Gun Church Read Free Page B

away from Kant without killing her. Her death would be painful for Kant, but not crippling. You want to cripple Kant, to punish him for his transgressions. If you want to cripple him, she must survive and live just beyond his reach.”
    She was right. Moira, in contrast to her angry young men, had lived a little. She felt her job was to introduce subtlety to the young writer’s palette.
    “Men get older, Kipling, but they never do grow up.”
    She was right about that too. I was living testament to it.
    I edited the chapter so that Harper Marx lures both Kant and Pandora up to the roof of his old loft building in SoHo. He holds them at bay with a chef’s knife, explaining in excruciating detail to Pandora how Kant ruined him, how Kant had paid him to play the part of the vengeful partner, how he was supposed to menace them the following night at CBGB. When Marx sees that Pandora believes him in spite of Kant’s feverish denials, Marx leans over the edge of the building and plunges to his death. Like the smell of my father’s suicide, I hadn’t thought about that chapter in decades.
    I peered up at Frank Vuchovich standing over me, that blue hunk of metal in his hand. He looked more perplexed than angry, as if he hadn’t ever considered the endgame. He just sort of stared at the gun as if it held the answer about what to do next. He might just as well have clicked the heels of his ruby slippers or strung together all his blown-out birthday candle wishes for the good it would do him.
    “Frank, put it—”
    A window shattered. I felt the spray of warm liquid on my face before I could make sense of it. Another window broke and the kid sat down on stringless legs; his head making a sickening thud as it smacked against the tile floor. I scrambled over to him, but it was no use. The shots had ripped holes through his heart and liver. Death had come so quickly that Frank Vuchovich hadn’t had time to rearrange his expression. He was puzzled even in death. And in that second I felt every feeling I’d ever felt, including things that hadn’t stirred in me for a very long time.

Three

Keith Richards
     
    “Lazy, undisciplined, untalented writers who can’t figure out bridge scenes—how to get from point A to point B—employ dream sequences.”
    I never forgot Professor Archer Knox’s admonition, although I stopped quoting it to my own classes a long time ago. The Kipster was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. By the advent of the ’90s, I was Archer Knox’s poster boy. Money had made me lazy. Coke made me undisciplined. And who the fuck knew what disappeared my talent?
    I had included dream sequences in my last three novels and they were some of the best things in the books. That’s when I knew my career had come to utter shit. Talk about work destined for the remainder bin! If it hadn’t been for Meg Donovan, I wouldn’t have even bothered retrieving the rights to those books.
    “Christ, Meg, it’s like asking the surgeon for the tumor back.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic, Weiler. You can’t afford it.”
    “Says who?”
    “Says me, your agent.”
    “Who in their right mind is going to pay me to put out new editions of this puke? If no one liked lunch going down, they’re not going to like it any better coming back up.”
    “This is publishing, Kip! Since when does logic have anything to do with it?”
    I may have written my final dream sequence many years earlier, but I seemed to have been living in an extended one these last couple of weeks. I had appeared on all the network morning shows. I had done the circuit before in the ’80s, many times; although, my memories of those spots ranged from vague to nonexistent. I was usually hung over, sometimes drunk, and often lit up like a Christmas tree. By ’89, I was live television poison and my on-air comments about the size and shape of Jane Pauley’s ass hadn’t exactly helped my cause.
    Meg had hoped to slap some sense into me by sharing with