God Hates Us All (8 page)

“Ha,” she says. “What are you, a drug dealer?”

“Funny you should ask….”

I fill her in on the details of my new life, minus the gloomy stretches of loneliness and my recent make-out session with a rising supermodel. Daphne manages a real smile when I tell her about the Chelsea. My words seem to nourish her and I remember why we stayed together long enough to make a list of Top 5 Fights. Sure, she’s done some crazy things, but I wasn’t always an honest boyfriend—if she was nuts, I’d helped
to get her there. So I continue for an hour, like a rookie camper trying to make fire from flint; there are a few sparks, but in the end, Daphne’s deadened eyes refuse to ignite. She rests a hand on mine, letting me know that it’s okay to stop trying. I promise her I’ll visit again, that she can call me anytime if she needs something, even if it’s just to talk.

“There
is
one thing you can do for me,” she says. “I want to find my father.”

Her father left home when she was five. A few years later, he’d completely disappeared from her life. Daphne and I had a running debate over whose grass was greener, the guy with the kind of dad who steals money from his kid to take his mistress out to lunch, or the girl without a father.

“Wow,” I say. “Are you sure now’s a good time for that?”

“His name is Peter.”

“Peter?”

“Peter Robichaux. You said if I needed anything….”

“I meant something that I could actually do. Finding a guy who dropped off the map ten years ago doesn’t exactly play to my strengths.”

“Forget it,” she says, forcing a smile. “I was just fucking with you. I’m crazy, you know.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Do you have any other information, an address or a phone number?”

“That’s all I got,” she whispers.

It’s a five-minute walk to the parking lot from the building where Daphne is housed. Tana is waiting for me in her car. She holds up her wristwatch when she sees me.

“Really?” she asks.

I climb quietly into her passenger seat. I feel disoriented—spend an hour in a mental institution, and the outside world starts to seem a little weird. Tana, God bless her, parses my mood. We drive back to Levittown in silence.

CHRISTMAS IS HERE, IF THE CROWDS DESCENDing on the Macy’s in Herald Square are any indication. Which for me means that walking—the bedrock principle of my workday—is getting tougher. Bitter winds off the river pounce like Clouseau’s man Kato, knocking about the unprepared. Mini-tsunamis form by whatever angle of intersection causes rubber tires to launch numbingly-cold waves of ash-colored snow and gravel onto already icy sidewalks. Getting from point A to point B requires determination, concentration, and fortitude.

None of which is enough to bring me down. Then again, I’m high.

“The whole visit to Daphne, I think it transformed me. It just felt like I was doing the right thing. Like I had a place in the universe as a force for good.”

Or so I explain to Tana as
21 Jump Street
goes to commercial
break. She smiles brightly, unsure how seriously to take my epiphany. “You going to bogart that spliff all night?” I pass her the joint. “You’re not going to join the Peace Corps,” she asks, taking a puff. “Are you?”

“No,” I reply, taking the weed back from her. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought this all the way through. But it’s almost like my whole life has been leading to this point.”

“You
have
spent a lot of time in the food
service
industry. And delivering pot, you’re helping a lot of people.”

I nod gravely, examining the burning stick in my hand. “Food for the soul.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, reaching toward me. “Now share. Me hungry.”

Earlier that evening, I’d spoken to Larry Kirschenbaum about Daphne’s father. He gave me the name of a private investigator he thought might be able to help—an excop named Henry Head—but he’d probably charge me five hundred a week.

“Not a problem,” I responded a little too quickly, causing Larry to study me in a new light. Not respect, exactly—more like the instinct, earned from decades of defending criminals, that I might sometime soon require his professional services.

The truth was I
could
afford Henry Head, thanks to my ongoing business relationship with Danny Carr. I’d planned to reinvest the extra salary into my ongoing efforts to woo K. away from Nate. But so far it hadn’t mattered: I hadn’t seen her in the nearly two weeks since we’d mashed in the bar. In
the rush to leave I’d forgotten to ask for her number. Ray thought he had it, but couldn’t find it, and suggested I “just drop by her place.” Which I did, once again feeling like a stalker, again with zero success.

That Friday night, I debark the elevator on Danny Carr’s floor. His assistant Rick is outside the office door, hovering over a fax machine.

“So if it isn’t the man of mystery,” he greets me.

