by Bruce Wagner
They emerged from the sanctum sanctorum, unknowing. Exfoliated, kneaded, luminous, renewed—while Maurie was in some desert ER being violated by needless, tubes, and electrodes.
What—?
Chess knew. He must have had a freak reaction to the supposed Viagra! It was just a joke, the FNF payback: Maurie liked to get high and Chess said he had some Oxycontin (80 mg) he got from an online pharmacy. Which was true, but he gave Maurie Viagra instead. He carefully sponged the pill until it was white, not blue, so if Maurie had ever taken it before (Chess was sure that he had), he wouldn’t recognize it, and besides, those offshore Rx’s always looked different. That would have been his explanation if Maurie had asked, which he didn’t. All Chess had to say was that he’d already used some from the same batch. He’d had a general conversation with Maurie about sexual “supplements” only the week before. He mentioned Viagra and “Le Weekender” and Maurie claimed he “didn’t need that crap.” Chess knew his friend was bullshitting, but said he didn’t need it either. Peer pressure and all. Still, you could never tell. Maybe Maurie was one of those horny Jews who wouldn’t need help in that area until he was 90 fucking years old. The heebs were notorious horndogs. Upstairs in his room, while Laxmi and Levin had their little “rest,” he sponged the pill down just in case. Didn’t want anything to screw up the prank. It was genius. The thing is, Chess knew Maurie was kind of a homophobe; that’s why he wasn’t totally sure he would go for the massage/masseur switcheroo. But evidently he did. He probably didn’t have the energy to get off the table and make a lame excuse about suddenly not feeling well or whatever. Or maybe he hung in because he got freaked or shy or paralyzed, or thought the jig would think he was racist if he walked. Or maybe he just really needed a rubdown and said fuck it, laughing to himself. “Just so long as the shvug don’t show me his shvanz.” Chess wouldn’t really have cared if Maurie had balked and canceled; he was determined to get back at the cocksucker one way or another—but funny, not cruel, like the way he’d done Chess. There would be no injuries. So he gave him the ‘Oxy’ about 20 minutes before the massage with the idea that Maurie would be thinking he was getting high for the happy ending, but in comes the nigger, and his hopes were that Maurie would just say fuck it and lie back to enjoy the rub and lo and behold, about 10 minutes in, the guy would inadvertently brush his cock, they always did, even if it was one of those towel-adjusts, and that would be enough of a trigger to give him a massive Viagracized blueveiner while Hutu gave him the old deep tissue. Tu-Tu-Tutsi, goodbye! That Hu-tu what you-do so well…that’s all Chess was thinking about during the Sacred Stone thing, he laughed aloud a few times, almost explosively, and the woman laying on the stones probably thought he was nuts, so Chess had to make something up about remembering an “unrepeatable joke,” how funny and dirty it was, he couldn’t share it, blah. But something must have—Jesus, maybe those fraudulent fuckers mailed Chess poison, or buffered it with something Maurie was allergic to, they couldn’t be trusted, they were all shell companies, gray marketers, you could never even call them back, no way to contact them, but no—he would probably have heard about something like that by now, there’d have been a mass occurrence, a 60 Minutes or Dateline exposé or whatever. Chess knew you could get a headache with Viagra but even that was rare. They said you could go blind too but you probably had to take it about a million times before it was statistically possible and anyhow that was something the lawyers made them put in the literature just to cover themselves. If Maurie had an embolism or some shit like that it’d have been such an insanely rare thing, maybe even independent of the Viagra. Or whatever it turned out to be. He wondered for a minute if they would check the Jew’s blood and find out. Do a panel. Still, something must have happened with that pill, Jesus H, because they said he’d had a stroke and it was just too coincidental. Why would Maurie suddenly have a stroke? While getting rubbed by a smoke? He was in pretty good shape, as far as Chester knew….
