Until Frank Vuchovich stuck his Colt Python in my nose, the toughest thing I had to tackle in Brixton was explaining subordinate clauses to the zombie-faced kids of coal miners and loggers. Well, that and marking their near-illiterate papers. Yet, as the West Side of Manhattan stretched out before me through the towers and cables of the George Washington Bridge, I found I was scared shitless. Suddenly, Brixton County felt like William Blake’s Jerusalem, dark Satanic mills notwithstanding. From the night Meg called with the good news, I thought this was exactly what I wanted. Now, not so much. It hadn’t taken long for the doubts to creep back in-the remembrances of things past, the bad things.
When I came out of rehab, Brixton was an easy place to land. One of the keys to breaking any addiction is to avoid the people, places, and things that help facilitate easy access to your particular poison. Well, let me tell you something about New York City in the 1980s: it was the mother of all enablers. I confronted my weaknesses on a moment-to-moment basis. Not confronted, really. I just sort of acquiesced. Every restaurant, every club and night spot was full of cocaine, cocktails, and willing blonds. And there was always an ample supply of Seven Sisters fangirls at the ready when I got bored of the blonds and wanted to have an intelligent conversation between orgasms.
Adoration is a universal addiction to which I was no more or less susceptible than anyone else. In the Manhattan of those golden years, nothing got the toadies, sycophants, and suck-asses going like success. Regardless of the abject dreadfulness of Clown Car Bounce, The Devil’s Understudy, and Curley Takes Five, I would have continued to be hailed as a genius if those books had somehow managed to do good numbers. When anthropologists and historians want to study the Big Bang moment of our cultural demise, they will look back to 1980s Manhattan, the time and place when the singularity of substance and style exploded into a chasm of universal proportion. Didn’t matter what the essential value of anything was as long as it sold.
So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I’d loaded a few things into the last vestige of the Kipster, his ridiculous 1988 Porsche 911, and headed for New York City. I’d come close to selling the car a hundred times. I mean, for chrissakes, the nearest Porsche dealership was fifty miles across the state line and simple maintenance cost more than a month’s rent. Plus, in a calloused and chapped-hands place like Brixton, it marked me as a superior fucker and a total outsider. Oddly enough, as I drove out of town, I no longer felt like either one of those things.
And there were reasons for my skittishness about driving back into the lion’s mouth that went beyond my worries about temptation. I’d swiped the.38 from the Colonel’s duffel bag the last time I shot with Jim. I don’t know why exactly. There was no inherent thrill in “borrowing” the.38. I nearly soiled myself at the thought of getting caught and then having to explain myself to Jim. The fear was not that I’d be exiled-it was pretty clear that Jim got as much out of our relationship as I did-but that I wouldn’t have been able to express my reasons for taking it in a way that made any sense.
Fact is, I had gone shooting with Jim nearly every day since the end of September. It was part of my routine and writers dread the loss of routine almost more than anything else. I think I took the revolver because I wanted to carry a piece of that routine with me even if I couldn’t shoot in the wilds of New York City. It was a rosary to pray on, a physical reminder of the thing that had made the book possible in the first place. But who knows? Truth is always more complicated than the rationalization.
And there was Renee. She too was part of my routine and don’t think I hadn’t been tempted to bring her, to show her my old world, a new world to her. Unlike the.38, which would be nothing more than a kind of semi-religious talisman, Renee would bring real comfort. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d sought convenient comfort in the company of a woman. The amazing thing is, I didn’t want to disrespect Renee like that, to turn her back into the St. Pauli Girl. I’d even convinced myself that she didn’t want to go. She hadn’t asked to come, not with words. Yet, as the week unfolded, I could see Please bring me, please writ large in her eyes.
In spite of my recent un-Kipster-like behavior, I didn’t fool myself that my default settings weren’t still firmly locked on self-destruct. It would take more than a few months of writing, monogamy, and noble impulses to declare the Kipster fully exorcised. I liked drama. I mean, what else were the chapel, Cutthroat, and Fox Hunt all about if not drama? I liked to complicate things and I was less than confident that the new me wasn’t more a function of lack of opportunity than a reflection of profound change.
No, as much as I liked the idea of having Renee with me, I knew leaving her in Brixton was the right thing to do. The right thing for me. For once, I needed things to be simple. I told Renee that I’d be going back to New York soon enough and that we’d make a vacation of it, over Christmas maybe. It wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, one she seemed willing to go along with so we might both get through the week until I left.
