Thomas Prescott Superpack (67 page)

Every time I tried to run the numbers I ended up getting an error message.

Of all the times not to pack my TI-82.

While I was running these numbers Base 2, I heard the door open. At first, I feared it was Little Wayne and he was going to put a round in my spine, leaving me holding a limp dick for all of eternity, but it wasn’t. It was just a guy. There were five urinals—I was at the second one from the door—and the man nestled up to the one nearest me.

Bad urinal etiquette.

I glanced to my left. J.J. Watkins smiled at me. He was wearing a blue, green, and yellow Hawaiian shirt. He had this big gap between his two front teeth. He looked like a beaver. An unfunny, untalented, prematurely bald beaver.

In a thick New Jersey accent, he said, “Crazy shit, huh?”

“You could say that again.”

“Crazy shit, huh?”

“Good one.” I mentally plucked the blue urinal cake from my warm piss and made him eat it.

“Yesterday, we were lying at the pool, sucking down piña coladas, today we’re fucking hostages.”

This guy should work for the
New York Times
. I was at the halfway mark of my pee and I said, “You said it.”

I wrapped things up, washed my hands, and then took another hearty drink from the faucet. J.J. Watkins was done with his piss and as I turned for the door he stuck out his hand and said, “I’m J.J.”

I looked at the hand he’d held his unfunny penis in six seconds earlier and decided against shaking it. I did say, “I’m Thomas. Nice to make your acquaintance.”

“Acquaintance. I like that.”

I didn’t.

He laughed then said, “I’m the ship comic.”

“Fooled me.”

He paused a second, then laughed. “Good one. We’re gonna be buds.”

Please no.

The door opened and two men entered. I nodded to both, then slipped out before the door closed. Men and women were coming towards the bathroom in droves. Apparently, I was a trend-setter. Take that Timberlake.

I weaved my way back to Lacy, Frank, and Susie and plopped back into my chair. A hand darted over my lap and I heard, “I’m J.J.”

Lacy took his hand and said, “I’m Lacy.”

He looked at me and said, “You with this guy?”

“I guess so.”

He looked at me and said, “You’re a lucky man.”

“She’s my sister.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh.”

“She’s engaged.”

“Got it.”

J.J. introduced himself to Frank, Susie, Gilroy, Trinity, Marge, and Walter then he said, “So do you think they’re gonna do it?”

“Do what?” Lacy asked.

“
Do what?
Do you think the U.S. will meet the demands? You know, do all the stuff that guy asked for.”

“They can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “That is called
negotiating with terrorists
. If I remember correctly, we don’t do that.”

Frank, who I hadn’t heard utter a word in more than an hour, said, “Where does this guy get off. The United States does a ton for them. I mean, I can’t buy a shirt, or jeans, or a box of cereal without some of the proceeds going to AIDS.”

I don’t know where Frank was shopping, but I hadn’t heard much about AIDS in the past few years. But then again, he was from New Mexico, which from the stories Frank had told, appeared a bit behind the times. I mean, they were still using asbestos.

My sister said: “That money doesn’t necessary get in the right hands or help the right people.”

Lacy of course knew this first hand. Since Lacy had been diagnosed with MS, I had attended more fundraisers and written more checks than I cared to remember. A couple of years ago, Lacy held a fundraiser at an art gallery, raising more than two hundred thousand dollars for MS research. No small feat. The money, which she thought was going fully to fund research, didn’t. It was given to a third party, then distributed among many hands. This weighed heavily on Lacy, prompting her to write a series of scalding e-mails to various people condemning the allocation of these funds.

Since then, Lacy and I have been more hands-on with our donations, seeking out a handful of those—it usually hits at early adulthood—late 20s early 30s, mostly women—each year who had been diagnosed with MS, but lacked the financial resources for the many necessary medications.

Lacy said, “Did you hear what he said, ‘two hundred thousand children were infected with HIV last year.’ Obviously, all that money
The Gap
is raising isn’t working. I mean, we’ve been hearing about the AIDS epidemic in Africa for twenty years now and it’s not getting any better.”

I didn’t put Lacy on my terrorist sympathizer list, but she
was
laying on the rhetoric a bit heavy.

She noticed my muse and said, “Listen, I’m not condoning what they’re doing, but you have to admit the guy’s got a point. I mean, what do these people have to do to get some help?”

Gilroy turned and said, “Give me a break. Tell these idiots to wear a fucking condom.”

“It’s not that simple.” Lacy shot back.

“Sure it is. You open it up and roll it down your dick. It’s pretty simple.”

Lacy glared at him and he turned back around.

I think now would be a good time to disclose my philosophy on this whole AIDS thing. If Lacy was the far left, and Gilroy the far right, then I was somewhere in the middle. This may sound a bit naive, but for me it was simple; you screw around, you don’t put on a condom, guess what? You might get AIDS. This didn’t mean I didn’t sympathize with people that contracted AIDS, I mean that would royally suck. But you reap what you sow.

Now, I know there are exceptions, but most people who had AIDS had Magic Johnson AIDS, meaning they slept with the wrong person. Expanding on this, AIDS had all but disappeared in the United States. Yeah, it was big in the 80s and 90s, but you rarely heard about it anymore. And guess what, Magic Johnson is still alive. That’s right, even if you have AIDS now, it’s like it’s not a big deal or something. But I was not
that
naive that I thought Africa AIDS and American—
You-Have-30-Different-Varieties-of-Energy-Drinks-to-Choose-From—
AIDS were even remotely similar. Theirs was closer to the plague.

I was ready for a discussion change so I said, “Isn’t there a cure for AIDS?”

Whoops.