THEY sat in the waiting room, in shock. Laxmi cried and Chess fantasized about going to jail. Who should I tell? He thought of fessing up. But what if Laxmi turned on him, with a weird, unpredictable vengeance, destroying whatever pathetic chances he imagined he had in terms of her love? He was stunned to be thinking along romantic lines in a situation like this. What am I, a sociopath? What if Laxmi completely flipped out, and accused him not only of performing a sick practical joke but of trying to kill Maurie for his FNF trangression? Murder him! What if she said that Chess must have given him something else, on top of the “Viagra,” like arsenic, and it was her duty to go to the police. Some kind of malevolence might kick in, for sure, especially if his conspiracy theories turned out to be true and Laxmi was in cahoots with Friday Night Frights (after all, she was on the payroll), and seriously in love with Maurie, whose dick would no longer work even if you pumped concrete straight into the shaft. Chess sat there, his brain short-circuiting, wondering if he should blab, then preempt her potential snitching by spilling his guts to the cops himself. In that case, why tell Laxmi 1st? Too dangerous: she might unload on a doc or nurse, or make a beeline for the phone to call whomever. Maybe he should get in touch with Remar. Attorney/client privilege—he could tell Remar he’d fucked a corpse and the guy was legally bound to keep quiet about it. Or maybe that wasn’t even true anymore. They used to say shrinks and priests couldn’t share confessions with the authorities but if you paid attention to recent news events, that bond had been severed with a fucking chainsaw. There was no sanctuary anymore. The trouble was, Chester Herlihy had motive. Not only had Maurie Levin caused him physical and emotional injury—that was public record—but there was evidence he was in love with the Vic’s girlfriend! Evidence the girl herself could—and would—provide. She might be a pot-smoking Karma Sutra–reading black-donkey-paraded cow-dung-covered child-molested Mansonette but she sure as hell wasn’t going to condone the homicidal actions of a pain-addled pseudo-paramour.
He saw himself in one of those Forensic Files, and his stomach soured. At least he could get medical care in prison. There was a guy he saw on CNN, 72 years old, doing time for killing someone who banged his wife. That was 20 years ago. Since being incarcerated, he’d had 3 strokes, 2 heart attacks, a bypass, a knee replacement, and cataract surgery, costing California taxpayers about a million and counting. Not too bad…though if he did tell Laxmi the “truth” (it didn’t really seem like the right word), she might play sympathetic while secretly fearing for her own life. The cops would make her wear a wire and tape future meetings. At least that way, if it was drawn out a little, maybe we’d still have the chance to fuck. He shook himself out of his lunacy, as if trying to awaken from a hebephrenic nightmare.
A nurse-type came and asked if they were family members.
They said they weren’t, and didn’t know if Maurie even had family (which the 2 suddenly thought odd: the fact that they didn’t know). Just before the woman went back in, Chess asked how their friend was doing. He hadn’t expected any sort of meaningful response but when she said “OK” his hopes soared—then crashed, realizing the answer was rote, a devious nicety, because, of course, nothing could be revealed, doctors were the only ones to do any revealing, especially not to “friends.” “OK” was vague enough that it could have meant, “Yes, as long as you’re going, a latte would be nice,” or “He is now able to sit up,” or “Your friend is dead.”
He flipped through an old People. An article said that Don Knotts was “upbeat and getting chemo.” Suddenly, Chess had a giddy, half-stoned moment of optimism—that Maurie was sitting up and talking, they’d given him one of those fast-acting clot-busters that downgraded strokes and maybe tomorrow morning or even tonight he’d be going back to LA—if such caprice turned out to be real, the dilemma of whether to fill his friend in on what Chess had done quickly followed. How would Maurie react upon hearing something like that? He might be so embarrassed, he’d say Just forget it. They would shake hands, Chester would drop all legal action, join the staff of
FNF, and that would be that. Or maybe he’d be pissed, and countersue, only his suit against the scout would be far stronger than Herlihy v FNF because in Levin v Herlihy, a lawyer could prove malicious intent. No: he’d wait. They’d stay a few extra days at the Morongo until he was certain Maurie was plus perfecto. There was that woman at the spa to deal with; no way anyone in authority would even be interested in talking to her, but if someone did, the most she could divulge would be the “birthday” prank, the switcheroo. It was kid stuff. The cops would probably have a laugh. (In fact, the cops would have a laugh about the whole Viagra thing; just the type of shit they probably pulled on each other all the time.) The prank alone obviously had nothing to do with what happened, whatever it was that had happened, medically, which was, clearly, to outside eyes, a flukish mystery. Besides, the spa chick would keep her mouth shut because she wouldn’t want her bosses to know she took a bribe, even if it was all in good fun. Customer satisfaction. No, Chess had other problems…sitting in the ER, he began to pray, the way people are prone to, in extremis. Please G-d let the Jew live and prosper. Please G-d let none of this be happening. Please G-d let me awaken in my house, never having come to Morongo. I promise never to see Laxmi again nor have impure thoughts of—then he got the idea to cut a deal (with G-d) and give a large portion of his pending settlement over, in confidence of course, Maurie would have to agree to the caveat, to sign something to that effect, because the proposal might not be strictly legal, to fork a chunk over to his friend, if G-d would only please please please reverse the stroke. I’m talking 80%.
