Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic, Chapter 24

Anonymous

In the five and a half months Nate Randall had been back in the city, only one person had come close to recognizing him. All he had done was let the beard grow out and wear a black market FDNY hat and sunglasses. His name was now “Steve,” and he had on very few occasions run into anyone who had the attention span to contradict that fabrication. This was, after all, New York City, where a person’s relative visibility can change radically from day to day or even from block to block—and where a six-month absence from the scene may as well be a lifetime. City people have a hard enough time picking out their best friends in a crowd, much less identifying a habitual loner they may have met or fucked once or twice a year or two ago.

During the ride to Newark, Martin had lobbied hard for Nate to come with him. “You can stay at my parents’ home in the Cotswolds, rest up in peace and quiet, write a book and plot your next insurrection.”

It was true. Nate could easily have left the country, using the ersatz “Stephen Jenkins” passport and Social Security ID card Big Nick had provided. But when he really thought about it, there was no place else he wanted to go. He was nothing if not a New Yorker. It had been the end of a frighteningly sultry March—spring and baseball season had ejaculated prematurely in the thickly carbonated air—and he told Martin to drop him at the Newark PATH station on his way to the airport. As he pulled the car to the curb, Nate handed him the videotape. “Use it how you want,” he said. “But be careful not to get yourself killed.”

Martin’s eyes shone. “I will do that. I shall never forget our adventures together, James Olsen,” he had blurted, for a moment considering jettisoning the gray future of upper-class security and government service his parents had reserved for him in favor of disappearing with Nate into the exotic bowels of lower Manhattan. He stifled his emotions and pressed a piece of paper into his friend’s hand. “Please call or write sometime. It’s been a pleasure. Good luck to you.”

Nate swallowed hard. “Thanks, mate. You were a lifesaver, more than once. Now get the fuck out of here, before I change my mind. Stiff upper lip and all that.”

Neither CNN nor WABC had carried live coverage of his jihad; someone had gotten to the producers in time. Aerial views of the burning governor’s mansion and of ambulances leaving the compound had been accompanied by grainy sequences of himself holding a gun to the cardinal’s pate, and a bald-faced head shot of him that Winnie had provided. The story was a decent diversion for five days or so, but it was no 9/11 or anthrax scare.

Three days afterward, Hiram Pollock was already helicoptering around to ribbon cuttings as if nothing had happened, seemingly no stiffer in the shoulders than usual. The cardinal also was back at work, although he might have wished he wasn’t, with all the pederast priests in his diocese being unmasked on the front page of the Post. Arthur Schmidt nursed his wounds in a private suite at Westchester Medical where he had been airlifted, while his name kept popping up as a deep-pocketed supporter of President George W. Bush and a vocal proponent of U.S. military intervention in Iraq.

There was virtually no news of the fates of Nicole and Nootch, which was not necessarily bad. The two WABC cameramen, the Colombian busboy and the slightly injured Tommy Dongan had disappeared into the yawning media blackout as well.

Reginald Thurston Brown might as well have been the top-secret X-files corpse of a marooned space alien. Perhaps that’s what he was all along, mused Nate.

The only detailed information of any kind was about the death of himself and his victims: Commander James Robinson of the governor’s special New York State Police detail, Jefferson Town Supervisor and GOP stalwart William T. McNally and limousine chauffeur Paul Coons of Pepperton. Bill McNally was eulogized by Pollock as one of the party’s premier fundraisers along with his surviving wife, Edith, who was mourning him gracefully with the help of her recently divorced daughter and four lovely grandchildren.

James Olsen, AKA Nathan Randall was portrayed by the networks and newspapers as a confused madman; a copycat criminal who had been traumatized by his fiancée’s death in the World Trade Center disaster. Dark rumors that Nate’s obsession with McNally was due to his daughter’s hatred of him were circulated, but were dismissed by the family, who spoke of Bill and Sheila’s “loving father-daughter bond.” Witnesses Nate barely knew—including an equestrian veterinarian named Natalie Johnson—were found who verified that he had fallen off the deep end into drugs, and was constantly besieged by nightmares and conspiracy fantasies. A flotilla of professional talking-head shrinks analyzed his crime, coming to the consensus that in addition to post-traumatic psychosis, televised images of the escalating violence in the Middle East had triggered Randall’s attack on the governor’s mansion with a suicide bomb.

