The Homeless Millionaire

She had been expecting me to join her. When I sat down, it felt as if we'd been there together for a while, and I'd just returned with a fresh beer from the bar counter.

"Hello again," I said.

"Hello," she said, with a sour smile. Maybe it was sour because her drink was nearly gone. I said:

"Where's Dick?"

She gave me a sharp glance, so I added:

"I'm asking because I haven't brought a gun. Guys like me don't have a chance against guys like Dick without a gun. And last time I saw Dick, he wanted to rip my head off."

"Dick always wants to rip heads off," she said. "You don't have anything to worry about. You're at the end of a very long lineup."

I laughed out loud at that, partly because it was funny but mostly from relief. I was happy to hear Dick wasn't around, and it seemed as if he wasn't Jane's boyfriend after all.

"You seem to know Dick pretty well," I told her. She shrugged and said:

"I don't have a choice. He's my older brother."

I felt a wave of warmth for Jane when she said that. It looked like she could be a twin soul.

"You have my sympathy," I said. "I have an older brother, too."

"Oh really?"

She seemed to slur a little when she said that and I realized that she was drunk. I finally began focusing on the details and saw that she had yellow stains on her cigarette fingers and shadows under eyes that were unnaturally bright. That was what people who'd partied all night looked like.

"Yeah," I said. "His name is Joseph, but he likes to be called Josh. He's a world-class asshole."

"Dick isn't that bad," she said, in a tone that told me she thought otherwise.

"He's really a sweet kid who still goes to sleep with his childhood teddy bear?"

She laughed, and said:

"I wouldn't go that far."

"How far would you go?"

"With Dick? All the way back to the cradle."

"That sounds almost mystical," I said.

"Maybe it is. Tell me, what are you doing here?"

"Apart from having a beer? I've just rented a place nearby. I thought I'd celebrate by having a drink."

"Oh really? What do you do?"

"You mean work?" She nodded. I said:

"Nothing right now. I'll have to look around. But maybe I'll get lucky and I won't need to find job. I've just signed a contract with an art gallery."

"Which one?"

"The Space."

"I know The Space! They have cool stuff. What's your name?"

I told her, wondering whether she remembered my first name was Michael. I also told her my stuff wouldn't be displayed until December.

"I wasn't planning on going there right away," she told me. It was a subtle putdown and I began to feel irritated. At the same time, I liked her a lot. Jane was the first girl I'd liked right away in a very long time. I said:

"How about you? What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up," she said, and grinned when she saw the effect her words had on my face.

I recovered quickly. I said:

"Wasn't he with you at the party?"

"How do you—never mind." She smiled to herself—I was clearly excluded from that smile. She said:

"This girl is drunk, and it shows. I must watch my step."

"I don't mind," I said. "I mean, I like getting drunk too, on occasion."

"It's nice sometimes, isn't it." She made a show of looking at her watch and added:

"I need to visit the ladies' room. Will you be sweet enough to stay and keep an eye out for Darcy? He's pretty tall and has curly blond hair and hazel eyes. He should be here any moment now."

I promised I'd watch out for hazel-eyed Darcy and she went off and I thought that in the new, unpromising circumstances it would be best to leave. I finished my beer and stood up and hung around the table for a little while, making internal bets as to who would appear first: the Darcy, or Jane.

It was Jane. I waved to her the moment she looked at me, and left. I stopped immediately outside the entrance, already regretting what I'd done. But there was no way I could score any points with her, not with curly-haired Darcy due shortly, and anyway I could feel my face setting into its habitual scowl.

I still had more than four hours left before I could call Harry to find out where I'd be actually sleeping that night. I found myself wishing it would be back on the island. I felt I hadn't said goodbye to that place: I hadn't expected to rent a room so quickly. I grew up a lot very fast in that place, and I wanted to sit down in the kitchen once again and smoke a joint and trip a little about my inner transformation.

How about your outer transformation, said my paranoid pal. The one from an art school student into a thief and a killer. Those are the facts, correct?

I couldn't just tell my pal to fuck off because he was right. Those were the facts. I started walking to shake him, and initially I succeeded. There were noticeably more people out in the street than there had been an hour earlier. There were more cars too, and one of these was a police cruiser and I could hear my pal giggle as I lowered my head and quickened my step.

