Hal Ackerman: Stein,stoned

“This will take all of one second. I just need you to look at this signature and tell me if it’s yours. One word, yes/no, and I’m gone.”

Morty’s full attention was at the giant screen tote board, where the finish of the race was being replayed, and the words PHOTO FINISH flashing repeatedly. “Nope,” Morty said.

“No, it’s not your signature?” Stein’s heart began to race. Had his name been forged? Was there really something going on with these shampoo bottles?

“No, I’m not doing company business on my day off.”

“This isn’t corporate. It’s just you and me.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear my man over the crowd noise.” The smaller man pressed up very close to Stein’s ear. He did so by pulling on Stein’s arm with such sudden and considerable force that the rest of Stein’s body followed in close proximity. “My friend said no.”

“I get that it’s his day off. I could authorize the company’s paying him right now for an hour’s overtime.”

A roar went up from the crowd as the result of the photo was posted up on the board.

“There’s my overtime,” Morty said. He pounded his fist into his open palm. The gesture carried the weight of a falling oak. “Damn if that artichoke-face muthafucker didn’t have it. Five hundred. Right on his nose!”

Stein looked with disbelief at the tote board. “A friend of mine told me to bet that horse.” Stein lamented.

“You should listen to the good advice of your friends,” the short man observed. He and Morty high and low fived at their good fortune.

“Morty! You just hit a fifty-to-one shot. Are you really not going to tell me whether you signed this?”

“Forty-five to-one. And yeah. I’m not gonna tell you if I signed it.”

The overhead sun drove Stein’s shadow straight down into the yielding asphalt as he made the long walk back through the parking lot to his car. He berated himself at every step. He had blundered up to Morty Greene without a strategy, without giving himself a way to win. Woody was right. There was a word for people like him. The word was. He had gained nothing, learned nothing, accomplished nothing. It was right that he should have to go back to counting shampoo bottles. That was his level. A man at the top of his game would have gotten what he came here to get.

He leaned for a moment against the polished green hood of a Mercedes Benz. He was startled by the sudden appearance of a man right in front of him, and instinctively catalogued his opponent’s weaknesses: What he saw was a man in middle age, looking paunchy and soft, glib but without the bite to back up the bark, speckles of gray in his hair, soft conciliatory body, a man who could be taken. This all registered in a moment, before he realized that he was looking at his own reflection. A mechanized voice ordered him to take three steps back, which he did, and walked rapidly away.

Stein had forgotten where he had parked his car and scoured Aisle D for twenty minutes before he found it in Aisle E. He opened his door and was practically driven to his knees by the rush of aroma that cascaded out. Goodpasture’s bud must have come out of its plastic bag when Stein had swept it under the seat, and the sun beating down on the roof for the last hour had turned the car into an oven. Passersby in the next row craned their heads in search of the source. A young boy asked his parents in a loud voice what that smell was. They pretended not to know, but his fifteen-year-old brother looked back at Stein and flashed him the peace sign.

It would mean an extra hour and twenty extra miles, but he had to go home first to air out the car and his clothing. He could not go to Angie’s school with the car smelling like this. He could just picture himself getting yanked out of the seat by Sergeant Henley, the 300-pound parking enforcement officer who stood guard at the gate of The Academy, and being dragged by the scruff of the neck to the principal’s office.

Weeks later, when he would relate this story and people asked him why didn’t he just throw the bud away, he had no better answer than to say he couldn’t. It was too beautiful.

Penelope Kim, Stein’s tall, slender, twenty-year-old Korean bisexual neighbor, was in the courtyard wearing her blue Spandex yoga togs, bent into her downward-facing dog when Stein arrived home and tried to hurry past her to his apartment.

“Stein!” She called through her legs. “I’ve been looking for you. I have to pick your brain.”

She sprang from her pose and bounded at his heels like a Doberman puppy. Penelope had been an Olympic diving champion at fifteen, and a Paris high-fashion model at sixteen, where under the name “Cambodia” she had posed nude for the famous calendar featuring old and new farm equipment. She had climbed K-2 and had her fortune told by the Dalai Lama. She had been declared clinically dead on two separate occasions, slept with the male and female costars of three major motion pictures and their sequels; and since all that was merely her life, the exotic protagonist of the screenplay she was writing was a middle-aged Jewish insurance investigator, who in her script she called Klein.

“So did you write your five pages today?” Stein asked her.

“No, today’s been a thinking day.”

“You write and think on different days?”

“They’re separate functions. I can’t explain it. I need to find out more about what you did at the factory,” Penelope said as she followed Stein into his apartment.

“It’s a warehouse.”

“I changed it to a factory. It’s more visual. I can’t explain it.” Watson was asleep in a shaft of sunlight on the living-room rug. He raised an eyelid, grumbled, and went back to sleep. “Maybe I’ll give Klein an old dog. Make the audience worry that he’ll die.”

“Klein or the dog?”

She giggled. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She grabbed a ballpoint off his desk and scribbled shorthand notes across the taut pliable skin of her forearm. “Stein, this place looks like a garage sale. Your feng shui is all for shit. I’m going to get my friend Fiona to do a complete energy rebalancing for you.” Stein looked distractedly from the hand-grouted coffee table to the overstuffed sofa to the fifties pole lamp. “I hate it when you ignore me,” Penelope pouted. “I’m too much of a narcissist to take the rejection.”

“I’m looking for a place to hide this.” He displayed the contents of the plastic wrapping that he had resealed.

“Stein, that’s marijuana!”

“I’m aware of that. And now, so is everyone else in the zip code.” He explored and rejected several hiding places-under the base of the pole lamp, in the pinball machine, his file cabinet- while giving her an offhand synopsis of the morning’s activities.

She looked at him with reverence. “Stein, you pretend to live this boring normal life, but you’re out making dope deals, betting horses. Reality so kicks fiction’s ass.”

“Ah!”

He strode triumphantly to the hall closet and tucked the packet in among the helter-skelter shelves of blankets and bed linens.

“No good,” said Penelope. “Not enough ventilation. It’ll stink up the house.”

“It won’t stink up the house.”

“I vote for the file cabinet.”

“It’s not a referendum.” Her chin and her eyes dropped. “I’m sorry. Penelope, I didn’t mean to snap at you.” As a penance he admitted, “I can’t hide it in my file cabinet. She snoops there.”

The phone rang. Stein let the machine pick up.

“I can’t believe you still use a landline. Even Klein has a pager.”

“You’d give Van Gogh a spray can.”

Mattingly’s voice came over the machine in a panic. Morty Greene had called in and quit his job. This was enough proof for Mattingly that the bottles had been stolen and he was going to swear out a warrant for Morty’s arrest. Stein grabbed the receiver, shouting “Do not!” He didn’t know why he would so adamantly defend Morty Greene. It probably had something to do with Edna and that whatever Mattingly thought was right, Stein wanted to be wrong.