by Amy Gray
I had brought in some candy canes that morning I had left over from Christmas. They were a pacifier, an oral fix, a substitute for cigarettes (which cause cancer), pens (which I usually chew till my mouth is blue), or my fingernails (which I bite). Sol noticed me putting them in the middle of the conference table.
“That's funny, I didn't know you were a goy A. Gray,” he remarked. I explained that I'm not, I'm actually 100 percent Jewish, but for like the last six generations, my all Jewish relatives have celebrated Christmas. “My parents are from California,” I said to Sol's dubious stare. “Jews on the West Coast are different,” I told him.
“So you're not Jewish. You're not Jewish. I mean your name is Gray—what, was it Amy Graystein? ” George started laughing from his desk. “Okay, here's a Jewish trivia question. What's the most solemn day of the year?”
I looked at him gravely. “Your mom's birthday.” George started clapping, and Evan and Wendy and Linus giggled in the background.
“Nice one, Graystein.” He was smiling and his face reddened. “You know what you are? You're a Hide-a-Jew—one of those Jews who tries to ‘pass.’ ” He picked up a candy cane and bit off the tip of the hook. “But you gotta decide: You can't take off Christmas and Rosh Hashanah. Company policy. Take your time—you've got a whole year to decide.”
Requiem for a Smoker
I was holding my breath until I thought it was safe to sneak out for a cigarette break. It turned out we could only smoke in the office when our accountant, Adrienne, wasn't there. The smoke irritated her alveoli. We investigators hated her damn alveoli. When I saw Evan and Linus sneak out at twenty-three past ten, I figured they knew what flew and quietly walked out to the fire escape.
“Amus Graymus,” Evan said, when I stepped out onto the frigid platform. “Hi, guys,” I said. I suddenly felt like crying. I shifted around and sucked down three ciggies while they carried on a debate about why Superman was vulnerable to Kryptonite.
When they left, I sat on the ascending stairs and tears welled up. I took a deeper breath and they came out harder. Now I looked like shit, and I'd have to stay out in the cold until my face wasn't red and patchy. Just then the fire door creaked open and Big Gus stepped out onto the platform.
“A. Gray, how ya doin’,” he said with his subtle New York twang. He'd grown up in Texas, actually, but liked sounding like he was from Brooklyn, since now he was. He also was a former dog-catcher and zookeeper who proudly wore a four-inch scar on his right shin, an homage to his favorite client, a mountain lion named Betty. Gus was a hoarder of pop-culture factoids, a repository for every line in every movie or TV show ever made by Dennis Leary Burt Reynolds, and the entire cast of M*A*S*H. I found him a little intimidating, a cross between a hulking biker and a savant, sandy-haired farmboy He was also one of the many of my new colleagues who seemed suspicious of me hitching my wagon with Nestor and Assman, although he was superficially friendly. I wasn't sure what he thought of me. Maybe he didn't.
“Okay,” I squeaked. I was staring at the wrought-iron bars underneath me, giving way to tiers of smaller and smaller platforms below. My cigarette fell out of my hand as I went to wipe my lashes clean, and fluttered through the metal to the ground beneath. It was dizzying.
“Hey, are you cryin’?” He looked closer at me now, and I turned away.
“Nope,” I lied, not able to open my mouth, with my hands over my eyes.
“Is it that guy you broke up with?” I wasn't looking at him, but there was a tenderness in his voice that was soothing.
“Uh-huh.” If I opened my mouth I'd start bawling.
“Ya know, if that guys treats you bad, then fuck him. I think you're really cool. You don't need that jerk—fuck him!”
“Thanks.”
He patted me on the back. “Do you want me to beat the shit out of him?”
“Ha!” I laughed, with visions of Elliott encircled by a gang of Big Gus and Big Gus lookalikes, frail and shaking, all the masculinity in him drained out. I imagined him being tossed like a discarded penny, bouncing through the cracks of the fire escape grates like my cigarette. “That's okay,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
“No problem. Anytime you need me to—” He took his right fist and slammed into his left hand, indicating a considerable ass-whupping. “You just let me know.”
I looked up gratefully, for the first time. Big Gus nodded with his bandanaed head and patted me on mine.
“Thanks, Gus.”
