I have been thinking recently, particularly late at night when Lydia goes to town to see a movie with her lady friends, of my brief business relationship with Philip Wierzba. It was some years back, when I lived in Canada and still worked in the legal profession (please don't ask!). Late at night, when my mind finally wanders from the rheumatic anxieties of the day, I think about the first time I met Mr. Wierzba on 47th street at Sam Kabobby’s All-Night Diner fix.
It's the final minutes of the day, when they are doing their thing and I mine, surrounded on all sides by silence, Philip Wierzba slipping through the shadows, grey sheets hung out, one half mile from his dark third-floor apartment. Anyone passing him on the streets would have noticed, conspicuously suspended in the tight grasp of his clenched left (conciliatory?) hand a weary looking manila envelope festooned with a large, seemingly official stamp. Now, any guess as to the nature [furtherance] and content of that envelope would have been common hearsay, both because of the unreconcilable contradictions in the appearance of Mr. Wierzba, and because of the consummate weirdness implied in the very principle: clandestine landscaping figure, looming like animated monument, sliding through the grey sheet streets of this, the infamous northern end of town. He would have been an impossible man to place and his business could have been anybody’s guess. On the rather extraordinary subject of Mr. Wierzba’s appearance, I shall take this time to note some of the presiding elementals: He was dressed in a long, dark, Hamlet-like coat. The Dane.
He was wearing an old pair of horn-rimmed glasses like a goddamned owl and a brown journalist’s cap that had seen a great many better days.
Stylish—but strangely small, and mainly strange—vest in rather, uh, pressing need of ironing. A dirty pair of white tennis shoes.
All this was combined with the—and this is the only way to describe it!—incomprehensibly childish character of Mr. Wierzba’s waggishly youthful face (in the mouth of which was perched a lengthy, manure-smelling cigarette, of explicitly foreign origin).
Mr. Wierzba is as rigorously intelligible as an open book and was so as soon as you set eyes on him, his tending to carry himself in a rather regal, yet simultaneously absent-minded fashion. A girl we both knew (!) said she thought he betrayed the impression of being wrapped like a gas station tuna sandwich in a sort of mysteriously wealthy clown wrap, or perhaps a drunken aristocrat cloak. One way or the other, it is safe to say that Wierzba is incapable of moving through an urban setting/environment without causing something of a mass panic, eyes violently collating his every baroque movement, children being shielded from his wobbly approach, folks changing their course to avoid the inevitable altercation with him. These responses, as well as many others cast under a similar aspect tend to follow Philip Wierzba like a catamaran plague. However, on the day in question, he was in the part of town where nobody seems to pay him any notice, perhaps explaining certain underlying reasons for his having chosen it as a place to live shortly thereafter. He was drifting furtively through the dusk totally unnoticed by anybody excepting small dogs and the odd child. (Odd, to be sure!) Even those who periodically would pass him on their way(s) home from a friend’s or whatever or rushing off to some place of debauchery, say, would not bother to turn their gaze toward Wierzba. And those who would quickly feast their lifeless eyes upon the towering cuss would not expend the energy necessary to dwell upon either the beheld or the beholding. Philip Wierzba felt as free as he ever had in his whole life. I know this because it says so in one of his journal entries, which I have splayed open across my oak writing desk at this very moment. Here is an image of him camped outside the Apple Store, gearing up for that saviour hour...
