Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Yes but Tijuana and Minneapolis were west, too, and so was Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Pitcairn Island.

  Out of nowhere—well, not really nowhere (my main character in Dead on Arrival had driven from Westchester to Las Vegas and I remembered the route)—I said: “Okay, this is how it’s done, guys. Hear me out. . . . Take Two-eighty. It will become Interstate Eighty at around . . . at around someplace after Passaic or somewhere. You take I-Eighty through Chicago, all the way to Cedar Rapids, I think.”

  “And what,” Second asked, his eyes sinking into his mustache, “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Gobshite Magellan the Lincoln Navigator, happens in Cedar feckinating Rapids?”

  “In Cedar Rapids I guess we stop and get a road motherfeckinition map, lad.”

  “No,” Cookie said. “You’re all wrong. We take Seventy. Seventy goes all the way to Utah. We should take Eighty to around Columbus and then get on Seventy there.”

  “Columbus where?” I said, realizing I was dealing with a Directions Nazi. “Missouri?”

  “Missouri?! Ohio, man!”

  “Yeah . . . okay, that sounds good.” I turned to our driver. “You gettin’ this?”

  [Often, over the course of this journey, if the last person speaking was Second, I sounded Anglo-Irish; if the last person speaking was Toll House Cookie, I sounded African-American.]

  “I-Eighty to Columbus,” Abdul said with a confidant nod. “Seventy to Utah.”

  “Right.” I turned back to Cookie and said: “You sure about this?”

  “I give directions all day long in my booth, Chip. I believe I know my way around.”

  “Yeah sure . . . but admit that we’re a little out of your purview here.”

  “We’re out of my what?”

  “Your purview. Your range of expertise. We’re out of your element. Your bailiwick.”

  “So we should take your way? You ever drove from New York to Las Vegas before?”

  “No. But I know someone who did.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy, okay?”

  “What guy?”

  “This guy. Like, this character I once created.”

  He rolled his eyes. As I would have. For not only had this character never really lived and thus never really driven from New York to Las Vegas, but the book in which he appeared had not been published either. A heaping triple shot of nonexistence.

  “My purview. Eight hours a day for twenty years I tell people where to go and how to get there and you tellin’ me about my purview.”

  “Okay. Sorry. We’re doin’ it your way. You’re the pro. You’re Hammond and Rand and McNally and MapQuest all rolled into one.”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  This was the first of about a thousand I’m-just-sayin’s that I was to hear over the next few days.

  The Delaware River soon approached and I began to drift off. I put my head against the cold window and with one eye made sure that Abdul was more awake than I was. He was.

  When I woke up I thought my bladder was going to explode and take the rest of my body with it. It was just past ten in the morning and the sun was warming and bright; Cookie and Second, his mouth wide open and dribbling, were still asleep in the back, and Abdul was wide awake. We were bypassing Youngstown, Ohio, and the meter was up to $840.00.

  “I need a bathroom,” I said, my breath so rancid it almost shattered the windshield.

  On one side of us there was a KFC, a Popeyes, a Denny’s, a Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell; on the other side was a Bob Evans, a Motel 6, a Casual Corner and a Super 8. It was as if our taxi was plummeting down a gigantic artery clogged with trans fats, onion rings, chili fries, and melted down Kenny Chesney CDs.

  “We will find one soon,” Abdul said. “And we need gas.”

  Second yawned loudly, stretched, and in doing so landed a glancing blow on Marvis’s jaw and woke him up, and looked out the window.

  “Good morning, Johnny-Boy. Welcome to Ohio, the Aloha State.”

  “Ohio, eh? Not very pretty.”

  “Yeah and this is the nice part.”

  “The Magnolia State,” I said. “Vacationland, USA. The Birthplace of Jazz.”

  “What the hell is a Dress Barrrn?” Second asked right when we went by a strip mall that was so depressing and run-down I almost began to weep.

  “Just a place for women to shop, that’s all,” I said.

  “What a name. Callin’ it a barn. Do they have a Cow or an Elephant Department?”

  “Most farms,” Cookie said, “don’t have elephants on them.”

  A gas station and its ramshackle, skid-marked restroom was up ahead on the right, and Second looked out the window and asked, “So who the hell is this Bob feckin’ Evans?”

