Herk is my ICE,48 my Linderman,49 my Cosa Nostra, my Secret Service guy itching to jump in front of the bullet. It hurts to hear him speak ill of me, so I take the only logical and emotional action of which I am capable at this vertiginous moment: I run away. Double-time. With my head awash in poison, my eyes stinging with toxic fumes, my mouth smelling of sperm whale feces and hamster vomit, I stagger out the door and crabwalk to the corner of Pitt and Stanton, where I make a defeated semaphore at passing cabs. One finally stops and I try to convey my destination by making a steering-wheel gesture and saying, “Orchard,” then, with sadness, I realize I no longer live there, so I try to say, “Clinton Hill, Clinton and Greene,” which also doesn’t get much of a response. The trouble is that all the Nix I just shotgunned is suppressing respiration and making my lips feel as large and dead as a pair of suitcase handles, both of which give me an Elmer Fuddian accent that makes it difficult for the cabbie to decipher my meaning. While the meter runs, I administer the first dose of antidote. The delay doesn’t exactly smooth things over.
“For the last time, where to, pal?” says the cabbie.
Thirty seconds later I garble at him.
“Where?”
Another injection, another thirty seconds later, I try again.
“Where?”
A third dose and yet another thirty silent seconds don’t make him any pleasanter. Finally, as the guy froths in the front seat and spins around in a way that suggests he craves physical access to my person, I just write the address down on a receipt and present it to him, eyes downcast like someone trying to placate a wild animal with a nonthreatening offer of food.
“Fucking people,” he says.
I am out of it enough not to notice how long it takes to get home, or how circuitous the route, but the fare glowing at me on the meter convinces me that we’ve taken the scenic route. It’s possible we took the Brooklyn Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge. Too weak to argue, I push a wad of bills of unknown denomination through the slot. I wait for a certain amount of time for change. I might have some coming. I might not.
Inside my apartment I don’t fare much better. I follow a track that terminates at the wall, which is also where my nose close-encounters the plaster, leaving a bright red spot on the paint. It is involuted, flowerlike, and because my brain is so distracted by the chemical maelstrom raging in its neurons, it takes me a long time to realize how bad it hurts.
The answer is: bad.
Bad enough to require ice, which is in itself additionally painful: the wedding cake action figures are in there. But my brain is sufficiently fricasseed to forget about that until I open the door and see those schmucks staring at me. One of the women is definitely smirking at me and her groom, Chester Wellington III,50 is giving me the eye.