Howie arrives at her two-bedroom ranch at exactly 6:30. He is not alone. With him is Hugh Harbinger’s Jack Russell. “He asked me to watch Matisse while he was in New York,” Howie says.
As he preheats her oven to accommodate a supermarket pizza, Howie tells Katherine about finding Hugh Harbinger in his yard the previous afternoon, painting little circles of green in a tablet. He tells her how he ripped a piece of clapboard from his house and gave it to the strange man from Parma, so he could take it to New York and make it one of the hottest colors in years. “He’s going to give me half of everything he makes.”
Matisse likes Katherine Hardihood’s little two-bedroom ranch. Likes it fine. Likes the broad-backed chairs. Likes the rubber cat toys lying about. Likes the catty smells. Likes the cat.
The cat, however, does not like the dog. The dog’s sudden and unexpected appearance has thrown Rhubarb off balance, like a bad case of ear mites. After a long back-bending hiss, he has fled to a shoe box in his mistress’ closet.
Howie and Katherine eat the pizza while they watch Jeopardy. As soon as a winner is declared they copulate on the sofa, as is their custom. Later, after watching a PBS show on Australian railroad journeys and eating a bag of Fritos, they retire to the bedroom, not to copulate, but to snuggle and listen to Cleveland’s only big band radio station. And to talk.
“I shouldn’t have ripped that clapboard off my house,” Howie Dornick says, one hand scratching his woman’s bare shoulder, the other scratching Matisse’s belly. “I shouldn’t have painted my house that color either.”
“Sure you should have,” she tells him. “Both things.”
Now Howie, fed and bed and ready for confession, tells her about D. William Aitchbone’s visit while he was hosing the tobacco spit and blueberry pie off the parking lot. He tells her about his fresh threats, how D. William Aitchbone is going to rub his illegitimate nose in the dirty bones of his ancestors. “Bill Aitchbone has not yet begun to fight,” he says.
“And neither have we,” Katherine hears herself saying.
Howie Dornick buries his illegitimate nose into the hollow space just above her collar bone. “No, Katherine, we have yet begun to lose.”
Katherine Hardihood is not the least bothered by his fatalism. Dr. Pirooz Aram’s words are still burning in her brain, as vigorously as the pepperoni burning in her throat. According to the wise old Persian, she has been awakened, transformed and is in love. And whether her man knows it, the two of them are as genetically insane as D. William Aitchbone, and therefore, if they put their minds to it, they can be just as ruthless. “Jiminy Cricket, Howie, where’s your vinegar?”
Howie Dornick allows himself an evil chuckle. “Know what I did? Sprayed him with the hose. Made him jump back and get blueberry on his suit pants.”
Katherine hugs him and fills her lungs with his Frito breath.
They fall asleep.
Matisse goes into the living room, where he finds Rhubarb licking Frito crumbs off the sofa cushions. There is the obligatory growling and hissing, and the mutual suspicious sniffing of both ends, but with so many crumbs to lick, the two kept-beasts quickly make peace and share the bounty.
16
The Lakeshore Limited leaves Cleveland’s humble Amtrak station at 1:36 in the morning. North of the tracks Lake Erie’s black waves are crashing. South of the tracks the city’s skyscrapers are having their wastebaskets emptied. Hugh Harbinger has nothing with him but a chunk of green clapboard, a duffel bag stuffed with wrinkled clothes, and a half-bottle of butter-yellow Solhzac.
Erie 3:07. Buffalo 4:42. Rochester 6:00. Syracuse 7:25. Utica 8:12. Schenectady 9:30. Albany 10:05. Three-plus hours of not toppling into the pewter-blue Hudson River. Penn Station 1:24. Six minutes on a subway platform. Six minutes on a subway train. Buzzy’s garden apartment 2:04. Buzzy’s refrigerator 2:08. Buzzy’s slippery leather couch 2:18. Hugh Harbinger is back in New York, back in The Village, sleeping like a New York baby.
Buzzy shows up at six with a portfolio full of sketches. Charcoals of manly men in Cary Grant suits. Manly men in Gary Cooper suits. Manly men in Ray Milland suits and Jimmy Stewart Suits. “Perfect,” says Hugh Harbinger.
“Do you like the big-ass overcoats?” Buzzy asks. “You said you wanted big-ass overcoats.”
“Fabulous,” says Hugh.
