Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  “What color is that anyway?” He clicked on his flashlight again, shined it into the car. “Kind of a light blue, ain’t it?”

  “In the swatch book, it’s called robin’s egg.”

  “Whoo-wee,” sang Hatfield, a tone of amazement indigenous to the thick forests of the Appalachian Mountains, where he grew up, the son of a lumber mill worker and his pious wife. The cop played the light beam slyly around the interior of the car. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “What have we here?”

  The beam was trained on the aftermarket drink caddy that was straddling the hump beneath the dash—a cheap-looking, molded plastic thing with sandbags on either side for balance. In it was a large Popeye’s Coke with a straw, a package of tissues, a nail file, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, some spare change … and a rolled-up dollar bill.

  “I was using it to clean my ears,” Jamal protested, half-amused, half-indignant. A search of the Lincoln at that moment could have proved disastrous.

  “Then you won’t mind reaching down, real slow, and handing it to me.” Hatfield’s voice had an edge now, a deeper pitch, what they called “command tone.” It was the first thing you learned when you got off the bus at boot camp—how a voice can have the power to knock you to your knees.

  Hatfield examined the bill under his flashlight. The end was caked with crust and goo. He raised it to his mouth.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Obviously you ain’t me,” Hatfield said disdainfully. He dabbed the crusty edge of the bill on the tip of his tongue … and then his face imploded—a look of foul disgust, like he’d just eaten a spoiled oyster.

  “I tried to warn you,” Jamal laughed.

  Sputtering and spitting, Hatfield tossed the bill back through the window, stepped away from the vehicle. He pointed his thick finger, rosy from the cold, at Jamal’s face, the message unspoken but very clear. Then he headed south on the Strip.

  Jamal took a pull from his soda. The clock on the dash said 11:07. Razor Sally was on the far corner, her wig slightly askew, bargaining in sign language with four Salvadorian busboys who were seeking a group discount on blow jobs. Sana, a beauty from Saudi Arabia, was leaning into the back window of a stretch limousine; by day, it was said, she was a George Washington University student. Across the street, in front of a used car lot, colorful streamers flapped in the variable breeze. Two of the younger pimps paced the sidewalk, blowing on their hands for warmth, looking expectant. They’d smoked up all their money in a nearby crack house that catered to players. Now they needed to collect from their hos. On the street they called this “checkin the traps.” The only problem: these traps were constantly on the move. In the economy of the Strip, the johns paid the hookers for sex, the hookers paid the pimps for love and protection, the pimps paid the pipe—they called it “suckin on the glass dick.” Jamal had had his time with rock—in the days before crack, he used to cook it himself, using a Bic lighter, baking soda, and a glass cigar tube. But he hadn’t touched the stuff in years—since the night he’d hit bottom and made his return to the Strip, to the family business. And that’s exactly how he approached it—as a business. He needed to keep his head on straight. He needed to save his receipts. He needed to pay his accountant—who had him laundering his money through a shelter corporation, an erstwhile home cleaning service. Often he passed his idle time reading the dog-eared Webster’s dictionary that he kept in the glove box. He tried to learn a new word every day. His game with himself was to try and work the word naturally into a conversation. Like they used to teach at St. Michael’s Academy—where he’d gone from first through eleventh grade before quitting to join the army—Scientia est Potentia.

  Jamal took a bite of his biscuit. The taste of butter was strong; it tickled the back of his tongue. A brand-new Volvo station wagon, the tags still temporary, pulled to the curb in front of him. The passenger window slid down. The streetwalker with the opaque tights and large leather handbag stuck her head partially inside. After a brief discussion, she opened the door and got in.

  The Volvo merged into traffic. The beat-up Chevy with the salt-and-pepper undercover team pulled in behind; the counterfeit crackheads by the pay phone began to move. At the intersection, a patrol car rolled slowly into the Volvo’s path and stopped, causing the Volvo driver to slam on his brakes. Two uniforms jumped out of the patrol car, guns drawn. The hooker pulled her .38 service revolver out of her oversize handbag; the crackheads pulled the driver out of the car—a balding, fortyish man wearing a Patagonia fleece jacket.

