Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Frank W. Dixon has sold his third novel, Dead on Arrival, for an undisclosed sum to TriHo Books. Toby Kwimper, who edited Dixon’s Plague Boy and Love: A Horror Story, will edit. Reportedly the deal is in the high six figures, although neither Mr. Dixon nor anyone at TriHo would confirm. Calls to Ross F. Carpenter, Mr. Dixon’s new agent, were not returned. Mr. Kwimper described Dead on Arrival as “a coruscating, blistering, brilliant and disturbingly revelatory journey into the dark, twisted, wounded, damaged psyche of the Modern American Male.” Several movie companies have approached Mr. Carpenter for rights and a seven-figure deal is said to be imminent.

  I lived for such a moment. No, not the book finally getting published—and at this point, the undisclosed sum could be a dime—but for the moment when Clint hanged himself in his office by either his Hermès tie or his own ponytail, the copy of Publishers Weekly still rolled up in his hands. He had let me dangle for months . . . now it was time for him to do some dangling.

  One day an archaeologist will stumble upon some scrawls in an Eritrean cave or some cuneiform script on thirty-sixth-century B.C. tablets and publish a scholarly paper that proves what I’ve long suspected: writing was invented not as a way to communicate, record history, or effect commerce, but as a way to settle scores with enemies. A club to the head is great but it only kills once—you embarrass someone in print, it lasts forever. Hemingway humiliated the writer Harold Loeb in print while Loeb was alive, transforming him into the ex-pat Jewish shitheel Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. It was a devastating drubbing, although Hemingway made one minor miscalculation: had he not used Loeb as the basis for an unforgettable fictional character, not one single person today, including me, would remember who the hell Harold Loeb was. James Joyce exacted revenge on his old roomie Oliver St. John Gogarty by turning him into Buck Mulligan—once again keeping a mediocrity alive for eternity—and centuries ago, some Roman guy stole Ovid’s girlfriend (or his boyfriend) and so what does Ovid do? He grabs a pen and some papyrus and turns the guy into a hyacinth.

  I don’t have that kind of courage, imagination, or talent. Disgracing a living person in print is like blowing a man’s brains out face to face and keeping both your eyes open. But getting back at Clint Reno in the above fashion was as tidy a thing as pressing SEND on my cell phone and blowing him up from a hundred miles away.

  So it was too bad that Toby never responded to my e-mail.

  It was during another stretch of folding and daydreaming when Harry sent me an e-mail, asking if I wanted to cowrite the script. He had two weeks free around Labor Day, he told me. I e-mailed him back and told him I loved his idea but had plans to go with Cynthia to Empyrean Island then. I’ll think about it, though, I wrote. And I did.

  He e-mailed me back the next day and attached a file containing a vague scene-by-scene breakdown for the screenplay. “I NEED YOUR HELP WITH THIS!” he added.

  I read the scenario and saw what was good and what wasn’t and what might be done with it. I opened a page in Word and gazed for a minute into the terrifyingly empty blankness of it. It really did make me shudder from head to toe. I cut and pasted Harry’s scenario in. It was now mine to tinker with . . . all I had to was add or subtract a few words, jumble things around, throw in some ideas. I stared at the screen, then played a hand of poker. I went back to the scenario, read it two times and even giggled when I thought of some dialogue and plot twists I’d throw in. Maybe, just maybe, this time something that Harry and I wrote would work! We were a lot older, a lot wiser, a lot less stoned, and now he knew Hollywood pooh-bahs. I played two more hands of poker, did some chatting, then went back. I read it again and thought of which actors would be great for which roles and envisioned them saying the lines that I would write. Leonardo DiCaprio, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Giamatti, Keira Knightly, Jake and Brad and Cate . . . the usual gang. Hey maybe, if Harry and I cranked this out quickly, I could get it to Pacer Burton and he could make Plague and then do this! What a one-two punch that would be! I played five more hands of poker, then another five. Then I closed the file without saving it and e-mailed Harry and told him that I’d look at the scenario and get back to him.

  “Let me know soon,” he wrote me only seconds later, “okay?”

  I promised him I would.

