The Launch

Chapter One

My name is Watson Sinclair and I am a pathetically heterosexual man. Not the kind who decides in elementary school that he likes girls but is too shy to do anything about it all the way through high school, learning what he can from teen romance books, pornography and playground rumors, although that, too. Compulsive ogling is the true symptom of my condition. Unsubtle rubbernecking is its unfortunate result. I have always lived in fear that I would see some particularly attractive woman while driving and be so distracted that I'd just drive my car up onto the sidewalk, probably uncorking a fire hydrant or something. This has never happened to me until now.

The particularly attractive woman who has so completely bamboozled my powers of concentration is radically under-dressed for the weather and is probably running across the street from her office or something. Tight black skirt, black tights and long spiky heels in the snow, but no coat. She has long dark hair, creamy skin flushed from the cold and a low-cut shirt with excellent cleavage. As I'm realizing that I have run up into a sidewalk fruit stand, she's turning a corner and now there's a Korean guy yelling at me and waving a broom.

Forgetting that you're driving a car to stare at a woman who hasn't given you the slightest provocation is pretty sick. What is even sicker is that seeing all this fruit on the ground, I can't help thinking that her boobs are at least as big as these large navel oranges, maybe even the grapefruits. And speaking of headlights, I've got no time to sit around picking citrus out of my grill. I was only supposed to drive around the block a few times and come back and now this damn calamity.

I peel off a couple of twenties and drop them on top of the pile of fruit in the snow. I jump back in the front seat, slamming and then locking the door just as the broom hits home on the window. Thank God the front of the car was nose deep in wooden stalls or he'd have come at me straight instead of having to circle around the back. I give him a polite wave and smile even though his spittle is flecking my window as he shouts incoherently. And all this because I am a goggle-eyed tongue loller who can't look away from T&A. Normally I rely on my best friend and artistic partner, JC Dubois, to say "Eyes on the road, Watson," but he is currently a few blocks away, kidnapping the Editorial Director of the Royal Features Syndicate.

I honk my horn and pull back into traffic. Yes, I'm Canadian and a crazy driver: deal with it. It has to be the stress of driving in this metropolitan mayhem that short-circuited my brain into looking for some comforting eye candy.

Focus, Watson. I'm in Midtown near the park and I have to get back to the Royal Features building. I drove past the MOMA two blocks ago and I got stuck in traffic for a while, then I saw Carnegie Hall at one point. If I can make it there, I know I can get back to where I started. Damn these Manhattan one way streets. I can't stop to ask for directions, because I just know when I ask how to get to Carnegie Hall, some hilarious New Yorker will say "Practice."

Speaking of Big Apple clichés straight out of a Woody Allen film, there are yellow taxis just everywhere. I think they see the Ontario plates and jump all over me like a lion on a gazelle. I hate to think what their insurance rates must look like, because I have stomped on the binders more times in the last five minutes than I have since my renewal. If JC texts me right now, I'm in trouble.

Finally, there's an oldster asleep at the switch. Muscle the nose of the car into this small gap, cue honking, now flip him the bird while inching into the space I've created. There. I'm moving again and the old guy is back there miming the "storm on the heath" scene from King Lear. Man, he is coming apart. I guess you get used to this eventually.

Through a patch of daylight between buildings I can see the Rockefeller Center. Fifth Avenue is coming up. I'm on East 55th Street heading west, which sounds strange, but I know this will get me back to Seventh Avenue, which will get me down to Carnegie Hall. We went over these maps fifty times, and thank God we did. Traffic is actually moving along a bit, so I'm in good position. What is taking JC so long?