Thick, ropy veins were bulging out of his neck; the veins in his temples were pulsating like tiny blue wires in a short-circuiting computer. His head seemed to be on the verge of exploding. I knew there would be no reasoning with the man. I knew it even before his fist flew out of the fifth dimension and slammed into my jaw, sending me toppling backwards into a stack of cardboard boxes filled with who knows what—more of Heather’s garbage. I heard crashing and rattling and tinkling and knew that something fragile had broken; I hoped it was nothing inside of me.
A number of thoughts raced through my mind all at once as I tried to push myself up off the floor. The only person at that party who knew where Heather lived was Danny. Had he given Mike the address during some drugged-out stupor? Is that why he’d called the previous night, to warn me about Mike? First and foremost in my thoughts, however, was the idea that I really wouldn’t mind getting beat up for fucking somebody else’s girlfriend if only I had had the pleasure of fucking somebody else’s girlfriend. A great deal of pleasure in return for a great deal of pain is an acceptable equation in my book as long as the pleasure part isn’t left out of the deal. Imagine being punished for a sin you didn’t commit, but would have if only you’d been given the opportunity. What could be more frustrating than that?
I had risen to my hands and knees when I felt Mike’s boot slam into my ribcage. Bright bluish-purple splotches appeared in front of my eyes, darting about like weird airborne paramecium. I released an animalistic grunt and keeled over onto my side. Just as I thrust my hands in the air to ward off further attacks I heard the bedroom door open behind me.
“What the fuck?” Heather said in that most concise, Heather-like way of hers.
In my peripheral vision I could see that Heather had no way to protect herself. She was wearing her fluffy white bathrobe, nothing else. I tried to open my mouth to tell her to get out of here, but all the air had been knocked out of my body. I couldn’t speak.
“Who the hell is this?” Mike said, poking me in the face with the tip of his boot. “Is this your little girlfriend? Maybe she’d like to know who you were fucking Friday night, hm? Maybe she’d like to know about you and Esthra?” The second he uttered Esthra’s name he slammed his boot into my solar plexus. What little air I had left in my body now fled south for a perpetual vacation among the Antarctic ice floes.
“Don’t hurt him!” Heather shouted, her voice laced with panic. Hearing the sound of a woman pleading for my life was a pleasant sensation in some ways. I never thought a woman would care about me enough to do such a thing. If only you could edit out the life-threatening aspect of the situation, it would’ve been even more pleasant.
Mike backed away from me. For a second I thought that maybe Heather had somehow gotten through to him. “I’m not going to hurt him,” Mike said in an emotionless drone, “I’m going to kill him.” He pulled up his shirt and removed a .22 from his belt. I remember thinking, I wonder if that’s the gun his dad keeps by his bed.
“I’m not takin’ any more shit from her, man. No more.” Both his voice and hand were shaking. “Right here and now I’m announcing Mike’s new policy. You touch her, you die. Simple as that.” He released the safety, then aimed the shaking gun at my head. I closed my eyes tight, waiting for the shot.
From somewhere in front of me I heard a familiar voice say, “Excuse me, we thought we’d drop by to—hey, what’s going on here?”
I opened my eyes in time to see Mike spin around and fire his gun at Brothers Lundberg and Fleetwood, both of whom were standing in the open doorway holding up little blue hardcover copies of the Book of Mormon. The firing gun thunderclapped throughout the room. Lundberg’s head snapped backward, his body toppled onto the carpet. Fleetwood’s jaw dropped as he watched his companion fall; his gaze darkened with anger; he spun toward Mike and threw the Book of Mormon through the air like a Frisbee. It slammed into Mike’s wrist, knocking the gun out of his hand. The look on Mike’s face was one of stunned disbelief. Before he could have time to recover I mustered up enough energy to rise to my feet and tackle Mike about the waist. Heather jumped on top of him too, as did Fleetwood. He was such a bundle of rage it took all three of us to pin him to the floor, but I knew we couldn’t hold him there forever.
“What do we do with him now?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Fleetwood said, “knock him unconscious?”
“With what?” I said.
“Who’s Esther?” Heather said.
“What?”
“You heard me!” Her lips had tightened into a thin white line. “Who’s this Esther?”
“I don’t think that’s very important right now!” Mike managed to get one of his hands free and almost punched me in the eye.
“I think it is. Is she pretty?”
“Will someone get his hand?” Fleetwood pinned the hand to the floor, but had to release the other one in order to do so. With this hand Mike tried to punch me in the jaw again. I barely swerved out of the way.
“I suppose you told her she was beautiful,” Heather said, “just like you told me last night.”
“I didn’t do anything with her. And her name’s Esthra, not Esther.”
“Ooooh, exotic. Sounds phony to me. Sounds like some kind of fucking stripper name.”
“Can you put a sock in it for just one second? We’ve got a bit of a problem here in case you haven’t noticed.” Mike’s fist whizzed past my skull once more.
