Cockeyed

Chapter Three

“I think I should get half,” Stu Hood said. “It’s only fair.

Hunny told me lots of times he was gonna ditch Art and marry me. Just ‘cause Hunny never got around to doing what he promised is no reason for me to suffer. Anyway, I was underage when Hunny popped my cherry. That’s against the law, and I was an impressionable youth.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“When Hunny introduced me to the homosexual lifestyle, I was eighteen or nineteen years of age, I forget which. I was only a child.”

“But the age of consent in New York is seventeen, Stu. Dewy-browed stripling that you might have considered yourself to be, in the eyes of the law you were a consenting adult.”

“No shit. I thought you had to be twenty-one.”

“To drink, yes. But not for sex. Voting is eighteen and alcohol consumption twenty-one, but seventeen is the age of consent for sex in New York.”

“Well, he served me alcohol.”

“Uh huh.”

“He told me it was happy hour on Moth Street.”

“This was in Hunny’s house?”

“Yeah, Art wasn’t home and Hunny was sneaking a quickie, apparently.”

We were seated at a table near the dimly lit rear of the Watering Hole, a gay bar of robust semi-down-at-the-heels antiquity down the street from my office on Central Avenue. Hunny had told me an hour earlier that Hood was likely to be hanging out there on a Saturday, and Hunny had been right. The bartender had pointed Hood out, a hatchet-faced, late twenty-something, stringily muscular man in cargo pants and a tank top, with afternoon beer 18 Richard Stevenson on his breath.

I asked, “Had you been acquainted with Hunny previous to your accompanying him to his house?”

“Yeah, I’d talked to him a few times in the park. But only talk.

I was cherry.”

“Washington Park?”

“Sure.”

“Are you a naturalist, or did you hang out in the park trying to get picked up?”

“I was bi-curious, yeah. But I never did much of anything with guys till Hunny lured me into his car and took me over to his place and committed a lewd act. So, Hunny owes me. Hunny owes me big.”

“You said, Stu, that you believe Hunny should give you half of his lottery winnings. Do you honestly believe Hunny owes you half a billion dollars for a blow job? That sounds steep to me. These days I’m guessing you only get twenty or thirty bucks.”

“Sometimes fifty,” Hood said. “Anyways, with Hunny I just did it for the beer. He was nice to me, and I was nice to him back.”

“So you and Hunny had a continuing relationship after your initial visit?”

“Yeah, I’d ride my bike over there, and sometimes Art would show up and get a little, too. I’m not saying they weren’t nice to me. All I’m saying at this point in time is that Hunny did turn me into a homosexual, and then he did make certain promises. Like maybe I could move in sometime and be part of their alternative family. That would have suited me fine.”

The bar was surprisingly busy for a summer afternoon. The air-conditioning probably served as an attraction, and in any case the two dozen or so patrons did not look like either beachgoers or men who might otherwise have been off on Adirondack birding expeditions. Some of the men in the bar glanced our way from time to time, maybe wondering who Hood’s new friend was.

I said, “Stu, you’re a cyclist. How come?”

I knew what was coming. “I lost my driver’s license. Too many DUIs. It sucks, but I’m sort of used to it. It’s rough in the winter, though. People give me rides.”

“Have you had any other legal troubles?”

“A few.”

“Hunny says you like to set fires.”

Hood looked down at his draught beer. Almost inaudibly, he said, “I guess so.”

“He said you had an arson conviction as a juvenile.”

“Yes, I did. But I’ve been to counseling.”

“You left a message on Hunny’s voicemail threatening to burn his house down if he didn’t split his lottery winnings with you.”

He shrugged. “That was bullshit. I was drunk up to my eyeballs when I said that. Shit, Hunny should know.”

“I’m here to tell you, Stu, that if Hunny and Art’s house goes up in flames, you will be arrested in a short time. And if you set the fire, you will be convicted and you will go to prison for a very long time. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Hood mulled this over and had some more beer. “I guess Hunny must be pissed at me.”

“He is concerned about you. Hunny likes you, and he doesn’t want to see you locked up in Dannemora for twenty years. He said to tell you also that he would be willing to help you out financially, some small amount to tide you over. But half a billion is out.”

“Hunny is so cheap. How much did he say?”

“He said he heard you had been laid off at Target, and he said he would be happy to spring for a thousand to help you along until you located another job.”

