Gun Church

“Sorry. So how did you-”

“eBay.”

“eBay what?”

“I always scan eBay for stuff of yours. I have signed first editions of all your books, signed paperbacks, uncorrected galleys, promotional bookstore posters, videos of your TV appearances, all kinds of shit. One day last March I saw that Moira Blanco’s daughter was selling some of her stuff on eBay and I bought it cheap. It was mostly crap, but there were these envelopes with chapters from your manuscripts. How cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” I said, not wanting to set him off again. “But I’m still not seeing the connection between the chapter and-”

He annihilated his beer and squashed the can against the table. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. I don’t like it here as much as I thought I would.”

“The Hunt Club is gone, Jim. Humans are sentimental. The universe doesn’t give a shit.”

“Fuck the universe.”

“Doesn’t work. I’ve tried.”

He kind of snickered at that. “Yeah, well, we’ll see.” And he was out of the bar as quickly as he’d come in.

“Your friend okay?” the waitress asked, sliding the credit card receipt and a pen at me.

“Not sure,” I said, adding a twenty-dollar tip.

“Not sure of what?”

“Of anything.”

I think she said thanks, but I wasn’t even sure of that.

Forty-Five

The King of Coincidences

It had been a long time getting to Coney Island-a long time and a lot of beers. Jim had it in his head to do the stations of the Kipster’s cross. After buying two six-packs of Bud at a deli, we criss-crossed Manhattan, paying homage at sites Jim Trimble had determined were significant in my life or the lives of my characters. The drunker he got, the greater his reverence, the blurrier the lines between the Kipster and his characters, and the longer he prayed at my various altars. The only person for whom these places held any meaning was him. When we stopped at the building Kant Huxley had lived in, Jim nearly wept. Flashing Pandora was his favorite book ever, a point he repeated so many times during the course of our pilgrimage I wanted to scratch my own eyes out. He said he had a particular affinity for Kant Huxley. Did I know why? Did I care?

As the night wore on, it got more difficult for me to keep a lid on my emotions. Clearly, something was going on with Jim that was straying pretty far from the center line. I kept cycling through a spectrum of feelings, from anger to worry, from disappointment to fear, from boredom to disdain. At points, I even felt pity for Jim that he was so heavily invested in a writer whose time had come and gone. Still, there had to be more to it than this magical and miserable tour. Renee’s warning was never far from my thoughts, but by about one in the morning, I’d pretty much had it. I was so drained and so tired of indulging his fanboy adventures that I exploded.

“That’s it, Jim!” I yelled, slamming my hand down on the dashboard. “I want some fucking answers and I want them now. If you don’t start explaining what you’re playing at, I’m getting the fuck out of this truck.”

But if I thought my outburst would push him to melt down or to give me the answers I wanted, I was wrong. He just floored the truck, flew through a red light, and turned down Chambers Street.

“Amy’s loft is beautiful. I really like the portraits she’s done of the two of you.”

Words formed themselves in my head to say, but they caught in my throat like shards of bone. Fuck, he’d broken into the loft.

“You don’t want to yell at me,” he said, his voice feral and menacing. “The last person to do that to me was the Colonel. No one’s gonna do that to me again. Stay or go, it’s up to you, but all sorts of bad things happen when pets go off leash.”

Fuck! Now he was quoting Satan to me, literally. Although what I’d said to Jim earlier in the evening was true, that I’d forgotten my books once they’d been written, I hadn’t forgotten everything of my old work and I certainly remembered that line. In a chapter in The Devil’s Understudy, Satan discusses the dangers of free will with his future replacement, a young investment banker. I never thought I’d have it thrown back in my face. Where only seconds ago I’d been nearly paralyzed with fear, I was now furious. If Amy weren’t part of the equation, I might have smacked Jim across the jaw for using my own words to compare me to a dog on his tether, but Amy was involved and getting in one good shot wouldn’t have been worth it.

“Staying?” It wasn’t a question, not really, and ten minutes later we were across the Brooklyn Bridge, heading to Coney Island.

Jim was insistent. “Which bench was it that Romeo used? I want to sit on that bench.”

We’d come to the end of the line, the terminal station of the Kipster’s cross. In Romeo vs. Juliet-as Jim kept reminding me on our way here-Romeo bones his divorce lawyer on a bench in Coney Island. For reasons known only to Jim, he’d chosen this as our last stop.

“It was that bench,” I said, picking one out at random.

He didn’t question it and sat down on the cold moist slats, a beatific smile on his sloppy, drunken face. For all his bluster and menace, he’d believed me like a lost little boy believes the nearest grownup. I didn’t join him on the bench. It was damp and raw by the ocean, a cold fog hanging over the boardwalk like a gray veil. The wind blowing in off the Atlantic had jagged edges, the salt air cutting right through my sports jacket and sweater. I turned my collar up against the cold and damp to no avail.

“So this was the bench Romeo fucked his lawyer on, huh? I loved Romeovs. Juliet too. I used to jerk off imagining what it would be like having a hot girl like Romeo’s lawyer straddling me, her panties torn and her skirt flared over my lap. I asked Renee to fuck me like that once, just like in the book, but she wouldn’t. She thought it was weird. Did she ever fuck you like that, Kip?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I bet you can’t.”

“You in the mood to talk now?” I asked. “I’m freezing to death out here.”

“I don’t … feel so … good. I got … to … puke.”

He ran unsteadily across the boardwalk and down onto the sand, fell on his haunches and emptied his guts. I stood at the rail on the boardwalk above him, facing the last vestiges of the amusement park. Those rides that remained were ancient beasts, hibernating through another brutal winter. Coney Island was a hopeless place, a place for dying. Jim trudged back up onto the boardwalk, a sheen of sweat covering his ashen face.

“Let’s walk,” I said. “It’s too cold to stand still.”

Jim didn’t argue and followed me as I turned away from Coney Island and toward Brighton Beach.

“What was that crack before, Jim, quoting Satan back to me about pets off the leash?”

“I’m sorry I said that. I really am, I swear.” I thought I saw tears welling up in his eyes.

What, I thought, did a few tears matter at the edge of the ocean? His tears worried me, though. Jim was mercurial. Sure, he was sad now, but manic and belligerent too. He was the kind of drunk who beats the shit out of his wife, then tearfully swears his undying devotion to her as she spits out broken teeth. Those kinds of drunks are sorry only for themselves and that makes them dangerous.

“We’re way past sorry. What did you mean by it?”

“Did you know I got accepted into the best state university, but I stayed home in Brixton just so I could take your classes?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard the question.

“I’m honored.”

“You got me through high school. You did, you really did. I used to wish you were my dad. You would have been the coolest dad, not like the Colonel.”