A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  “Wave all you want, Freddie,” Wolfstein says. “Just don’t let your dog shit in my yard again. The mound I cleaned up the other day, it was like a garden hose.”

  “That couldn’t have been Freddie,” Freddie says.

  “Who names a dog after himself?”

  “Freddie Junior—what’s wrong with that?”

  “Watch he doesn’t shit in my yard again, okay?”

  “Look, he’s not shitting in your yard. You’re a witness.”

  “Now he’s not shitting in my yard. I go inside, who knows?”

  Freddie heads away up Beech Place, shaking his head.

  Wolfstein stares at her rosebushes. Looking good. She saw that kid from around the block, Billy Farrell, come onto her lawn and pick one for his little girlfriend the day before. She’s got a harelip, the girlfriend. Goes to Preston. Let Billy have it. Fucking romance, sure, she’ll sacrifice a rose for that.

  Two years Wolfstein has been in Silver Beach. She likes it. They don’t know her history. No one asked, and it’s a long shot that anyone would ever guess she starred in skin flicks all those years ago. The house belongs to her friend Mo Phelan, so the co-op board doesn’t give her any shit. Mo’s upstate in Monroe with her sick mom. Anything’s upstate when you’re from the city, but it’s only really sixty miles. Ma’s stubborn, won’t leave her place up there. Otherwise, Mo might be down in the Bronx with Wolfstein. She sees Mo only every once in a while these days. Mo, who she owes everything to. Mo, who helped her navigate San Fernando Valley. Mo, who saved her when she was on the ropes in her late thirties. Mo, who set her up in Florida after Los Angeles spit her out. Mo, who was instrumental in creating the hustle that sustained her, that still sustains her.

  Wolfstein grew up not too far away, in Riverdale. Silver Beach is different. Irish Riviera and all. Last name like hers, they give her that second look, but she mostly keeps to herself, and no one really bothers her.

  Across the street, there’s yelling. That Adrienne giving it to her daughter again. Her voice like a garbage can being dragged across a sidewalk. Who knows what she’s yelling about? The poor daughter, Lucia, about fourteen or fifteen, comes storming out the front door and looks across at Wolfstein, open-mouthed.

  Wolfstein tries to see herself through the girl’s eyes: red macramé top, her gold bra showing beneath it, sleek blue gym shorts from the eighties that still fit her, dyed brown hair. A weirdo. Some kind of messed-up queen, maybe. Not really an old lady, but old to a kid.

  And Lucia, she’s a sorry sight in a tattered Guns N’ Roses T-shirt and denim cut-offs, red Chucks with socks that don’t match. She takes a lollipop out of her pocket, unwraps it, and jams it between her teeth.

  Wolfstein motions for Lucia to come over.

  The girl looks over her shoulder and then back at Wolfstein like, Me?

  Wolfstein nods.

  The girl looks behind her, as if to make sure her mom’s not watching, and then comes chugging over.

  Wolfstein butts out her cigarette on the bench.

  “Hey, can I bum a cigarette?” Lucia asks.

  “How old are you?” Wolfstein says.

  “Fifteen.”

  “That’s a big no, kid. Sorry. Anyhow, that was my last. What are you and your old lady always at war about?”

  Lucia shrugs.

  “She’s got a shrill-ass voice,” Wolfstein says.

  “Tell me about it,” Lucia says, clicking the lollipop around.

  “We’ve been neighbors a while now and we’ve never even talked. You know my name?”

  “Wolf-something?”

  “Wolfstein. What’s your mother say about me?”

  Lucia hesitates.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to say what she said.”

  “Diplomatic. I get it. We had a little shitstorm about parking back when I first moved in, me and your old lady. I don’t even have a car, so I’m not sure why I got so hot. It was just the principle of it. Her boyfriend—your dad, maybe?—he was always blocking my driveway.”

  “That’s Richie,” Lucia says.

  “Not your dad, then?”

  “I never met my dad.”

  “Tough break. But, honestly, dads are wild cards. Mine was a lazy ball-chunk. Wasn’t there my whole childhood, but he came sniffing around in my twenties and thirties when I was raking in the big bucks.” Wolfstein pauses. “You want to come into my joint for a drink?”

  “A beer?”

  “I’m not gonna give you a beer, no way. How about a ginger ale?”

  “I guess.”

  Wolfstein stands up and works out the kink in her right leg. It’s been there for a while, this kink, a little locked-in tremble that pulses with pain. She runs her hands over her thigh, as if locating where it hurts.

