“What happened?” she asks. “Did you see him?”
“No, I saw his gardener and got yelled at by what I assume is his housekeeper, unless he’s married to a very high-strung lady who doesn’t speak very good English.”
“You never know,” Heaven says. “Maybe she’s really nice but overly caffeinated. I’m sure they have an endless supply in that house.”
“I’m going to go with a no on that. I think it’s safe to say that nobody is married to that woman.” She looks at my hands holding my proposal and the baby bottle.
“What’s that?” she says. “Why is your proposal still in your hands?”
“Did you miss that last bit? The high-strung lady, the gardener . . . his rake?”
“Ugh, give me that,” she says. She grabs the proposal and bottle out of my hands and marches over to a stoner kid. The next thing I know, he’s peeling off his hipster bowling shirt and handing it over. She turns it inside out and puts it on, ties her hair up into a bun, and marches up to Schultz’s entry walkway, toward his front door.
“Nice knowing you,” I shout.
I can’t even look. But since Heaven’s life is in jeopardy, I figure this might be interesting. So from behind the car, I peer across the lawn to where she’s reached the front door of the hulking Howard Schultz house. I can make out a door opening, and a figure dressed in black, and Heaven speaking to him for what seems like an eternity. Then the door closes. And as if nothing has happened, she returns.
“Brady?” she says.
“Down here,” I say from my position crouched behind the car, which now strikes me as a little cowardly. She crouches down. “What happened?” I whisper.
“A guy came to the door . . . I told him I had a very important delivery expressly intended for Mr. Howard Schultz, and I would hold this man personally responsible for ensuring that it reached Mr. Schultz intact and with all due—” and she waves her hand in the air.
“All do what?”
“I forget the word I used,” she says, “but he was very impressed with the gravity of the situation. So I think we’ve got at least a fifty-fifty chance.”
He’s not the only one impressed. Success or not, it seems like such a Heavenly thing to do. She pulls me out from behind the car, and we come face-to-face with this twelve-year-old boy wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and a black motorcycle jacket.
“Cool jacket,” I say to him. “You’re like the Fonz in that thing.”
“Who’s that?” the kid says. I don’t even bother putting my thumbs up and saying “Aayyy” to try to jog his memory because he has no memory of this. And suddenly I feel like the oldest man in the world.
Right then this cop car pulls up behind our rental car and two cops get out.
“Shit,” I say. “That fucking maid really did call the cops.”
“What’s this?” Heaven says.
“We need to just blend,” I say. “Blend. Act natural.” But the cops walk over to our car and start shining their flashlights into it. “Fuck . . . they know it’s me. I better just go over there.”
I walk over to the car, and Heaven follows.
“Excuse me, Officer, I think it’s me you’re looking for,” I say. “I didn’t mean any harm, I just wanted to talk to Mr.—”
“That’s her! Freeze! Get down on the ground,” they say and draw their guns. “Facedown.” And I do. Fuck. Schultz must be in really good with this town. But why “her”? How did Heaven get implicated in this thing?
“Both of you!” they say, looking at Heaven. She complies. I feel awful that Heaven is being dragged into this.
“Look, Officer, she had nothing to do with it,” I say.
They handcuff us while we’re on the ground, and then they walk us over to the cop car and push us up against it with our backs to them.
“Spread your legs,” they bark at us. “Are you carrying any weapons?”
“No,” we both say. And they start patting us down. Right then about seven other police cars come speeding over to us, lights flashing. One of the cops reaches into Heaven’s pockets and pulls out the keys.
“Is that your white Ford Focus?” he asks.
“Yes . . . I mean, no . . . it’s a rental,” I say.
They open the trunk and pull out this big duffel bag.
“What’s that?” I ask Heaven.
“I don’t know,” she says.
One of the cops opens the bag and then looks at the other cops with a look I don’t quite recognize. Then he pulls out this gigantic shotgun.
“Oh my God!” Heaven and I say at the same time.