“Hmm. Check or cash?”

“Whichever you would prefer.”

20 Richard Stevenson

“Cash money, please.”

“But no more threats, okay?”

“Well, shit, it’s more than I got out of the Catholic Church.”

“You sued the church?”

“I wrote a letter to the pope. He never answered it. A priest at Sacred Heart fucked me seven times when I was eleven.”

“But there were lawsuits over sexual abuse by priests, and victims were compensated. This was several years ago.”

“I heard about that later.”

The music playing now was Donna Summer’s “On the Radio.”

It occurred to me that the first time I had heard this song could well have been in this very bar some decades earlier, perhaps on the same night I met Timothy Callahan under a bush over in Washington Park, and we had been together pretty much ever since. I raised my bottle of Saratoga Water with a chunk of lime jammed down into it. To Donna Summer.

To Hood, I said, “The church did shut down the compensation machinery at some point. Didn’t your friends urge you to file a claim before it was too late? Did Hunny know about this?”

“I didn’t tell anybody back then. In fact, I kind of forgot about it. A guy I was involved with for a while kept asking me why I didn’t like to get fucked, and then I remembered.”

“And that’s when you wrote to the pope?”

“Another guy I used to date who had a computer helped me send an e-mail to the Vatican. Maybe the pope only speaks Italian, but there must be other dudes who work in his office who speak English. I think the guy is just a geek, that’s all.”

“You said you’ve had counseling. When was that?”

“At the farm the judge sent me to. I was thirteen years of age.

Anyway, that wasn’t about sex, it was about fires.”

“Have you had any problems with the law since then? Hunny said he was unaware of any run-ins. But he said that when you drink you sometimes threaten to set people’s houses on fire, or CoCkeyed 21 their cars, and it is very frightening to people.”

“That’s just the Bud Lite talking,” Hood said. “I would never do it. Hunny doesn’t have to worry. Though I would appreciate a little compensation for Hunny turning me into a homo, since it looks like the friggin’ pope is gonna be of no use to me whatsoever.”

“Hunny told me about your parents,” I said. “And about the terrible way they died. That must weigh on you, too.”

“Hunny has a big mouth.”

“It’s why even though he is fond of you, he is somewhat afraid of you.”

“Yeah, well. Mom and Pop never replaced the battery in their smoke alarm. Does he know that part of it? Let that be a lesson to Hunny.”

“Stu, what you are saying to me isn’t all that reassuring.”

“What I’m saying to you, Strachey, is that I don’t set fires anymore. I’m all talk. Talk and beer, beer and talk. And if it’s reassurance you want on a Saturday afternoon, this homo bar is not the place to find it.”

Hunny was back on the Channel 13 news Saturday evening at six. This time he was defending his lottery boodle not against blackmailers but against a co-worker at BJ’s Warehouse who claimed that half of Hunny’s winnings were rightfully his. Dave DeCarlo said he had given Hunny ten dollars to buy twenty dollars’ worth of tickets for the two of them, and they had agreed to split the winnings from any of the tickets purchased.

DeCarlo, who was interviewed first, along with his attorney, Thurmont Fewster, said it was the deep pain of being betrayed by a man he had always thought of as a friend that was hurting him most of all. His lawyer focused on what he referred to as a “broken oral contract.”

When it was Hunny’s turn, he said that while he and DeCarlo had once purchased lottery tickets together, that had been back in the spring and had been for an entirely different drawing, not the August Instant Warren. Hunny added that while he had planned on giving all his co-workers what he called an “August bonus” from his lottery winnings, now that DeCarlo was trying to swindle him, “that bleep bleep ” wasn’t going to get a cent.

Timmy and I were watching the news in our bedroom at our house on Crow Street before heading out for a Saturday night Thai dinner with friends. After that, I planned on meeting another of the blackmailers when his cleaning-crew shift at a Corporate Woods office building ended at eleven.

Timmy said, “Hunny is quite the sleazoid-magnet. It looks as if he’s going to keep you hopping.”

“DeCarlo does appear to be an unscrupulous fellow. Most of the other skeletons tumbling out of Hunny’s voluminous closet, though, look like they’re just hapless shmoes. I phoned three of them this morning after Hunny left my office and warned them off, and none of the ones I talked to seemed to want any trouble. I’m more worried about two other guys who do sound a bit unhinged and maybe even dangerous. I saw one of them this afternoon at the Watering Hole. He’s a hustler named Stu Hood who has a history of arson.”