The one proof Nate imagined could possibly clear his name was the Betamax tape he had given to Martin. He had no idea yet if he’d ever bother with a stab at redemption. He felt a sense of relief at being presumed dead, if he indeed had gotten away with it.

***

Roosevelt County Sheriff Dean Hildenbrandt cradled his massive gray-pompadoured head in his calloused hands. He was having a hard time keeping the media and the feds sidetracked while his boys tried to figure out what really happened. They had interrogated Winnie Babson and his wife, who swore up and down that the Randall cocksucker was clean when they arrived at the party. “He couldn’t possibly have smuggled a bomb without Marjorie fucking noticing,” Winnie had told him. “She was all over him like a cheap suit.”

Hildenbrandt knew what Winnie was talking about. He had been down that road with Marjorie himself.

Plus the blast and fire were much too large to have been caused by the amount of explosives in a fucking bomb vest. But that meant the little fuck had had help. But who?

Pollock had been clear. Everyone was suspect, even himself. Find out how this went down, and fast. Interview everyone, and keep any real witnesses clear of the feds. If anyone had seen anything, find out what they knew and either pay them off or get rid of them.

It wasn’t that easy. His boys had interviewed and disposed of the little Spic, before he had a chance to blab to his wetback friends. The cardinal and Schmidt he didn’t think he would have to worry about, as up to their ears in the business as they were. Along with the governor, they gave him valuable information about what had happened up until their escape. Schmidt said Robinson seemed to have popped a cork, coming out and threatening Randall with the girl like that. He had always wondered what Hiram had seen in that idiot. He was such a preening, tightly wound closet queen, he probably thought he had the guy in a Mexican standoff. But the fucker was so cranked on pills he had rushed Robinson and blew off his stupid hat and toupee, and all hell broke loose.

What a nightmare.

The big thing was, the 9X19 mm slug that came out of Schmidt’s ass didn’t match his and Pollock’s description of Randall’s .45 automatic. It could have been a stray from one of Robinson’s chicken-shit swat crew, but both Schmidt and the governor had sworn somebody was shooting at them on purpose.

The most likely candidate was that Ianucci character, who they said was dragging around a tablecloth sack full of guns. He and his girlfriend had gone missing, along with the two WABC camera people. Any one of them might be walking around right now with a fucking tape of what happened in the cellar. If that got out, the jig was up.

Hopefully they were all trapped down in B2 or had been killed in the explosion. The blast and fire had destroyed the entire north wing of the house, including the elevator shaft and stairwell access to the B2 level, which hopefully had withstood the conflagration. Crews from one of McNally’s outfits were working to clear the debris and secure the exits, while he himself was coordinating efforts to keep the feds out until Monday at least. He hoped that was time enough to move all traces of the dope operation out of the place.

That left Dongan, who had showed up after the blast with a bullet in his thigh and scratches on his face, saying he had escaped from the limo during a fracas between Randall and McNally, and flown the garage through the governor’s secret passageway. That lame explanation produced a spike in Hildenbrandt’s well-oiled bullshit meter, and he had his boys put the big Mick on ice.

He was beginning to smell a bigger rat in all this, and the rat was Nick Vitello. During their necessarily rough processing of the uncooperative Dongan, his boys found Big Nick’s phone number in a text on his phone. Dongan tried to explain it away, but that and the fact that he had failed to put any hurdles at all in Randall’s path was enough to put the big Irishman on the sheriff’s shortlist of probable accomplices.

Hildenbrandt had never heard of any secret passageway from the governor’s garage to the train station below. When he asked him about it Pollock seemed surprised, and said he had never told anyone but McNally about it. “Tommy Dongan knew. That’s how he escaped,” said the sheriff. “I don’t know how to say this, Hi, but I think somebody else might have gotten out of there with him.”

“Fuck. I want that motherfucker found and killed. I don’t care what you have to do.”

