Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (8 page)

The elevator clanked down to the basement and landed with a hard thump, and I hustled back into George’s dim cave of an office. An impressive mountain range of junk rose from the desk, and an old dinette set with a TV on it, tuned to the Handyman’s Channel on cable. The camera was focused on a wall covered with wet paint, and it didn’t move. And there in an ancient recliner lay George, grizzled, bundled up in his old DeLaSalle letter jacket, reading a paperback,
Compassionate Custodianship.

“Hey, Noir, how’s it going?” he growled. “Something wrong with the radiators again? That cheapskate Lou won’t let me call the plumbers.”

I was staring at the TV. The picture didn’t move. Live coverage of a wall covered with wet paint.

“Birch sent me down. I need to hang out here for a few minutes until Sugar picks me up.”

He roused himself and cleared away some paper plates with pizza crusts on them and asked if I wanted to play cribbage. “Sure,” I said, and it was a shock to me, after he dealt the cards, that I’d forgotten the gist of the game. I guess fear will do that to a man. I could feel my tenants trembling in my gut; probably they could taste my fear. Visions of large men stomping on me and driving enormous fists into the tapeworms’ living quarters.

“You seem uneasy, Mr. Noir.”

“Terrified is more like it, George.”

“Is there something you’d like to talk about?”

“George, you’re a janitor, not a therapist. So don’t talk like one.”

“You don’t have to be a therapist to care about your fellow man, Guy.”

George is a squatty man with two days’ growth of whiskers and big tufts of ear hair and warty hands, not a person you’d care to discuss your innermost feelings with. I told him to care about some other fellow man and leave me out of it.

“What kind of attitude is that?” he said. “You’re lonely. Just say so. Loneliness is a form of suppressed rage. I’ve seen a lot of it in men our age.”

“I’m not your age, George. Nowhere near your age.”

He grabbed my wrist. “I’m only trying to help—and I’m not going to stop caring just because you’re in denial.” I tried to take my wrist back, and the old booger clamped down on me like a dog on a sirloin.

“You need me, and you don’t dare admit it!” he cried, leaning up close, breathing his onion breath on me. “Have you ever heard of Joseph Campbell and
The Trail to Ecstasy
? We’re all on a quest to escape the feminine wound and be initiated into manhood and harmonize our duality in the great circle of the universal soul. Plain as the nose on your face. You’re broken inside and so am I. We can help make each other whole.” I tried to shove him away and he wouldn’t let go of my wrist, so I kicked him, and he fell backward and banged his head on a steel locker, and when he got up, a little woozy, he knocked over a pile of old paint cans, and suddenly there was bellowing from down the hall and the
rar-rar-rar-rar
of the three brutes
like hounds on the trail of an escaped inmate.

“George,” I said, “I wasn’t here, and you didn’t see me. Okay?” And I took a deep breath and climbed into a packing case a moment before the
rar-rar-rar-rar
came thundering into the office.

“Hey numb nuts,” said a low growly voice. “You seen a heavyset guy in a blue suit come by?”

George shrugged. “Not recently.”

“Well, if you see him, tell him that we are on his trail, and if he doesn’t come out of that box right now, we’re going to pick it up and heave it into the Mississippi River.”

I climbed out as gracefully as I could under the circumstances. “Gentlemen,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

10

In the clutches of the evil three

THE BOGUS BROTHERS WERE XXX-LARGE,
about a sixty-four long, I’d say, solid muscle, with legs like tree stumps. Shaved heads, big eyebrows, flared nostrils, a lot of facial scar tissue, as if they’d been pounding fence posts with their foreheads, muscle shirts under the black leather jackets, and purple warm-up pants, and they smelled like old gym socks sprayed with cheap cologne. They wasted no time in chitchat. They grabbed me, one to an arm, and the third guy held my necktie, and they perp-walked me out back into the alley, the broken glass crinching underfoot. An old cat let out a meow like fingernails on a blackboard. Steam hissed from a manhole. The smell of burning rubber and lost hopes.

“Listen,” I said, “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. I left my horse in the woods beside a frozen lake. Where it’s snowing downy flakes.”

