Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned

by Kinky Friedman

  "Don't get cold feet now," said Fox. "It's nine-thirty and counting."

  "I just want to go over something," she said. "You'll be safely in the bathroom deactivating the toilet and Walter here will be harmlessly chatting up the brewmasters or whatever the hell they call themselves behind the counter. But I'm the one whose movements could look very suspicious. I'm the one the salespeople or the cameras actually could catch."

  "That's a very good point," said Fox, "and I'm glad you brought it up. I'll go in first and if there are cameras, I'll come right back out and we'll begin preparations immediately for Operation Cockroach Bomb and Operation Elephant Dump Numbers One, Two, and Three."

  "That's fine," said Clyde, "but what if the brewmasters catch me red-handed? What if they nail my ass?"

  "No offense, Clyde," said Fox, "but it's a pretty nice ass. As Teddy would say, 'You got some junk in the trunk!'"

  "Hey," I said. "What about Teddy? He'd be a perfect man to have on our side in this campaign."

  "C'mon, give me some credit," said Fox. "I've already thought of Teddy. But I'm not bringing him in until after Operation Cockroach Bomb."

  "I'll probably be watching that one from the calaboose," said Clyde.

  "No, you won't," said Fox. "Let me give you a few little helpful tips. When you first go in, put in a big order for your whole bridge club or something. Twelve latte frappachuchis. Something like that."

  "And I'll be sure and get a receipt so I can sue the shit out of them as well."

  "Isn't she a sweet kid?" said Fox, getting misty-eyed. "She doesn't miss a step. Okay, now while they're making your order, it's natural for you to be browsing in the place and looking at stuff. Keep the vials in the palm of your hand, sort of a sleight-of-hand job. Hey, Walter. Has Clyde ever given you her famous sleight-of-hand job?"

  "He wishes," said Clyde, who was so on the money that I almost blushed. She capped it off with a wicked, telling wink in my direction.

  "And here's the perfect way to justify your behavior if you happen to catch one of them looking at you with a suspicious eye. Just pretend the sugar bowl or cream container is stuck and you're having a little trouble opening it. They see that. Then they see you get it open. Then they don't look at you anymore."

  "That's what I wanted to hear," said Clyde with renewed confidence. "Fox knows everything, doesn't he, Walter?"

  "Just about," I said.

  "Remember the Unicorn!" shouted Fox, moving on toward our little date with destiny. "All those for freedom, follow me! Our only enemies are time and Starbucks and there may not be an army in the world that can defeat them but if three crazy Americans can't do it I'll let you lay your dick on my wisdom tooth!"

  "Quite a battle cry," I remarked to Clyde, with Fox ten steps ahead of us and out of earshot. "Tell me, is he gay?"

  "Terms like that don't apply to Fox," she said. "He likes all flavors. If more people were as crazy, as thoughtful, and as unconventional as Fox, it would be a better world."

  "Amen to that," I said, but I don't know that Clyde heard me. Clyde and Fox were ahead of me now, moving toward Starbucks like heat-seeking missiles. I had to move quickly to catch up with them. And I found that I wanted to catch up with them. Whatever insane, inane antics they were involved in at any given moment, I wanted to be a part of them, of whatever they had, of whatever they were.

  "This is a wonderful, medium-bodied coffee," I found myself saying to the barista only a matter of moments later. That's what they called themselves. Baristas. Not brewmasters. At Starbucks, I was to quickly find, they have another name for everything and no matter what you call something, they will invariably correct you, politely, if rather patronizingly.

  "Actually, it's one of our light-bodied blends," said the barista as she readjusted a ring in her left eyebrow.

  "This is Sumatran, right?" I ventured. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Clyde moving about the store, poking into things.

  "Sumatran blend," said the barista, checking her watch. It was getting close to the ten o'clock closing time and she looked more than ready to start shutting things down.

  "It does appear to have a rather bold acidity," I said. "A friend of mine once worked with the Peace Corps in Kalimantan, Indonesia. I think he was an agricultural extension worker or something. His job was to distribute seeds downriver to the natives but the Peace Corps failed to send him any seeds. Eventually, he was forced to distribute his own seed downriver, which led to some rather unpleasant repercussions—”

  "Excuse me! Excuse me, miss!" came a strident, mildly irritated female voice from the far end of the counter. "Can I have twelve frappuccinos to go, please? It's Little Italy night at our condo."

