Gun Church (20 page)

No, the hard part wasn’t about the advance, but about being left alone in a city that I no longer knew and one that no longer knew me. Meg offered to take me out for a drink, but her heart wasn’t in it. I could always tell when there was someone keeping the bed warm for her at home. And frankly, I wasn’t in the mood for trying to celebrate while simultaneously sitting on my hands. Franz Dudek might have looked like a farmer, but he well understood human nature and knew better than to press his luck. Instead of offering me yet another chance to fuck up, he just patted my shoulder and told me to go home and finish that book.

What I did was go back to the hotel. Success came so easily to the Kipster that he never quite trusted it. Hence, when things fell apart, he had no coping skills on which to rely. So this was new for me, achieving something through hard work that I wasn’t willing to piss on or away. I didn’t know what to do with that. In the jumble of feelings, the only thing I thought I wanted to do was to call Renee. I wanted to share the moment with her, but I couldn’t pick up the phone. Maybe it was because I so regretted not bringing her or maybe because I didn’t. Maybe to call her would have indicated she meant way more to me than I was willing to let on. I wasn’t sure of anything.

And there I was, the .38 in my hand, looking at the bedside phone. I kept snapping the cylinder of the Smith & Wesson in and out the way some smokers flick on their old Zippos in one fluid motion. That I found comfort in this didn’t much surprise me. Nor did it surprise me that I loaded a single round into the cylinder and spun it like a roulette wheel. I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. That impulse had passed with the concussion. I just liked the
clickity-clicking
, the feel of its weight in my hand. Then the phone rang and I jumped. I hoped it was Renee, but I’d given up magical thinking during the first Clinton administration.

“Hello,” I said, snatching up the phone, keeping the .38 in my other hand.

“Ken?”

The last time my equilibrium was this out of whack was during Fox Hunt, but this was more disorienting. The woman at the other end of the phone could cut me down faster than any bullet ever could.

“Amy, what are you—How did—”

“Meg told me you were in town.”

I could not speak.

“Ken. Ken, are you there?”

“I’m here, but why are you calling?”

“Do you really have to ask me that?”

“It’s been ten years, Amy. I thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”

“I thought so too.”

“What’s changed?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, about us, since the incident when you saved your class. I thought about calling a hundred times, but I could never find the right moment.”

Funny, that September afternoon that Vuchovich took my class seemed like a thousand years ago, almost like it never happened. I didn’t understand how just hearing Amy talk about it made it all real again.

“What made this the right time?”

“Proximity. Knowing you’re in town. I’m not sure. Meg says you’ve just signed a new book deal.”

“Meg’s been telling tales out of school.”

“Is it true?” she asked.

“I’m surprised you didn’t already know. I thought Peter would have told you.”

“Peter and I don’t really communicate much. We just grumble at one another in passing. Even if we did speak in full sentences, I doubt he would have wanted to tell me anything positive about you. It is positive, isn’t it?” she hedged.

“It’s good news, yes, but I don’t think you’d recognize my writing. I don’t feel enough like a god anymore to snicker down my sleeve at my characters. You spend seven years in Brixton and you see what real hopelessness is like. Living on the edge isn’t having to move into a Tribeca condo because you were forced to sell your place in Amagansett. I couldn’t write a book about Wall Street now. I wouldn’t want to.”

“You sound different.”

“I’m old, Ames,” I said, before I could catch myself using my pet name for her.

“No one’s called me that in a very long time, Ken.” Then she stopped and there was silence, but something in her breathing told me she wasn’t finished. “Come see me.”

“I—I can’t. I’m leaving first thing and—”

“No, Ken, tonight. Right now.”

This wasn’t what I had envisioned. Of course, I had thought of Amy constantly since I agreed to come up to New York. And I’d fantasized about us bumping shoulders on the street or us hailing the same cab, but not this. If I was going to see her again, I wanted it to be when the book was out and I had something tangible to prove all the pain I’d caused her, and myself, had come to something worthwhile.

“I’m beat, Ames. I don’t have it in me now. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to go anywhere except to the elevator.”

“What?”

“I’m in the lobby.”

Of course, in my fantasies Amy hadn’t aged a day: her hair was black and cut in a simple bob, her face unlined, her sad mouth smiling only at the corners. Her gold-flecked green eyes, the most God-awful sexy eyes on earth, would glow in low light. Her breasts, always so firm and assertive, would be untouched by gravity and time. And the rest of her body, paradoxically lean and lush, would fit together with mine, as it always had even at our worst moments. Of course there would be speckles or smudges of paint on her jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes, on her hands, cheeks, and forehead.

The lighting in the Algonquin lobby is famously soft. Still, when she stood up from the sofa and edged around the marble coffee table, Amy’s eyes did not glow green. Her hair was indeed black, but long and lined with threads of gray, and any hints of happiness in her smile had been buried deeper than Brixton coal. Gravity had been kind to her body, but she was too thin. It didn’t suit her. She had abandoned her uniform of T-shirt, ripped black jeans, and duct-taped running shoes for a proper woman-of-means wardrobe: a tasteful white cashmere sweater, navy blue flannel slacks, and gray heels. Paint? Not a drop on her. Yet, when she came up to me, softly stroked my cheek with the back of her hand, and kissed me lightly on the lips, none of the rest of it mattered.

When I fell out of the moment, I noticed that I was kissing Amy and not lightly. I noticed too that she was kissing back. It was a stupid thing for both of us to do, really stupid. Then again, we had been stupid in love with each other. It was always like that between us: we knew better, but couldn’t help ourselves. It wasn’t like we’d had some blissful period together at the start before it all went south. We were trouble for each other from day one. Yet no matter what damage we inflicted on each other or, worse, on ourselves, we were completely and utterly stupid for each other. Even now, ten years totally removed from each other’s lives, it was still there. That’s why it had taken us so long to fall apart in the first place.