Now, with the first dim rays of the sun filtering through the gaps in the skyline, it occurred to me that this was when I’d normally be wrapping up my first writing session of the day and climbing back into bed with Renee for a few minutes before getting dressed to run with Jim. Okay, so I knew I would miss them, miss my routine, but I didn’t expect it to happen even before I got across the Hudson River. Hell, a few more minutes of this, I thought, and I’d be getting weepy for Stan Petrovic.
As I opened the door to the Liars Pub, a gaggle of chattering, Southern blue-hairs poured out past me and asked for directions to Radio City. Their tour bus to Branson must have missed a turn at St. Louis. But who was I to laugh at them, even a little bit? You teach at Brixton County Community College, you lose the privilege of looking down your nose at anyone but yourself.
“One for lunch?” the hostess asked, thumbing a stack of menus.
“I’m meeting someone. The reservation’s under Donovan.”
When the hostess looked down at her reservation sheet, I looked at her. Curvy, petite, and in her mid-twenties, she was dressed in a vintage clothing store cocktail dress-black, of course-over black heels that reeked of credit card debt. Her hair was jet black, her skin a shade of light mocha, her eyes almond-shaped but hazel. Her lips red and thick, her nose upturned, her breasts full, she was the most exotic-looking woman I’d seen in seven years.
“Yes, we have it, but I’m afraid Miss Donovan hasn’t yet arrived. Would you care to be seated or to wait at the bar?”
“Actress, dancer, painter, or writer?” I asked. This might have been the only time I posed the question without a motive more nefarious than curiosity. After all, no one who looked like her came to New York City for a career in hostessing. Nobody.
“Writer.”
I said, “You have my condolences.”
If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Tell me about it.”
“This place used to really be something once.”
She sighed. “So I’ve heard.”
“You would have liked it,” I said.
“Not now.”
“Of course not, it’s a job.”
“It’s a corpse. No one likes working in a place that once was.”
“Almost as unpleasant as somebody who once was. I’ll be at the bar.”
I’d been so exhausted when I drove across the GWB and down to the hotel on 44th Street that nothing had penetrated. Nor did I get teary-eyed and gawky on the cab ride over here. Only when I made my way to the bar did it begin to sink in. Standing there, taking it all in gave me a sense of just how long I’d been away, of how isolated and insulated I’d been, and what this weekend might mean to me.
The Liars-no one who knew better called it by its full name-was a stone’s throw from the Flatiron Building and had been around for about a century. Back in the day, it used to be the kind of place where writers swapped stories about bigger-than-life characters like Runyon, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. But now as I looked around I saw that the place was as artificial as Disneyland. It had become a theme park eatery that sold T-shirts and hot sauce. The banquettes bore the names of legendary writers on commemorative brass plaques. The Liars was a venue where gods and giants had been supplanted by tourists and the talentless. Even before I left New York, the Liars had become a bit of an insiders’ joke. Now it was just a joke. Not so different from me, really.
Given that Meg had booked me into the Algonquin, it came as no shock that she’d chosen the Liars for lunch. She seemed not to know what to do with me, fearing, I suppose, that I’d somehow melt down at the thought of eating or sleeping somewhere not haunted by literary ghosts. And why not? “Literary ghost” was a pretty apt description of me. I might have considered telling her that I would have preferred to stay in a boutique hotel and to lunch at a restaurant that didn’t sell souvenirs. The very notion of a chic hotel and three-star restaurant had broad appeal to someone from Brixton County. And while the Algonquin, a lovely old hotel, was more than several steps up in class from Hendrick’s Motor Court or the Red Roof Inn in New Prague, it wasn’t exactly hopping. The most exciting thing about the Algonquin was the cat that lived in the lobby. Maybe that was the point. Until I signed those contracts, Meg meant to keep me as far away as possible from hot new places and dangerous old haunts like the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t like it, but I guess I understood her reasoning.
I took note of many things as I stood there nursing a pint of ale. Meg was always late for our meetings. She liked drama too, but only of her own making. I noticed too that several additions had been made to the caricature sketches of writers, editors, and publishers lining the walls. I saw the sketch of Moira Blanco that hadn’t been there seven years ago and the one of the recently deceased Haskell Brown. I wondered if the cops had made any headway on his murder, but didn’t dwell on the subject. I wasn’t a hypocrite and it was Brown’s homicide that had cleared my path. I noticed sketches of Bart Meyers and Nutly and Marty Castronieves. Mostly I noticed the one of me that wasn’t there and winced at how much that hurt.
