Book of Numbers: A Novel (42 page)

Altogether, never altogether, online comprised a religion of bespoke blue plural gods that could also be goddesses that could also be customized in any alternative to gender and blueness, not a religion but a flux of cults, temporary sects, routing allegiances, provider alliances. The user as like the Hindu can ping whatever divinity is best convenient for whatever purpose, can ping the deity of the specific moment or location, or the one pertinized to a particular task, without any core theology, without any central control, anything goes.

What guaranteed this access was search. No one understood search as like an Indian.

We stopped at a tarpit outside Paso Robles and Moe got out and pumped gas and went into the conmart and returned with a carton of menthol cigarettes, buckled up, then unbuckled and conmarted again and returned with a tank of gin in plastic. He put his incisors to the carton, a pack, bit a menthol and struck a strike anywhere match anywhere, breathed in and out and swore he had quit. He uncapped the gin to wash down two whitepink pills whose pharmcalls we noted, M575, do the detectivework, go sleuth it. When he swallowed it was with the Gayatri, that mantra that clears the astral nerve tubes. We have no clue how to drive. We have never had a license.

We got into LA around 18:00 and went to get some dinner. After our steaks he gave us a pill. We took another after our sundae. The steaks were gushing in that rare to raw style that homophobe kitchens hash out to men on dates who request medium. The icecream was brownbutter lardon nut brittle berry. We had never eaten as like that in our lives, but had no guilt.

Though we had two, but only one each, martinis. Because Moe was taking us along to his regular game, and we had to stay upright to knock it over.

“You go in and just ask the reception for Rosebud,” Moe said, “who will tell you the room. Come in calm and be yourself. Sit how you are told to sit and get your cash out. Pretend you might have met them all before but you cannot remember. Pretend with me just the same.”

The waiter offered cappuccino, espresso, and Moe said, “You are awake enough?”

We said, “Are you asking us or just the waiter?”

Moe said, “You are awake enough. Check, please.”

Modafinil retails as like Provigil in the States, but the whitepinks we had taken were some Canadian version, Alertec. A eugeroic, a nootropic, which IT twerks and the Green Berets prefer to amphetamine and methylphenidate because it is nonaddictive.

Moe insisted on paying for dinner, as like he had paid for the gas, and we got back into the van and drove and stopped and he lit up a menthol for us from the dash.

“That mansion,” he said, and through the smirched windshield was a mansion. “You will get out here at the Liquor Locker and walk slow down Sunset, so I will have time to park and go in before you. We do not know each other. Remember.”

“But that is not a lie,” we said and got out on the street.

Then Moe leaned over and unrolled the window. “Trust me,” he said. “I always know a rakhi bro. I can sense our wheels turning back through the samsara, Joshua Cohen.”

He waved all the honking cars around him and said to us, “But if they ask, only if they ask, tell them you are the guy who runs the game out in Venice Beach.”

Moe crept into the lane and we went on slow for blocks, doing the base vs. adjusted probabilities for holding an 8/8. Preflop against one player was 2%, 2.9%, and by increasing by one player per block we had mentally calculated for up to six, a situation in which there was a 16%, 16.3% chance that one of them had a larger pair.

Then we spit our autograph onto the sidewalk and crossed the street and up the drive. We had been prepared for everything except the Chateau Marmont.

We dropped Rosebud and were shown down speedbump carpet halls and opened a door to the celebrity 1990s. We are not sure we should be more specific.

But suffice to say someone as like Keanu was in the room, someone as like Johnny Depp, a Damon and an Affleck, the wrong Wahlberg, who
could have been wasted from a protracted wager sessh or just from more of better drugs than we had.

The one who was Affleck or Damon was yelling at the one he was not for leaving the door unlocked, while the other was yelling that the last to leave the room had been the butler. The Wahlberg was approaching as like to bounce us out, but we were recognized.

Moe recognized—“You are that guy,” he said. “We met him out in Brentwood, Johnny?”

Then Depp claimed we were familiar.

“Not Brentwood,” we said. “You came to our Venice game.”

With that Damon and Affleck relaxed and put their arms around us but also they were frisking us and the Wahlberg said, “This guy is famous?”