  "Everything is prepared to go," the barista pointed out. "Twelve frappuccinos!" she said to a black man who seemed to have materialized from a cubbyhole somewhere and who very much resembled a young Lionel Ritchie.

  "And I'd like a receipt, please," said Clyde. "I'll have to present it for reimbursement at the meeting."

  There were a few other people making last-minute purchases, I noticed, and this screened Clyde even further from the eyes of the people behind the counter. Another positive note was that the lids and container tops seemed to be large enough to help shield the small vials with which she was industriously working. On the downside, the place was really beginning to thin out. It was almost ten.

  "I'll have a double espresso, please," came a suave male voice just over my right shoulder.

  "That's a doppio," said the barista to the man.

  "And may I also have a key to the rest room?"

  The woman with the eyebrow ring screamed "One doppio!" at Lionel Ritchie and then handed the man behind me a rest-room key that appeared to be attached to a large red Easter basket of some sort. I dared not look around as Fox's trench-coated arm reached right in front of me to retrieve the key. "Pardon my boardinghouse reach," he said, chuckling politely to himself. Fox was cutting it very close, timewise, but there was really no decent way the key could be denied him. He would, it appeared, definitely be the last customer to use the rest room. After him, I thought with a smile, it might not be used for a longer time than Starbucks expected. At least not very successfully.

  "So my friend asked the Peace Corps to send him some coffee beans," I continued, in an effort to distract the people behind the counter who now numbered three, but they all appeared so busy with tallying things, preparing a dozen frappuccinos, and closing up shop that my monologue was almost unnecessary. Clyde was putting a few finishing touches on some sugar bowls and she didn't seem to be drawing any attention. My monologue didn't seem to be drawing much attention either, but I didn't let it hurt my feelings or slow me down. I wanted to do my part.

  "By the time the coffee beans finally arrived," I droned on relentlessly, "some sort of tribal dispute had occurred in the region. I recall my friend telling me how he drove the load of coffee beans down the highway, running over hundreds of arrows in his Land Rover. Well, it wasn't really his Land Rover. There was a wealthy plantation owner who lived nearby and he had a beautiful blond daughter. I think it was her father's Land Rover. My friend always had quite a way with the women. By the time the daughter took the Land Rover back to her father, there was a spear sticking out of the front grillwork. Unfortunately, there was also a spear sticking out of my friend's penis."

  It didn't really matter what I said. None of the Starbucks people were listening. They were in the seriously elaborate process of closing up and trying politely to urge me to leave. Clyde had paid for her frappuccinos and was collecting her all-important receipt for her meeting at the condo that didn't exist, just, of course, as my friend with the coffee beans didn't exist. I let Clyde leave first. Then I took my departure, which must have been a great relief to the people who were exploring the possibilities of advancement in their Starbucks careers.

  I met up with Clyde about a block away and we loitered on the corner congratulating ourselves. No doubt we both looked somewhat flu
shed, pardon the expression, from the excitement of the apparent success of the operation.

  "Now where the hell is Fox?" I asked. "This waiting for him is starting to make me nervous.'"

  "Don't worry, Sunshine," said Clyde sweetly. "Fox always comes through. In the meantime, there's something I've always wanted to say to you."

  "What, darling?"

  "Care for a frappuccino?"

  twenty-six

  Bright and early the next morning, Fox and Clyde woke me up like Huck Finn, throwing stones against my basement apartment window as if I were an urban-dwelling Tom Sawyer. Or was it Tom Sawyer who threw stones against Huck Finn's window? It really doesn't matter, I suppose. As an author, or literary man, as Fox would have it, it's possible that I've faulted myself unfairly for not being certain of these things. Fox's little lecture on Herman Melville was still mildly rankling as well, conceivably because I'd learned things about Melville I'd never known. Of course, nobody really knew much about Melville. That was the glory of being an author: successfully creating something that would outlive your own bones. Like a great white whale, a maniacal ship captain, and a first mate someone would someday name a chain of corporate coffee shops after. For all I knew, Huck Finn might have been throwing stones at Melville's window. Anyway, Fox and Clyde awakened me in this prepubescent fashion and I woke up and realized it was six-thirty in the morning. I staggered over to the door and buzzed them in. They seemed to hurl themselves into the room like a pair of human harpoons, both in an arc of constant kinetic energy. They paced back and forth excitedly as I struggled to get dressed, brush my teeth, and comb my hair. Indeed, the two of them seemed so full of life it almost felt as if I were a single adult looking after two small children.

