Pocket Kings (28 page)

“No man's is. We're all born with the first page filled in, thanks to Adam and Eve. And it isn't technically stealing until they start payin' me what I know I'm worth. Plus, I have to live day and night with the fear of being replaced by EZ Pass. You don't know what that's like.”

I signaled the waiter over and told him to bring me the check . . . after I told him to also bring me a pulled pork sandwich with a side of sweet potato fries, for the road.

Second Gunman took the wheel in Salina, Kansas; the closest I'd ever get to having my very own Neal Cassady, he was a surprisingly cautious driver, never going over 65 miles per hour.
Th
e meter hit $3,800 in Burlington, Colorado, just over the Kansas state line, and I took the wheel again. We were all in the same clothes, now grimy and wrinkled, as when we started out; we hadn't showered or brushed our teeth and the bones beneath my ass were hurting me . . . it was like I was sitting on a stove, all four burners going.

“Colorado, eh?” Second said. I was riding shotgun. Abdul was asleep in the back and Cookie, who refused to drive, was gawking out the window. As I was.

“Yep.
Th
e Land of Lincoln, Johnny. Live Free or Die.
Th
e House that Ruth Built.”

“You know who's from Colorado, don't you?”

“Who?”

“History Babe is.”

“From Colorado Springs,” Cookie said from the back, “to be exact.”

“She's gotta be the hottest thing on that site,” Second said. “God's filled in a few pages of my sin book up there 'cause of her for sure.”

APG at her very filthiest was no match for History Babe, who had probably IM'ed five hundred different men to orgasm, two hundred of them while winning their money.

“Let's call her up,” Second said.

I didn't deem this ridiculous caprice worthy of a response, but . . .

“And how do we do that?” THC said.

“We'll get her number is how. And call her. Maybe she'll coom to Vegas with us.”

“Anyone know her real name?”

“It's Tracey,” I said. “Or Stacey or Lacy.”

Nobody knew History Babe's real last name. So the matter was dead. For ten minutes.

“Let's go someplace,” Johnny/Second suggested, “where we could go online and if she's playin' poker she'll tell us.
Th
en we call her. And also, I need to buy some new underpants.
Th
ere's more crust down there right now than on an uneaten blueberry pie.”

Th
ere wasn't much of anything but clear sky and cold air in this stretch of I-70. My main character in
Dead on Arrival
had taken a different route than this. He was fleeing the shocking loss of his wife and kids . . . I was fleeing the loss of $7,000 and what little was left of my pride. But playing poker with Scott Heyward was disappearing back into the primordial pea soup from which it arose and with every mile we traveled westward, the soupier it became.

We pulled into a Comfort Inn, south of Denver.
Th
e sign outside said there were vacancies, HBO, an indoor pool, and wifi, and we got a room. Second took a long shower while THC, with our waist, inseam sizes, and shirt specifications, waddled just across the road to a Big K and got us all new clothing and some toiletries. (I said to him, “No boxers please, Cookie!” and he came back with boxers.) It was cold here and there was a sparkly layer of snow on the ground and we could see snow all over the Rockies from the window. When Second was done showering I took a shower, then it was Abdul's turn. I applied three extra coats of deodorant just to make up for the prior two days. None of the clothing Cookie came back with fit right and none of it looked good or went together. My splashy rayon socks had pictures of BMX bikers on them and it occurred to me that, for whatever reason, Marvis was purposely trying to make us look like idiots . . . but in his new threads he looked like one, too. While Marvis showered, Second logged on to the Galaxy and, sure enough, History Babe was online, trouncing five others at a table with two slow-played Aces. Second gave her my cell phone number and told her to call. It was amazing: logging on, finding her, her calling me—it all took less than three minutes.

History said, sure, she could get away and go to Vegas with us; she just had to make a few calls, go to an ATM, get some cash. We'd drive down to Colorado Springs, I told her, and pick her up. In the background, Second and THC were bickering about the clothing the latter had picked out; Johnny, looking ridiculous in tangerine cargo pants and a mauve polar-fleece hoodie that blared
I
MONSTER TRUCKS
! across the chest, might have done better for himself shopping in the Elephant Department at a Dress Barn than in trusting Cookie. You sure you want to do this, I asked History. She said she was sure.
Th
ere're nothing much else going on right now, she told me. Her sister, whom she lived with, was an extreme Evangelical and was currently was on a three-day prayer jag. I need to get out of here really quickly, she said.

