Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (42 page)

 
          
 
“Tyrannosaurus Rex," Banner said. “The
most dangerous woman in
London
." He giggled. The giggle evolved into a whinny, then into a chain
of deep, spasmodic sobs that brought tears and coughing and, finally,
hysterical, high-pitched, wailing laughter. Banner leaned on the podium and
gestured at the audience, willing them to share the fun.

 
          
 
People were no longer murmuring; they were
talking out loud.

 
          
 
Tomlinson got to his feet and started for the steps.

 
          
 
“Ringo!" Banner said, jolting upright and
staring at Tomlinson. He held his arms up as if clutching a dancing partner,
and began to tango across the stage, away from Tomlinson, singing at the top of
his voice, ''Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and little man, little Lola wants
you. ..."

 
          
 
At the far side of the stage he halted, bent
over and kissed the air. He looked up and winked at a man in the front row.
"I sure could use some pussy," he said. “How 'bout you?"

 
          
 
Tomlinson was on the stage. Guy Larkin was
running down an aisle. A man in a sports jacket—Walter, from the A.A.
meeting—started up the steps on the other side.

 
          
 
Banner saw that he was surrounded. He backed
against the curtain. His eyes narrowed, and his head snapped from side to side.
He was General Custer or Davy Crockett or Audie Murphy. He reached for his
pistols and yelled, “Don't give an inch, men!" He fired two phantom shots,
and when neither Walter nor Tomlinson fell, he holstered his pistols and
charged at Tomlinson, shrieking like an amok.

 
          
 
Tomlinson threw his hands up to protect
himself, took a step backward, turned to flee . . . and stumbled off the edge
of the stage and sprawled onto a chubby woman, who screamed.

 
          
 
The entire audience was on its feet now, many
rushing for the doors at the back of the room, many more staring in
fascination.

 
          
 
Larkin shouted, “Chuck! Get out here!”

 
          
 
Deep in the shadows backstage,
Preston
shook Chuck's hand and said, **Tell him you
were in the John."

 
          
 
Chuck handed
Preston
the flask and ran out onto the stage.

 
          
 
Through the peephole
Preston
saw Priscilla. Her expression was no longer
blank. Her eyes sparkled, and a slight sly smile played across her face, as if
wonderful news had at last reached the faraway land she was visiting.

 
          
 
Banner spun and faced Larkin, Walter and
Chuck. They were spread before him, and they advanced slowly, pressing him back
against the lip of the stage.

 
          
 
“It's okay. Stone," Larkin purred. “It's
okay. Just let me—"

 
          
 
“Stand back!" Banner unzipped his fly and
reached in his pants and grabbed his penis and pointed it at them.

 
          
 
They obeyed, as if facing a machine gun.

 
          
 
"Don't worry, Mr. President," Banner
said over his shoulder. ''I've got them covered."

 
          
 
Mention of the President seemed to alter
Banner's hallucination, for he faced the audience, snapped to attention,
saluted with one hand and gripped his penis with the other, and said, “Ladies
and gentlemen, the President of the United States."

 
          
 
Then he began to pee.

 
          
 
Chuck, Walter and Larkin charged.

 
          
 
Preston
emptied the last of the liquid onto the floor and set the flask—engraved with a
steer's horns and the initials 5.5.—on the table.

 
          
 
“Let's go," he said to Twist.

 
          
 
It made the late-night telecasts, of course,
and by
midnight
CNN's Headline News Network had bought the tapes and was broadcasting Banner's
performance worldwide. Although the incident was not of cosmic import, so
sensational was the footage that the next morning, the CBS Morning News, Today
and Good Morning America all led their newscasts with it and followed up with
roundtable discussions with celebrity substance-abusers.

 
          
 
The producers of the Phil Donahue show, Oprah
Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera called the clinic and let it be known that if Stone
Banner would appear exclusively, he could name his fee.

 
          
 
But Banner was being held incommunicado in a
detox unit in
Santa Fe
. Reports leaked out—via a ward nurse who was behind in her payments on
a Jeep Cherokee and was thus susceptible to having her palm greased—that Banner
recalled nothing about the evening at the civic center in Promised Land, a
symptom typical (according to reliable sources) of users of PCP or Ketamine.
His mood was said to be swinging wildly between violent hostility and a manic
congeniality during which he was offering to buy drinks for one and all. The
police were waiting to question him further about the circumstances of Natasha
Grant's demise, for a routine search of his premises had turned up chemicals
that would normally be found only in the possession of psychiatrists or circus
veterinarians.

 
          
 
The board of trustees of The Banner Clinic
resigned en masse, as did the clinic's chaplain, its resident psychotherapist
and two of its counselors, Gwendolyn Frye and Melvin Crippin, who declared
their intention to marry and go into missionary work among the Guarani Indians
of Paraguay.

