Kingdom of Fear (41 page)

At dawn we drove across the tarmac and pulled up to a seedy-looking office marked
AIR JACKPOT EXPRESS CHARTER COMPANY
. “This is it Judge,” I said and slapped him on the back. “This is where you get off.” He seemed resigned to his fate until the woman behind the front desk told him there wouldn’t be a flight to Elko until lunchtime.

“Where is the pilot?” he demanded.

“I am the pilot,” the woman said, “but I can’t leave until Debby gets here to relieve me.”

“Fuck this!” the Judge shouted. “Fuck lunchtime. I have to leave
now,
you bitch.”

The woman seemed truly frightened by his mood swing, and when the Judge leaned in and gave her a taste of the long knuckle, she collapsed and began weeping uncontrollably. “There’s more where that came from,” he told her. “Get up! I have to get out of here now.”

He jerked her out from behind the desk and was dragging her toward the plane when I slipped out the back door. It was daylight now. The car was nearly out of gas, but that wasn’t my primary concern. The police would be here in minutes, I thought. I’m doomed. But then, as I pulled onto the highway, I saw a sign that said,
WE
PAINT ALL NIGHT.

As I pulled into the parking lot, the Jackpot Express plane passed overhead. So long, Judge, I thought to myself. You’re a brutal hustler and a Warrior and a great copilot, but you know how to get your way. You will go far in the world.

EPILOGUE: CHRISTMAS DREAMS AND CRUEL
MEMORIES . . . NATION OF JAILERS . . . STAND
BACK! THE JUDGE WILL SEE YOU NOW

That’s about it for now, Jann. This story is too depressing to have to confront professionally in these morbid weeks before Christmas
. . . . I have only vague memories of what it’s like there in New York, but sometimes I have flashbacks about how it was to glide in perfect speedy silence around the ice rink in front of NBC while junkies and federal informants in white beards and sleazy red jumpsuits worked the crowd mercilessly for nickels and dollars and dimes covered with Crack residue.

I remember one Christmas morning in Manhattan when we got into the Empire State Building and went up to the Executive Suite of some famous underwear company and shoved a 600pound red tufted-leather Imperial English couch out of a corner window on something like the eighty-fifth floor. . . .

The wind caught it, as I recall, and it sort of drifted around the corner onto Thirty-fourth Street, picking up speed on its way down, and hit the striped awning of a Korean market, you know, the kind that sells everything from kimchi to Christmas trees. The impact blasted watermelons and oranges and tomatoes all over the sidewalk. We could barely see the impact from where we were, but I remember a lot of activity on the street when we came out of the elevator. . . . It looked like a war zone. A few gawkers were standing around in a blizzard, muttering to each other and looking dazed. They thought it was an underground explosion—maybe a subway or a gas main.

Just as we arrived on the scene, a speeding cab skidded on some watermelons and slammed into a Fifth Avenue bus and burst into flames. There was a lot of screaming and wailing of police sirens. Two cops began fighting with a gang of looters who had emerged like ghosts out of the snow and were running off with hams and turkeys and big jars of caviar. . . . Nobody seemed to think it was strange.
What the hell? Shit happens. Welcome to the Big Apple. Keep alert. Never ride in open cars or walk too close to a tall building when it snows. . . .
There were Christmas trees scattered all over the street and cars were stopping to grab them and speeding away. We stole one and took it to Missy’s place on the Bowery, because we knew she didn’t have one. But she wasn’t home, so we put the tree out on the fire escape and set it on fire with kerosene.
That’s how I remember Xmas in New York, Jann. It was always a time of angst and failure and turmoil. Nobody ever seemed to have any money on Christmas. Even rich people were broke and jabbering frantically on their telephones about Santa Claus and suicide or joining a church with no rules. . . . The snow was clean and pretty for the first twenty or thirty minutes around dawn, but after that it was churned into filthy mush by drunken cabbies and garbage compactors and shitting dogs.

Anybody who acted happy on Christmas was lying—even the ones who were getting paid $500 an hour. . . . The Jews were especially sulky, and who could blame them? The birthday of Baby Jesus is always a nervous time for people who know that ninety days later they will be accused of murdering him.

