Reed Coleman - Gun Church

“I’ll be there.”

“You better be.”

Click.

Until Frank Vuchovich stuck his Colt Python in my nose, the toughest thing I had to tackle in Brixton was explaining subordinate clauses to the zombie-faced kids of coal miners and loggers. Well, that and marking their near-illiterate papers. Yet, as the West Side of Manhattan stretched out before me through the towers and cables of the George Washington Bridge, I found I was scared shitless. Suddenly, Brixton County felt like William Blake’s Jerusalem, dark Satanic mills notwithstanding. From the night Meg called with the good news, I thought this was exactly what I wanted. Now, not so much. It hadn’t taken long for the doubts to creep back in-the remembrances of things past, the bad things.

When I came out of rehab, Brixton was an easy place to land. One of the keys to breaking any addiction is to avoid the people, places, and things that help facilitate easy access to your particular poison. Well, let me tell you something about New York City in the 1980s: it was the mother of all enablers. I confronted my weaknesses on a moment-to-moment basis. Not confronted, really. I just sort of acquiesced. Every restaurant, every club and night spot was full of cocaine, cocktails, and willing blonds. And there was always an ample supply of Seven Sisters fangirls at the ready when I got bored of the blonds and wanted to have an intelligent conversation between orgasms.

Adoration is a universal addiction to which I was no more or less susceptible than anyone else. In the Manhattan of those golden years, nothing got the toadies, sycophants, and suck-asses going like success. Regardless of the abject dreadfulness of Clown Car Bounce, The Devil’s Understudy , and Curley Takes Five , I would have continued to be hailed as a genius if those books had somehow managed to do good numbers. When anthropologists and historians want to study the Big Bang moment of our cultural demise, they will look back to 1980s Manhattan, the time and place when the singularity of substance and style exploded into a chasm of universal proportion. Didn’t matter what the essential value of anything was as long as it sold.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I’d loaded a few things into the last vestige of the Kipster, his ridiculous 1988 Porsche 911, and headed for New York City. I’d come close to selling the car a hundred times. I mean, for chrissakes, the nearest Porsche dealership was fifty miles across the state line and simple maintenance cost more than a month’s rent. Plus, in a calloused and chapped-hands place like Brixton, it marked me as a superior fucker and a total outsider. Oddly enough, as I drove out of town, I no longer felt like either one of those things.

And there were reasons for my skittishness about driving back into the lion’s mouth that went beyond my worries about temptation. I’d swiped the.38 from the Colonel’s duffel bag the last time I shot with Jim. I don’t know why exactly. There was no inherent thrill in “borrowing” the.38. I nearly soiled myself at the thought of getting caught and then having to explain myself to Jim. The fear was not that I’d be exiled-it was pretty clear that Jim got as much out of our relationship as I did-but that I wouldn’t have been able to express my reasons for taking it in a way that made any sense.

Fact is, I had gone shooting with Jim nearly every day since the end of September. It was part of my routine and writers dread the loss of routine almost more than anything else. I think I took the revolver because I wanted to carry a piece of that routine with me even if I couldn’t shoot in the wilds of New York City. It was a rosary to pray on, a physical reminder of the thing that had made the book possible in the first place. But who knows? Truth is always more complicated than the rationalization.

And there was Renee. She too was part of my routine and don’t think I hadn’t been tempted to bring her, to show her my old world, a new world to her. Unlike the.38, which would be nothing more than a kind of semi-religious talisman, Renee would bring real comfort. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d sought convenient comfort in the company of a woman. The amazing thing is, I didn’t want to disrespect Renee like that, to turn her back into the St. Pauli Girl. I’d even convinced myself that she didn’t want to go. She hadn’t asked to come, not with words. Yet, as the week unfolded, I could see Please bring me, please writ large in her eyes.

In spite of my recent un-Kipster-like behavior, I didn’t fool myself that my default settings weren’t still firmly locked on self-destruct. It would take more than a few months of writing, monogamy, and noble impulses to declare the Kipster fully exorcised. I liked drama. I mean, what else were the chapel, Cutthroat, and Fox Hunt all about if not drama? I liked to complicate things and I was less than confident that the new me wasn’t more a function of lack of opportunity than a reflection of profound change.

No, as much as I liked the idea of having Renee with me, I knew leaving her in Brixton was the right thing to do. The right thing for me. For once, I needed things to be simple. I told Renee that I’d be going back to New York soon enough and that we’d make a vacation of it, over Christmas maybe. It wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, one she seemed willing to go along with so we might both get through the week until I left.

Now, with the first dim rays of the sun filtering through the gaps in the skyline, it occurred to me that this was when I’d normally be wrapping up my first writing session of the day and climbing back into bed with Renee for a few minutes before getting dressed to run with Jim. Okay, so I knew I would miss them, miss my routine, but I didn’t expect it to happen even before I got across the Hudson River. Hell, a few more minutes of this, I thought, and I’d be getting weepy for Stan Petrovic.

As I opened the door to the Liars Pub, a gaggle of chattering, Southern blue-hairs poured out past me and asked for directions to Radio City. Their tour bus to Branson must have missed a turn at St. Louis. But who was I to laugh at them, even a little bit? You teach at Brixton County Community College, you lose the privilege of looking down your nose at anyone but yourself.

“One for lunch?” the hostess asked, thumbing a stack of menus.

“I’m meeting someone. The reservation’s under Donovan.”

When the hostess looked down at her reservation sheet, I looked at her. Curvy, petite, and in her mid-twenties, she was dressed in a vintage clothing store cocktail dress-black, of course-over black heels that reeked of credit card debt. Her hair was jet black, her skin a shade of light mocha, her eyes almond-shaped but hazel. Her lips red and thick, her nose upturned, her breasts full, she was the most exotic-looking woman I’d seen in seven years.

“Yes, we have it, but I’m afraid Miss Donovan hasn’t yet arrived. Would you care to be seated or to wait at the bar?”

“Actress, dancer, painter, or writer?” I asked. This might have been the only time I posed the question without a motive more nefarious than curiosity. After all, no one who looked like her came to New York City for a career in hostessing. Nobody.

“Writer.”

I said, “You have my condolences.”

If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Tell me about it.”

“This place used to really be something once.”

She sighed. “So I’ve heard.”

“You would have liked it,” I said.

“Not now.”

“Of course not, it’s a job.”

“It’s a corpse. No one likes working in a place that once was.”

“Almost as unpleasant as somebody who once was. I’ll be at the bar.”