Chapter 4
The humidity still hadn’t lifted when John made it home. He climbed the three floors to his apartment and let himself into the one-bedroom sauna, what it felt like, then went straight to the bedroom where he turned the air conditioner on high. He stood in front of it with his eyes closed a few minutes before retreating to the bathroom.
He let the cold water run in the shower while he thought about the bills he had to pay in the morning, but wasn’t sure his checking account could cover. He used the toilet and listed the bills off in his head: rent, electric, telephone, life insurance.
John knew he had six hundred to cover the rent, electric, and telephone, but he’d be short on his life insurance. The six-month premium had gone up to eighty dollars. He had ninety-five in cash on him and there might be sixteen left over in the checking. He would get paid from the car service, at least his tips, if he drove tomorrow afternoon, but then he’d have to hustle to an insurance branch that would take payment before they closed or get hit with a late fee.
He tried not to think about it as he stepped under the cool water. He stood there as long as he could take it, then turned the water from cold to hot and tilted his head back to let the spray soothe his scalp.
John was exhausted after another twenty-hour day. He wondered about the waitress and if she was just as tired being on her feet all day as he was sitting in a car. He wondered if she was showering now, too, and what she looked like naked and whether or not they’d be compatible in bed if he ever got that lucky.
When he was relaxed enough, John turned the shower off and stepped out of the tub. He saw his reflection in the mirror hanging from the back of the bathroom door and thought about his unwanted nickname, Johnny Porno. The thought made him frown.
He examined his reflection and noticed he was starting to gain weight. He’d never been close to two hundred pounds before, but was thinking he was already there or damn close to it. He had retained some muscle definition working construction, but there were love handles now he hadn’t noticed before. He turned sideways and saw it was worse than he’d thought. A small pouch had started above his waist.
He dried his head, chest and legs, then his arms and hair again as he made his way to the kitchen. He checked the fridge for something to snack on and enjoyed the cool he felt with the door open. There was leftover macaroni his mother had given him, a slice of cold pizza and half of a turkey sandwich.
He decided against eating and made a drink instead. He poured from a bottle of cheap gin, nearly filling a highball glass. He added a few ice cubes from the plastic tray he kept in the freezer. He used flat tonic water from a bottle he’d left open on the counter two days ago; there was hardly any fizz when he mixed the drink.
John sat at the kitchen table and did the math between his checking account and bills on the white margin space along the cover page of the Daily News. He added the figures twice each and frowned at the result. He had been right about the leftover sixteen dollars. If he got an advance for driving the next day, he could pay his backed-up child support and the life insurance and still have two, maybe three dollars until Wednesday.
He drank deep from the highball glass. Less than a year ago he could afford to pay for his life and still have a few extra bucks to take his son to a baseball game. Last year he’d had enough to buy the kid the bike with the banana seat he’d asked for.
So far this year all he’d done that was close to special was take his son to the official opening of the World Trade Center back in April. He had wanted to take him to the opening-day game at Yankee Stadium to see the first ever designated-hitter game, but April 6 had been a Friday and the same night he had started his job counting the number of men that showed up to see Deep Throat at theaters on Long Island.
In two months the kid would be ten. John felt guilty thinking about his son. Sometimes the guilt was overwhelming. He did his best to think of something else and glanced at the headlines about a plot to kill President Nixon. He read some of the article, saw it was an ex-cop the Secret Service suspected in New Orleans, a guy nicknamed Punchy. John thought about Nick Santorra and thought Punchy might be a good name for him, too.
He took another long drink, refilled the glass with gin, added another ice cube and stood up. He used his free hand to carry one of his two kitchen chairs into the bedroom. He set it down facing the stream of cold air blowing from the air conditioner, sat, closed his eyes and drank deep again.
Tomorrow was another day.
* * * *
Louis fell asleep watching a World War II documentary. Holly woke him at two when she called from the Port Washington train station to tell him she was on her way. She called again a few minutes later to make sure he was still awake and Louis told her he was and that he would be waiting for her at the Woodhaven Boulevard subway stop. Then he put his head back down on the pillow and fell asleep.
He woke again nearly an hour later. He saw the time, threw on some clothes and rushed out to his car. He ran two lights to make up time, but a tow truck pulling a car away from an accident on Metropolitan Avenue cost him five minutes.
He was at least half an hour late when he spotted Holly standing at the curb on Woodhaven Boulevard with her arms folded across her chest. Louis beeped the horn and flashed his lights. Holly didn’t acknowledge him. He called to her after making a U-turn at the next light and she barely turned her head.
When he pulled up to the curb, Holly was glaring at him. He leaned across the bench seat and opened the passenger door. She ignored him another few seconds before finally getting in.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He tried to kiss her and was rebuffed when she pulled away.
“I thought I turned the alarm clock on, but it didn’t go off,” he said. “You waiting long?”
Holly glared harder at him.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“I’m out here alone at three-thirty in the morning,” she finally said. “And I called you this afternoon.”
“I wasn’t home.”
“Bullshit.”
“I wasn’t. I was out doing privates.”
“Yeah, your ex-wife’s probably.”