  Lucia watches her.

  “You like Guns N’ Roses?” Wolfstein says, pointing at Lucia’s shirt.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you like Guns N’ Roses? What’s with the shirt?”

  Lucia chomps down on her lollipop until it shatters in her mouth. She stuffs the paper stick in her pocket and crunches the candy. “It was Adrienne’s,” she says.

  “You’re gonna have no teeth by the time you’re twenty,” Wolfstein says.

  “I don’t care about my teeth,” Lucia says.

  “You don’t care about your teeth?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You get teeth troubles, kid, watch your ass is all I’m saying. Everything bad starts with teeth troubles.”

  Another shrug.

  Wolfstein guides Lucia into the house through the side door and gets her settled on the orange counter stool in the kitchen. Lucia spins around, her legs flailing, torn between wanting to be a kid and not wanting to be a kid.

  “You fall and bust your head, that’s on me, so quit it, huh?” Wolfstein says.

  Lucia stops spinning and looks around: at the vintage dinette set, the buttercup yellow retro refrigerator, the dried roses hanging from the ceiling. And then she looks out into the living room. Sofa. Funky lamp. Hardwood floors. Looming wall mirror with gold scrollwork. Pictures on the wall—classy ones. Wolfstein and Hammie Fields at an awards banquet. A behind-the-scenes still with Crystal Desire, where they both have perms and are wearing silver robes. Sitting on a chaise lounge in a red-striped one-piece in Malibu—a B-roll shot from a Leg Work spread that was way too tasteful to use. And her prized possession: a framed picture of when she and Mo met Stevie Nicks backstage at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre on the White Winged Dove Tour. What a time it was.

  “Your place is pretty cool,” Lucia says.

  “It’s my friend Mo’s house,” Wolfstein says. “I’ve taken it over the last couple of years, while Mo tends to her mom up in Monroe.”

  “What are those pictures from?” Lucia asks.

  “My past life.” Wolfstein opens the fridge and grabs the kid a pony bottle of ginger ale that she keeps around only as a mixer. She cracks another Bud Light for herself.

  Lucia accepts the ginger ale and the cap twists off with a hiss. “What were you?”

  “In my past life?”

  Lucia nods.

  “I was a goddess,” Wolfstein says.

  Lucia’s clearly not sure what to make of that. “That’s not here, is it?”

  “I lived in Los Angeles a long time.”

  “Were you in movies?”

  “I was.”

  “Awesome.”

  “I did some work I was proud of, but it wasn’t all fun.” Wolfstein leans on the counter, gives Lucia the once-over. “You’re a scrawny kid, anybody ever tell you that? Your mother feed you anything over there?”

  “I eat a lot of popcorn and bagels and pizza. I like to eat.”

  “I once knew a girl called Hunny. H-U-N-N-Y. Sweetheart. But a terrible eater. I couldn’t get her to try anything green. A salad, even. I’d say to her, ‘Hunny, you need something green, you’re gonna croak.’ She’d eat chips and
drink Diet Cokes and that was about it. Pills, too, but you don’t need to know about that. One day, she up and dies. No kidding. I says to myself, ‘You see where not trying things gets you? Spread the word. Teach the children.’”

  Lucia looks disinterested.

  Wolfstein continues: “Eat healthier is what I’m saying. You hungry now? I made a salad. Chickpeas and arugula with a balsamic vinaigrette. Say the word.”

  “I should go.” Lucia hops off the stool and somehow nearly falls on her face, hits the floor with her knees. Wolfstein was clumsy as a teen, too. She remembers a yard in Nyack, where her mother dumped her with her aunt as a kid. Must’ve been a friend’s yard, because they lived in a squalid apartment. She remembers a fall in this yard, a sweet, disastrous slamming to her knees. Bricks thickly scraping away the skin there. Blood. Burning. Just a dumb fall by a dumb girl. Pigtails. Teeth not yet fixed. Everyone calling her Woofstein. The girl whose yard it must’ve been hosing her down after the fall, saying, “Look at all that dumb girl blood.”

  Lucia’s not hurt like that, but she stays on her knees. Wolfstein scurries over and helps her up. “Shit, I’m fine,” Lucia says, brushing her away.

  “I’m sorry I made you feel bad about eating,” Wolfstein says.

  Lucia stands up and looks at the floor.

