by Ted Heller
Reader, my whole life up to that point had been spent not being George Clooney . . . George Clooney, who had been put into this world to be the very exemplar of all the things I should be but never would. (My one saving grace might be: just as George Clooney was created to remind me that I was not successful, perhaps I had been created to remind him that he was.) Even in the dark, ignorant years when I didn’t know that there existed in the world such a thing as a George Clooney, I, as mistake-prone as a person can possibly be, still had never come close—not even accidentally—to being anything remotely like him. A man can measure his life in many ways—how much money he makes, how he provides for his family and how his children turn out, how many women he’s slept with—but my measuring stick is the Clooneyometer. So on the 100 Top UnClooneyest Moments of My Life Countdown, I would put fainting at the pool at the Nirvana somewhere around 11 or 12 and I’d put the seared peppercorn tuna around 13. If my lousy book reviews are numbers 7 and 8 and walking in on my brother with my girlfriend is number 1, then I put losing $7,000 playing poker that night at number 5.
Second Gunman fared even worse. He’d dumped almost ten grand, he told me, and for a few minutes hated my country about as much as your average Al-Qaeda recruit does. Outside, back on the stoop across the street, I sat on a dirty stone stair, bewildered and angry, and rested my head against the cold black iron banister. What just happened to me, I was trying to figure out, did that really happen? Second paced in a circle and muttered, using all sorts of slang and curse words. He must have walked the same circle fifty times, punched his palm about twenty times, and employed every possible variety of the F-word at least ten times each.
“Jaysus . . . Jaysus . . . Jaysus feckination Chroist.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Can you feckin’ believe this, Chip?”
“Did I just not indicate to you that I couldn’t?”
“Nine-feckin’-thousand eight-feckin-hundred-and seven-feckin’-teen dollars! Gone!”
It was, I confess, enlightening and reassuring to see someone as tormented by losing as I was. So this is what I was like to be with, eh? It was a pretty ugly spectacle but I couldn’t not look at it.
Second stopped his pacing, put his hand on the iron banister, and asked me, “Well, what the bloody hell are we gonna do then?”
“There’s nothing we can do. We can just win it back online.”
“Bollocks. Takes too much bloody time, man!”
He was going to start pacing again, but I pulled the collar of his suede jacket to stop him. A few hundreds fell out and he picked them up and shoved them back in.
“So what do you suggest then, mate?” I asked.
“Where’s this Mohegan Woods? We could—”
“Forget it. It’s, like, literally right in the middle of a forest. It’s an unnatural act against Nature to frequent a place like that.”
“Run by injuns, right? What kind? What tribe? Mohican? Cherokee?”
“Comanch! I dunno. Some made-up tribe.”
“Fuck it.” He waited, then said, “What about Atlantic City?”
I thought about it. We could rent a car, we could take a taxi, maybe even get a helicopter. We could afford it. But that car, taxi, or helicopter would wind up pulling up or settling down in Atlantic City, the Land that Steve Wynn Forgot. I didn’t want to go.
He was pacing again. Hands in the pocket of his jacket. Muttering. I was muttering, too. Goddam Scott feckin’ Heyward, I said. The brogue and burr were back and going in and out.
“What about Las Vegas?” Second said, carving circle number fifty-five into the Upper East Side asphalt.
In the corner of one eye I saw a thousand neon lights flashing, and in the corner of the other a lubed-up, top-heavy stripper, her body dripping liquid gold, flopped around a pole like a dying trout.
“What about it?”
“We go back to your flat right now and we pack our bags and go to the airport and take a plane to Las Vegas. We’ll win it all back. Come home and nobody including Wifey is the glimphy wiser. And if we lose more, then pfffft . . . it wasn’t our yoopy ploosh to begin with.”
I looked up at him. He wasn’t circling anymore. Under the wan moonlight and the flickering streetlight, the fire was back into his cheeks and his mustache sparkled like a lit fuse.
In the insane world I was now a citizen of, it made sense. I wanted to win my money back, too, any way that I could, as long as that way didn’t involve Atlantic City. Cynthia was out of town for a week. I had no job to go to. There were no responsibilities, no meetings to keep, no books to write.
We took a taxi back to my apartment, both of us wailing “Freebird” at the tops of our lungs with the windows open, and got home at approximately 2:30, packed some clothing, packed up our laptops and some toiletries, got some cash and hit the road, still singing.
There was a little problem.
No planes were going to Las Vegas at that ungodly hour.
So we took a taxi.
11
Whales, Blowfish, and Walruses
Ever since reading On the Road I’ve always wanted to take a cross-country road trip.
