Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what he was thinking when he tried to do spinal surgery through my gut.”

  “Sorry about distracting you out there but I didn’t want to have sex with a hood ornament.”

  A bottle of champagne was on ice alongside a cart appointed with elegant silver dining trays. Lila had tied her bath towel the way women in forties movies did, knotting it just above the cleavage point. She had slender shoulders and a long elegant neck. She had reapplied her makeup and her hair was slicked back with a glossy gel that made her look sexy as Winona Ryder. Stein took the scene in with some bemusement.

  “What is all this? Did you call room service?”

  “You make it sound like a war crime.”

  “It’s an indulgence.”

  “It’s an amenity, Stein. I’m hungry! If we’re not going to sleep together, then at least I get to eat. I don’t think personal comfort is a crime against nature. I know I live in what a lot of people would call luxury. I’ve been lucky, and I don’t think this makes me heartless. But I do believe I’m entitled to eat well. And I sincerely hope I’m not fucking up the ozone layer, but I’m not going to be the only person in Palm Springs not to use air conditioning.”

  She turned the switch back on that Stein had turned off and patted the cushion of the sofa alongside her for him to sit down. “You look so forlorn. Do you hate being stuck here with me?”

  “I just wonder if I’m doing anyone any good,” he sighed and plopped himself down

  “You just solved a big case.”

  “It’s shampoo. Who gives a shit?” He sighed out one last deep pocket of air that even Roland Dupuis’ blow to his guts hadn’t dislodged. “Nicholette Bradley, the girl who died. I could have prevented it.”

  “Stein, how?”

  He realized that Lila had no idea what had happened last night after he left her at the warehouse. She listened now to the events unfold like she was hearing Alice in Wonderland for the first time. “Is any part of that really true? You know I believe anything you tell me.”

  He nodded with rueful weariness that it was all true. “I just don’t know what to do next.” She kneaded his neck and shoulders. “Thanks. That feels good.” His chin dropped toward his chest. “Nothing I do changes anything for the better. Nicholette. Angie. You, for that matter.”

  She resisted the urge to follow up on ‘you for that matter,’ and asked what the matter was with Angie.

  “She’s always so angry at me. For things I did. For things I didn’t do. For existing.”

  Lila got up onto her knees for better leverage. Her fingers probed deep into his back and knotted shoulder muscles. Her chin was close to his ear. “Listen to me. Number one, your daughter is a bright, sensitive, emotionally mature young woman.”

  “This is Angie we’re talking about?”

  “All of my friends have teenagers that are either in rehab or should be in rehab. They drink, they shoplift, they do drugs, they’re having sex.”

  “You’re telling me this to make me feel better?”

  “I’m saying you have a good kid. At this age, derision is the purest expression of love. And you are its legitimate target. If she thinks she has no effect on you, then later when adolescence is over and she rejoins the human race, she’ll always doubt her power. She’ll choose the wrong men to test herself. She’ll be hurt and disillusioned and she’ll blame you for everything that went wrong in her life because you didn’t accept her when she was horrid to you.”

  “So the lesson is to be grateful that she’s abusing me?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What would I do without you?”

  The bath towel came not quite down to her knees. Her legs were tanned and waxed. The champagne was disabling her inhibitions. “It wouldn’t take a Boy Scout to untie this knot.”

  “Lila, you know we shouldn’t.”

  “What are we saving up for? We die in the end anyway.”

  “I do love you, you know that.”

  “Yes,” she said with bored indulgence. “You’re just not in love. As if you had a clue.”

  “Do you think I’m afraid to fall in love?”

  “Stein, you’re afraid to fall into giving a shit.”

  “You know what would happen if we slept together?”

  “Yes, I’d be thoroughly addicted and ruined for other men.” With sweet humor she turned him to face the full-length mirror. “Look at yourself! Do you think you’re some exotic rodeo boy who has to warn women they may get hurt? You’re a balding, paunchy, fifty-year-old, divorced single parent. You drive a Camry. You got a birthday card from AARP. You’re from the demographic group called normal. Get over it.”