“Oh no.”

“He has only one conviction, as a juvenile, but Hunny says the guy was a suspect in a number of later cases. When Hood was thirteen, he burned down his parents’ house with them in it. He was supposed to be out mowing the lawn, but instead he poured gasoline from the lawn mower can all around the downstairs and lit it and ran out. He told the police he didn’t know his mother and father were upstairs napping and that he thought they had gone out for the afternoon. But Hunny said the family car was in the driveway, so Hood’s story was widely doubted. On Thursday, Hood threatened Hunny and told him he would torch his and Art’s house if Hunny didn’t go fifty-fifty with Hood on the lottery winnings. He claims Hunny turned him into a homosexual after Hunny picked him up while Hood was cruising the park.”

“Why, Donald, it’s our story.”

“Exactly. I was a confused youth, and when you fondled me behind that bush, I thought, oh, wow, I could get used to this.”

“You were the mixed-up youth? I’m reasonably certain it was the other way around.”

“Then how come you were carrying that towel thing around with you at eleven o’clock at night? You even told me at the time that it was so you wouldn’t get moss on your knees.”

“I seem to have repressed any memory of that.”

“Anyway, Hood’s story is as ugly as it gets. He told me that he was repeatedly raped by a priest when he was eleven years old but that he didn’t recall these incidents until it was too late for any legal recourse.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure. But it was two years later that he started setting fires. Or two years that anybody knows of.”

“Were there any church fires around that time?”

“Good question. But my role here is not to prosecute or to clear Stu Hood for any crimes he may have committed in years gone by. My job is to get him off Hunny Van Horn’s back.”

Timmy zapped off the TV — no more Hunny news for the moment — and started getting into his dinner togs, his nicely pressed slacks and a polo shirt he had ironed earlier in the day. He said, “I keep hearing that gay people in the Capitol really do wish somebody other than Hunny had won the Instant Warren. He is just such an excruciating public embarrassment.”

“I find him interesting and sometimes even entertaining,” I said. “Hunny is one of a vanishing species. Also, here is a client who, when I bill him at the end of the month, will be in a good position to pay it.”

“Vanishing species, I don’t think so. God, if only.”

“Hunny is gay man at his most primitive. He’s the untamed queer Neanderthal. He’s the rugged individualist on the old gay frontier. He’s a homo Huck before Aunt Polly tried to civilize him. Hunny is proudly out and proudly nelly. Hunny am what he am.”

“What Hunny am,” Timmy said, “is a loudmouth drunk and a hideous old letch. It wouldn’t surprise me if the greatest threat to Hunny at this point is not some juvenile delinquent arsonist he had sex with, but any of the thousands of decent, sober, well-behaved gay men and women across America who see Hunny on national television and are now looking for ways to make this grotesquely embarrassing creature just disappear.”

Timmy had at least a partial point. Maybe looking after Hunny was going to be even more complicated than I thought.

The first thing Mason Doebler said to me was, “I’m not taking any shit from Hunny and I’m not taking any shit from you. Don’t waste your time threatening me, and don’t waste your time pissing me off. Hunny has owed me three thousand dollars for four years, and now he can afford to pay his debt to me — with interest.”

“He told me that the other day you demanded fifty thousand dollars. That represents a lot of interest on three K. It’s even more than Citibank charges.”

“I’m charging him a lot because now that he’s won the lottery, fifty K means nothing to Hunny. And because his refusal to pay me anything at all has been a thorn in my side that I am sick of. I have it coming, and, believe me, I am going to get it.”

Doebler looked like a man who, when he made demands, generally had them met. A good six-three, two-forty, with a crew cut above a whiskery moon face, he had the heft and sartorial coloration of a gay bear but not one with a cuddly demeanor.

We were seated at a table in the upstairs restaurant in a noisy bar on Lark Street. The music was some type of heavy metal lite, though the band playing it did not appear on any of the eight large flat TV screens arrayed around the room. These were showing a variety of sporting events — baseball, pre-season football, NASCAR — and the overall feel of the place was that of a rest home for people with severe Add.

Doebler was chowing down on two double chili burgers, and I was keeping my grip moist on a sweating bottle of Sam Adams.

I said, “Hunny told me that you think he was responsible for wrecking your car. But he says none of what happened four years ago was his fault, and he accepts no financial responsibility.

