God’s Addiction — Chapter 3
Body Fluids
Like that line in Hitch, it was one hell of a week. I’d been beaten, stabbed, and lost my memory. Subjected to hospital food morning, noon and night. Found out I’d been experimented on with mind altering drugs, had been living with a prostitute, and had sex with a lovely woman up to thirty times a night — none of which I could remember.
Rachel had told us about an earlier stage of Doc Bloom’s research. I had already discovered the time lag between male orgasms when I was in the hospital. Rats show the same refractory period (textbook lingo). But when a novel female — more textbook talk — is introduced to the cage, that gap can disappear. It’s called the Coolidge effect.
Ol’ Cal’s wife was shown a rooster mating continuously with chickens. She wasn’t getting the bedroom action she wanted, so she told the farmer to tell her husband about the busy rooster. When he did, Cal asked if it was the same chicken all the time. Farmer said no. Cal said, tell that to wifey.
Psych data shows novel females can override the refractory period in humans, just like in rats and chickens. So Doc took it as a challenge to get rid of that delay without novel females. That was his first big success with me — a drug to cancel the Coolidge effect. Thirty times a night, all with one woman. According to Rachel, it was strictly business.
***
We had left the Beckman Institute after our chat with Rachel…Doc’s fate unknown. As it turned out, Happy had socked away a sizeable rainy day fund. To avoid encounters with Mack, or Happy’s pimp, we headed for a neighborhood across town from our former apartment. Got cash from a bank branch even further away. Then we rented a sweet little loft over a pizza joint.
I finally learned what happens under the bed sheets! Happy was rather talented in that respect. When you want results, go to a pro — ha ha. I sometimes wondered what all that sex with Rachel had been like, but without a memory it didn’t really matter. It was probably better this way — everything felt new and exciting: Sex, taking a walk, doing a crossword, eating a hot dog.
On our third day together, Happy began hitting the sidewalk looking for work. She refused to take a supermarket job — too demeaning — and said auto mechanics would be perfect. However, she had no experience. Fast food appealed. But after stints at a Burgerland and Lennie’s Doghouse, she had quit both. She didn’t like interacting with flirty customers.
Figuring to give it three strikes before moving on, she’d checked out Codfather Fish House. According to Happy’s telling, the manager shook his head: “Sorry Sweetie, no plate pushers needed. But if ya know somebody’s good at math, send ’em in. My ‘countant just quit.”
You wouldn’t know it from her speech habits, but Happy loved math — even before she ran away from an abusive home at age 15 to roam the streets. The manager had replied to her desire for more info, “Come on Sweetie, two plus two’s one ting but I’s talkin’ serious math here. Ya gotta spot shit like bad divisions etc. Calc’lators only give th’ right answers if ya push th’ right buttons.”
I’m guessing he didn’t actually speak her street lingo. “Try me,” she’d said.
So he gave her a calculator and a list of numbers and said, “Le’s see how fas’ ya can tote ’em up.” She sat staring at the list for fifteen seconds. “Knew it,” the manager said. “You don’ even know how ta op’rate the calc’lator.”
Then Happy wrote down a figure at the bottom of the list. “Check it,” she’d said. He did. Same total. Most nights after that, we had fabulous leftovers that Happy brought home. I love fish!
***
“Seven-thirty, gotta git, Honey.” Happy put her arms around my neck from behind, and kissed the top of my head.
I turned in the chair and took her face in my hands. “You should be kissed, and often. And by someone who knows how,” I said, from Gone With the Wind. But I didn’t wait, like Rhett did, to deliver on the promise.
In a moment she pulled back. “Made fresh coffee fer ‘ya,” she said smiling, as she turned for the door.
“I’m finding a job today,” I said.
“Don’cha worry Jack, I’m diggin’ th’ worms jus’ fine.”
Happy had taken to calling me Jack, maybe to lessen our links to the past, maybe because she thought I was embarrassed by ‘john’ for her former tricks. I wasn’t.
The door closed behind her. I sat at the kitchen table in our tiny apartment, with sunlight streaming through the curtained window along with the sounds of dogs, cars, kids. I poured fresh coffee in my mug and watched a dust mote. It was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but a bit skewed. My memory was gone, but not Happy’s. We would make a new life together and I needed nothing more than the present moment.
It freaked Happy that I didn’t sleep, but she got over it. I spent nights either reading, watching movies, or surfing the internet on a working computer I’d pulled out of a dumpster. What some folks throw out! One of our neighbors had an open wi-fi network that I tapped in to. We had no inkling of the storm clouds forming over our cozy nest in the City of Angels.