  “Maybe I’m just worried I’ll disappoint you.”

  She turned off the light.

  “Lila-”

  “Don’t think, Stein. It takes you to bad places.” She let the towel drop.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Lila yelled through the door. “If it’s room service, come back later.”

  There was another knock. This time more insistent. Stein disengaged from Lila and went to the door. The man who stood in the threshold was definitely not the room service waiter.

  “Well, well,” said Stein.

  “Who is it?” Lila asked.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Stein berated the visitor. “I called your hotel half a dozen times. They don’t have any Doctor Schwimmer registered there.”

  “I’ve heard from our mutual friend,” Schwimmer said.

  “Goodpasture?”

  Schwimmer looked pointedly at Lila, meaning they shouldn’t talk in front of her.

  “There’s nothing she wouldn’t wring out of me in five minutes. You may as well say what you have to say.”

  “He’s in Amsterdam. He needs you to fly there right now.”

  “Now?” Stein drew his head back and shook it for ironic effect. “Amsterdam, Holland?”

  “There isn’t time for burlesque reaction,” Schwimmer said in his annoying, humorless way. “Are you on the bus or off?”

  THIRTEEN

  The Klm Royal Dutch passenger jet rose up off the tarmac at LAX, banked over the Pacific, and established its flight plan that would take it across Canada, Newfoundland, the North Atlantic, then down over Western Europe into Amsterdam. The aircraft weighed seven hundred thousand poundsat take off, carried forty-eight thousand gallons of fuel and consumed four gallons per each mile during its eleven-hour flight. There were three hundred eighty-seven pillows and blankets, six tons of food and equipment, three hundred and ninety-one frozen meals. Thirteen liters of hard liquor had been loaded aboard plus two hundred forty-three liters of wine and beer, sixty-seven of tea and eighty-four liters of coffee. The captain was Jan Verheoff. The film was Jumanji. Stein did not watch it.

  He thought that he had to be insane to be flying a quarter of the way around the world on a whim. At first he had flatly refused. Schwimmer had not begged or cajoled or offered the crown to Caesar a third or second time. He had shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge Stein’s response was neither a surprise to him nor a matter of much importance but rather a diplomatic courtesy that had to be observed before putting the real plan into motion. Stein had to follow him down the hall through the lobby and into the parking lot to get a reaction. “You put a Stop Payment on my check? You disappear? You don’t tell me one goddamn thing that you know. Then you expect me to fly across the universe because you say he says he wants me there? This is bullshit!” In the end, with all of Stein’s ranting and railing, it was obvious to anyone half-listening that he already knew he was going.

  Lila had risen to the occasion like a friend. Like a really good friend. Like- he hated to acknowledge it because it made him feel like he was taking advantage of her or squandering a good thing-like a steady, solid committed long-term life companion. She made the drive back to Los Angeles utterly guilt-free, devoid of complaint, knowing not to ask for any more information than she was gi
ven.

  Once back at Stein’s she had packed a suitcase for him while he tried to find his passport. She had made a list of things she would take care of, which included collecting his mail, taking care of Watson and providing a contingency plan for Angie to stay at her house in case Stein was detained in Holland. She even headed off what appeared from his facial expression-tilted head, soft smile of wonderment-was going to be a sentimental declaration from Stein. “In moments like this,” she said, “love is better than being in love.” Stein agreed and loved her more for knowing that any declaration he made would have come out of a moment of weakness, and would be enforceable maybe legally but not in any way that really mattered. The practical side of her added, “Of course how many moments like this are there?”

  Dr. Alton Schwimmer’s social affect had undergone no miraculous conversion now that he and Stein were officially allies. He remained dour and irascible. He had dispensed information in the tiniest doses, as if it were a precious commodity that needed to be husbanded over a long winter. Stein had still been unable to pry a gramsworth of new information from him-just that everything would be made clear when he arrived. He had given Stein two envelopes containing small quantities of Dutch currency and the telephone number of a taxi whose driver would be expecting Stein’s call and who would know where to take him.

