Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Jim arrived at Sam’s Club and clocked in.

  “Man, Jim. You look awful,” said Orville.

  “Something bothering you?” asked Wilma.

  “Don’t look back,” said Satchel. “Something may be gaining on ya.”

  “Thanks, guys,” said Jim. “Just an off day.”

  Wilma removed one of her enamel pins and stuck it on Jim’s pinless apron. “There. Feel better?”

  Jim managed a sincere smile.

  “Why don’t you join us tonight?” said Orville.

  “Join you where?”

  “The crime watch,” said Wilma. “This is our night. Every other Friday.”

  “You don’t use guns, do you?”

  “Oh no,” said Satchel. “Just walkie-talkies. We’re the eyes and ears of the police. It’s loads of fun.”

  28

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH, Coleman sat on the plaid couch with a beer in his hand.

  Serge paced the living room. “This idleness is killing me! I’ve got to get out of here!” He went in the kitchen and checked the refrigerator—nothing he liked. He came back in the living room and resumed pacing. Coleman was still on the couch, facing the TV. Serge disappeared into his bedroom and changed his pants a few times, but nothing felt right. He marched into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator again. Still nothing.

  Serge ran back in the living room. “Coleman! I can’t take it!”

  Coleman wasn’t responsive, even for Coleman. He slouched into the loose couch cushions like gelatin.

  “Coleman! What’s wrong with you!” Serge then noticed the open prescription bottle on the coffee table.

  “You got into my schizo medicine!”

  No answer.

  Serge buzzed around the house for an hour, trying on more pants, looking at his matchbook collection with a magnifying glass, sprinting the length of the hallway making dunk shots with a nerf basketball: “And here comes Jordan with the three-sixty, triple pump, over-the-shoulder, in-your-face, supergalactic mind-fucker! Eeeeee-yaaaaaaa!!!!!!”

  Crash.

  Coleman finally began to move as Serge climbed out of the Serge-shaped hole in the drywall.

  “You okay?” said Coleman.

  “Did I score?” asked Serge, shaking dust from his hair.

  “I think so. I’m not sure. Those pills…”

  “I know what you mean,” said Serge. “I hate taking that shit.”

  “I thought they’d never wear off. That was fucked up!”

  “Why would you do something so brainless?” said Serge.

  “I got curious.”

  “Learn a lesson?”

  “And how! It was like I spent six hours staring at the

  world through twelve inches of glass—a scary, unfamiliar land where my brain felt like molten plastic and my body refused to respond to the simplest command.”

  “That’s why I stopped taking it.”

  “Oh, I’m not complaining,” said Coleman. “I liked it.”

  Serge joined Coleman on the couch. Coleman grabbed the remote control and clicked on The New Dating Game.

  “Weren’t we supposed to rob someone tonight?” asked Coleman.

  “Supposed to, but we needed Sharon for a decoy,” said Serge. “She’s nowhere to be found, as usual!”

  “Bachelor number three, if you could be any kind of cheese…”

  “Cool,” said Coleman. “A night off.”

  “I can’t stand the inactivity!”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Coleman, balancing the beer on his stomach.

  “I’m gonna explode if we don’t get out of here!” Serge leaped off the couch. “I have no choice but to call it!”

  “Night Tour?” asked Coleman.

  “Night Tour!” said Serge.

  “Righteous.” Coleman climbed off the couch and rummaged through the fridge for a cold one for the road. “Will we be going by any place to eat?”

  “I was thinking of Fat Guys.”

  “That’s a buffet,” said Coleman. “I better smoke a joint in the car so I can get my money’s worth.”

  “If you eat enough, theoretically you can actually start making money.”

  “I’ll bring two joints.”

  They jumped in the Barracuda, and Serge stuck a CD in the stereo and cranked it, Spirit in the Sky.

  “Where first?” asked Coleman.

  “Dale Mabry Highway. Tampa’s spinal cord. We need to check the pulse of the night.” They passed steak houses, lube shops, fern bars.

