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XXXIX.Chester

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He was seeing a lot of Laxmi and didn’t know what to make of it. He really didn’t want to analyze too much. He smoked pot for his pain, and Laxmi smoked along. Sometimes she brought her own. She could roll it too.

He showed her the healthcare fax and she said it sounded like a scam. He knew that, but wanted to know what she’d say. He liked that Laxmi saw through it. She said lately everything seemed “scammy.”

“Did you know the Enron guys were trading futures on the weather? That’s what it says in this documentary I got from Netflix. I’m not even kidding.” She segued into a thing about how cigarettemakers were behind a campaign to send free coasters to young people because they knew kids tended to smoke when they drank. The tobacco industry “positioned itself as antismoking,” and even teamed with drug companies to create inhalers for people with breathing problems. “The people who lobby that shit are among the most obscenely fucked-up dysfunctional entities on the face of the planet.”

The way Laxmi talked cracked him up, even when they weren’t stoned. She took a megahit from the joint and they both guffawed.

She was writing a book about her “molestations.” Her expat father had been in on that, though he wasn’t “primary.” She couldn’t remember exactly what he’d done but there was inappropriate stuff for sure. Chess had a feeling that whatever went on with her dad might have had something to do with why a sensitive hippie chick like Laxmi would get involved with a crass guy like Levin. Another thing that made sense about it was the Jew Factor: the heebs tended to get mucho pussita.

So Laxmi sat on the couch and journaled in her Moleskine (he called it Molestskin) while they smoked dope and Chess watched TV. When they got hungry, if she hadn’t brought food, they walked over to Ürth Café or a tea place on Melrose with a garden in back. He was attracted to her but didn’t have much of a sex vibe going these days, probably cause all the painkillers had done a number on his testosterone. She didn’t seem to care. In fact, he thought she might be relieved in light of her diary and all — being a port in the storm was OK by him. Still, he got Viagra samples the last time he saw his doctor, just in case. For that rainy day. The potential listed side effects spooked him: you could get a headache or your heart might start hammering or in rare cases, V-men went temporarily blind. He knew most of it was bullshit and maybe his pride was the only thing preventing him from giving the blue pill a whirl. (The shape reminded him of a baseball diamond.) Chess wasn’t sure she was all that interested anyway. He didn’t want to rock the vote. He liked her company. They were happy campers.

One afternoon they got completely out of their skulls and watched something on television about “assets forfeiture.” There was a stretch of highway in Florida where cops pulled people over for burnt-out taillights or whatever — everyone from rapper-types to single moms with babies onboard. The cops acted all friendly but just when they were giving folks the greenlight, the pigs would say, Oh by the way, do you happen to be carrying any contraband or firearms, and would you mind if we have a look? The question was so left-field that it kind of blew people away, especially since they’d already been softened up for the kill. The cops then “confiscated” their money, peeling the lettuce right out of their wallets and purses! Told em whatever amount of cash they had was “suspect” and would, like, grab $300 from Mom while her 2 year old bawled in the backseat. The trippy thing being — Chess and Laxmi went from seizures of stoned-out laughter to slack-jawed silent awe — that the whole deal was full-on taped by police car camcorders! That’s how above the law they were! You could go to court and try to get your money back (one guy had 9 grand taken off him, a builder who later proved he was on his way to buy a used tractor) but that alone would cost 20 or 30K. The segment bled over into other forms of corruption and the one that really stuck in Laxmi’s craw was the 60something Grace Slick lookalike now facing 8 years in federal prison for sending Hillary Clinton a New Age “dreamcatcher,” one of those Native American feather-things people hang on their rearviews. Eagles were under an endangered species protection act and even though the woman said she found the feathers while hiking, the motherfuckers were going to put her away! The last thing on the tube was about a kid who’d been raped and murdered. A guy abducted her from school. They finally figured out how he did it. The little girl had been told never to go with a stranger unless he used the codeword Unicorn, which only the family knew. What happened was, the parents got divorced and the husband told a friend about how clever they’d been. So the guy drives up after school and says, “It’s OK, come with me: Unicorn.” Then he takes her to a creek and fucks her in the ass and crushes her head in and they only catch him when he does the same thing (sans codeword) 10 years later. He confesses, sittin with the cops in the interrogation room, and tells em he’s just like an alligator, he comes up and feeds then sinks to the bottom of the river for another 10 years or so, “digesting.” That’s just the way he is, he says, and nothing can ever change im. Laxmi cried hard at that one. Unicorns were the new bogeymans. Jesus! It was grimmer than the grimmest Grimm’s.

REMAR phoned to say the parent company “was willing to settle for 50,000.” Chess would have to sign a general release (like he thought) “holding them harmless” from any future medical bills he might incur. Remar said it was a joke but he was obligated to pass on the information. “They can eat their release and shit it out in front of a jury too.” Chess liked Remar; he made him laugh. Hang tough, he said. The Friday Night Frighters were in for a major scare of their own—and damn well knew it. Things were lookin good. Parent company can rim my black ass. You heard of Meet the Parents? Well, we gonna eat the parent.