They said not a word, not even a syllable. I told them a whole string of humorous jokes—about lost lithographs (“Someday my prints will come”) and wet newspapers in an entryway (“These are the
Times
that dry men’s soles”) and a rooster sicced on Margaret Thatcher by a man who just wanted to see a chicken catch a Tory—but they didn’t laugh. “Tell us where we find the worms,” said the guy holding my tie. “You know which ones. The ones with the eggs.”

“Do worms lay eggs?” I said. “I thought chickens did.”

He flexed his right arm, and the bicep filled up his jacket sleeve, and he drew it back to drive it into my solar plexus, and just then a horn honked, and up drove Sugar O’Toole in a black BMW. She rolled down the window and said, “Which one of you fairies thinks he can leg-wrestle a skinny little progressive Democrat?”

That amused them. The Bogus boy holding my right arm relaxed his grip and chuckled and said, “Take your pick, lady.”

She got out. She had changed into a loose low-cut blouse of a translucent fabric and a short skirt that drew your eye toward what, in some circles, is referred to as the “moneymaker”—she was quite a sight as she stepped around the front of her car, her arms folded ninjalike, looking straight at the big boys, unflinching.

“I’ve been doing leg lifts and built up my glutes to where I can sit down naked on a bench and pick up a quarter with my cheeks. Want to see me do it?” She smiled. “It’ll cost you a quarter.”

The boy holding my left arm suddenly dropped it. His mouth was open and out came a sort of a
huh-huh-huh-huh
like a car trying to start on a cold morning. I reckoned he was laughing, but he hadn’t had much practice, so it sounded rather painful.

“Or we can arm wrestle. I’m a black belt in tai chi, and I’ve been working out with unabridged dictionaries—one kick, and I’ll lay you out like tenpins and collect your nuts with a letter opener and donate them to a museum.”

“Let’s see you do it then,” said the Bogus holding my right arm.

“You want to go first?” she said.

“Sure. Why not?”

“I’ll give you a choice: a flying kick to the jaw, or I’ll tit-slap you until you beg for mercy.”

Sugar’s breasts are not big enough to slap a Chihuahua. The Bogus boys glanced at her chest and chuckled heartily.

Something about a beautiful woman brings out the John Wayne in me. I said, “Come on, you sissies. Afraid she might hurt you?” The boy with the flexed bicep told me to shut my yap, and he hauled off to slug me, and Sugar yelled, “Hey!” and he turned, and she had three syringes in her left hand. She hurled them at the Bogus boys,
thump thump thump,
hard and with great accuracy, and hit them in the shoulders, right about where the school nurse gave you your measles shot, and the needles stuck, and the brutes went pale from fear of needles and their legs turned to rubber, and they took a wobbly step or two and sank to the pavement and lay in a heap, mouths open, eyes rolling, drooling, out like a light.

“You okay?” she said, and grinned. I nodded. “Get in the car.” She poked a Bogus with her toe, and he murmured something like “Can I open my presents now, Mama?”

“They’re going to be miffed when they come to,” I said.

She got behind the wheel, and the BMW eased down the alley and out onto East Seventh. “It’s an animal tranquilizer. Got ’em from a naturalist friend who uses them to bring down moose so he can install radio transmitters in them,” she said.

And we looked at each other and said, “Hey!” at the same time. And she made a quick U-turn and drove back up the alley.

We debated whether to put the tiny transmitter in a Bogus boy’s underarm or in his buttock, and in the end she inserted it into his scrotum. “Easier to numb,” she said. “One little incision, and in it goes.” She was right. She snipped the sack, slipped in the transmitter, which was about the size of a penlight battery, stapled three stitches, sprayed antiseptic, and that was it. Easy. She drove away and whipped out her iPhone and pressed the Map icon, and up came the grid of St. Paul and a flashing blue bulb marking the spot where the Bogus boy lay with a radio in his nuts.

It kept flashing as we drove to Minneapolis and around the university campus and along the Mississippi past the dam and the Stone Arch Bridge and old flour mills and Grain Belt beer sign and over the river and through blocks of old warehouses that had been turned into art galleries and lofts and chichi restaurants, and it was flashing in the same exact spot when we arrived at the old
Minneapolis
Journal
printing plant, now a six-story condominium complex, and walked into her living room full of leather furniture and a big glass-topped coffee table with enormous picture books of Picasso, Peru, petroglyphs, and the pool halls of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I could hear a dog growling in the next room. “That’s Luke. Wally wanted a guard dog. At first we named him Mark, but when we called his name, he’d go pee on a tree. So we changed it to Luke.” The dog sounded like he took his job seriously.

