Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (11 page)

“I don’t go for Southern literature,” I said. “It makes me perspire and it makes me itch.”

“Unsnap my bra,” she whispered. “What about Faulkner? I love
Absalom, Absalom
.” The bra fell to the floor. Her nipples were large and funguslike. I looked away.

“Are you into restraint?” she said.

“Self-restraint?”

She made a face. “Have you ever tied a woman’s wrists and ankles to a bed? It’s only an idea. We don’t have to do it. But if you would—and if you would sprinkle kitty litter on me, I get all hot and tingly.”

“I don’t think this is going to work out,” I said. I got to the door, though she clung to my lapels and was swinging her breasts from side to side, trying to arouse interest. “Touch my perfect body with your mind,” she said.

“I have to tell you something. I’m gay,” I said. And I sang a little bit of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” in a high trembly voice, and she kissed me good-bye. “I hope you find someone to love,” she said. “And call me if you decide you want to experiment.”

THE PILLSBURY MILL CONDO THAT
Peyton showed me was a two-bedroom on the sixth floor, with thirteen-foot ceilings and enormous windows overlooking the Mississippi waters churning below, the dam and locks, the Stone Arch bridge, the towers of downtown, and Nicollet Island—she gave me a full tour of the joint, and I couldn’t remember a thing except how my heart leaped up when she asked me if I would be living there alone. “I hope not!” I cried.
Got any ideas?
I thought. “I’m sort of in between relationships right now,” I explained. “Been thinking maybe it’s time to settle down,” I offered. A few minutes later I had forked over a down payment of $175,138 and signed the mortgage and shaken her hand on the deal.

“Any advice on decoration?” I asked.

“If it were me, I’d do minimalist.”

“I was hoping you’d say that! It’ll be minimalist all the way. I can minimize with the best of them!”

I was sort of distracted by Peyton, and not until I moved into 619 did I notice there were no cupboards, no stove or washer or dryer, and no wood flooring in the bedroom, just rough plywood with big splinters. Ah well. A person can always carpet a bedroom. I looked around my little domain and thought,
Here is where I will be finally happy again. Here is where I will bring her, whoever she may be, and here she and I will make a good life together.
I missed having a woman in my life. The pantyhose on the shower rod, the doodads around the bathroom sink. The cat hair. The wet towels on the bathroom floor. The monthly emotional meltdown and the weeping and accusations. The hour-long phone conversations with the girlfriend in California while the two of them paint their toenails. The handwriting with the little heart shape dotting the I on the note you find in the morning on the bedside table,
darling i am so sorry i called you a shithead last night. i want you to know i love you & there is nobody like you. xxxxxoxoxox
. The stuffed animals in the bed. The anger toward the mother. The vast arsenal of beauty products that takes over the entire bathroom. I miss all of that.

I MOVED OUT OF THE
Shropshire Arms on August 1, me and a U-Haul trailer, assisted by a pimply faced kid named Kevin. And my landlady, Doris, hands on hips, telling me what a big mistake I was making, that real-estate values were in the toilet, and that I was about to lose my shirt, and where’d I come by all that money anyway, was I selling drugs or what? If so, did I expect her to take me back after I was indicted and the condo gone back to the bank? Well, think again.

I HAD SAVED HER LIFE
one summer night when I whacked her on the back and dislodged an ice cube from her epiglottis as she was choking to death on her rum and Coke, and she never forgave me for the favor. “No good deed goes unpunished,”
as they say. She was furious at her late husband Sidney, who ran off with a twenty-five-year-old named Chrysalis the day Doris had four wisdom teeth pulled and was heading home from the dentist zonked on Vicodin and a teenager stole her purse with her car keys in it so she had to walk twenty-seven blocks home and got there to find her husband’s note saying, “I have found a love so rare that I cannot walk away from it. Chrysalis completes me as I’ve never been completed before. I wish you all the best.” And also the toilet had overflowed. From this afternoon of horror she became a gimlet-eyed harpy, and I was the one available for harping on. Sidney was not, having died, drunk and desolate, when Chrysalis left him for a personal trainer. (Doris scattered his ashes in a hazardous waste site.) Doris’s apartment was just inside the front door and whenever I came home late I could hear her listening to my tippy-toe footsteps, trying to discern if two other feet were tiptoeing alongside mine. She loathed me, which was her form of love, and when I told her I had put money down on a two-bedroom in a luxury high-rise overlooking the Mississippi, she was heartbroken. “You’ll be living on the street before Christmas,” she said. “Wait and see. A big cardboard carton on the steps of a church and a tangle of ratty blankets and a hand-lettered sign: HOPELESS FOOL WHO NEVER LISTENED TO ANYBODY AND NOW LOOK AT HIM. HERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD, ETC. PLEASE HELP IF YOU CAN. HAVE A NICE DAY.”