 
          
 
The governor of
New Mexico
considered closing the clinic and
transferring patients to other facilities. But the waiting list at other
reputable rehab centers—"reputable" meaning any that did not practice
aversion therapy, under which patients were forced to consume large quantities
of ethyl alcohol and were then given pills that made them convulsively allergic
to ethyl alcohol, or revelation therapy, under which patients were browbeaten
with religious messages until, supposedly, they were visited by a revelation of
Christ or the Virgin or a charismatic figure of their choosing who commanded
them forever to keep their noses clean—was between three and six months long.
And so, in consideration of the many patients whose treatment was at a critical
phase and who might relapse immediately if they were exposed to the temptations
rampant in an America propelled by engines of instant gratification, he
permitted the clinic to continue operation with a skeleton staff.

 
          
 
Lobbied hard by a committee of patients
surprisingly well versed in manipulation of the media, the governor prevailed
upon one Marcia Breck, who was said to have left the clinic because of a
disagreement over treatment policy, to accept an appointment as senior staff
counselor.

 
          
 
Lupone hung up the phone. ''Raffi," he
said. “Sends you his best wishes. Hopes you make it."

 
          
 
“I don't think I want to know,”
Preston
said, "but did he ever tell you where
he got that stuff?"

 
          
 
“It’s a batch the don's been tryin' to move to
the government."

 
          
 
"The
U.S.
government?"

 
          
 
Lupone nodded. "Thinks it'd be great
stuff to send to
Nicaragua
, pump in the Sandinistas' water."

 
          
 
"Jesus!"

 
          
 
"Yeah. The don's very into foreign
policy."

 
          
 
Preston
had
put on his suit and had shined his shoes, for he and Duke were graduating.
Twist would graduate tomorrow, with Hector, who didn't mind leaving because he
had gotten bored with the desert and it would be a while before enough people
came to Banner to make it interesting again. Marcia had already alerted a rehab
center in
New
Hampshire
to expect a call from Hector within the month, and Hector was looking
forward to it. He'd heard
New Hampshire
was pleasant in the summer.

 
          
 
Preston
and
Lupone had a cup of coffee and waited for Marcia to assemble the other patients
and begin the ceremony.

 
          
 
Priscilla entered the common room, moving
soundlessly, seeming to hover a few centimeters off the floor.

 
          
 
She saw
Preston
and came over to him and smiled and touched
his head and said, "You look nice," and moved along, drifting toward
the water fountain.

 
          
 
She was almost back now, lingering on the
border between this world and her private world of secret safety, as if not
ready quite yet to take the final few steps. Marcia wanted to keep her for two
more weeks, to escort her tenderly back into the realm of reality.

 
          
 
Preston
had
had one brief coherent conversation with her.

 
          
 
"What will you do?" she had asked
him.

 
          
 
"I don't know. I have no wife, no place
to live. I think I still have a job." She looked sad, so he added,
"The good thing is, whatever I do I'll do it sober."

 
          
 
"Will we ..." she began, but the
question vanished, like steam.

 
          
 
"Nobody can know. Best not to plan. When
you're better ..."

 
          
 
"I'll look at Eloise every night,"
she said with a smile. "She'll tell me how you are."

 
          
 
When all the patients had gathered, Marcia sat
Preston
and Duke in straight-backed chairs in the
center of the room. She spoke of her impressions of them when they had arrived,
described them as hard cases who knew it all, denied everything and thought
treatment was a waste of time, told of her bets with Dan that neither of them
would make it. Then she talked about how she thought they had changed, how they
had come to know themselves, to tolerate and appreciate others, to realize that
they couldn't survive on their own, that the world of recovery was one of
caring and commitment.

 
          
 
She urged them not to become "dry
drunks"—solitary soldiers for whom every day was a lonely battle against
the bottle because they would not take solace from their fellows—but to get
with the Program and stick with it.

 
          
 
Everybody said a few words about Preston and
Duke, nothing memorable, really, except perhaps Lupone's offer to find them
work if they fell on hard times and 1's confession that hanging out with
Preston had taught him one thing: It might not be a bad idea to learn how to
read, really read, not just comic books and road signs.

 
          
 
Duke said these four weeks had been a real
adventure and now that Clarisse was going to give him another chance, he was
sure he'd make it.

 
          
 
Preston
hadn't thought about what he was going to say. He stood and looked around the
room and his eyes lit upon an A.A. poster.

 
          
 
“I’ve been thinking," he said, “how nice
it'll be to be in a place—any place—where every picture on every wall doesn't
say 'One Day at a Time' or 'Easy Does It,' where every minute of every day
isn't taken up with warnings about how not to get drunk.

 
          
 
“But now that it's about to happen, you know
what? I'm going to miss those things because I'm scared. Those things work.
They keep me thinking, let me know that I'm just one little glass of clear
shiny liquid away from where I was when I came here. And that's a place I do
not want to be."

 
          
 
He paused, because for some reason his throat
felt thick.

 
          
 
"But as scared as I am," he
continued, hurrying to finish before some emotional thread could unravel and
embarrass him, "I have one thing that's like armor, and nobody can take it
away from me. It's my higher power. I never thought I'd have one. You know what
it is?" He looked at Marcia. “It's people. It's people who understand, people
who care, people who . . .” He felt a weird sensation, as if he were drowning.
“I think I'd better shut up," he said, and he did.

 
          
 
Marcia presented them with their medallions.

 
          
 
Then everybody hugged everybody.