Rummies

by Peter Benchley

  As Tomlinson embarked upon an apparently endless voyage across an ocean of encomia, Banner dropped his script on the table, put his hands behind his back and paced in circles, practicing facial expressions. With his lizard-skin boots and tuxedo jeans (a blue silk stripe down the side of each leg) and fringed calfskin jacket filigreed with spangles, with his rhinestone-studded ascot and diamond-studded Rolex, he looked like Elton John imitating Liberace imitating Elvis Presley trying to walk like Prince Philip.

  Tomlinson was in mid-ocean, awash in adjectives like "selfless" and "dedicated" and "loving." There was no way to tell when he would reach the far shore.

  They had to try again. Now.

  Preston peeked around the curtains and gestured to Chuck.

  "Y'okay, boss?" Chuck whispered. The flask was lying on its side. Chuck set it upright. "Lookin' jeeby."

  "Shut up!" Banner said.

  Okay. Preston looked at Twist and nodded. If this doesn't work, if we have to throw him down and do it to him, we 're all bound to die. Or at least have to move to Bhutan.

  He tugged at Twist's sleeves, which had gathered up beneath his elbows. He buttoned his own jacket and checked his tie. His mouth felt full of flaking paint.

  He stepped out from behind the curtain. Twist stepped after him and stood behind him.

  “Mr. Banner,” Preston said in a voice he hoped would demand respect. A whisper would have signaled undue deference; full volume would have been audible to Tomlinson.

  Banner's head snapped up. **What? Who're you?"

  Preston whipped out his wallet, flashed it. “I’m Agent Barnes. This is Agent Noble. Need to know when you'd like the President to make his remarks, before you or after."

  “The Pr—? The Pr—? He's here?” Under his makeup, Banner's color was fading like that of a day-old bass.

  "Outside. Don't want to bring him in till we have to." Preston gestured at the ropes, wires and sandbags. "Didn't have time to sweep the place."

  "No. . . . Sure." Banner smiled, and his color came back.

  "He wanted it to be a surprise, but . . . you understand."

  "It is…It is a surprise. I'm . . .I'm flattered. I'm—"

  "So what do you think? I'd recommend after. Give you time to say your piece, then the President'll come on and sort of be the capstone to the evening."

  "Yes. Right. Good idea." Banner's hands touched his hair, his ascot, smoothed his jacket.

  "Fine. We'll go get him." Preston took a step back and landed on Twist's foot. Twist jumped. "You do good work, Mr. Banner," Preston said, covering. "I heard the President say you’re a source of comfort and strength to him.''

  “We’re a family here, Agent. . . Barnes, is it? That's what it's all about . . . love."

  Preston and Twist stepped behind the curtains, took a couple of noisy steps, then returned on tiptoe.

  “Hear that, Chuck?" Banner said, and they could feel him grin. " 'Source of comfort and strength.' Jesus!"

  Preston peeked. Chuck wasn't saying anything, just sat there with his hand on the flask, turned so it caught the light and glittered.

  Lawrence Tomlinson was coming in to port. “. . . never in my broad experience have I known so much to be done for so many by one man. And so it is with the greatest of pleasure ..."

  Do it! Do it, damn you!. . . DO IT!

  Banner said, "I can't remember ..."

  Chuck said, “You don't look so good, boss."

  “I think this is an emergency. Chuck."

  “I agree, boss. I sure do agree." Chuck unscrewed the cap and passed the flask to Banner.

  Banner tipped the flask back, and Preston saw his Adam's apple bob. Banner closed his eyes and waited. The recollected feeling swept over Preston: the creeping suffusion of warmth and comfort.

  Thank you.

  Then Banner tipped the flask again and took another draft, deeper this time.

  My God! They d better evacuate the women and children.

  Chuck's eyes were as large as cue balls as he reached to take the flask from Banner.

  “. . . ladies and gentlemen,” Tomlinson said, “your friend, my friend . . . Stone Banner!"

  Banner popped a big breath and marched out onto the stage. The audience rose to its feet, cheering and applauding.