“Howdy, Rick. The boss around?”

“Just finishing up a call. You guys gonna …” Rick places his thumb and forefinger in front of his mouth and sucks in, mimicking a toke.

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

Rick smiles, or at least bares his canines trying. “So it’s like that, huh?” He turns his attention to the inbox on his desk. A minute later, Danny pokes his head out from his office.

“My new best friend,” he says, gesturing me in. “You can go, Rick.”

“What about the fax?”

“I’ll get the fax,” Danny replies. “Now get out of here.”

Rick gathers his things slowly, a man with something on his mind. “You decide about those tickets?” he finally blurts out.

“Yeah,” Danny says in a flat voice. “I don’t think that’s going to happen this time.”

“Ain’t no thang,” replies Rick. “See you on Monday, Boss. Don’t party too hard this weekend. Later days and better lays.”

Danny’s already on his way back into his office. I follow, closing the door behind me per his request.

“What a prick,” he says, already removing the vaporizer from his sin cabinet. “Wants my fucking Knicks tickets to impress some piece of tail from Staten Island. What a fucking waste of a human penis.”

Danny hands me the money, five hundred dollars already promised to Henry Head, who during our five-minute telephone conversation would guarantee no immediate results but assured me that “when you need a private dick, you can count on the Head.” I’d kept reminding myself that Larry Kirschenbaum had vouched for him.

“You want ’em?” he asks. “The tickets. I’m supposed to be on a plane to Saint Bart’s in …” He looks at his watch. “Right now. Come on, take ’em. They’re behind the Sonics bench. You can play bongos on the X-Man’s bald head. Don’t … You can’t do that, I’ll lose my tickets, but you know what I mean.”

It’s amazing,
I tell myself as I exit the office with the tickets in my pocket,
what you can accomplish by just not being a dickhead.
And it only gets better: The elevator is waiting for me when I push the button. The uptown 2 arrives the moment I reach the platform. There is an open seat near the door. And when I finally reach the hotel with time enough to change—out of slavish loyalty to what I now consider to be my brand, the well-dressed drug dealer, I’m still wearing business-casual—I hear a familiar voice call my name. I spin around to see K.

“I thought I recognized that ass,” she says.

“Hey,” I protest. “I’m not just a sex object you can ogle.”

“Mmm. Too bad. I had fun the other night.”

“Me too. I tried to call you until I realized I didn’t have your number.”

“I’ve been superbusy,” she says.

“Life in the big city.”

We wait together for the light at Seventh Avenue. “Also …,” she starts, then trails off.

“Don’t tell me. You’ve got herpes.”

“Gross me out. No, I’ve got a boyfriend. And I probably shouldn’t be kissing strange men in bars.”

“I think if you get to know me,” I say, starting across the street, “you’ll find I’m really not that strange. And besides, there’s the whole thousand-mile rule.”

“That’s
riiiight
,” she says, catching up to me. “I forgot about the thousand-mile rule. I’m sure Nate would understand.”

“He seems like an understanding guy.”

“Only I can’t ask him tonight,” she adds, “on account of the band being in Cleveland. How far away is Cleveland?”

“Cleveland, Spain?”

By the time we reach the Chelsea, I have a date for the Knicks game. We agree to change and meet in the lobby in fifteen minutes.

“WEED MAN!” MY DATE CALLS to me from the end of the row. “You’re our only hope!”

“Yell it a little louder, Nate,” I reply. “I don’t think the whole team heard you.” One of the Sonics’ bench players turns around and winks at me, confirming they had.

I take some solace in the idea that he’s not trying to embarrass me as much as draw attention to himself—while I still don’t have enough information to judge his musical talents, it’s clear that Nate already has a rock star’s appetite for attention. He’s the only person in the Garden wearing a purple velvet Mad Hatter lid festooned with peacock feathers.

“I seem to have departed the manse without my portfolio,” he continues, his voice faux-preppie, a nod and a fuck-you to the millionaires who surround us, it seems. “Would you be so kind as to slap a twenty on me? The local stout runs five a pop.”

I wonder how badly we have to behave for Danny Carr to lose his season tickets. I give us a fighting chance.

After waiting for a half hour in the lobby at the hotel, staring at the art and evading Herman’s questions about poems I had no intention of writing, I’d foolishly climbed up the stairs.