“Nope,” Lacy said, with a shake of her head. “It’s in the same boat as MS. They have a
bunch of drugs you can take to stop it in its tracks so it doesn’t progress, but there isn’t a cure. And the meds cost a fortune. They make my meds look cheap.”

And Lacy’s meds were anything but cheap.

Lacy continued, “It doesn’t matter if there was a cure. There have been preventive immunizations for malaria for like fifty years and it still kills hundreds of thousands each year in places like Africa. Did you know Tuberculosis is still around? We’ve had a vaccine for a hundred years and it’s still killing people in third world countries.”

I didn’t know my sister was so, oh what’s the word? Greenpeace.

Susie screamed, “Who cares?”

We all looked at her. Including our three friends at the door.

“It doesn’t matter,” she sobbed. “These pirates have taken over our boat. It doesn’t matter what they want. Who gives a rat’s ass about AIDS? What are we going to do? What are we going to eat?”

We didn’t have time to think about this. Or even answer. The doors opened and the Warlord entered.

This time he was alone.

“Uh-oh.”

I looked at J.J. Watkins.
Uh-oh
was right.

The Warlord spoke briefly with the three pirates at the door, then all four walked down the angled walkway. I noticed the Warlord was holding an unfolded piece of paper in his hand. I had a feeling things were about to get uncomfortable. And not
The Office
uncomfortable. The
Sopranos
uncomfortable.

J.J. Watkins tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I think that guy with the beret means business.”

I wasn’t a huge fan of Mr. Watkins, but again, I had to agree with him. The Warlord continued down the walkway, leaving a pirate in his wake every twenty feet, sort of like Hansel and Gretel, but instead of breadcrumbs he was using African mercenaries. All bad metaphors aside, the Warlord made his way onto the stage and stopped. He looked around the room, then shouted, “All de wuman stan dup.”

I looked around. Not a single woman had stood. Apparently, the Warlord noticed this as well. He pulled his gun from his waist, raised it above his head and pulled the trigger three times. Spackle from the ceiling rained down onto the stage, and if there were any pirates sunbathing at the pool, they might want to check for an extra asshole.

“All de wuman stan dup!”

I looked over my shoulder. Still no one was rising. I think it was a combination of half the people not understanding what he wanted and the other half not wanting to be the first to stand;
should they take a bullet between the eyes.

Lacy stood.

I took a deep breath.

The Warlord stared at her, but said nothing. Lacy turned and yelled, “He wants all the women to stand up.”

One by one, the women began to stand, until all were upright, if not shaking.

The Warlord nodded. Then he cocked his head to the right, well, my right, his left, and said, “Aganst de wahl.”

I looked up at Lacy. She gave me a smile and squeezed my hand. The smile said, “I’ll be okay,” the hand squeeze said, “But if I’m not.”

I could feel all the women’s eyes trained on Lacy. Without doing much, she had become the face of the group. As a hostage you wanted to blend in. Go unnoticed. You may already be aware of this, but going unnoticed isn’t a strong suit for the Prescott clan.

Lacy looked at Susie, who was standing just in front of her, and said, “Do what he wants.”

Susie gave Frank a pleading stare. Frank nodded at her, and after a couple calming breaths she stood. It was as if all of us were in a medium sized movie theater, and all at once, 70 women in the theater decided it was time to use the restroom.

J.J. leaned over me and said to both Frank and me, “This is bad. When this happened on
24
, the terrorists killed all the women.”

I looked at him. The most important person in both Frank and my own life had just left to go stand against a wall and I don’t think the Warlord was going to make them stand there so he could give them each a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.

I said, “You aren’t allowed to talk anymore.”

To his credit, he said nothing.

I watched as Lacy, Susie, Trinity, and Marge—Lacy in her tattered shorts and lime green bikini top, Susie in her rainbow vomit, Trinity in her two pieces of white dental floss, and Marge in her khakis and blue blouse—were lost in the large group making their way towards the golden wall seventy feet away. As the women neared, one of the pirates would grab them, drag them to a certain spot, and then push them up against the wall. Berta, Reen, and los lesbianos were packed together near the bathroom door. Trinity and Marge were up at the top of the wall near the entrance, spaced four women apart. Lacy was smack-dab in the middle of the pack. She looked so small compared to Susie on her left and another large woman on her right. She made eye contact with me. She made a face she does sometimes, with her tongue out to the side and her eyes rolled up. I tried not to laugh, but it was impossible.

The Warlord walked to the woman at the far end of the line, closest to the door, and stood in front of her. He looked like an army sergeant doing a barracks inspection. The woman was
wearing a huge pink shirt which hung down near her knees. The Warlord lifted the piece of paper in his hand and put it next to the woman’s face.

“I think it’s a photo,” I said to Frank,

“Looks like he’s comparing her face to the face in the photograph.”

“They must be looking for somebody,” remarked J.J.

I thought I told him not to talk.

But, he was right. They were looking for somebody. Not somebody. They were looking for a woman.

The Warlord glanced at Tupac, who was right behind him, and shook his head. Tupac grabbed the woman and shoved her down the aisle. She tripped and fell. When she made it to her feet, she ran back to her seat where her husband cradled her head in his arms.

This show went on for a while. Sometimes the Warlord would shake his head quickly and the woman would be dismissed straightaway. When it came time for Trinity, I glanced at Gilroy. I wondered if he was feeling the same thing Frank and I were feeling? Did his stomach feel like that big knot of Christmas lights Chevy Chase hands to his son in
Christmas Vacation
? Were his palms clammy? Did his heart feel like it was going to gallop through his chest?

The Warlord held the paper up to Trinity’s face. He stepped back. He didn’t dismiss her.

Frank and I cut our eyes at one another.
Was it her they were looking for
?