Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (4 page)

4

A beautiful beautiful idea

“IT’S THE MOST EFFECTIVE WEIGHT-LOSS
product ever known to man, and it’s one hundred percent natural. You may doubt me, but it’s true. Poor people have known about it for centuries, and now we’ll make it available to the rich.” She leaned in close to my ear. “Tapeworms,” she said. “A special breed of tapeworms. You swallow a large reddish capsule, the worms hatch in your stomach, you eat all you like, they devour eighty-five percent of it, and you shrink to skin and bones, you take a little yellow pill, and you poop the worms out. It’s simple, it’s perfect, it does the job, and I’ve got a worm supplier, a man named Ishimoto. He’s promised to produce a half-million red capsules in the next eighteen months.

“Americans spend sixty billion dollars a year on weight-loss stuff. Most of it a waste of money. I mean, the secret of weight loss is simple: eat less and move around more. Everybody with a brain knows what to do: cut out bread, cut out butter and cheese, skip dessert, take long, brisk walks. But instead people lavish money on ‘diet’ foods and ‘programs’ and creams and gels and vitamins and get caught in a spiral of guilt and shame. Those actresses at the Oscars: each one skinnier than the next. In Los Angeles, a size one is considered medium. And the movies set the standard for glamour. To be beautiful today, you’ve gotta have two sticks for legs, a sunken belly, tits like ginger snaps, and a long swanlike neck with only your spine and gullet in it, otherwise you are Old & Fat & Washed Up.”

She continued.

“The American obsession with youth and skinniness. It’s tragic. Rich people buy powerful pills to jack up their metabolism to that of adolescent hummingbirds, but the pills have terrible side effects: they cause Nocturnal Excess Eating Disorder, and you wake up at four a.m. with empty ice cream cartons in your bed, so you have to go to a NEED support group and sit in a circle of folding chairs with weepy people in a church basement and share your sad stories about feelings of inadequacy going back to when you walked naked into the showers after ninth-grade gym and someone grabbed your belly roll and called you Porky and the nickname stuck to you for three painful years until you enlisted in the Marines and got the nickname Psycho.

“Rich people fly off to chop shops in Manhattan or L.A. to have their jiggly parts excised by smooth-talking surgeons and come out looking like Mongol mummies with a permanent look of alarm on their faces, and they have to wear a turtleneck and a serape to hide the hideous scars. Maybe the butt reduction comes out uneven, so they have to wear orthopedic pants with support pads in the cheeks to help them sit up straight. And their navel is now up in their armpit, so they can’t wear sleeveless dresses.

“Rich people go on weird diets: lichen on RyKrisp and a soup made from birch bark—and they lose a few pounds and then black out. And in the morning, their bed is full of empty ice cream cartons. It’s a wicked circle.”

Naomi reached down into her bosom.

“And now here’s this: Elongate.”

She held out a clear plastic envelope containing a reddish gelatin capsule.

“Take this, and in two weeks you will begin to see the difference.
Eat what you like—gorge yourself on creamy desserts, cheesy omelets, half-pound hamburgers, giant cartons of onion rings. Y
ou will continue to lose weight until you take this.” She held out a small yellow pill. “This cleans you out. Completely. Stay close to a toilet for a few hours, and when stuff comes out of you, don’t look at it, just flush.”

I opened the envelope and held the red capsule in the palm of my hand. I felt like Wilbur Wright watching Orville soar in the biplane at Kitty Hawk. Like John Logie Baird looking at the flickering image on his 1927 television. Or Frank Colton looking at Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, in 1952, and thinking about all the women who would sleep with him if they could only get their hands on this.

“You’re looking at the cure for American obesity,” she said. “A life saver.”

“You’ve taken these?”

She grinned. “I used to have three chins and weigh 180 pounds, baby. My nickname in Bible school was Bubbles. I worked in a pizza joint. Pizzas the size of truck tires, and I ate the leftovers. And then I met a gynecologist named Buddy. He’s the one who got me into stripping. He loved me, or parts of me, but not the fat parts, so he offered me these pills, not knowing what was in them, only that they had worked for him. He’d gotten up to 380 and needed a motorized cart to get around, and when I met him, he was 168 and a men’s senior handball champ. I took the pills and lost 70 pounds and gained a new personality. I became a third-wave feminist who wants to posit a poststructuralist positivist model of gender that embraces ambiguity and rejects the binary handcuffs of the first-wave paradigm. And I also want to be fabulously rich and utterly gorgeous so that men are helpless in my presence. The worms made me gorgeous, and they’re going to make me rich. And you, too, if you want in.”

