Deep down, every writer knows they are playing a role; that they’re not the real deal — their big smarts and swagger mere threat displays of a jungle creature with small teeth and a lousy dental plan. They live in a world where accusers lurk under parked cars, on editorial boards, in mirrors, and threaten to leap at them any moment — exposing them for the fakes they really are. Every imposter I read about seemed like a distant relative.
None of this introspection darkened my mood, though, especially when reading Le Monde. I often savored a single issue for two Des Moines weeks, being proud of my French and apt to carry the paper around everywhere waiting for someone to comment on it so I could show off. Sitting in Pat O’Brien’s that morning, I was surprised at how much I still retained from my time in the Peace Corps at Burkina Faso.
Just west of Niger among the deforested flatlands of West Africa, Burkina Faso achieved independence from France in the ‘sixties, but retains its language. It’s a land whose sons and daughters inherit little more than dust and disease. There’s not much to see if you only look with your eyes; yet it’s also a world where the visceral human will to survive runs through the streets like mercury. And four dollars will get you a house.
Looking back, I sometimes think those were the happiest days of my life. Teaching English in mud-brick huts. Living on baguettes and Sovobra beer. Sleeping under the stars during the hot season. My writing might lack humanity, but at least I knew I wouldn’t lack lunch. Next month looked a bit shaky; but today food wasn’t a problem. That thought put my recent career setback into perspective, giving me a smile Huey Long himself couldn’t corrupt.
When I stepped out to the street from the blackened bar, the sun sent goosebumps up my arms and neck. The rays burned through my thinning brown hair and onto my scalp like an imaginary lover kissing the crown of my head. This was just what I needed to forget about the Detective Demitrez disappointment and get on with my writing; maybe even on to something bigger and better! I lit up another cigarette with a grin and began the hunt for what I now know was the last lunch of this life.
Passing an antiques shop, I saw a painting by Winston Churchill. “Is that cool, or what?” I asked a lady next to me as she frowned and walked away. It depicted a coastline, with placid waters imposed on an ominous wall of cliffs and rocks. Over half a million bucks! Whoa! We have antiques stores in Des Moines, but nothing like this. I went inside, walked past a half-dozen clerks fawning over a well-dressed Indian couple, and walked to the rear of the store. The room buzzed with financial appreciation. Never had I seen such a collection: a 1795 Swiss birdcage for a quarter-mil; an apropos pair of enormous globes once belonging to Napoleon; King Louis XV’s war plans for the Seven Years’ War, framed and mounted in 48-karat gold. But it was when I saw the bedroom suite that things went south: a mahogany and mercury-gilded seven-piece Empire-style bedroom suite once belonging to an Egyptian king. I was enthralled, and not exactly paying attention to what I was doing.
The security camera’s grainy black-and-white footage showed a trim man in a suit, formerly of Indian-couple fame, running at full speed, knocking over a Spanish suit of armor and jumping over a footstool once owned by the pirate Jean Lafitte, to hunt down the distinct smell of cigarette smoke. Across the store, it showed a frumpled, lanky pseudo-academic from Des Moines in a red Hawaiian shirt leaning against the painting-lined wall and staring at the Egyptian bed, then throwing his hands up like a night clerk being robbed after realizing what he’d done. Together, both men stared at the tragedy: a perfect circular, cigarette-shaped void on the canvas of Evening Gold by John Atkinson Grimshaw. The price tag, still blown by the displaced air of the flying proprietor, read $775,000.
Grimshaw was an English genius; a painter whose works were produced in counterfeit even before his death in 1893. But the one I branded was as real as a prison cell. Depicting the artist’s nineteenth-century Victorian home, it was painted in 1885 and preserved by dozens of galleries and private owners from Leeds to Louisiana until finally meeting its end at the hands of a half-drunken novelist from Des Moines.
Smelling the burnt canvas, I became like one of those mimes out at Jackson Square: limbs locked in an impossible position hoping some dentist from Chicago would put a dollar in my box so I could spring to life negotiating an invisible world. But it would take a lot of dentists to get me out of this mess. I shoved my way back to the street, where I vomited violently into the tall hair of a short housewife from Texas.
“Contrary to popular belief, jail doesn’t really give you time to think about what you’ve done, you know,” I told Big Winkie the bail bondsman a few hours later. Public intoxication. Destruction of private property with intent to split. Assault with potentially hazardous biological pathogens.
Mr. Winkie was a shaven-headed Creole with a chest like two oil drums and a Patek Philippe wrist watch. He and I were talking in French and, complemented by the international language of intimidation, he told me that if I skipped out on my bail he’d make in me another little black hole. This caused an uncomfortable pause in the conversation. “It’s actually pretty loud in there all the time,” I went on, out of nerves. “The yelling. The clanging. The bodily functions.” There’s an old Chinese saying that the emptiest containers make the most noise, and there’s a lot of emptiness going on in the slammer.
The events of earlier that day were all the more reason the greenbacks in Bob’s driveway had my attention. After it was evident that the explosion was over, and the money shower wasn’t, the terrier and I ran to investigate — orange jacket in tow. My sister-in-law’s Volvo was crushed as flat as a crêpe, an impossibly configured humanoid on its roof wearing a white helmet and half-deployed parachute. On the satellite dish hung a huge, ripped canvas satchel, more like a three-person tent, really — and the apparent source of the mysterious cashola. I started picking money from the ground so it wouldn’t blow away as I waited for the sirens, neighbors, and news crews. Then I ran and put on my good baseball cap and got my wallet so I could have ID handy for the police, like on TV. I picked up a copy of Scientific Explosives that had blown from the car and thumbed through it as I stood in the driveway and waited for what seemed like an hour.
But no one came. Bob’s nearest neighbors live miles away here in this little agrarian exurb far from the New Orleans city limits. No sign of any pursuer or official. No curious neighbors. No news crews’ talking hairdos. Just me and the money and a dead man on my sister-in-law’s flattened Volvo. Eventually I climbed up and got the satchel, went inside, and started counting. Having already been to jail once that day, I needed to think carefully about my next move; about how important money was in comparison to my integrity; and about what kind of man I really was. It didn’t take long.
You can stuff an amazing amount of cash into your sister-in-law’s duvet cover if you roll it just right. One thing I knew for sure, though. That Volvo, my only dependable wheels in the Big Easy, wasn’t rolling anywhere — and I was too old to lug a seven-foot-long cash-and-cotton enchilada a thousand miles back to Des Moines. I lit a cigarette and watched the terrier roll up on the giant money bag with my jacket and go to sleep, clawing and assembling a suitably comfortable nest the way dogs do. Like me, he didn’t think the money was going anywhere soon. I couldn’t drive it home. I couldn’t take a taxi. There was no room on my Mastercard to rent a car. And since Southwestern Airlines had been known to pick all the green M&m’s out of my checked baggage, much less refrain from stealing actual cash, flying it up there wasn’t an option, either.