“You have the right to remain silent . . .” he says. As he goes on with the reading of our rights he’s being drowned out by the people at the vigil, who are all of a sudden booing and hissing at us.
Many more cops have arrived, and we’re being walked through the crowd at Kurt Cobain’s vigil, handcuffed, with a cop carrying a shotgun, which he just found in our trunk. They hate us. Somebody actually spits at me and then a couple other people follow suit.
“Kurt died for your sins!” some girl screams. And all of a sudden we’ve become the common enemy that everybody has banded against.
“She stole my shirt!” the stoner kid says. And that one has a special sting to it, because while accidental . . . that part is true. Strummer starts barking like crazy, and he won’t stop.
“How did that get in our trunk?” I ask Heaven.
“I don’t know! They’re spitting on me!” she wails.
“Heaven! Think about it! A shotgun? At Kurt Cobain’s vigil? You do know that’s how he committed suicide, right?”
“Of course I know that.”
“Well, I’m about ready to spit on you, too.”
“It’s not my fault!” she yells.
“When was the last time anything was your fault? Never? Okay, just checking,” I say. Then I add, “You are the embarrassment capital of the world, you know that?”
We get to the cop’s car. He opens the door and covers our heads as he guides us in, so we don’t hit them on the roof of the car. They take Strummer and put him in a separate car. No cuffs.
I’m staring at Heaven, but she won’t look at me. She can feel my eyes burning into her, but she won’t look back. She’s like Strummer when he’s misbehaved—he can hear the tone in my voice, but he pretends he can’t hear me and won’t look at me. “The car is also being impounded,” the cop says.
“Of course it is,” I say and turn to face the menace on my right. “Okay . . . Heaven?” I say, and she just sits there refusing to look at me. “I am officially raising your national terror alert from orange to red.”
I’m sitting in a cell at the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. Heaven and I just totally disrupted Kurt Cobain’s vigil, and we’ve been arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm and accessory to bank robbery. How this happened, I do not know.
We’ve just been fingerprinted, and I’m in a holding cell. Heaven is in the cell next to me, and she’s taken to singing old chain-gang songs. I roll my eyes at her.
“I’m sorry!” she says through the bars. Then she gets this look, like she’s just seen a ghost. “Hey!” she says to some guy in a Cubs cap and cuffs that the cops are walking past us. “It’s the cat piss guy!” she whispers to me. Not a ghost, apparently. The cat piss guy. Whatever that means.
Then I hear footsteps coming toward us. I turn, and I’m shocked to see that little wank from Schultz’s office and a short, heavy Hispanic lady in a housekeeper getup . . . peering into our cell.
“Yes, Officer,” David says. “That’s him.”
“Sí,” the Hispanic lady says. “Bad man!”
“You have got to be kidding me. Is using the restroom in an office building a crime?”
“No, but trespassing is,” the cop says. “You’ve sure been around today, Mr. Gilbert.”
“Somebody pinch me,” I say. “Smack me . . . do something. Wake me up from this nightmare.” Then I look at the guy who
I’m sharing my cell with, and he’s suddenly perked up. I definitely need to correct myself. “I don’t really want to be smacked.”
“Who was that?” Heaven says.
“The receptionist,” I say.
“Get out of here, you little maggot!” Heaven yells at him. “You’ll be sorry when you realize who you messed with!”
“You’re not helping,” I say to her.
“Sorry,” she says and presses her face between the bars so she can better see the “cat piss guy.”
“What are you doing here?” she asks him. “Oh my God . . . you!” she says as if she suddenly realized something. She extends her entire arm through the bars to point her finger accusingly at him. “You put that gun in my trunk. And you’re the reason all of those cop cars were coming—”
“Say what?” I ask her.
“It’s his gun.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s the nice guy that helped me put some stuff in the trunk. Turns out . . . not so nice.”
The guy doesn’t even look at Heaven. He just stares down at his shoes.
