Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (2 page)

“…give her a call tomorrow. I think I need to have a conversation with that bitch.”

Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Lonnie Saunders called me! He called me about a book!

The realization washed over me in a wanna-puke tsunami. Lonnie Saunders wanted me to write a book! Lonnie, the unctuous chimera of a used-car salesman, sports agent, and pimp, wanted me to write some sort of godforsaken guide.

Guide to what? What was it? Fuck! Something about wizards?

“Fuck!” I exclaimed aloud.

Buddy looked over at me.

“Which one? Rita? Been at least six weeks. Now Sheila, we used to…”

I hit the nurse’s
CALL
button beside my bed as Buddy began to describe a sex act he performed on his fake wife that began with lassoing her in a barn. It ended with dire hillbilly deviance I dare not recount here without risking the confiscation of this book from libraries.

The door to the room opened and the night nurse stood silhouetted in the doorway. Neither busty nor Asian, I would generously describe Mandy as “structurally sound.” She was short and stout, with legs as thick as rail ties. She filled a Technicolor nurse’s smock with a confused bust that seemed to expand in several directions at once. No looker, true, but I was glad it was Mandy.

The other nurse, an Ecuadorian girl who was beautiful except for her bad teeth, was a sadist. I once asked for an extra pillow to prop myself up better and she looked me in the eye and pinched my arm. I don’t even know if she spoke English. She never even brought me the pillow.

“How are we doing tonight, Mr. Parsons?” Mandy asked.

“When I came in here”—I pushed myself upright—“what happened to my stuff? The stuff that was in my pockets. My phone. Where did it go?”

“Did your wife take it?” Mandy asked. “I saw a bag of your stuff at some point.”

I shook my head. Michelle took my car keys, but I had no memory of seeing my wallet or cell phone. I had not thought to ask someone about either until Buddy’s rambling reminded me of my phone call from Lonnie.

Mandy helped me out of the bed and together we searched all of the possible nooks and crannies in the room where my phone and wallet could be hiding. Buddy watched our efforts until the morphine pump for his shattered pelvis activated. He grinned and his chin slowly dropped against his chest.

“Found it,” said Mandy with a triumphant smile.

She handed me a plastic Ziploc bag containing some coins, a receipt from the grocery store, my wallet, my phone, and two dead flies. The phone was disgusting. The holes on the earpiece were gummed up with blood and the buttons were covered by a thin crust that was almost black. To my amazement, the battery was not dead.

Mandy brought a damp washcloth over and I wiped down the phone until it was reasonably clean and the white cloth was pink. I should add that doing this was not particularly easy when you only have one hand and the nurse seems disgusted by the sight of blood.

I accomplished the task by sitting on the edge of the bed and resting the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other. I then placed the phone upright in the crook of the bent knee, pinched the knee closed on the phone, and proceeded to grunt a great deal as I swiped the wet cloth across the front of my phone.

I had a few voicemail messages from friends and family wishing me well, but nothing from Lonnie. I switched over to e-mail on the hospital’s anemic wireless and my phone practically melted down from the number of e-mails it was receiving. Lonnie had unleashed a stream-of-consciousness barrage of ideas and notes for me to “help” in writing the book.

The cryptic and sometimes frightening subject lines for the messages included classics like “tron guy a hit,” “what is a 4 cham?”, and
“chapter about girl with a dick.”
This at least vaguely informed me on the subject matter. I didn’t have the heart to actually read any of the e-mails, but that was fine. My conversation with Lonnie was flooding back.

Based on his e-mail subjects, I deduced that Lonnie wanted the guide book to be about the Internet. This was possibly the stupidest idea I had ever read. What sort of moron reads, let alone buys, a guide to the Internet? That is the sort of book a mom in 1994 gets for her kid interested in computers. It was the sort of book that would have a picture of a robot surfing on a river of numbers for its cover.

No, the Internet is far too fleeting and dynamic to ever be adequately tied down. To borrow something from Buddy, you could never lasso the Internet to a fence and convince a horse to have sex with it.

I sighed and fell back on the bed, so dispirited I could almost ignore the screaming pain that exploded as my skinless hand flopped against the mattress. That scoundrel Lonnie Saunders had once again fast-talked me into writing the worst book ever.

