New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  “Pokerface—” Len starts.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Fine, Neil. Brand new that gun wasn’t worth a thou.”

  “It’s reliable,” I counter. “Shoots straight.”

  “I don’t need a gun,” the mortician says.

  “Who made it,” Rocky says, “the Krauts?”

  Len says, “It’s worth three bills at this table.”

  “Was it the Ko–reens? Liable to shoot your pecker off with one of those.”

  “I already have a gun. A B.B.-gun. It’s a Daisy.”

  “It’s settled,” Len says. “Gun’s worth three bills.”

  “Fine,” I say, flipping my aces and reaching to rake the pot…

  …until the mortician turns over his pocket kings.

  Archie and Ezzard say “Bad beat” simultaneously. Rocky sucks air through his teeth. I can’t draw air into my lungs.

  “Four kings beats a full house.” Len shrugs expansively, as though to suggest the karmic absurdity of it all. “You can’t win every day, Pokerface. Otherwise it’d be no fun when you did.”

  The chips and cards shimmer out of focus, clean edges disintegrating, colors blurring. I reach for the gun. It’s suddenly very important—crucial—I hold it.

  “What are you doing?” Len says.

  I find myself backing out a door. Not the door I entered: this one flimsier, unvarnished pressboard rather than oak. The others follow me into a dimly-lit hallway.

  “Hey,” the mortician says. “Hey.”

  The hallway empties into a coffin showroom. In the muddy light I glimpse caskets resting on crushed-velvet catafalques. Pachabel’s “Canon in D” pipes in through recessed speakers. Each casket is affixed with a nametag: Sweet Hereafter, Heavenly Chariot, Eternal Bliss.

  “Give the man his gun, Neil.”

  Rocky says, “Nobody likes a sore loser, fella.”

  I stumble and grab hold of an Everlasting Salvation to avoid horizontality. The mortician strides forward, his spindle neck cabled with veins.

  “I can’t abide welshers.”

  “You don’t need another gun,” I remind him.

  The mortician removes his glasses. His eyes look like pressed raisins. “It’s a matter of principle.”

  I am fully aware that, if it came down to it, I could kill every man in this room. The gun’s got a nine cartridge clip—two slugs for every player, tack on a buckwheat for Len. Not that I’d do it, you understand, but I could. These guys see me as a one-eyed washout eaten up by Vegas, and a poor loser to boot…and they’re right. But, time was, I ran with the best of the best. Time was, I ran with the Magnificent Seven.

  I tuck the pistol into my pants and fix the undertaker with a look meant to freeze the piss in his bladder to ice-cubes. “Here it is,” I drawl. “You want it, come get it.”

  “Terrible sportsmanship.” The mortician removes combs, tweezers, and toothbrushes from his pocket, then rolls up his sleeves. “Just…appalling.”

  He comes to get his gun.

  The little mortician dances toward me on sneaky feet and loops a tight hook into my bread basket. He feints a right hand and executes the Fitzsimmons’ shift, shoes kicking static sparks on the thick scarlet carpeting, popping a short uppercut that catches me on the chinbone. They’re not powerful shots but I don’t protect myself. I fall flat on my ass. White noise fills my skull. He grabs my shirt, hauls me to my feet, throws me against a Celestial Conveyance. I bounce off the heavy wooden coffin and go down. My prosthesis is jarred loose and rolls under a cherrywood casket.

  The mortician jumps on me swinging. I get my hands up and catch most of it on my arms and shoulders until he flags. My face, which elicits either disgust or pity in most people, doesn’t seem to faze him at all, which I find strangely comforting. I shove him off and stagger away. He finds his second wind and comes at me, lab coat billowing in wings: an albino moth. He grabs me again and drags me to a Pleasant Slumberer, pushes me in headfirst. I kick feebly, catching him in the legs and chest, but he’s wiry and relentless. He stuffs me down into the innerspring mattress; plush sateen presses against my cheek. He tries to lower the lid but I keep a foot on the edge so it can’t be closed and latched.

