We cursed the mail. Why couldn’t these words of wisdom have gotten here three hundred and nineteen bucks ago?
On Monday morning, I was taking a shower, trying to conserve soap when, through the shower curtain, I thought I spotted movement out on the fire escape. Shocked, I turned off the water, wrapped myself in a towel, and jumped out of the tub. I watched in horror as the air conditioner was lifted out of the window, and a hairy arm, big as a tree trunk, reached in and flipped the lock.
My mind screamed, “Help! Police!” but nothing came out of my mouth. I stood there cowering as the window was raised, and in climbed the biggest guy I’d ever seen. He looked at me with blazing eyes, and roared:
“You’ve got five seconds to get out of Joe Cardone’s apartment! After that you’re going to start having bad luck!”
That’s when I recognized the intruder. Semi-relief flooded over me. It wasn’t a burglar. It was worse. Whenever Joe wanted to scare me, he’d tell stories about his craziest friend, a guy named Rootbeer Racinette, who was half man, half Bigfoot. I’d always figured he was exaggerating until this very moment. The person standing before me was almost seven feet tall, and his long black hair and beard looked as though he’d just stuck his finger in an electric socket. There was no doubt about it. The man, the myth, the legend, Rootbeer Racinette, had surfaced in our toilet.
“I’m Jason,” I said in a small voice. “Joe’s brother. Are you — uh —?” For some reason, I had trouble making my mouth form the word — “Rootbeer?”
“Jason! Yeah!” He gave me a “friendly” slap on the back that sent me reeling into the wall. “I thought someone broke into Joe’s place. It’s not that hard, you know.”
I watched him replace the air conditioner with one hand. It had taken all three of us forty-five minutes to get it from the closet to the window.
“Well, I was kind of scared at first,” I said with a nervous laugh. “We’ve had some crime in the neighborhood. Joe’s car’s been stolen.”
Rootbeer looked shocked. “Already? I just parked it two minutes ago!”
I looked out to Pitt Street. There, in front of the deli, was the Camaro, gleaming like an aerodynamic black hole. “You had it?”
“Sure. Joe and I are really tight. We share everything. I grabbed the Camaro and took a spin down to Florida. I had some business to take care of with this guy and, wouldn’t you know it, he had bad luck.”
“But we had the keys!”
Rootbeer shrugged. “Oh yeah. Keys. Never use ’em.”
I glanced at the window. “I can see that.”
Rootbeer reached into his shirt, actually a voluminous poncho, and pulled out a crumpled paper grocery bag. “Where should I put my luggage?”
Life did this to you every so often. Here I was, so happy that the car wasn’t stolen after all — I could have danced a jig, except my towel would have fallen off. How long did I get to enjoy this bliss? Less than thirty seconds before being hit with the news that this ponchoed grizzly bear was moving in.
I cleared my throat very carefully. “Uh — just how long are you planning to stay?”
Rootbeer stuck his great ugly face into his paper bag and counted up his underwear. “Four pairs. Yup. I’m here from now on.”
At that moment, there was an insistent knocking at the door. “Quit talking to yourself, Jason, and let me into the can before I bust a gut!”
Rootbeer flung the door wide, and Don jumped back with a gasp. Even the unflappable Peach was staring at me as if to say, “You went into the bathroom to take a shower, and this came up out of the drain, right?”
“Ferguson, Don, this is Rootbeer Racinette. Uh — he brought the car back. Isn’t that great?”
Rootbeer chased down my two roommates and awarded each one the how-do-you-do wallop. “Any pals of Joe Cardone’s brother are pals of mine.”
Poor Ferguson and Don alternated between terror and confusion.
“He’s Joe’s friend,” I supplied.
“I’m here to make a change,” Rootbeer announced. “My old job really took a lot out of me.”
“What line of work are you thinking of getting into?” asked Don with a quiver in his voice.
“None,” said Rootbeer honestly. “See, that was my whole problem. The same job, day in, day out, no excitement, no variety.”
“What did you do?” ventured the Peach.
“I wrestled alligators. Don’t try it. What a grind.”
