my wife you are talkin’ about there,” Buddy snapped.
I apologized and Buddy seemed to accept.
“It’s okay. I ain’t never peed on her. Sheila left me ’cause I was still married to Rita. So me and Sheila’s marriage didn’t count. And I said, ‘Well, I got the license from Reggie work up at the courthouse.’ But I think she just wanted to pick a fight…”
Buddy was a terrible clown. While he digressed into a monologue about his girl Sheila, his “fat bitch” sister, and his previous wife, my mind focused in on the pulsing pain in my hand. It felt as if someone was taking a drag on a very evil cigarette and the burning ember at the tip was buried inside each of my shattered finger bones. I became hypnotized by the rhythm of the pain and almost drifted off to sleep when something Buddy was saying snapped me back to consciousness.
“…give her a call tomorrow. I think I need to have a conversation with that bitch.”
Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Lonnie Saunders called me! He called me about a book!
The realization washed over me in a wanna-puke tsunami. Lonnie Saunders wanted me to write a book! Lonnie, the unctuous chimera of a used-car salesman, sports agent, and pimp, wanted me to write some sort of godforsaken guide.
Guide to what? What was it? Fuck! Something about wizards?
“Fuck!” I exclaimed aloud.
Buddy looked over at me.
“Which one? Rita? Been at least six weeks. Now Sheila, we used to…”
I hit the nurse’s CALL button beside my bed as Buddy began to describe a sex act he performed on his fake wife that began with lassoing her in a barn. It ended with dire hillbilly deviance I dare not recount here without risking the confiscation of this book from libraries.
The door to the room opened and the night nurse stood silhouetted in the doorway. Neither busty nor Asian, I would generously describe Mandy as “structurally sound.” She was short and stout, with legs as thick as rail ties. She filled a Technicolor nurse’s smock with a confused bust that seemed to expand in several directions at once. No looker, true, but I was glad it was Mandy.
The other nurse, an Ecuadorian girl who was beautiful except for her bad teeth, was a sadist. I once asked for an extra pillow to prop myself up better and she looked me in the eye and pinched my arm. I don’t even know if she spoke English. She never even brought me the pillow.
“How are we doing tonight, Mr. Parsons?” Mandy asked.
“When I came in here”—I pushed myself upright—“what happened to my stuff? The stuff that was in my pockets. My phone. Where did it go?”
“Did your wife take it?” Mandy asked. “I saw a bag of your stuff at some point.”
I shook my head. Michelle took my car keys, but I had no memory of seeing my wallet or cell phone. I had not thought to ask someone about either until Buddy’s rambling reminded me of my phone call from Lonnie.
Mandy helped me out of the bed and together we searched all of the possible nooks and crannies in the room where my phone and wallet could be hiding. Buddy watched our efforts until the morphine pump for his shattered pelvis activated. He grinned and his chin slowly dropped against his chest.
“Found it,” said Mandy with a triumphant smile.
She handed me a plastic Ziploc bag containing some coins, a receipt from the grocery store, my wallet, my phone, and two dead flies. The phone was disgusting. The holes on the earpiece were gummed up with blood and the buttons were covered by a thin crust that was almost black. To my amazement, the battery was not dead.
Mandy brought a damp washcloth over and I wiped down the phone until it was reasonably clean and the white cloth was pink. I should add that doing this was not particularly easy when you only have one hand and the nurse seems disgusted by the sight of blood.
I accomplished the task by sitting on the edge of the bed and resting the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other. I then placed the phone upright in the crook of the bent knee, pinched the knee closed on the phone, and proceeded to grunt a great deal as I swiped the wet cloth across the front of my phone.
I had a few voicemail messages from friends and family wishing me well, but nothing from Lonnie. I switched over to e-mail on the hospital’s anemic wireless and my phone practically melted down from the number of e-mails it was receiving. Lonnie had unleashed a stream-of-consciousness barrage of ideas and notes for me to “help” in writing the book.
The cryptic and sometimes frightening subject lines for the messages included classics like “tron guy a hit,” “what is a 4 cham?”, and “chapter about girl with a dick.” This at least vaguely informed me on the subject matter. I didn’t have the heart to actually read any of the e-mails, but that was fine. My conversation with Lonnie was flooding back.
Based on his e-mail subjects, I deduced that Lonnie wanted the guide book to be about the Internet. This was possibly the stupidest idea I had ever read. What sort of moron reads, let alone buys, a guide to the Internet? That is the sort of book a mom in 1994 gets for her kid interested in computers. It was the sort of book that would have a picture of a robot surfing on a river of numbers for its cover.
No, the Internet is far too fleeting and dynamic to ever be adequately tied down. To borrow something from Buddy, you could never lasso the Internet to a fence and convince a horse to have sex with it.
I sighed and fell back on the bed, so dispirited I could almost ignore the screaming pain that exploded as my skinless hand flopped against the mattress. That scoundrel Lonnie Saunders had once again fast-talked me into writing the worst book ever.
Maybe, just maybe, I could weasel my way out of this one. It had to work.
I was afraid that if I didn’t do something, and quickly, writing a book about the Internet might be the end of my career as an author.
Early Release
In the morning, I made four calls to Lonnie’s office in New York before I got through to his personal assistant, Roxy. I had never met her, but we had spoken many times. Roxy sounded the opposite of my admittedly uninformed stereotype of the average personal assistant.
I envisioned the average personal assistant as a young and well-groomed up-and-comer, constantly speaking into a Bluetooth headset to make reservations at upscale restaurants or cancel high-power meetings. Personal assistants were lean and on the edge, wired to please their boss and serve him or her slavishly.
Roxy was nothing like that. She sounded bored and had the rough voice of a woman on the wrong end of decades of chain-smoking.
No, that’s being too kind. Roxy sounded like she was half a carton of Pall Malls away from a cancer voice box. A chest X-ray of her would look like a picture from the Hubble telescope. There would be spiral arms and nebulas of malignancy swirling in the twin universes of her lungs.
I imagined her with an unruly head of gray hair, eyeglasses secured around her neck by a chain, wearing a frumpy sweater and lugging canvas tote bags full of crumpled legal pads.
“Yes?” she growled.
“Roxy, this is Zack Parsons. I need to speak with Mr. Saunders.”
“Are
