Bobby Gold Stories

by Anthony Bourdain

  Bobby was well liked at the hotel as he was neither Russian nor German and didn't insist on bringing whores to his room like the other guests. He spent his days at the temples or at the riverbank and his evenings at the bar slogging through Malraux and Greene and Maugham and Tim Page, trying to absorb their enthusiasms. Their lives so different than his own. "I love you," she'd said and squeezed him tightly, her fingers sinking into his back. He'd kissed her and tasted blood and then she'd slipped —as Jim Morrison once put it - into unconsciousness.

  He'd been drinking too much . . . and smoking bad weed — the rough-tasting Khmer smoke that cost only a stack of worthless riels per kilo and the anti-malarial pills he'd been taking once a week were putting the screws to his head, giving him nightmares. He'd wake up, middle of the night with his chest pounding after a particularly violent dream, smelling blood, his arms actually aching from fighting off full-color phantasms.

  Here's one dream Bobby had:

  Bobby Gold at eight years old, in blue jeans, high-top sneakers and pale blue T-shirt, standing in the schoolyard, a ring of faceless children around him in a tightening circle. It was dodge ball they were playing — and Bobby was it —the bigger kids, pale and dead-eyed, aiming the big rubber ball at his face. Suddenly the action switched and it was Eddie Fish standing in the perfectly round gauntlet, Bobby holding back the ball, taking aim, throwing it. Eddie cowering, the ball (Bobby could smell the rubber, read the manufacturer's name: "VOIT") striking Eddie flush on the nose, smashing it flat, the blood coming, coming, not stopping, as Eddie, in shorts, screaming silently and Bobby's head filling with the smell of rust, of school erasers, Juicyfruit, disinfectant, latex paint, the taste of chewed pencils. The others come at Eddie with garden hoes now, striking first the hard schoolyard asphalt, then flesh, Bobby hearing the sound as metal buried itself in bone, felt the vibrations in his spine with each solid whack.

  He woke up in cold, wet sheets, gasping, then smoked a half a pack of 555s, afraid to go back to sleep.

  An ancient Antonov to Phnom Penh, seats broken, seat belt useless at his side, the cabin filled with steam a few minutes after take-off — the other passengers actually laughing when the stewardesses handed out the in-flight meal, a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a roll in a cardboard box — wings yawing dangerously as the plane touched down. Overnight in Bangkok in a gigantic airport hotel, a twenty-minute walk to his room from the lobby, a Filipino trio singing "Rock the Boat" in the lounge, Tiger beer in the mini bar. Transfer at Narita. A packed flight - tourist class — to LAX, taxi to a Japanese-owned hotel in West Hollywood.

  The cocktail lounge was filled with well-dressed people talking on cell phones in amber-colored light. The women were well made-up, hair done, heels, the men in jackets with recently polished shoes. They sat in plush, upholstered chairs and overstuffed couches, drinking novelty drinks off tiny little tables. British techno-soundtrack music issued from hidden speakers. A waiter offered Bobby a complimentary spring roll from a tray. He'd never felt so detached from his own country. It smelled of nothing here, only air-conditioning, the figures around him in the lounge moving dreamlike through space like characters in a film. A woman at the next grouping of chairs looked at Bobby then whispered something to her date — he turned around for a second, glanced at Bobby, then snapped his head away as if frightened. Bobby sat there like a stone obelisk, his ice melting in his drink, horrified. There was something indecent in all this affluence. He'd just come from a place where everything smelled, where children tugged your sleeve and begged for your leftovers, where amputees slithered legless across the street and the police felt free to open fire at any time. He felt like he was on another planet, the languid movements of the young, graceful crowd somehow a cruel and terrible affront to the way he knew the world to really be. Bobby thought, "I could kill anyone in this room and never feel a moment's guilt."

  He was coming apart here. He had to get out.

  He rented a Ford Focus through the desk, set out for Arizona in the morning.

  He'd never seen America but he saw it now. Out the window, one strip mall led to another, then desert, then more strip mall, filling stations, fast-food joints, car dealerships, desert again. The kids were fatter than in Asia; baggy pants, caps on backwards, fierce acne, sullen looks as they watched him pump self-serve gas, grab a bite. He was old, he realized, nothing to say to anyone anymore — if he'd ever had anything to say - America suddenly a vast ocean of blond hair, crenulated thighs, fanny packs and Big Gulps. He aimed the car at the horizon and drove, a six-pack of Budweiser in a Styrofoam cooler on the seat next to him, a gas station map his only guide. He bought new clothes at a mall in Tucson — khaki pants, a denim shirt, aviator glasses, a pair of shoes which the clerk assured him would "last a lifetime" — changed at a Motel 6 after a swim in a pool that stank of chlorine. He arrived in the small development community at dusk: cookie-cutter houses, ranch-style with little signs announcing family names over identical mailboxes, driveways filled with SUVs, muscle cars, children's toys. Just outside of town was a mega-mall with food court, deca-plex cinema, a chain hotel with heated pool and "convention facilities." The "old" part of town dated back only to the forties; similarly identical homes - built like the newer ones all at once — these to accommodate the wartime aviation and munitions industry who'd once had factories in the nearby desert. And a single strip of shabby businesses: superette, hardware store, a movie theater turned furniture outlet, city hall, police department, bowling alley, a few shops selling nostrums and notions.