Nor did it escape me that the hostess wasn’t close to being the hottest woman in the place. At the bar alone there were five women, most of them in their early twenties, who, even on a no-makeup-bad-hair day, would have been Miss Brixton County. And no two of them were attractive in the same way. I’d forgotten that New York City was a city of St. Pauli Girls. That at any one time in any bar, on a subway car, or in a movie theater line, there were women, young and old, whose varied charms and looks were even more alluring than Renee’s. Renee had a kind of regional perfection, if that makes any sense. Yet, at that moment, I found myself missing her. Then Meg walked in.
When we first met, Meg’s look was sex neutral: not androgynous, neutral. She was plain faced, brown eyed, thin lipped, and built like a pencil, so she depended on her black-on-black wardrobe and take-no-prisoners attitude to lend her an air of authority. We hit it off almost immediately, though, to this day, I’m unsure why. I liked that she was immune to my charms and me to hers. It was just healthier that way. Funny thing is, our taste in women was very similar: we liked them, a lot of them, and often. It was one of the few things we shared, actually. Meg was unknowable. I knew about her. I knew she was loyal and dogged, but not why. True, I’d earned her a lot of money once, but that was yesterday’s news and in New York publishing, yesterday was ancient history. I never knew much about her upbringing, her family, or what was going on inside her head and she never volunteered information. Still, we’d somehow managed to love each other.
The Meg who strolled into the Liars was more severe looking than I remembered. Her thin brown hair had gone silver-gray and she wore it short, gelled, and spiky. She had on glasses with sharp rectangular lenses like microscope slides set in heavy black frames. In her black leather duster with upturned collar, she reminded me of Ming the Merciless from the old Flash Gordon serials, and her black bag was more Harley saddlebag than purse. She would have been as out of place in Brixton, I thought, as Truman Capote in Holcomb, Kansas. I watched Meg hungrily eye the hostess as she handed her the duster to be checked. That much hadn’t changed. Meg wore a black silk blouse over gray wool slacks and pointy-toed black pumps. Around her neck and wrists she sported thick, uncomfortable-looking silver jewelry twisted at irregular angles. Sort of Cartier meets Home Depot.
“What are you smiling at, Weiler?” she asked, when I slid into the booth next to her.
I leaned over, kissed her cheek. “It’s been a long time, Meg.”
“You’re not going to start sobbing, are you?” she said, even as she squeezed my hand.
“I promise. You?”
“Don’t be an ass. I’ve wasted too many tears on you over the years.”
“You look good, Donovan. And gray slacks, my god, it’s heresy.”
She laughed or what passed for her laughing. “You could always do that to me, you know, make me laugh. You look older, Kip, but fit.”
“I run.”
“Talk about heresy! The only running you used to do was from bed to bed.”
When the waitress came over and began reciting her prepared little speech, Meg cut her off and ordered a dry Ketel One martini with four olives. I held up my half-finished beer and said I was fine. Meg looked relieved.
“This was an interesting choice for lunch,” I said. “What happened, all the tables at Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday’s were booked?” She knew I didn’t want an answer. “And the good old Algonquin, thanks for that. Maybe I’ll find an old pair of Dorothy Parker’s knickers to sniff. Her crypt’s in the basement, right?”
The martini arrived and Meg swirled the contents around with the olive-laden plastic sword. She sipped it, curled her lips, and slid an olive into her mouth.
“Look, Weiler, if I could have kept you in a straitjacket and leg irons until after dinner tomorrow night, I would have. But I figured the Algonquin and this dreadful joint were the most I could get away with without you acting out.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine. You don’t have to worry.”
“If you’re trying to make me laugh again or reassure me, it isn’t working.”
“I guess I’ve given you ample reason to be skeptical.”
“Ample? Since when is understatement part of your repertoire?”
That was my cue for a segue and I took it. “So, did you read the new pages I added to the original manuscript? What did you think of the plot synopsis?”
“I’ve read them both.” Meg did that curly lip thing again, took another sip, and a second olive. She actually turned to face me, a very un-Meg-like thing to do. “Kip,” she cleared her throat, “before we go to dinner tomorrow night, I have to … um … ask you a question.”
Meg hesitating! Surely, this was the end of days.
“What’s the question?”
“Is it your book?”
Of all the things she could have asked, I didn’t see this coming. I was shocked and angry. “What the fuck kinda question is that to ask me?”
