Bigger Than Jesus

by Robert Chazz Chute

  “Jimmy Lima’s looking for you and being rude to me.”

  “Oh.” You take a few centuries to form the next thought. Civilizations rise and fall while you cogitate and formulate. Oddly, she’s still here when you finally manage, “I’m not sure about Jimmy. I think the Irish Mob might be after me.”

  “The Irish Mob?”

  “Yeah,” you say, slightly more swift now, gathering steam. Only one eon passes before you answer. “The Irish Mob. You know. As in…the cops.”

  “Get up.”

  “I’m not feeling altogether sexy right now, sweetie.”

  “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

  “A Robocop line? Now? Baby, you’re my dream girl.”

  “Come with me if you want to live.”

  “That’s definitely Terminator. And Terminator 2. And Termin —”

  “Jesus, either get up and get going right now before the Spanish mob or the Irish mob busts in here or I’m leaving.”

  “You wouldn’t leave me like this, would you?”

  “With the mob or worse on the way? I’ll get the hell out of here and I’ll take your left nut in my clutch purse as a memory of all the wonderful times we had.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Please.”

  “I thought you liked the dirty talk.” Lily leans on the doorframe. No matter how she stands, Lily looks like she’s in a glamour pose, like she should be stepping onto a movie screen or off a magazine cover.

  “It’s not the dirty talk that breaks my heart, sweetie. It’s you talking about us in the past tense. Can’t have that.”

  She’s one of those women who is beautiful when she’s angry, though she’s stunning when you make her smile. Smiling’s better.

  “Move faster, Jesus.” She sweeps her bejeweled hands up and down her torso, “Or you’ll never have this again.”

  You get your feet under you.

  Move! Feel the pain but walk anyway and, no matter what, don’t lose Lily.

  MORE LIES FOR LILY

  Lily gets you dressed and out of the apartment. You’re all the way to the service elevator before you have to run back to the apartment to pull two more black Armani suits (still in their dry cleaning bags) from your closet and fish your go bag out from under the bed. Lily gives you the look when she sees the suits but she asks about the big backpack.

  “My sergeant taught us a few phrases in Latin. Non semper erit aestas. It means be prepared for hard times and zombie attack. We’ve always gotta be zombie-ready.”

  “Jesus, you’re delirious. How’s your nose?” She reaches out to touch it and you flinch away. “If you’re going to be a tough guy, keep in mind for next time that a bag of frozen peas or hash browns conforms to your face and works much better than holding ice cubes on your skin. I think you’ve got freezer burn on top of everything else.”

  “Sweetie, I’m such a tough guy, I got no frozen peas and no hash browns.”

  She pinches your nose and you shriek like a little girl. Well, not if the little girl was Lily. She tells you to squeeze the bridge of your nose to stop the bleeding. When you tilt your head back, you taste blood. Before you can bring your chin down, Lily slaps the back of your head. “Just pinch your nose. Don’t let your head fall back or the blood will run down your throat! I swear, you throw up in my car, I don’t care how bad you feel, you’re cleaning it up!”

  You step on the service elevator and ride down. Staring at the wooden planks, both of you are silent. By the time the service elevator’s door opens, she lets you in on what happens next. “We’ll go to my father.”

  “Pete works for Jimmy.”

  “He’s my father more than he’s a bookie. You get in trouble, you go to Dad.”

  “My dad was eaten by a shark, so I never got that.” Still pinching your nose, you sound like a chipmunk’s squeak muffled by heavy snow. “What’s this about Jimmy insulting you?”

  She shrugs. “I’m a big girl. I told you because it pissed me off, not because it’s a problem for you to solve.”

  The rain has let up a little by the time you are out in the street and you think how great a night in the city smells after a hard rain. It’s like all the sweat and stink and dirt gets flushed down the sewers and the air is cleansed. You have to think about it because you sure can’t smell it. “I wonder if my smeller is broken forever. I’ll miss your perfume most.”

  “That would be a shame,” Lily says, but you detect no worry or warmth in her voice.

  “I know what’s up with me, babe. What’s up with you?”