***

After six days in hiding, Nate had ventured out to Kinko’s to perform some Yahoo searches. He entered the names “Ianucci,” John Ianucci,” “Royal” and “Nicole Royal.” Nothing relevant came up. He checked the on-line pinksterkilljournal.com for any stories during the week by or about John Ianucci. There was nothing. Against his better judgment, he clicked the “Obituaries” icon. Scrolling down, he froze before he got to “I,” momentarily unable to go on. He psyched himself up to expect the worst, as he had done so many times before.

If they’re dead, they’re dead. Life is for the living.

It wasn’t working. He felt dead inside himself.

He took a deep breath, and scrolled: Hoag, Hopper, Jackson…Lindsay, Orenstein, Randall. Randall, Nathan. Who would have thought to put his obituary in the paper?

He scrolled, slower.

Randall, Rogers…Sidwell, Travers…

He sighed with relief. No news is good news.

…Vitello.

Vitello, Nicholas, age 76, after a long illness.

It was an extended obituary, full of anecdotes lifted verbatim from Nate’s articles about the man. He paused and reflected on Big Nick’s flawed legacy. Was it a life well lived?

Yes and no.

How about his own legacy, now that he was a certified memory? Was Nate Randall’s a life well lived?

As things stood at present, definitely not.

Still, he had to pat himself on the back for one thing: Nick’s obituary was much livelier and better written than his was. Seeing the words staring back at him in an unfamiliar context after so much time, space and tragedy had intervened, Nate finally saw his own writing objectively. He actually wasn’t half bad. Almost as good as Sheila on her worst day.

Nate hardly noticed as his mind began to wander, backtracking aimlessly and touching down every so often like an Oklahoma twister, kicking up puffs of disconnected data and addled notions. Freddy Natale would be the family boss now, he thought uselessly. Charles Overlook would be looking for a new job. What on earth could a man like that possibly do? And what the hell had happened to Tommy Dongan, God bless his mutilated eye? He might never find out. Time to move on, time to move on. Just forget about the whole fucking thing and move on.

And then Nate remembered Nick Vitello’s death-grip handshake and warm, basset-hound eyes, which brought back vivid flash-card memories of his father and mother and Mr. DiSalvo and Anthony and Annie and Sheila and Rico and Nicole and Nootch and… he began to weep, which brought on yet another pounding headache. He paid the Kinko’s bill, dry-swallowed a morphine pill, and went across the street to wash it and his aching sadness down with a freshet of bourbon.

***

Dying isn’t always as easy as it looks. After five-and-a-half months of drowning himself in drugs and alcohol fully expecting to die, Nate had to admit failure. He resigned himself to the fact that, short of putting a bullet in his brain, he might be around a while longer. Maybe he didn’t have cancer after all. Maybe he was just crazy. The headaches hadn’t gone away, but they hadn’t gotten any worse either, and Nate realized one day he could ease up on the morphine dose by seventy-five percent with no corresponding increase in discomfort. This was a good thing, because at the rate his wad was dwindling from payoffs to the five-finger-discount pharmacist up on First Avenue, the money would be gone long before he was.

Other behavior modifications ensued. Once he succeeded in rolling back his daily intake of Jack Daniels from nearly a fifth to four shots at mealtimes, he felt his appetite returning, and as he was able to get and keep more food down he felt his strength increasing. He went on walks around the neighborhood, bought an old stationary bike off the street and started pedaling in his room while looking out the window at the woman sunbathing on the roof next door. As the globally warmed dog days of August became unbearable, he traded in the Jack habit for vodka, mixing it over lots of ice with carrot/orange juice for an extra antioxidant kick.

After about a week he reached a sort of plateau, where further experimentation failed to produce any improvement but there was no regression either. The headaches would come and go during the day; he could mitigate most of them without medication by exercising. When his condition inevitably worsened after dark, he would pop a couple of morphine pills, suck down a shot of something or other, smoke a bowl and go to sleep. He hoped he could eventually wean himself off morphine entirely, as it upset his stomach. But pot by itself was too weak by far to deal with the worst of it.

He still figured he was effectively a goner, and blamed what he assumed was a brief remission on the sturdy genes of his maternal grandmother, who had beaten back breast cancer at 35 and gone on to bear his mother at 40 and live another 57 flinty, smart-mouthed years. His pessimism was borne out by a convulsive attack one Saturday morning in which he threw up blood and green bile. Strangely, though, it abated as quickly as it had begun.

