Chapter Twenty-Two
Do not dress in clothes made of leaves when going to put out a fire.
(Chinese Proverb)
Despite his best endeavours and entreaties – indeed, begging might not be too harsh a word – Arnie Garth has found himself encroaching on the one place he least wants to be at this daunting time, this particular week.
This wretched evening. The celebrated Las Vegas Strip, as night (and NECA) approach.
Looking all around him, he steps tentatively out of the fashion shop into which Noreen had only minutes ago dragged his sorry arse.
In fact, she had yanked him with all her strength and a capacious bag brimming with those black-and-white dollar things the lovely casino people had just handed to her.
On his way here from that same casino, Arnie had wisely managed to find himself a large but cheap hat, practically a Stetson, that at least affords him some sort of camouflage, coming down as it does over his balding head and right to the bridge of his nose.
“It’s almost as if you don’t want people to see you, Arnie,” Noreen had said, peering under the massive garment into his shifty little eyes.
“Actually, you’re right, Noreen,” admitted the lavishly be-hatted man, a tad ruefully.
“See, in my business, you get crazy autograph hunters and wannabe movie stars hounding you all the time. 24/7 and more. ‘Sign this for my citizenship teacher, Mr Garth. Can I play Archbishop of Canterbury in your new film, Mr Garth?’”
“You must show me one of your movies one day.”
“Noreen, I would be honoured,” Arnie Garth had said. I should live so long, Arnie Garth had thought.
Fortunately, at this point, Noreen had spotted the clothes shop that had her name on it.
Well, not literally ‘Noreen Millburn’ – who in their right mind would call a fashion outlet Noreen Millburn?
I doubt even Noreen Millburn would do that – but it was called It’s So You, and right then Noreen was as ‘so you’ as you can get.
So now Arnie and her – or ‘you’ – are strolling out of the shop, he with his cheap ‘I’ve stayed and played in Vegas’ Stetson pulled down low, she with all her old, shapeless cardigans scrunched into a large plastic bag and a brand-new, sparkly, diamanté-studded, shapeless cardigan buttoned up around her sturdy Cumbrian frame.
“You really think it suits me, Arnie?” asks Noreen coyly, as they hit the Strip.
“Suits you?” says Arnie vaguely, as his head jerks around like a coked-up meerkat, seeking people and even posters to avoid. “Honey, you were born to wear that… thing.”
He suddenly notices one of his DVDs on prominent display in a window – ‘Arnie Garth presents Breakfast on Tiffany’s’ – and swiftly steers her away.
“Well, thank you, Arnie Garth,” continues an oblivious Noreen, patently intoxicated by the new sensations of the day and possibly the first compliment of her life.
Even Arnie, with his much-practised lack of perception, can detect that the usual, wind-battered ruddiness in her cosmetically unenhanced Cumbrian cheeks has been supplanted by a new and different glow, one that appears to generate from within rather than being purely elemental.
“And now,” she announces, with a hugely satisfied smile, “I have got a surprise for you!”
“You bought the matching panties?”
“You!” she says matily, punching his shoulder so hard that his hat slips to a jauntier angle and he develops a bruise that could last beyond death.
“No, silly man,” explains an excited Noreen, “I asked the lovely kind American lady in the shop for the very best restaurant round here. I know you like your food – that’s why you’re such a podge. ”
“I’m not such—”
“You’re a little porker, Arnie. Anyway, guess what? Tonight, I am going to take you to dinner! With my – what do you call them? – winnings. Just as friends, mind. No funny stuff.”
Arnie stares at her in total panic. “No way!” he cries. Then adds swiftly, “I mean, no way to dinner, Noreen. As for the funny stuff…”
“Now, Arnie, I am not taking ‘no way’ for an answer. It’s the very least I can do after you rescued me from that awfully cruel lot back home and dragged me halfway across the world for reasons I still can’t quite fathom.”