  Preston and Twist eased from behind the curtains and walked over to stand beside Chuck.

  Banner and Tomlinson embraced. Tomlinson draped a gold-colored medal on a silk ribbon around Banner's neck. The applause grew louder. Tomlinson shook Banner's hand, descended the steps and returned to his seat.

  Banner stood alone at the podium and bathed in the waves of adoration.

  There was a peephole in the curtains at the side of the stage, and Preston looked through it and scanned the audience. In the first few rows he recognized a couple of athletes, a U.S. senator, some television actors and a rock singer wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his own name.

  The patients from Banner were in the sixth and seventh rows. Priscilla sat between Duke and Crosby. None of them applauded. Priscilla's face as she looked up at Banner was a blank, a death mask.

  Don’t go yet, I beg you, stay awhile.

  At last, Banner raised his arms, and gradually the applause subsided. A couple of people coughed, and then there was silence.

  Banner put a hand on the podium and smiled at the audience. He looked fine, cool, in control.

  “Before I begin," he said, “I hope you'll all join me in the Serenity Prayer. It's my rock, as I know it is for many of you." He closed his eyes and extended his arms, as if holding hands with the congregation.

  “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”

  The sound of a thousand voices was like surf on a rocky shore.

  “. . . the courage to change the things I can . . .”

  Suddenly Banner's eyes opened and he pointed at the ceiling and said—not alarmed, not panicked, just commenting—"Wow! Flutterbugs at ten o'clock!"

  Here we go. Preston felt his heartbeat double. Did anybody hear him? He looked through the peephole at the audience. A few people were startled, two or three gazed at the ceiling, but most were immersed in the prayer and deafened by their own voices.

  Duke had heard it, though, and Crosby. They looked at each other, Duke grinning, Crosby frightened.

  Preston couldn't tell about Priscilla. Her expression hadn't changed, but her eyes, wide and cold, were fixed on Banner.

  By the time Preston looked at Banner, his eyes were closed again, his arms outstretched.

  "... wisdom to know the difference."

  Banner opened his eyes, dropped his arms and started to smile. Then, as if he had forgotten something, he frowned. One of his hands flew to his throat, and he tore off his ascot and threw it on the floor.

  "Hot mama tonight," he said.

  Preston heard scattered murmurs from the audience.

  Banner shuddered, shook his head and began to speak. "I accept this award, humbly and with gratitude, on behalf of everybody . . ." He stopped. He looked down at his ascot. His eyes bugged, and he shouted, "Hey!" He stomped on the ascot, first with one foot, then with the other, then with both, grinding it into the stage. “Who let them in here?" he yelled. He turned to the audience, grinned and said, “Lucky thing I was on duty."

  There were some awkward laughs, as if they thought they should appreciate a joke that had eluded them.

  “Tyrannosaurus Rex," Banner said. “The most dangerous woman in London." He giggled. The giggle evolved into a whinny, then into a chain of deep, spasmodic sobs that brought tears and coughing and, finally, hysterical, high-pitched, wailing laughter. Banner leaned on the podium and gestured at the audience, willing them to share the fun.

  People were no longer murmuring; they were talking out loud.

  Tomlinson got to his feet and started for the steps.

  “Ringo!" Banner said, jolting upright and staring at Tomlinson. He held his arms up as if clutching a dancing partner, and began to t
ango across the stage, away from Tomlinson, singing at the top of his voice, ''Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and little man, little Lola wants you. ..."

  At the far side of the stage he halted, bent over and kissed the air. He looked up and winked at a man in the front row. "I sure could use some pussy," he said. “How 'bout you?"

  Tomlinson was on the stage. Guy Larkin was running down an aisle. A man in a sports jacket—Walter, from the A.A. meeting—started up the steps on the other side.

  Banner saw that he was surrounded. He backed against the curtain. His eyes narrowed, and his head snapped from side to side. He was General Custer or Davy Crockett or Audie Murphy. He reached for his pistols and yelled, “Don't give an inch, men!" He fired two phantom shots, and when neither Walter nor Tomlinson fell, he holstered his pistols and charged at Tomlinson, shrieking like an amok.

