Cuan-do? Cuan
-
do?”

“What shall I tell them?” Nunez wanted to know.

“Cuan-do? Cuan
-
do?”

So I guess now would be a good time to tell you that what happened next still stuns me to this very day. For at the exact moment I was about to answer the mob's rallying cry of
“Cuando”
by shouting
“Mañana,”
that idiot Peckerman, who'd remained mercifully quiet thus far, pointed to a group of rebels who were celebrating by holding hands while dancing in a circle and shouted at the top of his hideous lungs,
“A hora!”
which is an Israeli folk dance—though it was only natural that a Spanish-speaking mob, who'd just asked when they should start the revolution, heard it as
Ahora!
which means “Now!” and then let out loud cries of
“Vive El Horkman!”
and
“Vive El Peckerman!”
as they turned on their heels and headed toward the capital.