What’s your side of the story, Mason?”

Through a mouthful of dough and ground beef, Doebler said, “Hunny was sucking my dick while I was driving out Western Avenue near suny, and I ran off the road and smashed into some bushes. The air bags went off, and we didn’t get hurt much. But my Firebird was a mess and my collision insurance had a three thousand dollar deductible. I had told Hunny to wait till we got to his place. But Hunny’d had a few cocktails — as Hunny always does — and he was totally out of control, as usual.

He was smoking a cigarette, too, and we were just lucky we didn’t go up in flames. Getting the Firebird back on the road cost over five thousand, and three thousand of that was out of pocket. My pocket, even though Hunny was totally to blame.”

“Something doesn’t quite add up here, Mason. Are you claiming that while you were driving your car, Hunny raped you?”

“Of course not.”

“But you are saying, as I understand it, that your erect penis was out in the open air, and Hunny was bent over and sucking it.

Did you take your dick out of your pants, or did Hunny?”

“Well, he did. That’s what I’m saying.”

“It must have taken Hunny some minutes to get your pants open or down around your ankles. During that time, why did you not pull to the side of the road — taking proper care and utilizing your directional signals — and retrieve your dick from Hunny and place it back in your trousers where you claim you wanted it to remain?”

Doebler glared at me and said, “You know goddam well why I didn’t make him stop. If somebody is sucking your cock — and they’re as good as Hunny is at it — you’re not really thinking clearly. But I did tell Hunny to fucking cut it out.”

“If we were in a court of law, I doubt you could fall back on ambivalence as a justification for your behavior. Or temporary insanity, either.”

“Look, if Hunny had not been stinko and out of his mind, the whole thing would never have happened. That’s the point, and that is why Hunny owes me three thousand dollars. No, fifty.”

I said, “Hunny says that when you called him on Thursday, you threatened him. He has this on his voicemail.”

A rivulet of chili sauce ran down Doebler’s chin, and he wiped it off with a napkin. “Oh, Hunny told you that, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, fuck, I was just making a point. And I guess I made it.

What with you all of a sudden ragging my ass.”

“I understand, Mason, that you have a couple of assault convictions on your record.”

“So?”

“This has Hunny concerned. If you choose to sue him for three K, that’s your right. But you have no right to hurt him, and I am strongly advising you not to do it.”

Doebler, who was having a Coke with his burgers, said,

“Those incidents were when I was drinking. I’m sober now, and this enables me to manage my anger. What I said to Hunny the other day was just to get his attention. What’s fifty thousand dollars to Hunny, anyway? Why doesn’t Hunny just fucking help me out? He could do it with no sweat. I have issues, and he knows it. The suspension on my Firebird is practically shot and the catalytic converter is shit, and the check-engine light is on, and I know that in October I’m not gonna pass inspection. Fuck, it’s no skin off Hunny’s nose if he helps me out in my time of need. Ah, shit.”

I said, “Hunny is willing to give you a thousand. Not as a settlement but as a gift. He said you two had some nice times together, and he is sorry that there are hard feelings. This present, if you took it, would not indicate that he accepts any financial responsibility for the accident. Hunny is sorry it happened, but he believes that it was your own inebriation at the time that was the main cause of your driving off the road. You were still drinking then, Hunny told me.”

Doebler shook his head. “Fuck.”

“The thousand should cover the catalytic converter and get you an oil change, too.”

“I saw Hunny and Art on TV the other night,” Doebler said.

“That looked like quite a party they were having.”

“If you quit pestering Hunny about the three thousand, my guess is he would be willing to let bygones be bygones and you two could be friends again.”

Doebler had finished off the first chili burger and now he started in on the second. “Well, I could use the thou. I can’t deny that.”

“It’s up to you, Mason.”

Before Doebler could reply, my cell phone went off. I excused CoCkeyed 29 myself and walked back toward the men’s room, partly for the privacy but also so I could hear anything over the barroom din.

Hunny said, “Donald, girl, I’m sooo sorry to be phoning you at this late hour. You’re such a good boy and it’s probably past your bedtime. But Lawn just called me, and he is extremely upset.

He says Nelson has gone off somewhere to deal with a situation I am supposedly the cause of, and he said Nelson told him that I have really done it this time, and Lawn is coming over here to wring my neck.”

