Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (9 page)

12

Getting lucky

SO SUGAR THOUGHT I WAS
the handsomest, sexiest man in Minnesota. She who had often in the past addressed me as “
Lard Ass.”
In general it had started to dawn on me that I was indeed becoming rather gorgeous. My size L shirts were billowy, and I was tucking in the tails, not leaving them hanging out as I had in my spare-tire days. The 38 waists were sagging on my hips—which now were bony, not humps of flab—so I switched to 36, a little snug but not for long, and by June I was a 34. My chins didn’t wibble-wobble when I shook my head. Even my earlobes seemed skinnier. Women in coffee shops gave me the eye who had never eyeballed me before. Several women in their twenties flirted with me. Brazenly. Sidled up on the street and asked for directions to the Cathedral but in a way that suggested they’d be glad to skip the Cathedral and accompany me to a bar for a cool drink and some frank conversation. Soon I needed a belt to keep up the 34s and was looking at 32. I felt weaker, the worms made me queasy when they got jumpy. And ever so often I let some thunderous farts, big boomers that smelled like deceased penguins. But I was turning into a show horse. Definitely. I was in better shape than when I was seventeen and graduating from Ira R. Globerman High School on West End Avenue. Back then, thanks to high metabolism, I could pack away eleven hot dogs at a sitting, and now tapeworms gave me all the metabolism a man could want. I was doing forty sit-ups at one sitting and almost fitting into a 32-inch waist and wearing skimpy briefs to show off my tight glutes. Not bad for an old man.

My landlady, Doris, noticed my slenderness. She, who took a quasi-spousal interest in my comings and goings, said, “You’re looking rather skinny, Mr. Noir, hope that doesn’t mean you got some sort of wasting disease and one day we’re going to detect a powerful stench and the cops have to break down your door and there you are on the floor in your skivvies and your body bloated and your glassy eyes staring up at me. It takes a long time to get the smell of a dead body out of an apartment, and even then they’re hard to rent, so if you’re about to croak, I’d rather you go out in the street and save me the headaches. Or when you sense the end is near you could dive off the High Bridge. You hit the water, it’s as good as hitting concrete. How about it?”

I assured her that I had plenty of shelf life left, but she wasn’t buying it.

“I’ve seen it before—there was a gentleman named Hobbs who tried to lose weight on a diet of bran flakes and mothball crystals. He played piano in the lobby of the Lowry Hotel and everything he played sounded like ‘Till There Was You.’ He got so fat he had to sit sideways at the keyboard and play one-handed, and one summer he lost about two hundred pounds real fast, went from pumpkin to string bean. Went off to work one day and was knocked down by a small child on a tricycle and hit his head on the pavement and couldn’t remember ‘Chopsticks’ and had to go to work as a chicken plucker. This isn’t some harebrained weight-loss scheme you bought from an ad in the back of
Field & Stream
, is it?”

“Just trying to take care of myself, like every other guy my age. The days of wine and roses have become the days of tea and rosehips. A sad story. I used to be Mr. Excitement, and now I’m Mr. Appropriate.”

She studied me through narrowed eyes. “What is Elongate?” she said.

I feigned ignorance. “A long gate? Is this a joke?”

“Those pills you took. In the silver foil wrapper.”

I had switched to new worms, since the old ones seemed to be slacking off, and like a dope I had put the wrapping in the garbage, which Doris studies like an archaeologist. The woman knew as much about me as if she were my wife.

“Those are vitamin E pills, Doris. They give me illusions of youth.”

“Don’t go taking some pills you bought off the Internet that they make in some tiny Caribbean island that contain God knows what. People have sent away for stuff like that and wound up losing a kidney.”

“All’s well, Doris. Don’t give it another thought.”

But I started to wonder: How much did Doris know? Had she listened to my voice-mail messages from Naomi? Was she maybe in Larry B. Larry’s pocket? Someone that cranky and abusive you assume is playing you straight, but anyone can be bought if you can meet their price.