So what? We have our
own
problems, eh? Jesus! I don’t know how you can ride all those motorcycles around in the snow, Jann. Shit, we can
all
handle the back wheel coming loose in a skid. But the
front
wheel is something else—and that’s what happens when it snows. WHACKO. One minute you feel as light and safe as a snowflake, and the next minute you’re sliding sideways under the wheels of a Bekins van. . . . Nasty traffic jams, horns honking, white limos full of naked Jesus freaks going up on the sidewalk in low gear to get around you and the mess you made on the street . . .
Goddamn this scum. They are more and more in the way. And why aren’t they home with their families on Xmas? Why do they need to come out here and die on the street like iron hamburgers?

I hate these bastards, Jann. And I suspect you feel the same. . . . They might call us bigots, but at least we are
Universal
bigots. Right? Shit on those people. Everybody you see these days might have the power to get you locked up. . . . Who knows why? They will have reasons straight out of some horrible Kafka story, but in the end it won’t matter any more than a full moon behind clouds. Fuck them.

Christmas hasn’t changed much in twenty-two years, Jann—not even 2,000 miles west and 8,000 feet up in the Rockies. It is still a day that only amateurs can love. It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to believe in Santa Claus—but it is still a
profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year. . . . Some people can accept this, and some can’t. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season, and also why criminal shitheads all over New York City will hit you up for $100 tips or they’ll twist your windshield wipers into spaghetti and urinate on your door handles.

People all around me are going to pieces, Jann. My whole support system has crumbled like wet sugar cubes. That is why I try never to employ anyone over the age of twenty. Every Xmas after that is like another notch down on the ratchet, or maybe a few more teeth off the flywheel. . . . I remember on Xmas in New York when I was trying to sell a Mark VII Jaguar with so many teeth off the flywheel that the whole drivetrain would lock up and whine every time I tried to start the engine for a buyer. . . . I had to hire gangs of street children to muscle the car back and forth until the throw-out gear on the starter was lined up very precisely to engage the few remaining teeth on the flywheel. On some days I would leave the car idling in a fireplug zone for three or four hours at a time and pay the greedy little bastards a dollar an hour to keep it running and wet-shined with fireplug water until a buyer came along.

We got to know each other pretty well after nine or ten weeks, and they were finally able to unload it on a rich artist who drove as far as the toll plaza at the far end of the George Washington Bridge, where the engine seized up and exploded like a steam bomb. “They had to tow it away with a firetruck,” he said. “Even the leather seats were on fire. They laughed at me.”

There is more and more Predatory bullshit in the air these days. Yesterday I got a call from somebody who said I owed money to Harris Wofford, my old friend from the Peace Corps. We were in Sierra Leone together.

He came out of nowhere like a heat-seeking missile and destroyed the U.S. Attorney General in Pennsylvania. It was
Wonderful. Harris is a Senator now, and the White House creature is not. Thornburgh blew a forty-four—point lead in three weeks, like Humpty Dumpty. . . . WHOOPS! Off the wall like a big Lizard egg. The White House had seen no need for a safety net.

It was a major disaster for the Bush brain trust and every GOP political pro in America, from the White House all the way down to City Hall in places like Denver and Tupelo. The whole Republican party was left stunned and shuddering like a hound dog passing a peach pit. . . . At least that’s what they said in Tupelo, where one of the local GOP chairmen flipped out and ran off to Biloxi with a fat young boy from one of the rich local families . . . then he tried to blame it on Harris Wofford when they arrested him in Mobile for aggravated Sodomy and kidnapping. He was ruined, and his Bail was only $5,000, but none of his friends would sign for it. They were mainly professional Republicans and bankers who had once been in the Savings and Loan business, along with Neil Bush the
manqué,
son of the President.