The way she said “in”
—
it sounded like more than a business proposition. It suggested something physical, a merger, if you will, or interpolation. My loins warmed at the thought, my aging loins, and I felt a quick, irrational stab of premature jealousy—that if I showed insufficient enthusiasm, she might locate a younger, more agile private eye and engage him.

“I want in. It’s all I want. To be in. Completely in.”

She blinked. “Here’s how it works. The pills are produced by Mr. Ishimoto in his bio-lab in Robbinsdale. He was in the germ warfare business and wanted to get into something socially constructive. A set of pills costs about forty cents to produce, the packaging is about fifteen dollars, and the marketing and overhead two hundred. They retail for fifteen hundred, and you do the math. It’s mostly pure profit. Of which, you, my friend, will be in for two percent. If that’s okay.”

When you’ve been residing in a third-floor studio walkup at the Shropshire Arms and the water is rusty and the drain is slow and your upstairs neighbors copulate vigorously at two a.m. on a bed with squeaky wheels, why quibble over percentage points? Two percent of several million was fine by me.

We shook hands on the deal, and she set a canvas tote bag on the table and pulled out a canister with a Baggie inside, and some rather fat worms, slowly writhing around each other. “These are the queens,” she said. “Extra specimens of our prime breeding stock. Your job is to guard it. Any safe place with a temp between forty-five and eighty-five Fahrenheit is fine. A cupboard, a box under your bed. There’s an electric warmer in here for when you carry it outdoors. This is what Mr. Larry B. Larry is after.”

In the bottom of the Baggie were what appeared to be grains of brown rice. “Eggs,” she said. “Mr. Ishimoto will drop by once a week and collect them. You’ll have to arrange a safe meeting place. Here.” She handed me a tiny cell phone. “This is a dedicated number that connects you to his line and only to his line. If you should be captured, you can press zero, and the thing shoots pepper spray out the skinny end. Aim at their eyes, and they’ll be in agony for an hour or so, long enough for you to tie them to a railroad track or whatever seems best at the time. Don’t laugh. You may need it.” And then she gave me a large red capsule.

I handed it back to her, and she took my hand and closed it over the pill and told me to swallow it.

“Now?”

“Think of it as caviar,” she said. “Except it doesn’t taste fishy at all, or wormy. And it’s not that I don’t adore you just as you are, darling Guy, but I want you to understand what we’re dealing with. And I think that secretly you want to be skinny. Take these and in a few weeks you’ll be shopping for clothes in the boys’ department.”

WHEN IT COMES TO EATING
tapeworm eggs, a man doesn’t want to think too hard about it. It isn’t an intellectual problem. I thought about Naomi and me sitting naked, flank to flank, in a hot tub, and my flanks not flabby but sleek and trim, my gut nice and flat, not needing to be sucked in, my jowls gone, and I closed my eyes, and down the hatch it went, a little bump on the epiglottis, and I chased it with her white wine—“Whoops, is it okay to drink?” She laughed and said the worms love alcohol.

I took a deep breath. I imagined snakes writhing in my innards. I tried to focus on Naomi and her general fabulousness, her minty breath, her playful fingers, the marvelous illicitries that we could enjoy, ignoring the bubbly sensation in my belly. Like gas bubbles but more urgent. I have always tried to avoid farting around women, knowing how they disapprove of such things. I crossed my legs and clenched my bowels and tried to think pure thoughts, but an unmistakable gas bubble was forming within. I excused myself and walked quickly, slightly bent, cheeks flexed, to the men’s can and closed the door, and
whammo,
out it came, one of those sickly putrid farts that can clear a room in seconds.

Memory is tied to smell, and that fart, like Proust’s slice of cake, reminded me of Beatrice Olsen and why she left me for Brett Brackett. (Pardon me while I digress.) We were in New York, and I had fallen for her like a soufflé in an earthquake, and she had written a hit musical,
Song of Ourselves,
about the
ménage à trois
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson hanging out with God, who is a good guy but not 100 percent certain of his own divinity. He feels godlike some days, and other days it’s hit and miss. It was SRO in Seattle and Boston with their large Unitarian populations. And Beatrice got it in her head that
The Great Gatsby (The Musical)
would be her next work—she said, “High school kids love
Gatsby.
It has New York, alcohol, big parties, nice clothes, hopeless yearning, violence, everything meaningful to teenagers. It’ll
kill
at the box office”—and she decided to move to St. Paul, it being Fitzgerald’s hometown. She and I were closer than a couple of mice in a shot glass, but I hated to leave New York. (Maybe she hoped that moving to St. Paul would be a way to lose me, but I didn’t pick up the cue.) I told her, “Darling—St. Paul is the city he was running away from. New York is where he was running
to—Gatsby
is no more about St. Paul than
Grapes of Wrath
is about Chardonnay. All you’ll get in St. Paul is some unhappy flashbacks.” But she was packed and ready to go, and so I bade farewell to the Upper West Side and caught the dog to St. Paul and hung out my shingle at the Acme Building.