“Think about it, Weiler.” She held up her right index finger. “One: You haven’t sent me a manuscript in god knows how long and your last three books were, to put it mildly, disasters.” Her middle finger. “Two: I call you with a big rights deal and what, magically there’s new book?” Her ring finger. “Three: The voice in this new book doesn’t sound like your old voice at all.” Pinky. “Four: Your new characters aren’t anything close to what your old characters used to be like. These people have souls.” Thumb. “Five: The writing is done in pitch-perfect Irish dialects.” Left thumb. “Six: And all of a sudden you’re an expert on handguns?”
“Better stop now before you run out of fingers and have to remove your shoes,” I said. “You forgot to mention that GunQueer doesn’t contain a dream sequence.”
“That’s not an answer, Kip.”
“You want an answer?”
“Yes.”
I would have told most people to go fuck themselves, but Meg had earned the right to hear the truth about where the book had come from. “Okay,” I said. “Order another martini or two. I’ve got a story to tell you that you might not believe.”
She took my suggestion and about forty minutes later she knew more about my life in Brixton County than she ever wanted to know. Meg gulped down her third martini and didn’t bother fussing with the olives.
“Are these people dangerous?”
“Anyone with a weapon in his hand can be dangerous, but there’s only one asshole in the bunch,” I said. “Mostly they’re harmless and just plain bored. There’s a lot to be bored with in Brixton no matter what you do. This world they invited me into is the one place they can shine. It’s like a cross between Kabuki and Catholicism.”
“What is the significance of those rituals you were telling me about?” she asked, turning once again to face me.
“Some come from how the chapel was founded, like the ashes from the first tree they shot at. The number of steps you take to get to the chapel floor and to shooting position have their roots in how many people were originally a part of things. And the things we recite come from the Bible when Jesus is talking to Doubting Thomas, but there are other things we do that have to do with status.”
“Status?”
“Look, Meg, I don’t think you can appreciate what these people’s lives are like. The people at the chapel, they’ve got no futures. They either work in dead-end jobs in a dead-end town or go to community college in order to get dead-end jobs. There’s no way for them to derive any self-esteem or achieve anything worthwhile outside the chapel. The chapel is really their salvation. It’s a way for them to prove themselves as something other than a clerk or a short-order cook.”
“But how do they measure status?”
Now I hesitated. It was one thing for me to create a fictionalized version of the chapel, but I actually felt a pang of guilt. I was breaking the big rule. I was talking about the chapel openly, naming names, discussing it with an outsider. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to give all the details about the shooting, especially the part about shooting with only a vest for protection. I decided to fudge a little.
“We get red crosses on our shirts every time we shoot. It shows how brave we are and how we trust each other. The higher the number of crosses, the higher the status. Each time we shoot, the test is different. Sometimes it’s who’s fastest, other times it’s who’s most accurate. It’s even in how well we perform the rituals. For instance, when we walk four paces away from each other, stop and take one last step before turning to face one another, we strive to be as close to thirty feet apart as possible. When the real experienced people shoot together, they often are exactly thirty feet apart. I don’t know all the nuances or intricacies yet because I’m still new, but it’s all carefully thought out.”
Meg shook her head. “Still, why don’t you consider moving up here to finish the book? I would feel safer with you close by.”
“To make sure I don’t go off the rails, you mean.”
“That too,” she confessed.
“No need to worry, Mom. Staying down there is good for the book and good for me.”
“And this blond, the St. Pauli Girl-”
“Renee.”
“Renee. Do you love her?”
“I’ve been faithful to her probably longer than I was faithful to Amy.”
“I was waiting for that name to pop up. She’s miserable, you know.”
“So you’ve said.”
“You should call her,” Meg suggested.
I didn’t know what to say. Had I known, I don’t think I could have managed to say it. No matter what Renee was to me, she would never be able to touch the way I felt at just the thought of hearing Amy’s voice over the phone. Then it dawned on me-I guess it was a day for revelations, large and small-that I had nearly achieved the goal I set for myself the year before. With the book deal, the money from the rights deal, my keeping on the straight and narrow, and my newfound monogamy, I was nearly in a position to win back Amy’s respect and my own.
“And one more thing, Weiler,” Meg interrupted my reverie.
“What’s that?”
“I ran the title by Dudek and as I anticipated, he thinks GunQueer would be too controversial. It’s got to be Gun Church.”
“Gun Church it is.”