Heather sighed, grabbed for the gun (which had landed near the leg of the sofa) and clubbed Mike over the head with the butt. His body immediately went limp and his head slammed against the carpet, bouncing once before lying still. We remained on top of him for a few seconds, just in case he emerged from unconsciousness like the implacable mad man in the last reel of all those slasher movies. He didn’t. We breathed a sigh of relief, then relaxed. The second we did so he shot up from the floor and tried to strangle me. Heather slammed the gun into his head again, this time drawing blood. He collapsed onto the carpet once more, then lay still. This time Fleetwood and Heather sat on him while I went to check on Lundberg.
I expected to see his head blown all over the wall, pieces of his skull scattered across the floor. Compared with this gruesome image Lundberg seemed fine. I could see no trace of blood, no wound at all. He was sprawled out on the floor like a straw-stuffed dummy, his mouth wide open, his eyelids pressed together, his consciousness lost in torpid slumber. Lying on his chest was his elephantine copy of the Book of Mormon. I did a double take when I spotted the bullet hole that had consumed the golden-colored “o” and “k” in the word “Book.” I slipped the tome out of his hands and peeled the pages apart, discovering the bullet flattened against page 779, the last page in the book, just barely forming a slight bulge in the metallic back cover. I flipped back to the title page and found the following note written in red ink:
Elliot,
Here is your own book. Please read it, think about it, and pray to know if it is true. Please call if you have any questions and we would love to help you understand the truth.
Late!
Brother Lundberg
375-4295
P.S.: Can we please keep that whole funny cigarette incident to ourselves?
I tucked the book under my arm, then lightly slapped him on the cheeks. “Hey, Lundberg,” I said, “wake up! Looks like there’s something to this God stuff after all.” When Lundberg’s eyes began to focus, I shoved the open book in his face and showed him the flattened bullet.
“Wh-what happened?” he mumbled.
“Well, either you’re blessed or god damn lucky or both.” Lundberg propped himself up on his elbows. “Uh … what time is it?” His eyes still weren’t quite focused.
I tilted my head to look at his watch. “8:22.”
“Oh good, we’re not late.”
“Late for what?”
“Why, for the lecture. Don’t you remember? Two weeks ago you told us to drop by this morning between 7:00 and 8:30
to deliver a second lecture to you and your wife Heather. Is she home?”
I couldn’t help but conclude that practical jokes actually served a utilitarian purpose in the grand scheme of things. “Yeah,” I said, “she’s sitting on your assailant right now.”
“Huh?”
“C’mon, I’ll explain everything inside. You can deliver your second lecture while we’re waiting for the cops.”
“What?” He began to panic. “You didn’t tell them about the cigarette did you?”
“No, no, that’ll remain our little secret.” I patted him on the back. “Let’s go, Brother. This is probably the most receptive Heather’s ever going to be to the Word of God.”
I helped Lundberg to his feet, wrapped my arm around his shoulders, and guided him into the apartment where a Mormon and a half-naked standup comedian sat on a comatose punk rocker to prevent him from murdering us.
Just another day in the life.
CHAPTER 15
The Necrophilia Bar (Or) You Want Fries With That?
(October 5-November 3, 2014)
After the police had dragged Mike away in handcuffs and jotted down detailed statements from everyone involved, the Mormons wished Heather and me a happy married life (this statement seemed to puzzle Heather, but she let it go), then promised to return in a week to deliver the third lecture. Those damn Mormons certainly are determined, you have to give them that.
Emergency Medical Technicians were even called in, though I insisted I was all right. They told me I had a couple of cracked ribs. I didn’t feel quite as bad as I thought two cracked ribs should make you feel. As the EMTs taped me up, warning me about the nasty bruises I’d probably develop over the next few days, in the background I could see Heather’s neighbors peeking around the open doorway to see what all the commotion was about. I told them not to worry, the anthrax would dissipate in no time. They all went back into their apartments.
Once Heather and I were alone in the apartment again I attempted to explain the entire sordid affair to her beginning with the first time I met Mike. I told the story exactly as I had to The Brink audience on Friday night. Heather rolled around on the sofa laughing for twenty minutes. By the time I got to the part where I bumped into Lundberg staggering out of the bathroom, she almost busted a gut. She believed that nothing had happened between Esthra and me, and admitted she would’ve had no right to be angry even if something had. In the end she was more concerned with what was happening to Danny.
I didn’t talk to Danny again for another three weeks. He stopped performing at the clubs and I couldn’t reach him by phone. I’d heard from other comedians, as well as Marsha, that Griffin was going through Danny’s money as if he had a printing press hidden in his bedroom. I’d also heard he was slamming a spike into his arm almost every day. It only takes about a month to get strung out on heroin if you’re shooting it on a daily basis.
It wasn’t much of a surprise early one Monday morning when I awoke from a wonderful dream about Heather to hear the incessant ringing of the telephone, pressed the receiver to my parched lips, mumbled something vaguely resembling the word “hello,” then heard the pre-recorded voice of a mechanical woman asking me if I would accept the charges for a collect phone call from L.A. County Jail.
“If so, please press 1,” she said.
I pressed 1, then heard Danny’s tentative whisper greeting me through the receiver: “Uh, hello? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you. What the hell’s going on?”
“I’m in jail.”