It takes the cops twelve hours to confirm our story and do the paperwork, but they finally let us go. Turns out the guy that Heaven charmed into helping with her groceries robbed the Bank of America next to the convenience store about ten minutes prior and decided to ditch his gun in our trunk. All of which was caught on the surveillance camera. They let me slide on the trespassing charges because one of the cops actually went to high school with the David Spade clone (whose name is actually David—you just can’t make this stuff up), and he promises he’ll “talk the dweeb down out of his tree.” The cop refers to David as a “band fag,” and informs me that David once passed out onstage while playing his bassoon at a recital. When I was losing my virginity David was praying to a shrine of Captain Kirk. This almost explains his loathsome existence. Almost. But geekism aside, I still want to crush the guy. Or at the very least give him a wedgie.
They take us to Strummer, who is hanging out in a detective’s office with a black Lab. He’s apparently been having a grand old time, having a play date with this cop’s dog, and he’s not ready to leave yet.
We drag him outside and stand on Fifth Avenue, where once it’s all officially said and done, we look at each other as if to say, “What the fuck was that?”
When we get our car out of the impound both of us are starving, so Heaven busts out the couple months’ worth of Pringles she bought. But she won’t let me have any unless I agree to race her and eat a whole can. This is what I have to deal with. After suffering in jail because of this woman. I can’t even have a single Pringle.
“Haven’t you done enough for one day?” I ask. “Must I condemn myself to a potato fist that will lodge itself in my solar plexus for a week?”
“Maybe your colon, not your solar plexus,” she says. “C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
“Having food races is not fun. I like to actually chew my food.”
“‘Once you pop . . . you can’t stop,’” she sings. This is the Pringles jingle.
“Yeah, but I’m not looking to pop . . . an artery.”
“Lame.”
“Pringles aren’t meant to be shoveled into your mouth twelve at a time,” I say, trying to sway her. “They’re special. They’re meant to be savored, one chip at a time. The ultra-thin texture . . . the crunch. And then the melt-in-your-mouth sensation . . . not too greasy . . . not too salty . . .” Finally I’ve worked myself up into such a Pringles frenzy that I can’t take it anymore. “Give me that,” I say as I grab a tube, pop the top, and dig in. Fuck it. “I’m done playing nice with you,” I say, mouth full of chips. “I just suffered in jail because of you. I think I deserve a chip.”
“Hey, you had your own woes in there, mister.”
“Did I?”
“Does trespassing and stalking ring a bell?” she says.
“But they wouldn’t have sent the entire Seattle police force looking for me. I got dragged into your mess.”
“Potato . . . po-tah-to,” she says. “And by the way, you should thank me. At least now, because of me, Schultz will know who you are.” And she reaches into the tube, takes about seventeen Pringles, and shoves them all into her mouth.
“I’ll bet you’re gonna be awfully thirsty in about thirty seconds.”
“And?” she says, mouth full of chips.
“And . . . you shouldn’t speak with your mouth full.” Which, naturally, makes her open wide to show me her chewed-up chips. When did I become her brother? “And . . . before you started acting like a bratty eight-year-old, I was going to offer you a beverage.”
“I really am thirsty,” she says.
“Well, it just so happens that I have a certain cola you might enjoy.” I pull out the Tab that I’ve had in my bag since we were in L.A. and hand it to her.
“Oh my God! Where’d you get this?” she squeals.
“I traded my cellmate for it. I’ll have you know, that cost me three packs of smokes and a hand job.”
“Shut up, where’d you get it?”
“I got it in L.A.—I meant to give it to you before, but it just kept slipping my mind. Between Schultz’s security throwing me out and doing hard time—”
“Thank you,” she says and yanks the pull tab off the soda can. She takes a big sip and aaahs. Then she takes the pull tab and puts it on her ring finger like a wedding band. She holds her hand out and looks at it. “Someday,” she says wistfully.
