“So then,” the reporter said, “are you planning on giving away a large portion of your newly acquired fortune?”
“Oh, sure,” Hunny said. “Why not? There’ll be plenty to go around. Art and I will probably have some work done on the house…”
“Yeah, like blow it up!” somebody yelled, and this produced more laughter.
“And Art was reminding me just the other day that we need four new tires on the Explorer…”
Now a man who had been part of the kick line was being nudged forward by other celebrants, and we recognized him from earlier in the report. The reporter said, “And here is somebody else who may have his own ideas about what you can do with your billion dollars. This is Hunny’s partner, Arthur Malanowski. Art, please share your feelings with us on this momentous occasion.”
A grinning long-faced man with a red nose and thinning straw-colored hair, Malanowski moved tipsily but spoke clearly in a fluty baritone. “Well, dearie, we are going to have to talk to an attorney, and I guess to an investment advisor. Right now, though, we’re just going to party, party, party!”
“Art is the grown-up of the household,” Hunny said cheerfully, waving his champagne glass at his sweetheart and sloshing a bit of its contents onto Art’s green, blue, orange and yellow Hawaiian shirt. “But what I have to remind him of is that neither of us has to act like a grown-up ever again!”
“He’s pulling your leg,” Malanowski said chortling. “Hunny is basically levelheaded.”
Somebody in the room started chanting, “No, he’s not!” and others picked it up. “No, he’s not! No, he’s not…!”
Then they all cheered as Hunny said, “I’m gonna act just as grown-up as America’s all-time favorite billionaire, which means wherever I go there’s gonna be a Pontiac under everybody’s seat from now on!”
Timmy said, “Uh oh.”
Suddenly looking a little more sober, Malanowski said,
“Hunny is well known for being generous, and I’m sure he will continue that. But in a kind of organized way. Maybe like Paul Newman. A foundation or whatever.”
“Artie, luv, you are my Paul Newman,” Hunny crooned, and planted a big wet kiss on Malanowski’s cheek. “And I’m your Bea Arthur!”
“Hunny, Paul Newman wasn’t married to Bea Arthur.”
“Yes, he was!” Hunny insisted, and another chant broke out all around the room — “Yes, he was! Yes, he was!” — before trailing away into raucous laughter.
The TV reporter asked, “How long have you two been a couple? I get the impression it’s been quite some time you’ve been together.”
“Oh, girl!” Hunny sang out, waving his arm and flinging an inch of cigarette ash onto the reporter’s blue jacket. “Arthur and I have been lovebirds since before you were even born. We’re not actually legally married, what with the State of New York still futzing around on the subject of gay marriage. But the reality of the situation is, we are already so married — the way we depend on each other and all — that we could give a rat’s ass what all those closet queen politicians do or don’t do.”
“But we would like to make it legal,” Malanowski said. “Just to show that we’re as good as anybody else.”
“And to make sure you’re in Hunny’s will,” somebody yelled, but this produced only scattered guffaws.
“Well,” the reporter said gamely, “like a lot of married couples, you two do seem to have quite a bit in common.”
“You bet we do,” Hunny said. “For example, we both like having buckets of money drop out of nowhere all of a sudden, ha ha ha!”
Malanowski added, “You bet we both like money. After all,” he sang, almost in tune, “mon-ey makes the world go ‘round… the world go ‘round…the world go ‘round…”
There were cheers again, and Hunny added, “Money, yes, you bet, but don’t forget boys! Boys, boys, boys!”
This led to more applause and then cries of “Bring on the boys! Where are the boys?”
Somebody yelled, “Put the twins on TV! Let’s get a little of the twins!”
The large black man reappeared in a voluminous pink satin blouse, and this time he was guiding the two identical youths wearing wAnt soMe? T-shirts into the center of the scene.
Hunny welcomed them by wrapping his arms around them and bellowing, “Everybody meet Tyler and Schuyler. These are our pool boys! Aren’t they adorable?”
The two comely lads stood looking goggle-eyed and twitchy, and plainly under the influence of a controlled substance.
The reporter was beginning to look uncomfortable now and glanced off to the side, maybe at her producer. She said to Hunny
— and then immediately looked as if she wished she hadn’t said it — “But you don’t have a swimming pool, do you, Hunny?”
“The boys may have misplaced it. They’re easily distracted,”
Hunny said, and this elicited a mixture of laughter and boos around the room. Tyler and Schuyler gawked into the camera.
“Anyway,” Art said, “maybe we’ll have a pool put in tomorrow.
The Luntzes, up the street, have an aboveground pool, and we know there’s room for one of those out back.”
“We have to wait until we actually get our hands on the money,” Hunny explained. “We’ve decided on the lump sum of a billion dollars instead of one billion, eight-hundred-seventy-two million spread out over twenty years. I mean, I could croak in three years and so could the freakin’ state of New York.”
“I understand,” the reporter said, “that the Lottery Commission is actually paying out nearly two billion dollars so that even after taxes you will still end up with an entire billion dollars.”
“Hey, does Warren Buffet pay his own taxes?” Hunny asked.
“Not on your life.”
“We’re going to get the check on Friday,” Art said. “They’re going to present it to us on The Today Show. Isn’t that fabulous?
They probably don’t remember that about ten years ago when we went down to hold up a sign on Hunny’s birthday, he got arrested for mooning Al Roker.”
“I wasn’t arrested,” Hunny insisted. “I was just locked in an office until the show was over. And anyway the security guard
— one of the biggest queens I ever saw wearing a uniform — that big black ol’ Miss Mary Mary Quite Contrary told me that Al thought it was pretty funny, and the problem was tight-assed 8 Richard Stevenson
Katie Couric.”
Timmy said, “We have to put this on the calendar. Friday morning at seven.”
“Maybe we should have a few people over.”
The Channel 13 reporter didn’t look as eager as Timmy and I were to witness this groundbreaking media event, and also she appeared to be receiving signals from somewhere to wind up the interview.
Before she could speak, though, the screen suddenly went black. A few seconds later one of the anchors on the studio news set appeared and said, “Well, it looks like we’ve lost Tiffany.”
“Yes,” said his female colleague, “But wasn’t that fascinating?”
Looking unsure of how to respond — even this codger seemed to understand that hint of mint cracks were a thing of the past — the anchor simply nodded and moved on to the house fires and convenience store holdups that somebody at the TV station thought the people of New York State’s capital region needed to know about.
Chapter Two
“Uncle Hunny asked for trouble, and he got it,” Nelson Van Horn said, indicating the man slouched in a chair across from me. “You just cannot live the life my uncle’s led and not have chickens coming home to roost by the