Rather than check into a hospital, he calmed himself down, went to the corner and picked up a Times, a Post, a Voice and a Bic pen and brought them over to Tompkins Square Park, relaxing among other humanoids for the first time in months. Within twenty minutes he was rejuvenating himself with the delicious trivialities of Page Six, box scores, musicians’ classifieds, personals ads and the crossword puzzle. If he was to die today, he would die doing what made him happy.

Eventually as he worked his way backward through each publication, Nate began to catch up on the world he had effectively stepped off of five months earlier. It amused him that life, like a television soap opera, can be skipped for an awfully long time without missing terribly much. The major characters—war, disease, famine, religious and corporate fanatics, errant priests and politicians, pregnant, drug-crazed, homicidal teenagers, pouting millionaires in cornrows and collagen-injected movie stars—hadn’t gone anywhere. Like hoary old Erica Kane, they seem mired in a recurring plot line by bad, repetitious scriptwriting.

And then he saw it.

It was a story on a public flap concerning the publication in the current issue of the virulent Leftie rag The Nation of an article potentially damaging to New York Gov. Hiram Pollock, currently angling for a vice presidential nod to replace an aging and physically hobbled Dick Cheney on G.W. Bush’s re-election ticket. Tucked away on the second-to-last page of the Metro section of the Times, the article stated that Pollock and his handlers were incensed at the “slanderous and deleterious lies” being promulgated by the Nation piece’s British author, who accused the governor of having run a multi-million-dollar cocaine ring out of his Hudson Valley mansion prior to its being torched by “St. Patty’s Day Bomber” Nathan Randall in March.

The author of the Nation article, which was liberally peppered with unnamed, confidential sources but contained no mention of any Betamax tape, was listed as Martin Brennan, an ambitious young assistant to the socialist writer Alexander Cockburn. Nate ran out to the news store at Second Avenue and St. Marks and bought a Nation, and it was all there, including eyewitness stuff that couldn’t have been caught on videotape and could only have been provided by someone like … Nootch? Nicole? His heart jumped once again with something approaching hope.

***

The trick, as always, was to keep moving.

After all that had gone down, it felt good to be back on a bike again, hustling packages. The bicycle was a good one, a brand-new fifteen-speed Peugeot Manhattan mountain/road hybrid that Nate had bought for 50 bucks off a hustler on St. Marks and scuffed the shit out of to make it look old and beat. He bought a mondo bike chain for it and an indestructible American lock; and a new helmet, aerodynamic goggles, skin-tight suit and bag. With his hair and beard now a wiry thicket, no one on earth would recognize him.

Or so he thought.

On a good bike, Nate was still a speed demon. Rico, who used to be a messenger, too, always told him he was pretty fast for an old man. He was right. When the two of them would ride uptown together Nate would kick Rico’s skinny ass, as well as the spandexed asses of more than one pro messenger—he was reckless.

Nothing much had changed, except there was no one worthwhile left to race against.

The headaches were under control through diet and exercise, and the hurling fits were infrequent. He rode downtown to a company he hadn’t worked for before: Bust-a-Move, an improbably busy messenger service on the fifth floor of a building otherwise full of Chinese rag trade sweatshops. He easily passed the silly bike messenger quiz—a cross between a Post Office exam and a driver’s test.

The business took up the entire floor, a light and airy loft bustling with the activity of messengers coming and going and dispatchers taking calls and droning instructions to their serfs out on the streets. The owner was Jack, an artificially relaxed lapsed yuppie, who reeked with false integrity and the odor of stale pot. As he interviewed Nate he seemed perplexed that a 40-year-old man with a résumé that read better than his own would want to be a bicycle messenger. Jack hired “Steve” anyway, and set him up with a dispatcher. “You’re real lucky to get Stewart,” said the boss. “He’ll give you as much work as you can handle, and he doesn’t play favorites.”

