Tumblin' Dice

by John McFetridge

  The radio was playing Lionel Ritchie, “Dancing on the Ceiling,” and Gayle started to change the station but stopped. She’d found this one out of Hamilton, calling itself “Vinyl 95” and claiming to play the “Greatest Hits of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s,” which pushed them one decade past the classic rock station that still played a lot of stuff from the ’60s, but even they were sneaking in a little Pearl Jam and Nirvana. But these Vinyl guys, they were playing top forty and it was taking Gayle back.

  She stopped and went down University Avenue in her eighty-thousand-dollar car, all the bells and whistles, radio playing Cyndi Lauper and Gayle thinking about dancing at that club out by the airport, way back when it was a sleazy dive, bringing in the French chicks from Quebec, those girls dancing to Céline Dion and Gino Vannelli.

  Gayle thinking that was a million years ago — her big dreams were a week on a beach in Venezuela and a bag of weed.

  Now the radio was playing Duran Duran as she drove up the ramp onto the Gardiner Expressway, and Gayle was thinking, what are my big dreams now? She had no idea.

  Not riding off into the sunset on the back of Danny’s bike just as they were becoming the really big players, that was for damn sure.

  She got off the Gardiner at Islington and pulled into West End Exotics, the car rental place she owned, and when she parked behind the building she was thinking how she really did own it now.

  They’d started putting the legit businesses in her name the last time Danny went down, seven years ago now, did his year and a half in the Maplehurst Correctional up in Milton, the Milton Hilton, and they lost everything they had to Proceeds of Crime. Since then they’d been a lot more careful with the money, and Gayle got more involved in the businesses and the money laundering so now she really was running things.

  And things were going well.

  She went in the back through the garage and Tony waved her over saying, “The Spyder’s back — you want to take it out?” pointing at the Ferrari 355, the roof still down, and Gayle said no.

  “Guys only rent that one to get road head — I’m not sitting in those seats, I don’t care how much you scrub them,” and Tony said, “I’m not touching them now,” and Gayle laughed, walking into the office.

  Two FedEx envelopes were already there.

  They hadn’t been shipped; they’d been dropped off.

  She opened them and took out the money — twenty-five grand in each — and put it all in her big shoulder bag. She was still surprised how little room fifty grand took up. Mostly twenties, fifty in a bundle, fifty bundles, wasn’t much more than couple pairs of shoes.

  Wasn’t all that much coke, either, a kilo each to a couple of their best wholesalers, but it was good to see payments on time.

  Gayle threw her bag over her shoulder and went out through the garage, Tony telling her the seats were fine.

  She said, oh yeah, “Try putting one of these cars under a black light,” and he said, “You’re gross.”

  She waved without looking back, got in the Q7 and drove further west into Mississauga to Stancie’s condo across the highway from the big mall, Square One.

  Stancie buzzed her in and Gayle took the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. When she got off Stancie was leaning against the door frame, waiting.

  Gayle said hey, and Stancie said, come on in, and held the door. The envelope, this one just plain manila, was on a table under a mirror in the front hall, and Gayle picked it up and put it in her shoulder bag.

  Stancie said, “You want a coffee?” and Gayle said sure and went into the living room while Stancie went into the kitchen.

  The living room had a pretty good view of all twelve lanes of the 401, steady traffic in every direction even in the middle of the day. Gayle sat on the white couch and watched Stancie making the coffee across the counter in the kitchen. Gayle was thinking it was a nice enough condo, a little small but served the purpose. They owned three in the building: Stancie ran the escort agency from this one and used the other two for in-calls.

  Stancie came out of the kitchen carrying a couple cups of coffee and handed one to Gayle, saying, “It’s all there, but it’s tough.”

  Gayle said, yeah? Stancie sat down across from her and said, yeah, “We had to lower the price again.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Not lower, really, but we’ve had to give hour-longs for the price of halfs. The girls are complaining.”

  Gayle drank some coffee and said, “I’m sure they are, but it’s a recession, what’re you gonna do?”

  Stancie said, I know, I know, “And they’re doing anal for the same price and duos for three hundred bucks instead of five.”

  “That’s the thing about this business,” Gayle said, “it’s flexible. There aren’t any hard costs — it’s not like the cost of materials is going up. So they have to do a few more hours — they’re making their numbers, they should be happy.”

  Stancie said, yeah, of course, no one’s complaining, and Gayle said, “Good,” but she said it hard to end the conversation because it sure sounded to her like somebody was complaining and Stancie said, “No, of course, I just wanted you to know what’s going on.” And Gayle said, “I know what’s going on.”

  Then she thought maybe she was too hard because Stancie looked worried, and Gayle figured she’d have to throw her a bone and said, “Look, we’re going to start moving some girls up to the Huron Woods Casino. Is that something that might interest you, get out of the city for a while?”

  Stancie said, yeah, “That might be fun,” and Gayle said, okay, I’ll let you know when that happens, and she stood up and said she had to go.

  Driving back across town Gayle cranked the radio, Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” and was thinking how things never change. Back before the bubble burst Stancie and the girls were complaining about how everybody was making so much money the clients weren’t classy enough and wanted all kinds of weird shit, Daphne actually saying she thought she’d be going out to dinner with businessmen. Shit, where do these chicks come from?