  “You’re still acting like I’m the enemy,” Stein groused. Schwimmer looked for a moment like he was going to respond but dismissed the thought.

  Six hours after take-off with the plane racing over the Atlantic at five-hundred miles per hour in pursuit of tomorrow, most of the passengers were asleep, their bodies Salvidor Dali’d into surreal fluid shapes dangling over the armrests or contorted against a shaded window. Stein’s shade was up. He couldn’t sleep. He watched an earlobe of moon that hung outside the window nestled between underlit clouds.

  Stein hadn’t anticipated the strength of the feelings his returning to Amsterdam would engender. He had found something there that had defined his life. The sixties had happened to him there. In Amsterdam. When migrating hippies were shunned by most European cities as deterrents to tourism Amsterdam welcomed them. The Dutch were cool people. While they shared the Germans’ Teutonic love for order and cleanliness, they possessed a rogue chromosome in the deep end of their gene pool that gave them a goofy sense of humor in place of the need to exterminate people. Living below sea level must have taught them the futility of legislating against nature. Every night in Dam Square, sleeping bags opened out from the center fountain to the edge of the square like a giant mandala. The police were not concerned by the sounds of singing and guitars, the commingling bodies or the wafting aromas of Acapulco Gold, or the soft, sweet, orange hash from Lebanon, or the hard black, bricks from Afghanistan. It was there that he became Stein. All the goofy antics of the time, which for most people was a costume they put on for a while and then, after Stein went back to being their real selves. For Stein it was his life.

  In the Autumn of ‘69, after Woodstock, after the moon walk, after Chappaquiddick, after Helter Skelter, either by coincidence or through a preordained Harmonic Convergence, Stein and Winston and five or six of their buddies had found themselves in Amsterdam, each of them happening to have with him a bud of the best weed they had smoked that year. Sitting in lofty judgment like the World Court of Cannabis, they awarded each other prizes for best in show. The following year without any of them mentioning it, leaving it in the hands of the universe to decide if it would become a tradition, they all convened again. Plus a few friends.

  The year after that a hundred people showed up. This was no Woodstock II. There was no promotion. No hype. The people who knew just knew. They came with buds of the best weed they had found. People stayed high for record amounts of time. Prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolates were consumed. Contests evolved with gonzo prizes. An emperor was crowned. The crown was smoked. They knew with absolute certainty that the changes they were making in the world would last forever, that this was merely the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and that they were the first generation that would never grow old.

  Thirty years later, now at the dawn of the false millennium, the festival had become so corrupted and commercialized, so mainstream and institutional it was like Disney Times Square. According to the brochure in the airline seat pocket, forty coffee houses were entered in this year’s competition. There were more than six hundred judges. Morley Safer, for God’s sake, was doing a segment on it for 60 Minutes.

  He pictured Hillary in those days, dressed in her peasant blouse and perpetual smile. They were uncorrupted embryos, cells in the hippie jet stream that wafted down over Spain to Morocco, east across the Greek islands and Turkey through the Hindu Kush to Katmandu. “A long way to go for a shortcut to Enlightenment,” the people who did not go had scoffed. Stein and Hillary had been inseparable, revolving around each other like twin stars. It bewildered Stein now to wonder where all that heat and fire between them had gone.

  He had tried several times to explain to Angie why he and her mother had gotten divorced, what had gone wrong. But he could describe it only in metaphors about adjacent raindrops on opposite side of the Continental Divide or comets whose orbits just touched for a brief moment on their ways to opposite sides of the Galaxy. But none of this explained to her why people married, had children, and then broke each other’s hearts.

  Stein hadn’t slept in days but his mind was too wired to surrender now. Lila had told him it was good for his circulation to walk while flying. So he took an excursion up the aisle to the back end of the plane. A cute, dark-haired flight attendant had taken her shoes off and was curled up in a window seat. Her lapel button said “Jana.” She patted the seat alongside her and invited him to sit down. “You are coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup?” she asked, though it was more of a friendly presumption of fact than a question.

