I WOKE UP ONE MORNING tangled in the sheets after a bad dream in which I was chased down a dark alley and had to hide in a Dumpster and I remembered suddenly a photo I’d seen a year or two before in Radio & TV Times of Mr. Larry arm in arm with Boyd Freud, co-anchor of Channel 5’s News About You, the news show with the big cooking segment and tips on relationships and skin care. I looked it up online, and indeed, the two appeared to be thick as thieves. (“Anchorman Boyd Freud and longtime associate Larry B. [L.B.] Larry at benefit for homeless.”) I happened to have met Mr. Freud at Sugar O’Toole’s birthday party years before, and I called him up at the TV station. “Noir. Guy Noir. We met at Sugar’s a long time ago, and we talked about arachnids.”
He remembered. I chatted him up and we met for coffee that afternoon at a noisy joint in Prospect Park.
Boyd was the male Caucasian news anchor with big hair that Channel 5 paired with Nevaeh Evans, the beautiful minority woman co-anchor with sardonic eyes, and Steve, the dorky meteorologist, and Artie, the goofball sports guy who bounces up and down in his chair like he’s wetting his pants. Mr. Freud sat slumped in a back booth, dark glasses, glum, chewing a cracker, as I walked in. He didn’t look at all like the hearty news guy on TV. I asked him why the long puss, and he told me his approval numbers were way down and Nevaeh’s were up, and he lived in dread of getting canned and having to go to a smaller market like Sioux Falls or Grand Forks. He wrung his hands at the thought. A marketing wizard at Channel Five had dreamed up a promotion, whereby Boyd would marry Nevaeh on the air, the culmination of a three-month courtship. She was agreeable but on one condition: she’d become the head anchor and do hard news, and he’d do human interest stories, interview small children, cover fairs and carnivals, and do a daily feature called “Animal Friends” in which he’d talk about an iguana or shrew or possum or garter snake, while holding the critter in his hands. Also, she wanted a bonus of a half-million dollars.
Boyd was sick at the thought; he was not fond of animals. “I am in a living hell. I’ve gained thirty-seven pounds in the past two months. I’m looking blobby on the screen.”
“We can help each other,” I said. “I can give you a guaranteed weight-loss pill, and I can give you some leverage with Nevaeh. You can give me Larry B. Larry, who is trying to horn in on a business deal.”
“Larry, that rat! He’s supposed to be my agent, and he’s done nothing for me! Nada! Zilch! Count me in.” We shook hands on it. He told me that Mr. Larry had a truckload of gambling debts and money was his one and only motive—so he could be negotiated with.
SAME AFTERNOON. LIEUTENANT MCCAFFERTY CALLED up and said, “I hear you’re hanging out with the Bogus Brothers.”
I told him I was trying to avoid the Bogus Brothers on account of they were attempting to take my scalp.
“I’m just saying I’d watch who I keep company with if I were you.”
I told him again that I didn’t want to get anywhere near the Bogus Brothers.
“I’m just saying that if I see you with them, I’m going to have to draw my own conclusions, Noir.”
McCafferty is not the brightest bulb in the field of law enforcement. He was once trying to track down a jazz bassist who had swiped a ukulele, and he collared a guy in the park—he said, “You’re a jazzer. You’re wearing dark glasses after dark.”
“I’m visually impaired,” the guy yelled. “Okay? See the white cane?” He whacked it on the sidewalk, and a German shepherd woke up and stood by his side. “See the dog? You blind or something?”
“Sorry. Didn’t notice.”
“Use your eyes, for crying out loud. Jeez.” Anyway, that’s McCafferty.