  We refueled the Crown Vic, took our leaks, and had breakfast at an IHOP, where Johnny/Second easily polished off two Rooty Tooty Fresh ’N Fruitys. Following Toll House Cookie’s instructions, we got on I-70 in Columbus. We’d traveled about seven hundred miles and the meter was past $1,600 and when I saw the exit sign for Spiceland, Indiana, I noticed that Abdul was playing tricks on himself to keep awake and that these tricks weren’t working.

  “You didn’t think you were gonna drive the whole way, did you?” I asked him.

  “It is my car, my friend. I am a driver. I am sure that you would want to do the profession that you do.”

  I don’t have a profession. I don’t do anything. I don’t work, I play.

  “Jaysus Chroist,” groused Second from the back. “There’s no wifi in here?!”

  I turned around. His laptop was on his lap and he was pecking wildly away at the keyboard. THC was looking at him warily out of the corner of his eyes.

  “Look,” I said to Abdul, “we’re all good drivers here. This is a long haul. We’ll take turns. And the meter can stay on.” (When we’d stopped to pee and to eat, Abdul had generously turned the meter off.)

  “Bloody hell. I’m down ten K and I can’t even try to win some of it back in here?!”

  “I’m not a good driver,” Cookie said. “So don’t include me in on this. I only drive from my house to the tollbooths and that’s it. I don’t like to drive.”

  “And we’re following,” Second said, “your bloody directions?!”

  “You know how many people,” THC explained, “pass through my booth in the course of a year and then probably hours or days or weeks later, they’re dead? Gotta be hundreds. Everyday I stare into the faces of future dead people. Thousands of ’em. People in their cars. More people die in cars than in bathrooms, did you know that? It’s like I work on a draft board and they’re all A-One and I’m sending them right to Okinawa or Iwo Jim. So I’m not driving.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “And it’s One-A, not A-One, and it’s Iwo Jima, not Iwo Jim.”

  “Is there someplace around here,” Second said, still fiddling with his laptop, “where we could maybe stop and go online and play?”

  There was nothing around us but trees and the chilly autumn grayness above and between them and a million miles of asphalt monotony, but I pointed to a pine tree and said: “I think that tree over there picks up a signal, Johnny-Boy.”

  “And I think that you’re a board-certified card-carrying, A-One, One-A gobshite.”

  “Can’t believe you lost that all money in one night, man,” THC said to Second. “I thought you was supposed to be good. Guess not.”

  I slid down in my seat. The truth was, if that pine tree did receive a wifi signal, or if the clouds above did, I probably would have stopped there and started playing. I wanted my money back too.

  “My friend,” Abdul said, “I think perhaps it is time you should be driving now.”

  His eyelids and head were drooping, and a minute later I was at the wheel.

  Lunch at an Arby’s in Centralia, Illinois, Second flirting with two teenage Hannah Montana wannabes at the next table; a long four-way bathroom break at a rest stop near High Hill, Missouri, and then dinner at Mighty Mo’s Ribs on the outsk
irts of Kansas City, the meter up to $2,600. “I guesstimate we’re almost halfway there,” Cookie said while eating a pulled pork sandwich, the exposed ends of which glistened and swayed fetchingly. “America’s too bloody big,” Second said. “They should split it into twelve different pieces. No coontry should be so wide that you can’t drive from the head of it to the arse of it in ten hours, if you ask me.” “I didn’t ask you,” THC said. “Well, I didn’t ask you if you asked me,” Second shot back.

  Abdul, of course, did not eat pork and was contenting himself with sides: rice, beans, corn, coleslaw, biscuits. “Aw, come on, Abdul,” Second goaded him, “have a rib.” Abdul shook his head politely. “What do you think is gonna happen to ya?” my half-Catholic, half-Anglican visitor asked our Saudi chauffeur. “You think you’re gonna go to Muslim hell?” Abdul thanked him for the offer but said that it was against the dietary laws of his faith. Second, twirling one end of his mustache, now soaked with a Day-Glo orange wet rub, asked, “In the Mooslim paradise if you get seventy virgins, once you shag one of ’em, is she replaced by a brand-new virgin or are you stuck with her forever? And what do the female martyrs get? Seventy male virgins?” Again he offered Abdul a rib but Abdul repeated, “It is against the laws of my faith.” “Well,” Second said, “grufflin’ me blipty is against the laws of my faith too but I’ve been doing it since I was twelve feckin’ years old.”

