by D Keith Mano
“ Every time her torso moves, they’re so soft, they take a different shape—like blown glass in a breeze. And her ass: the jut of it. If they padded dashboards with what her ass is made from
no one would get hurt in accidents.” And so forth and so on.
When you’re very short, you have to talk a good line.
“ Unnnh?” I said.
“ Mike, I want her,” said Norm. “ I ’m sweating inside me, I
want her so much. I want to sculpt those breasts—aaah. ”
“ Calm down,” I said. “ It’s norm al.”
“ No—it isn’t. I ’m desperate to know how those breasts f e e l-
desperate. And y e t. . . ”
“ And yet, Norm—?”
“ And yet I spent last night with her. I fucked her three times
and ate her out like a Barricini box. I ’ve touched every part of
her body—”
“ Gentlemen shouldn’t tell tales.”
“ It’s wrong, I know. Treat it as privileged information—but
I ’m trying t’make a point. The monotony of male desire. IT
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NEVER STOPS. My ex-wife would undress and I ’d start t’drool
on my lapels—after fifteen years of marriage. IT NEVER
STOPS. Even when youVe had it, you haven’t had it. We’re the
only species whose females are always in season. I lie ontopa
some lovely piece of strudel and I know, I know—NO PROG
RESS is being made. I wish maybe when you fucked a woman
she’d deflate and disappear. Like one of those rubber Judy dolls.
Just, you know, pop and be gone.”
Norm is short-man pompous. He was bragging and pontificating at the same time. (Plenty of truth in what he said. I had Berry just two days ago and her body is terra incognita again—
I throb for it.) But, bragging aside, I couldn’t help registering
what Norm said about wanting to kill women. Even in metaphor.
And he noted it, because five minutes later he said,
‘‘Not that I ’d ever kill a woman.”
“ Of course not,” I said.
“ I love women,” he said.
He’s too small to have strangled Rita. I think.
7 a.m .—a dawn I never expected to see. Homy, deceitful,
disloyal, angry—all those things—and add coward as well. I was
scared to second childishness tonight. Sheee-it.
You’re playing with the big boys now, Mike. The guys who
aren’t afraid to kill.
First of all, it rained spittoons of water from about 8 p.m.
until this morning. Great white gusts that streamed up Northern
Boulevard like a giant choir in a giant recessional. Thunder,
too. The old wood floor at The Car takes a licking in heavy rain.
People drip in—water just seeps through the wood. (This block
of buildings dates from 1923. The Car was a speakeasy even
then.) After three days the wood still isn’t dry. And all that time
you can resmell the acrid bouquet from every spilled drink since
April.
Small crowd. I had Nana—blond, blue-eyed—and Florian—
a redhead with freckles—dancing the last shift for three people.
(Who were they? I can’t remember their faces.) Believe it or not
Nana and Florian are from Brazil. Nana told me there are a lot
of Germans (which she is) and Italians in Southern Brazil. What
an ethnic stew that country must be.
I ran out and hailed them a cab, while brandishing a tiny pink
umbrella. The wind turned it up like a brandy snifter. So I was
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D. Keith Mono
drenched and crotchety and impatient to see Berry—who was
waiting at the apartment. (I’ve given her a key. Another significant moment in our relationship.) Since the Bubbles thing and all the unfounded rumors, I don’t want Berry meeting me at The
Car.
O f course, there’s Bert. Bert takes a bus down Northern Boulevard to catch the R train at Queens Plaza. I can’t make Bert wait for a bus in this weather. So I offer him a ride to Queens
Plaza.
Oh, no, says Bert, I couldn’t. Oh, yes, you could, I say. Oh,
no. Oh, yes. The man drives me crazy. On the other hand he is
(or was?) totally loyal to me—and that’s a new experience, very
welcome. But is he a good bouncer? Who can tell? This afternoon I heard him talking in the men’s room. “ Okav. That’s it.
I ’m counting t’three and you’re outa there, you little goniff.” I
push through the john door to help him and no one’s there. Just
a lot of Bert. He apparently practices these intimidations to see
if he can scare himself.
So out we go to the Lincoln. Bert runs the way the San Diego
Chicken runs: his belly about sixteen inches behind him, trying
to catch up. And, naturally, the seat belt does not fit around
him—we are short at least six inches of strap. And Bert is soaking the passenger seat, and he already' smells of mildew and . . .
A screeek.
I look up—through the beaded, pocked, steaming windshield, I see that a car has angled into the parking space ahead of me. I ’m furious. I can’t pull forward. I ’m about to open my
window, but it won’t go down without power, and this figure
gets out of the car in front. SLOWLY.
I can’t see him. mavbe he’s thin and Latino, mavbe not—but
I know I ’m in trouble. He got out SLOWLY. In that teeming
rain he got out SLOWLY.
And also, he had a rifle in his hand.
I waited. Bert is still trying to buckle up when—BLAT!—this
guy blows my right front tire out and—BLAT!—he blows my
left front tire out, and you can feel the car settle forward, and
Bert is holding my arm and keening like it was Yom Kippur—
oniiiiiiu
BLAT! Now the guy has taken my left rear tire out. And we
knew it would come—this was a thorough man—we waited,
staring straight ahead like truants caught. We waited and—
oiiiiiii—BLAT!