  They spread the suspect on the hood of his safe and sensible Swedish import and searched his pockets. His gold wedding band glinted in the amber light from the reproduction, turn-of-the-century streetlamps that had recently been installed, along with planters and concrete benches, as part of a residential initiative to reclaim the neighborhood.

  In an hour or so, Jamal knew, the Volvo guy would be inside a holding cell at the DC Central Jail, on the phone to his wife, trying to explain his predicament. Jamal thought about the time when he was fifteen, hanging out one night on the Strip with his dad. He’d asked, “Why do they call them tricks?”

  His father had laughed heartily. “What else do you call a man who pays forty dollars to put on a rubber and come all over hisself?”

  3

  The Pope of Pot sucked a last long drag from a joint and stubbed it out. He was a great doughnut of a man, sweet and puffy, lightly glazed, wearing Coke-bottle glasses and an oxford-cloth shirt, ink-blotched and frayed, a wardrobe remnant from his days as a federal bureaucrat. Cradled to his ear was a heavy Bakelite receiver from an old rotary telephone, one of eight lined up neatly before him on his government surplus desk, the nerve center of this storefront, which was located just across Fourteenth Street from Popeye’s. A large sign on the wall identified the place as the Church of Realized Fantasies.

  “Gotta go now, toots,” the Pope rasped, smoke leaking from his chipmunk grin. He threw back his head and laughed, Ah ha ha ha HA!, his rusty trademark cackle, a series of four exuberant chuckles followed by a trumpeting guffaw, strung together in sets like waves, crashing upon the jagged shoreline of his crooked yellow teeth, spraying mirth and spittle and tar-tinged phlegm, Ah ha ha ha HA! …

  Whereupon he was seized suddenly by a fit of coughing that jounced the phone from his hand. He clutched the arms of his swivel chair, riding the deep black hacks, a rag doll on a Brahman bull.

  “You okay, Pope?”

  Waylon Weidenfeld was tall and gaunt, bar certified—Ichabod Crane in a Burberry raincoat and a Brooks Brothers suit, a silk print tie by Armani, everything purchased at a Salvation Army store on Capitol Hill. He was sitting in a stackable plastic lawn chair, one of a dozen or so scattered about the room. Occupying the remaining chairs was the ragtag assortment of humanity comprising the Pope’s inner circle—his minions, his messengers, his ongoing projects—all of them seated at a respectful distance from the spray of his possibly infectious laugh.

  Waylon walked over to the shiny industrial refrigerator and poured the Pope a cup of cold water. The Pope had found him six years earlier, broken and bleeding, in a Dumpster behind a nearby Chinese carryout—a once promising DC city attorney whose fondness for gambling had led him afoul of the wrong elements. Waylon’s face registered deep concern. There’d been tests recently; the Pope was not well. Thirty-six hours on a concrete bench in a holding cell at the DC Central Jail hadn’t helped any, either. The DA’s office had apologized formally, profusely, pleading mix-up, lost paperwork. But everyone knew the score—fifty-nine-year-old white guy “misplaced” for thirty-six hours in a ten-by-twelve-foot holding cell. It was a mystery that explained itself.

  The room was cold; the furnace was on the fritz. Cracked plaster walls, scarred concrete floor, steel-reinforced front door—an odd choice by the former tenant, considering that the rest of the frontage was constructed entirely of glass, painted black in lieu of curtains. A large pot of water was boiling on a hot plate, the only
source of heat. A bare bulb in the ceiling provided the only light. Everything in the place had been purchased at government auctions—the gunmetal gray desk, the olive drab sleeping bags piled in the corner, the eight black telephones with their snakes’ nest of tangled wires—all of it for pennies on the dollar. Prior to founding the Church of Realized Fantasies, the Pope—under the name Michael David Rubin—had toiled for nearly twenty years in the bowels of the Office of Management and Budget. He still had friends in government; he knew where the deals were buried.

  Waylon handed the Pope his cup of water, retrieved the phone from the floor, hung it up. He took a seat on the edge of the desk. “So what are we gonna do about product?”

