“I hear things?”
“Speaking of hearing things.” Stein sensed there weren’t going to be many openings so he jumped in. “I came here for a reason.”
“You want something. Let me get over my shock?”
“Can we stop farting up each other’s assholes for a second?”
“You looking to score tickets for the Raven Family Five?”
“To score, yeah.” Stein tried to pluck the string just right. “But not tickets.”
Winston lit up another smoke. “I wouldn’t know what that means coming from you.”
“Same as it means coming from anybody.”
“Nah. Everybody knows a certain ex has got your nuts in a sack.”
“Not everybody seems quite as delighted about it as you are.”
“Trust me, they are. Activities deleterious to the well being of the child? How do you let that shit happen to you?” He did a pantomime of a testicle sac being snipped off.
“Listen to me.”
“Ears, man.” He shielded his stubs.
“Sorry.” Stein modulated his tone.
Winston slapped his attache case down on the stage and unzipped the inner compartment. Seven sandwich baggies were pinned to the inside wall, each housing a distinct variety of bud. “You want to look at some shit? Here is the basic winter catalogue. Humboldt Sense. Maui Wowie. Jack Herer. Some sweet hydro-ponic from that dope fiend capital of the world, Minneapolis.”
Stein smiled at the buds.
“Enjoying your vicarious window shopping?”
“That shit’s fine for the tourists and civilians. If I wanted to buy off the rack I’d go to Macy’s. I’m looking for something special.”
“Something special, he says.”
“I hear there’s Goodpasture Orchids around.”
Winston gushed out a pillar of Marlboro smoke. “Right. Maybe I can get you a date with Cameron Diaz, too.”
Stein unfurled the plastic placenta in which Goodpasture’s little embryo was ensconced, and with great care, broke off a small tip of the bud. Unmistakable perfume flooded the room and Winston knew instantly what he was looking at.
“Are you shitting me?”
Stein enjoyed the change in tone from derision to respect. “Would I bother a busy man like yourself, who doesn’t have time in five years to call his best bud, with anything but the best bud?” He tamped the fine grains into the bowl of Winston’s pipe with meticulous care.
Winston was like a boy leaning toward the bowl where his mother was mixing chocolate pudding “I’ve never smoked genuine orchid.” Pipe now in hand, Winston closed his eyes, folded down and lit a match one-handed, and took a long, luxurious lungful. “Oh man! This is the shit! I take back nearly half of the bad stuff I ever said about you.” Van Goze offered the pipe to Stein, who held up both hands in the international gesture of no thanks. “Good. More for me.” Winston vacuumed up another bellowsworth. “You know what’s beautiful about this shit? You can think clearly and be fucked up at the same time.”
“There may be a person or persons advertising to have quantities of this for sale. I’d appreciate a heads up.”
“Rather than telling them you’re looking.”
“You got the idea.”
“You’re working?”
“Just keep an eye open, will you?”
They made a feeble attempt at an embrace that neither of them was into. Winston conceded an inch. “Look. I’ve been out in the fucking Ozarks for a month with these crazy crackers. But if you’re really interested in Great Smokies you should reach out to my ex-old lady. She’s working with her new husband, Maw-Reece, in his antique shop.”
“Right. She’s with the antique dude. I heard that.”
Van Goze took a long last dredging hit on the pipe and sucked the smoke down to Australia. Stein narrated to an invisible TV camera. “Don’t try this at home, kids. This man is a professional.” Van Goze laughed so hard he coughed up chunks of the Outback.
“You’re still a putz.”
Stein was nearly out the door when Winston called after him, “It’s too bad you didn’t turn out like your kid. She’s a trip.”
Stein’s face reappeared. “What the hell do you know about my kid?”
“I was at your surprise party, man.”
“The Best of Times ” antique store was packed to a critical mass with chairs, desks, tables, cabinets, armoires: each of them in turn crammed with hats, bowls, glasses, mirrors, jewelry, scarves, cameos. The air was left from a previous century. Stein called a hello, but his voice was absorbed two inches in front of him by material goods. He slithered through the maze, pinching his love handles on an old metal stove, banging his forehead into the edge of a Monopoly board held together by a petrified rubber band. He followed the sound of a power tool into a back open courtyard. Somebody who looked like a Maurice-short, bald, wiry-was sanding down a cherry wood night table that its former owner had slathered in white enamel.
“Howdy,” Stein ventured.
Maurice turned around and took the sawdust mask off his face. “Help you?”
“Are you Maurice?”
Maurice nodded that he was.
“Winston’s old lady here?” Stein caught himself and apologized. “Sorry, I guess you probably think of her as Maurice’s old lady.”
“I think of her as Vanessa,” said Maurice. “And if she’s not inside, she’s probably down at the community center changing the world for the better. Do you know where that is?”
Stein indicated that he didn’t.
“You’re lucky.”
Maurice made a little map, directing him to walk a few blocks east then walk a block or two south.
“I notice you keep using the verb ‘walk’ instead of ‘drive.’ Is that just a figure of speech?”
“Not if you’re married to Vanessa.”
The DeLongpre Community Center was a large, rambling one-story house built in the 1920s. A plethora of signs on the bulletin boards would have you think this was international headquarters for the Abolishment of Domestic Violence, Saving the Whales, Saving the Ozone Layer, Free Choice, Free Condoms, Free Spaying and Neutering of Pets and a few other causes whose notices were thumb tacked over by newer ones. The person who met Stein at the door had unruly manes of black hair and beard that left only a small bit of unplanted acreage on his face. He looked like a short, squat version of Allen Ginsberg, and was one of the throng of seven people assembled for this afternoon’s lecture and book signing by the famed anti-automobile activist, Brianna Chisolm.
Stein understood why Maurice had told him to walk. A hierarchy of purity existed. People greeted each other not with hellos but by inquiring how they got here. A female in dark framed glasses and overalls who had come here on three buses from Pasadena was dissed for being “too internally combustive” by a geek who had pedaled his Schwinn from El Monte. The winners were brothers originally from Siberia who had pogo-sticked from Santa Monica the previous night for the talk on herbal colon cleansing and had just stayed on.
Winston’s now Maurice’s ex-old lady, Vanessa, was a striking woman, over six-feet tall with a great shock of wild, electric gray hair. Her eyes were gigantic and a little sad, which made you sad too, because her melancholy was so beyond hiding. When she greeted her old friend Stein her voice still had a bit of the aristocratic British accent she picked up while living in Tanzania. “Look who’s here. The man who misses his own surprise party.”
“Is that how I’m going to be known in history now? My identifying phrase?”
“You don’t look nearly as rotten as everyone says,” she smiled.
“Hillary being everyone?”