Maybe, just maybe, I could weasel my way out of this one. It had to work.

I was afraid that if I didn’t do something, and quickly, writing a book about the Internet might be the end of my career as an author.

Early Release

In the morning, I made four calls to Lonnie’s office in New York before I got through to his personal assistant, Roxy. I had never met her, but we had spoken many times. Roxy sounded the opposite of my admittedly uninformed stereotype of the average personal assistant.

I envisioned the average personal assistant as a young and well-groomed up-and-comer, constantly speaking into a Bluetooth headset to make reservations at upscale restaurants or cancel high-power meetings. Personal assistants were lean and on the edge, wired to please their boss and serve him or her slavishly.

Roxy was nothing like that. She sounded bored and had the rough voice of a woman on the wrong end of decades of chain-smoking.

No, that’s being too kind. Roxy sounded like she was half a carton of Pall Malls away from a cancer voice box. A chest X-ray of her would look like a picture from the Hubble telescope. There would be spiral arms and nebulas of malignancy swirling in the twin universes of her lungs.

I imagined her with an unruly head of gray hair, eyeglasses secured around her neck by a chain, wearing a frumpy sweater and lugging canvas tote bags full of crumpled legal pads.

“Yes?” she growled.

“Roxy, this is Zack Parsons. I need to speak with Mr. Saunders.”

“Are you the wizard guy?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me. Look, I had a little bit of an accident a couple days ago and I need to talk to Lonnie.”

“He’s not in the office right now,” she replied.

I sighed with disappointment, but Roxy wasn’t finished.

“He’s in Chicago,” she said, and I heard a loud crinkling of papers. “The Ritz-Carlton. Room eight seventeen. If you want to go over there I’m sure he’d be—”

“I just need to talk to him on the phone,” I interjected.

Roxy cleared her throat. It was a wet hack. I could hear marbles of phlegm being shaken inside a brittle paper bag. Her voice dripped with melodramatic annoyance when she continued.

“If you want to go over there, to the Ritz-Carlton, room eight seventeen, I’m sure Mr. Saunders would be glad to see you. He told me not to bother him, though. So you just go on over there and knock on the door unannounced. See how that works out for you.”

She hung up the phone before I could reply.

The idea of finally meeting my editor was a bit daunting, but I was in no position to allow my nerves to get the better of me. This critical moment called for courage. Heroic, assertive, type A personality. Getting out of the hospital and to the Ritz-Carlton meant convincing one of my two fairly hostile doctors to let me go.

Doctor Gerber flatly refused when I requested release. By “flatly refused” I mean that he lowered his face a few degrees and pursed his wet noodle lips. It was a deafening rebuke. I tried again with Doctor Lian. Asking his permission made me feel like a kid getting a second opinion from Mommy after Daddy says “no.”

“Dumb-Dumb, you go outside you get infection,” Doctor Lian explained. “You want to get killer bug, hand fall off? Maybe you get dick poison and dick fall off. Pretty stupid then, uh-huh?”

“I can’t skip this, Doc,” I pleaded.

“I’m no ‘doc,’ Dumb-Dumb.” Doctor Lian folded his arms across his chest. “Dock where you park a boat. But I not keep you here. You want to go, get deathly disease, go ahead. Go. Be Dumb-Dumb. Spread your wing and fly. Go on, Dumb-Dumb.”

“Can’t you put something on my hand?” I asked, and waved my skinless, gelatin-encased, steel-haloed hand.

“Oh, sure, I got a good one,” Doctor Lian sneered.

He stormed out of the room and came back with a white plastic shopping bag.

“Here you go,” he said, and grabbed me by the forearm. He covered my skinless meat hand with the bag and then stretched a fat rubber band down over my hand and wrist. He looked at me and let it snap against my forearm, cinching the bag tight in the process.

“There you go! Weatherproof!”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, and grunted as I climbed out of the bed.

“Oh, no, my pleasure. Be my guest. Go on, a whole dumb world await a Dumb-Dumb like you.”

I nodded and shuffled past him.

“Come back when you serious,” he called after me. “I fix your hand for real then.”