We stayed in the hotel room for about an hour and a half. Second didn't log off the Galaxy right away and won almost $2,000 at an Ultra-High table.

“Only eight more bloody K to go,” he mumbled, closing his laptop back up.

“Okay, gentlemen, let's roll,” I said after a perfunctory quickie flossing. I was in blue jeans that were more a lot more white than blue . . . they came down only to just below my knee and there may have been more pockets on this pair of pants than on all my other pants combined. It was something that one of the Fat Boys should be wearing, not America's 1,457th greatest living novelist.

Abdul was back at the wheel, and an hour later we were at the address that Tracey Winters, History Babe's real name, had given us. It was an eerily quiet middle-class neighborhood and she lived above a hardware store, and as I leaned against the lamppost on the corner I felt like a faceless figure in someone's poor attempt at a Hopper painting. It was snowing lightly and it was only us on the street. While THC stretched his stubby legs in his brand-new wide-wale Barney-purple corduroy pants, for some reason I thought of Cynthia. I missed her and hoped that she was thinking of me, too.
Th
en the front door opened and one of the mousiest-looking women I've ever seen came out, rolling a small green suitcase.

“Are you Second Gunman?” she said to me. Her voice sounded mousy, too. She was five foot four, in her mid-twenties, had thin straight brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail; her complexion was grayish, her eyes were brown, she had tiny ears and no curves at all to her waify body, and her round eyeglasses were for a woman, or an owl, with a much larger head.

“No, I'm Chip Zero,” I said.

I looked down at her, she looked up at me. If they knew what she really looked like, I wondered, how many of the five hundred men she'd coaxed into orgasm would love to have those orgasms back?

Cookie introduced himself and gallantly put her suitcase in the trunk and we all got in: Abdul was at the wheel, Second rode shotgun, Cookie was at one window in the back, I was at the other, and History Babe was sandwiched tightly in the middle.
Th
e windshield wipers went on and swept aside a furry wreath of snow, and onward we rolled.

“Okay,” THC directed Abdul, “now go back up Interstate Twenty- ­five, then get on Seventy going west again.”

“Nope,” Hist said. “
Th
at's not the best way. Take Fifty west. It hooks up with Seventy in Grand Junction.
Th
en we get on Fifteen. You'll save lots of time. I've done it before.”

I looked at THC, who sat stone-faced but for rapid eyeblinking. Finally a
hmmph
emerged from his epiglottis.

We were in the home stretch. Only eight hundred miles to go, which included a hell of a lot of desert. But beyond the quiet limit of the world wasn't absolute silence; there was neon, gold, platinum, silicone, beer, cashmere, lap dances, and prime rib.

A woman's presence in the Crown Vic changed the group dynamic and not for the worse.

Th
ere was a sizable decrease in the amount of tomfoolery and cursing in the car, and on those occasions when Second did curse, he was quickly reprimanded by Toll House Cookie. “Hey,” THC would snap, “we got a lady present now!”
Th
ere was a lot less talking in the car, period, and there was also less farting and belching and the air quality improved significantly.

Cookie paid a lot more attention to the awesome scenery of the American West and was heard to utter the words “wow,” “unbelievable,” and “look at that!” as we passed the majestic Rockies and then the desiccated moonscape of the Great Basin Desert.
Th
ese sentiments were echoed by all others present, including History Babe, who said “awesome” so many times that I requested she please employ another adjective. (She ultimately settled on merely “nice.”)

Another change: Abdul Salaam drove considerably faster than he'd been previously driving. Perhaps he was discomfited by the presence of a woman. Conversely, when History Babe took the wheel, in Green River, Utah, our speed got up to 95 mph, the fastest we'd yet traveled. She changed lanes as if she was playing an Activision NASCAR: Suicide video game, and Second dug his fingernails into the flesh on Cookie's wrists for support.

Also, the men had chivalrously decided that we wouldn't inflict our lousy eating habits upon Tracey/History Babe and that our next meal would be a good one, a healthy one, consisting of fresh ingredients and local produce, something that took more than two minutes to prepare. But somewhere along the road History Babe said to us, “We could just go to a Taco Bell . . . I really like their stuff.”

But we weren't perfect and I heard History Babe say to Second while we drove through Cisco, Utah: “Can you take your hand off my knee please?”