Pocket Kings (22 page)

“I must look like hell,” Wifey says, unable to eat another bite of mango pancake. (It's a line I can hear Ava Gardner saying.) Her pea-green shades, however, mask most of her hell.
Th
e morning sun is relentless . . . this is a place to come to in January, not the summer.

“You don't,” I tell her.

An hour later we're at the pool, sunning and sweating gallons, and replenishing with ice water, Coronas, and margaritas.

“How close are we to the equator?” she asks me several naps and dips later.

“Close. I just felt it move under my back.
Th
ey change it every day about this time.”

After a few drinks Wifey asks me, “You're really writing a book, right? You don't just sit around and play poker all day long?”

“I only wish,” I say, “life were that easy.”

I signal for my next Corona.

Wifey falls asleep just before noon and the sun beats right down upon her pricey Rosa Cha bathing suit (three 7s, Raise
Th
e Lawd, Bumbershoot Bob, $300) and amethyst necklace (two 9s, Gentile Ben, Playing Mantis, and Chips Ahoy, $450).

I walk around our pool, reeling slightly.
Th
e sweating bodies, some sunning and reading, some sleeping, are stacked in rows of beach chairs five deep.
Th
e air smells of chlorine, rum, cologne, and coconut. Female buttcheeks dapple the mise en scène, round ones, pale ones, tan ones, dark ones, buttcheeks of all variety sheathed in swimsuits of every color.
Th
ere are all sorts of breasts, too, plump ones, flat ones, pointy ones, freckled ones, and too-good-to-be-true fake ones.

No woman fitting APG's description is around the pool.

I walk past some palm trees, tall potted plants, and long, scuttling chartreuse and lime green lizards to the next pool over.
Th
e sweat on my neck is trickling down my back, down my shirt, which is underneath my silk robe.
Th
e next pool is the largest: there are children, some with water wings, at the near end, and at the deep end a few adults swim unremarkable laps.
Th
ere is a poolside bar and also a few stools in the pool where some bathers sit and drink or nod off under the blazing sun. I walk around the pool three times looking for my secret iLove.
Th
ere are many women in red bathing suits and maybe one of them is her . . . I just cannot tell. When I abandon this pool and make for the next one—walking around a large Jacuzzi filled with giggling adults holding glasses and bottles—I feel a combination of relief and frustration.

Th
e third pool is the smallest and the most kidney-shaped. Walking only a few inches from the edge of the pool I begin my circumnavigation; I'm so close to the chaise longues I pass that I scrape my calf four times against their metal ends. As it is now after one p.m., some people are eating lunch or at the bar or are back in their rooms recovering from the flesh-loathing summer sun. Only half the chairs are filled.

I walk . . . I pass a flabby man on his stomach and hear him snore, I see two empty chairs, I pass a woman in a red bikini reading an Eckhart Tolle book and improving her life, I see a guy in the next chair slurping a frozen drink, I pass two empty chairs, I pass a muscular stud with a
Wall St. Journal
lighting up a cigar, I see a woman in the next chair in a black bikini spray her shoulders with oil, I pass a chair empty but for a Stieg Larsson paperback, I see an attractive Hispanic couple fiddling with their cell phones, I pass a woman with black hair reading the book
Love: A Horror Story
in paperback, I see an empty . . .

I sit down in the empty chair.

“Excuse me,” I say.

Artsy Painter Gal puts the book on her negligible midriff bulge. Not only had my novel been providing a quick fun summer read but also excellent protection against the midday sun.

“Yes?”

“
Th
at book you're reading?”

“Yes?”

“I happen to have written it.”

“No way!”

“Swear to God.”

She takes off her sunglasses, revealing a pair of hazel eyes so intelligent that I feel my SAT scores diminishing retroactively, turns the book over and looks for the author photo.

“How do I know you're telling me the truth?
Th
ere's no picture.”

“I'm not bluffing, I promise.”

“
Th
is is good,” she says, smiling. “But
Th
e Missing Chums
was better.”

I notice that my robe is starting to separate around my chest and I pull it closer together even though my shirt is on underneath.

“A robe?” she says. “In
this
heat?”

“I'm . . . I'm a bit . . .”

I cannot find
le
mot juste
to tell her what I am.

