If he wanted to.
Which he didn’t.
Marcus was in shock. He left moments after the women, and found himself back at his car having no idea how he’d gotten there, because he’d been thinking about his grandfather.
When Marcus was ten years old, his paternal grandmother died and his grandfather Mickey moved in with the family. He had been a stevedore on the Dublin waterfront and made it to America on a freighter, sailing halfway around the world before landing in Long Beach. He found his way to San Pedro, which, with its rolling topography and adjacent harbor, bore a certain resemblance to a more sun-baked County Cork, a quality that attracted more than a few Irish, many of whom worked unloading cargo from around the world. Mickey’s convivial nature and his beer barrel build got him work on the docks, and, by being willing to break a few rules, he was able to provide for his family in a way he could not have imagined in Ireland.
The docks of San Pedro were an El Dorado to their immigrant workforce, a treasure trove of waterborne goods arriving in such volume that they could be easily plundered. And Mickey, performing backbreaking labor over long shifts, was never one to miss an opportunity. As a result, there was a room in his bungalow always stuffed with appliances, radios, crates of canned food: anything that moved through the Port of Los Angeles and could be transported without a forklift. These items were sold at a discount to local consumers and eventually allowed Mickey to buy a big-finned Cadillac in which he glided along hilly roads like a seaside king, arm out the side, face to the New World sun.
Only vaguely aware of Mickey’s activities, Marcus was devastated when his grandfather was busted after an FBI investigation of the Long-shoreman’s Union and wound up doing two years for racketeering. Traveling to Terminal Island to visit him was a great disincentive to a life of crime. When Mickey was released, he moved in with Marcus’s family. The time in the stir had diminished him, dimmed his bright immigrant eyes, and though he was only in his early sixties he looked a decade older. He would often play checkers with Marcus and Julian and regale them with tales of his Dublin boyhood and his realization at a young age that the world was fixed. With a voice that sounded like broken rocks in a bag, he’d tell his grandsons: The lad who don’t do it gets done himself. Shy boy Marcus listened to the stories with a degree of diffidence, drawn to the edge of the fire, then stepping back from the heat to imagined safety. But to audacious Julian, Mickey was a Celtic Sheherazade, a raffish spinner of tales so seductive that they could provide the map of a life. Mickey met his maker in the hold of a freighter when he was crushed by a five-hundred-pound crate of mayonnaise he was trying to steal. His devilish spirit skipped a generation, took a look at Marcus, said no, thank you, and landed squarely in Julian’s breast.
With this slide show flashing in his head, Marcus managed to navigate through West Hollywood to the Cahuenga Pass, where he picked up the 101 freeway. Merging into the light afternoon traffic, he drove west, again attempting to divine the true nature of Julian’s bequest. That they hadn’t been speaking when Julian died made parsing the situation particularly difficult. It wasn’t like they had ever really talked anyway, ever expressed anything resembling their actual feelings for each other beyond the subtle contempt that is the lingua franca of so many sibling relationships. What was Julian trying to convey with this ludicrous last will and testament?
Berkeley. Sophomore year: Marcus is in his dorm room one evening, writing a paper on John Locke’s theory of knowledge, when Julian appears like an apparition. His clothes are dirty and he smells like a bong. Julian tells him he’s in trouble: There’s a business deal with some Mexicans and he owes them five thousand dollars. What kind of deal? Never mind. They aren’t playing, Julian says, and if I don’t get the money and hand it over, they’re going to carve me up. Marcus listens to this story, his soft palm on the open copy of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding he’s highlighted with yellow magic marker, his heart rate increasing with each detail. He doesn’t have five thousand dollars. What do you want me to do? Come to Mexico with me, Julian says. I can buy enough dope down there to make a ten-thousand-dollar profit. But I thought you don’t have any money, Marcus says. How are you going to buy it? On credit! Marcus can’t believe what he’s hearing. You’re going to buy pot on credit? So you can pay off these guys who want to kill you? I need you to drive my car north across the border, Julian says. I don’t want to do it alone and I need you to help me. Can’t you get someone else, Marcus says. Julian’s pupils are dilated and his foot jiggles madly. You’re my brother. I’m asking you. Marcus wants Julian to leave. His roommate is due back from the library soon, and he doesn’t want him to walk in on this. I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at ten, Julian says, and we’ll be in Tijuana by dinner time. Okay, Marcus tells him. I’ll see you then. Marcus leaves his dormitory that night and stays with a friend in Oakland. He remains there for three days, figuring Julian won’t hang around. He never mentions the encounter to anyone. A year later, Marcus’s parents tell him they’ve heard from Julian. That is when he finds out the Mexicans haven’t killed his brother.