“I gathered that.” In the background I could hear someone talking through what sounded like a loudspeaker and the constant mumbling drone of a crowd of people carrying on dozens of conversations at once. “What did you do? I mean, what are you charged with?”
“Nothing too bad. Just making false statements to the police, possession of a needle, and trying to break into a pharmacy.”
“You tried to break into a—?” I just shook my head. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?”
“Let’s talk about that a little later, okay? Right now I need you to do me a favor.”
“No, I am not baking you a cake with a file in it.”
“No no, I need you to call a couple of people for me.”
The first person he wanted me to contact was some woman named Diane Evans, his dealer. He’d given her name to the police as a reference, believe it or not. The other person was his father. He wanted me to tell them both that he was in jail under the name Matthew Fuller. The cops were planning on letting him go on his own recognizance as long as he could prove he was a legal resident of Los Angeles, which required the verification of two references. If those two references said something along the lines of “Matthew Fuller? Who the fuck is Matthew Fuller?” he was pretty much screwed.
“Uh, now Diane’s kind of a wacky broad and she might yell at you for no good reason, but don’t let that intimidate you,” Danny said.
“Why don’t you have Griffin do all this shit?”
“I can’t. She left me. She left me for that punk rock bitch she met at that party in Hermosa Beach a few weeks ago. What was her name? Esther, I think. Or something like that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, Lord, things just keep getting stranger and stranger.”
“Remember, you’ve got to call my dad as soon as possible ’cause the phone company might be shutting off our phone today.”
“Wait a second, I just thought of something, why didn’t you give me as a reference?”
Long pause. “I didn’t think of that.”
“That would’ve saved both you and me a lot of trouble, you know.”
“Hey, if I could think clearly do you think I’d be in here?”
“No, you’d be using that fancy Neuro-Linguistic Programming of yours to hypnotize the guards into letting you go free.”
“I already tried that. Ever since I started taking heroin it doesn’t seem to work anymore.”
I was just about to make a wisecrack about that statement when I heard a click, indicating that I had a call on the other line. I hated call-waiting. I wanted fewer people to reach me, not more, but the phone company refused to get rid of it no matter how much I complained to them.
“Hold on a second,” I said, sighing. I tapped the disconnect button, which switched me to the other line. “Hello?”
I heard the pre-recorded voice of a mechanical woman asking me if I would accept the charges for a collect phone call from L.A. County Jail. “If so, please press 1,” she said.
I found myself experiencing yet another moment of cognitive dissonance, just as I had when Mike appeared in a puff of smoke outside Heather’s door. Was another Danny from a parallel universe somehow calling me at that same exact moment? God, I hoped not; it was bad enough dealing with one Danny. I guess I assumed the wires had somehow gotten crossed at the phone company, and figured I’d hear Danny’s voice on the other line as well. I pressed 1.
The next voice I heard was that of a youngish fellow with a distinct Latino accent. His first words were either “Hey, this is Elliot” or “Hey, is this Elliot?”
Since I wasn’t sure which I just said, “Yeah.”
“You a fag?”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, you a fag?”
I suppose a normal person would’ve hung up at this point. Come to think of it, a normal person would never even have accepted the charges in the first place.
“Wait a second, let me get this straight,” I said, “do you just randomly call people collect and accuse them of being a fag?” In the background I could hear someone talking through what sounded like a loudspeaker and the constant mumbling drone of a crowd of people carrying on dozens of conversations at once. “Where are you, anyway?” I asked, though I’m not sure why. I already knew.
“I’m in jail, motherfucker.”
“Don’t you think you should get in touch with an attorney instead of calling me a fag?”
“Nah, it don’t m
atter, I’m not gettin’ out of here in a long ass time, man.”
“Who is this?”
“This is Rob. Here, talk to my friend.”
The phone was passed to someone else, another youngish Latino-sounding gentleman. “Who’s this?” asked said gentleman.
“This is Elliot. Who’s this?”
“Billy. Where you at?”
“In my bedroom.”
“No, no, what city?”
“Um, Los Angeles.”
“You in with the Crips or the Bloods?”
I suddenly realized that Billy must have thought I was friends with the other guy. “Both. I alternate. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I’m with the Crips, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I’m with the Bloods.”
“Shit, they let you do that?”
“I have a special dispensation from the government.”
“You a cop or something?”
“No, I just talk like one.”
“How old are you, man?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Fuck, that’s probably how old I’ll be when I get out of this place. But that’s okay, dog. I ain’t gonna waste my time. I plan on usin’ this as an excuse to study computer technology.”
Shit, I thought, I’ve never been caught committing a crime and I don’t even have a computer! In five years this jailbird will probably be the next Bill Gates and I’ll be in some hovel burning my jokes for heat.
“You go to school?” Billy said.
“Yeah, I was majoring in unemployment for awhile.” He seemed to like that one. I think he actually laughed.
“What do you do now?” he said.
“I work at a necrophilia bar.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an underground bar where they take a dead body add put it on a table in the middle of the room, then I have sex with it while everyone watches and drinks margaritas or whatever.”
“Man, is that with dead girls or dead guys?”
“Hey! What do you think I am, some fuckin’ weirdo? Dead girls, of course.”
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 19