I DID SOME SCOUTING AROUND on Nevaeh and found an old boyfriend named Mutt Mullins who she picked up back when she was a telemarketer and called to ask if he’d like to save 25 percent on his texting charges and he said he never texted and she said, “How can that be?” and he said it took too long pecking one-fingered at the tiny keyboard on his phone screen and she said, “Use both thumbs,” and she offered to show him how and that’s how they got together. He was a mutt, and she was attracted to mutts. She moved into his apartment and dumped two Dumpsters full of his debris and refinished his floors and hung designer shades and cleaned out his closet and dressed him in classy clothes. He was the one who told her she should be in TV and introduced her to his brother Mike, a TV director, who hired her, and she promptly dumped Mutt for a sports anchor who was handsomer and happier, and Mutt was still bitter about that. He was a security man at a self-storage complex called Closet Warehouse, an octopuslike monstrosity of one-story cinderblock wings of windowless storage units that people rented to keep their junk in, out on Interstate 35W, across Maplelawn Boulevard from Pepe’s Pants Warehouse, Chris Wilmot’s Home of Hope Tabernacle, and Dave’s Drive-Through Desserts, which was featuring a Six-Scoop Hot Fudge Sundae. “We were in journalism school together, and she was good-looking and minority, so she got on a career track, and I’m white and got a mug like a shovel, and here I am, an attendant at a parking lot for flotsam and jetsam. That’s how the cookie crumbles, it’s all about looks.”
He was glad to tell me that in her college days she’d smoked dope and done pills, and once she posed nude for a men’s magazine called Nooner.
“Really,” I said. “That’d be something of interest.”
He offered to sell me a copy for fifty dollars.
The magazine was in his own storage unit, a twelve-by-twelve bin with a single folding chair, a handsanitizer dispenser, a lightbulb hanging on a cord over stacks of Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, Gape, Ogle, and I-Ball magazines, and file cabinets with clippings of photos filed by breast types—Titties, Gumdrops, Casabas, Chi-Chis, Bobblers, Missiles, Maracas, and O Mammy. “Nevaeh was a Gumdrop,” he informed me, handing me the mag. It was her, and she was naked all right. She was lolling in a pink 1957 Pontiac parked under pine trees, and her breasts, pert and perky, nested quite prettily against her rib cage. “Lissome, alluring Nevaeh Evans takes a break from her journalism studies at St. Cloud State to bathe her beauty in solar rays,” etc., etc.
Mr. Mullins’s breath was faintly fermented. Watching over storage units evidently left plenty of time for relaxation. “I applied for a janitor job at Channel Five and called her to see if she’d put in a good word for me, and she acted like she’d never heard my name before. We were in a relationship, man. We slept in a bed together. I helped her write her papers. Then when I was no longer of use, she dumped me like an old newspaper.”
I felt queasy about the whole deal. The exposure of a news anchor’s youthful indiscretion is nothing to be proud of. I never was a shining star in the Ethics Department, but I didn’t want to be involved in destroying a young woman’s career. Her boss was the bullet-headed right-wing tycoon and half-wit loudmouth Stanley Mutter—and the thought of him eyeballing this lovely, vulnerable, unclothed person was repellent to me. I opened the magazine to page fifty-two, and it was all so clear, her innocence, her good-heartedness, her need—some man had sweet-talked her into posing, lying naked on her side across the hood of the car, the hood ornament between her ankles, and he’d paid her a hundred dollars, which seemed like easy money to her, not knowing that it could come back years later and blow up in her face and ruin her career.
On the other hand, maybe this was the sort of scandal that PR people yearn for—a big boomer of a story that lands smack dab on page one:
NUDE PIX OF NEWS ANCHOR EXPOSED; “NEVAEH, HOW COULD YOU?” CRY FANS; CHANNEL 5 ORDERS 2-DAY SUSPENSION
And two days later, the exposée weeps (“I was young! I was foolish!”) and begs for forgiveness (“My viewers are the most important people in my life”) and announces she’s going into treatment (“I am a serial exhibitionist and this is my opportunity to confront my demons”). She returns ten days later, does a guest shot on talk radio, and tells about her obsessive need for male approval tha
t led her to do that shameful thing, and is forgiven, and becomes twice as popular as ever before.
Sending the issue of Nooner to Gene Willikers might be the biggest favor anyone ever did for Nevaeh.
On the other hand—what if it wasn’t?