(PRIVATE EYE. Surveillance. Background Checks. Marital Research. Reasonable rates. NO JOB TOO SMALL.)

She and I roosted in the honeymoon suite at the Commodore Hotel for three fun-filled weeks, and on our walks around Crocus Hill, she pointed out houses she fancied, which I thought meant we’d get hitched, and then one night after a few mai tais in the mirror-lined bar, we had a big argument. She was Unitarian and agnostic and believed that man is merely a teeming mass of electrons with no free will, no soul, no afterlife. Woman, on the other hand, has a soul and perhaps an afterlife, so long as the man dies first. That’s what she told me. Okay, so two lovers have theological differences—not a problem, right? But just then I let the worst fart of my life, it smelled like a dead badger on an asphalt bonfire, and she cried, “Oh my God, go away” and I did—for several days—slept on my office couch and bathed at the Y—and though we tried to repair the breach, it didn’t work. The smell of that fart stayed on her mind. She never sat close to me again. A week later she told me she needed “more space,” and I knew what she was referring to. And two weeks later, when I called her to say I’d taken her toothbrush by mistake, it was her librettist, Brett Brackett, who answered the phone in the honeymoon suite, the dimwit who wrote “Daisy Buchanan / Was crazy. A man in / His right mind would’ve said, ‘Rats!’ / But not Jay Gatz. Oh Jay Gatz / In his pastel shirts and brown felt hats, / Black shoes, white spats. / His gala parties, his confident talk / And the green light shone at the end of the dock.” Ira Gershwin he was not, just another yahoo with an urge to scribble. They finished the first act of
Gatsby
and sang it for potential backers and stank out the room, so they abandoned
Gatsby
and wrote
Dance with Your Daddy
instead, a musical marshmallow about fathers and daughters that the American public was starved for, and their ship came in, and I sat in my dingy office and prayed for a submarine. She became Beatrice Brackett, and they bought a big stone Cass Gilbert house on Summit Avenue, and there went my last shot at the Happily Married Life, dang it. She was a goddess of a woman with great alabaster hips and a magnificent rump who slept in the nude and so did I, and we spooned together like pigs in warm mud, sighing, nudging, feasting on proximity. That’s matrimony. You don’t have to astound each other with brilliant quips or fabulous salad dressings or prowess with the Sunday
Times
crossword, you thrive on nearness. And I did. Our bodies fit perfectly together, belly to rump. And then that horrible fart, which drove us apart. I admit it smelled bad, like sewer gas, but when it was gone, she somehow couldn’t forget it. I apologized over and over. I took antiflatulence pills. Gave up coffee, beans, tapioca, rutabagas, fried onions, all the known fart agents. I went to a twelve-step group for recovering farts (
Admit that your gasses are out of control. Take inventory of your expulsions. Make amends to those whom you have offended.)
but she was gone, gone, gone, married to a nickel-plated dope, Mr. Wrong, and I, who was destined to be her husband, fell into a life of aimless romances. Every so often I’d see them go wheeling by on their Italian racing bikes, or running in their French running duds, and I’d catch a whiff of methane. Science tells us that everyone creates several pints of intestinal gas per day and releases it in a dozen or so farts. The Queen of England farts, and so does Angelina Jolie. One reason people run is to release the gas outdoors. And then they can sit and discuss intellectual matters without suddenly smelling like a dead badger.

NAOMI SMILED UP AT ME
when I returned to the table from my long Proustian moment in the men’s can. “I forgot to tell you about the side effects,” she said. “Heightened libido and also gassiness. A cruel combination. But that’s the price you pay for getting skinny.” She gave me the tote bag and a brown envelope and said, “Don’t spend it all in one place,” and kissed me lightly on the ear and then the other ear. “I’m going to be gone for a while, writing a book. Oh Guy, I miss you so much already. This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” she said. She took the enormous mink coat off a coat hook and disappeared into the arctic night. It bothered me the way she said “friendship.”
It sounded so matter-of-fact, as if we’d be playing canasta in a tearoom over scones. I was frankly hoping for much more.