Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned

by Kinky Friedman

  Clyde and I moved in a little closer and we could see the store manager and Jabreel X huddled together in what appeared to be a serious, rational posture. Jabreel X did not need to make threats, of course. With a store full of Black Muslims loitering about, Jabreel X could be saying he wanted a tin of breath mints and still seem threatening. Clyde and I watched. The Jewish picketers watched. A small but growing crowd of spectators watched. Even a few cops pulled up in a squad car and watched. The discussion appeared to be going on interminably and so the cops did not move in. No laws, evidently, were being broken and no one had called for help. Then, a rather bizarre incident occurred. Teddy, obviously growing bored with the conversation between Jabreel X and the store manager, proceeded to tie what appeared to be a bright green Starbucks apron or tablecloth around his neck like a cape or a royal cloak. Then, grabbing an empty sixteen-ounce coffee cup and placing it upside down upon his head, he began marching regally around the store, exhorting and issuing apparent commands we could not hear to the few remaining customers and to the Black Muslims, who appeared to be dumbfounded by this unexpected, aberrant, and totally undignified behavior.

  "Oh, Teddy," said Clyde.

  It didn't take long for Jabreel X and his followers to realize that they'd been had, and that the mild-mannered black man they'd championed, who'd lost his job at Starbucks and was now marching around like a king in a storybook, was obviously cooking on another planet. The Black Muslims, looking to the man as chagrined and sheepish as it is possible for a Black Muslim to look, filed quickly out of the store, but this time the Red Sea didn't seem to part quite so easily.

  It started with a bit of pushing and shoving, continued with some name-calling, and before anybody knew it, the sidewalk in front of Starbucks was the scene of a full-blown melee.

  More cops had appeared on the scene, but the action was clearly beginning to spill over into the street, with Mordecai Hoffman and Jabreel X commanding like field generals their opposing armies of the night. And the cops were caught in the middle of the fray. Fists were flying, people were being shoved to the ground, and the front window of Starbucks was shattered by a skinny Lubavitch Jew swinging a picket sign over his head like a human helicopter. In the midst of this churning cauldron of depravity, there gradually materialized two figures I recognized:

  Fox Harris, who was standing on the fringe of the mob, arguing with a cop, and Teddy, who was just now descending majestically from the doorway of Starbucks as if he expected a royal coach to be waiting for him. I had half dragged Clyde across the street and, against her wishes, we were watching the scene from the relatively safe vantage point of the opposite sidewalk.

  "Oh, Teddy," she whispered. "Stay inside."

  "There's Fox arguing with the cops."

  "I'm going back over there," said Clyde defiantly.

  "You're staying right here," I said, encircling her in my arms.

  "Let me go, Walter!" she screamed.

  But now there was no place to go. Cops were suddenly pouring out of the woodwork, separating the warring factions, and arresting the unruly masses, most of whom just as suddenly began fleeing into the night. Indeed, a small cordon of cops had rapidly formed directly in front of us, effectively sealing off any attempt at approach by Clyde or myself. So we watched with fresh eyes as the cops placed Fox in handcuffs and hustled him out of there in the back of a squad car. We watched as Teddy walked obliviously toward the cops, ignoring their commands to stop. We watched as they hammered him with nightsticks and sprayed him with pepper spray.

  And yet he seemed to shake it off, standing for a moment alone, like a wounded bear in the light of a streetlamp. Then he turned and charged the cops. Gunfire crackled in the cold night.-Then Teddy fell to the sidewalk.

  Clyde turned away, burying her head in my chest, sobbing convulsively, then breaking into a long and lonely wail that found its only counterpoint in the sirens of an approaching ambulance. After a short period of time, they put a sheet on Teddy and pulled it over his head. After a little more time, they carried him off, put him in the meat wagon, and took him away.

  Soon the night became very quiet, indeed. Almost all you could hear was the sound of traffic on the avenues, like the muted drumming of the warriors from some imaginary African kingdom.

  thirty

  The best people you'll ever meet will often come to you like stray dogs and cats, moving with graceful evanescence through your life, then leaving you forever with empty spaces that only you can fill. After Teddy's death, I saw Fox and Clyde only one more time, then they moved on to the streets and alleyways of the world, leaving me no choice but to relegate them to the blameless pages of the manuscript in progress, nearing completion, but in a larger sense, never really ending. About four nights after the disaster at Starbucks, Fox came by my apartment. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised to see him. He hugged me as he came in the door. He looked pale and wan and a bit shaky but he still had that infectious, world-beating smile. This time, however, the smile did not seem quite able to reach up into his eyes.