  “Why would you think that?” he flirted. “I’m a respectable citizen.” He waited for her to laugh at the word ‘respectable,’ as an acknowledgment of how anti-establishment he was sure he looked. “I’m kidding,” he had to say, and attributed her gaffe to the language barrier

  “You American lawyers like to pretend to be radicals,” she said

  “You think I’m a lawyer? Oh, man! That hurts.” He played up the pouting.

  “So you are not a lawyer.”

  “The exact opposite of a lawyer.” Whatever in the hell that meant. He took his shoes off and brazenly pulled some of her blanket over his feet.

  “Are you high already?” she scolded. “And you don’t offer me any?

  “After we land that might be arranged.”

  She rubbed the ball of her foot against his leg and Stein began thinking of the mile-high club and converting feet to meters but the movement came in response to an announcment in Dutch over the intercom.

  “That means me,” Jana said. She extracted those lithe limbs from the blanket. She nodded that she’d be back soon but Stein doubted it. His thoughts became more focused as preparations began for their descent into Schipol Airport. He knew that a long delayed, long avoided moment of truth was approaching that would define what kind of a man he had grown into. In protesting the Vietnam War he had risked the bite of tear gas and Billy club. Yes, he had led protests. Yes, he had hunger-struck, yes, he had draft-resisted, Yes he had bedeviled authority, exposed hypocrisy; all of which were admirable. But he had not fought. He had not faced the possibility of death. He had been, for all of his bravado, for all of his audacious demonstrations, as safe and immune to the infliction of real harm as any pentagon general.

  He had no idea now what awaited him on the ground; whether Goodpasture had tracked Nicholette’s killers to Amsterdam or fled here from them. If her killers were here and meant to do danger to Brian, it meant that Stein would be in their crosshairs as well. But he couldn’t think of it that way. He had to think that they would be in his. That he was the hunter and they were the prey. He wondered how he would perform under life-
and-death pressure. He pictured himself as a high diver wondering as he peered down at the distant water from the top of the cliff, whether he was still as good as he once had been, and thinking, perhaps foolishly, that yes, yes he just might be.

  Captain Verheoff set the 747 down on runway number three. The passengers were thanked for flying KLM and informed that the local time was some number of hundred hours and that there were very, very few degrees Celsius outside. Stein looked at his watch but it was a meaningless gesture. After an eleven-hour flight across nine time zones and not having slept in God knows how long, his biorhythms were so askew he could have laid eggs. In the arrival terminal he telephoned the number for the taxi that Schwimmer had given him. Rather he had someone do it for him.

  He sailed through Customs. The inattention to him by authority was becoming irksome. Didn’t they know who he once was, for God’s sake? Jana, the stewardess, waved a cheery goodbye as she strode across the lobby, linked at the elbow to Captain Verheoff. The pilot looked just like his voice: tall, grey and surgeonly in his uniform, but with a slightly odd walk like he was trying to shake something out of his undershorts.

  Stein potted a taxi driver in the lobby holding a handwritten sign bearing his name transliterated into Shtejne but close enough. He pushed through the revolving door and was hit by a blast of air so cold it had to be a mistake. He batted his chest with his crossed arms as he ran to the car and got inside. “No coat?” the driver said.

  “I live in L.A. We forget that the rest of the world has weather.”

  The road layout into town followed the route of the concentric circles of century-old canals. Trams and bicycles were the primary vehicles. Cars had to create their own lanes, which they did with kaleidoscopic mayhem. It was hard to tell in the diffused, weak winter light but Stein guessed it was probably around noon. They chugged along the banks of the Singelgracht Canal passing the Rijksmuseum, which held nearly all of Van Gogh’s paintings. They took a hard right across the bridge at Nieuwe Speigelstraat, which ran smack into the one-way Prinsengracht and turned into the flow of traffic that proceeded onto the broad Leidseplein, penetrating into the inner circle of the city.