An Albany police cruiser was just pulling away from Hunny and Art’s brightly lighted house as I drove up, and I wondered if Hunny’s new “situation” had already escalated into a law-enforcement matter. It hadn’t, I soon learned, from a group of men ambling down the front steps. They informed me that the cops had come by in response to noise complaints from neighbors. The officers had asked Hunny nicely — he was a celebrity now — to have some consideration. He had graciously agreed, and now the party was winding down and people were heading off to the bars and clubs. A soft-spoken young Hispanic man with enough metal rings in his lower lip to hang a shower curtain on pointed out that there was still plenty of liquor and drugs available inside, and he suggested that I go on inside and help myself to some of “Hunny’s good shit.”

Hunny’s living room looked like the debris field after an air disaster, with dazed survivors lying around on couches and easy chairs while they snacked on Doritos and chips and Price Chopper clam dip. The twins, clad only in red thongs, were very much a presence, one of them doing some perfunctory tidying up, the other chatting idly as he sat on the lap of a man who looked like Karl Rove but probably wasn’t. A man in a pink ball gown introduced himself as Marylou Whitney and told me that Hunny and Art were in the kitchen.

“Oh, Donald, you have come to my rescue!” Hunny crooned, as he hung up the wall phone. “I hope you’re armed, ‘cause Lawn just called again and he is on his way over here to kill me. Nelson is on his way, too, and I think you should shoot them both as soon as they walk in the front door. It’s Bette Davis in The Letter.

Blam, blam, blam, blam! You can plead self-defense, and Artie and I will back you up. So, Donnie, are you carrying a pistol, or are you just glad to see me?”

“Neither, really. What’s going on now, Hunny?”

Hunny was seated at the kitchen table with a glass of something amber in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Art was bent over the sink rinsing out some glasses.

Art said, “We have apparently interfered with Nelson and Lawn’s dinner at Jack’s Oyster House with some local felons.

Dinner at Jack’s is a sacred ritual and I guess we have somehow blasphemed. Nelson went off to see some people about Hunny and his money, and he didn’t show up for dinner, and now Lawn is all higglety-pigglety-pooglety-swooglety.”

Hunny flung some cigarette ash my way. “Nelson supposedly is going to explain it when he gets here, but Lawn said Nelson said some people have demanded half of my billion dollars and we might have to give it to them. I mean, what’s half a billion to me, but I have to say, this does sound nervous-making, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah. It does.”

“Now, Donald, girl, I don’t like the looks of your dour expression. I think you might need a drink. Are you a Cutty Sark drinker with a Dos Equis chaser? Or how about some weed?

What can I get for you, sweetie? What about some dick? The twins are hung like Jeff Stryker, plus they’re more interesting.

Donald, take a load off and let us entertain you. It bothers me that you’re not having any fun. What can we do to cheer you up?

You look morose.”

“I’m all set, thanks.”

Art said, “Nelson and Yawn hang out with these horrible people — the city and county officials and state senators the banks and insurance companies are all paying off to get city and county business. You go into Jack’s Oyster house and it looks like a scene from Warner Brothers in 1932. You expect to see Edward G. Robinson at a front table cuddling with his moll and his tommy gun.”

“Though it’s a miracle those crooks will even be seen at Jack’s or anywhere else in public with Lawn nowadays,” Hunny said.

“Everybody who invested money with Lawn is flat-ass broke.

Lawn specialized in tranches. Derivatives and tranches. Donald, do you know what a tranche is?”

Art said, “It sounds like one of Sarah Palin’s kids.”

“Nobody knows what a tranche is,” Hunny said, “because it’s just a bunch of dumb, worthless pieces of paper. Yawn made millions on this phony-baloney crapola and then he got out, and then everybody else went straight down the toilet.”

Art waved a sponge at me and said, “Now Lawn is all mopey because the SEC is breathing down everybody’s neck and he can’t commit highway robbery and get away with it anymore. The poor dear has been forced to operate on a somewhat reduced level of criminal behavior, like income tax evasion or shoplifting.”

“Poor, tragic Lawn. We call him Tranche DuBois.”

Art hung a freshly washed shot glass on a fork protruding from the drying rack and said, “All these Albany mucky-mucks he no doubt swindled just like he did everybody else put up with Lawn because I’m sure he’s sucking their dicks. They’re all married closet queens, that crowd.”

