White Tiger on Snow Mountain (3 page)

“Hey,” she said, and it was really getting dark now, the bridge was lit and the bugs were out, but she sounded cheerful again, and when I looked closely, she was smiling slyly at me. “Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do?” She put her hand on my inner thigh and whispered into my ear. “Isn’t there anything special, an act of atonement I can perform, that will get rid of the curse?”

She giggled as I moved her hand farther up my leg. I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We Happy Few

They say there are no coincidences, that nothing in this world truly happens by accident. So perhaps, deep down, I really meant to show my penis to my entire class. After all, that one seeming mistake began the adventure that changed my life.

Or maybe I just suck at computers. I only intended to expose myself to one particular student, Sunhi Moon, a twenty-something Korean girl in the English conversation class I taught at a community college in Queens. It’s the same old story: a plaid skirt and white knee socks, a few giggles followed by a heated discussion of dangling modifiers and some cutely dropped articles (I mean articles like “the” and “an,” not, alas, the aforementioned knee socks or skirt), leading to an increasingly wild, if idiomatically incorrect, iChat affair, (“I wants you into me!”), then to a picture of a slender, rosy, headless body blooming in my in-box one morn, and, finally, my own doomed response, the fatal crotch shot I snapped and, unwittingly, sent to my whole class email list.

Imagine my surprise the next evening, when I showed up to teach and found security waiting. They seized my faculty ID and, fearing lawsuits, dispatched a grief counselor to my class. I
signed a paper agreeing to never again set foot on campus and wandered, stunned, into a winter landscape that had switched from day to night behind my back. I raised a silent cry to the moon. O mistress of perverts and fools! The wind howled back and shook the stop signs. The stars, rarely seen, gleamed suddenly like the points of falling knives. I rode back to the city and an AA meeting, where I raised my hand to grand applause. It was the anniversary of my twentieth year clean and sober.

One of the best things about being a sober alcoholic is that, no matter how low you sink, your experience can still help others by letting them forget their own problems and laugh at yours. So my sorry tale that night—freshly fired, nearing eviction, an old single with crumbling molars—won their hearts and hugs, but I prefer to be loved from a distance, anonymously, and after sucking up a little warmth, I left the church basement alone. I was shuffling down the powdered street when a voice stopped me.

“Hey! Wait up!” My interlocutor was a vigorous sixty, pink with specs and a tidy white goatee. Snow melted on his warm, smooth skull. No doubt some sad slob like me, wanting to make friends. I thought of running, but I’d probably slip and bust a hip, so I set my teeth in a smile.

“I like what you shared,” he said. “I like your realness.”

“Thanks,” I said, while my realness was thinking, “Fuck off.”

“But it sounds like you need a job. My name is Dr. Tony.”

Dr. Tony, or Dr. T, as he claimed to be widely known, was an ex—drug addict and ex-convict turned counselor to the stars, out in LA, of course, where he sold the weak and wealthy something called a sober companion—basically a paid buddy who
hung around and kept you from getting drunk. This was a controversial idea in AA and NA, which frown on profit motives. And we help only those who seek our help. In Dr. T’s business, often it was a family or board of directors that demanded its wayward son or CEO be monitored. In effect, the sober companion was a babysitter, trading his dignity and values for three hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.

“Sounds great,” I said. “How do I begin?”

“I actually have a client in mind,” Dr. T said, “someone I think you’ll really connect with. Derek Furber. A terrific young writer.”

“Fantastic,” I managed to hiss through my frozen grin.

Back in the ancient ’80s, when I was just beginning to degenerate, I too had been a terrific young writer. My book of short stories,
Shoot to Kill,
detailing the life of a young art-damaged junkie in the East Village, sold surprisingly well, and for a short time I became a literary celebrity, which basically meant free drinks in a few clubs and free passes at a few girls, all of which I took. Over the next few years, I shouted on a record with a punk band (the Scum, first single “Shooting to Kill”), wrote a screenplay (
Shoot to Kill,
sold but never produced), and tried to write a play (unfinished, working title
Shoot to Kill
). I want to emphasize that I did each of these things exactly once. Then, for a long time, I did nothing. In fact, when I was forced, later, by rehabs and shrinks and the IRS, to reconstruct my past, there were whole years I couldn’t account for: I nodded on the couch, in the sunny spot by the window, and petted my girlfriend’s cat. I went to the corner bodega for a Snickers. You think being a punk-rock writer/junkie was thrilling? It was,
briefly. But in the end it was like being a mailman, making my daily rounds, snow or rain, in my torn sneakers and moth-eaten coat, stomach twisting, guzzling Pepto from a bag. In abandoned buildings where the homeless shat. In alleys where kids picked their pimples and fingered their guns. In shooting galleries where, if you died, you got thrown out with the trash.