  “I love main drags,” said Serge. “They’re so egalitarian. Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, U.S. 41 in Naples, A1A in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Who’s Dale Mabry, anyway?” asked Coleman.

  “The most uttered name in Tampa, and maybe five people know who he was—local real estate man before he left to fight in World War One and later died in a 1922 blimp crash in Norfolk, Virginia.”

  Coleman pointed out the window. “Sure has a lot of strip clubs.”

  “We’re known far and wide. You mention to any guy in America that you’re from Tampa and he’ll go, ‘Oh, the Mons Venus.’ It’s our cash crop.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons: quality and quantity. End of story. The clubs popped up like toadstools over the last couple decades because of city-council neglect. Now the mayor’s trying to undo the damage through ruthless fiat. He just declared The War on Titty Bars.”

  “Sounds like another Vietnam,” said Coleman. “Why now?”

  “It’s sweeps week. The man’s no media fool. Every TV station in town has a giant video library of stock footage taken at discreet angles of strippers swinging around those poles. They’re just drooling for an excuse to put that footage on the air under the pretext of being shocked and offended by the footage.”

  “This could hit us in the wallet,” said Coleman. “Sharon buys a lot of our groceries with those lap dances.”

  “I know,” said Serge. “That was the part of our portfolio I was counting on to keep us recession-proof. If the mayor succeeds, we may be forced to lower our moral code and start pimping Sharon as a Hooters waitress.”

  “What are his chances?”

  “Damn good. He laid the groundwork last week by gathering a hundred of the city’s most prominent clergy to view police videos that revealed exactly what kind of Sodom and Gomorrah we’ve become.”

  “Sharon told me she was in one of the videos.”

  “She was. It showed her sitting on stage with her legs apart, and some lucky gentleman who had paid ten dollars was working a remote control box, driving a Tonka truck with a dildo taped to the roof. The clergy was so horrified that they had to move the next day’s viewing to a larger auditorium.”

  “Fat Guys is coming up,” said Coleman. “Left lane.”

  Serge turned into the restaurant parking lot. They went inside and grabbed trays. Coleman was about to pick up an all-you-can-eat plate when Serge grabbed his arm. “The one-trip bowl is a better value.”

  “But the bowl is too small,” said Coleman.

  “And that’s where they think they’ve got you, but don’t fall into the trap.” Serge reached for a bunch of celery sticks. “What you have to do is make yourself a bigger bowl. Watch carefully. First, you make a wrap-around cantilevered balcony with the celery. Then you mortar it in place with potato salad and anchor it all with the heavy stuff, pickles and hardboiled eggs.”

  “Wow, now the bowl’s huge.”

  “And perfectly legal.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Watching the college kids. They’re way out ahead in these areas.”

  Serge and Coleman slid their trays down the line until they got to the cashier. She stared at Coleman’s tray an unusually long time, then at Coleman, then made change.

  They picked up their trays and headed for a table.

  “Why was she looking at me like that?” asked Coleman.

  “Respect.”

  “Should I ask he
r out?”

  “Absolutely. But be patient. You want to give a great first impression like that time to build in her mind.”

  They sat down at a table surrounded by families. Coleman looked at Serge’s plate. Baked potato, french fries, potato soup, potato pancakes, ravioli and rigatoni.

  “How’s the diet coming?”

  “Can’t tell yet,” said Serge.

  “What are you on, the no-starch diet?”

  “I was,” said Serge. “But it wasn’t working. Now I’m on the all-starch diet.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “That’s because nobody’s done it before. Nobody’s ever dared.”

  “You’re sort of like a pioneer?”

  “I just want to participate in my times,” said Serge, hammering the bottom of a ketchup bottle for the fries. “I’m riding the mood of my country.”

  “I thought it was about losing weight.”

