Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “No,” he said. “Try Paul if you want.” And that was it for the night. They went to Lucille’s and Frank ran the table for a while. He wondered, when he saw Dmitry talking to the other patrons, if he was trying to find another backer. He probably was.

  Later, Frank was amused to think of how old he felt at twenty-six, but it isn’t eighteen, and after a while he couldn’t manage to work twelve hours every day and then make the trip to Lucille’s every night, so half the time or more Dmitry would drive into town himself. The patrons at Lucille’s had always found Frank standoffish, but Dmitry, after he started spending nights there without him, had become completely integrated, and when Frank did go, the place seemed busier each time, with guys from the lumberyard who never used to come showing up, the produce guy from the Safeway, even some young businessmen still in their suits, the first flank of the yuppie invasion Frank and Paul’s business plan depended on. Dmitry knew them all by name and wandered out back with them to smoke joints, he assumed, or do lines. Frank was strictly on the beer and wanted none of the other stuff, but Dmitry usually had red eyes by 10pm.

  Then Frank got absorbed by The Ambassadors — Henry James’s comic masterpiece in which each of the ambassadors sent to rescue an American scion from the evils of Paris gets sucked up in turn by the Frenchness of it all, necessitating the next wave of ambassadors. He skipped Lucille’s all week. Dmitry seemed to leave earlier and stay out later every night, so Frank assumed he was seeing some woman. Well good for him.

  By Sunday Frank had a few last pages to read, and knew he’d want to get off the site, at last, so Dmitry hitched a ride into town with Paul and Margie as they left at 5 o’clock. Frank would come in for a late drink. Around 10pm or so, he got to the end of the novel — the hapless hero Strether defeated, having made a point to “have gotten nothing for himself,” and Gostrey lovelorn — and as he drove to Lucille’s, buzzing with James’s big book, he wondered whether he was capable of some grand act of renunciation like Strether’s.

  But then he thought: what if there was no audience? Strether has Gostrey to witness it, and James’s readers. That makes grand gestures easier. Is it really renunciation if you’re lionized for it? And, the opposite, is it renunciation if nobody knows about it? He was renouncing all sorts of things right then. After all, he renounced any claim on Tracey or her daughters, although he was still doing all the divorced dad stuff, calling the girls every other day. Sometimes they answered. Sometimes they seemed to want to get through the call as soon as possible and get back to whatever it was — TV, friends, games — they were doing. He was OK with getting nothing much in return. But was that renunciation, or just accepting his fate?

  He walked into Lucille’s, and Carmen gave him the hairy eyeball, shaking her head in disgust, which maybe meant nothing special. Dmitry was in the back talking to one of the suits. Frank grabbed a beer and walked toward them. Two big biker dudes, in central casting bandanas, leathers, sunglasses — I mean really, at night? In Connecticut? — moved to stand in his path.

  “Help you son?” the one that looked like a professional wrestler said.

  “No, thanks,” Frank said, and started to give them a wide berth and go around.

  They moved in his way again.

  “You new here?” the one that looked like a movie extra said.

  “No,” he said. “You are.” What was this — bikers looking for a fight in Lucille’s?

  Dmitry came up between them and put his arm around Frank’s shoulder, steering him back to the bar, saying “Franky! Lucille’s has missed you!”

  “What gives?” he asked as they grabbed a couple stools.

  “You mean Benny and The Jet?”

  “That can’t be their real names.”

  “Of course not, Franky. They’re harmless.”

  He launched into some tale or other, and Frank noticed Cyndy was on stage. Maybe this is a form of renunciation, he thought, a denial of the flesh, just looking. The whole thing, hearing but not listening to Dmitry’s monologue, interacting but not bonding with the locals, the girls pretending to feel sexy when they didn’t, it was all a big orgy of renunciation. Thinking so made him blue.

  “You ready to go?”

  “Franky, you just got here!”