That was another lifetime. Today I am remarkably healthy, considering. I do yoga (stiffly) and run (slowly). I eat vegetables and fold the laundry. I water my neighbor’s plants. I even quit smoking. But I didn’t write a word. I tried at first, but I couldn’t get started. Then I took a break. Then I decided it didn’t matter anyway. The world wasn’t weeping for my unwritten books. Now when people ask what I do, I say: “I’m a teacher.” Or: “I proofread legal documents.” Or: “I hand out jalapeño humus dip at Trader Joe’s.” I say, to myself, mostly: “I’m alive, motherfucker.” What else do you want?

Two days later, I was on a plane to LA. After checking whether I had a driver’s license, a social security card, and a criminal record (yes, yes, and yes), Dr. T had briefed me on my mission. Derek Furber was the twenty-five-year-old author of
Down Time,
a fictionalized memoir or memorialized fiction about his life in Beverly Hills, where he sold drugs to his high school friends and their famous parents. He was busted, sentenced to community service, and ended up coaching some team (debate? polo?) of inner-city youth, which rapidly led to his own redemption, a plug from Oprah, and the bestseller list. Now young movie stars were competing to play him in the film, models were competing to play his girlfriend in
Vanity Fair,
and he himself was due, in a week, to accept the Lionheart Award,
presented annually for a Work of Literature That Exemplified the Human Spirit and the Power of the Word to Change Lives. The only problem was, he couldn’t stop getting high.

According to Dr. T, Furber was bound for disaster. You simply do not go on
Oprah
with your face numb and call her Opera. He’d become so risky that he’d had to sign a contract promising to sober up and prove it on demand by pissing in a cup. If he failed, he’d forfeit his movie deal, the Lionheart, and everything that went with it. He was getting out of Dr. T’s fancy Malibu rehab on Monday. My job was to escort him home, through a series of hurdles, and finally to the Lionheart back in New York. Dr. T gave me his book to read on the plane. I fell asleep on page six, during his parents’ divorce, somewhere over Pennsylvania.

The exact address of Freedom Ranch, which I am legally obliged to withhold, is known only to a select handful of wealthy screw-ups and a few million Internet users but you take Sunset to the ocean and make a right. I recommend a bright winter day. The fresh hills glittered with dew all about me, and the eucalyptus trees, shedding long peels of droopy bark to show the whiter meat beneath, soothed the worn linings of my New York nose and throat. As the mist burned off, a clear blue heaven expanded above the ocean, which struck me blind for a scary second as I hit the Pacific Coast Highway: countless tiny beads of diamond light jumping across the waves.

I turned up a dusky road and was met by two goons in a golf cart, who told me that I’d be joining “a group encounter already in progress.” I could only pray that I wouldn’t have to remove my clothes.

The encounter was held under a thatched roof, open to the salt breeze and commanding a five-star view. The group? Well, their haircuts and tans were better than usual, but however impressive the names on the wristbands, it was still a rehab crowd: itchy, scratchy, nervous, patchy, smoking too much and laughing too loud, endlessly rearranging their lighters or cell phones or limbs with the compulsive restlessness of the profoundly uncomfortable. And there, in the lead, was Dr. T himself, the elf who’d appeared in my whirlwind. With his shining dome and the modest muffin overhanging his belt, the man glowed like a burnished good luck charm. No wonder people paid so much to rub against him.

He put his hands together,
shanti
style, and declaimed. “I want now to invite my higher power, the universe, and all of our higher powers to enter my spirit here today and speak through my heart instead of my mouth.”

