Insane City

by Dave Barry

  “You mean just go smoke a joint? Get stoned?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Meghan stepped around Brewer, went to Laurette, who was watching her uncertainly. She put her hand on Laurette’s shoulder. She could feel the bones through her thin, worn blouse.

  “Are you OK?” Meghan said.

  Laurette didn’t answer.

  “They don’t speak English,” said Castronovo.

  “So you haven’t explained what’s happening to them?”

  Castronovo shrugged.

  “Where are you taking them? Are you taking them to the police?”

  “No,” said Castronovo. “We’re taking them to Delray B—” He stopped, seeing Brewer shake his head.

  “They’ll be fine,” said Brewer. “We’re just getting them out of this hotel, where they’re not guests and where they have no legal right to be, OK? We’re doing this at your father’s request because he doesn’t want their presence here to interfere with your sister’s wedding. You don’t want these people to ruin your sister’s wedding, do you?”

  “Right,” said Meghan. “God forbid anything should interfere with Tina’s wedding.”

  “OK, so if you don’t mind, we’re going to—”

  “I do mind,” said Meghan. “These aren’t animals you take to the shelter and dump. These are people.”

  “They’re illegals.”

  Meghan snorted. “And of course you care deeply about the law. Like when you shot the Jet Ski from the beach. No law against that, right?”

  Brewer said nothing.

  “Listen,” said Meghan. “Just leave this woman and her kids with me, OK? I’ll get them a room. I’ll pay for it with my money.”

  Brewer shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “We do what your father tells us to do.”

  “What if my father told you to kill them? Would you do that?”

  “Meghan, come on. We’re just doing our job here.”

  “I’ll call my father.”

  Brewer smirked. “Go ahead, call him.”

  Meghan reddened. She knew what would happen if she called Mike. He’d tell her to go to bed and stay out of this. She felt helpless and foolish, resorting to a child’s threat. I’ll tell my daddy on you.

  “Let’s go,” Brewer said to Castronovo. “Good night, Meghan.”

  They turned away from her and resumed walking toward the parking lot, herding Laurette, with the baby, and Stephane. The Haitians went docilely. Meghan stayed where she was. Laurette turned and looked back at her, their eyes meeting for a moment. Then Brewer said something, and Laurette turned her head forward again.

  When they were almost out of sight, Meghan started following. She reached the edge of the parking lot in time to see Brewer and Castronovo putting the Haitians into the backseat of a black Lincoln Navigator. The men got into the front seat, Castronovo driving. He started the Navigator and backed out of the space. Meghan went a few steps closer, next to one of the palms that lined the edge of the lot. The Navigator started forward. As they went past Meghan, Brewer, in the front passenger seat, glanced at her, shook his head and looked away.

  Laurette, in the backseat, met her eyes again.

  This time it was Meghan who looked away.

  38

  Wendell and Marty had finished the dong bo pork. They both agreed it was delicious, totally worth the effort involved in persuading Mr. Woo to sell the newly named Majestic Transglobal Rooster.

  They were no longer hungry. They were content now to lie on their backs in the sand and watch the moon’s leisurely journey across the sky.

  They had been utterly silent for more than half an hour when Corliss said, “We’re high, aren’t we?”

  Marty said, “I do believe we are.”

  “But not from drinking wine.”

  “No. I think we’re baked.”

  “Baked?”

  “We’re on the choongs.”

  “On the what?”

  “Choongs. We’re stoned. High on pot. Or as the kids today call it, with their crazy slang lingo, marijuana.”

  “But we didn’t smoke marijuana.”

  “Correct.”

  “So how did we get on the choongles?”

  “Not the choongles. Just the choongs.”

  “The choongs. How did we get on them?”

  “I think it was when we ate dessert.”

  “You can get high from dessert?”

  “You can if it’s brownies and somebody puts pot in them.”

  “Somebody put pot in the brownies?”

  “I think maybe somebody did.”

  “Who would have done that?”

  “I dunno. Maybe Seth, as a joke. Maybe Meghan. She likes pot. But whoever it was, pretty soon after we ate the brownies was when I started to feel the buzz.”

  Wendell thought for a while, then said, “I had three of those brownies.”

  “Whoa. Really? Then you are seriously baked, sir, because that was some strong weed. I only had one and I’m still buzzed. Or, as the kids say today, on the choongles.”

  “That would explain how come Greta ate the whole pizza despite the carbs.”

  “It would. Also why you bought two restaurants.”

  They both burst out laughing, thinking about the Transglobal restaurant empire.

  “Seriously,” said Marty, when they’d settled back down, “are you starting to feel buyer’s remorse? I mean, you’re Wendell Fucking Corliss.”

  “I am indeed. I am Wendell Fucking Corliss.”

  “So when you wake up tomorrow and you are no longer high and you still have two restaurants, are you going to feel like you, Wendell Fucking Corliss, made a stupid mistake?”

  Wendell pondered it. “I don’t care,” he said.

  “Seriously? It’s a lot of money.”

  Wendell made a farting noise with his mouth.

