Chapter 29.
The morning began like a Greek wedding, careering off the side of a cliff. Teddy arrived in the kitchen wearing his finest tuxedo, with the tips of his moustache, twisted to points, sharper than a couple of rose thorns. He’d spent the morning rehearsing his part, in front of the mirror in Minnie’s bathroom. She advised him that the tuxedo might be excessive but Teddy argued, that he always did his best acting while wearing one. Goldie submerged herself in her part, by submerging herself in a full bottle of vodka and half a bottle of gin. Method acting appeared to be the quickest route, to a convincing performance. Teddy stormed into the centre of the kitchen. “Darling, don’t you think you’ve had enough?” he asked dramatically. “You do realize, it’s only ten in the morning.”
“Teddy my sweet, has no one ever told you that time is relative? And it’s cocktail hour, somewhere on the globe.”
“I think you’ve had enough. Please put that bottle down.”
“Teddy, my dear Teddy, if I’d had enough, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Goldie replied.
“Frankly Goldie, I’ve had enough of your behaviour. It’s beyond reproach. And quite honestly, it disgusts me.”
“I disgust you! I disgust you!”
She picked up the bottle of gin and poured four fingers and a thumb’s worth into a wide glass.
“THIS. This disgusts me. You can barely stand,” he said.
“Stand? I can barely stand you, when you patronize me like this,” she yelled.
“Ok my dear, I think you’re taking this a little too far, we don’t want to say anything that we’ll regret,” Teddy said in a condescending tone.
“How dare you, you would never have amounted to anything without me,” Goldie bellowed. “Just look at you. I dragged you from some barnyard theatre company, where you punished your audience nightly with bad acting and ridiculous accents. I was the one who pushed you into the spotlight. I was the one who guided your career and now I disgust you. I rescued you. How dare you!”
Teddy looked genuinely stunned by Goldie’s performance. He turned and composed himself.
“I would be nothing? You rescued me?” he shouted. “No one rescued me but me. At least I didn’t crawl into a bottle twenty years ago and pull the cork in behind me.”
“Fuck you! You just don’t get it do you? Every day here, eats me up, just a little bit more. Second by second, I lose a little of myself, minute by minute and day by day, I suffocate, so vodka is my only salvation, my only companion. Your only companion, is YOU.”
Goldie picked up one of Minnie’s prized antique serving plates.
“Not that one,” Teddy warned. “Not that one, that’s one of Minnie’s favourite..”
She threw it across the room. It grazed the light shade hanging from the ceiling and disintegrated on the tiled floor.
“Right, that is it,” Teddy said. “That is it.” Teddy threw one of Walt’s floral dinner plates across the kitchen and mistakenly hit another six of Minnie’s favourite tea cups. They shattered on the floor. Goldie picked up Max’s fruit bowl and threw it like a Frisbee at Teddy’s head, he ducked and it hit a row of dinner plates – none of them were Walt’s floral set. They crashed to the floor. A few broken pieces skidded towards my paws. I tip-toed backwards into the sheltered corner of the room. Teddy was shocked at Goldie’s behaviour – it wasn’t what he had expected and definitely not what they had rehearsed. She picked up a toaster and hurled it at him. He dived behind the kitchen table narrowly avoiding the toaster’s impact.
“Ok dear, I think we’ve done enough damage for one day,” he said.
“I’ll tell you when I’ve done enough damage,” she screamed. “Come out from under that table and face me like a man. Come out here.”
Teddy poked his head over the top of the table. “No Goldie please don’t, please....”
Goldie launched a battery of cutlery at him. A steak knife speared the wooden table and stood upright above Teddy’s head.
“Please stop, someone will get hurt,” he said. “Look at poor Chumley he’s distressed.”
“I’ll give you distressed,” she said, swinging the blender by its cord and slinging it into the kitchen door.
I wasn’t distressed, I was captivated. Teddy crawled on his hands and knees towards her.
“Please, Goldie my love, no more.”
She screamed, like a creature in great torment. He wrapped his arms around her knees and she collapsed to the floor beside him. They both wept like children and declared their love for one another. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. In all the years that I had been with this family, I had never seen Teddy and Goldie express that emotional intensity before.
The kitchen door scraped open, clearing a path through Teddy and Goldie’s marital damage. Minnie’s reaction surprised me. She pushed pieces of the carnage out of her way with her little feet – gently toeing pieces of crockery and glass to her left and to her right, like she was performing steps to a dance. She lifted up the toaster and placed it on the sideboard. She moved over to where Teddy and Goldie huddled on the floor. They cowered beneath the tiny little woman, like they thought she was going to unleash almighty hell upon them. She simply reached out her hand to Goldie.
“Why didn’t you ever tell us, that you were so unhappy my dear girl?”
Goldie sobbed and spluttered unintelligibly into Teddy’s chest. Minnie placed her hand on Goldie’s head.
“Sorry about the mess mother,” Teddy said stoically.
“It’s all replaceable,” Minnie said. “I think you should take your wife up to bed, she could do with some rest.”
Dallas nosed his way cautiously into the room. He laughed. “Whoa, I seem to miss out on all the fun around here.”
