A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  “Nez tells the general manager everything. The general manager hooks up with a waitress who works here in the evening. She’s a terrible gossip. So she plies him like I think that you may be plying me. Except that he gets laid. And then she goes and tells everyone here what he told her,” Braden pointed out.

  “I can’t help it if she’s not very good at it,” I decided. “But isn’t that grossly unethical? A person in management sleeping with someone they’re supervising?”

  Braden looked at me like I was a natural born fool and said, “You’ve never worked in the service industry, have you?”

  “Do you think that the gossip is right? Have you witnessed anything personally that would confirm that Nez is a drug smuggler?” I followed up.

  “I think it’s right,” Braden nodded.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Nez is the only non-white person I’ve ever met who likes Jimmy Buffet,” Braden nodded knowingly.

  “Liking Jimmy Buffet is not evidence of a crime,” I replied. “At least, not always…I think.”

  “Yes, but it’s the song that he likes. I think that it’s called ‘A Pirate Looks at 40’. When he’s drunk, he’ll sit in his office and listen to it at absolute top volume over and over again. And one time he…Nez is a completely unpredictable drunk. He can be a total prick. He can be completely buddy buddy. Or he can swing rapidly back and forth between the two or like a hundred other personalities.

  But one day he was totally buddy buddy. I was in the back store room by his office. While I was back there, I could hear him listening to the song that I think is called ‘A Pirate Looks at 40’ and singing along with it…horribly, over and over again. But he just happened to peek out of his office as I walked out into the hall.

  ‘Braden!’ he blurted. ‘Come here!’

  I really didn’t want to get involved, but it was obvious that I had no choice.

  Nez staggered up to me, put his arm around me, and said, ‘I love you, brother! Come into the office for a second.’

  He dragged me into the office with him.

  He was on fire. His eyes were bloodshot and fevered. He looked like a mad dog.

  ‘You know, Braden, I think that you can tell a lot about a man by his favorite song,’ he nodded like that was some dope wisdom.

  ‘You know what my favorite song is, Braden?’ Nez asked.

  Of course I knew. I had heard it a hundred times blaring out of the office when he was drunk. I just didn’t want to reveal that I didn’t know the name of his favorite song, fearing that would turn him into an asshole. So I shrugged my shoulders.

  He said, ‘(I think.) It’s called “A Pirate Looks at 40”. Jimmy Buffet. You know Jimmy Buffet, right?’

  Of course I lied.

  He played the song. In that office it was so loud that my ears were ringing afterward. But he paused like midway into the song.

  ‘This is my favorite verse,’ Nez slurred. Then he played it and sang along at the top of his lungs.

  I believe that verse was:

  ‘I’ve done a bit of smugglin’.

  I’ve run my share of grass.

  I made enough money to buy Miami,

  But I pissed it away so fast.’

  When the song was done, Nez put his arm around me and said, ‘It’s all true, Braden. I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away so fast. I mean. I guess not all of it. I’ve got this.’

  He gestured awkwardly around as if he was describing the whole building.

  So what do you make of that?” Braden challenged.

  “Have you ever known him to be a thief?” I asked.

  There was a long pause.

  “No,” Braden said.

  “Are you lying to me, Braden?” I looked askance.

  “Nope, never heard of him stealing. I don’t think he’s above it. I just think that he figured out that smuggling is easier,” Braden decided.

  “Thanks, Braden,” I concluded.

  Braden looked like he wanted to say something, but he just stood there, awkward and silent. Until he made a weird half bow, took my plate, and walked gingerly away like a kid carefully stepping on objects instead of a floor that’s lava.

  “The plot thickens,” Thad smiled at me.

  “Let’s go somewhere and get seafood,” I insisted. “This place is an abomination.”

  7

  Dave and his wife and Jace and her wife lumbered up the driveway in Jace’s minivan around nine in the morning the next day. It was the first time that I had met either Jace’s or Dave’s wife. And I must say, there must be something really attractive about a good sense of humor. Because I was surprised how pretty their wives were. And how young Dave’s was.