“I am soooo relived,” says Buzzy. “Now show me that Greeeen of yours.”
Hugh Harbinger retrieves his precious chunk of clapboard from the closet.
Buzzy hooks his fingers over his teeth. Then he splays his bespittled fingers across his pounding heart. “Fabulous.”
They rush out to meet Jean Jacques Bistrot at the Peacock. After a round of espressos as rich and thick as river silt, they maneuver the sidewalks to Zulu Lulu. Over baba ghanoush they plot the campaign which they’re certain will, as Hugh Harbinger now says, falling into his color-talk as if he’d never spent those colorless months in exile with Bob and Eleanor Hbracek in Parma, Ohio, “Enrage and engage” marketing vice presidents worldwide.
Jean Jacques Bistrot, the gifted leftist who since fleeing the death squads in his native Haiti has become New York’s most important fashion writer, promises in advance to go gaga over their line of serendipity green business wear. Hugh and Buzzy smile at each other without moving their lips. They knows this is quite a coup. They know Jean Jacques Bistrot sells his soul to very few devils.
Jean Jacques Bistrot confesses that he is “sick to death” of brown and black and gray. He tells them that he’s “sick to death of having nothing new to say fabulous to.” He tells them sight-unseen that he’s certain serendipity green will be “simply fabulous.”
By eleven Hugh Harbinger is copulating with Zee Levant. It has indeed been a fabulous day.
At nine the next morning, Hugh Harbinger is in the office of patent attorney Carl Jablonsky. He knows he can’t protect Howie Dornick’s concoction—you can no more claim ownership of a color than you can claim the oceans—but he can protect the name he gave it. And so serendipity green becomes Serendipity Green®. Carl Jablonsky also drafts a contract giving Howard Allen Dornick half of everything.
At 11:30 Hugh Harbinger takes his chunk of clapboard to his old friend Karl Bice at McDougall & Kline. They small talk until everyone else in the tech department goes to lunch, then run the clapboard through the scanner, letting the firm’s Macintosh do what Hugh Harbinger could not do with his little circles of gouache: decipher Howie’s serendipitous concoction. At 2:15 Hugh Harbinger is on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, at Zildenheim & Pavli, formula in hand, blank check from Zee Levant in his pocket, ordering the proper dye. It takes four days for Zildenheim & Pavli to mix and deliver the dye to Westerman & Klup in Chelsea, where bolts of wool and cotton and hemp are waiting.
Even as the Serendipity Green® dye is soaking into these natural fabrics, Jean Jacques Bistrot is heralding the Second Coming of Hugh Harbinger. His articles praise the new color. His articles praise the suits, the big-ass overcoats. and hats. He uses words like bodacious and unrepentant, apoplectic and scandalous, whoomp and duggy, cool beans and jiggy, and of course he uses fabulous. His articles not only promise a new fashion paradigm, but a new cultural Zeitgeist as well. His articles brazenly recount Hugh Harbinger’s slow descent into clinical depression during the years he was designing his 300-plus shades of black; they recount his miserable, Solhzac-controlled exile at Bob and Eleanor Hbracek’s house in Parma, Ohio; they recount his journey to Tuttwyler for Squaw Days; they recount his serendipitous discovery of the two-story frame on South Mill and his immediate epiphany; and with all the spiritual drama of the King of Kings riding his donkey into Jerusalem for his final showdown with the powers that be, he recounts Hugh Harbinger’s all-night Amtrak ride to New York with his chunk of precious green clapboard.
One of Jean Jacques Bistrot’s nuggets is even selected by Newsweek for its page of pithy and ironic quotations:
“Hugh Harbinger’s 300 shades of black gave individual e
xpression to our generation’s collective narcissism. Now Double H is back from the Ohio hinterlands with a dazzling and disturbing new hue that will force us to shed the snake skins of our angst and admit that we are about as goddamn happy as a person can be.” Fashion writer Jean Jacques Bistrot on colormeister Hugh Harbinger’s latest creation, Serendipity Green®.
By the time Buzzy’s designs are cut and the invitations sent, Serendipity Green® has already piqued the interest of anybody who is anybody in the color world, not only in New York, but in Paris and London and Milan and LA. Even automotive executives in Detroit and Tokyo are intrigued.