Stewart turned out to be a pathologically impatient, intensely moody dreadlock brother who enunciated like an Uncle Tom but bristled with spiky Afrocentricity. Sensing his new dispatcher eying him suspiciously, Nate wondered just how in the name of Judah they were going to get along. Still, as he sat around being ignored for more than an hour trying not to think about anything, he couldn’t help noticing that Stewart worked far more efficiently than did any of the other people jabbering into their headsets. He would browbeat his riders when they screwed up, yelling and hanging up on them; but afterward he would call them right back and say he was sorry. He seemed able to keep a lot of balls in the air.

Eventually Stewart handed Nate a Bust-a-Move “manifest” pad with a few addresses scrawled illegibly on it, and told him to get moving and call him when he’d made the first three pick-ups.

The first address was an organic-looking block-long maze of somehow still extant artsy dotcom offices on Broadway in SoHo. It had two identical entrances, and Nate knew from experience that if you took the wrong one you could get lost in there for hours. Luckily he found the place right away—a modeling agency crawling with big-boned young ladies and beady-eyed boys with spiky, heavily moussed N-Sync haircuts. One of the latter pushed two giant black cloth-bound supermodel portfolios at Nate across the counter—neither would fit in his bag—and sneered that they were going to an ad agency on 57th and Broadway.

The Bust-a-Move slip he gave Nate screamed: “RUSH!”

Nate dragged the things into the hall—they each weighed about 70 pounds—and tried to recall how he once horsed a similar burden uptown while riding a bicycle. He remembered the method of using his big chain to hang the portfolios off the handlebars, saving his back and neck during the ride. It was still slow going due to reduced leg motion and a high center of gravity, not to mention the thought of an unidentified cancer eating at his brain. Lugging the things up and down five flights of stairs for the next two pick-ups had Nate ready to pack it in.

When he called Stewart, the first thing out of the surly dispatcher’s lips was: “Where the hell are you?”

Nate told him about the two-portfolio “RUSH!” job.

“Shit,” he said. “We should have sent a truck. Just get up there and call me when you’re done. Put down ‘overweight’ and ‘long distance’ on the manifest and you get triple for the trip. You all right?”

This sudden hint of genuine concern took Nate aback. “Yeah, I guess.”

“All right then. Just don’t wreck the portfolios. If you do, you’re dead.”

“Sho’ thing, boss.”

“Whoa there, looks like we got ourselves a real honky smartass. Go fuck yourself.”

“Thank you, sir. You, too. Just keep me working.”

Nate mapped out his route of drop-offs to give him the quickest, most level ride. He had one stop to make that wasn’t on his manifest, the U.S. Post Office on 8th Avenue, to mail a long letter to Martin Brennan. The letter detailed specifics that filled in the blanks in his article and could help him continue his work. He provided names and phone numbers of contacts like Charles Overlook, Belinda Strossner and Hamilton Canard, Esquire. He revealed where he had hidden a stash of documentation in the attic of the Arms, including a computer disk containing the opus: “Adventures in Pollockistan: How USE, the Government and the Mob Conspire to Give You Cancer,” by Sheila McNally and Reginald Thurston Brown.

His missive concluded:

“Great story, Martin, and thanks for keeping me in the grave where I belong. I am not germane to the story, which is yours to run with. By the time you read this, I shall be either actually dead or removed to sunnier climes. I do not wish to be exhumed from the crypt only to be prosecuted and die in Guantanamo. Take care of yourself, and please do not burden Mr. Iannucci or Ms. Royal with any news of me or my whereabouts, should they be in touch with you.

Thank you, and kisses,

J. Olsen

P.S.: Please burn this letter.”

When Nate finally got uptown and unloaded the twin monstrosities at a pretentious ad agency staffed by a snooty, shellac-haired receptionist in a mauve power suit, he felt like Atlas after his big shrug. He called Stewart again and was rewarded with a flurry of well-timed uptown pick-ups—nothing bigger than an envelope—that would last him the rest of the day and wind him up a mere three blocks from the Bowery hotel where he was holing up. “Don’t call me again until you’re done,” said Stewart. “I’m sick of you.”

“Thanks, chief.”

