White Tiger on Snow Mountain Read Online Free Page A

face numb and call her Opera. He’d become so risky that he’d had to sign a contract promising to sober up and prove it on demand by pissing in a cup. If he failed, he’d forfeit his movie deal, the Lionheart, and everything that went with it. He was getting out of Dr. T’s fancy Malibu rehab on Monday. My job was to escort him home, through a series of hurdles, and finally to the Lionheart back in New York. Dr. T gave me his book to read on the plane. I fell asleep on page six, during his parents’ divorce, somewhere over Pennsylvania.
    The exact address of Freedom Ranch, which I am legally obliged to withhold, is known only to a select handful of wealthy screw-ups and a few million Internet users but you take Sunset to the ocean and make a right. I recommend a bright winter day. The fresh hills glittered with dew all about me, and the eucalyptus trees, shedding long peels of droopy bark to show the whiter meat beneath, soothed the worn linings of my New York nose and throat. As the mist burned off, a clear blue heaven expanded above the ocean, which struck me blind for a scary second as I hit the Pacific Coast Highway: countless tiny beads of diamond light jumping across the waves.
    I turned up a dusky road and was met by two goons in a golf cart, who told me that I’d be joining “a group encounter already in progress.” I could only pray that I wouldn’t have to remove my clothes.
    The encounter was held under a thatched roof, open to the salt breeze and commanding a five-star view. The group? Well, their haircuts and tans were better than usual, but however impressive the names on the wristbands, it was still a rehab crowd: itchy, scratchy, nervous, patchy, smoking too much and laughing too loud, endlessly rearranging their lighters or cell phones or limbs with the compulsive restlessness of the profoundly uncomfortable. And there, in the lead, was Dr. T himself, the elf who’d appeared in my whirlwind. With his shining dome and the modest muffin overhanging his belt, the man glowed like a burnished good luck charm. No wonder people paid so much to rub against him.
    He put his hands together,
shanti
style, and declaimed. “I want now to invite my higher power, the universe, and all of our higher powers to enter my spirit here today and speak through my heart instead of my mouth.”
    Or other orifice, I thought, while the rest shut their eyes. It is a strange feeling, when everyone around you has closed like sleeping flowers, and you are the one soul on guard. But I was not alone. As I scanned the faces—even the hardest looked vulnerable without their watchtowers—I spotted a wooly head above the flock. Two dark eyes darted between a mop of dark hair and a fashionably fuzzy beard. An ironic charmer’s grin found me, as if to say, “Just look at these suckers.” I somehow knew, this was Derek F, my new best pal.
    My first date with Derek was awkward. I drove back down the coast while he sat silently behind dark sunglasses and filled the car with smoke. Wasn’t that considered rude nowadays? I’d become strongly anti-smoking since I quit.
    “Sorry, but do you mind putting that out? It’s bugging my eyes. Probably dry from the plane or something.”
    “What? Oh, sorry.” He flipped it out the window, a billion-dollar fine in these parts. I cringed, imagining the forest fire raging on the news, but held my tongue. Two reprimands in the first five minutes was not the way to warm a new employer. Which raised the larger issue: Who’s the boss?
    “First stop is Century City,” he said, settling that question. The sun lit the edges of his beard with gold fire, and the glare off his watch stung my eye. “I’ve got a meeting with my agent.”
    The agency’s headquarters was in a glass fortress with a hole cut in the center, presumably for Will Smith to chopper in, but we left the car with valet parking, still pretty impressive to me. An elevator whispered us up to a vast waiting room that held a few