  "How's the book coming?" he asked, immediately breaking out the one-hitter and the locket filled with Malabimbi Madness.

  "Fox!" I shouted. "How'd you get out of jail?"

  "Clyde brought me a copy of your manuscript with a hacksaw in it."

  "Then you know I'm almost finished."

  "I am, too," said Fox.

  I smoked more dope with Fox that night than I ever have in my life, before or since, and when we were through, he gave me the one-hitter and the silver locket, like a man on his deathbed passing on the most precious trinkets of his existence. It was almost two in the morning when he got up to leave. He stopped at the door and asked me if I wanted to go for a little ride.

  "Where'd you get the car?" I asked as I followed him outside.

  "Same place I got the Ryder truck," he said.

  I guess you'd expect an author to have an eye for detail, but I couldn't tell you what kind of car it was that Fox had evidently "requisitioned." It was a late model, it was a dark car, and it was a dark night. That's about all I remember except that I got in and Fox started cruising slowly around the neighborhood. I was out of cigarettes and I mentioned that fact to Fox.

  "Check the glove compartment," he said.

  I opened the glove compartment and found a pack of cigarettes. I also found a gun.

  "Jesus, Fox," I said. "Where'd you get this gun?"

  "Came with the car," he said.

  Fox drove around for a while longer, then stopped along the curb across the street from where Teddy had died in front of Starbucks. The window had been fixed, I noticed. Starbucks looked dark and deserted. The whole street looked dark and deserted. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a cold and unforgiving rage that came from somewhere deeper in my dark and deserted soul than I ever cared to know about. I opened the glove compartment, took out the gun, and lowered my passenger-side window. The night air came into the car and it was cold and unforgiving, too. It was a one-way street and it was a one-way life and you do it their way or you don't do it at all. There was nothing between me and Starbucks now. There never had been anything between me and Starbucks. I aimed the gun at the Starbucks window and I fired methodically six times, shattering the glass again. Then Fox took the gun away from me, rubbing off my fingerprints with his own hands, placing it back in the glove compartment. He quickly pulled away from the curb and drove me back to my apartment. He checked in the rearview several times but there was no sign of cops. As I got out of the car, in front of my building, Fox leaned over from the wheel and uttered the last words I would ever hear him say.

  "You know something, Walter," he said. "You're all right."

  It was late the following afternoon when I finally got up, wandered over to a nearby little Greek coffee shop, and read the newspaper. "TWO KILLED IN DRIVE-BY SHOOTING AT STARBUCKS," it said. Employees working late, repairing damage from previous protests. Suspect apprehended with murder weapon bearing his fingerprints.
Suspect makes full confession to the police.

  thirty-one

  That night Clyde came over with her suitcase. She said she was shipping out. Things were getting too hot since Fox's arrest. There was a moment when I saw the sparkle in her eyes, dimmed recently by tears, during which I almost told her who the real triggerman was. But that moment passed and I let it. It was then that I truly felt Clyde and Fox slipping through the fingers of my life, consigned, for better or worse, to the pages of a book. What was it that Fox once said? I asked myself. "The only things you really keep in life are the things you let slip through your fingers." Something like that. "There's not much time," she said, taking off her clothes. "I've got a plane to catch in a few hours."

  "You're not traveling like that, I hope."

  "That's very funny, Walter. Your wit seems to have sharpened noticeably in the time you've been around Fox and myself."

  "How could it not?" I said truthfully. "Aren't you going to take your clothes off?"

  "Well," I said, fumbling with a button on my shirt.

  "There's not time to be modest, Sunshine. This is something you've been wanting to do for a long time now."

  She turned off the lamp on my desk and the room took on an almost subterranean dimness, bathing her skin with the ambient glow of the light from the street. Bending gracefully, like a tree in a storm, she removed two religious candles from her purse, placed them carefully on the windowsill, and borrowing my lighter for one last time, she lit them reverentially, prayerfully, in the manner of a supplicant at the altar of a god she trusted in spite of everything. The candlelight touched her skin like fireflies, like roses, like little fingers of light and lightness through which would slip a memory I would surely keep.

  "Take off your clothes, Walter," she ordered in a soft, husky voice, and I obeyed.

  "Get on the floor," she said.

  And I did. And she was on top of me, fucking my brains out, sitting on my face, sucking my cock like a Dreamsicle on a dusty summer day. And I was all over her, wanting her love, her passion, her scent to stay with me forever. And on it went, her fingers pulling my hair, her fingernails raking my back, her very essence becoming a part of me as our bodies rolled across the floor in the flickering shadows of the candlelight. After we came together, we slept in each other's arms, with me still inside her, wanting more, wanting everything, wanting what I knew I would never have again.