  "Hurry up," said Fox. "They're probably starting without us."

  "It's going to be great!" shouted Clyde. "If it works."

  "Of course it'll work! I'll bet it's already started!"

  "Hurry up, Walter! We could be missing the greatest show on earth!"

  "Will you two please control yourselves!" I mumbled in exasperation. "I'm trying to brush my teeth!"

  About five minutes later, the three of us, bundled up against the chill, damp morning, headed out the door and down the street toward Starbucks to pay witness to the fruits of our nefarious labors. At this hour of the morning, the Village looked almost beautiful, waking up against the dawn with most of the stores still shuttered and most of the people still sleeping. We stopped at a little bakery, got doughnuts and coffee, and walked leisurely up the final block to Starbucks. It was six-fifty when we reached the sidewalk in front of Starbucks and heard the first siren begin to wail.

  "Holy shit," I said. "They've called the cops!"

  "Relax," said Fox. "No way they've tumbled to it yet. Bet you anything you want that that's an ambulance on the way to pick up a customer who's been inexplicably stricken with some unknown illness."

  "I like that 'inexplicably stricken'!" said Clyde. "Maybe Fox should be writing the book." She smiled a wide, amoral smile that connoted no sympathy whatsoever for the possible victim or victims. I was mainly irritated by her remark about Fox writing my book, so I suppose I was equally guilty of feeling little if anything about the victims of our latest prank. It takes an amoral eye to recognize an amoral smile, I thought to myself, taking out my notebook and scribbling down the line.

  "Walter is the writer," said Fox, "and I'm the fighter."

  "I'm the inciter," said Clyde.

  Before anyone could say another word, an obese woman in a canary yellow spandex outfit stumbled out of the front door of Starbucks and vomited on the sidewalk. Other customers continued to enter and exit the premises, generally ignoring the woman and her plight as if she were a homeless person or a dead body lying in their way.

  "Good ol' New York," said Fox. "It takes more than a fat lady in neon yellow puking on a sidewalk to give anybody pause around here."

  The siren was getting much louder now and as I glanced through the window, I noticed that the tempo seemed to be picking up inside the store as well. There was a guy who looked like a Wall Street type doubled up right in front of the counter, obviously suffering from rather severe bowel cramps. Other customers, however, were still placing their orders on either side of the man, as if he didn't exist.

  "Not the best latte advertisement I can think of," said Fox, sidling up next to me by the front window. There was a smile on Fox's face resembling that of a small child opening his birthday presents.

  "And look at that guy trying to get into the men's room," shrilled Clyde gleefully as she pulled up on the other side of me, encircling my waist with a slender arm.

  "Here comes the first meat wagon!" said Fox as an ambulance pulled directly in front of the Starbucks. "There'll be more where that came from."

  "The cops have got to get here soon," I said, trying to keep the trepidation out of my voice.

  "Not necessarily," said Fox. "They haven't figured it out yet. How could they? Hell, they'll probably suspect it's some kind of weird Legionnaire's disease type of thing before they finally stumble on the truth. The truth, remember, is not only hard to take, it's often hard to find. And when they do find it, it won't make any sense to them. 'Why would anybody want to do something like this to Starbucks?' they'll say."

  "Poor little Starbucks," offered Clyde.

  "That's one thing they're not," said Fox. "They've got some of the deepest pockets on the whole planet. They've sucked the lifeblood out of every coffee farmer, every mom-and-pop place, and every yuppie-clone consumer in the country—"

  "And they murdered the only Unicorn in New York!" finished Clyde. "They killed poor Jonjo's life's dream. They deserve what-ever's coming to them!"

  "And what's coming," I said, "is another ambulance."