  “The masses out there are lost,” said Serge. “They’re looking for something, anything. Right now they’re following people who eat a bunch of crazy stuff. Like that doctor who came up with the all-protein diet. What kind of bullshit is that? Bacon and eggs and pork and hamburgers. The guy puts out a book that says eat all the wrong stuff, and now he’s so rich he can go back to eating healthy.”

  “I think I’ve heard of that diet,” said Coleman.

  “I think you’re on it.”

  Coleman picked up a buffalo wing. “Wow, I never thought of myself as a health nut.”

  “That’s why you have to watch the news, to know where you stand at all times.”

  Coleman reached for one of Serge’s french fries. Serge slapped his hand.

  “Ouch!”

  Serge pointed at the fries. “These have been counted. I’m taking notes.”

  “Notes?”

  “If the diet works, they’ll give me a book deal.”

  “They give you a book for eating fries?”

  Serge speared a ravioli. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

  “That sounds crazy,” said Coleman.

  “I don’t make the rules. I just follow ’em…Finish up. We’ll hit the bookstore across the street. It’ll help explain a lot of this.”

  They left their car at the restaurant and darted through traffic and into the giant new bookstore in town, Barnes & Borders.

  “What do you think?”

  Coleman looked concerned. “Everyone’s sitting around reading. Why don’t the store people get mad?”

  “Something else that’s changed,” said Serge. “Nobody yells, ‘What do you think this is, a library?’ Now, you’re supposed to sit and read. This is what I’ve been talking about. Everything’s now the opposite. You weren’t supposed to eat meat. Now, you are. You’re supposed to read the magazines. Rob Lowe’s working again…”

  “Who can keep it all straight?” asked Coleman.

  “It’s nerve-racking, I tell you. No wonder people are going back to religion.”

  Serge led Coleman over to the health section and the display of books at the end of an aisle. The Sugar-Busters Diet, The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, Ten Days to a New You, Rediscover the Old You, Yoga a Go-Go, Natural Remedies That Can Kill You, Burn Fat Through Exercise, Prescription for Peak Performance, The Peak Performance Myth, Declare War on Love Handles, Surrender to Success, The Low-Expectations Revolution, Calcium Crackdown, Strong Colon for Public Speakers, Take a Pass on Bypass, Cooking Right 4 Unwanted Guests, The Complete Menopause Vacation Planner, Eat All You Want and Ignore Everyone, Time Out for a Breakdown, 101 Desserts for Multiple Personalities and Eliminate Stress Through Hysterical Screaming.

  “Look at how these are shelved. What a mess!” Serge began aligning books.

  A customer mistook him for an employee.

  “Can you help me find the self-help books?”

  “No.”

  Serge and Coleman went over to the coffee shop. They grabbed magazines and a table by the window.

  “This is a pretty nice setup,” said Coleman.

  “It’s the new café society,” said Serge. “Just like Paris.”

  Serge read The New Republic, and Coleman flipped a High Times open to a hotel-rating guide for a psilocybin tour of the Yucatán.

  Serge stood up. “I need some coffee.”

  He went to the counter. A waif with a pierced tongue greeted him. “Mmgtgh skjhje?”

  “What?”

  “Mmgtgh skjhje?”

  “What? I can’t understand you…Holy God! You’ve got a piece of metal rammed through your tongue! Don’t move—I’ll get help!…”

  The café manager stepped up. “Everything’s fine. Can I get you something?”

  Serge stared at the first woman a moment, then turned to the manager: “Coffee.”

  “Latte? Mocha? Café con leche?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Chicory? Raspberry espresso? Frappuccino?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Decaf almondine? Cinnamon Explosion?…”

  “Never mind.”

  He walked back to the table.

  “What the matter?” asked Coleman.

  “They don’t have any coffee. Let’s get out of here.”

  They headed south through the Tampa night again, grooving on the moment. Traffic raced by on both sides. Sports cars, motorcycles, pizza-delivery trucks. Serge and Coleman smiled. This was their town. Serge began tapping the steering wheel and singing: “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?…”

  Coleman: “Hookin’ up words and phrases and clauses…”

  Serge made a left into a grid-street neighborhood. It was a dark road, and he slowed the Barracuda to a crawl. The street was empty. He rolled down his window.