  My guess is that people think that he’s her dad all the time.

  It was good to see them. And it was good to have access to a vehicle again.

  We needed it.

  The first thing that Thad, Dave, Jace, and I did when they arrived at Farhad’s mansion was that we scoured the internet to see if we could find a bar trivia contest that the team could go to. The only one that was at all workable was in Fort Myers, across that now infamous (at least in my mind) Causeway. And it was scheduled for that very night.

  So we went out for an early dinner with everyone. (To The Island Cow of course. Thad had to show it off to the newbies.)

  We chatted and ate. In addition to being beautiful, the wives of Jace and Dave were also smart and witty. Like to the point where I would’ve felt intimidated around them if we were all single and on the prowl together. And I couldn’t figure out how such a young, vivacious, beautiful, and witty woman who seemed to have so much going for her could end up with a guy like Dave who was a dead ringer for a slightly younger, just beginning to gray version of David Cross.

  I wondered less about Jace. Probably because I’m not a lesbian, but it’s fifty-fifty to me if you asked me which one, between Dave and Jace, was more attractive. I know men have this idea of lesbians as two smoldering, exquisite young women who just can’t stop touching each other. But almost every straight woman I know thinks that if we had to go that way, we probably wouldn’t do it with some beautiful, young ingénue. We would probably pick a fairly masculine looking woman, or at least a kind of androgynous one. And I really didn’t doubt Jace’s ability, with her short spiked hair, her rugged jaw, and stocky physique, to attract some kind of beautiful, feminine lesbian.

  But Dave was just an old goat. What kind of girl has a pinup on their wall of David Cross? It boggled the mind.

  We dropped the wives off at the mansion after dinner. And we headed toward Fort Myers.

  “This should be like stealing candy from a baby,” Dave beamed in the captain’s chair next to me.

  “Totally,” Thad agreed. “Have you guys ever seen those Florida man stories?”

  “I saw one where a Florida man was high on meth, cut off his penis, and fed it to an alligator,” Jace said.

  “Yeah, he’s probably going to want that back after he comes down,” Dave observed.

  “I don’t know,” Thad objected. “Have you ever seen the castrati? Or people in cults who’ve been castrated? I’ve never seen a castrated man who didn’t look happier than the average man who has testicles.”

  “You’re right,” Jace noted. “I’ve studied cults intensively. I wrote several papers on them back in grad school. Castrated men usually look happier. I have the sneaking suspicion that the E Harmony guy has been castrated, but I can’t prove it.”

  “Maybe he’s just in love. Like really…creepy…want to wear my mate like a human suit kind of love,” Thad suggested.

  “I’ve never seen anyone who’s actually in love who looks that happy,” Jace shook her head up in the front passenger seat.

  “Exactly,” Dave agreed.

  “Maybe you guys just aren’t in love,” Thad suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Jace decided.

  “Yeah, it�
�s possible,” Dave admitted. “It’s also possible that I just still have my nads.”

  “Besides,” Jace pointed out. “I don’t think that they cut off the penis when they castrate someone in a cult. This Florida man is like a whole other independent level of drug fueled idiocy. I wonder what he was thinking when he made that decision.”

  “I think that alligator looks hungry,” Thad suggested.

  “It’s either my penis or the rest of me,” Dave suggested.

  “Quentzel the Alligator God demands a sacrifice,” Jace suggested.

  “What do you think?” Dave asked me.

  “I think that he had that ‘I’m going to cast off my burdens down by the riverside’ song playing in his head,” I replied.

  “That sounds the most plausible,” Dave decided.

  “The point is,” Jace insisted. “We are going to torch these dotards. This is going to be like a professional soccer team playing a group of kids who all still hover around the ball in a little hive. This is going to be like some kind of abuse. If there’s a modest cash prize we could be legally prosecuted for stealing from people who would be deemed mentally incompetent by a court of law in any other state. This is our time! This is our hour!”

  We cheered and said nothing else. What more needed to be said?