  A succession of ambulances continued to come and go for the next hour or two, and when the cops finally did show up, it appeared to be mostly in the capacity of crowd control. The largest crowd, of course, was in the immediate vicinity of the Starbucks's rest room. It was a restless and desperate and vocal crowd and it swelled and roiled and surged in front of the rest-room door like the dark and dangerous tides of a distant sea-Moby-Dick's sea, if I may. People were pounding the door, kicking the door, clawing at the door, as if it were some intransigent heavenly portal representing their last and only chance for salvation. In a narrow, secular sense, no doubt, I suppose it was.

  A feisty old lady was using her umbrella to push away people who were shitting and vomiting all around her. As she exited the place, she turned in our general direction and preached to the assembled multitudes:"I'm nevah going in there again!" she shouted. "There's something wrong with this kaw-fee!"

  The very pavement in front of the store by this time had been transformed into an obstacle course of vomit and human excrement. People were slipping and sliding their way out of the treacherous area, some of them falling down, many others in a determined, hurried state that seemed unusual even for inveterate New Yorkers. It was a scene right out of Dante's Inferno all right, but I had to admit there was something genuinely funny about it, too.

  "It's a Berlitz cultural-empathy course," said Fox. "There's nowhere to take a dignified crap anywhere on this block. Now they'll discover firsthand a little bit of what it's like to be homeless."

  People were now flying like arrows out of Starbucks. Rubberneckers had slowed traffic to a standstill in the area and the cops, who'd finally arrived, had their hands full with the hopelessly snarled traffic as well as moving the crowd of onlookers and kibitzers off the slippery sidewalk in front of the store. We moved on with the crowd, eventually making our way back toward the apartment. As you can imagine, we were all three in a state of high exhilaration. There was no reason then, and, indeed, I see no reason now, to pass any moral judgment upon our behavior. We did what we did for reasons I'm not sure I could explain. Maybe there was no reason. Sometimes in life that's the best reason of all.

  Back at the apartment, we passed
around a bottle of Jim Beam Clyde had brought, and Fox triumphantly put a little red flag on the flowchart on the wall. Then he broke out the one-hitter and started circulating that around with the Jim Beam. We were beginning to feel pretty good about things. Starbucks, for sure, had taken a major hit that morning and Clyde and Fox had lived to tell about it and I'd lived to write about it. It was not a knockout blow, however, and none of us was under the delusion that an outfit as big and deep and insidious as the Starbucks organization, or even one tiny link in its chain, could ever truly be broken. The one-eyed giant of the West could be bloodied and bowed, according to Fox, but he could never be killed. That was because, again according to Fox, he was part of every one of us.

  "Today," said Fox, lying on his back in the middle of the floor, "we bore witness to a thing of beauty."

  "And it was fun!" said Clyde almost wistfully. "What did you think of it all, Sunshine?"

  I put my thumbs together in front of my face. Then I raised my two index fingers higher and higher toward the sky we could not see.

  "Touchdown," I said.

  twenty-seven

  The next days were a little crazy and a little busy even for this intrepid trio of coconspirators. Clyde, who did not love cockroaches, nonetheless kicked into high gear in a supportive role in the operation. She began making calls to the city's health inspector's office, the same office that the Starbucks people had used to bring down the Unicorn. She complained that she'd seen cockroaches at Starbucks. There weren't, of course, any cockroaches at Starbucks. Not yet.

  Clyde also, not wishing to let her antipathy for cockroaches distance her from the campaign, came up with her own plan, which eventually she named Operation Disconnect. It involved calling the Daily News on her untraceable phone line and placing ads for help wanted at Starbucks. The ads went out to all union and nonunion workers offering a ridiculously high hourly salary and requiring no past work experience whatsoever. Anyone interested in "exploring the possibilities of a Starbucks career" could call the number provided, which was, of course, Starbucks's number. Operation Disconnect also involved Clyde's going down to her friendly neighborhood Kinko's and making thousands of flyers, which she proceeded to put up on bulletin boards and telephone poles all over the Village. The flyers offered a one-hundred-dollar discount at Starbucks if the customer would only fax the flyer back to Starbucks with his or her address and signature included. Operation Disconnect, as you might expect, was a huge success. In some ways, I must say, Operation Disconnect, in its own quiet, unobtrusive way, was even more effective than Operation Diarrhea, if such a thing were possible. Clyde, in her own ingenious fashion, managed to bill both the newspaper ads and the flyers to Starbucks. Fox, of course, dutifully recorded Operation Disconnect on the flowchart with a little red flag.