The problem with telling a new girlfriend too much about an ex-wife, even when accusing the ex of being a first-class bitch, was they gathered all that information and stored it. Louis had met Holly a few months ago, but she had already become suspicious of his relationship with Nancy.
“Don’t be like that,” he said. “I was working, I swear.”
Holly had turned in the seat so her back was flush against the door. She was a tall, thin girl with a pretty face, perky rump, long legs, blue eyes and long blonde hair. Model material, Louis had thought the first time he saw her.
“What?” he said. “I said I’m sorry. I overslept.”
“I thought the alarm didn’t go off?”
“What? Shit, Holly, gimme a break.”
Holly faced front again. “You working in the morning?”
“Yeah, but not windows. Something else.”
“Can I at least sleep in? I don’t have class until the afternoon.”
“What, I’m gonna throw you out?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t answer my call, you didn’t bother waking up, I know that much.”
It wasn’t going to be easy talking her into anything tonight. He might as well give it up and try again tomorrow, Louis was thinking, except he had to be ready at a moment’s notice if he intended to rob Nancy’s ex-husband of all that cash he was collecting from that porn movie. Louis was hoping to work Holly somewhere in his game plan.
“Look, I’m sorry. I really am, okay?”
“You’re saying that a lot tonight.”
And he’d keep saying it if it eventually got her to help him. Holly Nordstram was a former runner-up Miss Oklahoma, was from a good family and was a firm believer in hard work and education. In fact, it was Holly’s work ethic that first attracted her to Louis. When he showed up to c
lean the windows at an acting studio where she was attending a workshop and he complained bitterly about the job being neglected, she assumed the neglect was the fault of another window-cleaner. Rather than clearing up the misunderstanding, Louis got her number. That had been three months ago. Now that she’d been living in the big city and probably learning the ropes a lot faster than she ever could in Oklahoma, he was afraid of losing her confidence.
“I say it because I mean it,” he told her. “I’m sorry if I’m busy trying to make ends meet, Holly, but I don’t have a choice. I wasn’t smart like you. I didn’t take school seriously. I have to work for a living.”
She fell silent. At this point in their relationship Louis knew how to tap into her upper-middle-class guilt. They were nearly back to his apartment when she finally spoke again.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I know you work hard. I shouldn’t get upset.”
Bingo, he was thinking. Maybe the time was right after all. The feminist cause du jour had become pornography. Holly and her young, affluent friends were enthusiastically riding the anti-porn bandwagon. He would have to work with her recent musings against pornography and try to convince her that Nancy’s ex-husband was somehow connected to the movie Deep Throat; that she’d be doing her fellow sisters in feminism a solid by helping him rip John Albano off. Holly and her friends had recently spent an afternoon protesting in front of one of the porn theaters on Forty-second Street.
“It’s nothing I’m proud of,” he said. “Being another working slob, but it’s what I do and I have to make the best of it when there’s extra work.”
“You’re not a slob for working hard, Louis, don’t say that.”
It wouldn’t be easy getting her to go along with a robbery, but Louis had learned a long time ago the way to a woman’s heart was with compliments.
“I tell you how pretty you look today?”
“No, but thank you.”
“I tell you how much I missed you?”
“No, and I wouldn’t believe it because you were sleeping.”
He held up a finger. “Unless I was dreaming about you.”
“Sure,” she said. “Can we stop for some pop?”
“What?”
“Soda. Do you have any in the fridge?”
“Coke, I think. I’m not sure. I’ll go get some if I don’t. I need to get you to forgive me tonight.”
“If you’re looking for sex, it won’t be that easy.”
“I’m always looking for sex with you, honey.”
“When it’s convenient, it seems.”
“Come on, Holly,” Louis said. He matched her frown with one of his own, then said, “What if I had a proposition that involves acting?”
Holly made a face.
“I’m talking about helping the cause,” he continued. “Your cause against pornography.”
Holly seemed skeptical.
Louis turned onto the street where he lived and parked in front of the apartment building. Then he turned to Holly, took her hands in his and explained some of his game plan.
* * * *
Nick Santorra was in a foul mood when he finally made it home. It had been a bad day that turned worse from the moment he left the house a few minutes after noon. First there was the speeding ticket he got on the Cross Island Parkway. Twenty minutes later he got another one on the Belt Parkway. Both tickets had come as a result of Nick’s new job chauffeuring Eddie Vento, who happened to be a skipper with the Vignieri crime family and his wife’s first cousin’s husband. Nick had joined Vento’s ranks with the hope of becoming a made man himself one day. After two years of performing gopher work for the mob and having to fork over most of what he earned on his own for the sake of a no-show truck driving job, Nick had finally moved up, the way he viewed the driving job.
Except so far it wasn’t all that glamorous, his new position. Today Nick had to pick up his boss’s dry cleaning and then chauffeur Vento’s wife back and forth to local stores. She was shopping for her daughter’s engagement party, something else that would cost Nick another fifty dollars in a couple of weeks.
Then he was stuck at the bar in Williamsburg doing the tally count for the fuck movie he was sick and tired of already. Even though it was the only chance he got to abuse somebody lower on the mob food chain, it was a lot of work counting all that money and having to deal with guys who would steal from their mothers.