  “S’up? Huh. Well, let’s see. I get a call from my father’s employer asking me for my boyfriend. He says you have been calling Panama Bob’s ex and asking about a safe. He asks me where you are and, of course, I say I don’t know. I tell him it’s not like we’re an item or anything. We just go dancing sometimes.”

  “You’re saying we aren’t an item?” Your head is beginning to throb again.

  “I told him we’re no item.”

  “Are you saying to me we aren’t?”

  “Baby.” She reaches out to caress your cheek. “The way you’re looking right now and the trouble you’re putting me through? It’s not a good time to ask that question.”

  “Ah.”

  Lily hits her key fob button, the Toyota beeps and the door locks click open. As she climbs behind the wheel, she reminds you not to bleed in her car.

  “So Jimmy asks me straight out what’s this about a safe and I say I have no idea and he says some rude things. No name-calling, you understand. Just hinting that maybe I know more than I’m saying and if that’s true, he’d get hot about that. Then he says he was at my christening and my confirmation and tells me that good Catholic girls should listen to their parents and godparents and ’fess up before things get complicated.”

  “That doesn’t sound rude.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t the worst of it. Then he told me to give the phone to my father. Daddy listens and nods so hard, you’d think Uncle Jimmy can hear his brain rattling around in his head over the phone. Then Daddy tells Jimmy he’ll have a talk with me as if I’m, like, six years old. As soon as he hangs up, he starts in on me.”

  “Did Pete hurt you?”

  She throws you the first smile of the night and it is a sight to behold as the streetlights flash by. Her full lips pull back over pearl white, even teeth and she’s all dimples. “Daddy talks big but he’d never lay a hand on me. I’m my mother’s daughter. Any man lays a mad hand on me, he’ll pull back a quivering stump.”

  You believe her and when you nod, the throbbing in your nose reminds you how hard Big Denny could hit. You wonder if your best friend is even now being slowly impaled on a grid of steel rods and praying for death. You’d feel bad and cry some more if that hadn’t been what Big Denny had planned for you.

  “I told Daddy that I’d find you and he wasn’t so keen on that, you being you. But what Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets. That’s his problem. He gets it all and still wants more.”

  “Did he say anything about Panama Bob?”

  “Uncle Bob had a fall.”

  Yeah, he had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…

  “Is Uncle Bob going to be okay?”

  Uncle Bob. Not a real uncle. Panama Bob is an uncle to Lily like Tia Marta was your aunt. Children adopt neighbors and family friends and strangers and sometimes even mafia bosses and call them uncle and aunt. Bob and Lily weren’t close, but close enough that Bob came around with Christmas and birthday presents. Lily might not understand that you had to kill the guy who set her up with her Barbie collection, Malibu dream house and whatever that toy RV for Barbie was called. Lily might not understand that when Jimmy Lima tells you to kill somebody, you do it or somebody else gets the job but they have to kill you first.

  “Jesus! I asked you a question.”

  “Uncle Bob is not going to be okay.”

  “I figured that much since you were asking about his safe.” She lights
a cigarette off the car’s lighter and rolls down the window a couple of inches to let the smoke trail from her lips to the wind. Her father, Pete Vasquez, is the most successful bookie on the East Side. He’s so sharp at his job, he gave her this car for her twentieth birthday. He’s not so sharp that he knows she smokes yet. Or maybe she’s just that much smarter.

  “Where’s your portly friend with the bad breath?”

  “Denny’s missing in action. Prolly killed in action.”

  She waits until the next red light for the next question so she can look in your face when she asks. “Did Denny De Molina murder my Uncle Bob?”

  “Yup.” It’s close to the truth. Jimmy told you to kill Panama Bob and Denny drove. He knew the mission.

  “Did you get Denny or did Bob?”

  “I got Denny.” You’re squirmy over that truth, but rush to it so you can get back to being the hero.

  “Shit.” She pauses a moment after the light turns green and drives on, a little faster and weaving her way through traffic.