I find the door to K.’s suite partially open. I knock and no one answers, so I cautiously push open the door. Nate walks out of the bedroom, cradling his cock.

“Wart or canker sore?” he asks, holding it up for inspection.

Nate’s dick is long, skinny, and buck naked, like everything else about him. Even from a distance I can see what appears
to be a red blemish near the tip. But Nate’s not looking at his dick—he’s staring at the Knicks tickets, which for some idiotic reason I’m holding in my hand.

“The Knicks? Bangin’!” Nate turns toward the bedroom, mock-Ricky Ricardo. “Oh, Lucy … you have a
vis-i-tor.
…”

K. emerges from the bedroom in a robe. Her eyes plead for forgiveness. Everything else about her screams
freshly fucked
.

“Need a date?” Nate asks, referring to the tickets. “I fly home early to surprise my girl only to discover she’s ditching me for the Isle of Lesbos.”

“Maybe if you warned me you were coming,” she says to Nate without taking her eyes off me, “I wouldn’t have made plans with the girls.”

“They always say they want more spontaneity,” Nate says, “Until you surprise them.”

“That’s only because your idea of a surprise,” protests K., “is to accidentally slip it into my ass.”

Nate grins like a well-fed cat. “You weren’t complaining for very long.”

“And they say romance is dead,” I deadpan, a major accomplishment given the nuclear explosions taking place in my brain.

“I like this guy,” Nate tells K., whipping a tentacle-like arm around my shoulder. “So what do you say, Weed Man? Boys night out?”

I look at my pager, amazed at the speed of my transformation
from would-be cuckolder to cuckold. I know I don’t have any good reason to be angry at K., but I am anyway. “Why not?”

Who the hell walks into a room holding up tickets?

As Danny promised, the seats are close enough to smell the game. But smelling sweaty men hardly seems like a consolation prize. When Nate offers to buy me a beer with my own money, I pull a twenty out of my pocket, crumple it into a ball, and wing it at him.

“Classy,” he says, picking it up off the floor.

I try to lose myself in the action. The game moves both faster and slower than it does on television. Up close, the players jump and cut much faster than their freakish size (also more impressive in person) should allow. But the Knicks’ style of play, halting and deliberate and bruisingly predicated on fouling the opposition every time they drive toward the basket, seems to suck some of the joie de vivre from the room. Not helping is their coach, who calls a timeout every time the Sonics manage to string together two baskets in a row.

“You should see the asshole who usually sits here,” I hear a guy behind me say about my seats.

A backhanded compliment? Damnation by faint praise? Does it fucking matter? I am itching for a fight.

Only when I spin around, I see Liz, my favorite client from the Upper East Side. Her attention-demanding breasts provide support to something fuzzy and charcoal, too long to be a sweater but too short to be a skirt, allowing plenty of exposure
for long, athletic legs wrapped in shimmery black tights and high-heeled boots. Her hair is moussed and tousled. A light layer of makeup helps her eyes to outsparkle the diamond studs in her ears, while the string of pearls around her neck make her look like she’s just stepped out of
Vanity Fair
.

“Hi,” I say.

“You know this guy?” says the man sitting next to her, the one I’d targeted for a fight. He’s in his mid-forties, wearing a brown suit and a Yankees cap to cover what I assume is male-pattern baldness. Liz’s mind seems to be cycling through potential replies. Or potential escape routes.

“Liz and I went to high school together,” I say, extending a hand. “The name’s Coopersmith … Biff Coopersmith.”

“Jack Gardner,” he replies, taking my hand tentatively, then crushing it. “High school? I could swear Lizzie said she went to Spence.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I say, freeing my hand.

“He means summer camp,” Liz interjects, “since Spence is an all-girls school.”

“Summer camp!” I laugh. “She was an absolute beast during Color War.”

“Coopersmith,” says Jack, rubbing his chin. “No relation to Casey Coopersmith …?”

“You know my cousin Casey?” I slap Jack on the knee. “He’s the best.”

“Casey’s a she.”

“Well, sure,” I say. “Since the operation.”

Liz, who’d been smiling wryly, allows herself a soft giggle. Nate returns with the beers and I make introductions all around. I don’t bother with my ridiculous new alias as I doubt Nate remembers my real name.