Bruce Wagner - Memorial

When they got back to the apartment, Cesar smiled broadly.

“So: would you and ‘Mr Nip’ like to be on the show?”

“Why, sure!” said Ray, beaming. “But you’ll have to ask him. He has a mind of his own!”

Cesar squatted and rubbed the dog’s chin.

“Would you like to be a TV star?”

The Friar seemed not unhappy with the proposition.

“I guess that’s a yes,” said Cesar, and with flawless timing, Nip licked his hand. “This guy’s gonna be a star!”

The men laughed.

“You’ve seen Dog Whisperer ?”

“Yes, I have. Religiously.”

“There’s a woman whose dog has been sick — a King Charles. He’s skittish, fearful. This usually has more to do with the human than the animal. She’s a very nice lady. Her grandchildren go to school with Will Smith’s kids. Do you know Will Smith? I work with his dogs.”

“Not so much. But I saw you on Oprah. ”

“Wonderful person, Oprah,” he said, with that unbeatable smile. “A pack leader with humans, but not so much with dogs! I thought it might be good to work with Nip a little, and work with the King Charles — then bring them both together. I don’t know how long this dog is to live. But it’s very important to make him comfortable and wag his tail in the time he has left. And to make his owner happy too! This is a gift. We are trying some new things on the show. I think you’ve met this woman before,” he said. “The woman with the ‘little King.’ Her name is Cora. The dog is Pahrump.”

At 1st Ray couldn’t place them, but then he remembered.

“Oh yes!”

“She said she met you in the waiting room of the hospital where they did Nip’s surgery.”

“Yes! Nice, nice lady. He’s at the Center now, isn’t he? I’m afraid my Friar wasn’t so welcoming. Kinda went after him.”

“That’s one of the reasons we want to get the 2 of them together,” said Cesar. “Wouldn’t it be nice for them to be friends, without the fears?”

HE was in panic seizure.

Something happened to Maurie while he was on the massage table.

911 had been called.

Maurie had been taken away — while Chester and Laxmi were having their Sacred Stone massage and Desert Volcanic Fango Body Mask/Sage Body Polish.

Horror when they 1st found out.

Or, as news anchors liked to say: Hawhr.

They emerged from the sanctum sanctorum, unknowing. Exfoliated, kneaded, luminous, renewed — while Maurie was in some desert ER being violated by needless, tubes, and electrodes.

What—?