***
Happy had a fake ID. Me, I had nothing. Not even a memory of former jobs. One day I wandered into the Mark Twain library branch. Holy Bookcases, Batman! This was better than the internet — I could flip paper pages much faster than loading web pages. I don’t understand everything I read, but I can recall it. Ask me a word or tourist phrase in Italian, Haitian Creole, or Sinhalese and it’s right there. But I’m far from fluent. Same thing with history. I can tell you that the Bible story of Elijah being fed by ravens could equally well be translated as being fed by Arabs — written Hebrew contained only consonants, and they’re the same for ravens and Arabs. But ask if Japan would now be Russian had they lost the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, and I can only parrot the experts. There’s no depth to my understanding of the forces at play.
What I also discovered was a deep love of chess. Maybe I was a player before. Chess is a game where memory can count for a lot — most of the best moves for the openings are known and recorded. Still, there are far more possible moves in a chess game — the Shannon Number — than there are atoms in the known universe. So there’s room for creativity. My memory of chess openings, endings, theory and all that didn’t make me a genius, but it led to a job.
Bill’s Chicken has tables outside, with inlaid chessboards. Any given time of day, there’ll be a game or two going on, or someone waiting for an opponent. They’re usually playing five minute blitz with clocks, so it’s exciting to watch. If a player’s clock runs out, they lose as surely as being mated. So players are moving and pounding the clock buttons with great noise and speed.
Move.
Slap.
Move.
Slap.
There’s little time for thinking.
First time I sat at a table, a curly-haired ten year old black girl plopped into a chair across from me. She wore cut-off jeans and an oversize T-shirt that read ‘Talk to my Face — My Breasts Can’t Hear You’. “I’m Tanya,” she said.
I said, “You look like Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild. She played Hushpuppy. I’m going to call you Hushpuppy.”
“ Whatever. Ain’t never seen it.”
Hushpuppy offered me the white pieces, which gives a slight advantage by having the first move. I declined, of course, already having the advantage of perfect memory. So we chose for colors, and I drew white anyway. I lead with d4, the best first move according to many top players. In the next few moves, Hushpuppy played into the Budapest Gambit, where black sacrifices a pawn to disorganize white’s position.
Hushpuppy was quite verbal, saying “Zam!” and “Take that!” as well as muttering to herself. I took her pawn, accepting the gambit. “Doubled pawns!” she exclaimed, gleefully pointing out the weakness in my position…a debility that still didn’t compensate for her lost pawn.
On move six, I could have tried to hang on to my doubled pawn, but preferred to let it go with the hope of breaking up her bishop pair — a subtle but real advantage if I could carry it into the end game.
To be fair, when she took my pawn on e5, equalizing the pieces, she warned me: “Don’t take that bishop, Whitey!” While I had the experience of countless players solidly in my head, I’d no experience in real play. This trap might have been mentioned in one of the books I’d memorized, but my recall doesn’t work like that. I could recite ten different lines of play in the Budapest Gambit — none came with warning flags that popped up in the heat of blitz moves. I grabbed the bishop and slammed the clock almost in one motion. In a fraction of a second, I saw what she was up to. Too late.
Hushpuppy moved in for the smothered mate, my logical savior pawn helplessly pinned against my king. Like a husband getting home late with a lame excuse, my brain popped up the name for her play: Kieninger trap.
She grinned widely, sunlit white teeth against dark face. “Black wins,” she said, almost in a whisper, as she adjusted the buttons so that both of the clocks stopped.
This was real play! It was what I needed to flesh out the book moves — to be swindled by a kid. I jumped up and grabbed her hand to shake it. Normally, the winner offers a hand to the loser, as a consolation I suppose. Hushpuppy frowned, taken aback at the breach of protocol. But then she smiled again and shook my hand heartily. A few thin braids in her curly hair bounced. “Ya got po-ten-shul Whitey,” she declared.
Hushpuppy and I played and laughed a lot in the days that followed. Sometimes we’d sit at separate tables and invite spectators for games. Hushpuppy’s street dialect began to rub off on me. “Come awn dog, sityo scroney ass down. Tha’s right, less see what youse got.” When one of us made a brilliant move, we’d high-five each other. The players and spectators were hungry, and the wings and mashed potatoes kept coming. Business picked up. The restaurant manager was Bill, a bear-like black man with a light gray beard. He paid us eighty bucks a day, which we split fifty-fifty.
One day, a woman reporter for the Los Angeles Times came by for an interview and photos. Bill was thrilled, of course. Me, I should have been worried. But I don’t worry.