My phone rang. There was a high-pitched tone at the other end. Someone’s fax machine. I yelled, “Wrong number! I am not a fax machine!” Hung up. Two minutes later same thing. I whistled into the phone, hoping to confuse the circuit, and hung up. Two minutes later,
ring ring ring.
And
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Technology! Nerds taking revenge for us not inviting them to our parties. So I had to trek on down to Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark and borrow
their
fax machine and haul it up to my office and plug the son of a gun in and receive the fax, which was, of course, a menu for a taco joint, Nacho Mama, and then haul the machine
back
to Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark, a huge inconvenience.

On the other hand, I did run into Birch Bergquist, who visibly brightened at the sight of me and said, “My God, you look great.” A compliment from a gorgeous woman makes my whole day. It is better than finding a twenty-dollar bill behind the sofa cushion.

My plan was to slim down to a 28 while avoiding the Bogus Brothers and buy me a white linen suit and go away on a fourteen-day cruise of the Aegean aboard the
MS Bellissima
. I’d read the brochure. I could imagine lounging around on the afterdeck, tanning myself, surrounded by a bevy of sloe-eyed beauties in diaphanous dresses listening spellbound to my stories of detection and the darkness of the human heart. I had big plans. I’d travel around Italy while my eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park was replastered and painted, the bedroom looking out at the treetops, the kitchen redone with Mexican tile floors and countertops, all described in a splashy story in Lifestyles of the Rich and Handsome. (G
OTHAM’S
M
OST
E
LIGIBLE
B
ACHELOR
L
AVISHES
F
ORTUNE ON $4.2
M
IL
P
IED-À-TERRE
), me in a silk running outfit, an attractive personal assistant named Deirdre pouring cream in my coffee.

Why not?

I believe in progress. Look at Barack Obama. The guy was a state legislator and then he wrote a fine book and gave a big speech, and suddenly people were excited about him running for president. And lo and behold, a black guy with an odd name beat a war hero. Usually the heavyweight beats the lightweight, but an ordinary horsefly has been known to drive an elephant crazy.
The Washington Post
did the same to Richard Nixon. The world turns. People demonstrated in the streets of Cairo and shouted “Down with Mubarak,” and other people joined them, and the army refused to shoot them, and eventually the regime fell. Ditto Qaddafi. And look at Oxford. It started out as a shallow bend in a stream where herds of dumb cattle could be made to cross, and over the years it’s become quite a prestigious university. We live by improvements. Bad luck can change. Redemption is within reach. For weeks, Joey Roast Beef wandered around unable to distinguish his left foot from his right hand, and then he went to a shrink who gave him a little pill and next day Joey sat down and wrote a poem. Joey, a poet! Who knew?

This Is Just to Say

I have taken the body

that was in the icebox

and which you were

probably saving for evidence.

Forgive me it smelled bad

So pale and so cold.

It just goes to show you never can tell. He was so pleased, he sat down to write another.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit informants. Love is not love

Which goes to the cops with what it finds.

A guy like that I’d have to remove.

Oh no, it goes straight for the mark

And posts a lookout for the break-in,

It is the car that’s waiting in the dark

To race away after all the stuff is taken.

And then he quit taking the pills because he felt so good and he stopped writing poems and he got mad at me again. So maybe it all evens out in the end.

13

Joey again

JOEY ROAST BEEF LIKED ME
just fine all that spring and then in June I went back on his shit list. Senile dementia is funny that way. It comes and goes. He had forgotten what he was mad at me about, but he knew that something was stuck in his craw, so he buttonholed me in the Five Spot one sweet summer night—came beetling splay-footed along the bar, his jowls bouncing on his starched shirtfront and the red tie with the purple bacilli, and he jabbed a hairy finger in my sternum and said, “What gives, Guy? What’s goin’ on? Something is. You owe me money? You been bad-mouthing me, or what’s happening? Fill me in.”

“Joey, we had a disagreement about American foreign policy toward Canada, and you argued for patience and negotiation, and I argued that we ought to bomb their hockey rinks and show them we mean business, and now I see that you were right and I was wrong and we’re pals again.”

