Pocket Kings (27 page)

“My
purview.
Eight hours a day for twenty years I tell people where to go and how to get there and you tellin' me about my purview.”

“Okay. Sorry. We're doin' it your way. You're the pro. You're Hammond and Rand and McNally and MapQuest all rolled into one.”

“I'm just sayin'.”

Th
is was the first of about a thousand I'm-just-sayin's that I was to hear over the next few days.

Th
e Delaware River soon approached and I began to drift off. I put my head against the cold window and with one eye made sure that Abdul was more awake than I was. He was.

When I woke up I thought my bladder was going to explode and take the rest of my body with it. It was just past ten in the morning and the sun was warming and bright; Cookie and Second, his mouth wide open and dribbling, were still asleep in the back, and Abdul was wide awake. We were bypassing Youngstown, Ohio, and the meter was up to $840.00.

“I need a bathroom,” I said, my breath so rancid it almost shattered the windshield.

On one side of us there was a KFC, a Popeyes, a Denny's, a Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell; on the other side was a Bob Evans, a Motel 6, a Casual Corner and a Super 8. It was as if our taxi was plummeting down a gigantic artery clogged with trans fats, onion rings, chili fries, and melted down Kenny Chesney CDs.

“We will find one soon,” Abdul said. “And we need gas.”

Second yawned loudly, stretched, and in doing so landed a glancing blow on Marvis's jaw and woke him up, and looked out the window.

“Good morning, Johnny-Boy. Welcome to Ohio, the Aloha State.”

“Ohio, eh? Not very pretty.”

“Yeah and this is the nice part.”

“
Th
e Magnolia State,” I said. “Vacationland, USA.
Th
e Birthplace of Jazz.”

“What the hell is a Dress B
arrrn
?” Second asked right when we went by a strip mall that was so depressing and run-down I almost began to weep.

“Just a place for women to shop, that's all,” I said.

“What a name. Callin' it a barn. Do they have a Cow or an Elephant Department?”

“Most farms,” Cookie said, “don't have elephants on them.”

A gas station and its ramshackle, skid-marked restroom was up ahead on the right, and Second looked out the window and asked, “So who the hell is this Bob feckin' Evans?”

We refueled the Crown Vic, took our leaks, and had breakfast at an IHOP, where Johnny/Second easily polished off two Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruitys. Following Toll House Cookie's instructions, we got on I-70 in Columbus. We'd traveled about seven hundred miles and the meter was past $1,600 and when I saw the exit sign for Spiceland, Indiana, I noticed that Abdul was playing tricks on himself to keep awake and that these tricks weren't working.

“You didn't think you were gonna drive the whole way, did you?” I asked him.

“It is my car, my friend. I am a driver. I am sure that you would want to do the profession that you do.”

I don't have a profession. I don't do anything. I don't work, I play.

“Jaysus Chroist,” groused Second from the back. “
Th
ere's no wifi in here?!”

I turned around. His laptop was on his lap and he was pecking wildly away at the keyboard. THC was looking at him warily out of the corner of his eyes.

“Look,” I said to Abdul, “we're all good drivers here.
Th
is is a long haul. We'll take turns. And the meter can stay on.” (When we'd stopped to pee and to eat, Abdul had generously turned the meter off.)

“Bloody hell. I'm down ten K and I can't even try to win some of it back in here?!”

“I'm not a good driver,” Cookie said. “So don't include me in on this. I only drive from my house to the tollbooths and that's it. I don't like to drive.”

“And we're following,” Second said, “your bloody directions?!”

“You know how many people,” THC explained, “pass through my booth in the course of a year and then probably hours or days or weeks later, they're dead? Gotta be hundreds. Everyday I stare into the faces of future dead people.
Th
ousands of 'em. People in their cars. More people die in cars than in bathrooms, did you know that? It's like I work on a draft board and they're all A-One and I'm sending them right to Okinawa or Iwo Jim. So I'm not driving.”

“
Th
at's ridiculous,” I said. “And it's One-A, not A-One, and it's Iwo Jima, not Iwo Jim.”

“Is there someplace around here,” Second said, still fiddling with his laptop, “where we could maybe stop and go online and play?”

Th
ere was nothing around us but trees and the chilly autumn grayness above and between them and a million miles of asphalt monotony, but I pointed to a pine tree and said: “I think that tree over there picks up a signal, Johnny-Boy.”

“And I think that you're a board-certified card-carrying, A-One, One-A gobshite.”

“Can't believe you lost that all money in one night, man,” THC said to Second. “I thought you was supposed to be good. Guess not.”

I slid down in my seat.
Th
e truth was, if that pine tree did receive a wifi signal, or if the clouds above did, I probably would have stopped there and started playing. I wanted my money back too.

“My friend,” Abdul said, “I think perhaps it is time you should be driving now.”