No, that’s not true. Ever since reading On the Road I’ve never wanted to take a cross-country road trip.
When Second and I crawled into the taxi that night I didn’t tell the driver our true intended destination, not because I thought he would immediately throw us out but because I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go all the way to Nevada. I merely told Abdul Salaam, our driver, to take us to the Holland Tunnel toll plaza. In the back of my mind (there wasn’t much going on in the front of it) was the hope that once we found the sensible, sober Toll House Cookie he would talk us out of the preposterous scheme that each minute was picking up more and more steam.
“You are just going to the toll, sir?” Abdul said.
“Yep,” I said, knowing it was an odd request. “A buddy works there. And please . . . don’t call me sir.”
“A buddy,” Second said to me in the car. “Have you ever met him? In person?”
“Nope. But a week ago I could’ve said the same thing about you.”
We turned west on Seventeenth Street, then went down Eleventh Avenue.
(Ernest Hemingway got to write sentences like “I walked to Place de la Contrescarpe and then went down to Cafe Select where I picked up Brett and we drank two fines and then we held hands and walked to Le Dôme where we found Robert and Frances who were both very tight,” and I’m stuck with: “We turned west on Seventeenth Street, then went down Eleventh Avenue.”)
“If we go through the toll,” Abdul said, “there will be a toll, sir.”
I said, “Uh-huh” and caught Abdul checking me—the infidel, the oppressor, the enemy—out in his rearview mirror, which he adjusted for a keener view.
When we emerged on the Jersey side, Second said, “So this is New Jersey? Tony feckin’ Soprano, eh, and Brucie Springsteen and Frank Sinatra and—?”
“Yeah. Jersey. The Hawkeye State. The Land of Enchantment. The Land of a Thousand Dances. Right here, Johnny-Boy. Did you know that Jon Bon Jovi is the governor?”
(I confess to a deep nostalgia every time I return to New Jersey, my ancestral homeland. As soon as I set foot in the Garden State, my mind is flooded with memories. Just the sight of Elizabeth or Bergen or the Pulaski Skyway . . . it’s like once again breathing in the musty body odor of a girlfriend from twenty years ago.)
There were only a few cars around at this late hour and the tollbooths got closer. The sky was the color of muddled blueberries in an expensive exotic cocktail. I knew that Cookie was African-American but didn’t yet know his real name. This might be tough.
Abdul took us into an uncrowded lane and we stopped. I handed him the cash to hand to the toll collector and rolled down my window and said: “Hey, are you Toll House Cookie?”
“What?” the man said, putting his hand to his ear to hear better.
“I’m looking for a guy who w
orks here and plays poker online, named Toll House Cookie!” He shrugged and indicated with a wave of the hand that we better keep driving through.
“I think that was him, you gobshite,” Johnny said.
“Will you shut up?” I said. But in a friendly, drunken 3 a.m. way. I said to Abdul, “Let’s try it one more time, okay?”
We swung around and went back into Manhattan, turned immediately around and came back through the tunnel, and Johnny was just as disappointed with New Jersey the second time as he had been the first. Abdul pulled the car into a different lane and I asked another African-American toll collector: “Are you a guy named Toll House Cookie who plays poker online?”
He looked at me as though I had offended him terribly. Stitched into his blue Port Authority jacket was his name in yellow script: MARVIS WASHINGTON.
He came out of his booth and waddled over to my window and asked me, “Who wants to know?”
All our windows were open and Second Gunman was rubbing his hands together to keep warm. His jacket, lined with his remaining $10K, wasn’t doing it for him, but if our Vegas road trip came to pass we’d soon be in a place where he wouldn’t need the jacket, only the lining.
“You can’t guess who I am?” I asked.
“Foldin’ Caulfield?”
“Do I look like a goddam orthopedic surgeon to you, man? It’s me . . . Chip Zero!”
“And I’m Second Gunman!” came the raspy voice behind me.
“Shit,” Cookie said. “You two come all the way out here at this time of night to see me?”
“Actually we were planning on kidnapping you . . . Marvis.”
“Oh yeah? To where? ’Cause my shift just ended. And don’t tell anyone my real name, okay? I don’t want anyone stealing my fake identity.”
Second said, “We’re plannin’ on goin’ to Las Vegas.”
Please talk us of out it, Marvis. Please talk us out of it!
“You mean,” THC said, “you’re goin’ to Newark Airport to go to Las Vegas?”
Second told him that, as insane as it sounded, we were going to ask Abdul to take us all the way to “the LV,” that I’d just dumped seven grand and that he’d dumped ten, that we were seriously jonesing to win our money back and that we would never have lost it but that he—Cookie—had told us about Big Lou’s underground casino in the first place.