Suddenly she puts her sunglasses back on and whispers, “Hub coming! Play blackjack with me tonight. Ten-thirty.
Th
e five-dollar tables.
Be there, Chip
!
”

A shadow comes over me, then two smaller ones, then the shadows join to engulf me.

You have to imagine the improbably cast movie scene: George Clooney, his rugged tan body in a black bulging banana hammock, and his two daughters (Abigail Breslin in a dual role) stand over James Gandolfini, who slouches forward in his sweat-drenched silk robe and talks to Elizabeth Taylor circa
Boom
and
Th
e Only Game in Town
while, two pools away, Ava Gardner's Body Double's Body Double, circa
Th
e Night of the Iguana,
bakes flat on her stomach atop a chaise longue—under which the ice of Margarita Number 3 melts and a pair of Christian Louboutin sandals (9-high heart flush, Bjorn 2 Win, Minnesota Phat, Steve McQueens, $500) seek shelter from the sun.

“Aaron,” Artsy/Victoria/Liz says, “you're not going to believe this . . . the book I'm reading?
Th
is man says he wrote it!”

“You did?” Mr. Artsy/Aaron/George says, insultingly void of any suspicion.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” I say, standing up quickly. Too quickly.
Th
e sun's blurry yellow, the pool's shimmering blue, the sky's paler blue, the terra cotta and saffron yellow of the hotel's tripartite façade, the many Coronas and all those encircled Nirvana
N'
s hit me at once and I fall back down to the chaise longue . . .

Five or ten or fifteen minutes later Chip Zero/I/James Gandolfini comes to, courtesy of some smelling salts and a few shoves, in the same spot. I hear splashing, I hear swimming, I hear a smattering of applause (for me being recalled to life). People I've never seen before are standing right over me. Artsy and her family are gone but Wifey/Cynthia/Ava Gardner's Body Double's Body Double is right there with her loving, caring smile and
Th
ierry Lasry shades (two Aces, Trey Scalini, Raisin' Bran, $350), asking me: “Are you all right? Can you get up?”

“Yeah,” I mumble as I shield my eyes from the light. “I think so.”

“What happened?”

“I was walking and . . . I saw someone reading my book. I saw that and I guess I fainted out of shock.”

Wifey and I head back to our room (three 10s, Bjorn 2 Win, Unlucky Lindy, Tally Ho, $2,800) to recover.

I ate a few grains of rice for dinner, then threw up into the toilet and showered. “It must be the water here,” Wifey said. “Although I drank it too and nothing's happened to me.”

I played poker in the room until ten, got an e-mail from Barbara Bennett in Hollywood telling me she wouldn't be able to make it to New York in September, then went into the bathroom and sat in the empty bathtub for ten minutes.

I told Cynthia I was going down to the casino, she told me she didn't want to go; she wanted to pack for tomorrow morning, watch TV, and read. She kissed me and wished me luck.

Downstairs, Artsy was sitting by herself at a fifty-dollar minimum table. She had a rich husband and had won over $75K online by then—these stakes were nothing for her.

“I thought you said the five-dollar tables,” I said as I took a seat next to her.

“I did. But when I got here I realized how truly short life is.”

“Where's Mr. Artsy?” I asked.

“Upstairs with the kids,” she said.
Th
e dealer busted and she won. I pictured her husband putting the kids to bed, doing three hundred push-ups, gargling with Drano, and calling it a night.

On my first hand I got a nine and a two and doubled down.
Th
en I pulled a nine and APG said, “Nice, baby.”

She told me she couldn't stay long.

“So I fainted, huh?” I said.

“I must look pretty terrific in a red maillot!”

“Well, you do.”

Her thighs were a little chubby, there were two tablespoons of flab under each arm, but that's nitpicking. She was a fine-looking woman for her age. Nice sturdy rack, piercing eyes, her butt hadn't yet fully collapsed. Here's a coarser way of putting it: if there's such a Web site as losangelesmilfs.com, she'd most likely make the top thousand.

On the next hand we both hit blackjack.

“Sweet,” she said, tossing the dealer a five-dollar chip.

She told me she had to get going and we gathered our chips and stood up.

“Well, Chip . . .” she began as we started walking.
Th
e place wasn't that crowded.
Th
e holiday weekend was over, people had gone home.