“Don’t call me ‘chief.’“

***

On Saturday, September 6, in the morning after throwing up, Nate felt a strange, serendipitous pull from the past. He went downtown and found the new pedicab headquarters, which had moved from its East Third Street garage to a former gas station in SoHo. There he renewed his acquaintance with Arnold, a Don Quixote-looking cadaver who apparently had a bottomless well of trust fund cash for propping up what would never in a million years be a moneymaking concern. With the five thousand a month he was paying in rent, on top of the four thousand each month for liability insurance that was guaranteed to be canceled the first time somebody got hurt, on top of being slammed by the post-911 tourist slowdown, Arnold was hemorrhaging daddy’s cash.

He owned ten pedicabs manned by an average of eight drivers a day who would give him five dollars an hour to rent one. It was easy to see the business would never last, but Nate didn’t care. For one thing it was anonymous, and under the table. Neither scatterbrained Arnold nor any of the pothead veteran drivers remembered him distinctly from four years before, and when he reminded them that his name was “Steve” they’d bought the lie without so much as a furrowed brow. If hustling packages was easy, healthful work that cured a cancer headache, pushing a few thousand pounds of lipstick lesbians and German S&M tourists around a park on a blistering Saturday afternoon in early September would be Nirvana.

A pedicab is a garishly painted 200-lb. tricycle with a two-passenger seat in the back, five speeds, disc brakes, and running lights powered by a car battery. It has a virtually useless convertible top, and a lovely bell that attracts customers but has little effect on Manhattan traffic. The fleet owned by Arnold was once active in Honolulu, until they were banned after a couple of drivers were convicted of selling the coke they had stashed in the handy under-seat storage compartments.

Nate was immediately conscripted into pedaling downtown in a convoy of cycle freaks to wait by Trinity Church for a wedding party. He was not enthralled with the prospect of hanging out with this particular group of drivers, most of whom he recognized from the old days, even if they didn’t remember him. Sally, the lone woman in the group, was, when not driving a pedicab, apparently an actress and children’s clown. She was loud, talkative, literal-minded, and dressed like a Harlequin. Arnold’s most experienced driver, Jerry, a brillo-haired cretin with bad teeth and one leg at least six inches shorter than the other, was a fount of bad stories and worse advice. He leered at women, and would routinely frighten away potential customers. Another poor soul named Dave was so painfully shy and pockmarked that he would refuse to ring his bell, and would look the other way when someone approached to ask a simple pedicab question. The group reminded him of the cadre of misfit journalists he had left behind in Dutch Hollow—a far cry from the hordes of fancy, well-dressed people he somehow had successfully avoided rubbing shoulders with for his entire life. Nowadays Manhattan was overrun with shallow-hearted mercantiles. Nate swore that if he donned a pair of special sunglasses—like Rowdy Roddy Piper in “They Live”—that the crowds walking these sidewalks would be exposed as the lizard-faced space aliens they really were.

As soon as the drivers hustled the wedding guests to a nearby Irish restaurant for their beer-soaked reception, Nate separated from the group. He cruised the streets around the fallen Trade Center, pretending to be a viable form of transportation. “Cheaper than a cab, and ten times more fun,” he squawked at pedestrians, ringing his bell furiously and making irony-tinged eye contact whenever possible. The mood, however, was somber, as tourists had come downtown in droves on the eve of the second anniversary of Sept. 11 not to revel in the city’s charms but to gape at the hole in their collective consciousness and gawk at the blocks of sad, faded memorials.

Nate did much better just sitting at the corner of Broadway and John Street and looking morose. It was easy picking, as downtown traffic patterns and reduced and confusing subway access were still difficult for out-of-town pedestrians to cope with. To amuse himself, Nate regaled his passengers with first-hand narratives of the carnage, devastation and eerie aftermath of that horrid day. It was oddly liberating.

Before sundown Nate ventured north up Sixth Avenue through the Village, with the eventual intent of hanging out by Bryant Park where there was always a profusion of drunken yuppies and a dearth of cabs. In the old days he had scored his biggest coups out of that park, once charging a fat lawyer $300 to haul him over the Brooklyn Bridge as kids on trick bikes buzzed around them offering fist pumps and hooting dated, Arsenio-Hall-style encouragement.

But he never got that far. As he pedaled past the blackened stone hulk of the Limelight—which last time he’d heard about it had been closed forever due to its being a notorious drug bazaar—a pair of revelers flagged him down at the 21st Street red light.