Before I went back into the office I lit another cigarette and rearranged my face. I surveyed the jigsaw of open sky cut by the backsides and alleyways of the buildings around ours. Concentrating on the white firmament above, I tried carefully not to look down to the graveyard of abandoned butts and injured dreams below.
SEVEN
He examined the sky like a stupid detective who is searching for a clue to his own exhaustion. When he found nothing, he turned his trained eye on the skyscrapers that menaced the little park from all sides. In their tons of forced rock and tortured steel, he discovered what he thought was a clue.
—NATHANAEL WEST, MISS LONELY HEARTS
Just Call Me Madam Magnum
When I got back to my desk after a round of high-fives, my voicemail light was flashing, and I felt an unexpected surge of satisfaction. My heart fluttered and I was dizzy. If it's Elliott, that little bastard, I'm not even gonna call him back, I said to myself. I'll be my own valentine. I'll buy myself that Rebecca Taylor peasant blouse from Intermix, the store around the block from my office that had singularly caused my financial ruin. There was the devil inside that store that hid in my gorged credit cards and compelled me to rack up finance charges and late fees. For someone in the business of checking other people's credit, I was uniquely sympathetic to my subjects. Or maybe I'd just have a new Valentine. February 14 was only two weeks away.
Imagine my chagrin when I realized the message was not my newly jettisoned ex-boyfriend, Elliott, but Luke, a wiry neighborhood guy I had met at a Cobble Hill street fair months before. He had a job with the city, and we had talked about zoning laws and Pavement a lot—the band and the hard stuff. He also called everybody “jokers,” such as, “That joker's really got to get his act together,” or, “What, you mean that joker?” He had the sluggish inflection of a skate bum, the kind of guy who said “stoked,” and he wasn't even from Seattle. He grew up in Brooklyn.
He invited me to see a band that night, and, owing to a combination of flattery, and vindictiveness toward Elliott for not having called in the last three days, I agreed to meet him for dinner and to see his friend's band, the Whiskey Whores. After sushi, we headed to Brownie's in the East Village and I slumped into a banquette near the stage, sipping my traditional G&T and sucking down Tarey-tons. Luke was making the rounds, high-fiving his friends, and I wasn't in the mood for schmoozing.
The first set was a trio jug band, Poncho's Luck, which performed a fifty-minute instrumental homage to Willie Nelson. They were actually good. The second consisted of four fairly straight-laced frat-boy washouts doing an agonizing Hootie-style jam, but with a mildly cute bassist. I kept my eye on him. In the middle of one song, “You're Killing Me,” there was a long falsetto part, and I could have sworn the cute bassist was looking at me as he sang, You slip into my life, and then slip out, No more road to travel, I kick your memory into gravel, and wash it away. Pretty romantic.
Later, in between their set and the Whiskey Whores, I am in line for the bathroom when Cute Bassist walks by. “Hey,” he says, putting his cigarette in his mouth to offer a handshake, “I'm Ethan.” Ethan and I talk for a while, but Luke's not far away and I'm feeling uncomfortable neglecting him, so I'm about to graciously extricate myself from the conversation—while still getting his number—when another guy walks up behind him, puts his arm around Ethan, and introduces himself as Markus, the drummer in the band. But the thing is, it's not just that he's not just a guy in a band, he's Dot-Com Guy, the grand prize in Sol's Jack Daniel's challenge
.
Adrenaline pumping, I see my chance for glory and I seize it. These are the moments investigators must live for. Copping a swig from Ethan's Miller Lite (one must make do in dire circumstances), my morph into hyper-PI-mode is complete. I chat him up, and he gives me his number. The amazing thing is this: I stay cool, and say something to Ethan about how I have a friend in town that night and can't chat for long and he seems to buy it. “What's Markus's deal, anyway?” I ask him, holding my breath. “He's a friend of mine from the University of Tennessee,” he says (Markus had claimed he went to Yale). I ask him what Markus does; Ethan says Markus made a lot of money from some “online outfit” he set up with his father's money, but that the two of them are planning to open a bar in the Caymans—“With a bowling theme—you know, bowling shirts, roller-girl waitresses.” I'm horrified, but outwardly rapt. Such are the perils of the investigator's work today where kids are playing with grownup sums of money and the PR machine keeps financing in the fold long enough for fly-by-night investors to make a nice return, take the money and run. Just call me Madam Magnum, baby.