I turned once again to page fifty-two in hopes of getting some guidance from the young, lissome beauty reclining on the Pontiac, her lovely head against the windshield, arms flung to either side, long legs splayed, a faint patina of goose bumps on her dark skin—she looked like someone who could easily lure sailors to their deaths. Would this maiden choose broad dissemination of her image, or would she prefer to draw a curtain of privacy?
I parked in front of the Channel 5 building, pondering this issue, and spotted the Eyewitness News van (News 4 U@ 6 & 10) with the satellite dish on top, and there on the sidewalk stood Nevaeh herself, microphone in hand, as the cameraman waited and a poofy-haired man brushed powder on her beautiful countenance and got out a mascara pencil. “Close your eyes,” he said, and so she didn’t see me when I walked up. On the grass behind her, standing ramrod straight at attention, was the Anoka High School Marching Band in maroon and gray uniforms, eighty strong, clarinets in front, six silver tubas in back, the plump, fish-faced director standing to the side, the drum major in white poised to give the downbeat. I put the magazine in her hand. “Someone is trying to blackmail you, and it isn’t me,” I said. “By the way, you have terrific tits.” And I gave a big thumbs-up to the drum major, who took me for a TV producer, and the drums hit four big beats and a long roll and blazed out with “The Minnesota Rouser.” But I was already aroused. If Nevaeh had made a pass at me, I would’ve scooped her up right there and then and headed for the airport. She looked like she was about to. She glanced at the porn and looked up at me and touched her bosom and whispered, “Thank you.” But before she could say more, I felt severe gastric disturbances and moved at a quick trot toward the street, and a whisper of gas escaped from me, and I got in the car and peeled out. I felt heat in the gluteal cleft. I opened the windows and let go of it, a long trombone blast, a cloud of evil shooting out, rattling the aperture, and I decided then and there to put the worms to death and resume normal life.
16
Scarlett
NAOMI HAD WARNED ME THAT the process of ridding oneself of tapeworms is not pleasant. She had killed hers off in Paris, and there was, she said, a lot of writhing around and some bloating and blasting and other sorts of abdominal turmoil while she sat on the porcelain throne and then gradually, grudgingly, they came out, still twitching, great long lengths of them, slimy, blue-green, swimming around in the toilet bowl, and thank goodness Johnny was there to clean up the mess. (She didn’t say who Johnny was, and that’s good because I didn’t want to know.)
I had set up camp in my new apartment and steeled myself to the task ahead and took my position on the throne, with bicarbonate of soda at hand and also a ballpeen hammer in case the creatures needed pacification, and I held the yellow pill in my hand and was about to swallow it when the phone rang, and like a fool I answered. It was Naomi, calling from New York.
“Hi. How are you doing?” she said. No “Darling I miss you” or “I count the hours until I see you”—just the “Hi. How are you doing?” A sign that something was amiss. She was sitting in a café on West 67th Street, waiting to go into ABC-TV and tape an interview with Phil Ragbin, the aging co-host of the Chloris & Phil show, to promote her brand-new book—“New book??” said I. “Why? How?”
“I have a brilliant writer named Billy Williams. I’m way too busy promoting books to keep writing them, and he loves to sit in a dim cubicle all day and flesh out my ideas, so what the hey. The book is called The Blessing of Less, and it basically says that weight loss is an act of religious devotion, and it’s forty-four pages long, and my publicist says it’s shooting straight to number one on the Times best-seller list. Anyway—I called because I need you to take care of something. Remember Larry B. Larry?”
“He’s been threatening me with bodily harm for the past month. Yeah. I’m well aware of the guy.”
“Well, Mr. Larry has gone and sold an option on Elongate to Pfizer. Pfizer, the pharmaceuticals giant. They gave him a half million to deliver the DNA of our tapeworms. And Pfizer has a mole in the Food and Drug Administration named Cliff Kress, who is about to usher their version of Elongate through the licensing process. We’re in an ambush by giants, Guy. I’ve got my lawyer Birch on the case, but I need you to scout the opposition. This Kress is based in Minneapolis, a mild-mannered bow-tie sort of guy who adores French pastry and Marcel Proust and hopes to retire to an apartment in Provence in a few months, and he’s in Pfizer’s pocket. I’d like you to drop some cash in his small white palm and see if he might cut us some slack. We can afford the dough.”