  “Come again?” said Marty.

  “Do you know how much money I spent tonight on restaurants?”

  “Including the helicopter?”

  “Sure, include the helicopter.”

  “A million dollars?”

  “No. It was about seven hundred and twenty thousand. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was a million. Let’s say I spent a million dollars tonight so we could have some dong bo pork and a pepperoni pizza.”

  “Which you did not get any of.”

  “Which I did not get any of. Now, let’s say I do that again tomorrow night.”

  “Buy two restaurants?”

  “For a million dollars.”

  “OK.”

  “And then let’s say I do it the next night, and the next, and the next. And I keep doing it.”

  “OK.”

  “Do you know how long it would take me to run out of money? Take a guess.”

  “OK, spending a million a night.” Marty frowned, trying to do some mental calculations, which he was not good at even when he was not baked. “I dunno,” he said, “five years?”

  “Longer.”

  “Ten years.”

  “Longer.”

  “Twenty years?”

  “The answer,” said Wendell, “is just about a hundred years.”

  Marty sat up. “Are you shitting me?”

  “I am not shitting you. I am constipating you.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Shouldn’t that be the opposite of shitting somebody? Constipating them?”

  “I guess it should.”

  “My point is, the money is nothing. It has no material effect whatsoever on my life. It does not matter. What matters is, this was the most fun I’ve had in as long as I can remember. And you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was ridiculous. There was no logical upside to it. Which is extremely uncharacteristic of me. The one principle I’ve lived my life by is: Don’t do anything ridiculous. Always pursue the upside, always avoid the downside. Take risks, but always calculated risks. Everything I have ever done has been calculat
ed. When I was at Harvard, you know what I did?”

  “What?”

  “I studied! I studied all the time so I could get better grades than everybody else, so I could get into Harvard Business School and get better grades than everybody there and get my MBA and go out and make more money than everybody else. You know what I did not do at Harvard?”

  “What?”

  “I never got high. Not once. This was in the early seventies. Everybody got high then. There were people in my dorm who were never not high, as far as I could tell. I walked by their rooms, smelled the pot, heard them playing the same Van Morrison album over and over and over again, and I thought they were idiots. It wasn’t a moral thing. It was a rational calculation. Drugs diminish your mental capacity and distort your sense of reality, and when your mental capacity is diminished, you make foolish decisions.”

  “Like buy a restaurant just to get a pizza delivered.”

  “Exactly. So I never did anything like that. I was extremely disciplined and focused all through college and graduate school. Then I went out and excelled at rational risk taking, and I became very wealthy and influential. I became Wendell Fucking Corliss. A complete prick.”

  “Oh come on. Not a complete prick.”

  “Yes! Complete! Ask anyone who has ever negotiated with me. ‘What a prick,’ they’ll say. And they’ll be right! I am a prick. I am proud of my prickitude. I can out-prick anybody in a business situation. This is the essence of being Wendell Fucking Corliss.”

  “Yeah, but that’s a pretty good thing to be, right? You have a mansion and a jet and a helicopter and probably a giant boat.”

  “Actually, I have several of each of those things.”

  “Right. And you can go anywhere you want in the world and do whatever you want.”

  “True, I can do whatever I want. But in the course of becoming, by discipline and focus and careful calculation, Wendell Fucking Corliss, I have somehow become very limited in my ability to imagine things that I might enjoy doing because I automatically rule out anything that’s irrational or might be viewed as ridiculous. So I end up doing basically the same things that all extremely wealthy people do, and I do them with other extremely wealthy people. I have come to simply assume that only extremely wealthy people are worthy of socializing with me. And you know what I have found?”

  “What?”

  “I have found that extremely wealthy people can be fantastically boring. Not all, but many. Because it turns out that, in most cases, the only thing they’re really good at is getting rich. I’ve been bored to death in some of the most fabulous places on the planet. And yet these are the people I associate with as a matter of policy. May I be frank with you?”

  “Please.”

  “I was standing outside this hotel with the Clarks when you and your friends arrived. Do you remember?”

  “Dimly.”

  “Unless I’m mistaken, all you were wearing at that time was a shirt. Except you were wearing it as pants, with your legs in the sleeves.”

  “Oh yeah. That was Steve’s shirt. My balls kept falling out the neckhole.”

  “That they did. Do you want to know what my initial impression of you was?”

  “I’m guessing not positive.”

  “Correct. I thought you were an idiot, a clown. I was appalled that I, Wendell Fucking Corliss, would be attending the same social event as a repulsive buffoon such as yourself. No offense intended.”

  “None taken.”

  “And I was also appalled when I realized that you were going to be at the rehearsal dinner.”

  “I totally understand.”

  “And you may have noticed that I didn’t say a word to you or your friends until the brownies arrived. And if they hadn’t arrived, I never would have talked to you. I would have ended up talking to Mike Clark about the relative merits of our helicopters. Do you know how many evenings I’ve spent in fabulous places having boring conversations with boring people about helicopters?”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot. But that would have been the topic. That would have been my evening. Instead, thanks to the brownies, I got on . . . I’ve forgotten—is it the choongs or the choongles?”

