tickets to impress some piece of tail from Staten Island. What a fucking waste of a human penis.”
Danny hands me the money, five hundred dollars already promised to Henry Head, who during our five-minute telephone conversation would guarantee no immediate results but assured me that “when you need a private dick, you can count on the Head.” I’d kept reminding myself that Larry Kirschenbaum had vouched for him.
“You want ’em?” he asks. “The tickets. I’m supposed to be on a plane to Saint Bart’s in …” He looks at his watch. “Right now. Come on, take ’em.
They’re behind the Sonics bench. You can play bongos on the X-Man’s bald head. Don’t … You can’t do that, I’ll lose my tickets, but you know what I mean.”
It’s amazing, I tell myself as I exit the office with the tickets in my pocket, what you can accomplish by just not being a dickhead. And it only gets better: The elevator is waiting for me when I push the button. The uptown 2 arrives the moment I reach the platform. There is an open seat near the door.
And when I finally reach the hotel with time enough to change — out of slavish loyalty to what I now consider to be my brand, the well-dressed drug dealer, I’m still wearing business-casual — I hear a familiar voice call my name. I spin around to see K.
“I thought I recognized that ass,” she says.
“Hey,” I protest. “I’m not just a sex object you can ogle.”
“Mmm. Too bad. I had fun the other night.”
“Me too. I tried to call you until I realized I didn’t have your number.”
“I’ve been superbusy,” she says.
“Life in the big city.”
We wait together for the light at Seventh Avenue.
“Also …,” she starts, then trails off.
“Don’t tell me. You’ve got herpes.”
“Gross me out. No, I’ve got a boyfriend. And I probably shouldn’t be kissing strange men in bars.”
“I think if you get to know me,” I say, starting across the street, “you’ll find I’m really not that strange. And besides, there’s the whole thousandmile rule.”
“That’s riiiight,” she says, catching up to me. “I forgot about the thousand-mile rule. I’m sure Nate would understand.”
“He seems like an understanding guy.”
“Only I can’t ask him tonight,” she adds, “on account of the band being in Cleveland. How far away is Cleveland?”
“Cleveland, Spain?”
By the time we reach the Chelsea, I have a date for the Knicks game. We agree to change and meet in the lobby in fifteen minutes.
“WEED MAN!” MY DATE CALLS to me from the end of the row. “You’re our only hope!”
“Yell it a little louder, Nate,” I reply. “I don’t think the whole team heard you.” One of the Sonics’ bench players turns around and winks at me, confirming they had.
I take some solace in the idea that he’s not trying to embarrass me as much as draw attention to himself — while I still don’t have enough information to judge his musical talents, it’s clear that Nate already has a rock star’s appetite for attention.
He’s the only person in the Garden wearing a purple velvet Mad Hatter lid festooned with peacock feathers.
“I seem to have departed the manse without my portfolio,” he continues, his voice faux-preppie, a nod and a fuck-you to the millionaires who surround us, it seems. “Would you be so kind as to slap a twenty on me? The local stout runs five a pop.”
I wonder how badly we have to behave for Danny Carr to lose his season tickets. I give us a fighting chance.
After waiting for a half hour in the lobby at the hotel, staring at the art and evading Herman’s questions about poems I had no intention of writing, I’d foolishly climbed up the stairs.
I find the door to K.’s suite partially open. I knock and no one answers, so I cautiously push open the door. Nate walks out of the bedroom, cradling his cock.
“Wart or canker sore?” he asks, holding it up for inspection.
Nate’s dick is long, skinny, and buck naked, like everything else about him. Even from a distance I can see what appears to be a red blemish near the tip. But Nate’s not looking at his dick — he’s staring at the Knicks tickets, which for some idiotic reason I’m holding in my hand.
“The Knicks? Bangin’!” Nate turns toward the bedroom, mock-Ricky Ricardo. “Oh, Lucy … you have a vis-i- tor.…”
K. emerges from the bedroom in a robe. Her eyes plead for forgiveness. Everything else about her screams freshly fucked.
“Need a date?” Nate asks, referring to the tickets. “I fly home early to surprise my girl only to discover she’s ditching me for the Isle of Lesbos.”
“Maybe if you warned me you were coming,” she says to Nate without taking her eyes off me, “I wouldn’t have made plans with the girls.”
“They always say they want more spontaneity,” Nate says, “Until you surprise them.”
“That’s only because your idea of a surprise,” protests K., “is to accidentally slip it into my ass.”
Nate grins like a well-fed cat. “You weren’t complaining for very long.”
“And they say romance is dead,” I deadpan, a major accomplishment given the nuclear explosions taking place in my brain.
“I like this guy,” Nate tells K., whipping a tentaclelike arm around my shoulder. “So what do you say, Weed Man? Boys night out?”
I look at my pager, amazed at the speed of my transformation from would-be cuckolder to cuckold.
I know I don’t have any good reason to be angry at K., but I am anyway. “Why not?”
Who the hell walks into a room holding up tickets?
As Danny promised, the seats are close enough to smell the game. But smelling sweaty men hardly seems like a consolation prize. When Nate offers to buy me a beer with my own money, I pull a twenty out of my pocket, crumple it into a ball, and wing it at him.
“Classy,” he says, picking it up off the floor.
I try to lose myself in the action. The game moves both faster and slower than it does on television. Up close, the players jump and cut much faster than their freakish size (also more impressive in person) should allow. But the Knicks’ style of play, halting and deliberate and bruisingly predicated on fouling the opposition every time they drive toward the basket, seems to suck some of the joie de vivre from the room. Not helping is their coach, who calls a timeout every time the Sonics manage to string together two baskets in a row.
“You should see the asshole who usually sits here,” I hear a guy behind me say about my seats.
A backhanded compliment? Damnation by faint praise? Does it fucking matter? I am itching for a fight.
Only when I spin around, I see Liz, my favorite client from the Upper East Side. Her attentiondemanding breasts provide support to something fuzzy and charcoal, too long to be a sweater but too short to be a skirt, allowing plenty of exposure for long, athletic legs wrapped in shimmery black tights and high-heeled boots. Her hair is moussed and tousled. A light layer of makeup helps her eyes to outsparkle the diamond studs in her ears, while the string of pearls around her neck make her look like she’s just stepped out of Vanity Fair.
“Hi,” I say.
“You know this guy?” says the man sitting next to her, the one I’d targeted for a fight. He’s in his midforties, wearing a brown suit and a Yankees cap to cover what I assume is male-pattern baldness. Liz’s mind seems to be cycling through potential replies.
Or potential escape routes.
“Liz and I went to high school together,” I say, extending a hand. “The name’s Coopersmith … Biff