“Get the dustpan and roll your sleeves up,” Minnie said. “And get your father in here as well.”
“Minnie, Flowers just sent us all a message – it says”, ‘viewers up for Teddy and Goldie, but maybe keep the alcoholics a little more anonymous and dial the overacting back a smidge, if I was looking for amateur dramatics I’d go see Shakespeare on Venice Beach. All round, a good start following our little confab’.
Minnie glared directly up into the blinking camera light. “You think I care? You think we need your validation? Do you?”
Dallas looked concerned. “Minnie, I think the men in the white coats might think you talking to God.”
“Pah, I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m too old to care.”
The ratings had spiked sharper than the tips of Teddy’s moustache. Supporters of both Goldie and Teddy, slugged it out, in an online debate. Dallas read out some of the messages like he was commentating on a live sports broadcast. Some said that he was a useless, clueless husband and others argued that she was a worthless lush. Doctors wrote messages offering help for substance abuse, therapists offered counseling and psychiatrists offered mental health help.
It took less than a minute into Chuck’s latest, ‘The World According to Chuck’ report, before Harvey Spinks personally sent a text message to every phone in our house. It simply read, ‘All bets are off, you’re all finished. What a shame, it could have been great’.
“You know the way the label on the Mister Muscle bottle, tells you that the product kills ninety-nine point-nine-nine percent, of all bacteria and viruses. You see, if I was the head if ISIS, I’d get a few of my guys to go to the Mister Muscle factory and I’d tell them to find out, what the point-zero-one percent of viruses and bacteria exist that can’t be killed by their very broad acting product and then I’d be manufacturing truck loads of the stuff, to unleash a torrent of justice upon the unbelievers, infidels and general western layabouts.”
He drained a beer and shoveled a fist of nachos into his face. He chomped noisily and continued. “I can just see it now, in a tiny little tin shed, way, way out in the desert, there’s like thirty of the nastiest, meanest looking dudes with bazookas and AK-47’s, waiting patiently while their nerdy, evil scientist squirts Mister Muscle at some green blob of a virus. They wait, and they wait a bit more, and even a little bit more. The virus lives. It’s party time at the Caliphate. And boy, I’ll bet those guys can party. I’m not buying a word of this no booze in the Caliphate rule. Definitely things are going to be changing when King Chuck takes the reins.”
Chuck’s online feed went dead.
“They’ve pulled you from the feed Chuck,” Dallas said. “But the likes for today’s report have gone nuts. Comments are pouring in.”
Dallas flicked giddily through the comments. “Everyone is asking where you’ve gone. And why have you gone off air.”
“I’m here, locked and loaded for more, if that little weasel Flowers would stop pulling my plug,” Chuck said. “So Dallas my boy, it looks like there’s nothing going to be happening for the next eleven minutes.”
I sat next to Dallas while he flicked, tapped and swished through his phone. “One guy called ShaftusMaximus-Fifty-Seven, first of all says, ‘Chuck you’re kind of cool for a fat, lazy, middle aged dude but do you have the same lazy opinion that all baby boomers and generation X have about millennials?”
“I’d better be careful with my response to this one.”
“No shit, you’re looking at one.”
“And remember what happened with the vegans? They’re baying for my blood,” Chuck said. “Imagine if I ended up flipping vegans, by driving them to kill me? Oh yeah, that’d be worth dying for.”
Chuck laughed and began choking. His eyes streamed and turned red. He reached for another beer and guzzled it down. He sat motionless and stared into the camera. Dallas checked the time.
“Hey Chuck, Flowers has your feed back online,” Dallas said. “Even he’s waiting with bated breath.”
Chuck snorted. “He knows he needs me. I’m his show pony. He knows that I’m the oracle of wisdom about to sprinkle my crumbs of knowledge in to the empty cups of the hungry masses.”
“Ammm Chuck, are you going to answer the question because we’re running out of time? He’s not asking for the secret to the universe.”
“Well ShaftusMaximus-Fifty-Seven, if that’s your real name, my young nephew Dallas here who happens to be one of you millennials, has just answered your question, one word – impatience. You guys are generation impatient. But you do know some cool shit. You know, like tech stuff, you’re good at that,” Chuck said profoundly. “Although having said that, in your defense, I think everyone has become more impatient. I remember a time, when if you said to someone – wait – there was no timeframe, it could be a minute, an hour, a day, a month. You’d just wait until they got back to you and that was fine. But then technology came into the picture. Pretty soon, everyone was saying ‘wait a minute’. Then the eighties came and money and cocaine pushed a minute, to a second and everyone was running around like headless chickens on blow saying, wait a second, just a second, in a second. Do you realize that they have a gun that can fire like three-hundred rounds in one second? In a single second – that’s insane. Apart from the shooting people part, that’s batshit crazy. It’s got so bad, that people don’t even want to waste any time, between killing people!”
“Any last advice before you go?” Dallas asked.
Chuck sat staring into the top of his empty beer bottle like it was a gateway to all worldly knowledge.
“Today would be great Chuck,” Dallas said.
