Between the Bridge and the River (26 page)

The town is popular with middle-aged bikers, optometrists on Harley-Davidsons, who roar up and down the road taking full advantage of Florida’s no-helmet law to show off their rebelliousness, their danger, and their male pattern baldness.

At this time of night, though, the wild motorcycle gangs of Delray were tucked up in their stripy pajamas and the street was deserted. The restaurants and stores were closed. T-Bo made his way along Atlantic Avenue to the ocean. He parked the Caprice at a broken parking meter on the coast road and woke Fraser.

Fraser rubbed his eyes and looked out at the moonlight throwing white and silver flashes on the blue-black sparkling sea. He remembered Saknussem and shuddered.

“We gotta get you cleaned up, man, you a little stinky right now. Messing up my ride.”

Fraser nodded.

T-Bo helped him out of the car and Fraser limped toward the ocean.

“Where you going?” asked T-Bo.

“I have been born again. I must be baptized.”

“No, there’s a shower here, people use it to clean the sand off themselves when they sunbathing. It’s fresh water. Use that.”

“No, I have to go to the ocean.”

“Crap,” said T-Bo. But he followed Fraser over the dark, deserted beach to the shore.

Fraser started taking off his clothes.

“You can’t get nekkid here, man, you’ll get arrested.”

“What will they do? Charge me for having a body?”

T-Bo looked at Fraser’s white skin, alien in the moonlight. “They’ll charge you for showin it. No offense, but Victoria’s Secret you ain’t.”

Fraser ignored him and stripped off. He walked into the cold water. The shock of the water had a sobering effect on him but he was changed. Changed forever. He wanted no part of his old self or the
Press Bar or his old life in television. He had been through the fire and had been tempered.

He worked for God now and no one else.

He opened his eyes underwater and there in his blurred, dark, salty vision was Virgil the poet.

He smiled at Fraser and said, “Congratulations, Rabbi.”

Fraser smiled back and then blinked.

The poet was gone and only the sea remained.

He returned to the surface.

A doctor would probably have diagnosed Fraser with having some kind of brain damage, some kind of internal trauma that occurred during the beating, but as far as Fraser was concerned his brain had not been damaged.

It had been improved.

He ducked down under the surface and felt the surf cleansing him and massaging his bruised limbs.

T-Bo looked up and down the shoreline but there was no one around.

“Fuck it,” he said out loud. Then he stripped naked and dived into the water.

T-Bo swam across to Fraser, who was floating on his back looking at the moonlight. He touched the beaten man’s face tenderly. Fraser turned and looked at him directly in the eye. T-Bo’s heart pounded and he felt himself get hard.

He kissed Fraser softly on the lips.

Fraser smiled at him.

“I’m not having sex at the moment,” said Fraser gently, “and I have to tell you that if and when I do, it will probably be with someone who has ladies’ equipment.”

T-Bo was at a loss. Deeply embarrassed and angry, he wanted to hit Fraser again.

Fraser saw his rage building and spoke to him again. He had a calmness and an authority in his voice. No aggression. He was mildly surprised by the clarity of his tone—he was not yet fully aware of what had happened to him.

“There is no point in being angry, my friend. I did not make you what you are any more than you did yourself. You are a beautiful child of God and nothing you desire is shameful. You could drown me right here and compound your misery, you could run away and your pain will follow you, or you can let me help you.”

T-Bo had never broached this subject in his life. This was the source of his shame. All his life he felt he was wrong, a freak, despising himself for what he felt. His moment of grace had arrived. The miracle was that he honored it by asking a question.

“How can you help me?” he said.

Fraser grinned. “I’ll find you a nice boyfriend.”

There was a quiet moment between the two men as they stood in the dark water. The danger of the situation was palpable and Fraser knew that T-Bo
was
thinking about killing him. T-Bo was thinking about killing Fraser but he couldn’t do it. The crazy Scottish preacher was right.

T-Bo was, like Saint Paul, that which he always professed to despise. He felt an enormous weight leave him. He felt himself laughing, real, beautiful, hysterical, transcendent laughter.