Hunny picked up on this theme. “It’s just like the ‘70s. You’d go into the back room at the Mineshaft, and all the pols would be there crawling around naked on their hands and knees. Today it’s no different — Cuomo, Schumer, the Supreme Court. They’re all taking it up the butt and they’re all just such disgusting phonies.”

The shot glass fell off the drying rack and back into the sink, and Hunny said, “Artie, dear, why don’t you come set for a spell and have another mai tai? At least until Nelson gets here, I’ll be the darky and you be the lady.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Art said, waving Hunny down into his seat, where he poured more of what appeared to be whiskey from a plastic pitcher with a spout shaped like a daisy.

I said, “Did Lawn give you any idea who might be in a position to insist on being paid half a billion dollars?”

“No,” Hunny said. “Stu Hood wanted half a billion, but he’s only getting a thou, and that sorry little fire setter will have to be grateful for that.”

“He’s an arsonist,” Art said, “but, Lord, is that boy hung.”

Now there was some commotion in the other room, and soon a tall, austere-looking man wearing an Armani jacket and ten thousand dollars’ worth of pectorals strode into the room.

“Congratulations, Hunny,” the man said, not smiling, “for doing the absolutely most idiotic thing you have done so far. You are going to hear all about it when Nelson gets here. He left Cobleskill forty-five minutes ago, and he is on his way here, and Nelson is so upset I had to talk him down and tell him to pull off the road if he felt he couldn’t drive safely.” Taking note of me, he said, “Are you the private investigator? I’m Lawn Brookman.”

“Don Strachey.”

“I am Nelson’s partner. He said you seemed to be on top of things, which I was quite relieved to hear, and that I could go ahead and brief you.”

“Yes, I’d like to hear about this one.”

“Nelson used to faint,” Hunny said. “When he was thirteen, he passed out in church and had to be carried out. It was a salt deficiency or something.”

Art said, “Lawn, did you tell Nelson to put his head down between his legs?”

Hunny laughed and said, “Ooo, that should help. For those who can do it.”

“The twins almost can,” Art said, rinsing out an olive jar.

“And we have that one video,” Hunny added.

Lawn glared at Hunny. “Do you two ever think about anything besides sexual activity? When Nelson arrives you’ll have a whole new topic of conversation, I can guarantee you that.”

Hunny lit another cigarette from one that was smoked down to the filter and about to go out. “If you say so, Aunt Eller.”

“You know, it was tremendously awkward, Hunny, meeting people for dinner and Nelson not showing up without calling.

He was so upset and distracted that he neglected to phone or CoCkeyed 35 text and inform me he would be unable to meet us. And when I was unable to explain his absence I was both concerned and irritated, and I’m sure people noticed. They probably thought it was something I did or said. It was incredibly embarrassing. Then when Nelson phoned midway through the meal, he said I should not actually tell people where he was and what he was involved with, and I had to make something up. Instead of saying it was about Hunny’s mother, I said he was dealing with a cousin who had been in a boating accident. But now my dinner companions will look in the paper about a boating accident, and there won’t be any, and I will look like such a fool.”

Hunny looked up. “This has something to do with Mom?”

“With some people she used to work for,” Lawn said. “He didn’t say what it was, just that it was serious and it might involve a large part of Hunny’s lottery winnings. Half of the winnings, in fact.”

Art put down his sponge and turned to face us, and Hunny lit a second cigarette. One was now smoldering in his filthy ashtray and the second he held in a hand that was trembling slightly.

Hunny said, “Were these people the Brienings?”

“Nelson didn’t mention their names.”

I asked, “Who are the Brienings?”

“They own a crafts store out in Cobleskill,” Art said. “It’s where Rita worked until she retired thirteen years ago.”

“Is there any reason,” I asked, “that the Brienings might think they can extort half a billion dollars from you, Hunny?”

After a moment he mumbled, “Maybe.”

Art said, “Lawn, don’t you know who the Brienings are?”

“No, I never heard the name before.”

“How long have you and Nelson been together?” I asked.

“Eleven years. We met when I came back to Albany after establishing myself in the city in the financial world, and I felt ready to return to my roots and make a name for myself.”

“Mary,” Art said.

“Nelson and I met in the locker room of our gym on my third day back in Albany, and we have rarely spent a day apart since then. We are just wonderfully well suited for one another, and I consider myself just incredibly lucky to have found my perfect match.”