  “How much did they get?” asked Beta Max. He’d shown up at the Pope’s doorstep one humid night the previous summer. His hair was long on top and shaved at the temples. A spindly goatee hung down to the middle of his chest. His rippling arms were tattooed with sleeves of snakes and skulls and medieval weapons. As always, his face was hidden behind his video camera, which itself was dwarfed by his beefy paws. Waylon had been the one who dubbed him Beta Max, after his soon-to-be-obsolete choice of equipment. The Pope had named him official church videographer.

  “They took seven pounds,” the Pope said.

  “Was that everything we had?” Waylon asked.

  “But they only charged me with possession of four pounds.”

  “What a surprise,” Waylon said sourly. “Cops steal drugs! Film at eleven.”

  “Fret not, my child,” the Pope said. “The balance is to be returned. I have set the wheels in motion.”

  Beta Max zoomed in for a close-up. “A lot of people say that your interview with Capitol City magazine was the reason the cops decided to target you,” he said to the Pope. “Do you think you could explain why you gave that interview in the first place?”

  “He called and I answered: Howdy, honey, howdy! That’s why we got the toll-free number, right? 1-555-WANT-POT. You call. You get the Pope. I send out a messenger with your order. Guaranteed service in one hour or less. How was I supposed to know that we were delivering a quarter ounce of sacrament to a freelance writer at Capitol City magazine? I might be the Pope of Pot, but I’m not a mind reader. And anyway—it’s over now. Think of the free publicity. I know I do. I think about it all the time. All the time. That and sex, toots. Because right now, what’s critical to us is mass. Critical mass, don’t you see? Not until we reach our goal of one million members will the tide begin to turn. The voice of the people is the voice of God in a democracy. I have to convert the world to a more sane policy. It’s the cross I have to bear. It’s the burden of being the Pope, Ah ha ha ha HA!”

  Feeling celebratory, the Pope spun around in his high-backed leather office chair like a kid in his daddy’s office, one full revolution, then another, then a half … then stopped himself with his back to Waylon and the rest, facing his credenza. A beautiful walnut piece from the General Services Administration’s executive line of furnishings, it had seen service in Al Haig’s West Wing office during the final days of the Nixon administration. Inside the credenza, the Pope stored his office supplies: Post-its, pens, highlighters, binder clips, steno pads, staple refills, paper clips—he was passionate about office supplies. Like he always said: “You need the right tools to do the job.” Displayed across the top of the credenza was the Pope’s dusty collection of robot toys, Ken dolls, and rubber cartoon figurines, and also a life-size skull fashioned from a large piece of translucent crystal rock. Perched atop the skull was the Pope’s papal miter—a high, white, John Paul number with a nine-inch green velvet marijuana leaf sewn onto the front. He picked it up with both hands, placed it atop his head.

  “May I have your attention, your holiness?” Waylon pleaded, obviously annoyed.

  The Pope of Pot spun around in his chair again, one revolution, then another … then caught himself on the desktop, facing front. “My attention is yours, consigliore.”

  “Okay, this is the story,” Waylon said, recounting. “We’ve got no product. We’ve got no money. We haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. We’ve got two hundred thousand dollars cash in a suitcase in a locker at Dulles Airport because nim-nod over there”—pointing now to Louie, sitting in one of the plastic chairs, a rain-thin albino in a rabbit fur hat—“lost the key somewhere and can’t remember the number of the locker. We’ve got to face facts. We’ve got to do something. We’re totally screwed.”

  “Screwed?” A radiant smile broke across the Pope’s face. “When? Where? Don’t be a tease, now!” He batted his eyelashes coquettishly.

  Waylon put both of his hands on the Pope’s shoulders. “I know you don’t like bad news,” he said quietly, “but there’s no way around it. We’ve got to start dealing with stuff. This could really be bad.”

  Sadness emanated from the Pope’s watery blue eyes, which looked huge and alien behind his thick corrective lenses. “Have faith, my son. God has given us the sacrament to cure our ills, to set our minds free. He has given us credit to sustain us in times of need. He has given us telephones to help us communicate across vast distances. Get Colombia on the line immediately! Ask for Don Diego. Tell him the Pope desires a private audience.”

  “The charges!” Waylon said, exasperated. “I’m talking about the charges! It’s one thing to be cited for handing out a few joints to the people waiting in line for the White House tour. But this is a major possession charge, Pope. Possession with intent. Seven pounds. You’re on the chopping block. They finally have you where they want you. Jesus H. Christ! They brought the press with them to the bust! Are you starting to get the picture here? They want to put you away for a long, long time.”

