Gun Church

subtlety to the young writer’s palette.

“Men get older, Kipling, but they never do grow up.”

She was right about that too. I was living testament to it.

I edited the chapter so that Harper Marx lures both Kant and Pandora up to the roof of his old loft building in SoHo. He holds them at bay with a chef’s knife, explaining in excruciating detail to Pandora how Kant ruined him, how Kant had paid him to play the part of the vengeful partner, how he was supposed to menace them the following night at CBGB. When Marx sees that Pandora believes him in spite of Kant’s feverish denials, Marx leans over the edge of the building and plunges to his death. Like the smell of my father’s suicide, I hadn’t thought about that chapter in decades.

I peered up at Frank Vuchovich standing over me, that blue hunk of metal in his hand. He looked more perplexed than angry, as if he hadn’t ever considered the endgame. He just sort of stared at the gun as if it held the answer about what to do next. He might just as well have clicked the heels of his ruby slippers or strung together all his blown-out birthday candle wishes for the good it would do him.

“Frank, put it-”

A window shattered. I felt the spray of warm liquid on my face before I could make sense of it. Another window broke and the kid sat down on stringless legs; his head making a sickening thud as it smacked against the tile floor. I scrambled over to him, but it was no use. The shots had ripped holes through his heart and liver. Death had come so quickly that Frank Vuchovich hadn’t had time to rearrange his expression. He was puzzled even in death. And in that second I felt every feeling I’d ever felt, including things that hadn’t stirred in me for a very long time.

Three

Keith Richards

“Lazy, undisciplined, untalented writers who can’t figure out bridge scenes-how to get from point A to point B-employ dream sequences.”

I never forgot Professor Archer Knox’s admonition, although I stopped quoting it to my own classes a long time ago. The Kipster was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. By the advent of the ’90s, I was Archer Knox’s poster boy. Money had made me lazy. Coke made me undisciplined. And who the fuck knew what disappeared my talent?

I had included dream sequences in my last three novels and they were some of the best things in the books. That’s when I knew my career had come to utter shit. Talk about work destined for the remainder bin! If it hadn’t been for Meg Donovan, I wouldn’t have even bothered retrieving the rights to those books.

“Christ, Meg, it’s like asking the surgeon for the tumor back.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Weiler. You can’t afford it.”

“Says who?”

“Says me, your agent.”

“Who in their right mind is going to pay me to put out new editions of this puke? If no one liked lunch going down, they’re not going to like it any better coming back up.”

“This is publishing, Kip! Since when does logic have anything to do with it?”

I may have written my final dream sequence many years earlier, but I seemed to have been living in an extended one these last couple of weeks. I had appeared on all the network morning shows. I had done the circuit before in the ’80s, many times; although, my memories of those spots ranged from vague to nonexistent. I was usually hung over, sometimes drunk, and often lit up like a Christmas tree. By ’89, I was live television poison and my on-air comments about the size and shape of Jane Pauley’s ass hadn’t exactly helped my cause.

Meg had hoped to slap some sense into me by sharing with me what the head publicist at Ferris, Ledoux had told her about trying to book me on the morning shows.

“Kip, a producer at GMA told your head publicist to go fuck herself. She said that watching Capote self- destruct on air was one thing, that him doing it was Greek tragedy, but that you were an incoherent clown. ‘If I want incoherence, I’ll book Keith Richards. If I want a clown, I’ll book Bozo. When your guy writes In Cold Blood, I’ll think about it.’ That’s what she said.”

But I laughed it off as I laughed everything off in those days because I’d yet to hit bottom. I had no way of knowing the terminus would be Grand Central Nowhere and that it would smell of pine tar and asphalt.

For now, all the satellite trucks had gone back to the state capital or New York City or whatever termite mound they crawled out of. The Newsweek, Time, and People reporters were history. Even the local rags had moved on to the next school shooting and photos of the county’s biggest pumpkin. School was back in session. Frank Vuchovich was buried. The police had finished up their investigations, such as they were. Cashiers, who for weeks had refused my attempts to pay for my meals, were once again accepting my money. My bottomless cup of coffee was drying up. But not everything had returned to the rocky depths of normalcy.

I hadn’t slept soundly for two weeks, which, I suppose, wasn’t altogether a bad thing because at some point every night I would find myself in front of my laptop. There was one night when my shaking hand had gone to Documents and I’d double clicked on the file saved as McGuinn.doc. It wasn’t exactly cause for celebration. The file was nearly as empty as my soul.

McGuinn.doc was nothing more than a collection of feeble first lines from a book I had wanted to write for many years. Problem was that by the time the inspiration train pulled into the station, the train with my talent aboard had long since pulled out. So over the course of the last decade and a half, I would, upon occasion, sit and cringe at what I’d written:

Terry McGuinn

Terry McGuinn killed.

Terry McGuinn was a killer.

Terry McGuinn was an assassin.

What Terry McGuinn did could not be called a living.

He was a nondescript man of no discernable age who drank like he

I met the ghost of Terry McGuinn in a pub in Deptford High Street and

That one there, the one about the ghost of Terry McGuinn was the one with the most promise, but I had no promise. I had nothing to add after the and. I cursed the day I met the man who I always thought of as Terry McGuinn; rather, I cursed the timing of it. He’d actually never told me his name.

It was during that period in my life when simple downward momentum had succumbed to gravity and it was all going to shit-when my world was a blur of cocaine, alcohol, and fading celebrity. You can’t imagine how desperately you want to hang on to celebrity until it begins to fade. Bill Septan, a friend of mine at Rolling Stone, wanted to assign someone to do a long piece on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but he said he was sick to death of the unremittingly dark tales of woe that came out of the place. For some bizarre reason, he seemed to think the Kipster’s biting cynicism was a good fit for the piece. The whole idea was madness, of course. I jumped at the chance. It offered all sorts of things that appealed to my worst instincts: money, escape, and a chance to fuck up on the big stage.

I didn’t disappoint. Not only did I have nothing fresh to write, I had no juice in the tank with which to write it. No one who spent five minutes in that bubbling caldron of religious hatred, political radicalism, and violence would question why the reporting from the North was categorically dark, moody, and full of woe. But I had to write something in order to collect the kill fee from the magazine. The only thing I could be cynical about was my own pathetic life, so that’s exactly what I wrote about: my endless pub crawl from the Catholic ghettos of Belfast to the streets of London. Naturally, the day after I faxed my piece to Rolling Stone, I met a nameless man in a bar in Deptford.

I was in Deptford because I vaguely remembered-I suppose all of my memories from those days were vague-that the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had been murdered there and because the band Squeeze came from there. I liked Squeeze a lot more than Marlowe, frankly: more danceable, catchier lyrics. Some