“Why do you always assume the worst about me?” I said.

“You really want to know?” she replied. “Are you not aware of what I’ve put up with for the past fifteen years?”

“Why don’t you just say, ‘Good luck, Guy, and I hope you’re happy’? Why the insults and accusations?”

“How can you do something so stupid as this? Where are your brains? In your butt?”

I was getting hot under the collar. “Why is it so difficult for you to utter a simple declarative sentence? Why talk only in questions?”

“You want a declarative sentence? Is that what you really want?” she said, jabbing me with her index finger. “Or are you just trying to irritate me by acting like an irresponsible idiot?”

“Why does a simple request always turn into an exchange of insults? Why are you so bitter?”

“Am I supposed to care what you think? Why should I?”

“When are you going to get over Sidney and find a life, Doris? When?”

“What business is that of yours? What do you know about anything?”

And then I lowered the boom on her.

“May I have my damage deposit back, please?”

She took her sweet time, examining every nook and cranny of my apartment, counting scratch marks on the floor, before she shelled out the deposit, $75.75. I took the dough and gave it to an old wino stationed in front of Central Presbyterian. He took it, blinked, cleared his throat, and said, “Think you could see your way clear to making it an even hundred bucks?” So I shelled out an additional $25. A reward for chutzpah.

15

Enter Mr. Freud

I KEPT WAITING FOR MR.
LARRY
to come around and settle my hash, and he didn’t and didn’t, and I know that game, the waiting game. You want your prey to go crazy wondering where you are and when you’ll show up, and pretty soon you’ve taken control of their mind day and night.
Where’s Larry? Is he standing just outside that door? Is he going to beat it down and come in roaring and bust me in the chops?
It’s an old psychological game, Waiting for the Last Trump & the Judgment. The day I moved into Pillsbury Mill, he called, just so I’d know he knew where I was. “Nice apartment, pal, very classy,” he said on the phone. “But when I told you to get out of town, I didn’t mean Minneapolis—that’s just a suburb. I meant,
way
out of town. And you gotta hand over the worms. My patience is running out. And when I hit you, it’s gonna hurt. I’m gonna squash you like a June bug. Boom. You’re outta here. I got friends among the meathead element. Your punks, your shooters. They envy my lifestyle. So don’t jerk me around, Noir, or else. Boom. I want the worms in forty-eight hours, or else my boys are gonna put you six feet under where the worms can have their way with you.” I could hear him gnashing his teeth. He wanted me to know that he meant business.

I WOKE UP ONE MORNING
tangled in the sheets after a bad dream in which I was chased down a dark alley and had to hide in a Dumpster and I remembered suddenly a photo I’d seen a year or two before in
Radio & TV Times
of Mr. Larry arm in arm with Boyd Freud, co-anchor of Channel 5’s
News About You
, the news show with the big cooking segment and tips on relationships and skin care. I looked it up online, and indeed, the two appeared to be thick as thieves. (“Anchorman Boyd Freud and longtime associate Larry B. [L.B.] Larry at benefit for homeless.”) I happened to have met Mr. Freud at Sugar O’Toole’s birthday party years before, and I called him up at the TV station. “Noir. Guy Noir. We met at Sugar’s a long time ago, and we talked about arachnids.”

He remembered. I chatted him up and we met for coffee that afternoon at a noisy joint in Prospect Park.