After the tally count at the bar and after Vento held a private meeting in the basement with some Irish kid Nick didn’t like, he drove the drunken wiseguy to make a few pickups in Queens where he was stuck sitting in the car while mobsters exchanged cheek kisses and bear hugs ten feet away without ever acknowledging his existence. Then Vento insisted on stopping to see one of his girlfriends to get his pipes cleaned and that had taken almost an hour. Afterwards the wiseguy decided he wanted a piece of cheesecake at some diner in Queens and Nick was stuck being his company for that, too.
It was at the diner where the tension bubbled over and Nick lost it, first on a waitress and then with the cashier when a ten-cent charge wasn’t removed for a cup of coffee he never drank. Vento gave him shit for it later when they were in the parking lot, telling Nick he couldn’t curse like that in a room full of people because it made them look bad.
“What’s the matter with you?” Vento had told him. “First of all you don’t act like that in a public place. Second, you don’t talk like that to some broad unless she’s your girlfriend. You wanna act like a tough guy, save it for the street.”
Nick had been dumbfounded at the lecture. He’d been trying to impress Vento since he first went to work for him and was sure he’d started to make some headway when he was told he’d be the wiseguy’s new driver. Vento’s regular driver was serving a two-year sentence for assault. Nick had thought the move from flunky to personal driver was a big deal and had even taken his wife out to celebrate.
He’d since found out the road to becoming a made man was a lot bumpier than he’d originally thought. Being Eddie Vento’s personal driver wasn’t half as glamorous as Nick had imagined. All he’d done so far was pick up dry cleaning and make shopping runs. He’d become a glorified gopher subject to Eddie Vento’s vitriolic temper tantrums and the man could go from calm to insane in two seconds flat. When that happened, there was nothing Nick could say or do to avoid the berating he’d get for putting or not putting on a turn signal.
Nick found himself catching a lot more flack than he’d ever caught before and was starting to wonder if or when it would be worth it because he was still bringing home peanuts in salary for all the aggravation he was getting. He wondered if the driver he was replacing maybe had it better serving out the assault conviction up in Fishkill.
When he finally dropped the wiseguy off, it was close to one o’clock in the morning, but before Vento let Nick go, he had him haul six cartons out of his basement.
It was then the abuse and humiliation had been stretched an extra yard his ego didn’t have to spare; when Vento told him what was inside the cartons.
“Posters and panties,” the wiseguy had said.
Vento wanted them distributed where they were showing the fuck movie, Deep Throat. Nick resented it. He knew the big shots were making big money off the porn flick while guys like him were picking up crumbs for all their work.
“What you’re gonna do is take those home and have them signed, the panties and the posters,” Vento had said. “Sign them Linda Lovelace and have the guys running the movie sell them off as specialty items. Fi’ dollas for the panties and two for the posters. They keep a quarter on whatever they sell. We get the rest.”
“Panties?”
“Just make sure the same person signs them all the same way. Or the mopes might figure out they’re fugazy.”
Now, sitting at the dining room table, his hand cramping from signing poster after poster, Nick felt stupid.
Earlier he’d asked his wife to help, but Angela freaked out when she saw the posters were o
f Linda Lovelace and that the panties were supposed to be from the porno flick.
“That’s disgusting,” she had told Nick. “That woman should be in jail and so should you for selling that shit.”
Nick hadn’t had the energy to fight with her then. He let it go and started signing the posters instead. It was a time-consuming process during which he had to pull the plastic sleeve off each one, unroll it, then sign and re-roll it before slipping the sleeve back on.
It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when Angela awoke to use the bathroom and saw the dining room light was still on. She saw Nick was still working and said, “How long you gonna do this? It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“As long as it takes,” Nick said. “You could’ve helped me, you know.”
“With that filth? You better get if off the table before the kids wake up.”
“You could help me do that at least.”
“No thank you, I gotta get up in the morning. I don’t have the luxury of sleeping until noon.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Or getting off your ass once you’re awake.”
Angela flipped him the bird.
Nick considered telling her to go fuck her mother’s cunt, the words were right there on the tip of his tongue, but then he thought about the lecture he’d gotten from Eddie Vento and kept his mouth shut.
Chapter 5
John was up early when a fuse blew. Without air conditioning the apartment had turned into a sweatbox.
He showered with cold water while a pot of coffee brewed on the stove. He dressed quickly and left the apartment twenty minutes later, his shirt sweat-stained before he was in his car. Rather than waste the morning, he showed up to work early and was lucky when a call for an airport run turned up. John’s good fortune continued at the airport, where he caught a return fare into Manhattan he didn’t have to report.
He worked steady the rest of the morning into the early afternoon and was able to stop at an insurance office to make the payment on his life insurance policy. He mailed the rest of the bills he’d written checks for and was thinking he might not have to ask for an advance to pay the backed-up child support when the afternoon fares dried up in spite of a few rain showers. Then he had to shell out close to five dollars to fill his gas tank and by three o’clock he was down to thirteen dollars. He owed his ex-wife seventy.
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