Elongate had done six million in sales in one week, she told me. The big sales bulge was among women forty-eight to sixty-four, the gals with the harem pants and the voluminous shirts, and after that, men eighteen to thirty-five, the nerds who sit at computers day and night and snack on Cheez-Its and apple fritters and develop a ring of blubber over their belt. And then there are the grossly obese who live in darkened apartments with no mirrors, in buildings with freight elevators, who feed on ginormous pepperoni pizzas, two at a sitting, and earn their living as telemarketers. Elongate had made a big splash in the fattycake world. Naomi told me this in a dispassionate way, as if she were telling about something she’d read in the paper. She was no longer het up about tapeworms. She had moved off in pursuit of Lessness.
It dawned on me then that the big checks might stop coming. A gift horse that falls into your lap can just as easily fall out of your lap. And my lap was not as large as it had been.
“Are you coming back to Minnesota?” I asked, and as the words came out of my mouth, I knew the answer. When you are conquering the world, why would you turn around and come home?
“Oh darling, I miss the Mississippi, but a girl has to cut hay while the sun shines, and I don’t know anybody back there anymore except you and some lady professors, and they all hate me because I got too successful. If you’re a feminist academic, you’re supposed to be unappreciated and bitter, and here I am with a Paris apartment and I just bought the most darling little cottage in Southampton. It feels little but it’s eight thousand square feet, and I would love to show it to you, darling, but if I had lunch with those ladies, they’d sit and loathe me unless I made up a story about having pancreatic cancer, and that would give them such pleasure, they’d almost forgive me for being rich and beautiful.”
She sighed, and I waited for her to suggest a specific time when she might show me the cottage in Southampton, but she swept on. “The Blessing of Less is going to be huge, darling. It’s gathering slowly, like a tidal wave, and it’s going to start a revolution in this country. Less is the new More. It’s not only about weight loss, it’s about the power of diminishment. Concentration. The beauty of the minimal. Politics, the arts, religion—it is relevant across the board. Walmart ordered a hundred thousand copies. Oprah is making it her Book Club selection. The Dalai Lama is sending it to everyone on his Christmas card list.”
“How long will you be in New York?” I said.
“Only two days, then I’m off to Mexico with Rush Limbaugh and that big fatso governor of New Jersey, Mr. Chris Misty. Rush is on the pill. He lost forty pounds in the first month, and it’s making him sensitive and wistful, and he wants to quit his attack-dog radio show and become a children’s author. He’s working on a book called Lillian the Llama, and we’re going to his llama ranch in Michoacán and just lie in a steam bath and cleanse.”
She was so happy I didn’t have the heart to tell her about all the women who were after me. Even as she talked about Lessness, Sharon was texting me: The smell of espresso makes me horny since you were in here yesterday. I just want to rip your clothes off. Just saying. Oh, by th
e way, good morning.
I checked my phone, and the blue ball was in Minneapolis, moving slowly west on Wayzata Boulevard, so I dropped in at the Brew Ha Ha to tell Sharon I’d moved, in case (hint hint) she wanted to come over and check out the bedspreads. The place was jammed with art students, and she was in excellent form, snarffling a pitcher of milk to a fine froth, and asking an old guy if he wanted any sprinkles, hinkles, or dinkles on his latte—he shook his head—and I strolled over. She whispered behind her hand: “What’s going on with you? I heard you moved to a fancy-schmancy place on the river.”
“Who told you that?”
“A guy named Mr. Larry. He was in here looking for you.”
“Why would he look here if he knew I was over there?”
And the old guy turned and said that if this was the same Larry B. Larry as the one he knew, then I’d be well advised to hightail it to Chicago and keep going. He took his latte, and Sharon leaned over and said, “You and I going to spend some time together?”
“Let’s do that. We’ve known each other a long time. It’s time we should get to know each other.”
She reached down under the counter and hauled out a box the size of a hatbox, wrapped in brown paper and tied up in string. “Mr. Larry left this for you,” she said.
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 12