Boyd was the male Caucasian news anchor with big hair that Channel 5 paired with Nevaeh Evans, the beautiful minority woman co-anchor with sardonic eyes, and Steve, the dorky meteorologist, and Artie, the goofball sports guy who bounces up and down in his chair like he’s wetting his pants. Mr. Freud sat slumped in a back booth, dark glasses, glum, chewing a cracker, as I walked in. He didn’t look at all like the hearty news guy on TV. I asked him why the long puss, and he told me his approval numbers were way down and Nevaeh’s were up, and he lived in dread of getting canned and having to go to a smaller market like Sioux Falls or Grand Forks. He wrung his hands at the thought. A marketing wizard at Channel Five had dreamed up a promotion, whereby Boyd would marry Nevaeh on the air, the culmination of a three-month courtship. She was agreeable but on one condition: she’d become the head anchor and do hard news, and he’d do human interest stories, interview small children, cover fairs and carnivals, and do a daily feature called “Animal Friends” in which he’d talk about an iguana or shrew or possum or garter snake, while holding the critter in his hands. Also, she wanted a bonus of a half-million dollars.

Boyd was sick at the thought; he was not fond of animals. “I am in a living hell. I’ve gained thirty-seven pounds in the past two months. I’m looking blobby on the screen.”

“We can help each other,” I said. “I can give you a guaranteed weight-loss pill, and I can give you some leverage with Nevaeh. You can give me Larry B. Larry, who is trying to horn in on a business deal.”

“Larry, that rat! He’s supposed to be my agent, and he’s done nothing for me! Nada! Zilch! Count me in.” We shook hands on it. He told me that Mr. Larry had a truckload of gambling debts and money was his one and only motive—so he could be negotiated with.

SAME AFTERNOON. LIEUTENANT MCCAFFERTY CALLED
up and said, “I hear you’re hanging out with the Bogus Brothers.”

I told him I was trying to avoid the Bogus Brothers on account of they were attempting to take my scalp.

“I’m just saying I’d watch who I keep company with if I were you.”

I told him again that I didn’t want to get anywhere near the Bogus Brothers.

“I’m just saying that if I see you with them, I’m going to have to draw my own conclusions, Noir.”

McCafferty is not the brightest bulb in the field of law enforcement. He was once trying to track down a jazz bassist who had swiped a ukulele, and he collared a guy in the park—he said, “You’re a jazzer. You’re wearing dark glasses after dark.”

“I’m visually impaired,” the guy yelled. “Okay? See the white cane?” He whacked it on the sidewalk, and a German shepherd woke up and stood by his side. “See the dog? You blind or something?”

“Sorry. Didn’t notice.”

“Use your eyes, for crying out loud. Jeez.” Anyway, that’s McCafferty.

I DID SOME SCOUTING AROUND
on Nevaeh and found an old boyfriend named Mutt Mullins who she picked up back when she was a telemarketer and called to ask if he’d like to save 25 percent on his texting charges and he said he never texted and she said, “How can that be?” and he said it took too long pecking one-fingered at the tiny keyboard on his phone screen and she said, “Use both thumbs,” and she offered to show him how and that’s how they got together. He was a mutt, and she was attracted to mutts. She moved into his apartment and dumped two Dumpsters full of his debris and refinished his floors and hung designer shades and cleaned out his closet and dressed him in classy clothes. He was the one who told her she should be in TV and introduced her to his brother Mike, a TV director, who hired her, and she promptly dumped Mutt for a sports anchor who was handsomer and happier, and Mutt was still bitter about that. He was a security man at a self-storage complex called Closet Warehouse, an octopuslike monstrosity of one-story cinderblock wings of windowless storage units that people rented to keep their junk in, out on Interstate 35W, across Maplelawn Boulevard from Pepe’s Pants Warehouse, Chris Wilmot’s Home of Hope Tabernacle, and Dave’s Drive-Through Desserts, which was featuring a Six-Scoop Hot Fudge Sundae. “We were in journalism school together, and she was good-looking and minority, so she got on a career track, and I’m white and got a mug like a shovel, and here I am, an attendant at a parking lot for flotsam and jetsam. That’s how the cookie crumbles, it’s all about looks.”

He was glad to tell me that in her college days she’d smoked dope and done pills, and once she posed nude for a men’s magazine called
Nooner
.

“Really,” I said. “That’d be something of interest.”

He offered to sell me a copy for fifty dollars.