September flies by. The trees in Washington Square start dropping their leaves on the chess players. October blows in from Pennsylvania. One month after Hugh Harbinger’s return, two hundred of the world’s most influential marketing, manufacturing and media gurus are trekking into a sweaty old warehouse house in the trendy Meat Packing District. As they enter they are handed tiny flashlights. The warehouse is cold and damp and dark. With the help of their tiny beams, the privileged 200 find the rows of metal folding chairs. Somewhere in the blackness a klezmer band is playing Jewish funeral tunes. Slowly, as the clarinet wails, a wintergreen wind mixes with the faint stench of beef. Green laser beams begin to slice. Then a great square of flood lights, everyone of them green, explodes into the eyes of the privileged 200. The klezmer band, now joined by a shirtless steel drum band from Trinidad and Tobago, breaks into a throbbing rendition of Kermit the Frog’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Three men in black business suits appear on the catwalk. Three women in green spider suits—a green no one has ever seen—bungee jump from the high ceiling and squeeze the three men in black until the catwalk is dripping with what for all the world looks like green blood. The wintergreen wind reaches gale force. Fluorescent ceiling lights pop on. For the first time the privileged 200 realizes they are sitting on green chairs in a warehouse with a green floor and green walls and a green ceiling—the green a green none of them has ever imagined. Now three meat hooks descend from the ceiling and the spider women run them through the backs of the three bloodless men in black. As they are hauled into the rafters, a choir of green-robed Gregorian monks wind through the aisles, chanting “Serendipity Green®” over and over while the Klezmers and steel drummers maintain a blistering tempo. Suddenly, New York’s currently most famous transvestite, Pippy Monroe, flutters down the catwalk in a shimmering Serendipity Green® gown scooping handfuls of green M&Ms into the crowd from a Serendipity Green® basket. “Yo-yo-yo, everybody,” she sings out. “Y’all ready for Serendipity Green®? Serendipity Greeeen®? Serendipity Greeeeeeeen®? Ahhhh can’t heeeeaaaar y’all!” The privileged 200—the most jaded gaggle of fashion and manufacturing elites ever assembled—screams “Yes!” Begs “Yes!” Demands “Yes!” And so in this painful cacophony of sound and light and heat and orgasmic anticipation, amidst the dueling scent of wintergreen and beef, the first Wall Street type marches manfully down the catwalk in a three-piece Cary Grant suit of Serendipity Green®.
There is a fabulous gasp.
Howie Dornick has been watching Matisse for two weeks when a contract arrives in the mail from Hugh Harbinger. There’s no small print in this contact to worry about, or see a lawyer about. In the clearest English it simply guarantees one Howard Allen Dornick of 185 South Mill St., Tuttwyler, Ohio, fifty percent of all royalties derived from the licensing of the color therein known as Serendipity Green®. Embarrassed that he has consented to such a foolhardy agreement, he signs the contract as soon as he finds a ballpoint. He stuffs it into the self-addressed stamped envelope his new partner has provided him. With Matisse trotting alongside on his leash, he walks the envelope to the out-of-town drop-off box outside the Post Office.
The next morning he drives the village truck to the old Aitchbone family farm on Three Fish Creek Road, to fulfill an even more foolhardy agreement—to dig up and re-plant Bill Aitchbone’s ancestors at seventy-five bucks a pop. “Why in thee hell am I doing this?” he yells at himself as he drives. “Why in thee hell?”
He reaches the Aitchbone farm much too soon. The house and barn have been flattened by bulldozers. A huge plywood sign has been planted: SETTLER’S KNOB. EXQUISITE EXECUTIVE HOMES. He drives past the earthmovers waiting to scrape the precious topsoil off the land, drives all the way to the hill overlooking the creek, where the village’s faded yellow backhoe and a stack of inexpensive coffins are waiting. He crawls over the wrought iron fence and climbs aboard the backhoe. The tractor, with its great digging claw poised like the tail of a giant scorpion, starts up on the first try. Diesel fumes spoil the crisp October air.
As skillfully as Artie Brown drove that Seabee bulldozer into the Japanese-infested Matanikau River, Howie Dornick sends the backhoe’s claw into the six feet of good earth atop the bones of Henry and Blanche Aitchbone. Little by little he peels away the dirt until he finds traces of rotted wood. Now comes the hard part, the shovel work. It’s noon before he has Henry and Blanche in their new caskets. With chains and skill he lifts them into the truck. Next he lifts their old weather-worn headstone into the truck. He drives to the Tuttwyler Village Cemetery where, with only a pair of squirrels as witnesses, he lowers Henry and Blanche into their new eternal resting place. When they are covered with dirt and their headstone resting firmly atop them, he goes back to the farm for another Aitchbone or two.