Keanu said, “For losing.”

Seats were rearranged to give us next hand first position, or not rearranged because the only seat available was the bed and so the table was nudged in our direction. Action heroes nudged it, and put us in the chips. We were dealt and folded and lost to establish credibility at first. But then we were betting middlingly, after tipping our hands to Moe using chipstacks to signal our facecards. Ten of $10 whites a jack, ten of $20 reds a queen, ten of $100 blacks a king, nine of the white or black an ace just to miff it, cutting a red stack for a warning sign if his raising verged on patterny. A crude system but comptrasted with manual collusion as like finger taps, effective.

Pathogenic duvet, walls venereal with mold, polluted cash, but we never washed, we never even had the urge to wash. No bend or crease or soil would spoil our royalty. The bartender was knocking and Keanu was trying to undo the chain with his mind alone until he folded and the Wahlberg helped carry in the bar trolley. Moe kept ordering gin and tonics but we held with martinis despite the bowtied guy repeatedly belaboring our options up or down and dry or wet, dirty with a twist, and smirking because we ordered them with vodka.

We had to get drunk enough so that our loss was convincing, but not too drunk so that we betrayed our cheat, just running out the clock until a watch was on the line. Moe won but did not have the wrist to wear a Bulgari Ellipsocurvex Tourbillon. Two pairs of courtside tickets to the
Lakers next season. If Jerry Buss had been there Moe might have won the Lakers.

Keanu was busted. The Wahlberg was broke. There was no air, only smoke. There were no glasses that had not been used as like ashtrays. Everyone was yawning that they were due at a party. We were not invited to the party.

Moe had left his van in Marmont Parking but was in no shape to drive it and would not let the bellhop call us a cab. He did not trust anyone that any venue would call to pick up two men who had just won their karma at duplicitous cards.

He led us down the strip to hang outside a bar until two guys, all gelspiked hair and cacti muscles and torus piercings through Celtic tatts, got dropped off by a cab.

Moe yanked us in and across the backseats and directed the driver in a mellifluous Hindi, “He will take us to women,” he translated for us. But we stopped at this sportslounge with a grungy chalet debased out back as like it had slid down from the hills and the driver said something and Moe shook his head and responded something else and said to us, “He misunderstood that we wanted prostitutes,” but we said nothing again and he said, “If we maintain this luck we will have no need for prostitutes,” and then he spoke to the driver who banged a sharp U, let us off in the lot of a stripclub.

Moe said something to the driver and translated for us, “I told him to come in with us, we will treat him.” But as like the driver declined, Moe pressed, saying something about it not being a hassle or condescension. Or about how we would pay not just for the cover charge but also for the dances and lost time. Moe got out of the cab and removed from his jeans his naugahyde wallet spilling a wad of bills across the asphalt and as like we stooped to reclaim them from the wind more $100s fell loose from the pouch of his lumberjack plaid, and Moe gathered them up himself and offered them to the driver.

The driver then declined again by delivering a canonical poem in Hindi until Moe got soberer and solemn and held his hands to his heart and then hugged the guy and kissed his lips. Moe must have told the driver he had to take the money because the driver finally agreed and accepted the bills smoothing them as like to soothe them
into a roll to fold into his pocket and the total was definitely more than $2K.

With the cab turning around we stood separate from Moe in another slotted emptiness of lot and asked him what the driver had said. “He said his wife is to have her surgery tomorrow.”

The cab slipped back onto the boulevard and sped through a yellow. We asked, “What type of surgery?”

But Moe was already grinning past the bouncer. We caught up with him and inside the club he flipped his trench over his head and spread it into the frill of a spooked dinosaur and hopped around yelling, “Cardiac cardiac cardiac cardiac.”

The club was loud and crowded gagging from the smell of bowlingalley antifungal footspray and was called 98.6°, if we did not already mention it. It was 360° all around us that hot, in Fahrenheit.

The coatcheck girl offered to check the trench by asking, “Am I taking it? Or not?” Moe said, “I was hoping you would just give me the hanger,” and she said, “Lick my cock,” and Moe said, “Why?” and she asked, “What about you?” But we kept our jacket and msgrbag too and the girl shrugged, “Whatever, I dance next.”