“You’re lying. You tried to pull a fast one on me, and I was gonna pump you full of lead. I remember that much, ya crum bum.”

I suggested we sit down and make peace over a fine Scotch. He shook his head. “You’re lying to me, Noir, I can see it in your shifty eyes. You think just because I’m eighty-two, you can sneak one past me. Well, you can’t.” And he reached in for his shoulder holster and I had to restrain him.

“Don’t have a coronary over it. You’re a beautiful man, Joey. You’ve been like an uncle to me. Let me buy you a drink.” And I waved to Jimmy. “Coupla Scotch and sodas! Ice on the side. And a boiled egg and some pickled pigs’ feet.”

Steam was coming out of Joey’s ears. He was not to be pacified. He struggled to pull the gun out and called me vile names, and I was afraid he would shoot himself in the armpit. He spat a big gob in my face. “You’re dead, Guy. I wash my hands of you. And don’t expect me to speak at your memorial service. I am going to skip the whole thing and have a big lunch until after they put you in the ground, and then I’m gonna come over and piss on your grave. So I hope they bury you in a raincoat.”

He was beyond reasoning with, so I shoved his gun into the ice bin and ankled it on out the back and down the alley and into the back door of the old Visitation convent, now a fancy office complex, and into the elevator and up to the fifth floor and the former chapel that—miracle of miracles!—had been made over into the Minnesota Musical Theater and an audience was waiting for the curtain to open on
Two to Duluth
by my old flame Beatrice and her new love, the librettist John Jensen, she having ditched her husband Brett who suffered from memory loss and was busily writing things he’d written years before and that were not improved by the passage of time. I squeezed into a seat in the back row and hunkered down, but Beatrice spotted me and leaped up and galloped back and gave me a big showbiz hug. “Darling!” she cried. “It’s been too long!” The boyfriend looked pretty much as you’d expect a John Jensen to look: pale, bony, wary, limp handshake, a look of chronic pain.

“If I had known you wanted to come, darling, I would’ve invited you!” Then she stepped back and gasped. “My gosh, you’ve lost weight. You look fabulous! I heard you were dating Naomi Fallopian. Congratulations! She and I go way back. I adore her book,
The Blessing of Less.
John and I want to make it into a musical. A one act.”

“The blessing of what?”

“She hasn’t told you? She’s become very spiritual lately, and she’s on an antimaterialism kick.”

The lights dimmed, and she and the boyfriend tiptoed out the back door, and the curtain came up on a big photographic backdrop of Duluth, the Lift Bridge and all, and the little orchestra in the pit struck up the overture as a lady usher came by and motioned to her head, and I took my fedora off. “Thank you,” she said.

The music was rather thin and whiny. Four large people in parkas came out and sang:

When you are white

You are white all the time

You’re very uptight

And you drink a white wine

When you are white

An average white man

You get a bright light

And work up a tan.

You can’t hear the beat—

It’s sheer frustration—

You’ve got two left feet

No syncopation,

’Cause you’re Caucasian.

I leaned back and started to doze off and then smelled an exotic perfume from overhead as Birch Bergquist stepped into the row and stood over me, her hair like melted caramel, her jeans so tight, I could read the embroidery on her underwear. It said
Tuesday
. She sat down next to me and pressed her body against mine. It was like the front bumper of a ’57 Buick. Her heart was pounding like it wanted to get out. Or maybe it was my heart. “I spoke to Mr. Ishimoto today, Mr. Noir,” she said. “Naomi’s in terrible trouble. And I can’t reach her. The Food and Drug Administration has assigned a man named Kress to hunt her down and throw her into prison. I’ve got to make sure she stays in Paris and doesn’t go to Switzerland, where she could be extradited.

“I’m scared,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “Larry B. Larry and those thugs of his are rumbling around and one of the brutes is holding his crotch and bellowing your name. And Mr. Roast Beef is steaming mad. I ran into him in the alley, and he’s furious because I won’t tell him what’s going on with you and Naomi. I told him it was lawyer-client confidentiality, and he told me he was going to change his policy of not hitting women.”