Fraser laughed along with him.

The two men laughing—naughty children on a midnight swim.

After they had bathed, T-Bo got dressed and ran off to find Fraser something clean to wear. The only thing he could get was a bright orange floral sundress that an overweight lady had left to dry on a low hotel balcony.

He brought it back to Fraser, who was delighted with it.

“It’s beautiful. When I was a wee boy, I remember my mother telling me a story about a man who grew nasturtiums on his roof. This is the color of nasturtiums.”

“What are nasturtiums?” asked T-Bo.

“They’re flowers. They are bright orange. Like this.”

T-Bo nodded. He laughed at the sight of the big Scotsman in the sundress but then stopped when he saw that Fraser’s feelings were hurt.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “It’s just—maybe you would have done better in that nightclub you was in if you had been wearing that.”

Fraser smiled.

They sat down on the beach and watched the sun rise over the horizon. Fraser wiggled a broken front tooth loose and spat it from his mouth.

“Ah, that’s the ticket,” he said.

“You okay?” asked T-Bo.

“Never better,” said Fraser, tasting his own blood in his mouth.

“You need to get back to Miami?” T-Bo said.

“No,” said Fraser. “I need to go to Alabama. I have been asked to go there to preach the word of God. That’s what I must do else I will end in the belly of the whale again.”

T-Bo nodded. “Can I take you there?” he said.

“Yes,” said Fraser.

Fraser was sleeping on the sand when T-Bo’s cell phone rang. T-Bo answered and had a short conversation with the caller. Then he woke Fraser.

“Come on,” he said. “You gotta meet Vermont.”

And so Fraser began to rise.

OH LEON!
HAD A TOUGH SLOT
. It premiered against an established sitcom,
Roomies,
on one rival network and a new cop show,
Ballerina Detective,
on another.
Roomies
was the most popular show on television. It was a youthful, upbeat comedy about a group of six rich white twenty-somethings in Boston who had plenty of cash for disposable goods and air travel but not enough money to find their own apartments, so they had to share. None of them had any friends who weren’t white. The cast were attractive and likable and the scripts were good.

It was a very unusual show indeed.

On the other hand,
Ballerina Detective
was standard TV fare. It was about a woman named Jenny Dakota who was a dancer with the New York City Ballet Company and for some reason also worked undercover for the FBI investigating serial killers. In the first episode she caught a crazed psychotic, danced the lead in
Swan Lake,
and still had time for a cheeky little joke with her partner, Jack Hardiman, a tough FBI Special Agent who had to pretend to be a ballet dancer in order to maintain their cover—with hilarious results!

There was an obvious sexual chemistry between the two leads, and although the show tested well in market research, it appealed directly to the same demographic as
Roomies,
and that audience—
women and gay men who love too much—was far too loyal to leave its favorite show.

This was before the rise of cable TV, so there were only three real players in the TV ratings game. The three big networks.

The network that
Oh Leon!
aired on, ABN—the American Broadcasting Network—was pleased with the initial figures for Leon’s show. Although the total numbers were still well in favor of
Roomies,
there was a significant audience of males ages eighteen to thirty-five for Leon.

Then, after only three weeks,
Ballerina Detective
was axed and replaced with
America’s Funniest Accidents,
a cheap clip show that consisted mostly of disastrous wedding mishaps caught on home video cameras. ABN moved
Oh Leon!
to Wednesday nights, where the only competition was a tired old family drama called
The Richardsons
and a lame high-concept sitcom called
Alien Monkey, M.D.,
starring a cute puppet as a friendly extraterrestrial chimpanzeeish doctor who shared a practice with a grumpy old doctor and a sexy girl doctor.

Oh Leon!
became a hit, first with the target audience of men ages eighteen to thirty-five, who liked Leon’s comedy neighbor Stan, played by roly-poly Midwest comedian Bo Ness. Bo joked about farting and beer, and regular American guys could relate. In time, though, women started watching the show too, because of Leon’s looks and his great voice. Everyone loved the song at the end of each episode; eventually it became a national obsession to catch the closing number on
Oh Leon!
every week.