  A couple more stops at a couple more condos to pick up more cash, and then Gayle drove across the top of Toronto on the 401 and down into town on the Don Valley Parkway, feeling good. She took the Lake Shore exit and drove up to Eastern Avenue, past the new condo building where the old clubhouse used to be, thinking that was as clear a sign of them moving up as anything could be. They’d made that deal with the cops they owned to raid the clubhouse, make a big deal on TV about how they were cleaning up the neighbourhood, then they bought it back at the Proceeds of Crime auction, added it to the other properties they owned on the street, and put up the condo building. Gayle had thought about keeping a condo there, but the neighbourhood wasn’t that nice yet.

  She pulled into the car audio place, one of the legit businesses that wasn’t doing that well, and went inside.

  One of the installers was sitting on the edge of the receptionist’s desk and they both looked up like they’d been caught when Gayle came in.

  Gayle said, “No work,” and the installer said he was waiting for a guy bringing in a truck, going to install surround sound and a flat screen in the sleeper, and Gayle said, “G3 so he can get porn 24/7,” and the installer said, “You know it.”

  In the back Danny was working on his motorcycle, and Gayle said, “What the fuck?”

  Danny said, yeah, “Look at this baby, haven’t had her out in so long, and then it was just for that run through Quebec,” and Gayle dropped her shoulder bag on the workbench and said, “Yeah, I remember.”

  Danny looked like he was just remembering then, and Gayle watched him put it together, remembering that she didn’t go on the run with him, first one she’d missed and probably the last one they’d ever have.

  At least she’d figured it was the last one since they’d moved so far into the big time and left all that biker bullshit beh
ind.

  Danny just shrugged it off and went back to work. He had pieces of the bike all over the floor of the garage. Gayle hadn’t seen oil on his hands like this in years, since way back when they started getting hangarounds to keep up the bikes and pretty much stopped riding them.

  Then Danny said, “You remember that first time we went to Sturgis?” and Gayle was thinking, oh shit no, not fucking nostalgia, and didn’t say anything.

  Danny said, “We went up around Superior, remember? Big as a fucking ocean, what a view, the mountains, you hugging me around the waist, started stroking me.”

  “We don’t have time to ride down memory lane, Danny.”

  “Shit, there we were on the T Can, you had your hand in my jeans — seventy-five-mile-an-hour handjob.”

  “We were kids, come on.”

  “Like it was yesterday.”

  Gayle said, yeah, well, “Maybe you get your head into today.”

  There were two more bags on the workbench, gym bags from some more dealers, and Gayle opened them up and put all the money into a single hockey bag. Half a million.

  Then she said, “I’m going to meet with Frank,” and Danny didn’t even look up from his bike, so she said, “I’m going to send one of Stancie’s girls up with him, the Portuguese one, I think.” Still nothing from Danny. Shit.

  She knew he missed the old days, but this was getting crazy. She watched him put pieces of the bike together, and she was thinking he didn’t even care about what they had going on, all the money coming in, the deals they were working. Shit, look at him covered in grease playing with his bike, looking like he’d give it all up for a blowjob on the lookout in Banff.

  Then she said, “And I’m going to lunch with the Mafia wives,” and Danny smiled and shook his head a little but didn’t look up from the bike, so Gayle said, “Nugs set it up with one of the guys, thinks it’s a good idea,” and Danny said, “You’re lucky he isn’t trying to marry you off to some eighty-year-old Godfather.”

  Gayle watched him for a minute, not even sure he’d mind if she did leave him and marry someone else, and she was thinking, why am I doing all the fucking work?

  Then she said, “Okay, I’m going now,” and Danny said, yeah, okay, still not looking up.

  She carried the hockey bag back out through the office thinking, fuck it. She was going to make this work, she’d take the next step, do whatever she had to even if it meant doing it on her own. If Danny didn’t give a shit, Nugs would help.

  In the office she said to the installer, “Why don’t you sweep up the place while you’re waiting,” and the guy looked shocked, but didn’t say anything, and Gayle thought, yeah, okay, if you have to, be the fucking boss.

  Outside she threw the hockey bag in the back of her Q7, got in, and started up and lit a cigarette before pulling out. She took a deep drag and thought, okay, I can do this, I can run things.

  Shit, she could never actually have a title, these old fucking men would never put up with that. She’d have to do it from behind like she was pretty much doing now with Danny, and if he didn’t want to do that, fuck it, there was always Nugs.

  He loved being president; he’d do whatever it takes.

  She pulled out of the parking lot and felt better.

  So some things did change. Some things could be changed.

  • • •

  Ritchie said there was already one high school in town, Brockville Collegiate Institute, been there a hundred years, “So when they built the new one, just in time for me to start going there in ’72, they were going to call it Thousand Islands Technical School till somebody realized what the initials would spell out on the back of a jacket,” and he waited till Angie got it and then said, “So they called it Thousand Islands Secondary School,” and she said, “TISS.”