The Breakfast Clubbing

Lonnie answered the door. He was much shorter and fatter than I had expected. Pot-bellied and Devitoesque. In fact, Lonnie would have been a perfect doppelganger for the diminutive actor if it weren’t for his fraudulent blond pompadour and the bushy, golden caterpillars above his eyes.

His face was flushed and sweaty. He was clad in boxer shorts and an ill-fitting hotel robe that hung open like playhouse curtains on either side of a rolling strip of torso. It was a very theatrical framing for the view of his grotesquely protruding bellybutton.

A girl wearing a similar hotel robe brushed past him and then me and into the hallway. Her black hair hung in her face, but as she passed me I glimpsed eyes puffy and red from crying and streaked mascara. She smelled like stripper perfume and burning rubber. Lonnie hardly seemed to notice her departure.

“Come in, come in,” Lonnie invited. “You want some star fruit, baby? A Thai massage?”

“No, no thanks,” I replied. “This is an amazing room.”

Lonnie’s suite was high ceilinged and luxurious. The main room was bathed in the golden light of parchment lampshades and appointed with overstuffed antique furniture that might have passed for Thomas Jefferson’s living room set from Monticello. Through the open double doors of the bedroom, I could see that the floor was scattered with cotton balls.

“Yeah,” he looked around admiringly. “Not as good as the room I get at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, though. Has a fireman’s pole. You just can’t get that in Chitown.”

Lonnie did a barefoot spin in the middle of the room, his arms spread as if to drink in his surroundings. Articles of clothing were draped haphazardly across the furniture. He scooped up a bra and a white T-shirt.

“Have a seat,” he suggested.

I moved aside a silvery sequined dress and relocated a purse from a chaise longue to an elegant teak end table sporting a Tiffany lamp. Round yellow pills spilled out of the purse across the polished wood. I looked to Lonnie and he shrugged.

“Ain’t mine, baby,” he said. “I am drug-free. Alcohol and Ketamine only. Just kidding. Just kidding, baby. Loosen up. Maybe you should take a couple of those. Kidding, kidding, baby. But seriously, help yourself.”

Lonnie was even more manic in person, bouncing from foot to foot like a lizard on hot sand. He seemed to remember he was still holding a bra, and he tossed it into the bedroom.

“Housekeeping,” he said incredulously.

I have never hated Lonnie, but I have never trusted him, and his guilty tweaker act was creeping me out.

“Holy shit!” he proclaimed suddenly, bugging his eyes out. “What happened to the mitt there?”

He leaned over to get a better look at my bag-covered hand. I realized that there was a small puddle of blood in the bag, as if it were a cut of meat from the butcher’s.

“I didn’t know it was bleeding,” I said. I lifted it up and looked at the bag, but the rubber band around my arm seemed to be containing the blood.

“What happened, baby?” he asked again.

“That’s part of why I’m here, Lonnie. We need to talk about this book deal.”

“All right.” He bobbed his head affirmatively. “All right, I’m down. That’s cool. Let’s order up some mimosas and—You like lobster tail?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s cool; that’s fine.” He snapped his fingers and paced distractedly.

“Hey, look, I just want to—”

“Here we go!” Lonnie snatched up the pearl-handled receiver of an antique telephone. He stabbed a fat finger into the rotary dialer and winched in the number for the front desk.

“Yeah, this is Saunders in eight seventeen. Yeah. Having a powwow up here and I wanted to order some room service. Four mimosas and lobster tails. You want lobster tails?”

“No, thanks,” I replied.

“Better make it six mimosas and two lobster tails.”

While he listened to the person on the other end he pantomimed shooting himself in the mouth.

“All right,” he said. “The door is unlocked, so just come on in.”

He hung up the phone and danced his way to the chaise longue and plopped down next to me. Not just next to me, practically on top of me.

“So what’s the bug, baby? What’s the deal?” He slapped a fat-fingered hand on my knee. “What can Lonnie Saunders do to make you feel good?”

His invasion of my personal space was calculated. He wasn’t making a creepy proposition, nor was he being overly friendly. Lonnie had some inkling of why I was there, and the sweaty little goblin wanted to bully me in some small way.

Lonnie was not physically intimidating. I had almost two feet on him. His move worked anyway. It threw me off. I have always been horrible at negotiating or demanding anything, and his hand on my knee creeped me out just enough to ruin my whole pitch.