  “Here!” I slip the pistol through the gap. “It’s yours!”

  The mortician lets up immediately. “Hey, now, that’s the spirit.”

  He raises the casket lid but I don’t get out. I peek over the coffin lip and watch Len and the others head back to the embalming room. Rocky says, “That was just…sad.” I cross my arms over my chest and let my head sink into the silk pillow. Well, it’s nicer than a lot of places I’ve flopped.

  After awhile I get out. I retrieve my prosthesis and wander around until I find the front doors, knocking over a few urns along the way.

  Two hours after entering the mortuary I’m back outside. Nothing seems to have changed—the sun’s in the same position, a disc of brimstone pinned to the sky above Bob Stupak’s Space Needle. I don’t even have bus fare. I trudge southwards.

  Three hours later, I’m back in my room at the Lucky Sevens. I haven’t worn any sunscreen, and my face and arms are sunburned beet-red. I don’t feel a thing. Someone once told me the sense of touch was easily the most underrated of the five senses. But, for this brief moment, I’m grateful I can’t feel.

  A knock on the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s the manager. You Paris?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Letter for you.”

  “Slide it under the door.”

  The envelope is stained and smudged, forwarded from the various hotels and motels I’ve occupied during my slide. It’s a miracle I got it—or else someone had a vested interest in making sure I got it.

  The first thing to catch my eye is the unsigned check.

  One five and four zeroes in a neat little row…

  — | — | —

  Randy “Answer” Blondeau—Information Extraction

  New York, NY.

  November 30, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

  I rack my first fare of the day at 54th and Lex when two yuppie broads flag me down outside Barney’s. They’re wearing identical cream silk blouses, tweed skirts—one pleated, one not—and black satin pumps, holding Tab colas in manicured hands. Their hair is shoulder-length and dyed the same retina-searing platinum blonde. Their tits are a surgically-augmented 36C, flashy but not overstated, the size preferred by image-conscious Wall Streeters. Their legs are tanned and toned from personal training sessions, arms baby’s-ass smooth from seaweed wraps. They smell like a cosmetics counter: papaya-scented shampoo and sandalwood skin astringent, lemongrass deep-pore cleanser and Q.T. Instatan bronzing lotion. The scent of them fills the cab, an invisible yet deeply-textured odor.

  They give me a fucking headache.

  “Where to, ladies?”

  One of them gives an address in an upscale section of Greenwich Village. She repeats the address three times, perhaps because she believes I am, or cabbies in general are, retarded.

  “Vanessa darling,” one of the doppelgangers says once we’re moving, “where are we going tonight?”

  “Brice promised a reservation at Slander—”

  “Benjamin Cullen’s new restaurant?”

  “The very same, Vanessa.”

  Oh, Christ. They’re both named Vanessa?

  “Have you tried the marlin—the marlin and squab chili?”

  “I can’t remember.” Vanessa plucks a white pill from a Gucci gazelleskin purse and swallows it with a sip of Tab.

  “Oh you must try it. And the tuna carpaccio? To die for.”

  “People have died for less,” Reflecting the red marquee lights of the Winter Garden Theater, the woman’s eyes appear to be filled with blood.

  I unroll my window, beckoning the din of honking horns and squealing tires, jackhammers and surging foot traffic to drown out their voices. It strikes me with a poignancy verging on despair that these women are the end product of
our American Dream, the American aristocracy: private schools, Ivy League universities, summer houses in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard, vacation villas in Aspen and Monte Carlo. Their husbands are lawyers or stock brokers with seven-figure salaries, their lives a procession of private soirées and exclusive nightclubs and benefit dinners for causes they care nothing about. Their husbands will fuck blonde, big-titted secretaries while they have loveless affairs with tanned masseuses, everyone dining on Waldorf salad and yellowtail sashimi and sundried tomatoes. Their existence is that of goldfish in a crystal bowl: the outside world, a world of discount superstores and homeless people and welfare mothers is as remote and unbelievable to them as elves or Chewbacca or Captain Lou Albano or—

  “—those panelists on Geraldo Riviera simply must be paid performers!” Vanessa squeals. “Yesterday’s topic was Men Living as Women. You should’ve seen—hairy-knuckled men wearing lavender sundresses, feet stuffed into stiletto heels. Not a designer label in sight!”