“He’s tied up. Don’t worry.” She sat me down with a glass of Pernod and disappeared into the bedroom, and when she came back, she wore black capri pants so tight I could make out George Washington’s face on the quarter in her pocket. And she had on a blouse made of thin netting; it had less fabric in it than you’d find in the average doily. She moved across the room with the grace of a cat, and if I was the sparrow, well, there are worse things than dying at the hands of a beautiful predator. She said, “I’ve never forgotten how good the good times were, Guy. There will never be anyone for me like you.”

“What happened with Wally? Why did he decide to be a woman?”

“He went on a big fishing trip to Alaska. A plane flew him into a wilderness lake, and he stayed there alone, in a tent, for seven days, and it rained the whole seven days, and his only reading matter was
Vogue
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and he just decided he should try a different gender, that manhood hadn’t really worked out for him. I wish him well. I think everybody deserves to be happy. And I think the change will be good for him. The man hasn’t read a book since he left the ninth grade. No movies, no newspapers. Fishing was his world, and Green Bay Packer football. From August through February, the man watched every Packer game there was to watch, twice. Taped the games for replay. Bought highlight videos. Had a big TV over our bed, another in the kitchen, one in the bathroom. Wore a Packer jersey and helmet. He was having headaches and went to a shrink, who told him that football was his way of destroying all the estrogen in his body, and Wally went cold turkey, and sure enough, the shrink was right. The holidays and the Super Bowl rolled around, and Wally turned the TVs to the wall and donned a green and red apron and did a fabulous Christmas, constructed a lovely mantelpiece, decorated a ten-foot spruce with real candles, roasted a goose which was scrumptious, baked a mince pie, played carols on a soprano recorder, everything. Centerpieces made from old egg cartons, hand-frosted windows, hundreds of cookies. The man had found himself. And he had no more interest in sex with me. He looked at me like a cat looks at a dog. And that’s when I started dreaming of getting back with you. Remember when we danced on that barge on the Mississippi, you in a black tux and me in nothing at all? We jumped on at the Ford locks and rode upstream and I danced in the towboat spotlight and the pilot said to take it off and I did and we got out at the St. Anthony lock and you put your jacket on me and your billfold was gone and we got a ride with the boy with the missing arm who loved Hank Williams so much?”

Well, what could I say?

11

Sugar reunion

IT WAS A WILD ROMANTIC
evening with tumultuous tumbling and rolling and exclaiming, quoting from poems, crying out extravagant sentiments, the giving of directions, moaning. When two grown-up people know what they want, they don’t waste time discussing politics and the ups and downs of the real estate market. She grabbed my hand and led me up the stairs and bedroomward, and I kicked off my shoes and unbuttoned my shirt, and she tore off my pants, the old pants with the belt pulled up to the fourth notch. “Whose big balloon pants are these?” she cried. “You working in the circus now??” It was nice of her to notice my newly gained slimness, or at least slimmerness. She threw me into bed and flung her undies to the wind, and I held her close and kissed her freckled shoulders and collarbone, which I had yearned for for six years, and also her slender arms and girlish navel and firm belly, and we got right down to business, and it was all rather thrilling and luxurious and ecstatic except for the heaviness in my gut. We jumped around in bed and tried out various interesting little things from Sex 101, and Sugar was crying out “Yes! Do that! Do that!” Meanwhile those little plastic capsules were bouncing around, and my worms were pitching a fit, and then I got an overpowering urge to head for the toilet. Egg capsules were making their way into the colon and pressing against the sphincter. Ishimoto had never mentioned anything about this. I did not want them to come blasting out during a paroxysm of rapturous delight.