Art had dried his hands on a paper towel, and now he went over and sat next to Hunny, who was starting to look queasy.

Hunny said, “Lawn, please shut the door, will you, dear?”

“This one is definitely not for the laundry basket,” Art said.

Lawn closed the door to the living room and said, “What laundry basket?”

“The laundry basket where we put all the letters and messages that have been coming in since Wednesday asking for money or trying to blackmail me,” Hunny said. “The basket is down in the basement, and it’s overflowing with piles and piles of all kinds of stuff. Mostly it’s people who want me to invest in something, or who want a donation for a walk or a swim for some awful disease, or their house was in a flood in Georgia or something. One lady said her astrologer told her I was her first husband in Australia and I still owe her child support. Most of the letters and phone messages are harmless like that, but some are mean and creepy and threatening. The nasty ones are the ones Donald is handling.

If this is the Brienings, Nelson has been in touch with, Donald

— girl, this is definitely a job for you.”

“The Brienings are evil,” Art said. “I hope you’re ready to wrestle with Satan’s spawn, Donald.”

“Who are these people?” Lawn said. “I’ve never even heard their name before. And Grandma Rita worked for them?”

Hunny moaned. “Maybe I should just write them a check and that will be the end of it. Maybe I should look at this as an opportunity not to be missed, and maybe finally they’ll just go away.”

“How would you go about making out a check for half a billion dollars?” Art said. “Would you write on it five hundred million, or half a billion, or what? And would there be room to write in all those zeros in that tiny space they give you to write out the numbers?”

Lawn stared. “You’ve got a billion dollars in your checking account, Hunny?”

“Did you think I was going to stuff it down my cleavage?

It’s actually one billion, four hundred and fifty-seven dollars. I checked the ATM on the way home this afternoon.”

“That giant check they gave Hunny on The Today Show,” Art said, “was a fake, just for show. The lottery commission provides you with direct deposit if you want it. Which is great. Direct deposit — that’s how I get my state pension and my Social Security. In Hunny’s case, it was a really good idea, so that on the way back from the city Hunny wouldn’t lose the check while he was blowing a truck driver at a Thruway service area.”

Hunny chuckled and said, “There’s an excellent reason they call them ‘service areas,’” and Art snickered, too.

On cue, Lawn looked aghast, and he didn’t look any happier when the kitchen door opened and one of the twins strolled in in his thong carrying more dirty glasses on a tray.

“Tyler, dearest, just leave everything till tomorrow morning,”

Art said.

“Yes,” Hunny added. “You and Schuyler should go on out and enjoy yourselves. Artie and I are not going to make it to Rocks tonight, it looks like. Can you get a ride with Marylou, or do you have your motorbikes out front?”

“Sho nuff,” was Tyler’s ambiguous answer. He winked at Lawn and sashayed back into the living room.

Art said, “Now that Hunny has money, he’s going to put Tyler and Schuyler through medical school. Isn’t that great? They plan on becoming podiatrists. They both like feet.”

Lawn checked his watch. “Nelson should be arriving soon.

There can’t be much traffic coming in from Cobleskill this time 38 Richard Stevenson of night. Of course, it’s the weekend, and there are bound to be drunks. Plus people coming down the Northway from the races at Saratoga.”

Hunny and Art exchanged glances, and then suddenly Hunny began to tremble. I feared he was having a seizure, but he seemed to know exactly what to do, which was to have another sizeable snort of whatever was in his glass. Then he shuddered once and seemed to exorcise something. After which he began to snuffle quietly as Art pulled Hunny against his shoulder and gently smoothed his little frizz of scraggly hair.

Hunny said tearfully, “Poor Mom, poor Mom.”

After a moment, Art said to Lawn and me, “After Hunny’s father died at the age of sixty-four of testicular cancer, Mother Van Horn had a rough time of it.”

Hunny nodded and shook his head and cried some more.

“Rita had always enjoyed a drink before and after dinner,” Art went on. “And to ease her sorrows she — well, let’s be frank -

Rita started drinking to excess. She had gone to work at Clyde and Arletta Briening’s crafts shop as their bookkeeper, and while her imbibing did not immediately affect her work there, it did affect her judgment after hours.”

Hunny lowered his head now, and it seemed way too close to the two smoldering cigarettes in his ashtray. Not unaware of the danger, he picked up one of the burning Marlboros and took a drag on it.