  It was the American Dream that took me to Vietnam. Uncle Sam wanted Victor Charlie to be just like him, to wear suits and eat cheeseburgers and drive a Chevy. In October 1966, a military Jeep dropped me off at a training facility outside Corpus Christi. It was there my particular…skills…were revealed. I was transferred to Duc Phong, fifty miles northeast of Saigon, where I joined the Mobile Guerilla Force, detachment A-303, Blackjack unit. It was my pleasure to serve.

  “Ohh, I absolutely adore this song,” Vanessa says. The dial’s tuned to WNYX and “That’s All” by Genesis is playing. Vanessa raps on the Plexiglass barrier like a spoiled kid trying to get the attention of a zoo animal. “Turn this up,” she commands. To Vanessa: “Phil Collins is sooo brilliant. I would have his love child.” To me: “Higher.”

  I know people in this city. Bad people. I know a man with a drill and an axe and a bottle of acid. I could give this man my passenger’s addresses and this man would pay them a visit—maybe not tonight or tomorrow, maybe not for years, but he would come. This man would cut their arms off and stab their eyes out and hack a trench down the center of their faces until the pressure forced sections of their brains, dull grey and glistening, through the wounds. The knowledge of this man’s existence prevents me from retrieving the silenced .22 Kirikkale pistol from under my seat, jamming it through one of the quarter-sized perforations, and painting the backseat yuppie-red.

  That, and the steam-cleaning bill.

  “That’s All” is followed by “Workin’ For a Living” by Huey Lewis and the News. Vanessa holds something in her lap that I mistake for a balled-up Kleenex until it yips and I realize, with dawning sadness, it’s a dog: papery, vein-shot ears and black marble eyes that seem on the verge of popping from its skull. My gaze locks with its through the rearview mirror and, in an unprecedented canine-human mindmeld, we simultaneously acknowledge the utter frivolity of its existence. It yips again—token protest?—and Vanessa soothes, “Shhh, Tootsie, shhh.” I pity the thing: it’s the latest pet-du-jour that, like the chinchillas and chows and Shar Peis and Abyssinian cats before it, will be tossed aside in favor of the next treat-of-the-week. I once picked up a lady outside Bloomingdale’s who’d slung a live ferret around her shoulders and the sight triggered the memory of…

  …Alex “Slash” Trimball, twenty-three years old, walking away from the blazing village of Bu Von Kon with the flayed corpse of a Viet girl draped around his shoulders. The village was in flames, the air rich with burning bamboo and burning palm leaves and burning…other things. The girl’s skinless body shimmered, blood-glazed tissue reflecting firelight the way moon rays reflect off a placid pond’s surface. “What do you think?” Trimball asked. He shrugged; the tiny body flapped bonelessly. “Keen… fashion sense,” I said. Trimball was a sharecropper from Iowa. Devout Methodist. Father of four. He shaved a ribbon of muscle off the girl’s thigh with the detached air of a man whittling wood. The jungle’s like that: it gets inside you, under your skin and into your bloodstream, plants roots in your heart and mind and soul. You surrender to its madness as a matter of basic survival…

  …I drop the Vanessas off at a brownstone on the corner of Riverside and Eighty-first. One of them pokes a ten-spot through the window to cover a nine-eighty fare. The two of them perform an intricate farewell ceremony: they clasp hands, bend at the knees, air-kiss, then produce identical daytimers to plan their next excursion. Feels like I’m watching a wildlife documentary: Inane Rituals of the Manhattan Socialite.

  The CB squelches: “Need an answer…need an answer man…”

  I switch to a safe band. “Go.”

  “Got a hardcase. Real John Dillinger-type.”

  “Sunchasers. Thirty minutes.”

