Bruce Wagner - Memorial

That’s when Ray pointed out that lion was the name’s root. She didn’t react — which was good.

“Doesn’t your friend Durga ride on one of those?”

“We’ll see,” she said. “And if it’s a girl?”

He waited a moment, then said, “Lioness.”

She scowled, then laughed in spite of herself.

She went to let the dog out. He’d puked on the rug. She swore at him then soaked a towel to daub it up. The old man pushed PLAY on his Twilight Zone.

STANIEL Lake stopped by and was promptly bit — the Friar actually broke skin. That didn’t make Ray happy at all. The detective shrugged it off but Ghulpa was mortified and brought out alcohol and cotton swabs. The detective said he was fine and asked if he could wash his hand in the kitchen sink. The old man felt even worse because when it happened, he’d instinctively swatted Nip’s butt — the dog yelped and pitifully shuddered, even though the hit was nowhere near the wound.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the kindly Mr Lake.

Ghulpa put the dog back in the bedroom, where he began to shriek and howl. She shushed at him and somewhere a neighbor said, Shut it! Shut that crazy motherfucker up!

“Sorry about that,” said Ray. “He hasn’t been himself. We’re gonna get some help — Friar’s got ‘mental’ stuff. You sure you’re OK?”

“I’m fine. Not the 1st time. Hell, I was raised around dogs. He’ll have to do more than that to scare me off.”

“He just might! Had your tetanus?”

“Don’t even worry about it, Ray.”

“I may have to give a press conference myself,” joked the old man. Then he thought the remark sounded cavalier. He tried to balance it out. “You know, I really appreciated that — the words of those officers. I know they’re good men.”

He felt bad. He wasn’t sure if he should say they had reached a settlement; maybe it wasn’t kosher, legalwise. He forgot to ask the attorneys about that. He didn’t want to do anything to upset the applecart. But he made a note to eventually explain the decision to Detective Lake, why he’d agreed to accept the City’s terms, and let him know for the record there were no hard feelings — he was going to be a new father soon, that’s all, and worried about the child’s welfare and what the future held, plain and simple. He wanted to take the detective and his colleagues to the Pacific Dining Car when the money came in but didn’t know if that was allowed; again, if it was kosher. Oh, the hell with it, he’d do it anyway. He’d do it before —before he got a penny. He wanted to convene, explain himself to the cops so that when the news broke, they wouldn’t think he was a hypocrite or a greedy man because afterall they had the best intentions and he didn’t consider it to be their fault that things went wrong (like things sometimes/always do), they put their lives on the line each and every day, and they’d spoken from their hearts, and hadn’t been Machiavellian. He wanted to say all of that right this minute but BG kept shooting him looks, he understood those kinds of signals, she was telling him to bite down, button up, zip it, upset as she was about the dog chomping on their guest, she still wanted to protect her own, protect her man and the bump in her belly. She subtly glowered each time she sensed Ray was weakening, wanting to share his sappy thoughts with Mr Lake.

The detective stayed about an hour, watching The Twilight Zone on and off, before going his way. Ray asked if he’d like to have a meal one day soon and Ghulpa seemed fine with that — it was the right thing to have said. He apologized for the Friar’s uncivil behavior and again, the detective shrugged it off.

Ghulpa and Ray watched a Larry King rerun. He was interviewing the model who lost her fiancé in the tsunami, a beautiful girl who clung to a palm tree for hours before being rescued. She spent 3 weeks in the hospital with a broken pelvis.

Ghulpa shuffled in from the kitchen with food, staring spitefully at the screen.

“I will never return,” she said, as if suffering a fresh insult.

“But that’s Thailand, not India,” said the old man.

“My child will never see that terrible place. I don’t care.”

“Suit yourself.”

THE kiss at the zoo surprised him.

It had stopped there, aside from a little groping, which was fine and dandy, because Chess didn’t think he was up for anything else. Too heavy. But it was obvious they were becoming more than just friends and he worried about getting too dependent. He didn’t need another drug in his life. Still, winding up as the neutered companion, like on some TV sitcom — standing on the sidelines while Ganesha Girl got involved with another Maurie-type — would be rough. (Though he knew he’d probably settle for anything; she was definitely nice to have around.) He was super -attracted. The idea of Laxmi even sitting on his toilet was a turn-on — just thinking about it gave Chess half a hard-on, which was all he seemed capable of lately. But for the life of him he couldn’t see her side of it.

Why would she be interested?

He got paranoid, occasionally wondering if it was a new setup involving Maurie, some meta— Friday Night Frights mindfuck. (Maybe his old pal was doing another reality show that even Remar was in on.) Chess started TiVo-ing FNF because Laxmi had become a semiregular. Apart from the thrill of watching her — she was usually scantily clad, as they say — he enjoyed it. One episode featured a clever show-within-a-show. They recruited a Vic, telling him he was going to “do some stunts” on a Punk’d -style series called The Fright Club. A real stuntman pretended to be fatally injured during the filming and the police came; the kid who’d been hired completely freaked. It was pretty sophisticated, kind of like the Michel Gondry version. Whenever Chess felt particularly vulnerable, usually after smoking weed, he thought Laxmi’s attentions might be part of an elaborate hoax. He knew it was crazy, and was usually able to talk himself down fairly quick.

Chess was convinced that his fears were only a function of all the physical bullshit he’d been experiencing: bouts of room-twirling vertigo in the morning being the latest. His doc ascribed it to the voodoo of various meds but Chess made an appointment to come in anyway because there was evidently some sort of “non-invasive procedure” they could do right in the office to equalize the fluids in the ear. From everything he’d gathered off blogs and chatrooms, dizziness was a bitch to get rid of. (People usually got the cookie-cutter diagnosis of BPPV — Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.) There was a widely accepted fix-it called the Epley Maneuver; like everything else, how-to diagrams were all over the Net. It seemed kind of hillbilly. The nurses took hold of Chess, yanking him this way and that until his eyes jumped and jittered in their sockets (“nystagmus,” said the regal RN), thus dislodging debris or “ear rocks”—literally what they were called. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. You had to sleep semi-recumbent for a few days after the mad teacup ride or risk undoing any salutary effects. If the vertigo didn’t go away after 2 or 3 Epleys, they left you twisting in the wind, in a thunderstorm of vomit.

Like lots of things — chronic pain being Numero Uno — no one really took it seriously, not even putative professionals. MDs just kept writing scripts for antihistamines and Dramamine, generally categorizing repeat offenders as fags, drags, and whiners. If the problem persisted, they were legally compelled to rule out MS, Parkinson’s, compression of vertebral arteries (that’s what was worrying Chess), or Ménière’s. People with vestibular disorders were called “wobblers”—sometimes you could be sent to permanent vertigo jail from the side effects of a virus or something as routine as a run-of-the-mill antibiotic. There were surgical treatments for BPPV but Chess didn’t even want to go there. The idea of someone cutting into his spine was bad enough but plumbing into notoriously delicate aural canals and fluid reservoirs or tinkering with weensy ear bones sounded like an invitation to suffer the consequences of illustrating Mohammed. So for a while, he took to propping himself up while he slept, which wasn’t easy. He spent $400 on special formfitting bolsters at Relax Your Back. Sometimes, on top of the painkillers, he needed 4 Klonopin (1 mg) and 3 Ambien CRs (12.5 mg) just to get him through the night.