The three of us all agreed to take Rootbeer’s advice.
Our new roommate yawned and stretched, which was a sight I won’t attempt to describe. “Well, I’m going to crash for a while,” he said, then threw himself down on the floor, and fell asleep instantly.
There was a second’s pause, and then a mad scramble for the bathroom. The idea was that the first guy washed and dressed would be the first guy out of the apartment. Don beat us there, slammed the door, and locked it.
“No fair!” said Ferguson. “You said you wanted to sleep in this morning.”
“I’ve got to go to work!” came Don’s voice through the door.
“You don’t have a job,” I retorted. I didn’t, either, but who was thinking straight?
“Yeah, but I have to find one. I want to start pounding the pavement at nine sharp.”
“He’s just scared,” I told Ferguson.
“I don’t blame him.”
Rootbeer slumbered on, his poncho draped around him like a blanket. It was a patchwork affair, made of what looked like old flannel pajamas, and it was big enough for two of him. I laughed nervously. What a concept! Two of Rootbeer would get its own area code from the phone company. Three of Rootbeer — well, I didn’t know too much about physics, but three might have so much gravitational attraction that his atoms would collapse in on each other, and he would achieve critical mass — a tiny neutron star in a poncho.
The summer was heating up, but even as the mercury crawled past 95° F, Don and I stayed away from the nice cool apartment. We bought a Toronto Star, and found a reasonably shaded park bench on which to begin our job search.
We never got to the want ads. En route to the classifieds, a headline caught my eye:
ALLIGATOR TYCOON’S BMW THROWN IN EVERGLADES
“Rootbeer!” I blurted out.
Don jumped. “Where?”
“This article! It’s him!”
The piece stated that the disgruntled employee suspected of being the culprit was an alligator wrestler fired for being too hard on the alligators.
“I don’t like this, Jason,” quavered Don. “Maybe Joe could kick him out. Call Europe.”
I had to laugh. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Hello, Europe? Could you please put Joe Cardone on?’ And even if I could reach Joe, then what? He’s the idiot who invited Rootbeer in the first place. He probably said ‘Come anytime,’ and forgot to mention he’d be gone all summer. Knowing Joe, he gave the guy carte blanche — the place, the car, us — let’s hope Rootbeer doesn’t believe in human sacrifice.”
Don slapped the paper. “Look what he does when he’s disgruntled! Can you imagine when he gets really mad? It’s bound to happen! Nobody stays gruntled forever!”
“Look,” I said, “pretty soon we’ll both be working, so we’ll only be hanging around the place at night. Rootbeer’ll be doing his own thing, and we’ll hardly ever see him. For all we know, he might pick up and blow off to Florida or somewhere again. Joe always talked about Rootbeer being flaky. So don’t worry about it.”
I sounded confident, but that still didn’t give me the guts to go into the apartment. For lunch, we split a small order of McDonald’s french fries, all we could afford on $5.83 per person per week. Between the hunger and the heat, we were limp as rags by the time Ferguson stepped off the Bathurst streetcar and found us sitting on the front stoop.
“Just enjoying the sunshine,” Don told him.
“Oh sure,” said the Peach. “And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that you don’t want any
one-on-one with our guest, Mr. Racinette.”
There’s safety in numbers, and we had as many as we were going to get. I’d have felt a little more secure being backed up by a crack platoon of Marines, but there are times you just have to go for it. Besides, if we didn’t eat something, Don and I were going to faint. “Let’s get up there! I’m starved!”
We paused to watch Plotnick burst out and net a hubcap from a speeding station wagon.
I waved. “Nice catch.”
Waddling back to the deli, our landlord scowled at me. “Mr. Cardone, I don’t want to mix in, but I think you should know there’s a gorilla in your apartment. Remember, no pets.”
“Come on, Mr. Plotnick,” I said, “you know it’s a person.”
“That’s your opinion,” said Plotnick. “Another houseguest?”
I nodded.
“What a host you are, Mr. Cardone. Just so you know, when I open my hotel, I’m going to start charging by the head.”