  The words on the Nirvana Resort & Casino Web site describe the place better than I can: azure, snorkeling, turquoise, white sand, tropical breezes, couples, spa, lazy river pool, casino, relax, sun, frozen drinks, time stands still. Empyrean Island is a forty-minute ferry ride from Nassau; the ferry docks inside the hotel lobby. The Nirvana is the island, from what I could tell: the property occupies 90 percent of the land. You can walk around the island, on the beach, in two hours and never be out of the shadow of the hotel itself. The Nirvana’s three immense towers are connected by bridges, and each bridge—for the benefit of the incredibly lazy—contains a moving sidewalk (the tread is made of clear fiberglass, and right beneath your feet swim hundreds of dazzling tropical fish). The theme seems to be Indian and Zen (there was a delicatessen in Tower 3 called Koan’s Delhi) with some West Indian thrown in. The hotel staff, man and woman alike, wear russet brown silk shirts with Nehru collars but also Bermuda shorts, and the music playing throughout is a jingly mix of sitar and ska. The logo, an Eastern-looking cursive N escaping from a circle, is everywhere—on the floors, the linens, the china, the staff uniforms, the casino chips.

  (The last time I’d been in the Caribbean was when I had to join fifty of my coworkers at an off-site retreat five years before. We were led in trust exercises, which included rock climbing (I passed on that) and cliff diving (no way). During one drill I was supposed to catch a coworker named Mimi, an assistant V.P. in her twenties, in my arms as she fell backward. Our cheery Facilitator counted to three and Mimi fell. I instantly stepped back and let her fall to the ground. “Why did you do that?!” the astounded Facilitator asked me as Mimi dusted the sand off her red polka-dot bikini. “Because to be honest,” I told him, “I just don’t trust her.”)

  Cynthia and I arrived at the Nirvana a day before the Artsy Painter Clan was to arrive, but I was already nervous. Cynthia noticed it, while she and I relaxed by one of the hotel’s three enormous pools (she relaxed, I didn’t), while we ate an enormous and only so-so seafood dinner, while we sat and played blackjack together in the evening and shot craps after that.

  “So what’s wrong?” she asked.

  We were walking along the white sand beach. The moon was enormous, the sky was swimming with stars, the sea was silent. It was summer and midnight and 99 degrees.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Because something’s wrong. I can tell.”

  Ten years of marriage, three years of dating before that. She knew me well.

  “I don’t know . . . I just don’t feel right.”

  “It’s that Trilogy,” she said, “isn’t it?”

  Okay, so maybe she didn’t know me that well.

  We went back to our room, which looked onto two of the Nirvana’s pools and the Caribbean beyond. I’d lost $250 at blackjack and won it back at craps. It took three hours. A hell of a lot of work for not that much profit or loss.

  So back in the room when Cynthia went to bed I turned on my laptop and logged on.

  I played three hands in High and, after folding the first two, won two grand with the last.

  Then I opened up an e-mail from Artsy Painter Gal.

  “Hope to see you tomorrow,” it said. “I’m kissing you long and deep in the pool now under a cool waterfall pouring all over us. We’re making the water steam.”

  “What are you doing?” Wifey asked me groggily.

  “You think the Muses,” I said, “stop singing to me just because we’re on an island? They have found, can find, and will find me anywhere.”

  When I woke up the next morning I was so panic-stricken that I went to the bathroom, got on my knees and dry-heaved violently. In her Nirvana terry cloth robe and fluffy Nirvana slippers, Cynthia put a cold
wet towel on my forehead. I clutched my belly and gagged up nothing but wave after wave of balmy air.

  “It must have been that seafood,” Cynthia said. “I thought the tuna tasted gamy.”

  APG and family wouldn’t be arriving until seven that night, but throughout the day I kept looking at my watch every five minutes, which Cynthia noticed.

  “Do you have to be somewhere?” she asked poolside.

  “Oh, it’s just a habit,” I said.

  “A habit? You don’t ever have to be anywhere anymore!”

  I tried everything I could to ease my nerves: swimming in the pool, wading in the sea, walking on the beach, almost dying on one of the hotel fitness center’s Stairmasters, drinking four margaritas. I went to the barber shop and got another short haircut (the Martin Guerre bangs were now officially all gone) . . . it seemed like I was in the chair three hours. In this glitzy tropical paradise, time, as the hotel’s Web site guaranteed, did not stand still—it moved backward. When at one point Cynthia suggested, “Maybe you should go upstairs and write,” I couldn’t even eke out a grunt.