Neil had just walked in on the infamous Silverado Savings & Loan scandal in Colorado. But only by the skin of his teeth, after his father said he would have to abandon him to a terrible fate in the Federal Prison System if his son was really a crook. The evidence was overwhelming, but Neil had a giddy kind of talent
negotiating
—like Colonel North and the Admiral, who also walked. . . . It was shameless and many people bitched. But what the fuck do they expect from a Party of high-riding Darwinian rich boys who’ve been running around in the White House like pampered animal for twelve straight years? They can do whatever they want, and why not. “These are Good Boys,” John Sununu once said of his staff. “They only shit in the pressroom.”

Well . . . Sununu is gone now, and so is Dick Thornburgh, who is currently seeking night work in the bank business somewhere on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. It is an ugly story. He decided to go out on his own—like Lucifer, who plunged into Hell—and he got beaten like a redheaded stepchild by my old Peace Corps
buddy Harris Wofford, who caught him from behind like a bull wolverine so fast that Thornburgh couldn’t even get out of the way. . . . He was mangled and humiliated. It was the worst public disaster since Watergate.

The GOP was plunged into national fear. How could it happen? Dick Thornburgh had sat on the right hand of God. As AG, he had stepped out like some arrogant Knight from the Round Table and declared that
his
boys—4,000 or so Justice Department prosecutors—were no longer subject to the rules of the Federal Court System.

But he was wrong. And now Wofford is using Thornburgh’s corpse as a launching pad for a run on the White House and hiring experts to collect bogus debts from old buddies like me. Hell, I
like
the idea of Harris being President. He always seemed honest and I knew he was smart, but I am leery of giving him money.

That is politics in the 1990s. Democratic presidential candidates have not been a satisfying investment recently. Camelot was thirty years ago, and we still don’t know who killed Jack Kennedy. That lone bullet on the stretcher in Dallas sure as hell didn’t pass through two human bodies, but it was the one that pierced the heart of the American Dream in our century, maybe forever.

Camelot is on Court TV now, limping into Rehab clinics and forced to deny low-rent Rape accusations in the same sweaty West Palm Beach courthouse where Roxanne Pulitzer went on trial for fucking a trumpet and lost.

It has been a long way down—not just for the Kennedys and the Democrats, but for all the rest of us. Even the rich and the powerful, who are coming to understand that change can be quick in the Nineties and one of these days it will be them in the dock on TV, fighting desperately to stay out of prison.

Take my word for it. I have been there, and it gave me an eerie feeling. . . . Indeed. There are many cells in the mansion, and more are being added every day. We are becoming a nation of jailers.
And that’s about it for now, Jann. Christmas is on us and it’s all downhill from here on. . . . At least until Groundhog Day, which is soon. . . . So, until then, at least, take my advice, as your family doctor, and don’t do
anything
that might cause either one of us to have to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States. If you know what I’m saying. . . .

Yes. He is Up There, Jann. The Judge. And he will be there for a long time, waiting to gnaw on our skulls. . . . Right. Put
that
in your leather pocket the next time you feel like jumping on your new motorcycle and screwing it all the way over thru traffic and passing cop cars at 140.

Remember F.X. Leach. He crossed the Judge, and he paid a terrible price. . . . And so will you, if you don’t slow down and quit harassing those girls in your office. The Judge is in charge now, and He won’t tolerate it. Beware.

FEAR AND LOATHING AT JACK’S HOUSE . . .
THE LONELIEST PLACE IN THE WORLD

It was a dark and stormy night when I set out from my house to Jack Nicholson’s place far away in a valley on the other side of town. It was his birthday, and I had a huge raw elk heart for him. I have known Jack for many years, and we share a certain sense of humor among other things, and in truth there was nothing inherently strange in the notion of bringing a freshly taken elk heart out to his home on the night of his birthday.

It was lightly frozen and beginning to leak from the chambers, so I put it in a Ziploc bag and tossed it in the back of the Jeep. Hot damn, I thought, Jack’s children will love this. I knew they had just arrived that day from Los Angeles, and I wanted to have a surprise for them. “You won’t be late, will you?” Jack had asked. “You know the kids go to bed early.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

And it was just about then that the night began to go wrong. Time withered away. Some kind of episode occurred, and before I knew it I
was running two hours late—two hours, keep that in mind because it will make a difference later on.