A bar and stools up front, banquettes toward the back, all the walls except the curtained one behind the middle stage mounted with TVs as like old and bulky bodied as like the audience, riveted to a replay of the NBA quarter or semifinals, the Dow, the NASDAQ ticker, NASCAR, Seattle or Portland up, the Dow down, the NASDAQ down, NASCAR at the finish. At the completion of each circuit a fresh young flatscreen showed the Hollywood clipnews.

Six girls took their turns twirling germs around two stainless steel poles. We cannot recall anything about them except how blatantly diverse they all were as like in an ad for democracy. One white, one black, two in the middle, two Asians. The martinis were watery and on the cutting, the bleeding edge of expensive, but we drank them and were crashing, we were core failure crashing.

Moe stubbed a menthol out on the table and covered the burn with the acrylic placard, No Smoking. Then he shrugged out of his trench and went for a lapdance. Then he came back for a second pack he had stashed behind the placard, left again for a double Asian lapdance. The trench
hung on the chair in a manner suggesting it was skin that had been flayed from its owner. We were teetotaler nonsmoking veganfuckatarians, feminists, proponents of female bodyhair, enemies of glass ceilings, of the mirrored ceiling above us, supporters of equal pay for equal work that extended to a fair wage for domestic chores for the stay at home parent. That was the milk we were raised on. We hated strobes and fucking hated being recalled to the genre distinctions between hiphop and rap. But this must not be construed as like racism. We had never been to a stripclub before. The flesh was live, not just live on the monitors.

Our share, all our poker money from the Moe split, was in our msgrbag, which would not leave our neck. We had not been able to count it all exactly.

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Moe returned to the table with the coatcheck girl and picked up his trench and huddled into it and sat again to take out some bills. He paid her this fistful of cash she was fanning us with as like it was our turn and though we only shook our head it was as like she was angry with us not for denying her but for being ourselves, and so she left, and we were left to correlate an increase in stiletto height with an increase in length of stride.

Moe was kicking at the denominations that had spilled to the tile, he was kicking the $50s and $20s into a mound and then leaning as like to fall and stuffing them back into his pockets.

Then he took out something black, contoured round and smooth as like a lingam, and he pointed it at us and we put up our hands. “Either I rob you or we rob this joint together,” he said.

Then he laughed and set the remote down on the table and tugged the trenchflaps around to his lap and dug through unloading the other pockets.

The exterior pockets held cash but the interiors held remotes, a different failed successful remototype in each pocket, rather no type because all universal. Also packs of batteries. AAs. AAAs.

Moe lined some remotes on the table and some on his lap but a bigger one was in his hand and he pressed at a button and nothing. Or anything that happened was just not discernible to us, because we had been transported to another time so faraway that the future must miss us and the present was only the waveparticle excitement of the past.

Moe repocketed the biggie then and picked up a smaller one instead and pressed a button but nothing or just the undetectable happened again, and so he repocketed it and went for a third, which had come from a breast slit, a fourth, which had come from a hip slit, a model even
smaller than the models preceding it, and with a strand of DYMO plastic label tape peeling: the Amote 2niversal.

Moe pressed, and up on the TVs stockcar crashes changed to the sitcom
Friends,
pressed again and changed foulshot recaps to the sitcom
Seinfeld
. Pressed yet again and the stereo system hiphop got louder to rap. Pressed the TVs that were muted unmuted. A movie about a woman who fell in love with her vacuum or how much plasma a papertowel absorbed or how baby gentle this roll of toiletpaper was or else it was a commercial.

We took another remote, took another that worked and we worked it more too, in a History Channel war documentary, and the girls onstage below the switching were caught in the crossfire, the changing flame colors and shrieks of the laughtracks, and they slowed their dancing toward the screens, they stopped their dancing and then the hugenormous penitentiary brawny bouncer who was the only untelevised personality not fixed on the girls or the screens was waving a truncheon as like to smack the plastic from our hands.

We turned to leave just as like he was clearing the other remotes from our table and cracking a few between boot and floor.