The magazine was in his own storage unit, a twelve-by-twelve bin with a single folding chair, a handsanitizer dispenser, a lightbulb hanging on a cord over stacks of
Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, Gape, Ogle,
and
I-Ball
magazines, and file cabinets with clippings of photos filed by breast types—Titties, Gumdrops, Casabas, Chi-Chis, Bobblers, Missiles, Maracas, and O Mammy. “Nevaeh was a Gumdrop,” he informed me, handing me the mag. It was her, and she was naked all right. She was lolling in a pink 1957 Pontiac parked under pine trees, and her breasts, pert and perky, nested quite prettily against her rib cage. “Lissome, alluring Nevaeh Evans takes a break from her journalism studies at St. Cloud State to bathe her beauty in solar rays,” etc., etc.

Mr. Mullins’s breath was faintly fermented. Watching over storage units evidently left plenty of time for relaxation. “I applied for a janitor job at Channel Five and called her to see if she’d put in a good word for me, and she acted like she’d never heard my name before. We were in a
relationship,
man. We slept in a bed together. I helped her write her papers. Then when I was no longer of use, she dumped me like an old newspaper.”

I felt queasy about the whole deal. The exposure of a news anchor’s youthful indiscretion is nothing to be proud of. I never was a shining star in the Ethics Department, but I didn’t want to be involved in destroying a young woman’s career. Her boss was the bullet-headed right-wing tycoon and half-wit loudmouth Stanley Mutter—and the thought of him eyeballing this lovely, vulnerable, unclothed person was repellent to me. I opened the magazine to page fifty-two, and it was all so clear, her innocence, her good-heartedness, her need—some man had sweet-talked her into posing, lying naked on her side across the hood of the car, the hood ornament between her ankles, and he’d paid her a hundred dollars, which seemed like easy money to her, not knowing that it could come back years later and blow up in her face and ruin her career.

On the other hand,
maybe this was the sort of scandal that PR people yearn for—a big boomer of a story that lands smack dab on page one:

NUDE PIX OF NEWS ANCHOR EXPOSED; “NEVAEH, HOW COULD YOU?” CRY FANS; CHANNEL 5 ORDERS 2-DAY SUSPENSION

And two days later, the exposée weeps (“I was young! I was foolish!”) and begs for forgiveness (“My viewers are the most important people in my life”) and announces she’s going into treatment (“I am a serial exhibitionist and this is my opportunity to confront my demons”). She returns ten days later, does a guest shot on talk radio, and tells about her obsessive need for male approval that led her to do that shameful thing, and is forgiven, and becomes
twice as popular as ever before.

Sending the issue of
Nooner
to Gene Willikers might be the biggest favor anyone ever did for Nevaeh.

On the other hand—
what if it wasn’t?

I turned once again to page fifty-two in hopes of getting some guidance from the young, lissome beauty reclining on the Pontiac, her lovely head against the windshield, arms flung to either side, long legs splayed, a faint patina of goose bumps on her dark skin—she looked like someone who could easily lure sailors to their deaths. Would this maiden choose broad dissemination of her image, or would she prefer to draw a curtain of privacy?

I parked in front of the Channel 5 building, pondering this issue, and spotted the Eyewitness News van (
News 4 U@ 6 & 10)
with the satellite dish on top, and there on the sidewalk stood Nevaeh herself, microphone in hand, as the cameraman waited and a poofy-haired man brushed powder on her beautiful countenance and got out a mascara pencil. “Close your eyes,” he said, and so she didn’t see me when I walked up. On the grass behind her, standing ramrod straight at attention, was the Anoka High School Marching Band in maroon and gray uniforms, eighty strong, clarinets in front, six silver tubas in back, the plump, fish-faced director standing to the side, the drum major in white poised to give the downbeat. I put the magazine in her hand. “Someone is trying to blackmail you, and it isn’t me,” I said. “By the way, you have terrific tits.” And I gave a big thumbs-up to the drum major, who took me for a TV producer, and the drums hit four big beats and a long roll and blazed out with “The Minnesota Rouser.” But I was already aroused. If Nevaeh had made a pass at me, I would’ve scooped her up right there and then and headed for the airport. She looked like she was about to. She glanced at the porn and looked up at me and touched her bosom and whispered, “Thank you.”
But before she could say more, I felt severe gastric disturbances and moved at a quick trot toward the street, and a whisper of gas escaped from me, and I got in the car and peeled out. I felt heat in the gluteal cleft. I opened the windows and let go of it, a long trombone blast, a cloud of evil shooting out, rattling the aperture, and I decided then and there to put the worms to death and resume normal life.