  “You know what job I want?” said Coleman, pulling a joint from behind his ear and lighting it.

  “I don’t know. Guidance counselor?” Serge leaned across Coleman’s lap and opened the glove compartment. He dug out a garage-door opener.

  “You know how all those soul bands back in the seventies had some guy who would scream, ‘Say what?’ ”

  Serge rolled by a house and pointed the remote control out his window and pressed the button. Nothing happened.

  “That’s the job I want,” said Coleman. He took a double-toke and held it.

  “What job is that?” asked Serge. He rolled by the next house and pressed the button again. Still nothing.

  “I want the job of the guy who goes, ‘Say what?’ ”

  “You’re uniquely qualified,” said Serge. He pointed the remote control and pressed again. Nothing.

  Coleman exhaled a hit. “Check it out: Say what?”

  Serge kept clicking the remote control without result.

  “Say what?”

  Serge looked both ways as he crossed a well-lit intersection.

  “Say what?”

  They continued into the darkness of the grid street on the other side.

  “Say what?”

  “Now it’s annoying.” Serge clicked the remote again.

  “Sorry,” said Coleman. He thought a second, took a hit. “If I can’t get that job, I want the job of that tiny little fucker who screams on Sly and the Family Stone.”

  “I know his work,” said Serge, clicking the remote again.

  “I think there are several of ’em,” said Coleman. “I’ve heard the same vocals on Kool and the Gang and the Edgar Winter Group, to name but a few.”

  “A cottage industry of James Brown midgets.”

  “Check this out: ‘Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’ ”

  “Again, impressive.”

  Coleman grinned and nodded and took another hit. “That’s why I really never worry about being unemployed. If push comes to shove, I always have that.”

  Serge clicked the remote. A garage door began rising. Serge stopped the car.

  “This is the Eagle. We have lunar-module separation,” said Serge. “Prepare for cabin depressurization and space walk.”

 
“Roger,” said Coleman. He grabbed Serge’s flashlight and jumped from the car.

  Serge soon saw a flashlight beam swooping around inside the garage. Then Coleman disappeared behind the parked car. The flashlight swooped across the ceiling. It was starting to take a long time. There were some noises, just a little at first, things dropping, pliers and screwdrivers. The flashlight went out. More noise. Serge could see Coleman’s silhouette knocking over something, then hearing the crash, then reaching to try to catch it before it fell, only sending more things over, until Coleman built to his big 1812 Overture finale, crashing into a set of metal garbage cans. One of the cans began rolling down the driveway. A light went on in the garage, and a man’s voice: “What the hell’s going on out there!”

  Coleman came running down the driveway with something in his right hand. He stumbled and accidentally kicked the garbage can rolling ahead of him, sending it slamming into the side of the Barracuda. Serge stuck his head out the driver’s window and looked down at the paint job.

  The porch light went on, then a floodlight. Coleman jumped in the car. Serge hit the gas and sped off as a man in a bathrobe came out the front door with a shotgun.

  They were three blocks away before Serge turned and saw what Coleman had taken from the garage.

  “Electric pepper mill?”

  “Is that what this is?” said Coleman.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “It looked expensive in the dark.”

  “It’s a piece of crap. It’s for people with more money than imagination.”

  “We can always pawn it.”

  “It might bring five dollars on Crack Street, but that’s it.” Serge looked around the car. “Where’s my flashlight?”

  “I must have left it.”

  “Nice going, Rico Suave. That was my sentimental flashlight. Cost twenty-nine bucks.” He pointed at the pepper mill: “We’re losing ground.”

  Coleman pressed a button on the pepper mill; an electric motor began to whir. “Hey, it works.” Coleman held the mill in front of Serge’s face and pressed the button again. “See?”

  “Get that fucking thing out of my face. I’m trying to drive.”