“Why, you going someplace now?”
“No, why?”
He smiled. “I was going to invite you over for a cup of coffee. I live just down the block from you.”
With raised eyebrows, I said, “You’re not mad about the hundred grand?”
“Nah, what’s a hundred grand between two drunks, right? Besides, I needed the tax deduction.” He smiled and put his arm on my shoulder, and we headed for the door. He said, “I was expecting to find you in the rooms one of these days. I’ve heard some pretty wild stories about you. I’m just glad you made it here before it was too late.”
I nodded in agreement. Then George added, “Anyway, I’m only inviting you over to my house under one condition.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I wanna know the truth about whether you sank your yacht for the insurance money.” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
I smiled and said, “Come on, I’ll tell you on the way!”
And just like that I walked out of the Friday night meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with my new sponsor: George B.
George lived on South Main Street, one of the premier streets in the estate section of Southampton. It was one notch down from Meadow Lane, insofar as price was concerned, although the cheapest home on South Main would still set you back $3 million. We were sitting across from each other, on either side of a very expensive bleached-oak table, inside his French country kitchen.
I was in the middle of explaining to George how I planned to kill my interventionist Dennis Maynard, just as soon as my Ninety-in-Ninety had been completed. I had decided that George was the appropriate person to speak to about such an affair after he told me a quick story about a process server who came on his property to serve a bogus summons on him. When George refused to answer the door, the process server started nailing the summons to his hand-polished mahogany door. George went to the door and waited until the process server had the hammer in an upstroke, then he swung open the door, punched the process server’s lights out, and slammed the door shut. It had all happened so fast that the process server couldn’t describe George to the police, so no charges were filed.
“…and it’s fucking despicable,” I was saying, “that this bastard calls himself a professional. Forget the fact that he told my wife not to come visit me while I was rotting away in the loony bin! I mean, that alone is grounds to have his legs broken. But to invite her to the movies to try to coax her into bed, well, that’s grounds for death!” I shook my head in rage and let out a deep breath, happy to finally get things off my chest.
And George actually agreed with me! Yes, in his opinion my drug interventionist did deserve to die. So we spent the next few minutes debating the best ways to kill him—starting with my idea of cutting off his dick with a pair of hydraulic bolt cutters. But George didn’t think that would be painful enough, because the interventionist would go into shock before his dick hit the carpet and bleed out in a matter of seconds. So we moved on to fire—burning him to death. George liked that because it was very painful, but it worried him because of the possibility of collateral damage, since we would be burning his house down as part of the plan. Next came carbon monoxide poisoning, which we both agreed was far too painless, so we debated the pros and cons of poisoning his food, which, in the end, seemed a bit too nineteenth century. A simple botched-burglary attempt came to mind, one that turned into murder (to avoid witnesses). But then we thought about paying a crack addict five dollars to run up to the interventionist and stab him right in the gut with a rusty knife. This way, George explained, he would bleed out nice and slow, especially if the stab wound was just over his liver, which would make it that much more painful.
Then I heard the door swing open and a female voice yell, “George, whose Mercedes is that?” It was a kind, sweet voice, which happened to have a ferocious Brooklyn accent attached to it, so the words came out like: “Gawge, whoze Mihcedees is that?”
A moment later, one of the cutest ladies on the planet walked in the kitchen. As big as he was, she was tiny—maybe five feet, a hundred pounds. She had strawberry-blond hair, honey-brown eyes, tiny features, and perfect Irish Spring skin, smattered with a fair number of freckles. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, but very well preserved.
George said, “Annette, say hello to Jordan. Jordan, say hello to Annette.”
I went to shake her hand, but she moved right past it and gave me a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. She smelled clean and fresh and of some very expensive perfume, which I couldn’t quite place. Annette smiled and held me out in front of her by my shoulders, at arm’s length, as if she were inspecting me. “Well, I’ll give you one thing,” she said matter-of-factly, “you’re not the typical stray George brings home.”
We all broke up over that one, and then Annette excused herself and went about her usual business, which was making George’s life as comfortable as possible. In no time flat, there was a fresh pot of coffee on the table, as well as cakes and pastries and donuts and a bowl of freshly cut fruit. Then she offered to cook me a full-blown dinner, because she thought I looked too thin, to which I said, “You should’ve seen me forty-three days ago!”
And as we sipped our coffee, I kept going on about my interventionist. Annette was quick to jump on the bandwagon. “He sounds like a real bastard”— bahstid—“if you ask me,” said the tiny Brooklyn firecracker. “I think you got every right in the world to wanna chop his cojonesoff. Don’t you, Gwibbie?”
Gwibbie?That was an interesting nickname for George! I kinda liked it, although it didn’t really suit him. Perhaps Sasquatch, I thought…or maybe Goliath or Zeus.
Gwibbie nodded and said, “I think the guy deserves to die a slow, painful death, so I want to think about it overnight. We can plan it out tomorrow.”
I looked at Gwibbie and nodded in agreement. “Definitely!” I said. “This guy deserves a fiery death.”
Annette said to George, “And what are you gonna tell him tomorrow, Gwib?”
Gwib said, “Tomorrow I’m gonna tell him that I want to think about it overnight and then we can plan it out the next day.” He smiled wryly.
I smiled and shook my head. “You guys are too much! I knew you were fucking around with me.”
Annette said, “ Iwasn’t! I think he does deserve to have his cojoneschopped off!” Now her voice took on a very knowing tone. “George does interventions all the time, and I’ve never heard of the wife being left out of it, right, Gwib?”
Gwib shrugged his enormous shoulders. “I don’t like passing judgment on other people’s methods, but it sounds like there was a certain warmthmissing from your intervention. I’ve done hundreds of them, and the one thing I always make sure of is that the person being intervened on understands how much he’s loved and how everyone will be there for him if he does the right thing and gets sober. I would never keep a wife away from her husband. Ever.” He shrugged his great shoulders once more. “But all’s well that ends well, right? You’re alive and sober, which is a wonderful miracle, although I question whether or not you’re really sober.”
“What do you mean? Of course I’m sober! I have forty-three days today, and in a few hours I’ll have forty-four. I haven’t touched anything. I swear.”
“Ahhh,” said George, “you have forty-three days without drinking and drugging, but that doesn’t mean you’re actually sober.There’s a difference, right, Annette?”
Annette nodded. “Tell him about Kenton Rhodes, *13George.”
“The department-store guy?” I asked.
They both nodded, and George said, “Yeah, but actually it’s his idiot son, the heir to the throne. He has a house in Southampton, not far from you.”