  I cut up Fifty-Seventh and hang a left on Fifth. Sunchasers is the newest high-society phenomenon: the tanning salon. Some poor yuppie had to cancel a trip to Cancun? No problem. Fifteen minutes on a tanning bed, bombarded with 2,500-watts of ultraviolet light, he’s a dead ringer for George Hamilton. Sunchasers is owned by Marco Sorbetti, an old-school Moustache Pete and current Capo of the Westside Outfit. It’s a front: drugs, guns, and stolen merchandise are hustled out the back. Half the beds aren’t even plugged in. It’s the most obvious front I’ve ever seen—it’s in Harlem.

  Who the fuck needs a tan in Harlem?

  How many yups are trekking to the ghetto for a tan?

  I park two blocks away and retrieve my black bag from the spare tire well. Stopping at a bodega to buy some heavy-duty trash bags, I spot a bottle of Coppertone oil beside the magazine rack. Eying my purchases, the clerk jerks his head towards the snow-covered sidewalk.

  “Bad time of the year to be seeking coloration.”

  “Taking a trip,” I lie. “Milan.”

  Sunchasers is deserted. A dead Boston fern rests in the window, bookended by two dead cacti. Joe Fresco sits behind the reception desk. Joe is the antithesis of a tanning salon customer: fat and fortyish, pale as mozzarella and hairier than a silverback gorilla.

  “Hey, Answer.”

  “Afternoon, Joe. Phil here?”

  “Last door on the left.”

  I head down the hallway as Joe slouches to the door and, to the utter dismay of the sun-worshipping bag-ladies and winos shuffling around outside, turns the sign from “COME IN, WE’RE OPEN” to “SORRY, CLOSED”.

  Information and knowledge are two currencies that never go out of style. Those with knowledge excel. But one must know what to look for, how to get it, and its value in a free market economy. Most importantly, one must know the correct questions to ask. And the most effective ways of asking them.

  I am in the information business. Information extraction, to put a fine point to it.

  The tanning room walls, ceiling, and floor are draped in transparent plastic. The tanning bed is white with the dimensions of a coffin. A decal on the lid reads TURBOTAN 2000, and the tagline says: “From Bleached to Bronzed in 10 Minutes Flat!” A man is shackled to a chair in the middle of the room. Behind him stands Phillip Menna. Phil’s a bottom-tier Outfit guy, your basic pavement-pounder. He tracks deadbeats and stoolies and anyone else who winds up on the Outfit blacklist—an unhealthy list to be on.

  “Afternoon, Phil.”

  “How they hanging, Answer?”

  “Low and lazy.”

  I set my toolbag next to the captive: early twenties, wearing black-pegged jeans and a torn Judas Priest t-shirt. He’s working on some patchy facial hair, it’s blooming in dark thatches at his chin and cheek hollows. I’ve seen him in the line-up at CBGB’s, wolf-whistling at chicks outside pool halls and all-nite diners…I haven’t seen him exactly, you understand, but he looks like a thousand other guys in this city—a type.

  “Mister Punk Rock here, he and some friends boosted a van last week,” Phil tells me. “A cube van full of bathroom fixtures. Now under that load, in a false bottom, are the fifty kees of uncut blow that was to be trucked into South Jersey.” Phil cuffs the kid upside the head. “Now Mister Punk Rock knows wh
ere the truck is stashed—isn’t that right, shit-for-brains?—but Mister Punk Rock ain’t spilling.”

  I throw a switch on the tanning bed. A faint hum as a slit of purplish light slants between the top and bottom halves. Mister Punk Rock’s eyes are a cloudy green. His face is a mask of defiance but around the edges, like a thin lip of light silhouetting a doorframe, I see fear.

  “Got a name, kid?”

  “Joey.”

  “Joey who?”

  “Joey Ramone.”

  “Fucking wiseass,” says Phil.

  “Alright Joey,” I say. “Why don’t you tell us where the truck is? Then you can go back to shooting stick and chasing underage tail.”