The smell of marijuana smacked him in the face the second he opened the front door of his house. It’s almost as if Julian is breathing on me from beyond the grave, Marcus thought. He had discussed this indiscriminate dope smoking with Lenore, asked her to confine it to her room, and then only after placing a rolled-up towel against the door frame. But before Marcus could locate her and unload the requisite opprobrium, he heard voices and then laughter in the kitchen. Lenore’s high-pitched giggle was easy to discern, but the other voice was lower, male, the accent an unfamiliar blend of foreign places.
When Marcus walked into the kitchen, he saw a large young man with his feet planted firmly on the floor, knees bent—his hand raised as if to strike. The man looked as if he was getting ready to decapitate Lenore, who was calmly smoking a spliff the size of a plantain.
“Smash elbow like this,” the guy said. “Crush windpipe.” Then he looked at Marcus and with a tilt of his head performed an instantaneous how-long-will-it-take-me-to-destroy-you? evaluation. Answer: two seconds.
“This is Kostya,” Lenore said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “He worked for your brother.” She coughed and immediately took another hit.
Marcus figured Kostya was somewhere in his twenties. A pile of dark dreadlocks bloomed from his head, tips dipped in gold. He wore a maroon tracksuit with parallel black stripes running up the pants and sleeves, Nike hightops on his large feet. And he was big, maybe 6′4″ with a broad chest. A sweeping side kick from this person would crush someone’s head like a cantaloupe.
“You look like him, only he outweigh you by hundred pounds, maybe,” Kostya said, leaning against the counter.
“Lenore …” Marcus said, indicating the spliff. “I asked you not to…”
“Chill, Daddy,” Kostya said, implying that if Marcus didn’t relax, he would be forced to. Lenore informed him she had been smoking—“For medical reasons!”—when Kostya showed up. Upon learning of her affinity for pot, he offered her some of his own, she said, “like a gentleman.”
Marcus was already so unsettled by what he’d recently learned that he immediately reassessed his inclination to get into house rules with Lenore. “Do you work at the dry cleaner?” Marcus’s voice came out evenly. He was pleased he had reasserted control over his recalcitrant nervous system. It helped immensely that Kostya, at least for the moment, did not seem intent on causing grievous bodily harm.
“Juice my nigga,” he said. While Kostya paused, Marcus noted the use of my nigga to describe the relationship, since Kostya appeared to be white.
“So you know he’s dead?”
“I told the fat mo’fucka cut down on chee’boorgers.” The accent was Moscow homeboy, some strange linguistic hybrid, borne on the epic wave of hip-hop that had encircled the globe in the years since Marcus had stopped paying attention to pop culture and had taken root in the unlikeliest of places. “For his own good,
you know … showing man some love.”
“I’m going to make pancakes,” Lenore said, removing a box from the cupboard. “Anybody want some?”
“That’s brownie mix,” Marcus told her. Then, turning his attention to Kostya: “I’m taking over the business.” Taking over the business? Why had he said this? When it was a simple dry cleaner, maybe. But now his plans needed to be reassessed, re-imagined. Retrofitted. He looked at Lenore, who was staring at the box trying to get her dull eyes to focus.