  “Yeah,” you say, thinking of how you had owed Big Denny for rent from when you first moved to the city. You never got around to paying him, but that debt is erased now, along with all the good things about Denny. Funny how he could be a badass and there were lots of things to not like about him, but it’s the good stuff that makes you hate him more now. Each good thing about Big Denny De Molina demands that you feel bad. And you do, worse than about Bob. Bob was a job. Denny’s dead because you lied to keep his big paws off Bob’s skim.

  “You said the cops are after you. Did they do this to you?”

  “Nah. Denny gave me my facial redesign.”

  “Then he deserved to die,” Lily says.

  You get a warm feeling in the pit of your stomach.

  “Twice over,” she adds. “Once for self-defense and once for Uncle Bob.”

  Back to ice.

  “The cops know you killed Denny?”

  “Uh…no, too early, but they might have a witness I got to worry about.” Another lie to Lily, though you guess you could call the camera eye a witness. You can’t tell her which crime scene you were fleeing at the time. You can’t be honest and still keep her. Without Lily, there wouldn’t be much point in getting hold of all that storage locker money.

  Heh. “Storage locker money.” It isn’t Panama Bob’s skim or even Jimmy Lima’s money anymore. It’s storage locker money — money with no owner until you can get to it. You’ll have enough money to get away with Lily and never look back on this shitty night. Or all the other shitty nights since Big Denny pulled you in and got you a job working for the Limas. You turn your head away from the lovely Lily, even managing to tear your eyes away from her long legs exposed through the slits in her dress. Instead, you look at the last spatter of rain caught in the city lights. Rivulets of water find each other and streak back, sliding down the glass like tears down cheeks.

  You tell Lily to pull over by an all-night drugstore you know has a bank machine. You pull some cash out of your account. You don’t need much for now, just enough to operate until you can get out of town. The machine’s jaws open and two hundred dollars in crisp, new twenties slide out. You break a twenty and buy a bottle of painkillers and a couple of bottles of water. Back in the car, you knock back twice the recommended dose of pills and finish one of the water bottles in one go. You close your eyes and wait for the medicine to do its work, but before the throbbing eases, Lily swings the wheel and you’re in the parking lot behind Pete’s after-hours club. You first met Lily on the dance floor here on salsa night.

  “Daddy wants to see you,” she says.

  If you had time to think this through, you never would have gone in to face Pete Vasquez. Lily’s already out of the car. You follow her like a puppy dog.

  You’d follow Lily across heaven and earth. And hell, too, as it turns out.

  THE CIRCLE OF LIGHT

  The line of Tuesday late-night partygoers stretches down the alley that leads to the side entrance to the club. They’re mostly kids of the ungrateful living generation, ironically trying to keep Goth alive. Their clothes match their black eyeliner: tons of black eyeliner, drugstores and mothers’ bathroom drawers full of black eyeliner. It’s a parade of sad raccoons who don’t have that much to complain about and they’re pissed off about that, too.

  The posers are interspersed with a few hardcore, outlandishly dressed party kids. They look like they all escaped from the same circus. The theme tonight appears to be Irish Vampire Clowns. They’re beyond pale, dressed in bright green. They wear curly antennae on their heads that end with big cherry lollipops. It’s like they’re part of some kind of twisted sports team, if cutting were a sport. You’re not much older than these kids. Not in chronological age, anyway.

  The club, called Como Si, is in the basement. Officially, Pete owns the bodega on the main floor and the top floor houses his accounting business. Pete’s crew of two old guys and one old lady — Lily’s grandmother — work the phones for his bookie operation upstairs. Pete doesn’t get along so well with his mother, so he hangs out in the back of the bodega smoking and talking on his cell phone and admiring his black Caddy in the rear parking lot.

  Pete only drives the Cadillac to make the rounds of a few laundromats he says he “has an interest in.” Pete started out as an enforcer for The Machine and still picks up weekly payments, leaning on mom and pop businesses. “I came up when the Korean laundromat biz was exploding. Koreans don’t call the cops. Protection’s a beautiful thing. I swing in, maybe pick up or drop off some laundry and there’s always a white envelope. It’s like being a bill collector for the government. It doesn’t even occur to them to give any flack.”

