1

They’d hired two strippers and a hooker who brought her own black bag of action for Philo’s bachelor party, all three of them staying busy entertaining the gang while the music raged and the city burned.

A firebug had been busy working across the upper west side, taking down two apartment buildings on 73rd right off Columbus, and another on 86th near the park.  Philo’s place was on 96th and Broadway and everybody kept making jokes about how we were all going to get our asses scorched before the night was out.  It had the ring of truth.

The strippers had finished stripping about twenty minutes into their gig and now walked around the place topless collecting dollar bills for the occasional shake and wag.  They flirted and touched thighs and giggled cutely, collecting dollar bills the whole time.

The hooker had stolen Philo into his bedroom and did things to him that made him sound like feeding time at the zoo.  She’d definitely earned her pay.  At the moment he was sitting on his leather couch barefoot with his shirt buttoned up the wrong way, holding a Jack and Coke on the rocks to his forehead and sort of groaning happily.  Her price was high but a lot of Philo’s friends had solid jobs, or had wives with solid jobs, and they could spare the cash.  She beckoned them in one after the other and sometimes in pairs.

Philo sipped his drink, looked at me with foggy eyes, and said, “You need to tap that.”

 I didn’t think tapping it would work.  The guys in there with her right now sounded like they were hitting it with ball-peen hammers and it was hitting back.  Her black bag intimidated me.  The rug burns on Philo’s forehead looked like they might scar.  I turned to the window and watched the night sky glow with hundred foot high flames.

“Seriously, Tommy,” Philo said, “you need to have some fun.  And she’s clean.  I checked.  I tested her.”

“You tested her?”

“I made her get tested and I read the results.”

“That was before you screwed her, though, right?”

“Well...right after the first time...sure...”

The strippers finished parading around for the guys, did a half hour lezzie act without much of a finish, and then collected bills off the floor and split.  When I went to the kitchen to get another beer I saw the other me sitting at Philo’s piano, humming a 40s crooner tune out of key with three other teetotalers.  He had a cane propped beside him.

It was the first time I’d seen him in almost two years.  I’d heard he’d been in and out of the hospital for heart trouble.  I’d been in and out with a series of minor strokes.  The left side of my face was still a little numb and wasn’t fully functional.  When I smiled only half my mouth raised up while the other half mostly just hung there.  Which was why I didn’t smile much anymore.

The other me’s name was Gray Beckenridge.  He was about three inches taller than me and a couple of years older and twenty pounds slimmer, but folks still sometimes confused us.  Our careers paralleled each other, and occasionally our lives as well.  If his latest novel flopped, then so would mine.  If I won a minor industry award, so did he.  If he was a guest of honor at a local convention, I could expect to be asked as well.

It wasn’t as weird as it seemed.  We’d started in the trenches at the same time.  Our sales figures were the same caliber of shit.  Our fathers had been abusive, our childhoods filled with the same blunt pains and sharp edges.  We wrote about our old men as a form of survival.  We’d wished our dads dead.  We’d both come through adolescence with scars and hate.

We were often referenced in each other’s reviews.  We’d been called “stylized brothers with the same literate sensibility.”  It probably wasn’t a good thing.  He eked out his own living as a creative writing teacher, but his wife was loaded.  I managed to swing the bills by digging around second hand bookshops, garage sales, and church bazaars and finding rare items to sell on eBay.  A dead man’s cache of pulp magazines was paying my rent this month.

He caught my gaze and winked at me. I winked back with my good eye.  That was enough interaction for another two years.

Philo was out cold on his couch.  I decided I’d had about all the fun I could take for one night.  I walked out and waited for the elevator and saw that it was stuck down in the lobby.  I felt antsy and didn’t want to wait.  I hit the stairs and hotfooted down to the ground floor.

I checked my watch.  It was midnight.  I caught a late bite at the corner diner to soak up the alcohol and read for a while.  A lot of folks would think it weird to bring a paperback to a bachelor party.  But I always had a book with me.  This one was a shredded copy of Woodmere’s last novel Stop at Nothing.  It smelled like mildew and sixty years of dust.  There was no hope of selling it, but I was interested in Woodmere’s early attempts at noir.

