My Best Man by Andy Schell (top 10 novels TXT) 📕

morning. Kim is smoking a cigarette, and Amity (topless) and he are sitting on the floor of my room, lotus style, in their underwear. Kim’s underpants have yellow stains in the crotch, and the stains are these weird shapes that provoke me to analyze them as if I’m taking a Rorschach test. I swear I see a raccoon and a garden rake.

Amity tells him to sit still because she’s going to pluck a gray hair from his head. I’m sure this is going to send his mid life crisis into a further tailspin, but he doesn’t flinch. Possibly because he’s so coked out of his mind at ten o’clock in the morning that his life is nothing but a big fat cabaret.

“Harry, read Kim some of your poetry,” Amity commands. There’s powder on her nose, and it isn’t the kind she gets at Max well’s cosmetics department.

“He doesn’t want to hear a poem,” I say, annoyed. There’s something unseemly about being around a wired-up middle-aged guy who has pee-pee stains shaped like animals on his underwear at ten o’clock in the morning. I’m losing respect for Amity too it’s difficult to watch her coke-induced gushiness for this mutt before I’ve even had my morning cup of coffee.

“Come on!” she pleads.

I want to give him a flea bath, put him in a crate, and take him to the pound. And insist they neuter him before adopting him out. Oh hell, if I can improvise anew for Nicolo, I can certainly recite something old for Kim. I choose a poem I wrote when I was sixteen about a young boy who rides on a cloud looking for his lost horse. I decide on this poem because it is the one I will always know by heart meaning I don’t have to join the underwear party by getting out of bed to rustle through my file box.

He rode above the plains below

Upon a castle of ice and snow

O’er wheat fields and farms and creek beds stony In search of his friend, his cinnamon pony.

Amity tries to look interested while bending down with a rolled up hundred dollar bill in her hand to snort a line of coke. She holds her hair back, but it falls into the powder and obliterates the line. “Damn!” she says, pulling back, grabbing the razor to reconvene the little nasal convention into a straight line.

They’d joined as friends when he was nine

This Kansas boy and his pony fine

And grew together, from boy and colt

To handsome steed and young adult.

Kim holds her hair back so she can stick the bill down and suck up the cocaine with her perfectly shaped nose and send herself flying into the atmosphere. After Amity’s done, he pulls on her hair to guide her down to his Rorschach crotch. “Kim!” she says, mock horrified. He laughs while she looks at me disgusted and rolls her eyes. “Naughty boy,” she sniffs, pinching her nose. He starts

chopping more powder with the razor while Amity stares down into the glass of the mirror. “Go on, Harry,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

She hasn’t heard a word, and this poem is more precious to me than others. Why in the fuck am I reciting it to them?

Along the way they learned to fly

O’er fences and gullies, to touch the sky.

No love had he, not yours nor mine,

Could touch the love of his pony fine.

Kim snorts up a huge line of blow, then reels back, eyes wide, and says something that I guess translates to “Killer shit, man!”

Amity giggles. “Don’t you love Korean? It sounds so … Korean!”

He pulls his head back, breathes in, holds out his hands. He’s going to sneeze. Amity screams and grabs the little mirror holding all the powder, lifts it away from him, and holds it over her shoulder just in time for him to explode with a sneeze that sounds as if he’s getting his head chopped off—four times. When he’s through, there’s a big green, phlegmy loogie hanging on his lips and chin.

“Nose floss!” Amity screams, holding her hand in front of her face so she doesn’t blow the coke off her mirror while laughing.

Kim wipes the loogie off with the back of his hand and reaches for another cigarette.

I’m baring my soul for this guy?

“Go on, babe,” Amity urges.

“I just finished,” I tell her, lying.

“You did?”

“Sure. Didn’t you listen?”

She nods as if she’s been hanging on every word. “Yes, it was great!” Grite!

Kim blows a cloud of smoke into my face. “Very good.” Velly Goo.

zuz nuy

Four days later, after working a trip to Atlanta, I’m back in Dallas cruising in a black Jaguar sedan. The interior is incredibly fine leather, and the dash is mahogany, and the sound system beats the shit out of anything. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the dash. I don’t smoke, not usually, but I light one up, and add to my mystique a twenty-three year old cruising the campus streets around DCU in a black Jag. I’ve never driven a Jaguar before because my parents were the Cadillac types, and I admit the power and design are intoxicating. I roll the electric window down and rest my arm as I drive. People look at me. On the street, in the next lane, at the stoplight. I pretend I don’t see them, but I do. Fuck, I’m acting like Winston. Isn’t it enough that I have my own dentedin BMW with a burned hole in the upholstery? What the hell is the matter with me?

Eventually, I park the Jaguar at Caldwell and Family, makers of fine clothing for the prep dogs at DCU, and I reach into my pocket and feel the five one hundred dollar bills. I hear Amity saying, minutes before, “Kim, you can’t expect Harry to stay around while we’re together at our house. We need our privacy and Harry needs his. I think you better send him shopping.” And so Kim peeled off five bills and handed me the keys to