“Baby,” I said, “he’s after me too, so maybe you and I ought to fly to Paris and start a new life together. “

She looked me over. Back when I was a lummox, she wouldn’t have given me five seconds, but now that I had a thirty-inch waist and a nicely defined jawline, she did not dismiss me out of hand. She considered the proposition for perhaps twenty or twenty-five seconds, and then she smiled and said, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, buster. You used to be a hulk and now you’re a hunk, and I’ve been feasting my eyes on you for weeks now.” And just then I smelled hair tonic, and it was Joey, all 340 pounds of him. He squeezed himself into the seat next to me, and I could feel the snub-nosed revolver in my ribs. Or it might’ve been a stapling gun, but I wasn’t going to ask.

On stage, a man was singing to a Holstein cow:

Moo a while, chew a while,

Regurgitate

I’ll take a rag and wash your bag

And I will pump out fourteen gallons.

Go ahead and swish away that fly, baby,

I don’t mind you dropping a cow pie, baby.

If your butterfat content is high, baby . . .

You can’t give me anything but milk.

The audience applauded like mad, and the curtain came down for intermission. Joey was not paying any attention to the play whatsoever. “Noir,” he said, “you are the reason I am on Xanax, and now I remember why I’m mad at you. It’s about you and that Naomi Fallopian and this whole tapeworm deal you got going, which you are trying to cut me out of, and if you’re wondering why I’m gonna blow your brains out, that’s your answer right there.”

He sat there, beads of sweat on his forehead, wheezing, his landslide of a gut draped over his belt buckle: he looked like he could use a couple dozen tapeworms himself.

“Shortness of breath, Joey—you better see your cardiologist.”

“It’s just a cold,” he said. And he cleared his throat and spat the phlegm into a hanky. It sounded like someone shoveling wet silage.

“Just ate lunch, huh, Joey? Cheese and onions. Thanks for sharing.”

“What is that supposed to mean, wise guy?”

“It means you and I are friends and what’s bad breath between friends, but if you’re planning to go visit Lulu LaFollette, you might pick up a mint mouthwash at the drugstore.”

“First I’m planning to blow your face off, and then I’ll get me a mouthwash.”

“How’s Pookie, Joey? Is she better?”

“Who you talking about?”

“Pookie. P-o-o-k-i-e. Your kitty.”

No light shone in the fat man’s eyes. He was gone.

Birch started to say something about taking a deep breath and counting to twenty, and he told her to shut her pie hole. Meanwhile the audience headed for the coffee stand in the lobby. I offered to get Joey a latte, and he told me to shut up and not make a move. I could see Beatrice and her beau in the back of the room, receiving the compliments of their hoity-toity pals.

“Joey,” I said, “we’ve got to get you into an anger management program of some sort. This has got to be awfully hard on your heart.”

“I got a strong heart, Noir, and you broke it with your treacherous ways, and that’s why I gotta get rough with you.”

He drove his fist into my solar plexus, and all the air went out of me
whooof,
and none of it came back. My liver lit up with pain, my pancreas too, and there was a wetness in my trousers that hadn’t been there a moment before. A flock of warblers circled my head, and church bells rang for vespers. I was looking over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and then I was holding onto a parasail as I drifted down toward the canyon floor, and then my mother was bringing me a birthday gift in a big red box. And then I was very nauseous.

“There’s more where that came from, Noir. Tell me where I can find Miss Naomi Fallopian, because if you two are riding the gravy train, then I’m coming with. First-class. Lower berth.” I wanted to say, “I know nothing about this, Joey,” but I didn’t have enough air in my lungs.

And then the lady usher returned. She had big white incisors and hair-colored hair, and from the shape of her, you could see that she was not a prisoner of Pilates. She leaned over Joey and said, “You can’t bring a gun into the theater, sir.”

“Oh yeah? Where does it say that, lady?” he barked. Well, she must’ve been a junior-high teacher at one time—she simply reached down and took the gun out of his hand and said, “I’ll just hold on to this for a while, mister.” He tried to argue, and she clapped a hand over his mouth. “You make me come back here again, I’m going to slap you so hard, your head will spin like a gyro.” And she walked away.