I grabbed her biceps and pushed her away. Not because I could feel everyone in the lobby watching us. Everyone but the cat. The cat couldn’t give a fuck and neither did I. I pushed her away because this wasn’t the way I wanted it to happen. I’d wanted her respect, not this. Falling into bed for us would have been as easy as falling down and if we were going to fall, I didn’t want it to be about how unhappy she was with Peter Moreland.

“I’m sorry, Amy. I can’t do this,” I said, looping a strand of her hair behind her ear.

I moved her gently aside and made for the lobby door. I needed air, more air than was in the hotel lobby or maybe in all of Manhattan. Thank goodness she didn’t follow me out. I couldn’t have withstood a scene out there on the street. That was such a part of the dance of Amy and the Kipster. I so didn’t want that to be part of my life again. Bent over, taking deep, slow breaths, I cursed Meg for doing this to me. And knowing Amy could not stay inside the lobby forever, I took my hands off my knees and walked east along 44th towards 5th Avenue.

As I walked, I thought I heard a familiar sound. It was the sound of a truck’s ignition.
Jim’s
truck!
Jim’s truck sounded like that. I was so fucked up that I actually started looking for his old F-150. I didn’t find it, of course. Hearing it was a product of wishful thinking and a longing to be rescued. I needed more than just fresh air. I ran across 44th, headed back west and ducked into the garage where the Porsche was parked. From the entrance of the garage, I watched the front of the hotel. When Amy finally left, I went back up to my room and retrieved the .38.

There had been a time when I knew exactly where to find trouble and what kind of trouble I would find when I got there. But the trouble I had in mind would have a gun in its hand, a gun pointed at me, and there would be a gun in my hand too. There
was
a gun in my hand, a .38 with one bullet in the chamber. Then I put it away.

Having exhausted all the old familiar places in Manhattan, I drove the Kipster’s Porsche to some of his former Brooklyn drug haunts. Brooklyn was where I went when I was desperate for blow, when I didn’t give a shit about how many times the coke had been stepped on. What I discovered was that in my absence more than just the Liars Pub had been turned into a theme park. The whole of New York City, it seemed, had been scrubbed clean and neutered, turned into a silly Las Vegas hotel-like version of itself. Even Red Hook, once the toughest neighborhood in all of New York, had gotten its ass wiped and been forced to take a long soapy shower. I mean, it had an IKEA and cutesy little tapas bars.

Good thing about Brooklyn is that it’s big and I knew there couldn’t have been enough soap and disinfectant to scrub behind the ears of all its neighborhoods. About twenty minutes or so after I’d left Red Hook, I was driving up Linden Boulevard at a crawl. I pulled off Linden onto a side street and into the mostly vacant parking lot of a strip mall. It was the time of morning when it was either very early or very late, the time when too much alcohol, frayed nerves, and perceived slights led to blood. And the only business still open in the strip was what looked to be a third-rate topless joint. The lurid red neon sign flashed Black Honey. If I couldn’t find trouble in East Flatbush at that time of the morning in front of a topless bar named Black Honey, I wasn’t going to find it anywhere. Forget Red Hook. Much easier, I thought, to pick a gunfight at a topless bar than a tapas bar.

With the motor still running, I sat on the front fender of the Porsche. The .38 was in my waistband and tucked behind the bottom of my famous brown corduroy blazer. I could hear the muffled thumping of the drum machines through the door and walls of Black Honey. No one entered or left, but it was only a matter of time till somebody came outside to smoke a cigarette or a joint or tried to cop some drugs to keep them awake till the sun rose up. I didn’t have long to wait.

Three hard-looking black men came staggering out the front door of the club. They were all in their early thirties. At first, they didn’t notice me at all. They were just laughing a little too loudly, fist-pounding, jostling each other around: the same shit all half-in-the-bag guys do outside topless bars. Then one of the men noticed me noticing them.

“What you starin’ at?” he said. The smile disappeared from his face.

The smiles on his friends’ faces went to that same mysterious place. Except for the continued muted pounding of the drum machine, the world got eerily quiet.

“I’m staring at you. Something wrong with that?”

For a brief second I thought they might let it go at that: just dismiss me as some stupid old white boy who didn’t know how to mind his business or his manners. And maybe if it had been earlier in the night, or if there hadn’t been so much to drink, or if … But it wasn’t earlier and I wasn’t going to get dismissed, not easily, anyway.

“Will you listen to this cracker motherfucka?”

“Yeah, you get the fuck outta here, you know what’s good for your ass.”

“But I don’t feel like going,” I said.

The third man, the man who hadn’t yet spoken, reached around behind him. That’s when the rush went full throttle and I got that tunnel vision thing. But this wasn’t the chapel and these guys weren’t playing Cutthroat. They weren’t playing, period. Jim’s words rang in my head, “The Colonel used to say it wasn’t a sport unless both sides knew they were playing.” I had no vest, not even a white T-shirt to protect me. Never mind that I had only one round in the .38. I knew it was possible to divide one by three, but this was gun math and bullets didn’t work that way. And suddenly my rush was overwhelmed by fear.

I moved my hand slowly under my jacket, feeling confident I could get to the .38 before the man reaching behind him could draw, aim, and fire. Then what? I was hot shit with a gun in my hand and bullets in my gun, but what would I be worth with an empty cylinder? A lot of my life had been a bluff, but bluffing wasn’t going to get me very far after shooting a man through his heart in the parking lot of a titty bar in the armpit of Brooklyn. I froze for a second time that night. Good thing too, because when the man brought his arm back around in front of him, his hand wasn’t holding a gun, but a badge.