Stupid and Contagious (33 page)

Just because. Because someday when Howard Schultz and I are hanging out, shootin’ the shit, doing those things that guys do—rating supermodels, berating pro-sports coaches, debating who has more hair—I’l always have my moat. My trump card. Oh yeah, Schultz? Wel , you don’t have a moat! Take
that
!

Just as I’m standing there nodding this very self-satisfied, moat-having nod, I’m snapped out of it when a gardener walks onto the property and leaves the gate wide open. Now I’m not a person who believes in signs and al that. But if
Heaven
were standing here, she would insist that that was a sign. And that I am supposed to just walk in behind the gardener. So I do.

Okay, the guy may not have a moat, but his house is pretty fucking nice. I don’t know exactly what to do here, so I just start walking up the lawn with my proposal. And that’s when I hear this shril Mexican woman’s voice come out of nowhere.

“What you want?”

I don’t even know where to look, but I answer like I’m talking to Oz.

“I just . . . have something for Mr. Schultz,” I say as I raise the proposal and baby bottle over my head to show that indeed I have something.

“Mr. Schultz no home. You no invited! You trespassing! I cal the police!”

“No, no need for that!” I say, stil wondering whether she’s invisible, or perhaps communicating through some tiny speakers implanted throughout the lawn.

“I cal police NOW!” she says, and I hear a snap. At first my panicked brain thinks it’s a gunshot. But no, it was more like a door slamming shut. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she means business. And then there’s the matter of the gardener striding toward me with a menacing look in his eye and an enormous metal lawn rake in his hand—so I take off across the lawn, through the gate, and down the hil over to where Heaven is talking to a couple of little kids.

I’m out of breath when I reach her, and I bend forward with my hands on my knees and just pant for a few seconds. Strummer comes over and licks me on the face.

“What happened?” she asks. “Did you see him?”

“No, I saw his gardener and got yel ed at by what I assume is his housekeeper, unless he’s married to a very high-strung lady who doesn’t speak very good English.”

“You never know,” Heaven says. “Maybe she’s real y nice but overly caffeinated. I’m sure they have an endless supply in that house.”

“I’m going to go with a
no
on that. I think it’s safe to say that
nobody
is married to that woman.” She looks at my hands holding my proposal and the baby bottle.

“What’s
that
?” she says. “Why is your proposal stil in your hands?”

“Did you miss that last bit? The high-strung lady, the gardener . . . his rake?”

“Ugh, give me that,” she says. She grabs the

“Ugh, give me that,” she says. She grabs the proposal and bottle out of my hands and marches over to a stoner kid. The next thing I know, he’s peeling off his hipster bowling shirt and handing it over. She turns it inside out and puts it on, ties her hair up into a bun, and marches up to Schultz’s entry walkway, toward his front door.

“Nice knowing you,” I shout.

I can’t even look. But since Heaven’s life is in jeopardy, I figure this might be interesting. So from behind the car, I peer across the lawn to where she’s reached the front door of the hulking Howard Schultz house. I can make out a door opening, and a figure dressed in black, and Heaven speaking to him for what seems like an eternity. Then the door closes.

And as if nothing has happened, she returns.

“Brady?” she says.

“Down here,” I say from my position crouched behind the car, which now strikes me as a little cowardly. She crouches down. “What happened?” I whisper.

“A guy came to the door . . . I told him I had a very important delivery expressly intended for Mr. Howard Schultz, and I would hold this man personal y responsible for ensuring that it reached Mr. Schultz intact and with al due—” and she waves her hand in the air.

“Al do what?”

“I forget the word I used,” she says, “but he was very impressed with the gravity of the situation. So I think we’ve got at least a fifty-fifty chance.”

He’s not the only one impressed. Success or not, it seems like such a Heavenly thing to do. She pul s me out from behind the car, and we come face-to-face with this twelve-year-old boy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and a black motorcycle jacket.

“Cool jacket,” I say to him. “You’re like the Fonz in that thing.”

that thing.”