  She worked at Duke's Pizza, spinning pies in the front window. She had her hair tied back with a red kerchief - to keep it from burning in the oven, and she wore a tight white T-shirt that revealed a slight impression of nipple, a long, sauce-stained apron. From across the street, he couldn't see where the bullet had entered. She was spinning pie now, two fists working the dough ever larger, a twirl with the fingertips of the right hand, and then the pie disappeared up and out of frame, reappearing a second later. Nikki looked grimly satisfied as she slung the floppy, white object back and forth between her wrists. A single strand of hair worked loose from the headband hung over her face, giving her an appearance of heartbreaking earnestness. Below the window frame, she ladled sauce, sprinkled cheese, then moved the finished pizza on a long wooden paddle into the back of a deck oven, yanked it free with a hard, unhesitating jerk of the arm, muscles flexing.

  He rolled up his window, ducking back as she pushed away the strand of hair from her face, blew out, stared out the window at the empty street, squinting in the midafternoon glare.

  Nikki in hiding. New name. New address. She'd snitched him off— as arranged bedside at the hospital — in return for protection. He looked up and down the street and saw no one who looked like a cop or a fed or a U.S. marshal. As arranged, she'd sent him a single postcard, care of a rooming house in Goa, telling him where she was and that she was okay.

  She'd had nothing to say - no "direct knowledge" as lawyers like to phrase it - about Tommy Victory. Bobby had been all she'd had to offer and he'd insisted. She'd needed something to pay the toll —and an organized crime "associate" with multiple bodies on his resume had seemed like an easy out. She'd been in the hospital for three months — and physical therapy for a year after that. He'd had to do something.

  "Why?" she'd asked him. "Why does it have to be you?"

  "Because it's all we've got," he'd said. "Because they might come back. Because what Tommy's people want from you is too high a price for anyone to pay." The person they'd send, if they could find her, would have been someone just like he had once been. A professional. Someone who knew how to hurt people, how to ask hard questions. Someone who didn't flinch when people screamed. Someone for whom another life extinguished was just another day at work.

  Because Tommy knew that Bobby was out there somewhere. Because he knew what he was likely to do.

  Bobby left town quietly, saying nothing. He didn't call her at the shop. He didn't even
wave.

  He dropped the car in Tucson, rented another —under yet another name — and made the long, long drive cross-country, New York finally appearing beyond the George Washington Bridge. He bought a banged up .38 Airweight from a Serbian safecracker he'd known upstate and checked into a no-tell motel just across the river in Fort Lee.

  Tommy Victory, in a smart tweed jacket, brown turtleneck and pleated slacks, approached his Lincoln town car in the cool autumn Connecticut dusk. A dead leaf stuck to his loafter, and he stopped to peel it off distastefully with a fingertip before standing by the rear passenger door of the idling car. He knocked on the smoked glass window for his chauffeur/bodyguard, and when no response came, opened the door, irritated, and heaved himself inside, mouth already open to chew out his sleeping driver.

  He wasn't sleeping. Tommy could see that right away. His head lay on the seat back at an unnatural angle, the neck broken. The door on the far side suddenly opened and Bobby Gold, looking thinner and tanner than he'd remembered him, was sitting next to him, grabbing him by the hair and pulling his head back. The .38 broke a tooth as it went in Tommy's mouth. Tommy's last thought was of bridgework as he heard the words, "Hello, Tommy," matter-of-factly spoken as Bobby pulled the trigger, pushed the barrel ever deeper down Tommy's throat.

  Bobby emptied the gun, the car filling with cordite smell, the report deafening in the enclosed space. When Tommy sagged back onto new leather, a single perfect smoke ring issued from his open mouth.

  Bobby Gold, in a purple-and-blue sarong, feet bare, drank Tiger beer and watched children washing their hair in dark, brown, muddy water at the riverbank. A water buffalo strained to pull a cart with a missing wheel in a rice paddy in the distance. A Khmer in a khaki shirt and shorts, a red krama covering his head from the sun, collected sticks from the roadside. Bobby brushed a persistent fly away from the corner of his mouth and lit another 555, sat there smoking, yearning for pizza.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Anthony Bourdain is the author of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and the Urban Historical Typhoid Mary, as well as A Cook's Tour, which was turned into a successful series by the same name for the Food Network. His mystery novels include Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. He is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. This old-style face is named after the Frenchman Robert Granjon, a sixteenth-century letter cutter whose italic types have often been used with the romans of Claude Garamond. The origins of this face, like those of Garamond, lie in the late-fifteenth-century types used by Aldus Manutius in Italy.