Joey tried to rise, but that seat wasn’t made for 340 pounds: the arms held him like a C-clamp around a Parker House roll. He tried three times to heave himself to his feet and couldn’t budge an inch. He beseeched me to help him up. “Look. I only brought the gun to get your attention. I never woulda shot you. And I only hit you because it was all I could do since I couldn’t shoot you. So give me a hand, and we’ll call it even.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the show, pal. Don’t forget to clap at the end.” Birch and I slipped out just as the crowd was filing back into the theater. Beatrice smiled at me—“Not sticking around?” I said I’d had an urgent call from a friend. “So you liked the first act?” I said I’d never seen anything like it. She managed to take that as a compliment, and Birch and I trotted out the door and around the block to the Five Spot.

She asked me if I was okay. “Could be worse,” I said, drawing a shallow breath, the air trickling into my collapsed chest. Jimmy the bartender told me I looked like death on toast. I whispered, “Just had a little run-in with Mr. Roast Beef, thank you, and bring me a gin martini a.s.a.p. And a white wine for the lady.” The wine came, and I could tell it wasn’t dry enough for her, or complex enough, so she just sniffed it. I got some gin in me, and my solar plexus started to revive. “So, ” I said, “you were saying—”

She told me that Mr. Kress of the FDA had to be dealt with pronto, otherwise he would sink the ship and settle our hash, and some of us—she poked me—might wind up in the Big House making license plates. “You got your hand in the Elongate cookie jar, and the feds can snap that lid down on your wrist, and they’ll perp-walk you into the courthouse, and Gene Williker will have a field day, baby. He’ll refer to you as an ‘aging gumshoe’
and ‘local Sherlock,’
and he’ll use an old photograph from your fatso days, pouches under your eyes, jowly, dog-tired, and he’ll quote Lieutenant McCafferty at some length about your being a relic of the old St. Paul underworld, and moms and dads can now sleep better without the likes of you walking around, and all your friends are going to see this, and—don’t kid yourself—friendship is a fragile thing. You see your old pal Guy Noir in handcuffs and read that he peddled pills that hatched tapeworms in people’s bellies, and you turn away in disgust. Mr. Kress can do you real damage, Guy.”

“So what’s this I hear about Naomi writing another book?”

“Naomi is out there in Cloudland. Like a lot of enormously wealthy people, she’s gotten all wrapped up in spirituality. She’s about to go live in a yurt with some yahoo in a saffron gown and let him explore her inner being, if you get my drift. We’ve got to save her from herself.”

I was shocked, naturally—Naomi had been telling me for months that she was in love with me and the ground I walked on. “Who’s the yahoo?” I said.

“His name was Rosen, he was raised on a resin farm in Racine, but he’s risen from Rosen and become Rama Lama Monongahela, and he’s celibate, but I suppose that’s up to her now, isn’t it. Anyway, they live in her cottage in Southampton, but they’re planning to move to Rawalpindi, and Naomi is weaving her
dhoti
on a hand-loom and chanting in Sanskrit, and she shucked her tapeworms, and she’s gained forty pounds, which, how you can do that on a diet of lentils and chickpeas, I don’t know, but she has. You wouldn’t recognize her.”

My adorable Naomi, transformed into a full-figured Hindu mama. As the kids would say,
Ack!

“So how do I get in touch with this Kress?” I said.

“He contacted me through Larry B. Larry. You know him?”

“Larry B. Larry? I know him like a white rat knows a python. How’d he get hooked into this?”

“He’s a friend of your ex-girlfriend Sugar O’Toole’s husband Wally’s boyhood chum Brett, who was married to Beatrice Olsen, the composer whose musical we just saw the first act of, until he found that his memory loss was cured by a well-bred brunette from Broken Umbrella, Nebraska, named Brenda Brickelle, a heartbreaking beauty with big brown eyes, and Brett crossed that bridge and burned it behind him.”