  “If he doesn’t want to eat pork, that’s his thing,” I said.

  “How many times in a man’s life you think he whacks himself off?” Second asked, picking up his last baby back. “What’s three-hundred and sixty-five days times ten times a day times seventy-five years? That’s like an Indian Ocean of spunk right there.”

  “I never did that,” Cookie told us. “Not one time.”

  “You’re lyin’, Marrrvis,” Second said. (His mouth and chin—and my mouth and chin and THC’s—were soaked with sauce and there were specks of hickory-smoked swine and cow between our teeth.) “Not one time? Not one time in your life? That’s not humanly possible!”

  “I’m tellin’ you, I never did it. It’s a waste of time and energy. It’s just wrong. Every time you do that to yourself, the Lord keeps track of it. See, each single person down here has a book on him up in Heaven. You play with yourself or you lie or curse, the Lord writes it down. And if you get past a certain number, you wind up going to Hell. You can’t erase anything in that book. It’s etched in stone and once it’s done, it’s done. But most of all, it’s a waste of man-juice. You just can’t be pourin’ that stuff out all over the place. You got to keep it. Store it up. Save it. Use it when you got to. Wasting it on yourself is just dumb.”

  I tried to picture God opening a massive leather-bound, gold-embossed tome, and such a book for every single person who’d ever lived. Surely by now the Lord had upgraded to computers.

  “If God’s keepin’ a book on me,” Second said to me, “for cursin’ and spankin’ me monkey and all that shite, then he’s fookin’ roonin’ outta paper up there.”

  “Anyway,” Cookie said, “I don’t do it. I never have done it. I never will.”

  “Yeah, but how can you help it?” Second, incredulous, said. “A man refills himself. If he doesn’t do it, the stuff’ll start pourin’ out his underarms, ears, and nose. It’s just not possible!”

  “I guess I just got more control than you do.”

  “That kind of control, I never wanted.” Second nibbled and sucked his last rib dry, then asked: “When you were a lad, you didn’t look at Playboy or a Leg Show or Black Playboy or whatever it is you blokes got?”

  “I looked at all of ’em as often as I could. Man, I used to see Pam Grier naked in movies with her big titties all hangin’ down. Looked nice. I saw them in Foxy Brown on the VHS and I damn near exploded. But I knew I had to save it all up and not waste it. It’s why I don’t need to take vitamins . . . I got a backlog of all the stuff. How you think I wound up with twin girls?”

  “But if you was really potent wouldn’t they have been boys?” Second said. He let out a belch that shook every salt and pepper shaker in the restaurant and then resumed. “So if you stored all of it up, Cookie, then you must have plurped your quiffles in like three seconds when you finally were with a woman.”

  “I did. I admit it. Three seconds. And I passed out from it too. It was a great big shock to my system. Took me nearly three minutes to unload. It was like I was watering the grass of Yankee Stadium. When I got home and weighed myself I saw I lost three whole pounds.”

  “So when you bluff at poker,” I asked Marvis/Cookie, “you don’t consider that a lie?”

  “No, Chip,” he said. “I consider that a bluff.”

  “But you curse. I’ve seen you do it online. And you steal from work too. You’ve told me that. The pages in that heavenly book of yours can’t be all blank.”

  “No man’s is. We’re all born with the first page filled in, thanks to Adam and Eve. And it isn’t technically stealing until they start payin’ me what I know I’m worth. Plus, I have to live day and night with the fear of being replaced by EZ Pass. You don’t know what that’s like.”

  I signaled the waiter over and told him to bring me the check . . . after I told him to also bring me a pulled pork sandwich with a side of sweet potato fries, for the road.

  Second Gunman took the wheel in Salina, Kansas; the closest I’d ever get to having my very own Neal Cassady, he was a surprisingly cautious driver, never going over 65 miles per hour. The meter hit $3,800 in Burlington, Colorado, just over the Kansas state line, and I took the wheel again. We were all in the same clothes, now grimy and wrinkled, as when we started out; we hadn’t showered or brushed our teeth and the bones beneath my ass were hurting me . . . it was like I was sitting on a stove, all four burners going.