“Yes?” I was ready for her to tell me that it was fun being with me but that she saw no reason for us to ever meet again. In a way, that's what I wanted to hear.

“I'd like to see you again some time,” she said. “
Th
is isn't going to be enough.”

“Sure . . . okay.”

We walked to the cashier and got our money.

“How are things with Mrs. Zero?” she asked me as we walked toward the casino entrance, the warble of slot machines almost drowning out her words.

I sighed and told her that it was so complicated that it defied explanation, and we walked out.

Th
ere were a few people in the lobby, there were a few at the lobby bar. Her floor was in a different elevator bank than mine and we had to separate.

“We'll say good-bye here,” APG said.

I stuck out my hand but she put her arms around my neck and kissed me, slipped me the tongue . . . there were about ten people out there who might have seen it but she didn't care.

I couldn't remember the last time I had a tongue in my mouth other than my wife's or my own.

Alone in the elevator, as the in-flight flat-panel TV touted the hotel's restaurants, sun, sea, and spa and plasmically flashed the time and temperature and Dow Jones, I wondered if all the people I'd been spending so much time with lately online were sad, unfulfilled, lonely, and more than just a bit strange and if it was this and not cards, good luck, bad luck, and winning and losing that bound us so closely together. Were we all in it for the collective insanity and not the money? In my dark hotel room, hushed and chilled with air conditioning, Cynthia was curled up and asleep . . . she looked so untroubled and angelic in the deep blue darkness. She was—and is—all I ever wanted. It took a while but after playing three holes of golf at Pebble Beach, each green ringed with an undulant halo of hearts, diamonds, Aces and 8s, I joined her in the spectral, stately clubhouse in Dreamland.

Back in New York a few days later I e-mailed Harry and told him that I just wasn't the man to work with him on the screenplay. I was way too busy, I told him, with my own writing.

But I wished him luck with it.

10

Dónde Está Big Lou?

O
ne day, two weeks after I returned from the Caribbean, I rode a winning streak so absurdly lucky that I was sure something calamitous was going to happen just to atone for it: I'd be walking to get my lunch and a Great Dane would rear up and rip my throat out, or a leather sectional would fall out a window and crush me, or a manhole cover would electrocute me. On Monday I had won $3,500; the next day I won twice that. Wednesday morning I didn't even start off at the low tables—I went straight to the top.
Th
e pixelated menace SaniFlush was there, so was Bjorn 2 Win, a few other high rollers. I took my seat and watched the cards as they were dealt to me. A King of spades, a Queen of spades. SaniFlush raised, Bjorn called, I called, two others stayed in.
Th
e flop was a Jack, 10 and 9, all of spades. Insane luck. I knew this pot was mine. When I showed my hand I won an amount so high that I am embarrassed to tell you, but I will say it was by far the easiest $7,500 I've ever earned. I could almost see SaniFlush flinching behind his mirrored Psycho Killer aviators.

It was September and the air had cooled and that night I took a subway up to a Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. I had seen in the paper that a writer named Cody Marshall would be reading from his first collection of short stories, recently published to much acclaim (to much acclaim in newspapers and magazines for which Cody Marshall had reviewed other writers' first collections of short stories).
Th
e name Cody Marshall didn't just ring a bell—it banged a deafening gong right near my ear, for it was this same Cody Marshall who'd shoved
Plague
through a high-speed shredder in the Sunday
Times
when it came out; it was his voice that had made me shave half the skin off my face.

I simply had to see this guy in action.

Besides, he owed me a pint of blood.

Th
e reading began at seven.
Th
ere were metal folding chairs, posters with Cody Marshall's book and his portrait on them, a small makeshift dais with a microphone and pitcher of water. Cody was of average height and wore thick glasses and had dainty, well-crafted hair.
Th
ere were about fifteen book lovers present, not including me as I no longer was such a thing.

When he began to read I asked myself:
Do you really have the courage to embarrass this person and destroy one night of his life since he destroyed countless nights of yours?

He read two stories (each time he ended, he had to tell the crowd that the story was in fact over) to a minor spasm of applause, and immediately hands shot up, people began asking questions, and my hand rose as though yanked by someone on the next floor up.

“Yes?” the author said after fielding a few softball queries, looking at me and swigging some water.