The character of little Petey, Leon’s fictional younger brother, was not well liked and was dropped after twelve episodes. The child actor who played him, Jonathon Daimler-Thomason, went on to star as Pucky the clairvoyant midget in the blockbuster movie
Chariots of Magic
.

Over its first season of twenty-four episodes,
Oh Leon!
evolved into a show about two guys, Leon and Stan, who live next door to each other and are trying to make their way in the tough town of Las Vegas, Nevada, although, of course, the show was shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, California. Leon’s character was that of a caring man
looking (unsuccessfully) for the right girl so that he could settle down and marry.

Bo Ness’s character was the fat guy in his mid-thirties who liked to drink beer, watch football, and date strippers.

Do these guys get along?

No, sir! With hilarious results!

Off camera, Leon and Bo, his costar, got along famously. They both shared a love of obvious, pneumatic women and partying. They did the talk-show circuit together, joking on couches, and then Leon would get up to sing while Bo looked impressed.

They attended movie premieres and industry parties and became fixtures on the Hollywood circuit, always surrounded by blond, shiny women. Saul was everywhere that Leon went too, keeping an eye on him, making sure things didn’t get out of hand, but he stayed in the background as much as a three-hundred-pound sweaty man can. He was noticed by the press, however, and the physiques of Saul and Bo got the little gang their nickname—the Fat Pack. Although Leon was as lean as a rail, he was seen as the leader, but anyone who spent any time around the brothers soon guessed who was really in charge.

The money was not terrific at first—season one salaries never are, and season two is not much better—but Leon and Saul were also producers of the show, so they’d get a piece of the real action when and if the show was sold into syndication (repeat showings on America’s hundreds of small syndicated TV stations, not to mention foreign sales).

For that to kick in the show had to stay on the air for about five years or 105 episodes—the recognized number that was the industry standard to make a syndication sale. Given the viewing figures at the end of season one, that looked highly likely.

Season two went even better, and at the end of that year Saul began to exercise the power that being an executive producer, brother, and manager to Leon had given him.

The first two years the show was on the air and his brother was becoming a star, Saul had trodden carefully. He was a little unsure of how to deal with the network executives and his fellow producers but they started kissing his ass anyway because even if he wasn’t really
aware of how much power he was attaining, they were. He found his jokes got funnier, doughnuts would be carried to him even if he didn’t ask, and strangest of all, women started to come on to him.

He couldn’t believe it. All his life women had looked at him with a mixture of pity and disgust and he had grown to hate them, all of them, and now they had changed the rules. He was attractive now to some women because he had money and power. That made him hate them even more but at least now he could have revenge.

The first time a woman approached him without first getting paid was in a nightclub called the Foxy on the Sunset Strip. He had gone there with Leon and Bo and their coterie the night after the first big article about the Fat Pack had appeared in
Peephole
magazine, the weekly celebrity Bible.

A tall, stunning brunette in a silver dress came over to him as he stood in the VIP enclosure. She took him by the hand and led him to the ladies’ restroom, to the cheers of Leon and Bo and the laughter of the ladies in the Plastic Pussy Posse, who later became known as the Snatch Batch.

She squeezed him into a stall and took his pants down, lifted his massive gut with the top of her head, and sucked his tiny penis while she gently scratched his enormous, swollen scrotum with her taloned finger-nails for the thirty seconds it took for him to come in her mouth.

She swallowed his juice, licked her lips, and pulled up his pants for him, then she left without saying a word, although she put her card in his jacket pocket on the way out.

It read, “I’m Candy. Call me, sweetie,” and had her number.

He sat down in the stall after she left. This didn’t happen to him, this is the kind of thing that happened to Leon. Leon must have paid her, put her up to it.

He started crying, his heart breaking on every exhale.

After he’d pulled himself together, he headed back out to the club.

“Thanks, bro,” he said as he returned to Leon, who was drinking a tequila and looking out at the dance floor trying to make his mind up who to fuck.