In three days Howie Dornick digs up seven of D. William Aitchbone’s ancestors. He is accustomed to the sight of dirty old bones by now, accustomed to handling skulls with gold-plugged teeth. He is accustomed to his recurring dream of opening a rotting box and finding the decaying bodies of Artie Brown and Patsy Dornick copulating like there is no tomorrow.
On the fourth day the backhoe eats into the dirt over one Seth Aitchbone. Only four feet down the claw strikes bone. “Well, that’s not right,” Howie Dornick says. He jumps off the backhoe to remove the yellowy femur dangling from the claw. What he finds in the hole sends him driving like a madman into Tuttwyler, to the Tuttwyler Branch of the Wyssock County Library, to the desk of branch librarian Katherine Hardihood who is completing a report to the board on how many children were caught looking at pornography on the Internet the previous month. It will be a short report, there having been only one offender, Darren Frost Jr., son of Squaw Days cupcake and Christian crusader Darren Frost Sr.
Howie does not let his woman complete the report, short as it is. He drives her back to the Aitchbone farm and the bones only four feet down. Katherine Hardihood crawls into the hole and like an ambidextrous Hamlet lifts two dirt- and worm-filled skulls high into the bluer-than-blue October sky. “Jiminy Cricket,” she says.
By Halloween Hugh Harbinger has signed two dozen licensing agreements. By Thanksgiving week investment bankers and stock brokers are showing up at work in Serendipity Green® suits, checking their Serendipity Green® hats and big-ass Serendipity Green® overcoats at the city’s toniest restaurants. Posh Christmas parties on both coasts are wall-to-wall with men and women in Serendipity Green®. Hugh, wearing a Serendipity Green® Santa suit appears on the cover of GQ. That same week Newsweek puts him buck naked in a Serendipity Green® wheelbarrow full of fifty dollar bills. Time doesn’t put him on the cover—that honor goes to Yobisch Podka who is about to perform his commissioned symphony at the ceremony celebrating the completed restoration of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling frescoes—but there is a three-page feature inside documenting the color world’s jealousy over the Second Coming of Hugh Harbinger: FABULOUSLY GREEN WITH ENVY the headline reads. A photograph of a perplexed Howie Dornick shoveling snow outside his Serendipity Green® two-story frame accompanies the story. Just a week before Christmas, the nation’s Gap stores are piled high with Serendipity Green® socks, Serendipity Green® jockey shorts, Serendipity Green® polo shirts, even stacks of Serendipity Green® chinos. On December 23, Hugh flies back to Cleveland to claim Matisse and hand Howie Dornick a prototype Serendipity Green® food blender stuffed with very real r
oyalty checks. “This is just the beginning,” he tells his partner as they sip a couple of brown beers.
And it is just the beginning. On New Year’s Eve Dick Clark broadcasts from Times Square wearing a big-ass Serendipity Green® overcoat. A Serendipity Green® Goodyear blimp flies over Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium on Superbowl Sunday. On January 3, both Jay Leno and David Letterman tell their first Serendipity Green® jokes. On January 6, the President of the United States wears a Serendipity Green® necktie while welcoming the prime minister of Mozambique to the White House. On January 8, Prince Charles attends a Yobisch Podka concert at The Albert Hall wearing a Serendipity Green® tuxedo. On January 11, The Today Show unveils its new Serendipity Green® couch. On January 12, Oprah Winfrey wears a Serendipity Green® pantsuit for her interview with Hugh Harbinger. On January 17, PBS viewers watch the hosts of This Old House slather Serendipity Green® paint on a newly restored Queen Anne in Vicksburg, Mississippi. On January 23, Hugh sends Howie Dornick a Serendipity Green® bread maker stuffed with more royalty checks. On January 27, the first copycat color debuts, assuring Hugh Harbinger that his comeback is complete; Serenity Green the manufacturer of plastic raincoats calls it. On February 1, Sixty Minutes correspondent Carolyn Carlucci-Plank profiles a village maintenance engineer from Tuttwyler, Ohio, named Howie Dornick.
Carlucci-Plank: “You’re father was a war hero.”
Dornick: “He hobbled six miles.”
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