Chuck looked up from his beer and said, “If you’re going to grow a beard, don’t manicure it like it’s a goddam putting green, let it rip, set it free, wild and free. By preening it like a house cat, you’re missing the point of a beard. A beard is supposed to be a statement of reckless abandonment, of nonconformity. Goddamit it’s freedom.”
Rufus skulked into the kitchen. I’d seen less guilty looking drug dealers, caught red handed sitting on a mountain of powder.
“Hey what’s Chuck up to?” Rufus asked, like he the lead in a budget Christmas pantomime. “What pearls of wisdom has Chuck got today?”
“If you’re going to drink heavily, do it in moderation,” Chuck said.
“Sounds like a fortune cookie, written by Charles Bukowski,” Rufus said.
“No that’s all Chuck Movi.”
“That should be on every middle school classroom wall across the country,” Dallas said.
Lenny, Max and Bunny arrived looking like they’d just dug a grave with their hands. Max looked like someone had just dug him up.
“That was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had to do in my life,” Bunny said. “Euch! I’m just going to burn these clothes. They’re could have been any kind of creepy crawlies back there.”
“That’s nothing, when I was your age I was working seven days a week,” Max said. “When I wasn’t up on stage, I worked three jobs and one was with a coal seller. You know that was the inspiration for my wheelbarrow routine.”
“Oh God, here we go,” Lenny said wearily. “When I was a boy, the coalman would thrash us to within an inch of our lives and then make us eat dirt for bleeding on the coal.”
Bunny laughed. Black inky looking water rolled off her hands into the kitchen sink.
“You know nothing of hardship,” Max grumbled. “Nothing!”
I tried to push past them to get out and investigate what was happening outside with Murray. Lenny crouched down and wrestled me back inside. I hoped by whining he’d let me out – he didn’t but he looked like he felt sorry for me. He wreaked of dust, bleach and Murray.
“I think he needs to go outside to go pee pee,” Lenny said, sounding like he was in the same Christmas pantomime as Rufus. “Let me take him.”
Lenny smuggled me out the door while Max and Bunny scrubbed themselves in the kitchen sink with four kinds of detergent. Lenny knelt down and turned me around. He dug out a small knife from his pocket – the kind with a bottle opener, can opener and a screwdriver. I sat diligently, while he poked around at my onboard camera. He tugged at the straps and swore about the complexity of the device until he finally managed to flick off the tiny switch, that connected me to the world. We ran outside like we’d just committed a crime and were running to freedom.
The horse trailer that Chuck scarcely used as a gym was backed up to the door of the shed, sealing off any entry. The only way in or out of the shed was through a small door at the front of the horse box. It looked too small for someone of Murray’s size to pass through. Lenny tapped three times and then once and then three more times. The little door opened from the inside and out poked Murray’s head dressed as Mariana, without the wig. He was wearing lipstick and eye shadow. I thought about licking his face but I didn’t like the smell of all the heavy make up. It reminded me of tubes of paint that I ate when I was a pup. I scurried through the door past Murray and into the shed. Lenny squeezed in behind me. Murray had a desk set up inside the trailer with stacks of papers and books on makeshift shelves made from orange crates – it was cozy. Lenny had connected a long cable from Murray’s new office, to a light bulb in our house. When Murray needed food he just switched on the bulb from the comfort of his horse trailer. Dallas said it was like the opposite of Pavlov’s dog experiment – Murray was like the dog ringing the bell while the master came running with food. Murray laughed when he said that and he enjoyed the idea of room service, even if he was living in a horse trailer attached to a shed.
“Welcome to the new offices of the Murray and Mariana Shamowski law firm,” Murray joked.
“It’s cozy,” Lenny said, scanning the patchwork of post-its on the walls of the trailer.
“I can’t complain, it’s a lot quieter than the Il Camino hotel and at least I don’t have to worry about getting shot or mugged on the way to the ice machine.”
I sniffed around the shed. I’d never seen it as clean. It reminded me of a set from a stage play that I’d been in with Rufus. The only furniture was an old metal framed bed and a paint spattered table with two chairs. A lonely looking lamp struggled to light up the scantily furnished space. Bathroom breaks for Murray required some stealth and agility – he needed to climb up a ladder onto the roof of the shed and then across another ladder to the window of Rufus’ bathroom. Lenny gave him one of Chuck’s old crash helmets and a head lamp to wear for the precarious after dark bathroom trips.
“I think Chums here wanted to come out and have a nose around,” Lenny said. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes I do, although if I keep eating all that food that Minnie’s been bringing me, you’re going to need to hitch this trailer up to the back of your truck to just get me to the courthouse.”
“Yeah it’s not going to be easy getting across to the bathroom with a belly full of Minnie’s Pierogis. You might want to cut back on those,” Lenny said. “How’s the case looking?”
“I think I might have an avenue but I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up too much yet.”
I wanted to get out of the shed and out of the horse trailer. There wasn’t enough to explore and I didn’t like the smell from Murray’s make up. I scratched the little door to get out.
“Ok I’ll leave you get back to it,” Lenny said. “I better get this little fellow back into the fray before they notice his camera’s dead. Remember hit the switch if you need anything.”
We both stole out of the horse trailer. Lenny reconnected me to the world.