***
“Hushpuppy,” I said after the interview was over and the onlookers had left, “Why wouldn’t you talk about your family?” The day had rolled into evening, summertime still furnishing plenty of light. There was no school, but Hushpuppy often stayed longer than me — she might have been slinging wood most days ’til Bill closed up, for all I knew. “Don’t your folks worry when you’re out all day and into the night?”
“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically.
“You have brothers or sisters?”
“Jack-man, don’t go private dick on me.” She’d taken to calling me by name. She got up to leave.
“Where are you going?”
“See? Tha’s what I’m talkin’. You ain’t my Daddy.”
Next day she didn’t show up and I began to worry. Then I caught myself. I don’t worry. But I was. When she came to play the day after that, I observed, curiously, that I felt relief. “Don’t ax,” she said. “Le’s push some wood.”
I let her win a couple of games. “You ain’t trying, Jack-man. This ain’t no fun.” She scowled and stuck out her lower lip. “Whatcho tink, Jack-man, I can’t beat yo ass fair ’n’ square?”
“Come to my place for dinner tonight. I want you to meet Happy.”
“Whatcho talkin’, fool? I don’t do no drugs.”
“Happy’s my partner. A woman. I think you’ll get along.”
“I gits along fine,” she said, setting up the pieces roughly. “Don’t need no fuckin’ pogey.” The slang, I saw in my mind, was derived from Scottish, and meant a handout or welfare.
“Tell you what, Hushpuppy. I win this game, you come for dinner. You win, you don’t.”
“Fine, Whitey,” she said, reverting to my former moniker. She turned the table so I had the white pieces and slammed the clock, starting my timer.
We both loved to shove our horses around early — I played a Halloween Gambit because of the knights and because I liked the name. Plus it’s a scary opening — white sacks that knight on move four. We followed Minchev v Turzo for most of the moves, though I doubt Hushpuppy knew that. She was way ahead piecewise on move fifteen. But she had a bishop, knight, and both rooks still in the slammer.
The endgame is where street players often break down, especially in blitz. Hushpuppy had a minute on her clock. I had twenty seconds more. She fought, but I played a waiting game and her clock ran out. “Dang!” she said. “If this was a fuckin’ gran-masser game wit more time, you’da been det, Jack-fuckin’-white-man.” Her tone was humorous though, and I knew my strategy had worked — get her to come to dinner and feel good about it. “We gon’ have pizza, Jack-man?”
“Whatever the fuck you want,” I said, and we both laughed crazily.
***
Hushpuppy said she’d meet me at my apartment. “You don’ serious tink I’m sidewalkin’ wit you like some kid. Fuck, Jack-man, gimme the ‘dress.”
Shortly after she left, the consequences of that interview came and bit me, hard. My picture had appeared in the paper — eliminating the anonymity Happy and I had attained. Heavy hands rested on my shoulders from behind, and I was pulled backward. Mack, upside down in my field of view, dragged me free of the tipped chair and onto the sidewalk. “Get the fuck outta here,” he growled to several people at other tables, who complied quickly. Mack’s flabby cheeks did a curious dance as he shifted his prodigiousness to sit on top of my chest. “Do it, do it, do it,” he repeated, nodding his head and rocking fore and aft like a humping dog.
Light dawned in my brain. I smiled broadly and said, “This isn’t about the drugs, is it?”
He held a hand up as if threatening a slap to my face while his rocking motion, a bit off center now, became more feverish. “Do it, do it fucker, do it.”
I thought of John Travolta riding the mechanical bull at Gilley’s in Urban Cowboy, and I began to laugh uncontrollably. There was something truly outrageous about being squashed under a 300 pound thug on a hot sidewalk after a good chess game. “Gotta make this a regular thing,” I said, gasping under his weight.
Like a dog realizing barking isn’t getting him any treats, Mack shifted tactics. He dismounted cumbrously and struggled to his feet. I stood as well, a bit more easily than he did. “Be a pal,” he said. “Do it again.” He shoved a meaty hand in a pocket and came out with a roll of bills. “Here. Take it. Just do it.”
“You’re a rat,” I said, knowing he didn’t get the joke. If a rat would press a lever unto death for what I’d given Mack before, I knew the fat man was in my power.
Sweat dripped off his forehead. “Whatever. Whatever. Take it. Do it.” Mack attempted to twist the wad into my pocket. I backed away and the roll fell to the sidewalk.
“Turn around slow, Mister,” Bill said, having come out of his restaurant with a pump shotgun leveled at Mack’s back.