  Frank tried to explain Jamesian renunciation, but Dmitry was preoccupied, even a little jumpy, maybe coked up. He drove Frank back to the site and returned to Lucille’s, not ready to call it a night. Frank flopped onto his air mattress, jerked off thinking about his favorite stripper, and went to sleep.

  In the wee hours the bleary-eyed Dmitry got back. He was even further toasted than usual, with inflamed pot eyes and more than a little drunk. He kicked his shoes off inside and caught his shoulder on the middle pole of the tent, then bunked his head into the utility light hanging from the ceiling and laughed: definitely wasted.

  He took his wallet and keys out of his pockets, sticking them on the little nightstand they had tacked together from scrap. The wallet was extraordinarily fat. It fell off the stand and, fastidiously managing his balance, Dmitry leaned over, picked it up, put it back, and patted it.

  “You probably shouldn’t be doing this,” Frank said.

  “It’s victimless crime, Franky, it really is.”

  “Not if you kill someone it isn’t.”

  Dmitry thought about this for a stoned minute.

  “Oh. You mean the driving.”

  “Yeah. What did you mean? And is all that money in your wallet?”

  “Ah!” he said. “I thought that was what you were referring to. I thought you’d got wind of my little venture.”

  “Venture.”

  “I do believe I am a little snozzled, Franky.”

  He had fallen while trying to take off his pants and giggled, rolling onto his air mattress with an exaggerated burp and a sloppy fart.

  “You stink,” Frank said to the nasty air, a simple, undeniable statement of fact, and he didn’t mean much by it.

  “Yes, Franky, although I notice it not myself — is that Shakespeare?”

  “It’s not Shakespeare, it’s not anything. What venture?”

  “Isn’t it remarkable that we can’t smell ourselves? We are the people closest to ourselves after all, we should be able to smell us better than anyone.” He glanced over at Frank slowly — it took him a moment to zone in and focus — and saw that his diversion wasn’t working. “My little venture. Well. I’ve been providing a minor service for some of our local friends.”

  “We don’t have any local friends. What kind of service?” without inflecting the question up — sounding a little like Margie.

  “You don’t have any local friends. I have quite a few now. They love me because I help them.”

  “Help them what.”

  “Well as soon as we started going to Lucille’s, Franky, it struck me, as I’m sure it struck you, that given all the risibly horny men at the bar and all the professionally slutty women, there were colossal entrepreneurial possibilities. One night Nick Bobetsky — you know him, right, the big plumber?” Frank wasn’t sure, but Dmitry didn’t care. “Anyways, he said to me one night, watching Kristine dance, God, I’d like to pound that! and I said How much? How much would you pay to pound that? I’ll arrange it. I had no idea if I could, of course, but he said, Fifty bucks, I’d pay fifty bucks to pound that, and I said, Come on, now, Nicky me boy, look at her! Double down and it’s done. And he said, OK, a hunnert. So on her break I asked Kristine if she would do Nick for fifty bucks and she agreed. Word got around fast that I had done this for him, and now I’ve got so much business I rented a room on a weekly basis at the King’s Knight Hotel, and I manage a few trysts a night. I don’t always make a hundred percent profit, since given the nature of the thing the business plan is very fluid — no pun intended — and I now have the motel expense, although I figure that at only about eight percent of revenue. All said and done, I’ve made roughly a third of what I need for my land yacht already, so in another week or two
I’ll be ready, more or less on schedule” — shed-jew-el — “to hit the road!”

  “You fuck!”

  “What, Franky?”

  “You’re a pimp!”

  “I suppose I am, from one perspective. But I don’t have a purple fur or a Cadillac with steer horns on the hood, and I don’t beat up any whores. I facilitate. Pimp seems mighty strong.”

  Could he be this stupid?

  “It’s fucking illegal. You know that it’s illegal for me to hire you without a work permit to begin with. You get busted, I get busted, Paul gets busted. The fuck. What is wrong with you?”

  Frank got up and walked out into the night, hot, fists and teeth clenched, and walked off to take a piss. The night air was cooler than the tent, but still sticky. Dmitry followed him out, the ungrateful asshole.