  “You come over whenever you want,” Wolfstein says. “I’ll keep a few ginger ales around for you. Eventually, we get to be pals, you come of age, I’ll pass you a smoke.”

  Lucia nods. Then she turns and walks out the front door.

  An hour later, Wolfstein is hunched over the bar at Charlie’s Inn on Harding, drinking cold Bud Light on draft in a frosted mug. What she’s looking for when she comes out now is a good time, that’s it. No strings. In Florida, the hustle occupied her fully. Made her some serious dough, but it was draining. Out of habit, she scans the place for a guy she hasn’t seen around. In Florida, she hunted for a certain brand of well-heeled sucker.

  Two regulars sit to the left of her—Sharkey and O’Brien, like some bantering duo from a crappy cop show, paging through a shared Daily News. Sharkey’s a fishing guide out at City Island. O’Brien’s an actual retired cop who now slings knock-off designer purses on Fifth Avenue a few days a week. Behind the bar, Garvey, in his white shirt and black tie with a shamrock pin, a black towel draped neatly over his shoulder, stalks around with a glass of club soda. Charlie’s has been in the neighborhood forever, the word being that it started in the thirties as a traditional Viennese restaurant and beer garden. Square-shaped bar. Low wood-paneled ceilings. Smell of potato pancakes and Wiener schnitzel and sauerbraten from the kitchen. Like everywhere else, you can’t smoke inside anymore, but the ghost of seventy years of it lives in the walls.

  “You see this, where Tropical Storm Alberto’s about to hit Florida,” O’Brien says.

  “You’ve gotta do like Cuban Nick,” Sharkey says. “Down there in the winter, up here in the summer.”

  “I couldn’t live down there.”

  Garvey gets into it now: “I knew a guy lived down there. Key West. Cooter, his name was. This big fucking hurricane comes through. He wakes up in Miami, no shit.”

  “You’re saying the hurricane picked him up and deposited him in Miami?” Sharkey asks.

  “Not a scratch on the guy.”

  They all laugh.

  Wolfstein doesn’t bring up Florida in this new life, just as she doesn’t bring up Los Angeles and her movies. Nor, of course, does she bring up the dark lost years between Florida and Los Angeles.

  Fort Myers Beach is where she lived in Florida, where the hustle gave her purpose. Or repurposed her. Mo was the one who suggested it, who sensed that she had grifter blood. Wolfstein’s method: make them love you. Old guys in their sixties, seventies, eighties, just babes in the fucking woods. Down there, they were all nutted on Viagra, too. She gave them a fun time. Moved in, wore their slippers, their robes, demonstrated her wild healing skills. Their stories were always the same: widowers, divorcés, single lads who’d worked for the city, some city, and lived with Mama too long. Dancing like they’d never known. Refreshed. Red-cheeked. In love. Envisioning a wedding on the beach, reception at the Cottage or Moose Lodge, conch fritters and beer.

  And then the hustle kicked in: she was in deep shit, needed dough for an old debt, to square some trouble from her past life. They were always loaded, so they always paid. She never got greedy, never pushed for more than fifteen or twenty grand. Twenty-five, tops. Enough to keep the chains moving. Just an embarrassment for them, not their life savings. The trick was making them disappear afterward. Wouldn’t have been worth it if she had to leave town, even if she knew she’d have to eventually. And it was pretty damn easy. She got a guy she knew, Ben Risk—his real name, a cardsharp—to play the tough bastard from her past life, the one threatening her existence. The mark would pay him in person. Ben held a gun to the mark’s head, made him crap his undies, told him to get out of town or else. The mark did. Every time. Without hesitation. There were other beaches, other Golden Girl pussy. They never called. Never looked back. A lesson, that’s what she was to them.

  Nine years it lasted. Eighteen marks over that time. Once she surpassed three hundred grand in prize money, she decided it was time to call it quits. Mo had the Silver Beach house and her mother in Monroe, so Wolfstein figured she’d go back to the Bronx and live easy. Her cash is in a fireproof battery bag behind the air vent in her bedroom.

  Before turning to the hustle for a living, she did a satellite radio show for four years, The Naughty List. Mostly truckers listened. Former adult movie stars spoke in hushed tones about their sex lives. She was famous with men of a certain age. Out in L.A.—the Valley—she made pornos in the seventies and early eighties. She’d been down in Times Square before that, briefly turning tricks before getting lined up with her first movie. All of it pre-AIDS crisis.