The next day and four phone calls later, I was on the line with the first of several financiers Markus and company had pursued for investments in their Bowlarama Bar. I was told on condition of anonymity that Dot-Com Guy, who one source referred to as “That little rat bastard,” has $250,000 of his investors’ money that was supposed to have been funneled into a Skee Ball manufacturing company in East Asia. I got the whole thing on tape, thankfully, and handed it over to Sol, demanding my prize. “What's this?” he demanded. I told him the story, which he got a kick out of, even calling George over to take it all in. Only next time, he promised me, he wouldn't let me off so easy. An anonymous source was okay, but it wouldn't break the case. Keep looking.
The Oenophile's Love Affair
At my desk later that day I got a phone call from my best friend, Cassie, inviting me to an Alphabet City bar called Niagara, where we're semiregulars of the largely nonalcoholic but shamelessly freeloading type. I took her up on it.
Cassie, like so many of my friends, worked for a website as a “content producer.” She wrote columns like “Ten Ways to Make a Good Marriage Great,” even though she was single, and she had somehow recently started doing a home advice column, counseling people how to remove vomit stains from sisal rugs and how to keep deer out of their garages, even though her apartment was smaller than most garages. Still, Cassie remained an optimist, as demonstrated by her belief that every new night spent at Niagara was full of possibility, despite hundreds of nights that indicated otherwise.
Making plans to go to Niagara was always a ritual of practiced futility, because we inevitably ended up there, although we always went through the motions of exploring other options. Cassie would ask me if I wanted to do something. I'd say, “Sure.” Cassie would ask what I want to do. I'd say “How about … this place or how about … that place,” and she'd respond, “No, it's too—” (fill in one of the following) “far away,” “crowded,” “rank-smelling,” “lame,” “full of ugly boys,” and so on. Then, after a moment of exasperated silence, I—or she—would say, “Well, how about Niagara?”
On this night, however, she just said, “So you wanna go to Niagara?” upfront and I said, “Sure,” and that was that. I told her about breaking up with Elliott. She'd been in L.A. visiting a sort-of-ex-boyfriend, so she wasn't up to speed yet.
“I'm sorry, but I always thought that guy was dis-gust-ing.” I knew Cassie didn't think much of him, but I was a little offended by her candor. I could have used a little sympathy.
“Listen,” Cassie said, “You are so out of his league it's ridiculous. He should be begging you to come back, and you shouldn't even be acknowledging his existence.”
“I shouldn't?”
“No.” She was resolute. “Now let's go flirt with some bartenders.”
I felt buoyed by her conviction. Cassie was the only friend from high school that I was still close to. Our nights out in New York together so often felt like replays of so many replays of high school: the two of us cutting class (or work), passing notes, and committing other acts of rebellion both small and big, even if there weren't parents or other adults around to affront. Cassie taught me to smoke my first cigarette in the parking lot behind a Friendly's ice cream store. First she had me practice inhaling with a piece of strawberry licorice. “Just fill your mouth with the smoke. Nope, don't breathe it in directly, just like you're filling your mouth with air, not breathing it. Right. And then remove the licorice and now inhale. Good. Now try it again.” She was a learned and precise educator. Later, behind the steamy overlit Friendly's Dumpster, I lit the real thing and I didn't cough or choke once, which was my greatest fear.
I took the F train to the Second Avenue subway station and walked over to Avenue A and then up to Seventh Street. When I got to Sixth Street, Cassie was waiting on a corner a block away from the bar.
“What are you doing? ” I asked her. We were supposed to meet at the bar.
“I didn't want to go in alone!” Cassie snapped. She had a thing about that. She refused to go to any social event—even drink at a bar—and arrive alone. She could be alone there, and usually did stay longer than me wherever we went, but arriving alone was out of the question.