It is practically impossible for a man to maintain an attitude of wild passion when he feels the urge to take a crap. “What’s the matter?” she said. I said, “Darling, gotta pee. Be right back. Hold that thought.” And trotted off to the toilet and tried to move my bowels but nothing was moving. There was a painful traffic jam in there, and I thought of picking up the toiletside phone and dialing 911 and letting the EMTs work it out, and just then a large animal hurtled itself against the bathroom door, barking like a jackhammer. A German shepherd, I guessed, but I didn’t ask for his passport. And in about three seconds, six plastic capsules came shooting out of me and floated in the toilet like buoys in a swimming pool. The dog was clawing at the door and snarling like I was out to get his girlfriend. I could hear bare feet on the stairs. I fished out the capsules and dropped them into one of Sugar’s nylons hanging on the shower curtain rod and stashed it behind the clothes hamper.

“Lukie Luke! What are you
doing?
Shame on you.” She tapped on the door. “It’s okay, darling. He won’t bite.”

And indeed he did not. Though he did grind his teeth and give me homicidal looks. She led me back up the stairs. Why I found this erotically stimulating, I can’t explain. Survival is a turn-on, I guess. We jumped back in bed and made love until my head was spinning like cherries on a slot machine, and Sugar in her ecstasy sang the Minnesota Rouser—“
Rah Rah Rah for Ski-U-Mah, Rah for the U of M”—
and fell back and lay fully spent, curled up on her side, and I pulled the blanket up to her chin, and she murmured, “You’re the best, Guy. The absolute best.” And was asleep.

I tiptoed down to the toilet, and the dog poked his head up from the couch where he was dozing. I retrieved the capsules and washed them off several times with soap and warm water and—Lord have mercy—swallowed them, gagging on each one, but down the chute they went. I spotted Sugar’s cell phone on the coffee table and picked it up. The dog’s eyes were locked on me like airport radar. The blue light was flashing on the same spot in downtown St. Paul. Evidently the Bogus Brothers had spent four hours snoozing in the alley behind the Acme. I could imagine their vast rage when they awoke. They would be in a mood to wreak devastation. Maybe I had better purchase a few dozen of those wildlife syringes and learn to throw them with accuracy. I tiptoed up to the bedroom and slipped into bed beside her, and she turned in her sleep and sighed at the proximity of me and nestled close and put her little curly head against my shoulder and smiled. And a few hours later I awoke to the smell of espresso and fresh-baked croissants.

I got out of bed and walked slowly naked into the bathroom, aware of her eyes feasting on me. I never would’ve done that back in my fatso phase, not slowly. I’d have grabbed a towel or something to cover my big butt. Now it was skinnier. Shapely, almost. She climbed into the shower with me and soaped my back and I soaped hers and she soaped me some more and then we writhed together under the hot water, all slippery and soapy, and dried each other off with enormous fluffy towels.

And then we did other things.

And afterward I lay, scratch marks on my back, my hard drive tingling with bliss, Sugar in my arms, feeding me a croissant stuffed with blackberry jam and a perfectly poached quail’s egg on a triangle of brioche. And felt the urge to get dressed and get out of there.
What was wrong with me?

“You just get younger and younger,” she said. “Move in with me, Guy. It’ll be just like it used to be, except better. I’ve got a million in the bank, and the apartment is all mine. We’ll throw away the fish lithographs and make it our little love nest. The best is yet to be. My heart is a caged animal, Guy, and you hold the key in your hand.”

There was a barely audible growl from the corner and a grinding of teeth. You didn’t have to be fluent in German to know what he was saying: “You move in here, and your troubles have just begun.”

“We’ll make a happy life together,” she said, her pale green nightie draped loosely on her naked body, her cheek pressed against mine. “We’ll go to the movies, we’ll cook together and read poetry aloud, and we’ll dance in the dark and do wonderful impulsive things like dropping everything and flying to Montana just because we want to, and walking up a mountain trail in the summer rain and singing Neil Young songs. That was the problem before, Guy. We weren’t impulsive. We were cautious. We dated for six years, and I can count the number of crazy impulsive things we did on one hand. But look at you now. You’re elegant. Dashing. A new Guy. I always begged you to lose weight, and now you have, darling. Oh Guy, you’re the handsomest, sexiest man in Minnesota. And probably other states as well. Marry me.”

And the dog said, “Go ahead, try it, and you’ll wake up one morning with one less testicle.”

The thought of singing “Heart of Gold” in a high voice in a public place did not appeal to me, nor did reading poetry aloud. “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” okay, and maybe some Robert Frost, but most poetry requires you to go limp with awestruck wonder at stuff like dew on the grass, and clouds in the sky or deer in the underbrush. Sorry, but I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl.