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No more tires. Bert has froth on his upper lip. Do we duck?
Does it make any sense to duck? Yes, says Bert and he dives—
aiiiiii—across me like a surge of molasses. I am stuck: upright
and vulnerable. And very still. Now I lay me down to sleep.
BLAT! — keerash. The back window is shot away. I feel pinpricks of glass on my nape, and I say—oh, what a pathetic sound—4 ‘Ple-asssse. ’ ’
And the figure is now in front of me—rifle up and aimed at
my head. My pulse is in my cheekbones: it’s pounding there.
He waits. I can’t stand it any longer—and I avert my face.
And the next thing I hear is the car engine. He’s gone. Bert
had befouled himself. Smelled like burnt galoshes. I kicked him
upright with my knees.
“ He’s gone, you big coward,” I had the nerve to say.
“ I quit,” Bert said.
“ I ’ll tell you whenta quit,” I said. “ I ’m not quitting.”
“ They’re your enemies, that’s why. You can’t quit. They’re
not my enemies, they’re—”
“ Oh, shut up!” I said.
I stepped out of the Lincoln and both my legs gave way. Just
whoosh and down like a kneeling bus. On the soaking sidewalk.
And I ’d bitten my tongue half off.
Ethel took it very seriously. She told me to rent myself a nice
new Lincoln
. And to be careful. Be CAREFUL?
“ Ethel,” I said. “ When a man wants t’kill you—he can kill
you.”
“ But he didn’t,” she said. “ That’s the point. He could have
and he didn’t. It’s just Leonard. Leonard is still pissed off. But
he’s not a killer.”
“ You’re sure of that?”
“ Yes. I know him. He just wanted t’ffighten you.”
“ But what about other people—it could be the Gaucho. It
could be Linese.”
“ The Gaucho, Linese, they would’ve killed you.”
“ Oh.”
“ So, you see it’s all right. Listen, Mike, we can’t let them
ride us out on a rail. ”
“ No.”
“ I ’m behind you 100 percent. And, you’ll see—Rita and Bubbles, maybe they were murdered, but it had nothing t’do with The Car. It had nothing t’do with Tony.”
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D. Keith Mano
“ Ethel,” I said, “ I ’m scared. My life is coming apart. I don’t
know who I am .”
“ You’re our knight in shining arm or,” she said.
SATURDAY, JULY 16
5 p.m.
Bert is back. Don Quixote (me) has discovered his Sancho
Panza.
t
I walk in at 11:45, and there he is—Bert,, in a raincoat, mopping out the girls’ locker room. (I’ll say this; If you point to it; Bert will do it. If, that is, he can find it first.)
‘ ‘I thought you quit, ’ ’ I said. -
“ I couldn’t do that,” says Bert. “ An impossibility. N eh.”
“ Because you like me?”
“ I like you all right—but then I ’ve worked for some real turds
in my day, you don’t mind my say so. The truth is, listen, I owe
Cousin Pearl six months rent and, frankly, she said she’d evict
me if I quit here. I ’m a Trekkie. I ’ve got 4,000 pieces of Star
Trek memorabilia in my apartment—worth a fortune before you
know it. ’ ’
“ So you couldn’t move?”
“ Neh. A momser hassle. ”
“ Cousin Pearl owns a house?”
“ Cousin Pearl, let me tell you, owns two square blocks.
Cousin Pearl could buy you and give change. She scares the shit
out of m e.”
“ Me, too. So you’re still here?”
“ Yeh.”
“ Bert, since we’re being frank—let me ask you something—”
“ Yuh.”
“ Are you any good in a fight?”
“ If I can use my weight—if I can roll over on a guy, pretty
good. Yeh.”
“ I ’m reassured. Where did you work in security?”
“ Eh. A school out by Rockaway.”
“ A school. O h.”
“ They were pretty big kids—ten to thirteen. Pricks.”
“ You rolled on them?”
“ Eh—sometimes you haveta.”
“ Bert, why don’t you get glasses?”
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“ People wouldn’t be scareda me in glasses. I ’d look like a
Talmudic scholar.”
“ Good thinking.”
“ I get pinkeye a lot, so I can’t wear contacts. But, if I remember correctly, this isn’t a china shop here. I can see someone good enough t’roll on them.”
“ Right. I didn’t mean t’be critical. In fact, I ’m very glad
t’have you aboard.” And then, old tactile me, I lean forward
and give Bert a friendly poke in the stomach.
The stomach goes BOINK and I almost break a knuckle.
In this heat Bert is wearing a bulletproof vest under his raincoat. No wonder he’s sweating. But this isn’t your ordinary bulletproof vest—this must be the original bulletproof vest. Solid steel. Worn first by scabs during the Boston Police strike of 1919
or something. No lightweight alloys for Bert. This thing was
made over an anvil. He looks like a backwards Galapagos tortoise.
“ Bert—uh, isn’t that a little extreme?”