“I just have this irresistible urge to help people in need.” He smiles, because you have to grab these moments as they fall. “Hey, I surely don’t have to tell you what that’s like, cuz… Saint Noreen.”
“No indeed, Arnie. I just never thought that anyone else felt the same way as I do.”
“Very few people do. Hardly anyone. So, you and me, meeting up like this, is what you call a magical coincidence. Yeah? And you know what Einstein said about coincidence.”
“I don’t even know about Einstein.”
“Who does? Well, anyway, he said that coincidence is ‘God’s way of staying anonymous’. Isn’t that beautiful, Noreen? That God himself is the guy putting us together. Reminds me of one of my movies. In fact, all of them. Did you know Faith Baste was one of my leading ladies?”
“Really? Then you must tell me all about her. At that restaurant.”
“Aww, Noreen,” says Arnie, “can’t we just eat in our nice, cosy room? And stare at our lovely… wall. Y’know, just you and me. Together. The two of us. I… don’t feel like being around people right now. Especially the sorta people in this town.”
Noreen looks shocked. “Eat in the room! And let this lovely new cardie go to waste? No wonder you never married, Mr Stick-In-The-Mud. I want to eat out.” She digs her hand deep into her bag and pulls out a tiny, white ferret. “And so does Stanley.”
***
“Ambrose!”
Arnie Garth’s worst nightmare seems about to come true. He can almost feel his treacherous heart caving in and whatever it is that causes strokes sneaking straight back to give him another one. This time for keeps.
“Ambrose!” he cries again but isn’t certain whether he is actually crying it out loud.
“Ambrose indeed!” endorses Noreen, thinking that it must be a word Americans use to express awe and delight, which – to no one’s surprise more than her own – is a little like what she is feeling right now.
(And who knows, perhaps one day the word ‘Ambrose’ might mean just that!
Stranger things have happened. A few of them could be about to happen this very evening.)
The couple, who are of course nowhere near a couple, are standing outside one of Las Vegas’s most magnificent and luxurious hotels, the shimmering lights bathing the marble columns and their persons in a warm neon glow.
All along their slow and wondrous journey here they’ve passed billboards and illuminated signs announcing that tonight is NECA night, that magical occasion when glittering and somewhat indecent prizes are presented to the lucky and talented winners of the National Erotic Cinema Awards.
The goody bags – or, as they are termed here, the Woody Bags – handed out to the invited guests are themselves worthy of prizes.
That Arnie Garth, founder and CEO of Bulge Entertainment, should be here in town amongst the illustrious throng – the titeratti, as the press have dubbed them – is a given.
That this is the last place Arnie Garth would wish to be seen right now, with so wildly innocent a companion, a human being light years from indecent, is a given ten times over.
“This is where she recommended we go eat?” says Arnie, staring at the faultlessly awesome hotel with dissembled incredulity.
“I think so. Yes. This is the place. What’s wrong with it, Arnie?”
“What’s wrong with it? What’s… er… wrong with it? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, Noreen… sweetheart.”
He can see that she is waiting as she admires the knee-trembling splendour, the classic design, as she watches smart cars arrive and even smarter men in their multicoloured tuxedos alight and escort staggeringly well-proportioned young ladies in their elegant fake-furs and very little else.
Not your everyday Vegas clientele, as I’ve pointed out.
But this is a special night. And this place Noreen happens to have chosen – or to which she has kindly been signposted – just happens to be the venue for those aforementioned, highly prestigious and much-trumpeted dirty movie awards.
Who knew?
“It’s a dive, Noreen!” announces Arnie Garth, his voice a tad too high.
“A hellhole! That cardigan – that cardigan – deserves somewhere far better. I know this little Italian place. You’ll love it.
I really got into those guys’ food when…
I was in Rome… shooting the musical biopic of Pope John Paul.
The seventh.” He grabs a solid, diamanté arm and yanks her away from the unbearable shoddiness of it all.
A confused Noreen finds herself being almost dragged halfway back along the Strip.