  “Let’s try the water slide?” she suggested. “That might be fun.”

  Wifey and I arose from our poolside chairs, now drenched with a tangy blend of sweat, suntan lotion, and tequila, and walked to the top of the slide, where we deftly cut in front of a few kids. Cynthia went first, then it was my turn. I slithered down and made a large loud splash when I hit the water. It was fun and for ten seconds I forgot that in a few hours my online poker-playin’ mistress would be somewhere on the premises, then suddenly I was confronted by one of the hotel’s lifeguards, a dark Adonis in a yellow bathing suit not much larger than a Band-aid, who told me, “Sir, I don’t think you should be using the water slide.” My impact had created too large a splash.

  We ate dinner at six o’clock at one of the Nirvana’s fifteen restaurants. The menu informed us the beef was Black Angus and was aged for so many days, that the lobsters were flown in live from Maine, and that all the produce was local. (Unless they were growing lettuce on the roofs of the hotel, that didn’t seem possible.) Cynthia had salad and prime rib, a baked potato and string beans, I didn’t touch whatever it was I ordered.

  I was too scared to go into the casino that night. APG might be there. I was scared to leave the room, but when Wifey suggested another walk on the beach I went. The water was warm but my bare feet stayed cold. Walking back to the hotel—all 5,800 rooms—I saw room lights twinkling in Tower 1 and wondered if one them was APG’s.

  When we got back into the hotel complex—the lobby alone is three acres—Wifey asked if I wanted to go to the casino and I said no. There was a good chance, I knew, that Artsy might be there. “We’ll spot each other,” she had written me, “at one of the pools or in the casino.”

  So I didn’t see APG that night.

  But we did have contact. She had brought her laptop, too. At 1 a.m., while Wifey slept and hugged a Nirvana pillow (it was the size of Santa’s toy sack for a family of five), I logged on to the Galaxy. There she was, in a room at a table by herself. Her avatar presently was the Jayne Mansfield/Lady Godiva blonde; I occupied the body of the suave James Bond dude.

  Artsy Painter Gal: I have attained Nirvana. You’re here too, right?

  Chip Zero: I’m here.

  Artsy Painter Gal: Tower 1?

  Chip Zero: Tower 1.

  Artsy Painter Gal: Room #? You must tell me or die, Mr. Bond!!

  Chip Zero: 1022. You?

  Artsy Painter Gal: OMG.

  There was a thud right over my head.

  Artsy Painter Gal: That was my suitcase! We’re in 1122! I’m on top of you, baby. Hope it feels good. So tomorrow, okay?

  Chip Zero: Okay (gulp).

  Again we kept it vague: one of the pools, the casino, a bar, a restaurant. She tried to pin me down to an exact place at an exact time but I refused to commit.

  The next day I was even more of a wreck. Every time a new person arrived at the pool my stomach went sour. Half of the people at the pool were women, two thirds of those were with men, a third of those were with kids. APG had salt-and-pepper hair, she’d told me—“a lot more pepper than salt”—and these days no more resembled a young Joan Collins than I did. “But I’m still in pretty decent shape for my age,” she added. She had told me she’d wear a shiny red maillot on the first day at the pool. Thinking it would be suspicious to ask Wife out of the blue, “Hey, what’s a maillot look like?” I found a few examples online. On APG’s first full day, there were eight women in red maillots at the pool, four with what could be construed as salt and pepper hair . . . but none that could be said to be in “pretty decent shape” for their ages.

  I couldn’t eat yet couldn’t keep anything down. This time my heaving wasn’t dry.

  Maybe I was throwing up Cynthia’s prime ribs and string beans vicariously.

  “Should we go back home?” Wifey offered. We could end the trip and catch an earlier flight, she suggested. I shook my head and told her I’d gut it out.