  Tomlinson threw his hands up to protect himself, took a step backward, turned to flee . . . and stumbled off the edge of the stage and sprawled onto a chubby woman, who screamed.

  The entire audience was on its feet now, many rushing for the doors at the back of the room, many more staring in fascination.

  Larkin shouted, “Chuck! Get out here!”

  Deep in the shadows backstage, Preston shook Chuck's hand and said, **Tell him you were in the John."

  Chuck handed Preston the flask and ran out onto the stage.

  Through the peephole Preston saw Priscilla. Her expression was no longer blank. Her eyes sparkled, and a slight sly smile played across her face, as if wonderful news had at last reached the faraway land she was visiting.

  Banner spun and faced Larkin, Walter and Chuck. They were spread before him, and they advanced slowly, pressing him back against the lip of the stage.

  “It's okay. Stone," Larkin purred. “It's okay. Just let me—"

  “Stand back!" Banner unzipped his fly and reached in his pants and grabbed his penis and pointed it at them.

  They obeyed, as if facing a machine gun.

  "Don't worry, Mr. President," Banner said over his shoulder. ''I've got them covered."

  Mention of the President seemed to alter Banner's hallucination, for he faced the audience, snapped to attention, saluted with one hand and gripped his penis with the other, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States."

  Then he began to pee.

  Chuck, Walter and Larkin charged.

  Preston emptied the last of the liquid onto the floor and set the flask—engraved with a steer's horns and the initials 5.5.—on the table.

  “Let's go," he said to Twist.

  XX

  It made the late-night telecasts, of course, and by midnight CNN's Headline News Network had bought the tapes and was broadcasting Banner's performance worldwide. Although the incident was not of cosmic import, so sensational was the footage that the next morning, the CBS Morning News, Today and Good Morning America all led their newscasts with it and followed up with roundtable discussions with celebrity substance-abusers.

  The producers of the Phil Donahue show, Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera called the clinic and let it be known that if Stone Banner would appear exclusively, he could name his fee.

  But Banner was being held incommunicado in a detox unit in Santa Fe. Reports leaked out—via a ward nurse who was behind in her payments on a Jeep Cherokee and was thus susceptible to having her palm greased—that Banner recalled nothing about the evening at the civic center in Promised Land, a symptom typical (according to reliable sources) of users of PCP or Ketamine. His mood was said to be swinging wildly between violent hostility and a manic congeniality during which he was offering to buy drinks for one and all. The police were waiting to question him further about the circumstances of Natasha Grant's demise, for a routine search of his premises had turned up chemicals that would normally be found only in the possession of psychiatrists or circus veterinarians.

  The board of trustees of The Banner Clinic resigned en masse, as did the clinic's chaplain, its resident psychotherapist and two of its counselors, Gwendolyn Frye and Melvin Crippin, who declared their intention to marry and go into missionary work among the Guarani Indians of Paraguay.

  The governor of New Mexico considered closing the clinic and transferring patients to other facilities. But the waiting list at other reputable rehab centers—"reputable" meaning any that did not practice aversion therapy, under which patients were forced to consume large quantities of ethyl alcohol and were then given pills that made them convulsively allergic to ethyl alcohol, or revelation therapy, under which patients were browbeaten with religious messages until, supposedly, they were visited by a revelation of Christ or the Virgin or a charismatic figure of their choosing who commanded them forever to keep their noses clean—was between three and six months long. And so, in consideration of the many patients whose treatment was at a critical phase and who might relapse immediately if they were exposed to the temptations rampant in an America propelled by engines of instant gratification, he permitted the clinic to continue operation with a skeleton staff.

  Lobbied hard by a committee of patients surprisingly well versed in manipulation of the media, the governor prevailed upon one Marcia Breck, who was said to have left the clinic because of a disagreement over treatment policy, to accept an appointment as senior staff counselor.

  Lupone hung up the phone. ''Raffi," he said. “Sends you his best wishes. Hopes you make it."

  “I don't think I want to know,” Preston said, "but did he ever tell you where he got that stuff?"

