I need to talk to Lonnie.”
“He’s not in the office right now,” she replied.
I sighed with disappointment, but Roxy wasn’t finished.
“He’s in Chicago,” she said, and I heard a loud crinkling of papers. “The Ritz-Carlton. Room eight seventeen. If you want to go over there I’m sure he’d be—”
“I just need to talk to him on the phone,” I interjected.
Roxy cleared her throat. It was a wet hack. I could hear marbles of phlegm being shaken inside a brittle paper bag. Her voice dripped with melodramatic annoyance when she continued.
“If you want to go over there, to the Ritz-Carlton, room eight seventeen, I’m sure Mr. Saunders would be glad to see you. He told me not to bother him, though. So you just go on over there and knock on the door unannounced. See how that works out for you.”
She hung up the phone before I could reply.
The idea of finally meeting my editor was a bit daunting, but I was in no position to allow my nerves to get the better of me. This critical moment called for courage. Heroic, assertive, type A personality. Getting out of the hospital and to the Ritz-Carlton meant convincing one of my two fairly hostile doctors to let me go.
Doctor Gerber flatly refused when I requested release. By “flatly refused” I mean that he lowered his face a few degrees and pursed his wet noodle lips. It was a deafening rebuke. I tried again with Doctor Lian. Asking his permission made me feel like a kid getting a second opinion from Mommy after Daddy says “no.”
“Dumb-Dumb, you go outside you get infection,” Doctor Lian explained. “You want to get killer bug, hand fall off? Maybe you get dick poison and dick fall off. Pretty stupid then, uh-huh?”
“I can’t skip this, Doc,” I pleaded.
“I’m no ‘doc,’ Dumb-Dumb.” Doctor Lian folded his arms across his chest. “Dock where you park a boat. But I not keep you here. You want to go, get deathly disease, go ahead. Go. Be Dumb-Dumb. Spread your wing and fly. Go on, Dumb-Dumb.”
“Can’t you put something on my hand?” I asked, and waved my skinless, gelatin-encased, steel-haloed hand.
“Oh, sure, I got a good one,” Doctor Lian sneered.
He stormed out of the room and came back with a white plastic shopping bag.
“Here you go,” he said, and grabbed me by the forearm. He covered my skinless meat hand with the bag and then stretched a fat rubber band down over my hand and wrist. He looked at me and let it snap against my forearm, cinching the bag tight in the process.
“There you go! Weatherproof!”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, and grunted as I climbed out of the bed.
“Oh, no, my pleasure. Be my guest. Go on, a whole dumb world await a Dumb-Dumb like you.”
I nodded and shuffled past him.
“Come back when you serious,” he called after me. “I fix your hand for real then.”
The Breakfast Clubbing
Lonnie answered the door. He was much shorter and fatter than I had expected. Pot-bellied and Devitoesque. In fact, Lonnie would have been a perfect doppelganger for the diminutive actor if it weren’t for his fraudulent blond pompadour and the bushy, golden caterpillars above his eyes.
His face was flushed and sweaty. He was clad in boxer shorts and an ill-fitting hotel robe that hung open like playhouse curtains on either side of a rolling strip of torso. It was a very theatrical framing for the view of his grotesquely protruding bellybutton.
A girl wearing a similar hotel robe brushed past him and then me and into the hallway. Her black hair hung in her face, but as she passed me I glimpsed eyes puffy and red from crying and streaked mascara. She smelled like stripper perfume and burning rubber. Lonnie hardly seemed to notice her departure.
“Come in, come in,” Lonnie invited. “You want some star fruit, baby? A Thai massage?”
“No, no thanks,” I replied. “This is an amazing room.”
Lonnie’s suite was high ceilinged and luxurious. The main room was bathed in the golden light of parchment lampshades and appointed with overstuffed antique furniture that might have passed for Thomas Jefferson’s living room set from Monticello. Through the open double doors of the bedroom, I could see that the floor was scattered with cotton balls.
“Yeah,” he looked around admiringly. “Not as good as the room I get at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, though. Has a fireman’s pole. You just can’t get that in Chitown.”
Lonnie did a barefoot spin in the middle of the room, his arms spread as if to drink in his surroundings. Articles of clothing were draped haphazardly across the furniture. He scooped up a bra and a white T-shirt.
“Have a seat,” he suggested.
I moved aside a silvery sequined dress and relocated a purse from a chaise longue to an elegant teak end table sporting a Tiffany lamp. Round yellow pills spilled out of the purse across the polished wood. I looked to Lonnie and he shrugged.
“Ain’t mine, baby,” he said. “I am drug-free. Alcohol and Ketamine only. Just kidding. Just kidding, baby. Loosen up. Maybe you should take a couple of those. Kidding, kidding, baby. But seriously, help yourself.”
Lonnie was even more manic in person, bouncing from foot to foot like a lizard on hot sand. He seemed to remember he was still holding a bra, and he tossed it into the bedroom.
“Housekeeping,” he said incredulously.
I have never hated Lonnie, but I have never trusted him, and his guilty tweaker act was creeping me out.
“Holy shit!” he proclaimed suddenly, bugging his eyes out. “What happened to the mitt there?”
He leaned over to get a better look at my bag-covered hand. I realized that there was a small puddle of blood in the bag, as if it were a cut of meat from the butcher’s.
“I didn’t know it was bleeding,” I said. I lifted it up and looked at the bag, but the rubber band around my arm seemed to be containing the blood.
“What happened, baby?” he asked again.
“That’s part of why I’m here, Lonnie. We need to talk about this book deal.”
“All right.” He bobbed his head affirmatively. “All right, I’m down. That’s cool. Let’s order up some mimosas and—You like lobster tail?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s cool; that’s fine.” He snapped his fingers and paced distractedly.
“Hey, look, I just want to—”
“Here we go!” Lonnie snatched up the pearl-handled receiver of an antique telephone. He stabbed a fat finger into the rotary dialer and winched in the number for the front desk.
“Yeah,