Art said, “Mother Rita had always had a nice time playing the ponies at Saratoga, and unfortunately after Carl died she apparently got it in her head that she could help make ends meet with her winnings at the track. One season she had actually come out ahead, and this must have clouded her judgment. But, well, you know how it goes with gambling. Lawn, I suppose you understand, since you are in a similar line of work.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Anyway, one thing led to another, and apparently pretty soon Mother Rita had begun covering her losses at the track with money she — I’m sorry, Hunny, but I have to say the word — embezzled at Crafts-a-Palooza.”

Hunny flinched.

“By the time Arletta and Clyde realized what was going on two years later, Rita had taken sixty-one thousand and some odd dollars from the business. When they confronted her, Rita begged them not to go to the police because it would be so embarrassing for Miriam and Lewis. Hunny, too, but especially Miriam and Lewis, who are active in the Epworth League and other Methodist organizations. Hunny, of course, has a forgiving nature, and also he has always had a soft spot for the criminal element.”

“I’m afraid that’s true,” Hunny said.

“The horrible Brienings unfortunately saw this as an opportunity, and they took it. They knew that Mother Rita would begin collecting over thirteen thousand dollars a year in Social Security in just a couple of months, and they made her sign a letter confessing to stealing their money and agreeing to pay them a thousand dollars a month until the sixty-one thousand had been restored — plus interest. Except, when you figured out the interest, it came to more than two hundred thousand dollars total. So every month Mother Rita’s Social Security has been going into her account from the government and then straight out and into Crafts-a-Palooza’s account. This has been going on for thirteen years.”

Lawn stood looking grim. “I have never heard of any of this.

I’m stunned. And I’m sure Nelson couldn’t have known either.

He would never have put up with extortion. He would have gone to the police, or he would simply have held his nose and paid these people off.”

“It’s true,” Hunny said, “that Miriam and Lewis decided not to tell Nelson. He had always thought so highly of Grandma Rita, and they were afraid it would break his heart. And also it might not be appreciated by Nelson’s investment clients that there was a crook in the family. It could have been bad for business.”

“A crook in the family that got caught,” Art said by way of clarification.

I asked, “How did your mother live, Hunny? With no income to speak of.”

“We all helped out. I paid her oil and electric and cable, and Miriam and Lewis dropped off groceries. We all pitched in one time for a new roof. For a number of years Mom worked off and on at McDonald’s. Then her mind started slipping a couple of years ago and she became frail at around the same time. She had to get out of the house, so we sold it and that’s when we got her into Golden Gardens. The house proceeds paid for the nursing home until that money ran out, and then the home said Mom would have to turn over her Social Security every month.

We told the Brienings, and they got mad and said all the money hadn’t been paid back yet and they might have to go to the police.

That was last month. So I bought two hundred dollars’ worth of Instant Warren tickets, hoping I would win and could pay off the Brienings, and — praise de Lawd! — I did win.”

“But now, apparently,” Art said, “the Brienings want half a billion dollars to shut them up, not just what Mother Rita still owes.”

Lawn said, “This is just totally bizarre. It’s no wonder Nelson is so distraught that he missed a dinner engagement.”

“The Brienings have been leaving phone messages since I won the lottery,” Hunny said, “but I’ve just been tossing them in the laundry basket with the other requests. I did mean to get to them, but I thought it wasn’t going to hurt if we all did a little partying first and got mellow and the friggin’ Brienings could just wait their turn. But they must have gotten antsy and called Nelson. The poor lad. First he has to put up with his rude, crude, proud-to-be-lewd Uncle Hunny, and now he has to deal with these shakedown artists from Cobleskill. The embarrassments for Nelson just keep a-rollin’ in, poor sweetie-pie.”

The door to the living room opened again, and this time Nelson himself walked through it. He looked frazzled and bordering on the unkempt.

CoCkeyed 41

Nelson said, “Uncle Hunny, I don’t know if you want to go out there. Probably not. But there are some more TV people out front, and they say they want to interview you and it would be best if you agreed to talk to them.”

Hunny looked uncharacteristically nonplussed. “At two in the morning? Who are they? Channel Ten? Channel Thirteen?

Channel Six? What is this?”

Nelson said, “They showed me their ID from Focks News in New York. There are two of them — a woman and a cameraman — and they say they’re from The Bill O’Malley Show.”