While I was sipping coffee and finishing up a chapter, my agent Monty Stobbs slid into the booth opposite me and said, “So, did you at least get laid?”

“What the hell are you doing here, Monty?”

He reached over and took a bite out of what was left of my grilled chicken on whole wheat.  “Jesus, no mayo?”

“I don’t need another stroke, Monty.”

“Right.  So tell me about it.  Man, I would’ve given anything to hit Philo’s bachelor party.”

“You’ve been wandering the streets pouting?”

“Not exactly.  Not with these fires.  They’ve got all of Columbus cordoned off.  I think a third building is going to go along with the others on 73rd.  The wind is rising too.  I don’t even know what’s happening on the east side.  It’s insane.  I hope they catch this prick soon.”

“Me too.”

“Okay, so tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“About the party.  I bet he had a first-rate call girl to show everyone a good time, right?”

I thought about it.  “Do the first-rate ones carry black bags?”

“I don’t have any idea,” he said.

“Me neither.  But she seemed to know her business.”

“Fuck yeah.”

He ordered a burger and flirted with the waitress for a minute.  It wasn’t all that surprising to find Monty out on the streets at one in the morning.  He suffered from insomnia and often stopped by my apartment or tracked me down at all kinds of ungodly hours.

“Good news, Tommy.”

I didn’t believe him.  Monty never had good news.  Monty showing up always set my teeth on edge and made my guts knot.  “What news?”

“I’ve got a Hollywood producer interested in The Repentance of Killjoy.”

I tried not to sigh.  “The last time you said a Hollywood producer was interested in one of my novels you turned a coming of age story into a softcore sorority girl slasher flick.  And you played the slasher.”

“You’re still seeing residuals off the back end.”

“Off the back end of my ass.  My last royalty check was for $12.67.”

His burger arrived and Monty set upon it like he hadn’t eaten in three days.   When he came up for air he breathed fried onions in my face. “This time the money will be good.   And they’re willing to bring you on as a ‘consultant.’”

“Do I actually get to consult?”

“No, probably not.  But you get paid extra.  They’ll fly you out and put you up.  And you will be on-set.  Unless you bitch too loudly or get in their way.  Then they’ll boot you off.”

“And when does all this happen?”

“He says he wants to fast track it.  Vince Schreiber.  Major player.”

“You don’t deal with major players, Monty.  What else has he done?”

Monty rattled off a list of titles, most of which I’d never heard before.  But there was one I’d actually seen.  It was a big budget bombastic action flick and stupid as fuck all.  I had given up most of my notions of making anything resembling art on the day I’d had my first prostate exam.

“Monty, I want you to listen to me carefully.”

“I always do.”

“You never do, but forget about that.  This time, I want script control.”

“They won’t give it to you.  This guy loves your work, but nobody’s giving a writer with zero Hollywood success script control.”

“I’m not having another one of my projects turned into a psycho killer gutting open co-eds flick that only turns up on late night cable.”

“Hey, I emoted the shit out of that role.”

“You emoted shit anyway.  Just go get me what I want.”

“I’ll do what I can.”  He finished his last few fries, threw a five down, and rushed out the door like he had another important middle-of-the-night meeting to make.  The five bucks wouldn’t even cover the tip.

I walked back to my apartment on 56th and West End Highway.  I still felt edgy and enjoyed the chance of getting a little exercise.  But instead of calming I grew more anxious.  The sky looked like it was burning.  The fire on the west side had spread.  More police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks raced down the avenues.  They had to be calling in additional help from the Bronx and Jersey.  The wind was working against them.

I glanced up at the sky to the east and could see the glow from at least one more building over on the other side of town flaming and illuminating the night.  The stench of ash was overwhelming.  The columns of smoke drifted across the face of the night and blotted the moon.  I kept my chin down and my hands in my pockets and picked up my pace a little.

By the time I got to my building I was drenched with sweat and breathing heavily.  I stood in my foyer at the bottom of the four-flight walk-up with an inch and a half of Chinese menus and other advertisements scattered under my feet.

I checked my cell and found that I had one missed call.  I retrieved the message.  It was from Gray.  He’d sent it over an hour ago, just about the time I walked out of Philo’s place.

The other me’s voice said, “Have you seen your first ghost yet?”