We ran upstairs, but paused before opening the door. I was in agony. What if that lunatic had trashed the apartment? I clicked the lock, and we went inside. The place looked exactly as it had when we’d left this morning, only Rootbeer had picked himself up off the floor, and was seated on the couch, watching television.
He looked up at us. “Hi. I hope you don’t mind. I ate your food.”
“No problem,” I said. “There’s plenty for everybody.” Ravenously I went to the kitchen to investigate the prospects for dinner. That’s when I found out that when Rootbeer Racinette eats your food, he really eats your food. All of it, right down to the last cracker. Even Mrs. Peach’s bran hockey pucks were gone. We were bare to the walls.
“Uh — Rootbeer,” I said cautiously, “what happened to all the food?”
“I ate it. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“But we had eight cans of soup,” I protested.
Rootbeer rubbed an area at the vague epicenter of the poncho. “I love soup.”
I began opening cupboards at random. Even the salt and pepper shakers were empty. Don and Ferguson were in the kitchen, too, now, searching.
“What about the cereal?” lamented Don, who had gotten the smaller half of our lunch fries. “We had Snappy-Wappies! We had Toasty-Flakes!”
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” said Rootbeer. He stood up, his face all concern. “Hey, this isn’t a problem, is it?”
“Well,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I didn’t want to insult Rootbeer and end up with that alligator guy’s BMW — at the bottom of the Everglades. “You kind of caught us on a bad week. The fact is, we’re all flat broke. We were depending on this food to last till payday.”
“Okay,” said Rootbeer cheerfully, “I’m broke, too. I guess I’ll have to work.”
Ferguson risked a complaint. “Your getting a job won’t help us now. We have no dinner.”
“Yeah, I feel bad about that,” said Rootbeer. “You guys are going to have to hang out for a couple of hours.”
A terrible hush fell over the three of us. What kind of job, lasting a couple of hours and yielding instant cash, could Rootbeer be talking about? It didn’t make us any more confident when he said he had to wait until it got dark. But how could we face him and say, “Rootbeer, which bank are you going to knock off?” because on the chance, however slight, that his plans were lawful and honest, he’d be pretty insulted. And even though we’d only just met him this morning, we’d already learned that people who insulted Rootbeer Racinette invariably ran into bad luck.
“I’ll need one of you to come with me,” Rootbeer announced when the sun began to set.
That did it. Don suddenly developed a terrible headache, and Ferguson locked himself in the bathroom, obviously with no intention of coming out. I could have made a fuss, demanded we draw straws or flip a coin, but I didn’t. It was Joe’s apartment and Joe’s friend, and the job of going with him fell to me.
Just before nine, Rootbeer declared the time was right. I followed him, my empty stomach rumbling ominously, as though it knew that my next meal was going to be served at Chez Penitentiary, on a tin plate.
We got into the car, and Rootbeer drove at a hundred miles an hour to an area of town even seedier than Pitt Street, if such a thing was possible. We parked in front of an old building that was in the process of either being torn down or collapsing, and Rootbeer started rummaging through the pile of debris, coming up with a long rotted two-by-four. This he carried over his shoulder, like a soldier with an eight-foot rifle, to a dumpy establishment on the corner with a neon sign that just read Bar.
“Wait here,” he told me, and disappeared inside.
About five seconds later, a booming voice bellowed, “Twenty bucks says you can’t hurt me with a shot in the stomach with this two-by-four!”
I almost died. There was a roar of enthusiasm from the bar, and out onto the street poured eighteen people, Rootbeer in the lead. He collected twenty dollars each from the participants, who were in a spirited argument over who would get to swing the heavy piece of lumber.
He handed the money to me. “Hold this.”
“For God’s sake, Rootbeer,” I quavered, “you can’t go through with this! You’ll get killed! Not to mention if we lose, we can’t pay off five cents of that money!”
“Not so loud!” whispered Rootbeer. “People don’t like to bet when they know there’s no money to pay them. They get mad.”
By this time, the eighteen were taking practice swings with the two-by-four. The whistle of the board through the air was making me queasy, and I watched in a daze as the group elected some guy who had once tried out for the Yankees to take the home run swing.