“Listen, Buddy,” Mack said, almost pleading, as he turned, “I ain’t gonna hurt him. We’re pals. We go way back.”
“That right Jack?” Bill queried.
“Sure is Bill. We go way back. Don’t worry about a thing. Sorry about the customers. Mack here would like you to have this cash as compensation.” I pointed to the money on the ground. “Isn’t that right Mack?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, fine,” he said, wanting to get back to the main issue. But his time had run out.
“Drop it, Mister,” a commanding female voice said as a woman with a pistol swung around out from the alley next to the restaurant. She was dressed in baggy khaki pants and a blue denim shirt. “Real easy. Real slow.” She flashed a badge with her other hand. Then a man dressed in a gray suit got out of a dark SUV on the other side of us. He, too, held a gun, two-handed, pointed at Bill.
“No problem,” Bill said as he laid the shotgun down. “Just tryin’ to protect my restaurant.”
“Go back inside,” the woman said to Bill, and he did, with a frown. “Well lookee here, it’s Mr. Smack,” she said to Mack. “Why the fuck are you here?”
Instead of answering, Mack sprang for the shotgun. I marveled at the power of the pleasure center, revealed by his completely hopeless effort. To her credit, the woman cracked Mack on the back of his head with the butt of her pistol as he lunged by her. Instead of shooting him. The big man flopped on concrete like a beached jellyfish.
As the agents — I presumed that’s what they were — herded me to the SUV, I kicked the wad of money toward Bill, who was peeking out the door. “See ya Bill,” I said, smiling. “It’s been real.” During the few steps to the dark-windowed truck, I pondered that it may not have been Angus that we had evaded, with the help of Tariq and friends, way back at the beginning of my newly minted life.
One agent pushed my head down as I entered the vehicle. No surprise — I’d seen that move in plenty of cop flicks. I was pushed — not too roughly — to the center of the middle seat by the suited agent, who then sat behind me. Another man was already seated on the road side. He was older than the others, with gray specked hair and a graying beard. Dark eyes and heavy eyebrows made me think George Clooney in Syriana. “I know a nice place for lunch, George,” I said. “Care to join me?”
He smiled lightly with his mouth, while his eyes stayed cool. Like most, he ignored my renaming him. It probably saved him the trouble of lying.
“Know why you’re here, John?”
“Call me Jack,” I said. George nodded slightly and I got the impression he was a person who took his time, but eventually got what he wanted. “Nice day for a ride?” I mused.
The woman agent slid in beside me, handcuffs in hand. “We ought to cuff him,” she said.
Still looking at me, George simply said “No” without inflection or expression. Then, “My associate, Carol.”
I looked at her closely. Her violet eyes, like cold evening sky, held little comfort or humor. Her long, almost-black hair, tied in a loose sheaf behind her head, swung with the car’s motion as we left the curb. The resemblance to Zooey Deschanel in certain scenes in Gigantic was compelling. “No,” I said to George, shaking my head, “Not Carol.” Then to her, “Zooey.” No smile, perhaps a slight glower. “Definitely Zooey.”
She looked past me to George. “You read the reports from the restaurant. He uses his hands.”
“No,” George said again.
I was looking at Zooey, then turned quickly to George. “Hah!” I said loudly, darting my hands at his face. There was the slightest flicker of his eyes, but otherwise he remained cool and composed. I realized then that I could sense something of his state of mind — fear, well shielded by layers of control. Images of a life flashed briefly: terrors of a punished child, covered by the armor of time. Foreboding, dread, even panic, jailed inside his skull under strata of relationships, both business and personal. A strong ego balanced on a tightrope with no net below. He would be quite predictable up to a point, beyond which was the unknown.
I turned back to Zooey. “Sweet ride,” I said, rubbing fingers on the back of the seat in front of us. “But Naugahyde? Come on, can’t the CIA afford leathah?” I laughed. Something was going to cheer her up. “Did you know Naugas, unlike most animals, can painlessly shed their skins? Did you know they have pointed ears and sharp-toothed grins?” No reaction except the ghost of a patronizing scowl. “Skins, grins. Everybody wins. Do you know the Frank Zappa song Brown Shoes Don’t Make It? ‘Every desire is hidden away, In a drawer in a desk by a Naugahyde chair.’ That’s you, isn’t it? Hidden away.”
Real scowl this time. As with George, I sensed what felt like the contents of her mind. To her, I was an animal to be skinned, the insides exposed. I was research, an assignment, a project. “The reason,” she said dryly, “is that blood is easily wiped off. And other body fluids.”