“Who’s that?” the kid says. I don’t even bother putting my thumbs up and saying “Aayyy” to try to jog his memory because he
has
no memory of this. And suddenly I feel like the oldest man in the world.

Right then this cop car pul s up behind our rental car and two cops get out.

“Shit,” I say. “That fucking maid real y
did
cal the cops.”

“What’s this?” Heaven says.

“We need to just blend,” I say. “
Blend.
Act natural.”

But the cops walk over to our car and start shining their flashlights into it. “Fuck . . . they know it’s me. I better just go over there.”

I walk over to the car, and Heaven fol ows.

“Excuse me, Officer, I think it’s me you’re looking for,” I say. “I didn’t mean any harm, I just wanted to talk to Mr.—”

“That’s her! Freeze! Get down on the ground,” they say and draw their guns. “Facedown.” And I do.
Fuck.

Schultz must be in real y good with this town. But why

“her”? How did Heaven get implicated in this thing?

“Both of you!” they say, looking at Heaven. She complies. I feel awful that Heaven is being dragged into this.

“Look, Officer, she had nothing to do with it,” I say.

They handcuff us while we’re on the ground, and then they walk us over to the cop car and push us up against it with our backs to them.

“Spread your legs,” they bark at us. “Are you carrying any weapons?”

“No,” we both say. And they start patting us down.

Right then about seven other police cars come speeding over to us, lights flashing. One of the cops reaches into Heaven’s pockets and pul s out the keys.

“Is that
your
white Ford Focus?” he asks.

“Yes . . . I mean, no . . . it’s a rental,” I say.

They open the trunk and pul out this big duffel bag.

“What’s that?” I ask Heaven.

“I don’t know,” she says.

One of the cops opens the bag and then looks at the other cops with a look I don’t quite recognize.

Then he pul s out this gigantic shotgun.

“Oh my God!” Heaven and I say at the same time.

“You have the right to remain silent . . .” he says. As he goes on with the reading of our rights he’s being drowned out by the people at the vigil, who are al of a sudden booing and hissing at us.

Many more cops have arrived, and we’re being walked through the crowd at Kurt Cobain’s vigil, handcuffed, with a cop carrying a shotgun, which he just found in our trunk. They hate us. Somebody actually
spits
at me and then a couple other people fol ow suit.

“Kurt died for your sins!” some girl screams. And al of a sudden
we’ve
become the common enemy that everybody has banded against.

“She stole my shirt!” the stoner kid says. And that one has a
speci al
sting to it, because while accidental . . . that part is true. Strummer starts barking like crazy, and he won’t stop.

“How did that get in our trunk?” I ask Heaven.

“I don’t know! They’re
spitting
on me!” she wails.

“Heaven! Think about it! A shotgun? At Kurt Cobain’s vigil? You
do
know that’s how he committed suicide, right?”

“Of
course
I know that.”

“Wel ,
I’m
about ready to spit on you, too.”

“It’s not my fault!” she yel s.

“When was the last time anything
was
your fault?

Never? Okay, just checking,” I say. Then I add, “You are the embarrassment capital of the world, you know that?”

We get to the cop’s car. He opens the door and covers our heads as he guides us in, so we don’t hit them on the roof of the car. They take Strummer and put him in a separate car. No cuffs.

I’m staring at Heaven, but she won’t look at me.

She can feel my eyes burning into her, but she won’t look back. She’s like Strummer when he’s misbehaved—he can hear the tone in my voice, but he pretends he can’t hear me and won’t look at me.

“The car is also being impounded,” the cop says.

“Of course it is,” I say and turn to face the menace on my right. “Okay . . . Heaven?” I say, and she just sits there refusing to look at me. “I am official y raising your national terror alert from
orange
to
red.
”

I’m sitting in a cel at the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. Heaven and I just total y disrupted Kurt Cobain’s vigil, and we’ve been arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm and accessory to bank robbery. How this happened, I do not know.