The woman was stunning, an almond-eyed chocolate delight in a skin-tight red dress with a thousand-watt smile. As incandescent as she was, her sugar-daddy escort easily outshone her in his deep purple velvet suit, tall, feathered Toussaint L’Ouverture admiral’s hat, cashmere scarf and solid gold eye-patch.

Mo’ Better strode over, exuding the confidence and bearing of an African prince. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of new gold caps. “My mans, could you please get us to Gran’ Central by the most scenic-est means possible? Money is no object… it’s a lot o’ little ones.”

Cracking himself up, Mo laughed a long, braying Eddie Murphy laugh.

“Yes, sir, step right in.”

Mo hesitated, and studied Nate’s face intently with his good eye. “Hold up a minute. Where I hear that voice before?”

His juicy companion beamed delightfully.

“Yo, Mo,” said Nate.

“Shorty? Is dat you?”

“Yes and no. Hop in, before I get a ticket for blocking traffic.”

Mo and his date clambered aboard as the light changed, and settled in romantically, he with his arm around her fabulous shoulders and she caressing his bony knee and snuggling under the absurd brim of his hat to nibble lasciviously at his diamond-encrusted left earring. Nate pedaled furiously, eliciting a squeal of delighted laughter from the woman.

“Looks like you’ve done pretty well for yourself since I last saw you,” said Nate. “I’m glad things worked out for you.”

“Yeah, well, I went back down near where we was and staked a claim, so to speak. It ain’t what you think, though. I found some more liquid assets, if you catch my meanin’. Alarms and shit don’t work so good when the power’s out, heh, heh, heh. Yo, I found some gold, too, but it was too damn heavy to drag around. I got a motherfucker to pay me for a map to where it was…”

Nate had reached 23rd Street and taken a right toward Madison Park. He slowed his pace, turned around and looked from Mo to his date with a questioning expression on his face.

“That’s OK,” said Mo. “She’s from Senegal or some shit. Only English she knows is ‘Yo, bitch, down on de wood.’ We in love, right, baby? Down on de wood, yeh, dass right.”

The woman laughed, cooed something musically unintelligible and stroked the edge of Mo’s crotch lustfully. Nate pedaled faster and wondered where he had gone wrong in life.

“It wasn’t so good for us,” he said, stopping at a light. “Rico was nailed in a tunnel collapse, and I had to hide out for a while. You hear about that?”

“Yo, G, that shit was fucked up,” said Mo, reaching inside his jacket with his free hand and fishing out a solid gold cigarette case. “We was supposed to meet at the corner at St. Marks that time, remember? I’m sorry I missed that shit, but I freaked out. Them motherfuckers seen me down there, too, an’ I didn’ figure I should be hangin’ out wit’ y’all in plain sight, dig? Sorry, man.” With one hand he deftly flipped open the case, withdrew an English Oval with his thumb and pinkie and lifted it to his mouth, closing the case simultaneously. His hand returned the case to its nest and re-emerged with a gold-plated version of the same silly Mickey Mouse Pez dispenser lighter he had lit up with in the tunnel nearly two years earlier.

“No, I understand, believe me.”

“So, yo, watchoo been doin’, shorty? I coulda swore I seen some mad bomber motherfucker on TV looked just like you. Heh, heh, heh.”

“No, man, I’ve just been laying low,” lied Nate. “‘S good to see you, though. Especially under these circumstances. Kinda gives a smug white cracker hope for the plight of the long-suffering negro, you know?”

Mo laughed so hard he nearly blew his cigarette out. His beautiful girlfriend laughed at his laughter. Somehow, thought Nate, things were as they should be.

Nate rode up over the sidewalk and into Madison Square Park, where couples huddled under the stilted Op-art taxicabs. He meandered northeast through the park, once known as “Needle Park,” but now as clean and bright and well patrolled on the perimeter as a suburban shopping mall.

The middle section of the park was relatively unpopulated. “Whoa, Trigger, stop right here,” said Mo. “We’ll be right back…”

He reached in his pocket. “Yo, here’s a down payment. Keep the meter runnin’. Heh, heh, heh.” Mo thrust a C-note into Nate’s hand, and he and his sweetheart alit from the carriage and disappeared into a copse alongside the pathway.