At the exact same time that Philip Wierzba was discovering freedom, I was reading the Friday paper (it was Sunday), alone in a discreet booth at the back of Sam’s. Wierzba's choice, not mine. I was waiting for my mysterious guest to materialize. In truth, I had chosen the booth at the back so that I could drink from my flask of Scotch undetected. I would be deceitful if I said that I was not a little nervous about the meeting. I had never met Wierzba and had only talked to him briefly on the telephone two days previous. He had called my office desperately demanding to speak to me, this pro-pulsed by an apparent recommendation from a close friend; my secretary had repeatedly insisted that I was too busy to talk, but apparently he was rather obstinate, a claim which I was soon to validate through my relations with him. He could not be deterred. My secretary—I think it would have been "Damn it" Janet Turner at the time, an all together pleasant woman—was eventually forced to relent, pro-pelled to total mental exhaustion at the hands of the painfully insistent churl on the other end of the line. She handed the wireless telephone to me with a look of dismay and a quick semi-coherent apology as she rapidly scuttled back out to her desk. My first impression upon speaking to Mr. Wierzba was that he was totally, stark-raving mad. I am not sure if this impression originated from what he said or the manner with which he said it, both of which were rather immediate in their peculiarity. Definitely, though, this was my impression. His voice possessed a bohemian, mock-professional/professorial inflection of the kind one would tend to associate with young, absurdly contrived hipsters. However, this quality was offset by his immediate and clock-regular proneness to flights of half-lucid fancy. For example, a brief explanation as to how he had come into possession of my office phone number quickly evolved into a treatise on dwindling privacy in the late 20th century, which in turn shifted his interest to some friend of his who had, in the early 1970s, been under constant surveillance by at least five prominent world governments. ("Not to mention free-lancers," I recall him adding.) I retain a vivid memory of having become very interested in this strange voice rather immediately. Many of my colleagues in the legal business, I can imagine, would heave most likely, after concocting some vague excuse and dispatching some necessary pleasantries, hung up on Philip Wierzba without the slightest hesitation. Something held me there. Something prevented me from putting down the receiver or fabricating some quick lie about a meeting. It was not so much that I had nothing better to do. I was actually rather busy, I recall! It was simply a case of my having become unwittingly interested in this man on the phone. I was ready to entertain what he had to say. He, I figure in retrospect, totally sensed this... As I was taking a hit of Scotch in the back of the diner. I am sure. I am sure. I am surely sure, sir, that all of this information was filtering through me. I must admit, sir, sure, that my recollection on the...the matter is...hazy. Sure. Surely. Both in lieu of the slow... stinting effects of the Scotch and because of some anxious residue retained from an earlier argument with Lydia. Oh, fuck me. One of all too many that day, that week. This series of arguments had been surrounding and covering [combat through grey sheets and streets] my penchant for periodically not calling her or coming into contact with her for exceedingly long periods of time. I felt her to be overreacting, mostly because we had only been seeing each other for a very brief interval and because I did not feel that I had been avoiding her. I chalked up her irritation and tension to the fact that she had recently, for baseline economic reasons, been forced into taking up a job as a counter-girl at a doughnut joint whilst I held the comparatively superior position of lawyer.
At any rate, one thing I recall quite vividly about that early evening at Sam K’s was the particular urban squalor of this unusual place. I wondered at Wierzba’s potential motivations for having chosen it as a place ideal for his specified form of legal consultation. I cannot remember the waitress, and, of course, there must have been one, but I do remember that the only other two people in the place were drinking coffee alone. A middle aged woman, with her face caked in many-day-old makeup and the rest of her cocooned in an almost tangible aura of despair, was sitting up at the bar. (As this was/is a "diner," I suppose you cannot really call it a bar.) She looked like an old, diluted prostitute making the best of a still intact, but fleeting, lucidity. Looking at her, I remember being flooded with a sort of melancholic grey of sheet street. She made me feel sad, uncomfortable, and ridiculously alien. On at least one occasion, the image of her, sullen and detached, pushed me to the verge of abandoning the diner and consequently of aborting my imminent meeting with the strange and insistent Philip Wierzba. She turned to focus outside the diner with an expression that appeared as if to be fixed on the dissolving ghost of a long-gone lover, suspended in the atmosphere before her, and it was nearly more than I could take. She held a violent air of division. She was the Living God Twitter its pre-incarnate and incarnate and post-incarnate self. She was drinking straight from the moat surrounding the Tower of Living Babel. There was also a man sitting in the furthest booth away from me, next to a primitive and I suspect long-since-defective jukebox. If not for periodic spasms in his left shoulder that would trickle with seismic accession down his aging arm, I would have taken him for dead. I only saw him sip from his coffee cup on one, fiercely laboured occasion. He wore a tattered old Expo’s cap and a thinning shot-to-shit tweed. I was too half-drunkenly terrified to look him in the eyes. This seemed no place for me to be in my present condition.
