The Homeless Millionaire

It took a while before I was ready to join Tony. I washed my face with cold water a couple of times and brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I still looked like a zombie, but at least it was a well-groomed zombie.

I gingerly made my way down the stairs, and was just a couple of steps away from completing this perilous journey when Tony called out from the kitchen:

"Michael! In here! Change of venue."

A strong smell of Chinese food hit me even before I entered the kitchen and I had to fight down a strong urge to throw up. I stepped through the doorway and instantly saw the source of that smell.

Tony had invited me for a coffee, but he'd laid out a lavish spread. The kitchen table was decorated with a dozen different containers of Chinese food—plates, bowls, saucers, cups—each containing one of the dishes Tony had ordered the night before. Fried rice, boiled rice, sweet-and-sour chicken, Szechuan beef, chow mein—the only item missing from the menu were the breaded deep-fried prawns. I remembered that they went really well with the Cuba libres, and that we actually had a tiff over who was going to eat the last one.

The star of that display was the big bottle of Appleton Estates, still nearly half full. Tony noticed me staring at that bottle as if I'd suddenly seen God, and he said:

"Yes, we've got quite a lot left. We could run out and get more I suppose, but on the other hand I don't want to be hungover tomorrow morning at work. It's just the right amount to feel a little better. Did you bring a joint?"

"No," I said hollowly.

Tony tut-tutted and said:

"I'm disappointed in you, laddie. Disappointed and disillusioned."

"My brain isn't working yet."

"Oh, of course. How stupid of me. Just a sec."

He moved so fast watching him made me dizzy. He was handing me a tumbler half-full of rum and ice before I could think of a good excuse to leave.

"You prefer it on the rocks, if I remember right," he said. "Fucking sacrilege! Anyway: cheers!"

I was pretty sure I was about to throw up anyway, so I stopped breathing and threw the whole drink down my throat.

I gagged and my eyes threatened to pop out. But I managed to keep the drink down and within seconds, rapid improvements began to take place.

"Wow," I said, when I was able to speak.

"Another one, before you run up the stairs?"

I could feel my brain begin to work. It informed me that Tony was expecting me to run upstairs, and roll a joint. That definitely required plenty of fuel.

"Okay," I said.

I drank just half of that second drink because Tony was acting a little weirdly, and my newly active brain told me he just couldn't wait any longer for that joint. So I put down my glass next to the boiled rice and smiled weakly at Tony and said:

"I shall return shortly. In the meantime, do you think I could have a coffee? Or tea. Doesn't matter, I just need some hot liquid."

"Of course, of course," Tony beamed and grabbed that fucking whistling kettle of his and began to fill it with water at the kitchen sink.

I crawled back up into my flat and actually moaned out loud with desperation when I was rolling that joint. I had next to no pot left. I thought about calling Harry and came to the shocking conclusion I hadn't called him yet solely because I was sure to ask him about buying some pot the moment I heard his voice. I was broke and couldn't afford any pot, but if I called Harry then sure as hell I'd end up buying some anyway.

The kettle began to whistle just as I was halfway down the last flight of stairs. I stopped and came close to retreating upstairs when Tony took it off the stove. Feeling like a man walking to his doom, I descended the last few steps and entered the kitchen.

"Here I am," I said, holding up the joint for Tony's inspection and admiration. "I had to add some tobacco. I'm nearly out of pot."

"No problem, no problem," Tony said hurriedly. "Why don't you light it up? I've refreshed your drink for you."

I glanced at my tumbler. It had been moved—it was next to the Szechuan beef now—and it was half-full. And suddenly, I heard my paranoid pal say: there's a reason for all that.

I ignored him. I grabbed my drink and raised it and said:

"Cheers."

"Cheers," Tony said, raising his glass with some reluctance. He was staring at the joint in my other hand rather like a dog at a bone.

I lit it and passed it on to him after a single small hit and boy, did he go at it with a vengeance. Luckily he got too greedy and began coughing and had to pass it back to me—he'd managed to burn through half of it, anyway. He'd probably completed a correspondence course with that Indian in Winnipeg.

I took a couple of hits while Tony was busy coughing. When he stopped, I held out what remained of the joint to him and said:

"It's all yours."