  She was known for her all-American body. Luscious Lacey, they called her. Cindy in Corn-fed Cheerleaders was her most well-known role. Also had substantial parts in Swallowed Hole and Suzy’s Last Night on the Planet. Famous enema scene in that last one. Better than Desireé Cousteau’s in Pretty Peaches, you ask her. Sixty-four movies over a ten-year stretch.

  She doesn’t talk about it. No one recognizes her anymore; it’d take an awfully good eye. She was only ever known as Luscious Lacey, which is why she likes to be called solely by her last name now. No one’s ever at the house to see the memorabilia, this kid Lucia being the recent exception; it’s just for Wolfstein. At sixty-one, she looks good, no work done even, but the girl she was is gone, way gone. A lot of tough years between retiring from the movies and getting picked up for the radio show. Eighteen, exactly, full of junk, coke. Stripping at sad clubs off sad highways. More truckers. Gaining thirty-five pounds: Wolfstein the Whale. Losing it with diet pills that made her shaky as hell. Her voice gone husky from smoking. More pills. Rehab. Reconnecting with her father, the fucker big-bellied with a goatee and a wife he found at the bowling alley on dollar-shot night. A dozen bad boyfriends, Pete Hightower worst of all. Her father dying of cancer. Her mother back in the mix suddenly, the mother who left her when she was seven with her crazy-religious Aunt Karen in Nyack. No money left from the movies. Always on the ropes. Until Florida. Until the hustle.

  “Wolfstein, another?” Garvey asks.

  She downs what’s left of her beer and nods.

  He takes her glass and pulls a fresh draft, lopping off the head with a foam scraper. He puts it back in front of her. “Guy was in looking for you earlier.”

  “For me?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who?” Wolfstein asks, at a loss as to who it could be.

  “Never seen him. Didn’t give a name.” He slings the black towel down on the bar and wipes up. “Got a joke for you.”

  “No more jokes,” Wolfstein says. “They never make sense.”

  Garvey turns to Sharkey and O’Brien. “My jokes make sense?”

  Sharkey
says, “Not so much.”

  O’Brien nods. “I wouldn’t really call your jokes jokes, per se.”

  “Fuck you, fellas. I could go on stage with my material and slay.”

  “Slay, huh?” O’Brien says.

  “I’m gonna tell my joke. Two priests and a rabbit walk into a bar.”

  “A rabbit or a rabbi?”

  “Two priests and a rabbit, I said. They walk into a bar.” Garvey stops.

  “That’s it?” Wolfstein says.

  “That’s just how it starts,” Garvey says. “I’m trying to remember the rest.”

  “Let me guess,” Sharkey cuts in. “The rabbit blows both priests, and then they play pool.”

  “What?” Garvey asks.

  “Well, that’s the typical modus operandi for one of your jokes. Always with the priests getting blown by animals. Horse last time, I think.”

  “Yeah, it was a horse,” O’Brien says.

  “The rabbit doesn’t blow the priests,” Garvey explains. “What happens, the bartender comes over, puts down some coasters, says, ‘What can I get you three?’ First priest says, ‘O’Doul’s, please,’ Second priest says, ‘Rye. Neat.’ Rabbit says, ‘All your register money. This is a stickup.’ ‘Jesus Christ,’ the first priest says, ‘not again. This is why I quit drinking.’”

  No laughter.

  “Worst yet,” Wolfstein says.

  “Come on, it’s funny,” Garvey says. “Priest’s done with seeing rabbits rob bars.”

  O’Brien bunches up a napkin and throws it at Garvey. Sharkey boos.

  “You guys don’t know jokes,” Garvey says.

  Wolfstein gives up on Charlie’s after twenty more minutes. Garvey’s jokes deteriorate even further, if that’s possible. Sharkey and O’Brien are huddled together, reading box scores. A young guy, bagpiper, just back from a funeral, looms over the jukebox in his kilt, depositing quarters and playing sad-as-shit Irish tunes.

  She enjoys the walk back to Silver Beach. At home, she fixes a drink and sits at the kitchen counter. Vodka on the rocks, a little club soda and lime. She thinks about calling Mo. She needs to, soon. Mo’s lonely up in Monroe with her dying mother. Last letter Wolfstein got from her said she was losing her mind a little. A woman like her, used to action, and now all she’s doing is wiping her mother’s chin and changing her diapers and shopping for Ensure and canned peaches at the ShopRite. Plus, Mo’s the only one she can talk to about certain things.