Chess knew. He must have had a freak reaction to the supposed Viagra! It was just a joke, the FNF payback: Maurie liked to get high and Chess said he had some Oxycontin (80 mg) he got from an online pharmacy. Which was true, but he gave Maurie Viagra instead. He carefully sponged the pill until it was white, not blue, so if Maurie had ever taken it before (Chess was sure that he had), he wouldn’t recognize it, and besides, those offshore Rx’s always looked different. That would have been his explanation if Maurie had asked, which he didn’t. All Chess had to say was that he’d already used some from the same batch. He’d had a general conversation with Maurie about sexual “supplements” only the week before. He mentioned Viagra and “Le Weekender” and Maurie claimed he “didn’t need that crap.” Chess knew his friend was bullshitting, but said he didn’t need it either. Peer pressure and all. Still, you could never tell. Maybe Maurie was one of those horny Jews who wouldn’t need help in that area until he was 90 fucking years old. The heebs were notorious horndogs. Upstairs in his room, while Laxmi and Levin had their little “rest,” he sponged the pill down just in case. Didn’t want anything to screw up the prank. It was genius. The thing is, Chess knew Maurie was kind of a homophobe; that’s why he wasn’t totally sure he would go for the massage/masseur switcheroo. But evidently he did. He probably didn’t have the energy to get off the table and make a lame excuse about suddenly not feeling well or whatever. Or maybe he hung in because he got freaked or shy or paralyzed, or thought the jig would think he was racist if he walked. Or maybe he just really needed a rubdown and said fuck it, laughing to himself. “Just so long as the shvug don’t show me his shvanz.” Chess wouldn’t really have cared if Maurie had balked and canceled; he was determined to get back at the cocksucker one way or another — but funny, not cruel, like the way he’d done Chess. There would be no injuries. So he gave him the ‘Oxy’ about 20 minutes before the massage with the idea that Maurie would be thinking he was getting high for the happy ending, but in comes the nigger, and his hopes were that Maurie would just say fuck it and lie back to enjoy the rub and lo and behold, about 10 minutes in, the guy would inadvertently brush his cock, they always did, even if it was one of those towel-adjusts, and that would be enough of a trigger to give him a massive Viagracized blueveiner while Hutu gave him the old deep tissue. Tu-Tu-Tutsi, goodbye! That Hu-tu what you-do so well…that’s all Chess was thinking about during the Sacred Stone thing, he laughed aloud a few times, almost explosively, and the woman laying on the stones probably thought he was nuts, so Chess had to make something up about remembering an “unrepeatable joke,” how funny and dirty it was, he couldn’t share it, blah. But something must have — Jesus, maybe those fraudulent fuckers mailed Chess poison, or buffered it with something Maurie was allergic to, they couldn’t be trusted, they were all shell companies, gray marketers, you could never even call them back, no way to contact them, but no — he would probably have heard about something like that by now, there’d have been a mass occurrence, a 60 Minutes or Dateline exposé or whatever. Chess knew you could get a headache with Viagra but even that was rare. They said you could go blind too but you probably had to take it about a million times before it was statistically possible and anyhow that was something the lawyers made them put in the literature just to cover themselves. If Maurie had an embolism or some shit like that it’d have been such an insanely rare thing, maybe even independent of the Viagra. Or whatever it turned out to be. He wondered for a minute if they would check the Jew’s blood and find out. Do a panel. Still, something must have happened with that pill, Jesus H, because they said he’d had a stroke and it was just too coincidental. Why would Maurie suddenly have a stroke? While getting rubbed by a smoke? He was in pretty good shape, as far as Chester knew….

THEY sat in the waiting room, in shock. Laxmi cried and Chess fantasized about going to jail. Who should I tell? He thought of fessing up. But what if Laxmi turned on him, with a weird, unpredictable vengeance, destroying whatever pathetic chances he imagined he had in terms of her love? He was stunned to be thinking along romantic lines in a situation like this. What am I, a sociopath? What if Laxmi completely flipped out, and accused him not only of performing a sick practical joke but of trying to kill Maurie for his FNF trangression? Murder him! What if she said that Chess must have given him something else, on top of the “Viagra,” like arsenic, and it was her duty to go to the police. Some kind of malevolence might kick in, for sure, especially if his conspiracy theories turned out to be true and Laxmi was in cahoots with Friday Night Frights (after all, she was on the payroll), and seriously in love with Maurie, whose dick would no longer work even if you pumped concrete straight into the shaft. Chess sat there, his brain short-circuiting, wondering if he should blab, then preempt her potential snitching by spilling his guts to the cops himself. In that case, why tell Laxmi 1st? Too dangerous: she might unload on a doc or nurse, or make a beeline for the phone to call whomever. Maybe he should get in touch with Remar. Attorney/client privilege — he could tell Remar he’d fucked a corpse and the guy was legally bound to keep quiet about it. Or maybe that wasn’t even true anymore. They used to say shrinks and priests couldn’t share confessions with the authorities but if you paid attention to recent news events, that bond had been severed with a fucking chainsaw. There was no sanctuary anymore. The trouble was, Chester Herlihy had motive. Not only had Maurie Levin caused him physical and emotional injury— that was public record — but there was evidence he was in love with the Vic’s girlfriend! Evidence the girl herself could —and would —provide. She might be a pot-smoking Karma Sutra —reading black-donkey-paraded cow-dung-covered child-molested Mansonette but she sure as hell wasn’t going to condone the homicidal actions of a pain-addled pseudo-paramour.