…again, he wished it was all a dream. Escaping into a tiny bubble, Chess took a deep breath and pretended he didn’t even know Maurie Levin, that he was sitting there waiting to be seen for a cough or waiting for his Mom who’d had a little chest pain—Chess pain!—or to fill out an application to work as an orderly, sitting beside this pretty freckled flowerpower girl, another applicant, whose name he didn’t know but with whom he would fatefully wind up sharing a desert apartment when they both were hired. (Like that Palm Springs movie Three Women, with Sissy Spacek and the tall, far-out gangly girl who reminded him of Karen Knotts.) At this moment, he gratefully remembered the Xanax in his pocket—not ordered online, he would have to throw all that offshore shit away ASAP, not only from the fear it was tainted but because the batch could wind up being evidentiary—after getting a Diet Pepsi from the vending machine, he took a handful along with 5 Vicodin, he almost offered some Xanax to Laxmi but knew she didn’t go for that, she was more into weed, maybe they should do some in the parking lot, probably not a great idea, then a shudder went through him as he fantasized about giving her an offshore benzo or Oxy by mistake instead of the tried-and-true, name-brand antianxiety agent and her collapsing in a weird reaction of her own, suddenly splayed on a gurney right next to Maurie behind ER drapes—then he would surely confess, at least it would all be over, the police would come and he’d be taken away on charges of illegally providing prescription drugs, automatically refiled 72 hours later to reflect a double homicide. He saw a documentary on television about prisons being warehouses for the mentally ill. He knew—had always known—that jail would break him. He’d be one of those men who stop taking their antipsychotics and throw feces at the guards who then ramrod their way in, 8 cops in chemical suits and goggles, fitting him with a spit-guard and a soft helmet so he couldn’t head-butt, crushing him with a mattress and causing nerve damage with high-tech handcuffs and low-tech chokeholds. There was no lawyer on earth who would touch a case like that; Inferno time. After fishing him from his cell, they’d send him to a psychiatric hospital just like the guy in the doc, 3 months of segregation and relatively decent meals, 3 months of stabilizing meds before reassessment. The prison shrinks would sit and look at his file, like judges from American Idol, and say he was much improved, that now it was time for him to go back, back to the Big House, he was doing wonderfully, that’s actually the word a therapist used in the doc, and Chess remembered the prisoner, who was quite smart, saying, “Yes—‘wonderful’ in this environment,” meaning that he was doing well in the context of the regularity, the care, the rather humane isolation, but they wouldn’t listen to the simple logic of the man’s proclamation, his time was up, there were probably state guidelines for how long a prisoner could remain, they’d send Chess back to whatever original hellhole, maybe Twin Towers Correctional Facility for the cycle to begin again, until 4 or 5 months later he was flinging feces and they were breaking into the cell to smother him with half a ton of bodies wielding blood and shit-encrusted mattresses before shipping him to the psych ward again, more nerve damage, paranoia flowering so completely now that soon even the most powerful of psychotropic weedkillers they had to offer wouldn’t do the trick.
All this went through his head as they sat waiting, waning, wondering what their next move should be. Ask for their friend’s personal things? Hey! Where were his wallet and cellphone? Still in the locker at the spa? (The paramedics brought him to the ER in a Sage robe.) There might be important numbers they could access from his Treo, not that Chess knew how to use it, maybe Laxmi did, but the cops had probably thought of that, maybe not, maybe it didn’t warrant it, they weren’t really all that efficient, but still, the Man could be at Sage this very minute, the chick he bribed could be opening up the locker—maybe Chess and Laxmi should just go back to the hotel and see if Maurie had something in the room, maybe there was even weed or other contraband that needed to be flushed or stowed or eaten. When Chess brought that up in a whisper, Laxmi said he should go back, she wanted to wait till she could at least see Maurie or talk to a doctor or something, and Chester suddenly quietly freaked at the idea of being alone, leaving her alone, being alone, and panicky, back at the hotel, Laxmi sensed his distress and placed a hand on his, and the cycle of guilt revved up again, the terror and remorse, the worry that his life had ended just when he thought he had a chance to begin again, what with his imminent fortune and budding affair with Maurie’s presumptive ex. Why did I do it? Why why why? Motherfucker—
AT midnight, they drove to Morongo in relative silence, with Laxmi, her face gone puffy, snorting and snuffling. They sat in the hotel parking structure before leaving the Benz 500 cocoon. She told Chess what she saw.