His eyelids and head were drooping, and a minute later I was at the wheel.

Lunch at an Arby's in Centralia, Illinois, Second flirting with two teenage Hannah Montana wannabes at the next table; a long four-way bathroom break at a rest stop near High Hill, Missouri, and then dinner at Mighty Mo's Ribs on the outskirts of Kansas City, the meter up to $2,600. “I guesstimate we're almost halfway there,” Cookie said while eating a pulled pork sandwich, the exposed ends of which glistened and swayed fetchingly. “America's too bloody big,” Second said. “
Th
ey should split it into twelve different pieces. No coontry should be so wide that you can't drive from the head of it to the arse of it in ten hours, if you ask me.” “I didn't ask you,” THC said. “Well, I didn't ask you if you asked me,” Second shot back.

Abdul, of course, did not eat pork and was contenting himself with sides: rice, beans, corn, coleslaw, biscuits. “Aw, come on, Abdul,” Second goaded him, “have a rib.” Abdul shook his head politely. “What do you think is gonna happen to ya?” my half-Catholic, half-Anglican visitor asked our Saudi chauffeur. “You think you're gonna go to Muslim hell?” Abdul thanked him for the offer but said that it was against the dietary laws of his faith. Second, twirling one end of his mustache, now soaked with a Day-Glo orange wet rub, asked, “In the Mooslim paradise if you get seventy virgins, once you shag one of 'em, is she replaced by a brand-new virgin or are you stuck with her forever? And what do the female martyrs get? Seventy male virgins?” Again he offered Abdul a rib but Abdul repeated, “It is against the laws of my faith.” “Well,” Second said, “grufflin' me blipty is against the laws of my faith too but I've been doing it since I was twelve feckin' years old.”

“If he doesn't want to eat pork, that's his thing,” I said.

“How many times in a man's life you think he whacks himself off?” Second asked, picking up his last baby back. “What's three-hundred and sixty-five days times ten times a day times seventy-five years?
Th
at's like an Indian Ocean of spunk right there.”

“I never did that,” Cookie told us. “Not one time.”

“You're lyin', Marrrvis,” Second said. (His mouth and chin—and my mouth and chin and THC's—were soaked with sauce and there were specks of hickory-smoked swine and cow between our teeth.) “Not one time? Not one time in your life?
Th
at's not humanly possible!”

“I'm tellin' you, I never did it. It's a waste of time and energy. It's just wrong. Every time you do that to yourself, the Lord keeps track of it. See, each single person down here has a book on him up in Heaven. You play with yourself or you lie or curse, the Lord writes it down. And if you get past a certain number, you wind up going to Hell. You can't erase anything in that book. It's etched in stone and once it's done, it's done. But most of all, it's a waste of man-juice. You just can't be pourin' that stuff out all over the place. You got to keep it. Store it up. Save it. Use it when you got to. Wasting it on yourself is just dumb.”

I tried to picture God opening a massive leather-bound, gold-embossed tome, and such a book for every single person who'd ever lived. Surely by now the Lord had upgraded to computers.

“If God's keepin' a book on me,” Second said to me, “for cursin' and spankin' me monkey and all that shite, then he's fookin' roonin' outta paper up there.”

“Anyway,” Cookie said, “I don't do it. I never have done it. I never will.”

“Yeah, but how can you help it?” Second, incredulous, said. “A man refills himself. If he doesn't do it, the stuff'll start pourin' out his underarms, ears, and nose. It's just not possible!”

“I guess I just got more control than you do.”

“
Th
at kind of control, I never wanted.” Second nibbled and sucked his last rib dry, then asked: “When you were a lad, you didn't look at
Playboy
or a
Leg Show
or
Black Playboy
or whatever it is you blokes got?”

“I looked at all of 'em as often as I could. Man, I used to see Pam Grier naked in movies with her big titties all hangin' down. Looked nice. I saw them in
Foxy Brown
on the VHS and I damn near exploded. But I knew I had to save it all up and not waste it. It's why I don't need to take vitamins . . . I got a backlog of all the stuff. How you think I wound up with twin girls?”

“But if you was really potent wouldn't they have been boys?” Second said. He let out a belch that shook every salt and pepper shaker in the restaurant and then resumed. “So if you stored all of it up, Cookie, then you must have plurped your quiffles in like three seconds when you finally were with a woman.”

“I did. I admit it.
Th
ree seconds. And I passed out from it too. It was a great big shock to my system. Took me nearly three minutes to unload. It was like I was watering the grass of Yankee Stadium. When I got home and weighed myself I saw I lost three whole pounds.”

“So when you bluff at poker,” I asked Marvis/Cookie, “you don't consider that a lie?”

“No, Chip,” he said. “I consider that a bluff.”

“But you curse. I've seen you do it online. And you steal from work too. You've told me that.
Th
e pages in that heavenly book of yours can't be all blank.”