  “Four pounds,” the Pope said.

  “What?”

  “They only charged me with possession of four pounds.”

  “Four, seven. It doesn’t matter. Mandatory minimums, remember? We marched against them in the NORML demonstration.”

  “The Popemobile. What a hoot! We need to do that again!”

  “You’re looking at twenty-five to life—with no judicial discretion. That means no intervening circumstances. With your string of misdemeanors, they could try to make this into a three-strikes case. You could get life in prison without possibility of parole. You could end up—”

  A knock on the door—three percussive blows, fist meat against reinforced steel. The windows rattled and shook.

  The Pope of Pot clapped his hands with childlike glee. “We have visitors, kids!” he trilled.

  4

  Four men in dark suits around a large, round mahogany table, overhung with a crystal chandelier. An immense stone fireplace, flames dancing and crackling, flanked on either side by a suit of medieval armor. A butler in white gloves cleared the dishes.

  The host was a diminutive billionaire named Bert Metcalfe. He sat atop a silk pillow in a saber-legged chair, his shiny tassel loafers, size six, swinging idly above the Persian rug. Though the setting was intimate—a wood-paneled dining salon on the second floor of his Georgetown mansion—he spoke in a formal manner, referring to index cards.

  “Every night, after I turn off my reading light, I lie awake in my bed for a span of time, reviewing my day. I think about the things I’ve done, the contributions I’ve made, the mistakes I’ve made, the things I could do better tomorrow. I think about where I’ve been and where I’m going—how far along the path another day has brought me. Invariably I am visited by the same eternal questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is our purpose?” He opened his arms to include his guests and all of humankind.

  “I think about the way consumerism has become a form of religion in our country—the new opiate of the masses,” Metcalfe continued. “I think about the woman’s movement—the way all the rules have changed over the last twenty years, the way men and women have been at each other’s throats: hell hath no fury, indeed. I think about God—I wonder why mankind fights so many wars in the name of religion. I wonder what
happens when we die. I wonder: Are we alone in the universe? What about Inner Earth—does it exist? What about Atlantis—did it ever exist? What happened to the Mayans? How does someone like Hitler get as far as he did without anyone stopping him? Why does it always seem like the leaders of this great country—men and women educated in the best institutions we have to offer—don’t seem to have the slightest understanding about the way the leaders of other countries think, especially when those leaders are nonwhite or non-Christian? Why can’t we find an alternative to fossil fuels? Why are our schoolchildren falling behind the children in the rest of the world? What are we going to do about AIDS? Why can’t we all get along?”

  The three guests at the table sat frozen in poses of weighty consideration. One nodded his head sagely. Another worried the bristles of his neatly pruned mustache. The third stared raptly at the frescoed ceiling, absently fellating a thick Macanudo cigar. All three earned their livings as pundits—paid handsomely to auger the bones of current events, to shape the tenor of public debate, to add their own two cents. Here in the early years of twenty-four-hour-a-day news, content was at a premium. These men were the new stars, able to fill large blocks of airtime with the slimmest of budgets.

  For the past several weeks, Metcalfe had put much of his energy into these evenings of intellectual exchange, inviting Washington’s brightest minds and sharpest tongues into his house for dinner, followed by a hearty round of debate. While the reason for these powwows—the actual goal, what he was trying to achieve—wasn’t clear to anyone, that in itself was not unusual when it came to Bert Metcalfe. In fact, little about him was actually known. It was said that he’d spent his youth being shuffled between foster homes, that he’d come into his fortune quite by surprise when he turned twenty-one. It was said that he owned a castle in Scotland and an island off the coast of West Africa. It was said that he funded scientific and humanitarian projects across the globe. It was said that he had recently, by secret arrangement with the government of Egypt, purchased one of the pyramids at Giza. But all of this remained speculation—nothing had been pinned down. In a town of endless investigations, where information trumped money the way paper trumped rock, Metcalfe had somehow managed to stay beneath the radar—obviously he hadn’t pissed off anyone important. He was a private citizen, albeit a fabulously wealthy one. He owed explanations to no one.