“How could you have done that to me?” I heard my voice say.

“What did I do?” Cody said.

“I think you know.”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

Of course he didn't. He had no idea. People all over the country didn't buy my book because of his review, but once he had written it, he was through with me. He didn't even have to wash his hands of the matter: it had happened so quickly, no blood could collect.

“You even gave away the surprise ending,” I said, sitting back down miserably.

Th
at was not to be my comeuppance for winning so much money so easily earlier in the day. My great Dane, leather sectional, and electrified manhole cover were still out there. But it would come soon enough.

When I got home Wifey was very excited and told me that
someone had called and left a message. It was, she told me, a publisher. “I think it's good news,” she said.

Good news? Had Clint Reno come through for me? Finally? After nine months of silence? I imagined the message: “Frank, it's So-and-So from Such-and-Such Books. We want to publish your novel.”

Dead on Arrival
was going to be published! I would get tens of thousands of dollars that I didn't need, but my reputation would soar. I could write more books, which is all I wanted to do. One book every three years for the rest of my life. Books that mattered to people. I would
be
somebody and finally would be satisfied, perhaps even happy, with my life.

“Frank, Deke Rivers at Last Resort Press,” the message went. “I had lunch with a friend of yours yesterday—Beverly Martin. I'm a huge fan of your first book, by the way. Huge fan. Anyway Bev told me you had something that might interest me and gave me your number. I'd love to take a gander at it, I really would. My number is . . .”

I deleted the message before it finished.

“So what was it?” Cynthia, still tan but peeling now, asked.

“It was just some guy. Deke Rivers. A publisher.”

“But that's good news, right?”

No, it wasn't. I wasn't going to pay someone to publish me.
Th
ere was putrid, uncooked animal-waste matter I'd rather swallow whole than do that. For a second I was furious at Bev, then I was mad at Deke Rivers, then furious at Cynthia (for being the nearest available human being), but I finally settled on me.
Th
e proper target.

“Which book was he talking about?” Cynthia asked me.

“
Th
e last one.”

“
Th
e one I couldn't finish?”

“Yeah.
Th
at one.”

When I began writing the
Trilogy
I felt invulnerable.
Th
ere was a force field around my body: a Cloak of Invincibility had been draped over me, the Muses would protect me. I'm certain that when Joyce was writing
Ulysses
he felt the same way.
Th
e book, he knew, had to come into the world, so what terrible fate could possibly befall its author?
Th
ere's no way,
Michelangelo thought while painting the Sistine Chapel,
that this scaffolding is going to collapse and I'll fall to my death and not finish this thing. No way.
He probably hopped up and down on the platform, maybe even sawed a few pieces off, or dangled off it from a pinkie nail. And I bet Marcel Proust felt the same way when he went looking for lost time, although I believe he never once left his bedroom for fourteen years to seek it out, so maybe he didn't.

Because of this newfound invulnerability I began doing incredibly stupid things. I was brazen, I was brash, I was a bit of a jerk. I regularly got into minor bar skirmishes in the East Village; I attempted to pick up women while they held their husbands' hands at parties; I once stormed into a kitchen at a restaurant and confronted three knife-wielding cooks because Flatbush Hethuh's cheeseburger had been done medium well and not medium rare. I did eighty-five in a fifty-five-mph zone, I drank red wine with fish and ate oysters in months without R's and went swimming within an hour of eating. Why did I do this? Because I could.
Th
e Muses had my back! One night I tackled a pickpocket on
Th
ird Street and Avenue B and knew he wouldn't stab me because Erato would lop his hand off in mid-plunge; I bought hard drugs from guys named Julio and Omar and knew they wouldn't shoot me because Terpsichore wouldn't allow a bullet to penetrate my skin. One night when a large, tattooed ex-con and I were about to go at it just outside a bar, even as he informed me that he had enjoyed carnal knowledge of my mother for the insultingly low price of $25 and as I, in turn, imparted to him the pertinent information that I, along with all of the male residents of the Bronx, had had our way with his sister in her hindquarters (“I don't
have
a sister, faggot!” he yelled at me), I was thinking:
He can't hurt me . . . nothing bad can happen to me until I finish the Trilogy.

And it worked. Despite the myriad stupid, suicidal things I did, not once did I die in all that time.