  “Colorado, eh?” Second said. I was riding shotgun. Abdul was asleep in the back and Cookie, who refused to drive, was gawking out the window. As I was.

  “Yep. The Land of Lincoln, Johnny. Live Free or Die. The House that Ruth Built.”

  “You know who’s from Colorado, don’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “History Babe is.”

  “From Colorado Springs,” Cookie said from the back, “to be exact.”

  “She’s gotta be the hottest thing on that site,” Second said. “God’s filled in a few pages of my sin book up there ’cause of her for sure.”

  APG at her very filthiest was no match for History Babe, who had probably IM’ed five hundred different men to orgasm, two hundred of them while winning their money.

  “Let’s call her up,” Second said.

  I didn’t deem this ridiculous caprice worthy of a response, but . . .

  “And how do we do that?” THC said.

  “We’ll get her number is how. And call her. Maybe she’ll coom to Vegas with us.”

  “Anyone know her real name?”

  “It’s Tracey,” I said. “Or Stacey or Lacy.”

  Nobody knew History Babe’s real last name. So the matter was dead. For ten minutes.

  “Let’s go someplace,” Johnny/Second suggested, “where we could go online and if she’s playin’ poker she’ll tell us. Then we call her. And also, I need to buy some new underpants. There’s more crust down there right now than on an uneaten blueberry pie.”

  There wasn’t much of anything but clear sky and cold air in this stretch of I-70. My main character in Dead on Arrival had taken a different route than this. He was fleeing the shocking loss of his wife and kids . . . I was fleeing the loss of $7,000 and what little was left of my pride. But playing poker with Scott Heyward was disappearing back into the primordial pea soup from which it arose and with every mile we traveled westward, the soupier it became.

  We pulled into a Comfort Inn, south of Denver. The sign outside said there were vacancies, HBO, an indoor pool, and wifi, and we got a room. Second took a long shower while THC, with our waist, inseam sizes, and shirt specifications, waddled just across the road
to a Big K and got us all new clothing and some toiletries. (I said to him, “No boxers please, Cookie!” and he came back with boxers.) It was cold here and there was a sparkly layer of snow on the ground and we could see snow all over the Rockies from the window. When Second was done showering I took a shower, then it was Abdul’s turn. I applied three extra coats of deodorant just to make up for the prior two days. None of the clothing Cookie came back with fit right and none of it looked good or went together. My splashy rayon socks had pictures of BMX bikers on them and it occurred to me that, for whatever reason, Marvis was purposely trying to make us look like idiots . . . but in his new threads he looked like one, too. While Marvis showered, Second logged on to the Galaxy and, sure enough, History Babe was online, trouncing five others at a table with two slow-played Aces. Second gave her my cell phone number and told her to call. It was amazing: logging on, finding her, her calling me—it all took less than three minutes.

  History said, sure, she could get away and go to Vegas with us; she just had to make a few calls, go to an ATM, get some cash. We’d drive down to Colorado Springs, I told her, and pick her up. In the background, Second and THC were bickering about the clothing the latter had picked out; Johnny, looking ridiculous in tangerine cargo pants and a mauve polar-fleece hoodie that blared I MONSTER TRUCKS! across the chest, might have done better for himself shopping in the Elephant Department at a Dress Barn than in trusting Cookie. You sure you want to do this, I asked History. She said she was sure. There’re nothing much else going on right now, she told me. Her sister, whom she lived with, was an extreme Evangelical and was currently was on a three-day prayer jag. I need to get out of here really quickly, she said.

  We stayed in the hotel room for about an hour and a half. Second didn’t log off the Galaxy right away and won almost $2,000 at an Ultra-High table.

  “Only eight more bloody K to go,” he mumbled, closing his laptop back up.

  “Okay, gentlemen, let’s roll,” I said after a perfunctory quickie flossing. I was in blue jeans that were more a lot more white than blue . . . they came down only to just below my knee and there may have been more pockets on this pair of pants than on all my other pants combined. It was something that one of the Fat Boys should be wearing, not America’s 1,457th greatest living novelist.