“Wow, a soda pop pull-tab ring. You’re easy. Most girls want their ring from Tiffany’s.”
“Well, I’m not most girls.” She’s telling me?
Our flight home is at seven tonight, and at this point I’ve done all I can do for Cinnamilk, so we have one last day to enjoy all that is Seattle. If we actually make it out of here in one piece, I’ll be amazed.
We take a disco nap so we’re not totally useless, and then Heaven wants to go to the Experience Music Project, which is Seattle’s newest tourist attraction. It’s a participatory museum of music, designed by Frank Gehry. I actually wanted to check it out, too, so we head over there. And I’m kind of amazed. Frank Gehry is someone that I really admire. Usually his architecture is so unique and fluid and graceful, but this thing is a fucking eyesore. It looks like he just threw up a bunch of steel and sheet metal.
We go inside and check out these electronic kiosks that are basically VH1’s Behind the Music, minus the commercials.
Jimi Hendrix collectibles were sort of the beginning of this place. Supposedly it started with the guitar Hendrix played at Woodstock and his famous black-felt bolero hat. Now they have guitars belonging to Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, and of course Nirvana.
They have technology that lets people who have no idea how to play music suddenly jam with their heroes. Heaven rushes off to the Onstage space, a light- and smoke-filled room, which allows people to experience what it’s like to play live before an audience of thousands of screaming fans.
She sings an over-the-top rendition of “Wild Thing” to the simulated crowd—apparently fans from a Yes concert in Los Angeles back in the day—and when she finishes, she stands there bowing repeatedly. Just when I think she’s done, she takes another bow. I have to physically remove her from the stage.
“Do you mind?” she says.
“Do you?” I say back.
“I was having a moment,” she says.
“Indeed you were. But then again, when aren’t you?” She makes a face at me, and we walk through the rest of the museum. They have a coffee shop in there called The Turntable, and there’s a gift shop where they sell CDs and other music-related items. They have what they’ve deemed the one hundred most essential CDs in rock and roll, and there’s some stuff in there that I didn’t even know they had on CD. This is actually my favorite part of the whole museum.
We leave the joint feeling satisfied that we—at least—did something you’re supposed to do when in Seattle. And Heaven wants me to see Pike’s Market,
which she saw a bit of yesterday.
We head over there and find a bar called Powell’s upstairs at the market. It’s this awesome, smoky, old-man bar with an amazing view. The type of place where people drink in the daytime and everyone’s on a first-name basis.
Heaven and I decide to get smashed before our flight home, but no matter how drunk I get, I will not forget that we made a pact when we landed here. She is taking the window seat on the way back.
“What are you going to do when we get back?” I ask her. And it makes me ask myself the same question. What the hell am I going to do about the ten grand I promised the band? I felt bad enough about lying to them about it . . . but now I feel even worse because when I get back . . . I’ve actually got to come up with the money.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“Well . . . not to bring up a sore subject, but you kinda lost your job recently.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says, obviously overjoyed that I’ve reminded her. “I can tell you what I’m not going to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Get another job waiting tables.”
“Good. You shouldn’t,” I say. “Somebody’s gotta need a great PR mind.”
She looks at me, and it becomes a stare. I’m tempted to shake it off, to ask whether I have something on my face.
“Yeah . . . I know a certain band that’s going to need a big push in a couple months,” she says. “And they’ll need a boutique firm, not one of those ones with the same old tricks. Somebody who thinks outside the box. Somebody who’s newer. Gonna work harder.”
“Hmm . . .” I say as I think about this. For maybe the first time in as long as I’ve known her, I see Heaven without irony. Straight up.
“I’m serious,” she says. “What have you got to lose?”
“You definitely have a big mouth.”
“If I did Superhero’s PR, then you’d be working with me. Could you deal with me on a regular basis?”
“Like you’re going anywhere?” I say with a smile. “It doesn’t seem like I have a choice in the matter. I may as well put you to good use at least.”
“What would I call my firm?”
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