“Why are you doing stuff like this?” Hethuh, exasperated and worried about her boyfriend, asked me the night I tackled the pickpocket. (He wasn't a pickpocket, it turned out. He was just some dude running.)

“Because,” I answered her, jutting out my jaw, “I can.”

Was Beethoven going to suffer a fatal heart attack while working on the third movement of his first symphony? When I was only twenty pages away from the last page of Book I, were Julio and Omar really going to slit my throat with a box cutter because I was five dollars short for three dime bags?
Th
at would have been like John Lennon and not Stu Sutcliffe dying in 1962. When he was writing Molly Bloom's soliloquy I wouldn't be surprised if Joyce dove in front of trolley cars nightly or chugalugged flaming shots of absinthe. He must have known that he wouldn't suffer even a sprained toe until he got to the final “Yes”
of that book, and here is as good a place as any to say that I've always found the “Trieste-Zurich-Paris,
1914–1921” ending of
Ulysses
to be about as annoying a thing in literature as exists, even more than that cutesy little flip book of a man falling up into the World Trade Center that David Safran Wallace Foeranzan included in
Incredibly Unbearable and Unbearably Unincredible.
Th
e final word of the most overrated work in modern literature, then, is not the affirming, inspiring, exultant “Yes,” but is the word “1921,” the year that brought the world widespread labor unrest, race riots, the spread of Bolshevism, the Communist Party in China, Adolph Hitler as the head of the Nazi Party, and the birth of Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh. Perhaps one day the world will see
Ulysses
for what it is: the First Gimmick Book. A whole day in the life of a man, the man is alienated from his surroundings, he is estranged from everyone he knows, all day long he is betrayed, he tries to reconnect with a child forever lost to him. Face it:
Ulysses
is
24
except not as exciting.

When Book I of the
Trilogy
was finally finished, I bought a copy of
Writer's Market
and sent out dozens and dozens of queries and samples of the book to agents and publishers. While I waited (and waited and waited) for positive responses, for
any
responses, I met someone who knew someone who knew someone whose cousin was a recently hired editor at the prestigious publisher Lakeland & Barker. I asked the first person in that chain to ask the next person and so on to ask if the editor would be interested in reading my book. It had been three months since I'd sent out my original queries and I was getting desperate. It only took a week to find out that Martin Tilford, the editor, would be interested.

I dropped off all seven-hundred-plus pages of Book I at Lakeland & Barker.

Later that night I told Hethuh that I needed some time off from her. She had straight black hair and freckles over her entire body but, as she was so tiny, that really didn't amount to so many freckles. (When I used to drop in on her at work I could barely see her: the blender on the counter where she whirled her health shakes was over her head.)
Th
e race was on as to what would happen first: my missing Hethuh and making a desperation booty call, or Martin Tilford getting back to me and telling me he wanted to meet me.

Against all odds, Martin Tilford won.

Could I meet Martin, his assistant wanted to know, at Café Quelquechose near Union Square for lunch on
Th
ursday, November 6th, at 1:30 p.m.? I didn't tell her but I would have met Martin Tilford at Café Rien in the Black Hole of Calcutta for a Ritz cracker with hamster turds on it on Wednesday, March 53rd at 3:30 a.m.

I called Hethuh, not for booty purposes, but to tell her I had a meeting with an important editor. She was happy for me. Two minutes of that and then an hour of her unfulfilled needs and I regretted making the call.

I showed up at Quelquechose ten minutes early and had a club soda at the bar. I didn't yet know what publishing types looked like, but the restaurant was full of them.
Th
e gray suits, the battered leather envelopes, the furrowed brows and serious-looking glasses. For every editor sitting at a table, there was a writer with scruffy hair next to him or her, wearing jeans or khaki pants, an oxford shirt and no tie and cheap shoes, and expressing something between a feigned grin and an eternal grimace.

Th
e front door opened, Martin approached and asked me if I was me and when I answered in the affirmative, we took a seat at a table near a window. He had a hint of a British accent; either he was American and had been educated in England or was English and had been living in America too long. (Or he just could have been an asshole.) Sitting down, I recognized a famous overrated novelist—he is no longer famous, overrated, or alive—who seemed to have put away all by himself the bottle of Merlot sitting on his and his stone cold sober editor's table.