While the lovers amused themselves, Nate sat on a park bench. His head was remarkably clear and pain-free. He could feel his heart pumping and the blood pulsing through the veins of his neck, groin and extremities. “I am alive,” he thought. “How and why that is so, I haven’t a clue. Maybe there’s a reason beyond my comprehension. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think somebody was looking out for me.” He gazed heavenward, open for suggestions.

As had happened on the handful of occasions in his life when he allowed himself to think the unthinkable, an involuntary frisson spread through his entire nervous system from his head, down his spine and out to the tips of his fingers and toes. This time, however, he did not stifle the feeling with logic. He let this sense of spiritual ecstasy, or whatever it was, overwhelm him. He shuddered and began to cry the tears a child sheds upon first realizing that the hairy giant hovering over his crib all the time loves him. He sniffled and gagged.

“Hi-ho, Silver, everything awright?”

Mo had returned, and was carefully checking his pants for stains in the soft park-light.

“Yeah, I was just sitting here having a religious experience, knowing you were getting your cock sucked.” Nate retched and coughed up the phlegmy mass that had gathered in his lungs as a result of his reverie.

Mo’s date returned from the bushes, looking none the worse for wear. She and Mo both looked at Nate quizzically. He coughed again, spat, ferreted out a tissue from his pocket and blew his running nose. “Really, man, you awright?” asked Mo, his eyes bright.

“Yeah, fine. Grand Central, right, boss?”

“Yeah. Take it easy, though. Don’t strain yourself.”

Emerging from the park at the northeast corner, Nate went east on 26th. As he turned left onto Park Avenue, Nate’s canoodling passengers were treated to the classic Woody Allen panorama of a fabulously lit Grand Central Station, with the MetLife building looming graciously behind it as a sparkling backdrop. Behind them to the south, a pair of massive searchlight beams, which had been temporarily re-lit for the week of the 9/11 observance, stretched into outer space, nearly illuminating the darkened new moon.

Park Avenue between 26th and 34th streets is as lung-taxing an uphill stretch as Manhattan offers to a biker, even when he’s not dragging nearly 500 pounds of weight behind him. It is also a notorious hooker stroll, and as Nate stood on the pedals in first gear Mo’ Better struck up conversations with some of his acquaintances on the sidewalks. “Yo, blood, I’m from the ghet-to, and this is my lim-o. We just rode in from Flo-rida, and we don’t know what to do.”

Laughter and catcalls erupted. Whores and their cell-phone-toting pimps stopped in their tracks to watch the slow procession. “Ooooweee! Lookin’ good, Black.”

“Yeah, booooey.”

Nate struggled mightily against gravity and the burning in his lungs, trying to trick his mind into not quitting by giving it the busywork of counting his leg pumps between lights. “Thirty-nine, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44… 33rd Street.”

He paused and breathed heavily, waiting for the light to change—only one more block until things leveled out for a while.

“You OK, Holmes? Shit, I got a bet on you. Heh, heh, heh.”

The woman giggled. Nate nodded and gave a thumbs-up sign. The light turned green.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…”

A searing fireball exploded in Nate’s head. Somehow he kept counting.

“Eight…nine…t-…elev-…”

An image of his mother, holding his head, stroking his hair, smiling.

“…22…minus 35… plus 13…equals…”

And then there was nothing.

Postscript: Although I did not perish from cancer while pedicabbing the fantastic-looking pimp and his lady friend through Madison Square Park, and while I managed to avoid Nate’s fate of deteriorating into an obsessed eco-terrorist, I did engage in many of the other dangerous and informative pursuits chronicled in this fantasy. That I lived long enough to father a crafty, equally devious young daughter who succeeds in selling me rocks and other useless detritus is a minor miracle. I will be crafting a follow-up to “Wasted” soon, unless I check out early. Meanwhile you can try to piece together what sort of empathy-challenged misanthrope I am by going here:

https://biffogram.substack.com/s/death-takes-no-holiday

… and you can observe a slice of my day-to-day existence as a reluctant do-gooder here:

Until later, take care. Life is short.