  The bar itself was pirate themed. And the patrons, at least the patrons who played bar trivia, took that as seriously as a heart attack. There were ten teams there besides us. And every last one of those teams had at least one member dressed in the frilly, ruffled, swashbuckling shirt, and/or the hat, and/or the faux parrot on the shoulder, and on and on.

  And the people there were nauseating and impossible. They all had to come up to us and say something like, “How arrrrrrgh you doing?” or call us, “scallywags”.

  The trash talk between teams, such an important part of any good bar trivia contest, had been reduced to stupid walk the plank statements masquerading as jokes. Although the other teams (many of them thoroughly lubed up) found them as funny as a toddler who just realized that they have the ability to say “butt”.

  We settled into our table. We prepared for our lucky pregame shot. It was Jace’s turn this time to call the shot.

  “These people are insufferable. We need to up the ante. Four Cuervos,” Jace told a waiter.

  Surprisingly no one objected. Well, maybe it wasn’t surprising. Jace was right. And we all knew it.

  They announced the rules of the trivia contest. There would be ten rounds of ten questions. We’d have to submit written answers. The whole team was allowed to work on every question together. The usual.

  The contest started with a math question. So I perked up.

  “What is the math term for the reciprocal of a cosine?” the proctor asked.

  Everybody looked at me.

  “Damn, that’s trig,” I pointed out. “It’s a secant, but that’s awfully tough for a first question.”

  “It’s a what?” Jace asked.

  “Secant,” I whispered again.

  “Here, you write it down,” Jace, who usually writes for us because she has the best handwriting, slid the slip of paper and pencil over to me.

  The next question was even more difficult, in my opinion. It was, “This best known picaresque work was extremely popular in its time, but its creator made very little money off of it, due in part to non-existent copyright laws.”

  Jace started writing right away.

  “What is it?” Thad whispered.

  “Don Quixote,” Jace whispered back.

  “I didn’t even realize that they were asking about a book,” Dave mused.

  I hadn’t either.

  The questions were extraordinarily difficult. And we missed a lot more than usual. Plus, we didn’t get a running tally of where we stood. We just turned in our ten answers each round and they got silently tabulated.

  I was shocked when we won second place and a fifty dollar gift card that would mostly cover our tab. We got seventy points. Third place only got fifty-three. First place, however got ninety-two!

  “We just got our asses whipped by a Florida man,” Thad pointed out.

  “Well, at least we still have our junk,” Dave replied.

  At that point, the most obnoxious group of pirates came over to our table, replete with “arrrrghs” and “mateys”. They weren’t just the most obnoxious group. They were also the oldest group. And the first place team.

  I expected them to stick to the pirate shtick, but they didn’t. They just asked what we did and where we were from.

  So we told them.

  “Wow!” the captain of the pirate team beamed. “Now I’m really impressed. We’ve never had anybody else score as high as you guys besides us. And this is tough competition. We’re all professors emeritus from Harvard. You beat the other Beanpot professors, Northeastern, BU, BC, and so on.”

  “So everybody here is from Boston?” Thad asked.

  “Yeah, this is a Boston area bar. You can see the Patriots here every Sunday. You can see a lot of the Boston area’s college football and basketball games here. Unfortunately, they don’t show Harvard as much as we would all like. Fort Myers is where the Red Sox go for spring training. Lot of Boston area people down here. Because the winter is just so damn bad. Probably not as bad as your home of Minnesnowta. Lot of people from Minnesnowta down here too. The Twins have their spring training in Fort Myers too, but this is a Boston area bar,” the man said.

  We exchanged a bit more small talk before those Harvard pirates finally went away.

  “I hate losing to Harvard. You know those guys think that they’re better than us,” Dave sighed.

  “They just kind of objectively, empirically proved that they are better than us,” Jace pointed out.

  “With their faux pirate nonsense,” Dave hissed. “Being a pirate was terrible. None of those posers have a gangrene limb that needs to be amputated by a sawbones as they bite on a strap. None of them have rickets or scurvy. One of them was a woman, and I don’t care what Hollywood says. There were no Keira Knightleys on pirate ships. If you were a pirate, you just hoped you weren’t the one who was pressed into being a bottom.”