  In the late afternoon, while Wifey was at the spa getting an oatmeal and aloe-vera enema and having her eyebrows reorganized, I logged on to the Galaxy. APG wasn’t on but I saw a new player named Hibernian Hottie sitting by herself and playing as the slinky Dragon Lady. I played a hand and she began talking to me. I lost, on purpose, then won the next. Hibernian told me, “I’m so hot that if you saw me your screen would melt.” I won, she won, we folded a few hands, I won, she told me she was playing with her enormous tits. I said, “Oh, okay,” then she said: “You turd! It’s me! Second Gunman! I’ve been playing as a woman for 3 days and I’ve been cleaning up too!” I told him, “I’m gonna kill you, you transvestite arsehole!” and he said, “Well, you’re gonna get the chance to cuz I’m coming to New York in a few weeks.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t know how I felt about that. These fake people whose real money I was taking and was spending all my time with were actually real people, but maybe it was better if they weren’t.

  After dinner that night—I forced myself to eat a quarter of a hamburger—and after chasing a Xanax with a double-shot of Pepto-Bismol, I went down to the casino. “I’ll be wearing,” APG had e-mailed me, “a tight black dress and red do-me pumps.”

  I played blackjack—sitting down concealed my burgeoning paunch better than standing at a dice table—and after two hours broke even. How, I don’t know . . . I wasn’t paying attention. There were too many women in black dresses and red pumps to count, but I did tally ten women with salt-and-pepper hair in black dresses and red pumps that could be construed as “do-me.” Of those ten, a mere three could be said to be in decent shape for their ages. Two of them were no taller than five foot three—“I’m five-eight,” APG had told me—and the other one’s hair was straight and almost fell to her waist. “My hair is shoulder-length and wavy,” APG had said.

  I gave up at ten that night and went back to the room and suffered the worst stomach cramps and case of nerves I’ve ever experienced. Trembling hands, sweat all over, cotton mouth, throbbing temples, the whole bit. If a panic attack means breathing rapidly and going in and out of consciousness, then I was having one . . . on the bathroom floor.

  “I’m sure,” Wifey said, “the hotel has a doctor.”

  She looked at me with such genuine concern that I wanted to never meet Artsy or talk to her again. Nobody ever liked me this much. What was I doing?

  “I couldn’t make it to the casino tonight, damn it,” APG IM’ed me that night.

  (Had my e-mistress and I, I briefly suspected, come all this way just to narrowly avoid meeting me each other?)

  “No problem,” I IM’ed back. “RLO. Wifey here. Gotta go!”

  Knowing the coast was momentarily clear I took an elevator downstairs, ran to the steakhouse and wolfed down two New York strip steaks, an order of fries, a baked potato, and two pieces of cheesecake in fifteen minutes, and made
it back upstairs and quickly fell asleep.

  On the third day I was so self-conscious that I wore a shirt by the pool. At some point I had to make contact with Artsy and time was running out.

  “Why are you wearing that thing?” Cynthia asked me by the pool.

  “I don’t want to burn,” I told her.

  “But long sleeves?”

  I stayed at the pool from ten until five. I also kept a robe over the chaise longue, for added protection from APG’s disillusionment. My shirt still on, I peed in the pool three times.

  I didn’t go to the casino that evening. On the thirtieth floor of Tower 2, the hotel has a spa, unforgivably named Nirvanspa—there are hospitals in medium-sized towns that aren’t as large—and it’s open twenty-four hours a day. Manmade waterfalls and hissing pools and the bubbly drone of New Age Music, everything saffron yellow, terra cotta, brilliant turquoise. That night, I got a Shiatsu massage at seven, a Swedish massage at nine, a hot-lava-stone and aroma-therapy combo at eleven. It didn’t help me relax.

  An hour after I returned to my room, so dehydrated and manhandled that I looked like a peach pit, Artsy Painter Gal told me, live on the Galaxy, that she had spent the day with her daughters on the beach and shopping at the hotel’s complex of 150 shops. Meanwhile Mr. APG, the Rugged Beachy Type, had hang-glided, jet-skied, and parasailed . . . but that goes without saying. (Had a great white shark attacked a young girl, he no doubt would have swam out and killed the evil beast with his bare hands.) Artsy had also visited the casino and gone on an extended futile Chip Zero hunt and won $250 at roulette.

  “I’m going to be at one of the pools all day tomorrow,” she said. “I may be alone. FIND ME OR ELSE, Big Blond Boy!” She would be back in the shiny red maillot, she told me.

  Tomorrow was my last day. I had to find her.

  Okay, let us act as if this hard-hitting, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners memoir is a movie on DVD. I’m going to press the PAUSE button here for you.