We’ve just been fingerprinted, and I’m in a holding cel . Heaven is in the cel next to me, and she’s taken to singing old chain-gang songs. I rol my eyes at her.

“I’m sorry!” she says through the bars. Then she gets this look, like she’s just seen a ghost. “Hey!” she says to some guy in a Cubs cap and cuffs that the cops are walking past us. “
It’s the cat piss guy!
” she whispers to me. Not a ghost, apparently. The cat piss guy. Whatever that means.

Then I hear footsteps coming toward us. I turn, and I’m shocked to see that little wank from Schultz’s office and a short, heavy Hispanic lady in a housekeeper getup . . . peering into our cel .

“Yes, Officer,” David says. “That’s him.”

“Sí,” the Hispanic lady says. “Bad man!”

“You have
got
to be kidding me. Is using the restroom in an office building a crime?”

“No, but trespassing is,” the cop says. “You’ve sure been around today, Mr. Gilbert.”

“Somebody pinch me,” I say. “Smack me . . . do something. Wake me up from this nightmare.” Then I look at the guy who I’m sharing my cel with, and he’s suddenly perked up. I definitely need to correct myself. “I don’t
really
want to be smacked.”

“Who was that?” Heaven says.

“The receptionist,” I say.

“Get out of here, you little maggot!” Heaven yel s at him. “You’l be sorry when you realize who you messed with!”

“You’re not helping,” I say to her.

“Sorry,” she says and presses her face between the bars so she can better see the “cat piss guy.”

“What are
you
doing here?” she asks him. “
Oh my
God . . . you!
” she says as if she suddenly realized something. She extends her entire arm through the bars to point her finger accusingly at him. “
You
put that gun in my trunk. And you’re the reason al of those cop cars were coming—”

“Say what?” I ask her.

“It’s
his
gun.”

“Who
is
he?”

“He’s the nice guy that helped me put some stuff in the trunk. Turns out . . . not so nice.”

The guy doesn’t even look at Heaven. He just stares down at his shoes.

It takes the cops twelve hours to confirm our story and do the paperwork, but they final y let us go. Turns out the guy that Heaven charmed into helping with her groceries robbed the Bank of America next to the convenience store about ten minutes prior and decided to ditch his gun in our trunk. Al of which was caught on the surveil ance camera. They let me slide on the trespassing charges because one of the cops actual y went to high school with the David Spade clone (whose name is actual y David—you just can’t make this stuff up), and he promises he’l “talk the dweeb down out of his tree.” The cop refers to David as a “band fag,” and informs me that David once passed out onstage while playing his bassoon at a recital. When I was losing my virginity David was praying to a shrine of Captain Kirk. This almost explains his loathsome existence. Almost. But geekism aside, I stil want to crush the guy. Or at the very least give him a wedgie.

They take us to Strummer, who is hanging out in a detective’s office with a black Lab. He’s apparently been having a grand old time, having a play date with this cop’s dog, and he’s not ready to leave yet.

We drag him outside and stand on Fifth Avenue, where once it’s al official y said and done, we look at each other as if to say, “What the fuck was
that
?”

When we get our car out of the impound both of us are starving, so Heaven busts out the couple months’

worth of Pringles she bought. But she won’t let me have any unless I agree to race her and eat a whole can. This is what I have to deal with. After suffering in
jail
because of this woman. I can’t even have a single Pringle.

“Haven’t you done enough for one day?” I ask.

“Must I condemn myself to a potato fist that wil lodge itself in my solar plexus for a week?”

“Maybe your colon, not your solar plexus,” she says.

“C’mon. It’l be fun.”

“Having food races is not fun. I like to actual y chew my food.”

“‘Once you pop . . . you can’t stop,’” she sings. This is the Pringles jingle.

“Yeah, but I’m not looking to pop . . . an artery.”

“Lame.”

“Pringles aren’t meant to be shoveled into your mouth twelve at a time,” I say, trying to sway her.