And then I remembered Naomi, the yacht on the Aegean, the underwater kiss. Women possess an infallible rival detector. If you so much as peck another woman on the cheek, your Primary Woman can sense this and she will hunt the peckee down and remember her scent and monitor your movements ever after. It was only a matter of time before Sugar said, “Tell me about you and Naomi Fallopian. Are you sleeping with her? Have you ever, or are you hoping to in the future?” And Naomi would phone in from Phoenicia: “So what’s this I hear about you and that O’Toole woman?” If Naomi and Sugar found out about each other, they would drop me simultaneously, and I’d be suddenly loveless and penniless and pathetic.

It wasn’t easy to tear myself away. Sugar begged me to stay for lunch. “Scallops, my love, on a bed of basmati rice. And then you, my love, on a bed of silk and satin.” I had to lie and say that Larry B. Larry was meeting me at the office in an hour. She wanted to drive me to St. Paul. “No, no, darling, I want to keep you out of this.” The truth was, I needed to be alone and think. A man loves wild passionate sex, and then he would like to be solo for a while in an undisclosed location. Maybe climb a tree and sit on a high limb for a few hours. And look at the sky.

“Be careful,” she said. She kissed me good-bye (many times and many places), and I glanced down the front of her shirt at the two friendly puppies lying in their hammocks, and I promised to be in touch, and waltzed out the door and down to the corner where a taxi was parked and climbed in and said, “St. Paul. Downtown.”

“You work around here?” the driver said. He was a big fellow. He filled up half the front seat. Balding, with a long thin braid hanging down.

“You could say that.”

“Night shift, huh?”

“Sometimes. When I’m lucky.”

“My girlfriend works a night shift at the hospital. We’re saving up our money because in January her and me are having a baby.”

“She and I,” I said. “Not ‘her and me’—‘She and I are having a baby.’”

He slammed on the brakes, and the cab skidded toward the curb, and a bus swerved around us, honking. “That’s not funny,” he said. “Where do you get off saying a thing like that?”

“I was correcting your grammar.”

“And leave my grandma out of it, too, you jerk!”

“You said ‘her and me are having a baby.’ It’s ‘
she and I.’
That’s all.”

“I ain’t taking that from you—” And he lunged over the front seat and grabbed my jacket and took a swing, and I managed to open the door and slide out, and he came galumping around and grabbed my shirt, and I had to hit him hard, an elbow to the ribs and a right jab to the chops, and he fell down and lay whimpering on the boulevard. I saw the roll of twenties in his shirt pocket, and I grabbed it. “I ought to charge you tuition,” I said. “The College of Etiquette. You just learned why you ought to think before you lose your temper. A couple hundred bucks might make it more memorable. But I don’t want your money—” and I stuck the roll in his mouth. “I just had sex with a fabulous lady and then a fine croissant as well, and I’ve got all the cash I want. But that doesn’t change the fact that ‘
she and I’
are having a baby. Your girlfriend and I. And she told me that your sperm are weak swimmers, barely motile, and that’s why I was brought into the case. Let me know when the baby comes, and I’ll send a box of cigars.” And I turned away and then turned back and said, “Last time I saw a mouth like yours, it had a hook in it,” and walked fifty feet to the bus stop just as the express to St. Paul rolled up—no need to break into a trot—and boarded
and
(get this)
I had exact change in my right-hand pants pocket
and dropped in the six quarters and they played the first six notes of “Dinah” exactly as Thelonious Monk played it in his 1955 Blue Angel recording. Talk about smooth. Perfect timing. And then the nubile young woman I sat down across from looked up and smiled at me. She smiled and held the smile and was about to say, “Don’t I know you?” and I was about to reply, “No, but give it time, darling, give it time.” But before she could say it, the bus stopped, and she got up to get off and looked back at me with that
I-will-always-look-back-on-this-as-a-tragic-missed-opportunity
expression on her face. And I gave her a
Look-me-up-I’m-in-the-book
look. She got off, the door closed, and I farted. It sounded like Jack Teagarden’s growly trombone in the second chorus of “I’m Coming, Virginia.”