Well, no almost about it. If Arnie Garth has even the remotest chance of ‘seducing’ this strange and saintly creature into loving him unconditionally, he really needs to steer them both as far away from the notorious NECA as possible.
Even though it is usually one of the pinnacles of his sleazy but stellar career and none more so than tonight, when he and his cast are up for several of the major awards. Some of them almost prosecutable.
This dragging, however, is not quite as simple as he might have thought.
For a start, Arnie is smaller than Noreen and nowhere near as strong.
The effort is also compounded to a huge degree by Noreen being rooted to the spot in her serious work boots – or, in fact, to several spots – in utter and repeated mesmerisation at what this miraculous place has to offer.
“Oh, Arnie, the lights are so beautiful! Can this really be a place of sin?”
“Only the seven deadly ones. Plus, a couple or three more. Boy, I’m so hungry. You know what they say in Nevada – hasta la pasta!”
“I never heard that.”
Before they can reach the only safe refuge of true squalor, a voice stops them. “Pssst! Hey!”
They turn to find a slightly seedy-looking man in a fraying brown suit and two-tone shoes stepping out of the bushes lining Caesar’s Palace.
He is shaking his head in a distinctly nervous fashion, like he is having some sort of argument with himself, and looks practically on the verge of tears.
As if he has an empathy detector built in, the man immediately focuses his full attention on the lady in the twinkling schmatter.
“Can you help me please, ma’am? I-I’ve been – well, I’ve been such a fool!
See, I’ve gambled away everything I’ve got.
Everything! Including my kid’s college money and my sweet wife’s liver transplant fund.
The only thing I have left is… is this watch my dear late mother gave me.
” He pulls up his sleeve. It is indeed a fine-looking piece of jewellery.
Noreen’s stare lands on it for a brief, admiring moment but is soon firmly back on the man again.
“It’s a Cartier, see?” he points out. “Cartier. From France. And I-I’d be so grateful if you’d give me just fifty bucks for it, so I-I could afford my bus fare home to face the music.” At this, he blinks back the tears of sorrow and guilt, staring earnestly into Noreen’s already moist eyes.
“Oh, you poor man! Of course!” She fishes in her bag, bringing out a tiny ferret, which throws the man a little, but then some bills. “Here’s – let me see – it says one hundred dollars on it, will that—”
Before the man in the brown suit can snatch it, Arnie is right there, grabbing his skinny arm with a firm, unyielding hand. Noreen gasps in shock.
“Arnie!”
With his other hand, Arnie pulls up the stunned man’s sleeve. There are at least half a dozen identical timepieces running up his arm. Noreen is open-mouthed and gawping.
“And just for future reference, shmuck, ‘Cartier’ doesn’t begin with a ‘K’.”
“Fuck you!” responds the man. “With a ‘C’ and a ‘K’!” With this snappy exit line, he runs off down the street.
“Shame on you!” calls Arnie. “Does your mom know what you do for a living?”
“Or your poor sweet wife and kid,” adds Noreen, then realises how she might have got that bit wrong. Arnie looks at her and notices that she appears quite upset. “Arnie… he was so… I truly thought he…”
Arnie puts an arm round her, squeezing the diamanté and feeling a shoulder like toughened granite. “I know, baby,” he comforts her. “But hey, not all Americans are scuzzballs.”
“I know you aren’t a scuzzball, Arnie. Whatever they are. What was that film you told me you were raising the money to make?”
“Moses – the Wilderness Years.”
When she smiles this time and Arnie stares into that disconcertingly innocent, make-up-free face and those oh-so-trusting pale-blue eyes, he senses a curious and completely unfamiliar sensation starting to wash over him.
He wonders for a moment if it is fear or IBS or even imminent heart failure, then realises – with a total shock of the new to his system – that it might very well be guilt.
He shakes his head briskly, as if ridding himself of a wasp.
“C’mon, kiddo, let’s eat.”