  “It’s a batch the don's been tryin' to move to the government."

  "The U.S. government?"

  Lupone nodded. "Thinks it'd be great stuff to send to Nicaragua, pump in the Sandinistas' water."

  "Jesus!"

  "Yeah. The don's very into foreign policy."

  Preston had put on his suit and had shined his shoes, for he and Duke were graduating. Twist would graduate tomorrow, with Hector, who didn't mind leaving because he had gotten bored with the desert and it would be a while before enough people came to Banner to make it interesting again. Marcia had already alerted a rehab center in New Hampshire to expect a call from Hector within the month, and Hector was looking forward to it. He'd heard New Hampshire was pleasant in the summer.

  Preston and Lupone had a cup of coffee and waited for Marcia to assemble the other patients and begin the ceremony.

  Priscilla entered the common room, moving soundlessly, seeming to hover a few centimeters off the floor.

  She saw Preston and came over to him and smiled and touched his head and said, "You look nice," and moved along, drifting toward the water fountain.

  She was almost back now, lingering on the border between this world and her private world of secret safety, as if not ready quite yet to take the final few steps. Marcia wanted to keep her for two more weeks, to escort her tenderly back into the realm of reality.

  Preston had had one brief coherent conversation with her.

  "What will you do?" she had asked him.

  "I don't know. I have no wife, no place to live. I think I still have a job." She looked sad, so he added, "The good thing is, whatever I do I'll do it sober."

  "Will we ..." she began, but the question vanished, like steam.

  "Nobody can know. Best not to plan. When you're better ..."

  "I'll look at Eloise every night," she said with a smile. "She'll tell me how you are."

  When all the patients had gathered, Marcia sat Preston and Duke in straight-backed chairs in the center of the room. She spoke of her impressions of them when they had arrived, described them as hard cases who knew it all, denied everything and thought treatment was a waste of time, told of her bets with Dan that neither of them would make it. Then she talked about how she thought they had changed, how they had come to know themselves, to tolerate and appreciate others, to realize that they couldn't survive on their own, that the world of recovery was one of caring and commitment.

  She urged th
em not to become "dry drunks"—solitary soldiers for whom every day was a lonely battle against the bottle because they would not take solace from their fellows—but to get with the Program and stick with it.

  Everybody said a few words about Preston and Duke, nothing memorable, really, except perhaps Lupone's offer to find them work if they fell on hard times and 1's confession that hanging out with Preston had taught him one thing: It might not be a bad idea to learn how to read, really read, not just comic books and road signs.

  Duke said these four weeks had been a real adventure and now that Clarisse was going to give him another chance, he was sure he'd make it.

  Preston hadn't thought about what he was going to say. He stood and looked around the room and his eyes lit upon an A.A. poster.

  “I’ve been thinking," he said, “how nice it'll be to be in a place—any place—where every picture on every wall doesn't say 'One Day at a Time' or 'Easy Does It,' where every minute of every day isn't taken up with warnings about how not to get drunk.

  “But now that it's about to happen, you know what? I'm going to miss those things because I'm scared. Those things work. They keep me thinking, let me know that I'm just one little glass of clear shiny liquid away from where I was when I came here. And that's a place I do not want to be."

  He paused, because for some reason his throat felt thick.

  "But as scared as I am," he continued, hurrying to finish before some emotional thread could unravel and embarrass him, "I have one thing that's like armor, and nobody can take it away from me. It's my higher power. I never thought I'd have one. You know what it is?" He looked at Marcia. “It's people. It's people who understand, people who care, people who . . .” He felt a weird sensation, as if he were drowning. “I think I'd better shut up," he said, and he did.

  Marcia presented them with their medallions.

  Then everybody hugged everybody.

  XXI

  CLARISSE wasn't THERE.

  Lupone and Twist had accompanied Preston and Duke to the lobby and waited while they checked out and carried their bags to the curb by the roundabout. There had been more hugs and pats on the back, more pledges that they'd keep in touch and would try to get together at least once a year. Then Lupone and Twist had gone in to lunch.