Despite the fact that I had been carefully analyzing the street through the large front window, I did not see Philip Wierzba until he came sweeping through the second set of diner doors. He entered like a figure in total, perhaps self-mocking control of its surroundings. I knew immediately that this was my man.
He carried an energy with him. And a sweetness. It conveyed itself in his face, his countenance, every aspect of his aspect, and in his movement too. It had been in his voice two days earlier. I had felt it even over the phone, a sense of clarity and drive. There was a causal purity to him. He approached my table with a strangely clandestine lack of eye contact. It was as if he were trying to avoid having our meeting seem anything more than entirely routine. I could not imagine who he might think would be watching us, but I played along anyway, maintaining a drunken disassociation. First setting his large envelope down on the empty table, he silently lowered his wiry body into the seat directly across from me. His mind still seemed to be wandering off elsewhere and he did not speak. I was half glancing at the envelope and half summing up his physical appearance. To this day I cannot understand why his manner and dress did not alarm me; I have already described both, and thinking back on that moment it strikes me curious that these have not been more thoroughly analyzed for clues. I have no real explanation whatsoever. What at all even is this lack of prurience on my part? Suffice it to say that I was not myself that day and that my faculties of judgment were rather bleary. After a minute of silence he furtively shifted his gaze toward me and, immediately comprehensively summating, spoke to me for the first time. His voice crackled and broke. Any trouble finding the place? he asked dryly, with limpid disinterest. Not really, I responded. Good … good. He ran his hand slowly across the envelope that he had placed on the table. Let's get down to business. By all means. After my having said this, Wierzba seemed to drift back off into his own endless thoughts. Then, without anything resembling a preliminary flurry, his face jerked as if awoken from an ongoing, infiltrating dream or perhaps a local anesthetic. Over the periodic surfacing of which he held no authoritative control whatsoever. I … I have a small … a small proposition for you … so to speak. His voice trailing in and out and crackling staticky also. His eyes darted about defensively. I was startled that he would talk in such a fashion. A client had never come to me before with 'a proposition.’ The term suggested to me a partnership as opposed to a normal client/lawyer association. It also kind of scans underworld. Such unfamiliar, and perhaps suspicious terminology made me somewhat uncomfortable. Despite this I politely asked him if he wanted Scotch, which he did not, and then encouraged him to pitch me. To put it simply: Do you think I could get a drink of that? He was pointing at my flask. Wait, what?..you just... He merely kept pointing at the flask as I trailed off. I reached across the table and handed it to him. Go crazy. He smiled and drank. I have been doing some rather significant work of late. Dangerous work. And I'm looking for intelligent men in the legal world to do some work for me. Well, not so much work as much as, well .. I am looking for some very easy assistance. He looked down again at the envelope. I am looking for reliable men to hold onto certain…certain unguarded documents. These documents have come upon my person, I must admit, rather…well, rather illegally, but you must understand that my possession of them is necessary. Someone must bring these things to light and it seems, well, let us just say that it appears that I have been chosen.
Chosen for what?
I asked curtly.
Well, since you ask. The way I see it is that it is up to me and it is my responsibility to blow a hole straight through certain acts of…let us say corrupted acts and actors. He accompanied this remark with a very peculiar system of interconnected hand gestures. Certain people seem to think that they are impervious to the general tenants of quote-unquote "democratic political practice" and that they can get away with whatever they want. It is my intention and the intention of my trust to, well, you know, teach them otherwise. He finished the contents of and passed my flask back to me. His eyes settled into a strange indolence. I sat back and hit the Scotch. But there wasn't any.
Look I don’t know who told you about me, I said taking another lazy hit off nothing, but I am afraid I must tell you that I’m a small-time insurance lawyer. I’ve never stolen anything of any greater value than an O Henry bar, which I’ll have you know made me feel so bad that I went back to the store, crying, and returned it to the cashier…I was ten.
Philip Wierzba looked at me confusedly.
I’m not James Bond, I added, after a moment’s deliberation.