Our love affair with Niagara started as an attachment of convenience. In college, when we used to descend on New York on the weekends, the bar was at the center of a downtown drag of dives we frequented. Then, when Cass first moved to the city after school, she lived a block away. Now, six years later, we still make the pilgrimage to our favorite watering hole at least once a week— she from her new fifth-floor tenement walk-up on Avenue B and me from Brooklyn. In addition to the appeal of reliable free drinks (she has vodka cranberry with a splash of seltzer and I have G&T), there is the pull of endless romantic potential: Cass has had crushes on, made out with, and/or dated all of the bartenders there. They are all members of a rockabilly-dressing, punk-rock-sounding band called Hogweed.
For me, the romantic tension at Niagara is negligible, but I go in my capacity as best friend and coconspirator in Cassie's romantic travails. We get waves when we arrive (no ID-checking for us!) and kisses when we leave, although Cass's sometimes involve deep-throat action. I'm the dutiful sidekick, the Watson to her Sherlock. The Horatio to her Hamlet. The black, joke-cracking supporting actor to her dashing white male lead.
In the glow of the bar's greenly illuminated rows of liquor, we took our usual seats at the end of the bar—the best place for chatting up the bartenders and for spotting hotties’ comings and goings. Cass refuses to sit anywhere else, in fact, than at the bar itself, and there aren't always seats available. So sometimes we'll elect some poor innocuous male sitting alone and we'll descend on him with the social equivalent of double-teaming. We squeeze up against the bar on either side of him, and, leaning in seductively in all our water-bra-enhanced glory, we converse with as much ear-splitting vulgarity as we can muster. Efforts are made to talk about “female problems,” like urinary-tract infections and menstruation, whenever possible. Like a lamb to slaughter, he invariably offers us his seat and tears off to the remote depths of the bar.
When we got there, the seats were almost all taken, so we staked out a single guy sitting next to an empty bar stool and moved in on him. All we could see was the back of his bald head, since he kept it turned 180 degrees away from us, presumably because he didn't want to give up his seat. “What do you want?” Cassie asked me. She was leaning in over to Stuart, one of our bartender friends and, for Cassie, an occasional suitor. “Whatever you're having,” I said. Even though Cassie was making major dough, she never picked up the tab. She passed me a dirty vodka martini and whispered, “You owe me nine please, with tip.”
“Right.” Cass was as cheap as she was single. We continued talking about Elliott, and Cassie resumed railing about how awful he was. I was just soaking it in, enjoying the armor of righteousness that one gets from laying wast
e to an ex-boyfriend. Iggy Pop's “Search and Destroy” was thumping out of the jukebox.
I was singing along. “Somebody will save my soul … Yeah, that's totally true. He's a fucker,” I allowed.
And with that the bald guy turned around and flashed us a gorgeous smile and two sweet puppylike big azure eyes and said, “He's stupid.” “Love in the middle of the firefight …”
Cassie rolled her eyes, “What?”
“He's stupid. For blowing it with you. Big mistake.” He was talking to me. His sweetness was so unexpected that I couldn't help laughing, which I was doing when I finally looked at him dead-on, and I almost departed this life. He was tan, tall, and he was close enough that I could smell him, like Tide and honeysuckle and wheat. I was laughing, and even though he wasn't smiling, he looked amused, his blue eyes revealing an intensity and innocence that was mesmerizing. He had an immaculately chiseled jaw, enticing lips, and a subtle tug in his shirt that hinted at the muscles beneath—an immaculate specimen of masculine form. This was no regular Niagara man, boy, guy, or bartender—he was an angel.
He must be dumb, I figured. Plus, I was only seeing him sitting from the waist up. Maybe he was short, which was a deal-breaker for me. Maybe he had skinny legs. Even worse, maybe he had no legs. There was, I tried to remind myself, no end to how bad this could get. Cass excused herself to the bathroom, and I introduced myself. Gorgeous Boy said his name was Edward, and he was in town from Boston, where he was a third-year resident in cardiology at Amherst. I mentally bracketed “dumb” for further research. I told him I grew up outside of Boston and I used to see bands at the Paradise all the time. He had been to the Paradise. He saw Dave Matthews there. I reinstated “dumb” in full force and added “jock” after it. He also saw Fu Man Chu. I set aside drawing any conclusions for now. By the time my cell phone rang an hour and a half later, I was so engrossed that I didn't recognize the voice on the other end of the phone. “Hello?” The line was crackling. “Who is it?” The reception was awful.