LAXMI continued to give him nonsexual massages. She poured her heart out. She wanted to be an actress, and write books too, like Shirley MacLaine, a dream her mother once had. Mom was a “major depressive.” Laxmi read aloud from an incredibly moving article in the Wall Street Journal about an American boy who’d been abandoned in Nepal “back in the day.” His mother, originally from Beverly Hills, was named Feather (in his stonedness, Chess misheard Father for Feather). His dad was a Jew and an artist, just like hers—this was during the 60s — and they lived on a commune in New Mexico before making the hajj to India. (Laxmi said the parallels were weird: she’d been raised in Beverly Hills before living with her parents in a “tribal family” north of San Francisco.) The couple split Sebastopol and went to Europe. Feather got pregnant and had their kid — the boy — in Switzerland. She and her husband, who was kind of crazy, wound up in Dharmsala, where the Dalai Lama makes his home. Feather decided to become a Buddhist nun but the dad couldn’t hack it without her and snapped, begging on the streets of New Delhi until the authorities sent him back to the States. Feather left their child at a monastery. She was this ice queen whose own mother had committed suicide and later, when he was grown, half apologized for making certain choices and told her son the only thing she ever wanted was to give him the dharma—a path free from suffering. That was so tragically ironic to Laxmi because all of the woman’s actions had only caused suffering. It made her cry (she cried a lot when she hung with Chess) because she thought of her father, alive and rich and mentally sound, and his abandonments and pretensions of detachment. He didn’t have schizophrenia as an excuse! Schizophrenia would have been better than narcissism. Laxmi kept the saga folded up in her journal and reread it about a hundred times because it was so resonant. Her mom was long dead from an accident that Laxmi had an inkling was a suicide — the car swerved into a tree on a street called Lasky in the middle of the day — and now her father was in Pune, India, a wealthy, high-functioning guru capitalist. The story of the boy and his parents had motivated her to write the Moleskine memoir of her upbringing on a Sebastopol commune that was later branded a cult. Yes, she was young but so many youngish women now wrote stories of their adventures as drunks and seekers, addicts and adepts. She would do something different, something epic, she would finally be understood, she told Chess that’s what women really wanted, and Laxmi hoped she could manage it without self-obsession. It was so hard. She cut photographs and epigrams from magazines and pasted them in her diary. She made little drawings too but most of the time felt completely lost.

They bonded over the fathers they never really knew. 2 hurt people tilting against the injustices of the world. And all that. She liked listening to what she dubbed Chester’s “love rants” (so named, he thought, because he got so passionate; she called him Chester, never Chess). The latest was on class-action suits. There were apparently attorneys who specialized in suing banks for the clever little wrongs regularly committed against customers. Judges forced settlements—5,000,000 here, 10 or 20 there — and the lawyers took half. The rest was distributed, minus a mysterious calculus of deductions, to X number of the public, who never even knew they were involved in a class-action suit to begin with. That would explain how one day he got a check in the mail for “Zero and 23/100 Dollars”—23¢. (Laxmi went on a mucousy laughing jag when he dug through a drawer to show her the perforated stub.) The Internet said if you didn’t cash it, the 23¢, or whatever, would go to a shadowy “charity,” the beneficiary details of which the banks refused to disclose. He spent an hour at Washington Mutual, standing there while pain shot up his leg, just so he could endorse his 23¢. (Laxmi went on another jag.) Worse than that, Chess was convivial with the teller, who was some kind of mongrel bitch that wouldn’t even joke along through the bullet-proof glass; the microphone system was so fucked that when he wasn’t cupping his ears from feedback he was practically doing sign language.

(Laxmi nearly crapped her pants.)

He dared to wonder how much he could squeeze out of Friday Night Frights. There had to be a formula to it, one of those statistical templates accountants dispassionately applied and attorneys rubberstamped. Had to happen each and every day. Buyouts and hush money settlements made the world go round! Shit, they were still giving so-called falsely accused Rampart scandal cops 5,000,000 apiece — and they’d already compensated the bad guys to the tune of 50 or 60 mil. Chess thought it would probably be hard for him to get a mil, but you never knew. He wasn’t even close to plumbing the litigable depths of his physical trauma, no real diagnosis seemed on the horizon, plus Remar said it was the type of thing juries would automatically be sympathetic toward because “plain folks” could definitely relate. Everyone could see themselves in exactly this kind of unjust situation; for reality shows (like frequently sued tabloids), settlements were the cost of doing business. The popularity of the genre was definitely on the wane and jurors would probably want to sock it to em, for fun. Nobody liked to be made a fool of for free — it was unAmerican. Besides, Remar said he’d scored with a bunch of similar cases. Chess hadn’t yet had the giddy conversation with counsel about how much he might expect monetarily. The lawyer would take a 3rd but hadn’t even clarified if the award was taxable. Part of him didn’t want to know. Part of him knew that whatever anyone got in this world would be chopped off like that knight in the Monty Python movie, arm by arm, leg by leg, until only a dancing torso remained.

He just needed to make sure his slice of the piñata had enough cash stuffed inside: if it was ¾s of a million, then Remar and the MDs could take the arms and legs. ¾ s of a mil was a lot, as long as you made sure to move your ass out of the country. Go subtropical and comport yourself like a king. Set up shop in a walled compound in San Miguel de Allende, right next to Remar and his gay caballero’s homo hacienda. Laxmi told him that in Costa Rica you could get a hundred acres easy, plus servants, chef, and private yoga instructor — for the rest of your livelong days.

For now, he had other concerns. He needed about $5,000 until mind and body were wrapped a bit tighter. Something to float him for the next few months. He put the call in to Marj. She had plenty of bread and he’d never asked for much; that had to count for something. He didn’t want to give too many details about the FNF fiasco (the whole thing embarrassed him — an authentic part of the pain and suffering angle) but would think of an “alternate history,” as Laxmi put it about various aspects of her journal.