There are times in your life when you see something so totally amazing you forget how scared you are and try to make the moment last, because you know you’ll never see anything quite like it again. Whenever I think back to that night, I always see it in super slo-mo, although it was really over in a flash. Rootbeer stood there like a mighty redwood, feet planted, stomach tense under his poncho. The almost-Yankee swung for the upper deck. The board slammed into Rootbeer’s abdomen with a thump that echoed through the streets. The wood splintered. I felt the sidewalk lurch, but Rootbeer didn’t move. He didn’t even flinch.
He started to whistle, and glanced around the circle of shocked faces. “Nice meeting everybody. We’d better get going. ’Bye.”
The three of us, me, Rootbeer, and the money, climbed back into the Camaro. Rootbeer indicated that I should drive, and I was overjoyed to take off out of there. Neither of us spoke, so I figured I had to break the ice.
“Rootbeer, that was amazing —”
“Aaaahhh!!!” he shrieked in a bone-chilling voice that nearly put me up a telephone pole. “Are you okay?”
“Aaaahhh!!!”
Now I knew why he’d needed one of us to go with him. Somebody had to do the driving while he screamed.
“Aaaahhh!!!”
He indicated by sign language that I should pull in at a grocery store, and sent me in to shop while he remained in the car, howling. Even in the frozen food section, over the Muzak, I could hear the echoes from the parking lot. About ten minutes later, Rootbeer joined me, cheerful as ever, as though he hadn’t been in the throes of agony thirty seconds ago. We bought $150 worth of groceries — enough to last even Rootbeer until Friday.
“What happened?” asked Don when we got back.
A five-hour explanation formed in my head. “Nothing,” I said. They wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.
* * *
The next morning we awoke to find Rootbeer Racinette lying dead on the floor.
We didn’t even know at first, because he always flopped down to sleep wherever he happened to be standing. So we tiptoed around, careful not to wake him up as we showered and dressed.
“At least he isn’t snoring,” whispered Don. “Did you hear him last night? I thought the building was going to come down. The Phantom was knocking on the wall
.”
The Peach bent over Rootbeer. “The reason he isn’t snoring,” he said, his face pale, “is because he isn’t breathing.”
We freaked out. The three of us crawled all over Rootbeer, poking, and prodding, and feeling for a heartbeat that wasn’t there. He was dead as a mackerel.
I admit it. I burst into tears, blubbering out the whole story of last night. “It’s all my fault!” I wailed. “If I’d stopped him, he’d be alive now! Joe would have stopped him! But I let him do it! And now he’s dead, because of internal injuries or something! What are we going to do?”
Ferguson shook his head. “Call the police, of course.”
“No police!” came a howl through the ventilation duct. This was followed by pounding footsteps on the stairs, and then Plotnick burst onto the scene, red-faced and wild-eyed.
He took in the situation with a horrified gasp. “Oy! How could this happen to me?”
“To you?!” I shrieked. “To you?! A guy is dead!”
“Okay, okay,” said Plotnick. “We’re in this together. We need to be reasonable. Let me think.” His brow furrowed, and unfurrowed. “All right. Take him out, throw him in a field, and to hell with him, God rest his soul!”
I was horrified. “We can’t do that!”
“Yes we can. I don’t want hassles over this. First police, then the coroner, then the reporters — no. Not in my building.”
“Look, Mr. Plotnick,” I argued, “if we throw the body in a field, the police will suspect foul play. When they trace it, they won’t just hassle us. They’ll toss us in jail!”
“I’m an old man,” Plotnick shrugged. “Maybe by the time they trace it, I’ll be dead.”
But by then, the Peach had already dialed 911, and the police were on their way.
The next hour was a nightmare. I must have told the story about the two-by-four twenty times, first to the police, then to the reporters, then to our fellow tenants. Plotnick went to lie down, and the officers, seeing an elderly man obviously overcome by emotion, were brief and kind. They assumed that he was upset over the untimely death, never guessing that his collapse was due to their own presence.
Losing Joe's Place Page 5