“Juice owe me five hundred dollar when he die. I got plans, Gangstaboy.”
Marcus didn’t need this guy in his kitchen. He just wanted to go upstairs and cogitate on the cosmic seltzer bottle Julian was spraying in his face. He could have given Kostya the money Amstel and Cortina had paid him, but why should he? Am I my brother’s bookkeeper? “I’ll write you a check,” Marcus said. He knew he could stop a check.
“Personal checks shit to me.”
“I don’t have cash on me right now.”
“Then we go ATM.”
“Whoa, whoa … I’m not responsible for his debts…”
“You take over bid’ness!”
“I know, but…”
“But, shit, yo! We go ATM. I drive.”
Marcus had already lied about not having the money on him and could have saved himself the trip, but he didn’t know how Kostya would react to being lied to. He felt as if he was being kidnapped, but his mother-in-law was rummaging in the cabinet for maple syrup when the two men left.
The Shining City van had been parked down the street from his house when Marcus had arrived home, but he had been too distracted to notice. It had three rows of passenger seats and no clothing racks. A residue of incense hung in the air, its particles microscopically pulsing to the beat emanating from the car stereo Kostya had installed “to create pleasing environment for ladies.” Marcus slumped in the passenger seat and Kostya drove, rattling on about what it was like working for Julian (not good) and how glad he was to be leaving the business.
“How long you been working for my brother?” Marcus wanted to know, dropping the word have from the question in an unacknowledged attempt to emulate Kostya’s international street patois.
“Almost three year,” Kostya said. “Three long year.”
“And you did what?”
“This and that.”
“This and that … what? Did you do his taxes?” It pleased Marcus that he was now relaxed enough to joke.
“His texes?” Kostya snorted. “You funny, Gangstaboy.” Marcus was pleased—the kid actually seemed to mean it. “Mo’fucka was pimp! Was not paying mo’fucking texes!” which, when Kostya said it, sounded like Texas. Marcus managed to learn that Kostya served as a driver, personal assistant, and general factotum for Julian and seemed to know a fair amount about how the business worked. Upon the realization that he possessed information that could be beneficial, Marcus changed his mind about trying to avoid paying the debt.
The two men were standing in the parking lot of the Ralphs Supermarket on Saticoy Street. Marcus was staring at the cash machine, which, having done a quick computer check of his status as a bank customer, had eaten his card and was refusing to return it. He felt Kostya’s eyes on him. Marcus knew that if he gave Kostya the money in his pocket, he might never see him again. Ten minutes ago, that would have been a welcome thought, but now he wasn’t so sure. Who knew what hidden knowledge the man possessed? Marcus needed time to think about the choice facing him. If he wanted to ask questions, Kostya was the Rosetta Stone.
“I don’t know what’s going on with the card, but I’ll get it for you by tomorrow.” Kostya stared at him suspiciously. “Look, it’s not like you don’t know where I live.”
Marcus was thankful when Kostya scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper instead of beating him to death in the parking lot.
Chapter 9
Rain rarely came to southern California in early October, but it had started to drizzle and the water was running down the windshield of the car as Marcus pulled off the verdant Winthrop Hall campus. Nathan sat in the front seat while his classmates Josh Flicker and Lyric Melchior slouched in back. Marcus thought Nathan had a crush on Lyric, a cute girl with braces and a sprinkling of freckles, and would have preferred sitting next to her. He also knew seventh grade etiquette required that he take the coveted passenger seat, which, to the average twelve-year-old, crooned of the adult pleasures that waited if only they could navigate the pimply shoals of adolescence. Marcus was half-listening as the kids yammered about a recent contretemps—a girl in the eighth grade at Winthrop Hall had taken nude self-portraits and forwarded them to her boyfriend online. He sent them to his friends, who sent them to their friends, and that day the girl’s family had been called in for a chat with the headmaster. Ordinarily this would have interested Marcus, but today the children’s words hung in a cloud about his head, failing to penetrate his consciousness.