"No, no," he croaked, waving it away. "My throat—fuck. I've got to cut down on my smoking. I'm smoking way too much. It's all that fucking stress."

"I hear you," I said, and I was hundred per cent honest for a change.

"Yeah. You hungry? I'm fucking hungry. Your tea's over there," he added, pointing. He seemed totally oblivious of the fact that he'd initially invited me for a coffee.

My tea was brewing in a hospital-white mug adorned with a red heart and the words: I LOVE YOU. I knew that Tony was a confirmed heterosexual, so this message didn't bother me. What bothered me was that the mug was probably a gift from Tony's wife to him, or vice versa, in happier times. I was scared that I'd spend the next hour listening to Tony moan about how much he missed his wife. My paranoid pal was giggling. This bothered me more than anything else.

I said:

"This is a veritable feast, Tony."

Tony didn't answer; he was too busy ladling food onto his plate. I took out and squeezed the teabag and asked:

"Where's the trash?"

"Same spot it was in yesterday," said Tony, eyeing the fried rice: his plate was already more than half full. My brain was working quite nicely by then, thoroughly refreshed after a walk through Appleton Estates. So I opened the door to the cabinet under the sink and scored.

The trash bin was one of those models that were hung on the inside of the cabinet door, with the lid snapping open when you opened the door. It gave me a start.

But it was nothing compared to the jolt I got a few minutes later. I was lifting a forkful of boiled rice to my mouth—that couldn't hurt, boiled rice was the recommended food for people with serious digestive problems—when Tony said:

"Mike… I don't know how to put it… Mike, you said some pretty disturbing things last night."

"Eh?"

I said that on automatic, because twenty alarm bells were ringing in my head. They were not nearly as loud as my paranoid pal, who was shrieking with laughter.

"I mean I understand that you're an artist, and a good one at that," Tony said. "I understand that you love art and everything else comes second, a very far second."

He paused with an appropriately faraway look on his face, and suddenly I knew what this whole event was about.

I'd told Tony about the museum robbery while getting drunk the previous night.

My heart went right up to my throat when I thought that, and things instantly got worse because I began to wonder whether I hadn't confessed to killing Schmidt, too. Michael Ryman was a guy who took things to the limit every fucking single time. When someone offered him a bit of sexual pleasure—wrong sex, but did it really matter?—he killed the guy.

Fuck off, I said to my paranoid pal. Then I said to Tony:

"So?"

"So… uh… You were saying last night that all fathers want to fuck their daughters and that all mothers want to fuck their sons, too. Uh, I don't want to delve into your past, but there's a guy you could talk to. When this whole divorce business of mine started someone gave me the name of that shrink and he's really good. I just saw him a couple of times and then I saw everything in a whole new perspective. He's not expensive and he's really good. Really."

"Really," I said. I bought some time by eating another forkful of boiled rice. Then I said:

"It was just a drunken rant, Tony. Don't worry about it."

"You sounded pretty serious."

"People often sound very serious when they don't mean shit, and especially so when they are drunk," I said. "I think it's called lying. I was lying to you last night, Tony. I was carried away by all that wonderful booze. You're so generous."

It was the right thing to say. Tony beamed.

"It's good, isn't it," he said. "You know, I used to drink Bacardi and shit, but once I tasted that stuff I just couldn't go back."

"You a big fan of rum, Tony?'

"Yeah. I mean, it's the real thing. Why fuck around with converting starch to sugar and then sugar to alcohol when you can just convert sugar into alcohol right away. Keep things simple. That's the best way to proceed, every time."

It was clear the rum and and the pot were having an inspirational effect on Tony. Unfortunately, things weren't working that way for me.

My paranoid pal was telling me that Tony had invented that whole fathers-want-to-fuck-daughters-and-mothers-want-to-fuck-sons story solely to camouflage my real confession: the museum robbery, and killing Schmidt.

He knew a lot about me, more than I'd have wanted anyone to know. It was evident in his every glance, every move. When he helped himself to more food, his hand always neatly skirted the high-alert perimeter of my radar.

It was obvious that he regarded me as someone who was really fucked up. It wasn't the kind of impression I'd wanted to make on my landlord, and I felt very uncomfortable.

So when we'd finished eating and pretty much finished the bottle, I said:

"Hey, Tony. How do you feel about smoking another joint?"