  “And the women!” Frank said. “Did you give a moment’s thought to how degrading this is? Don’t you care about their dignity — that they’ll live with the fact they’ve done this for the rest of their lives? That they let some fucked-up misogynistic boy pimp them out?”

  “A pimp completely manages his whores, Franky, demanding a percentage of all their income, telling them what they can and cannot do — I don’t do any of that. I just act as Cyrano for my lovelorn swains, and take a letter-writing fee, as it were.”

  “Like that makes fuck-all difference.”

  “Franky, Franky, face it! This knight in shining armor routine of yours is so out of date!” He’d sobered up quite a bit. “These women don’t need you to save them, they are sex-positive sex workers, unashamed and proud to be bringing down twice the money they were making weeks ago. Besides, there’s nothing to worry about, there’s no getting caught, everything’s cash, the room, too, cash under the table, rented under the name ‘Fatty Arbuckle.’ I know everybody involved. There’s no problem, no latent problem, no bombshell waiting. This is not one of your American TV cop shows — no one is going to be wearing a wire, no undercover surprises. What we have here are some losers who want to have a hump and some very hardworking, obliging ladies. They use me because none of them want to get busted. The men give me money, so they never have a transaction with the girls, and the girls never directly accept money for sex. I’m like everyone’s plausible deniability, one-stop procurement and money laundering. It’s genius. Even if the cops staked out the motel, and set up surveillance cameras, which let’s face it, the local constabulary is hardly capable of, the tapes would show no crime, no evidence. Just some marginally attractive women having sex with some considerably less attractive men. That, too, happens all the time. And in that equation, there’s always money involved, even if sometimes in the form of dinner or cocaine.”

  “Shut it down or I’ll call the cops myself.”

  “Aw, Franky! I can cut you in. Or arrange some free cooze.”

  Maybe that’s what he offered the Biker Brothers to run interference.

  “Cooze is such an interesting —” Dmitry went on, still selling.

  “Don’t even start with the fucking etymology. Shut it down.”

  Frank went back into the tent and lay on his back, still adrenalized, looking up at the green canvas ceiling. He wasn’t sure what he was so mad about. He imagined the cops coming and dragging him out of the tent, charging him with conspiracy to commit prostitution — is there such a thing? — hiring illegal immigrants, defrauding the state, maybe vagrancy for living in the tent. Probably shitting in the woods is illegal in Connecticut too.

  But he knew none of that would happen. He felt something else. Oblivious, yes — how had he not noticed? Betrayed, maybe? Yes, betrayed — he had thought they were baring their souls to each other. Thought they were — he didn’t know, but what the fuck was this thing if Dmitry was lying to him, treating him like just another yahoo?

  A minute or two later, trailing fresh cigarette smoke to accompany his bar-crud, beery stank, Dmitry came into the tent, flopped on his air mattress, and was snoring in seconds. Frank was up late.

  In the morning, Dmitry was cheerful.

  “There is, you know, Franky, a way to get me to close up shop. Take out that loan for the motorhome. You know that most people don’t choose prostitution, they’re pushed into it by economic circumstance, like myself.” He thought this was clever and funny. It was neither. Still, Frank had to think about it — some of the women dancing at Lucille’s were stuck with kids and no help.

  “OK, I have a plan,” Frank said. It struck him that human life goes on precisely because every morning things surprise us again, like we’ve all got a touch of Alzheimer’s, the whole world new and awaiting interpretation, and for some reason that morning, smelling the sawdust and coffee, having his first smoke, looking at this monumental, sun-splashed work of art they had made, a mild wind coming across the ridge, he was ready to find life full of promise again. “I’ll take out the loan, but only if you shut down the hooker operation and you work for two more weeks. I’ll keep your pay for this week and the two extras in escrow, and we’ll settle up after the thing is sold again.”

  “Excellent, Franky! You won’t regret it! Deal!”