  Maybe that’s because Pete’s rep as a guy not to mess with lives on from the old days.

  Lily’s halfway to the back door and you’re stumbling after her. Sitting in the passenger seat for the ride to Como Si, you’ve stiffened up and your body feels old. Thank you, Denny. Likely Denny’s body is slowly sliding down some bloody rebar, so you really can’t hold a grudge over a few aches and pains. You’re only halfway across the back lot and you can already hear the thump of electronica from the building’s basement.

  Como Si is the perfect New York after-hours club if you know the schedule. The regulars are a cult that somehow know the drill without taking notes. Wednesdays, local kids with electric guitars squeeze on the tiny stage to try to bring back the hair band, though everything sounds like REO Speedwagon on bad acid. Thursday the club is closed for cleaning, but it’s really poker night on the underground circuit. Friday is always gutless ’80s music. Saturday nights at Como Si are supposed to be like a Saturday Night Fever disco — AKA gay guys’ night. That always devolves into an ABBA marathon. Sunday, Dyke Night, features a lot of Justin Bieber early in the evening and Melissa Etheridge lyrics rapped over synth later on. Monday is Lady’s Night: Cool jazz and hot blues for the first half of the evening followed by salsa till dawn.

  If Lily had taken you to Como Si on any of those other nights, you could handle this meeting with Pete better. But Tuesday nights like this? A DJ spins house music until 3 a.m. and Como Si’s walls thump until dawn with industrial clash mixed with that ambient shit that’s only tolerable to sweaty kids on MDMA.

  The beat, even in the parking lot, matches your headache’s pace. This ear beating makes you wish you were back in Havana by the Hudson. Salsa till dawn (every night) is your preference. Tia Marta taught you salsa and English to make you a more acceptable boy. Sometimes, when you’re on the dance floor with Lily in your arms and lost in the music, you could almost forgive Tia Marta everything.

  Instead of heading to the side door, Lily steams straight at a steel door by the bodega’s loading dock. She rings a doorbell that’s hidden above the door frame. She has to lift up on the tip toes of her high heels to do it and you watch her bare legs working, the long calf muscles contracting under taut skin. Lily teaches Zumba part-time at a nearby gym and it shows. Her exe
rcise class was your in with Lily and how you found the courage to talk to her. Since she did Zumba, she thought she knew salsa. You showed her the difference between what she was doing and true salsa from Miami. Salsa is the only thing you and Lily both do that you execute better. You’ve got the looks and the clothes — at least you did until Denny’s fist pounded your face sideways and flat — but, no salsa? No Lily.

  The peephole darkens for a moment and you hear three heavy deadlocks ratchet and clunk. Jake Cibrian swings the door open and drinks your girl up and down slowly. “Hello, gorgeous.” Jake has one of those too-wide, shark smiles that shows two rows of sharp teeth. “You looking to skip the line and do some thumpin’?” He’s hard-muscle packed into a suit that doesn’t fit him in the shoulders. The jacket hangs straight down like he bought a big polyester shopping bag off the rack.

  Jake sees you step into the light behind Lily and his mouth forms a big zero through which a trilling, girlish giggle escapes. “If it ain’t the little Cuban! Hey, Cube! Jesus Diaz, the Cuban sensation! The Cuban burning sensation. You get hit by a truck?”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “Was you shaving with a machete?”

  You would have come up with something cutting, but just then your nose starts to bleed again, defying the sheer force of your will. You cover it with your handkerchief and step in front of Lily.

  “Never mind busting his balls, Jake. Busting his nut is my job.”

  Despite the pain in your jaw, you give Jake a smile. It hurts, but for the look on his mug, it feels better somehow, too.

  “He’s here to talk to my dad,” Lily says.

  “Pete’s in back with his noise-cancelling headphones. You musta messed up real bad to get Pete out of bed, Cube. He’s hardly ever here once Como Si opens. C’mon in.”

  He steps aside and you look back to make room for the lady, but Lily’s already retreating to her car. She blows you a kiss. “Keep pressure on it, up near the bridge of your nose. Come see me after, if it’s not too late.” She’s already floating away like a rose petal on the wind.