  When we woke from our little reverie, we dressed quickly and spoke briefly in oddly hushed tones. She talked of going to South America. I talked of completing the novel, editing, book tours. She had looked beautiful without any clothes on and she looked just as beautiful standing at the door with her suitcase in her hand. I believed I saw a bit more of that old sparkle back in her eyes. It made me happy to see it.

  "I promise you I'll always be a vegetarian," I said.

  "I know you will," said Clyde.

  "The two religious candles," I said. "Are they for Fox and Teddy?"

  "They're just for two chirpies," she said.

  "Chirpies?"

  "Two birds. They could be for Fox and Teddy. They could be for the two people who Fox didn't know were inside Starbucks when he shot up the place like a crazy cowboy. They could be for Fox and me, who once were your partners in crime and now are your creations."

  I didn't say a word. I just stood there and watched the candlelight dancing in her eyes.

  "The candles could be for you and me, Walter. They could be for all of us."

  She opened the door and she walked out into the little hallway. I think there were tears in her eyes.

  "Or they could just be," she said, "for any two birds who want to fly."

  thirty-two

  A year has passed since the night Clyde left and a lot of things have happened in the parallel worlds of fiction and nonfiction. I finished the book almost before Clyde's candles burned out and, believe it or not, it immediately started leaping off bookshelves all over the country. One critic actually said: "The characters leap off the page." In the process, I've made quite a leap myself. I've moved from the old basement apartment in the Village to a large, airy, spacious place overlooking Central Park. And why not? I can certainly afford it. At this writing, not only are book and author doing well, the book's on the best-seller list and Sylvia Lowell is telling everybody that Walter Snow's a genius and she knew it the whole time. Steve Samet loves me, too, and now Hollywood's considering turning the book into a movie except they want the three central characters to be black and they want Teddy to be white and they want the story set in a small town in rural Mississippi. They do like the Starbucks angle, however. As they were quick to point out, even small towns in rural Mississippi have a Starbucks these days.

  Fox is on death row, and this bothers me sometimes but there's nothing I can do about it. I haven't visited him or spoken to him since the night he was arrested but I do have my reasons. For one thing, he might decide to change his story, but I don't worry about that too much because nobody would believe him. The other reason I don't feel guilty about not visiting him is because I've already admitted in the book that I shot the people in Starbucks. No one believes it, of course, because the book is fiction and no one believes fiction even if it's the truth.

  I have agreed nonetheless, through lawyers, that I would go along with Fox's request that I take formal custody of his tropical fish, which are now swimming around in a large aquarium in my large living room. They don't seem to care much whether they're in a basement apartment or a penthouse. In an odd way, neither do I. I've got the one-hitter still and the silver locket and a large supply of the best dope in town and I find myself smoking a lot these days and watching Fox's fish. Tropical fish don't really belong in New York, I think, any more than we do. They should be swimming around in some beautiful coral reef in some crystal-clear tropical ocean. Instead, they just swim round and round in their glass-enclosed prison until they drown in their own sorrows like the rest of us poor bastards. But don't get the idea I'm not happy. It's just that when you're successful, important, and famous, happy doesn't really come into the picture.

  Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I got a postcard from Clyde this afternoon. First time I've heard from her. No return address. I miss Clyde. Sometimes when I get stoned, I miss her so much I almost forget to feed the fish. Sometimes I think I should have gone with Clyde instead of going to cocktail parties and late dinners at Elaine's and then out on book tours. I miss Clyde. I miss Fox, too. And I miss who I was when I was with them. But I'm not that person anymore and maybe I never was and anyway I can't afford to be. Now all I do is feed Fox's fucking fish, sign checks, and inscribe books to people who tell me I have a wonderful imagination. Can you imagine that?

  Anyway, here's Clyde's postcard. Here. I'll read it to you.

  Dear Walter,

  I live on a secluded island called Moro de Sao Paulo off the coast of Brazil. My heart is happy here. My soul is at peace. I don't think I'm coming back. I wish you all the success in the world. Love,

  Clyde

  PS. I have a beautiful baby boy now. His name is Walter. He's almost three months old. Sometimes I call him Sunshine.

  Acknowledgments

  The divine spirit within the author salutes the divine spirit within his agent, David Vigliano. The author would also like to express his gratitude to the editors who worked on this book: Mauro DiPreta, Joelle Yudin, and Diane Reverand. Thanks also go to Ted Mann and Goat Carson. The author extends a special salute to the memories of Fox Harris (Peace be with you, Fox) and Clyde Potts (Wherever you are).

  Table of Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  e
ighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  Acknowledgments