  Frank had no confidence that Dmitry would stop pandering, but at least he had done what he could. They went that afternoon to the bank and then to a junkyard to see the motorhome Dmitry had his eye on. The junkyard had a batch of nasty old heaps out front, a few grime-covered balloons and bleached-out pennant flags strung among the beaters as if trying to imitate an actual used car lot. The owner was less unguent than a used car salesman, but as hardboiled and grease-stained as any junkyard man. The place made Frank feel even less sanguine; he had somehow assumed Dmitry was buying from a private seller. This establishment did not strike him as an arena of pure, honest dealing. The motorhome itself was unpromising, too, a boxy, trashy, corrugated mess, every screw and piece of trim sending a trail of rust stain into the washed-out brown and beige siding. It had seen quite a few better days.

  “I know you don’t believe me, Franky, but we will turn a profit on this crate,” Dmitry said as they finished signing all the papers in the distributor- and carburetor-strewn office. “We will make money. You will come out ahead.”

  “You know that every scam ever perpetrated throughout human history came with that assurance.”

  “Yes, Franky, but so has every excellent business offering. It’s what you call the narcissism of small differences, isn’t it.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said.

  “Well I’m sure one of your philosophers or another can explain it — the same phrase meaning two opposite things.”

  He wasn’t listening. He figured he was safe enough, moneywise. The three weeks’ pay would cover the insurance and few payments, and if Dmitry absconded and nobody ever saw him or the crate again, he could report it stolen and let the insurance company pay off the loan, since everything was in his name. He still felt like an idiot, but not a panicked idiot.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Frank said to himself.

  “Don’t say that, Franky. You know if you find the right quote to describe it you’ll feel fine about everything. What about Emerson and the hobgoblins?”

  Was he fucking with him? Frank had started walking back to the van, but stopped and turned to face him. The junkman was already back in his little shed office, about to celebrate gouging them with a little dance, Frank assumed, or call his friends in the beat-up car business — you’ll never believe…!

  “That Emerson quote is about consistency, not contradictory meanings. And foolish consistency at that,” he said, “Nothing to do with this.” But then he couldn’t help himself and muttered under his breath as he turned back toward the van: “Blaise Pascal: Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”

  “See that?” He called after Frank. “Don’t you feel better?”

  “Would you please get back,” he said, getting in the van. “And do a little fucking work?”

  There was a fringe benefit. They parked
the battered thing on the concrete pad poured for the garage, and began to live in it, using its bathroom and shower instead of going to the pond, making their meals in its kitchen. Dmitry insisted that Frank take the big bed in the back, while he slept in the loft over the front seats. Frank started to think maybe he’d keep it when Dmitry got back, live in it himself until this house was done, and the next one, sell it later. They ate their meals in the dining room, with a nice view off the ridge, and even though there was a slight noxiousness drafting from the blue-chemical toilet while they slept, it was a big jump up, odor-wise, from the tent. Really living.

  Until, that is, Paul and Margie came up on Saturday.

  “What is that horrible thing?” Margie asked, and, being a witch, her brief magical incantation transformed their palatial yacht, their luxurious sanctuary, back into the shabby eyesore it was. She walked around it, then stood tapping her foot — her trademark move — finally stooping down to look under it.

  “Oh my god!” she screamed. “It’s leaking!”

  They all got down and looked, and there was a thin stream of blue liquid running across the concrete, caused by a slow drip from the sewage tank. Frank grabbed a cement-mixing tray to catch the drips, sliding it under.

  “No way,” Margie said.

  “No way what?” Frank said.

  “No way you’re leaving that disgusting thing on my garage floor.”

  “Dmitry,” he said. “Bring the hose over and flush the floor down, OK?”

  “Hey yeah no really,” he said. “And Margaret, please allow me to express my most profound apologies for this horrid defacement of the beautifully virginal concrete surface of your future garage floor. Had I had even the slightest of premonitions —”

  “Dmitry, would you give me a fucking break?” she said, quietly, and hung her head. They all looked at each other. She never swore, and she never backed down. Had he actually broken her?