  “Sounds like someone has been trying to start an authentic pirate cosplay group,” Thad smiled.

  “Yeah, but I can’t find anybody who’s willing to eat nothing but hardtack and develop beriberi,” Dave rejoined.

  By the next morning it was clear. Dave and Jace were with their partners in paradise and they wanted their own private little romantic vacations. And I totally understood. I certainly wouldn’t want to be hanging out with Dave, his back hair, and my lover if I had brought someone down here for a week of sun, sand, and romance. As much as I love Dave.

  So it quickly became obvious that, although it had weirdly never occurred to me until Dave and Jace and their spouses were at Farhad’s mansion, Thad and I would either be on our own or stuck as third or fifth wheels. I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s vacation. Thad didn’t either. So we made the decision that we would be a strange quasi couple for the rest of the trip.

  Thad and I made plans after Dave and Jace and their partners headed down to the beach. I tried to get Thad to go on a run on the beach with me. I told him you can do it barefoot. It’s great. I said that I’d go slow.

  He refused.

  Then I suggested that we sit on the beach after I was done with my run.

  “It’s too cold,” he shook his head.

  “What?” I guffawed.

  “It’s too cold. Look, I know I’m from Minnesota, but I brought nothing but tank tops, work shirts, and one nice, button down shirt for Farhad’s wedding. And it’s only supposed to get up to about sixty degrees today. It’s too cold for a tank top,” Thad insisted.

  “Thad,” I laughed. “Next time, pack one fewer pairs of shoes, and at least one long sleeve shirt and you’ll be fine. Besides, I can easily loan you a long sleeve shirt.”

  “No you can’t,” Thad declared.

&n
bsp; “This is America, Thad. It’s a free country, and I can give you a long sleeve shirt whenever I damn well feel like it,” I replied.

  “Don’t tread on you,” Thad chuckled.

  “Damn right,” I said.

  “Angie, I love you, but you’re impossible. You’re taller and slender and uber athletic and fit. I would look like I was pregnant and wearing hand me down maternity garments from my older, taller sister in one of your long sleeve ts,” Thad pointed out.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So, I’m not ruling out the possibility of meeting a guy down here, are you?” Thad demanded.

  I really didn’t see how being portly in a tank top was a better look, but I didn’t push the issue. We agreed that I would go on my run. Then I would go out to the beach. Meanwhile Thad was going to do a few little odds and ends repairs that he believed Farhad’s place could use. After that, we would meet for a drink for Thad, and lunch and a drink for me at South Seas Resort down the beach a little ways just before noon.

  So I ran. It was just perfect. It was cool. There was a light breeze. The ocean was this strange shade of almost jade out on the horizon, and even though I know a lot about science, I can’t figure out how that kind of optical illusion had been created.

  It was one of nature’s mysteries.

  Unfortunately, it’s hard to run and look to your right or your left the whole time. And the punishment for deviating a little off of the smooth, compacted sand is sure and swift and takes the form of seashell fragments. I have never seen as many seashells in my entire life as I see in twenty minutes on the beach in Sanibel. They’re just all over the place, and in every color of the rainbow from the orangish/pink of cooked salmon to a bold purple the color of the sky just before the first stars appear.

  I completed my run. I went home, changed, didn’t see Thad, but the house was big enough that I could’ve randomly wandered around for fifteen minutes and not found him.

  I went out to the beach. I brought the book that I had started on the plane. I don’t want to say what it was. Other than that it was one of those tawdry romantic thrillers. I don’t like to read anything serious on a plane. It’s just a waste. I get nervous every time that I fly. So, even in the airport, I don’t retain at least half of what I read. On the plane it’s worse. So romantic thrillers are perfect. You can read and remember like thirty percent of it and still know exactly what’s happening because there’s not a lot of mystery. From the beginning you pretty much know what’s going to happen. But they’re like soap operas. If you give them some time, then you feel like you have to know how they turn out. Even if you already kind of know how they’re going to turn out.