Maurie’s eyes were open but didn’t “track.” When she leaned over he seemed to focus, but couldn’t, and didn’t try to speak. His eyes welled up but Laxmi said she wasn’t sure if that was related to anything. She wiped them with a Kleenex. “The ducts might just have been leaking”—Chester, he looked so awful! Then she said she thought for a second that he may have been looking at her and asking for help…trapped in his body…Oh! Oh God! Oh God!—
Chess heard himself say, No, involuntarily.
He didn’t want to hear any more.
They went to the suite but couldn’t find his wallet. Laxmi said she’d go down and get everything from the locker. Chess said the place was closed and they could do it in the morning. She started to cry again. She said that while they were waiting in the ER she read an article about a 35 year old African elephant called Wankie who died after being transferred, over the objections of animal rights people, from the San Diego Zoo to Salt Lake City. The article said she “collapsed in a metal crate somewhere in Nebraska”—the 3rd elephant to die after being moved from the Wild Animal Park. Laxmi sobbed, screaming about how Wankie’s last hours were spent surrounded by 20 zoo workers and vets as she rested in a sling and they massaged her legs, warming the helpless animal with water.
“Then they executed her!” she said, almost gleefully, her face crushed and distorted, the grin fractured and perverse.
Chess was stoned—on top of the pills, they smoked a roughly rolled joint right when they got to the room—and before he knew it, Laxmi stripped off her clothes. He thought she was going to take a shower but instead she began to unbuckle his belt. They shagged on the shag, abrading themselves.
He split the cicada, mounted the tortoise, fl
uttered the phoenix, and monkey-attacked—
In praising unions of the left hand, the Chandogya Upanishad says that the woman’s call is the prelude, lying beside her the invocation, penetrating her sex the offertory, and ejaculation the final hymn.
LX
Marjorie
RUDDY Marone was a lot like his name. His silver hair and polite, cowboy demeanor reminded her of the movie star Jeff Chandler. She told him so, and Marj thought he’d probably never heard that. There weren’t too many people left who remembered Jeff Chandler.
Agent Marone said that the FBI, in cooperation with “LAPD Fraud,” had been tracking “ ‘Mr Weyerhauser’ and his gang” for well over 10 months. (Of course Weyerhauser was an AKA.) He told her she hadn’t been the 1st victim of the Blind Sisters lottery scam and probably wouldn’t be the last, bluntly adding that he wasn’t sure how much, if any, of her “funds” could be recovered. He was still confident they “had a pretty good shot” because the “noose was tightening on Mr Weyerhauser and his merry band of thieves.”
Bonita Billingsley—another alias—was part of the group, and Marj found herself strangely fascinated. Malone showed her a book of deglamorized mugshots, photos taken from earlier arrests in different states. They looked like common criminals. They had “played this game before,” he said, and were good at it. Over the next few days, the agent got a wealth of details from Marjorie about the gang’s MO. She showed him the ornate check that had been issued to her, Lucas’s business card (she still called him that; couldn’t help herself), and the various papers she had signed, papers with personal information the agent said had actually given them open access to her banking accounts. The old woman wanted to know about the original draft she had made, for more than $11,000. It was written to the State of New York—how could they have cashed it? He told her they probably hadn’t, and that it was “bait.” For them, it bought their trust and at the same time “gave them further insight to your liquidity.” Malone assured that he had already been in touch with the folks at Wells Fargo. She was finally able to tell him about the shopping trip with Bonita and the fiasco at Spago. She felt so ashamed, but it was good to be able to talk to someone. He had heard it all before yet retained his sympathy and compassion. He said that his mother was around her age.