Or other orifice, I thought, while the rest shut their eyes. It is a strange feeling, when everyone around you has closed like sleeping flowers, and you are the one soul on guard. But I was not alone. As I scanned the faces—even the hardest looked vulnerable without their watchtowers—I spotted a wooly head above the flock. Two dark eyes darted between a mop of dark hair and a fashionably fuzzy beard. An ironic charmer’s grin found me, as if to say, “Just look at these suckers.” I somehow knew, this was Derek F, my new best pal.

My first date with Derek was awkward. I drove back down the coast while he sat silently behind dark sunglasses and filled the car with smoke. Wasn’t that considered rude nowadays? I’d become strongly anti-smoking since I quit.

“Sorry, but do you mind putting that out? It’s bugging my eyes. Probably dry from the plane or something.”

“What? Oh, sorry.” He flipped it out the window, a billion-dollar fine in these parts. I cringed, imagining the forest fire raging on the news, but held my tongue. Two reprimands in the first five minutes was not the way to warm a new employer. Which raised the larger issue: Who’s the boss?

“First stop is Century City,” he said, settling that question. The sun lit the edges of his beard with gold fire, and the glare off his watch stung my eye. “I’ve got a meeting with my agent.”

The agency’s headquarters was in a glass fortress with a hole cut in the center, presumably for Will Smith to chopper in, but we left the car with valet parking, still pretty impressive to me. An elevator whispered us up to a vast waiting room that held a few million in art—Day-Glo graffiti splotches, a conceptual hat sculpture that was also a real hat—and an Amazon in a black minisuit clicked over. Her heels, headset, and tight bun made her seem like an angry android, but she smiled at Derek.

“So good to see you. I love the beard. I’ll tell Yoel you’re here.”

“Thanks, Katie,” he said, stroking.

She pressed something, and a small, shiny, round man in a black suit popped out of a great big door.

“Hey, bro,” he bellowed, hugging Derek, who introduced me, vaguely.

“This is my, um . . . companion.”

“Hi,” I said. “We can’t legally marry yet.”

“Ha,” Yoel said. “Good one.”

“He’s a writer too,” Derek offered by way of explanation.

“Awesome,” Yoel exclaimed. “I’d love to see your stuff.” He led Derek back to his vault. Katie turned to me.

“Would you like coffee? Water?”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks, Katie.”

“Which one?”

“Coffee. No, water. Well, both actually.” I laughed. “I got very dry on the plane.”

“I understand.” A light on her headset glowed bluely, as if ordering her to vaporize me. “Sparkling or flat?”

“Ever notice,” I rattled on, unable to stop, “how euphemistic English is? In French or Spanish, for water with bubbles, they say ‘with gas.’ ‘
Con gaseoso.
’ Americans would rather die than say ‘gas.’ ”

“So you want gas or not?” she asked me, smile deflated, as if she had suddenly realized how much she hated her job. I have that effect on people.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. Please give me gas.”

I sipped espresso. The sun bled out. Katie worked the phone. Derek and Yoel emerged, laughing, and I sprang up, reflexively chuckling too.

“Thanks for waiting,” Derek said. “Let’s roll.”

Yoel waved. “Great meeting you. Don’t forget to send me your stuff.”

“Right. Thanks. I will.”

Katie validated my parking ticket, and we rolled down the elevator and over to Hollywood, where Derek had an apartment in a building full of transients on their way up or down. His place was nice but unloved. The shelves held only a few self-help books. The never-lit candles on the mantel still had
their price tags affixed. The one odd note was that the couch cushions were on the floor, propped against the furniture. Throw pillows leaned against the coffee table, and there was even a towel spread over the corner of the desk.

“Do you have a dog?” I asked.

“No, why? Should I?” he yelled from the bedroom. “Do you recommend it?”

“That’s not what I meant.” I opened the empty fridge. A cleaning crew had scoured the place for drugs and booze as well as mildew.

“I hope you don’t think this is stupid,” Derek said, returning. “But do you think you could sign this?” He held out a copy of my book.

“Wow,” I said, in a whisper.

“I found it in a used bookstore. It’s worth a lot on the Internet now. Like fifty bucks or more, with your signature.” He seemed to blush under his beard. “Not that I’d ever sell it. I read it when I was fifteen and suicidal. It made me want to be a writer.”

I took the small volume in my hand. I hadn’t even seen a copy in forever. I turned it around like an artifact, afraid to look at the author’s photo.

“I’ll be right back,” Derek said. “I’ve got to hit the can.”