Marcus gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual, reflecting on the highly unusual situation in which he found himself as they cruised through the dirty rain down Laurel Canyon Boulevard toward Temple B’nai Jesherun. What would it be like, he wondered, to step into Julian’s business? To make that kind of money? To have that kind of life? It was difficult for him to even take the questions seriously, but still he asked them. Marcus knew, no matter how much of a swash-buckler he might be in his dreams, no matter how many mountains he’d climbed, seas and deserts he’d crossed, no matter how many extraordinary, exhilarating, shoot-the-moon adventures he’d had in the confines of his own head, whenever he’d been given an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary in his real life, he had balked; punted the chance; rolled over and died a little. Even when he and Roon went to Europe in 1989 following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Young and free and still in the thrall of his undergraduate preoccupations, it had been the perfect time to make a pilgrimage to the birthplaces of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, to journey further east and see the ravages of Communism up close, meet newly liberated, young blonde women whose evil leaders had been vanquished and wanted to show their gratitude by having sex with Americans, something of which Roon was only too happy to take advantage.
In Hamburg, Roon led them to an S&M club. Marcus lasted until a leather-clad Rumanian dominatrix inquired in a bats-and-vampires accent Do you want to have some fun? Roon stayed and, when he returned to their hotel the next day, told Marcus about the impossibly limber Bavarian girl who liked to dress up as von Bismarck and would only let him fuck her if he wore a short skirt with an angora sweater and a pair of slingbacks. Marcus was appalled, but Roon was the one who’d gotten laid, and he laughed when he told the story.
Marcus knew this would be no different. Julian had been a miscreant his entire life, and this attitude led him ineluctably to becoming a procurer of human flesh. Marcus, on the other hand, was a maker of toys, a manufacturer of mirth and merriment. The chasm separating their worlds was too vast.
He would somehow get hold of the women who worked for Julian and tell them Shining City “dry cleaner” was going out of business. Once he had that settled in his mind, he looked forward to telling Jan the entire story.
Every time Marcus dropped the kids at Hebrew school, he said good-bye and then watched them walk into the building, a modest two-story white stucco structure whose utter lack of pretension appealed to the Ripps family. That day, he forgot to say anything and drove off the moment they climbed out of the car.
Marcus headed for the Paradise Room, an old-school Italian restaurant on Ventura with a dark bar decorated in early hired killer—red leather banquettes, impasto renderings of “Sunny Italy” on the walls, and on every table a white candle jammed into an empty Chianti bottle. Other than an old souse in a plaid shirt who sat at the end of the long oak bar reading the Racing Form through smudged pince-nez, Marcus was the only customer. He looked at the bartender, a sixty-something woman with hair dyed jet black and a smear of red lipstick
looped across her mouth, and ordered a whiskey.
Marcus contemplated his life as he sipped the whiskey. He saw a glittery stage, on which there were three shiny curtains, a different prize behind each one. He opened the first and found a family. The second parted to reveal a man seated behind a desk going over endless ledgers beneath a frozen wall clock and a large sign that said, simply, WAZOO THANKS YOU! Behind the third curtain, as yet unopened, Marcus knew there was mystery, hope, the presumed happiness of dreams fulfilled. He longed to pull it aside, see what it concealed, yearned for an image that would provide the clue to a metamorphosis the nature of which he could not yet conceive. What would he change? Not his family, certainly, for he loved them and, other than his recent lack of physical intimacy with his wife, had little else to complain about. His livelihood? That was changing anyway, whether or not he liked it, but he thought, given his history, he would continue to labor in a traditional field.
What, then?
This: how he looked at the world and himself, how he viewed his life and the inner tape that played in his head and from which he took his cues. The one that said stop, don’t, I shouldn’t.
Shining City Page 9