“Hey, man, I got three kids at home,” THC said, scratching the back of his neck. “Two of ’em’s babies. Otherwise I’d . . .”
Good. Talk us out of it, Cookie! Come on! Do it! The kids! Use the kids! Talk us out of it and I’ll get ’em all Christmas presents every Christmas for the rest of their lives, I promise.
“And I got four,” Second said, astonishing me. “All boys.” Until that second, I had no idea Johnny Tyronne had any kids and a day or two later, just outside Abilene, Kansas, I was to discover that he’d made all of them up on the spot. “So are ya coomin’ or not, Cookie?”
“Hold on. My boy Donnie’s supposed to give me my ride home. Hold on.”
Oh no. Oh God no. Please don’t let this happen.
He walked over to another booth and pulled out his cell. Abdul, his beard, eyeglasses, and leather jacket the color of the blackening night around him, sat silently. Across the road was a drab place called the Tunnel Motel. It looked more like a prison than some kind of lodging.
“Have you ever been to Las Vegas?” I asked Abdul.
“No. I have never been more west than Detroit.”
He told me that he had lived and driven a taxi in America for seven years and had rarely taken a day off. But as of January this shiny yellow tank was his own baby. I asked him where was the farthest any passenger had ever asked him to go; he told me he’d once driven two businessmen from LaGuardia Airport to Baltimore. But that’s where you did go, I said. Where was a place that someone had once asked you to go but you wouldn’t? He thought about it, then told me that one very intoxicated guy, sir, had once asked to drive him to Aruba. I saw that Cookie, talking on his cell phone, was coming our way and said, “Abdul, please do not call me ‘sir.’ ” I asked him where was a faraway place that wasn’t across a body of water that someone had asked him to drive to but he’d turned them down, and he told me that a couple got in once and asked to go to Port St. Lucie, Florida, so they could watch the Mets play an exhibition game, but that he’d said no to them only because his wife was pregnant at the time, otherwise he would have done it. Is your wife pregnant now? I asked him. No, she is not, my friend, he said. He added that his wife and two children were presently in Riyadh. After telling him that I much preferred my friend to sir, I said, So you’ll be able to drive us to Las Vegas then?
Cookie stuck his head into the cab and said: “Aright, I just squared it with my wife. It wasn’t easy ’cause I don’t ever lie. I told her that my Cousin Cleon had just died in Atlanta from a stroke and I gotta go down there right away. The way I see it is, since I don’t really have a cousin named Cleon, I guess he really is kind of dead and I didn’t lie to her. And Donnie’s gonna cover for me for a few days here. So if we’re goin’, let’s go.”
“You got a cousin who’s a Klingon?” Second asked Cookie. The very first jab.
“His name, I just told you, is Cleon and no, I don’t have a cousin named Cleon.”
He got into the car and, much to my regret, we were on our way.
I sat up front alongside Abdul in his Crown Victoria; THC and Second—who had never really hit it off online and weren’t going to in person—were in the back.
I looked at the meter. It was already up to fourteen dollars and we hadn’t even made it out of Essex County yet. Our original deal, I believe, was that we would either pay Abdul the amount on the meter plus $1,000 so he could go back (plus we’d spring for all the gas and tolls), or else $5,500, whichever was more.
“You could stay a few days, Abdul,” I said to him as bits and pieces of mortifying New Jersey streamed by us in the chilly September night. “It’s nice and warm out there.”
“Perhaps.”
Behind me Second and Cookie were embarking on a minor countrywide dispute, about leg room, money, manners, stray elbows, belching.
“Well, the weather will be good. We’ll get a place with a nice pool.” He had already told me he was a Saudi so I didn’t feel I was being impolite when I told him, “It’s in the desert, it’s sunny, it’s very hot and dry there, everybody has a lot of money. You might feel at home.”
“I will think about it.”
Two thousand five hundred miles—he sure had a long time to think about it.
A few minutes later Cookie leaned his big head forward and whispered to me, “Second says he knows a shortcut to get here. He’s been in New York how long?!”
I whispered back: “He barely knows where he is right now. We could take him to Vegas by way of Fairbanks, Alaska, and he wouldn’t object.”
“But Fairbanks,” Cookie informed me perfectly seriously, “is way out of the way.”
The liquor and weed were wearing off. It was after 3:30 a.m. and the world inside and outside the taxi was all fuzz and bubbles and my inner GPS was on the fritz. To misquote Paul Gauguin: who were we, where were we, where the hell were we going, and why?
“Las Vegas, Nevada, is west,” Abdul said. “I will get us there.”