  “The choongs.”

  “I got on the choongs and I’ve had a very enjoyable time chatting and laughing and noticing things I never would have noticed before and making truly absurd yet strangely pleasurable financial decisions. I believe Greta enjoyed herself, too.”

  “I believe she did.”

  “But here’s the thing. On the one hand, this has been a remarkably pleasant evening. But on the other hand, it has been troubling.”

  “Why troubling?”

  “Because I’m wondering why I have so few evenings this enjoyable. I’m wondering if I didn’t take a wrong turn long ago when I walked self-righteously past the pot smokers’ dormitory door. Maybe instead of walking past, I should have opened the door and gone inside and gotten high and listened to Van Morrison over and over. I’m wondering if I haven’t missed out on a whole lot of life because I’ve always been so busy being Wendell Fucking Corliss.”

  “So you’re saying the door is, like, a metaphor.”

  “Exactly. A metaphor for an opportunity missed. I think I should’ve opened the door.”

  Marty shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Nope what?”

  “Nope, you’re wrong.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I was on the other side of that door.”

  “You went to Harvard? No offense.”

  “None taken. I went to the University of Delaware. But, metaphorically, I was on the other side of that door. I spent the vast majority of my college days high, listening to Phish.”

  “You listened to fish?”

  “It’s a band. They were my Van Morrison. I listened to them all the time and I went to see them whenever I could. What I didn’t do very often was study or attend class because I found that those activities interfered with getting high. After college I continued to get high—a lot. I did manage to get into a shitty law school, where, thanks to my ongoing policy of getting high a lot, I did shittily. There’s no way I will ever pass the bar exam unless they change it to include a lot more questions about World of Warcraft.”

  “World of what?”

  “Warcraft. It’s a video game you play against other people on the Internet. That’s basically what I’m doing with my life. I’m a grown man and I have no job and I live at home with my parents. I have very little money and nowhere to go, so I sit in my parents’ family room and play World of Warcraft online against thirteen-year-old boys and other unemployed loser stoners like myself. And I get excited, sometimes very excited, when I am able to outwit some thirteen-year-old boy. That’s what happens to you when you spend your college days on the other side of the door getting high and listening to Van Morrison or, in my case, Phish.”

  “So you’re saying pot is bad?”

  “Fuck no. Pot is great. It’s the only fun thing I do. I’m just saying I wish that back when you were walking by the door, I heard your footsteps and put down the bong and opened the door and followed you to whatever class you took where you learned to make ginormous piles of money so that now I’d be rich, except maybe not as rich as you because I would have continued to get high but in moderation. So that today I’d be combining the benefits of being able to afford a big house and a jet and a trophy wife, no offense . . .”

  “None taken.”

  “. . . with the benefits of being able, if I was at some fabulous location and some boring wealthy asshole started to talk to me about his helicopter, to tell him to shut the fuck up and let me enjoy the fabulous location, and maybe fire up a doobie. Do you follow me?”

  “Incredibly, I think I do.”

  They both stared at the sky for a minute. Then Wendell said, “Is this profound?”

  “Is what profound?”

  “What we’re discovering here about ourselves. That I would
be happier if I had been less obsessively rational and disciplined and smoked pot more. And you would be happier if you had smoked pot less and been more disciplined in pursuing a career. That each of us would be happier if he were more like the other. Is that profound?”

  Marty thought about that. “No,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we’re high. When you’re high, you’re always thinking you’ve discovered some mind-blowing insight. Then the next day you realize that what you discovered boils down to something pretty obvious, like that the universe is really fucking big. Or something that doesn’t really matter, like that you have way more bacteria cells inside you than actual human cells.”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh yeah, really. It’s a Science Fact. Your body contains like ten times as many bacteria as human cells.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is totally true. Google it, if you don’t believe me.”

  “But if that’s true, what you’re saying is, we’re not really human. I mean, we are, but only a tenth of us is. We’re really just hosts for all these other living things. That’s incredible. We’re not really human. We’re essentially hybrids.”

  “That’s exactly my point.”

  “That we’re essentially hybrids?”

  “No, that you think shit like this is profound. Trust me, tomorrow you’ll be, like, ‘Yeah, OK, so there’s a lot of bacteria inside us. Ho-hum.’ Then you’ll forget about the bacteria and go ahead and order breakfast just like you always do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Nothing will come of it. I’ve had many, many amazing pot insights, including about the bacteria, and every single one of them turned out, upon further review, to be stupid. That’s the thing about pot: It’s fun, but nothing really important ever comes out of it. That’s how come you had all those millions of Grateful Deadheads smoking all that pot and listening to all those endless songs for all those decades and the only tangible result of all that, in the end, was a lot of ugly T-shirts.”

  “So this isn’t profound, this conversation.”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “It’s just us talking.”

  “Nothing wrong with talking.”

  “I wasn’t a prick, right? When I negotiated with Stan and Mr. Woo?”