“ I ’d personally prefer it if you didn’t make snide remarks,”
he said with dignified reserve. “ I need this. I feel better when
I have it on. I was scared so bad last night I got hemorrhoids.”
“ I can relate,” I said. “ I can relate.”
Then, around 2 p.m ., Colavecchia and Daniels leaned on me
again. They had examined the Lincoln. (I called 911 at 5:20
a.m. It was a quarter to eight before a patrol car got there. Okay,
it was raining, but . . .) I took a told-you-so attitude. I ’m the
innocent bystander, that sort of thing. But somehow, getting
shot at doesn’t impress them—maybe it even, you know, cheapens my image.
Colavecchia and Daniels don’t have much to go on—only that
the weapon involved was an Uzi. That word makes my scalp
crawl. Uzi, in my mind, is associated with desperate terrorists
and great Israeli competence. This was a professional job.
“ You saw nothing?”
“ A silhouette—maybe a dark complexion. The rain was really coming down. It certainly wasn’t Leonard.”
“ You were on bad terms with drug people?”
“ Well,” I said self-righteously. “ I won’t tolerate drug use at
The Car. ’ ’
“ Very noble.”
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D. Keith Mono
“ D ’you think there’s a connection between this and Bubbles’s
death?”
“ N o.”
“ Why not?”
“ Well, between you and us, Bubbles—Cherry Watson—it
looks like she was a suicide. W e’ve found a note: several notes,
in fact. Also she had a history—she cut her wrists once. ’ ’
“ What did the note say?”
Daniels cleared his throat. “ She had the hots for you, cock-
sucker. And you wouldn’t give her the time of day. Must be fun
diddling 18-year-old girls. ”
“ Did you call me ‘cocksucker’? ” I said—it was a question,
not defiance. I couldn’t believe he had said that.
“ Yes, cocksucker.”
“ H al,” said Colavecchia, “ go easy.”
“ I have a teenaged daughter. Forgive m e.”
“ Listen,” I said. “ Yesterday you were all over me, telling
me I ’d fucked her. Now you’re on my case because I didn’t.
Make up your mind. ’ ’
“ My mind is made u p ,” said Daniels. “ You’re too good-
looking, and I ’m sorry that guy didn’t kill you. In fact it’s kinda
funny he didn’t, kinda funny. You sure you didn’t arrange the
whole thing?”
And they walked out—leaving me with this monstrous imputation, that I had caused Bubbles’s death (not to mention a murder attempt on my own life). But I won’t buy it. I ’ve got a
fine apparatus for locating and measuring guilt—it’s my other
profession—and, sorry, that just doesn’t compute. Besides, Bubbles wasn’t ready to die—no. If she had really wanted suicide Bubbles would’ve done it more dramatically. She would’ve killed
herself in front of me, when we were alone. Not out there in
front of old men in raincoats. She loved me, didn’t she?
No. I still think she was murdered.
6 :3 0 -
Ghastly, flat phone conversation with Kay. This furtive mode
doesn’t become me. I ’m so used to gossiping with her—it’s the
thing we do best together. Speculate on the day and people’s
motives. Examine relationships.
Kay has a marvelous instinct
when it comes to character study—if she had any aptitude for
plot and structure, she might be a better screen writer than I
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am. (But she isn’t. I know it. And, God forgive me, I ’ve found
a subject here.)
Naturally she wants to hear about the people I ’ve been meeting. I can describe Ethel and the kids. (Yet even there I ’m cautious. If I ever vocalized my anger about Ethel, said I felt she was using me—which Ethel is—Kay would say, “ Get out.” And
she’d be right. But I ’m not ready to get out.) As for the other
people, I make composites up. I put Pearl together with Bert
and turn them both into a “ next door neighbor” of Ethel’s.
Since, of course, my memory stinks, these ersatz characters are
neither believable nor even consistent. And I know bupkis about
Italian food. I stole a menu from Angelo’s last week, keep it by
my phone and say things like “ The scungill was overcooked
tonight.”
Lying, lying, lying.
And, naturally, I can’t tell her that some hitman just gave me
four flat tires and a glass bath.
More than that, Kay has a good ear. She knows me. She may
not realize I ’ve been lying . . . yet. But Kay certainly feels my
impatience with her. I ’m snappish and hurried—no matter how
I try to discipline myself. I plead the kitchen workload, but it
doesn’t hold much water. And Kay inevitably, says:
“ You don’t want me t’come.”
“ Of course I want you t’come.”
“ I won’t know any of your new friends, I ’ll be out of
place—”
“ I ’ll introduce you.” (Hi, Berry—thisis Kay.) “ You’ll take
t’New York like a duck t’water. You wanna write, don’t you?
This is where the action is.”
“ New York. Imagine, New York. I miss you—”
And so on. With such pretty, sweet endearments that I feel
like Mega-heel. I return her sentiments—“ Love you. Can’t
wait.” —as if I were reading the text of an eye chart.
Right now Kay intends to land at LaGuardia on Thursday,
July 28th. In large part I have blocked this bit of reality. I just
pretend it will never happen. The rational, conniving part of me
hopes that Ethel can perform a miracle. Or that I ’ll somehow
manage to train Bert in little over a week so he can stand by for