You can run but you can't hide, said my pal. You'll get punished, soon. Not for Schmidt: he was an asshole, and it's good he's dead. But you'll get punished for the Rembrandt. A masterpiece like this ought to be on display, so that people can see it. And now it's hidden on your bag, with one of your toy watercolours pasted on top. That's a sin, a grave sin. No one can look at it, not even you, and the world is poorer because of that.

Once again, he was right. My great, lucky Sunday morning was devolving into an exceptionally shitty afternoon. I crossed the road a few times just to get reassured by the lights. You go when the light's green and stand still when it's red and everything's hunky dory.

I thought about calling Roch and this rapidly grew into a great need to talk to him. But it was a Sunday and he would be at his parents' place and if I called there I would likely get one of them on the phone, and later on Roch would get a fresh earful about the friends he kept. He wouldn't be able to talk freely anyway with his parents hovering behind his back, as I was sure they would.

I wondered whether Roch had called my parents like he'd said he would, and about how that conversation could have looked like. They would be getting my letter soon too, maybe even Monday, the very next day. Jesus! I was getting to be pretty good at lobbing bombshells into other people's lives.

With all those thoughts crowding my head I didn't really look where I was going, and that was a mistake. It gave Fate an opening to plot my course and I found myself at the entrance to the Park Pub maybe half an hour later.

I didn't go in. I went for a walk in fucking Montrose Park. The sky looked like it might rain at any moment and there weren't many people around, but those that were present included a family with two obnoxious kids who kept running back and forth and yelling their stupid heads off. They seemed to follow me around, too. I stopped behind a tree and lit a cigarette in the hope that they would move on, and one of the little bastards actually ran up specifically to get a look at me, then ran back yelling there was a man hiding behind a tree. That finally elicited a reaction from the parents, they shouted at him to shut up and behave himself.

They had all mercifully moved on by the time I'd finished smoking. It wasn't a big park, Montrose and Bates parks combined were smaller than most city parks; the so-called Bates Park was no bigger than a football field. I spent an hour walking back and forth and smoking cigarettes, and got to know both parks inside out. I even found a coin—a copper penny— and spotted a couple of used condoms on the ground.

I went to the Park Pub and called Harry at his mother's house from the payphone inside the entrance. He answered right away, as if he was sitting next to the phone.

"So, you okay with that?" he said before I'd had the chance to speak.

"It's Mike," I said. "I know I'm calling early, but I thought maybe I could just go and get a room with Richard and have a nap."

"Oh. Sorry, thought you were someone calling me back. Yeah, that would be a good idea. It looks like I'll be staying the night here. I'll call you at the guesthouse in the morning, okay? Ten–eleven, no later than that."

I said okay, and we hung up. I didn't even tell him I'd rented a place. He was busy with phone calls that involved getting people to agree with him. These were often difficult, and I didn't want to cramp his style.

I went round to the guesthouse and found that Richard wasn't there, but Nancy was and she was expecting me: in spite of his busy schedule, Harry had found the time to call and tell her that I was coming. She was polite but preoccupied about something and we barely talked at all. She asked if I'd like the same room and I said yes. At least I already knew how to handle the sofa bed.

I'd shaved that morning and had my toothbrush and my brand new flashlight: I was all set. I was also beginning to feel tired—I hadn't been kidding when I told Harry about my desire to take a nap—and hungry, as well. I postponed the inevitable by a couple of cigarettes, and then went to the pub.

There were maybe half a dozen people inside, including the peace sign, who was busy having an argument with a couple of guys at the far end of the bar. I got a burger and fries and a Toby and ate as far away from everyone as I possibly could. But they kept invading my space, the peace sign in particular had a screechy, penetrating voice that was really irritating. I was forced to listen to what he was saying and during a lull in other conversations I realized he wasn't arguing about the Vietnam war as I expected, he was arguing about fucking baseball. Well, it was a Sunday, he deserved a day off like everyone else.

With the help of a couple of cigarettes, I heroically made my single beer last for over half an hour. Then I got four bottles to go along with a pack of chips and went back to my room at the guesthouse.

I was really sleepy by then but it was too early for bed, and too late for a nap. So I sat on the sofa drinking beer and eating chips and smoking cigarettes and resisting smoking the joint I'd taken along. It didn't seem like a good idea, and my pal was very disappointed. He would have had a go at me in revenge but the beer made him sleepy too, and so we just sat there in silence until the beer was gone.

I waited for another cigarette, then hit the can and went to bed, trying not to think about Jane.