  When they’d sat down for lunch Ritchie could tell right away she didn’t want to talk about anything from last night. Not the guy shot in the parking lot, not how it happened two minutes after she’d driven away, or how people were already acting like it never happened, and she really didn’t want to talk about the new kind of connection Ritchie was pretty sure they were making.

  He said, “Yeah, but it was still a tech school — auto shop, wood shop — that’s what they were getting us ready for.”

  Angie poked at her scrambled eggs and took a small bite, and Ritchie figured, okay, she doesn’t want to talk about anything. But she did call him up and invite him to lunch so she wanted something, maybe just not to be alone, he could get that, a little company with an old friend, so he said, “Yeah, but TISS was okay. That was where we put the High together.”

  She said, “Oh yeah,” and Ritchie said, yeah, thinking whatever she really wanted to talk about she’d get to when she was ready, and then he was proud of himself, thinking, yeah, that’s mature of me, not like the kid I was when something like this would turn into a huge fight.

  “It was a couple years before that when I knew I wanted to be in a band, though, 1969. Barry’s sister was already a pot-smoking hippie, already working. She was a hairdresser, which is funny because she looked exactly like you’d think she would, with long, straight hair to her ass.”

  Angie said, she probably ironed it, and Ritchie said, what? Angie said, “Like you iron clothes. She probably spent hours on her hair,” and Ritchie said wow. Then he said, “I never realized that.”

  Angie kind of smiled at him, playful like she was making fun of him but in a good way, and he thought maybe she was proud of herself for being all mature now, too.

  “Yeah, so Emily, Barry’s sister, she missed Woodstock that summer. Couldn’t cross the border, her boyfriend was a draft dodger or had a warrant out or something, he couldn’t go back to the States, so she drove up to Toronto for the Rock’n’Roll Revival, they called it, and we went with her, me and Barry and Cliff.”

  “It’s hard to picture Cliff as a kid. Was he working deals?”

  “He was checking out chicks in kindergarten. We got to the revival: it was at Varsity Stadium, place was packed, Jerry Lee Lewis rocking it out and all these chicks right in front of the stage taking off their shirts. That was it for Cliff — he was a rock star.”

  Angie said, what about you, “You didn’t want to be the singer?”

  Ritchie said, “You’ve heard all this before,” and Angie said, “No, I haven’t,” and Ritchie realized she probably hadn’t. Back when they were in their twenties they were always looking ahead, always looking for what was coming next, what they could make happen. They were inventing themselves. They sure didn’t have a handle on who they were, either one of them, so, yeah, they didn’t talk about where they were from.

  Then Ritchie realized he didn’t really know anything about Angie, about where she was from or what it was like or anything, but he could tell that was definitely not what she wanted to talk about now. She still looked like she was interested in what he was saying, even if it was just for the distraction, just to spend a little while away from what was going on.

  So Ritchie said, “When we got close to the stage I saw a couple of guys standing off to the side. There was a tent over the stage and these guys were standing in the shadow and I realized it was Jim Morrison and Robby Kreiger. Emily had a couple of Doors singles, ‘Hello, I Love You,’ and ‘Light My Fire,’ and, oh yeah, ‘Touch Me.’ I remember we’d be playing Ping-Pong in Barry’s basement and she’d be blasting those songs in her bedroom and her mother’d be screaming at her till she came out and they’d scream at each other and Emily would run out of the house slamming the door.”

  Angie was nodding, smiling a little and Ritchie said, “Good times,” and Angie said, “‘Abigail, Baby,’” and Ritchie said, yeah, “Not many people remember that one,” and Angie said, “I know all your songs.”

  And they looked at each other for a moment and then Ritchie said, “Yeah, so at the revival there were a lot of
old-time acts, after Jerry Lee there was Chuck Berry — got the whole place singing along to ‘My Ding-a-Ling,’ Bo Diddley, and oh man, Little Richard. I was shocked how good those guys were, how tight the bands were, how they really put on a show.”

  “Some of them still come up here,” Angie said. “They still put on a show.”

  “I believe it. I watched them that whole day, you know, but what I really noticed was Morrison watching them all. He stood there, off to the side in the shadows all day watching those guys. He was studying them, everything about them.”

  Angie said, so? And Ritchie said, well, you know, “We always got these stories about the new young guys, how they had no time for all that old crap. I was just surprised to see Jim Morrison watching Little Richard so close, you know? But then Alice Cooper came onstage.”

  Ritchie finished off his coffee and smiled. “I’d never heard of them, I don’t think they even had any records out. They were all hair, as long as Emily’s. No stage show really, just wild crazy rock, guitar solos, drum solos.”

  Angie said, “Didn’t they throw a chicken at the crowd?”

  “That was a couple years later, and actually it was someone in the crowd who threw a chicken onstage and they threw it back. You’re right, though, that was in Toronto, too. At the Revival they did throw a couple bags of chicken feathers into the crowd.” Then Ritchie shook his head and said, “I just realized, that’s probably why whoever threw the chicken threw it. I always wondered, who brings a live chicken to a rock concert?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “But that was when I wanted to be a guitar player. I was too young to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and all that, but that Alice Cooper Band, before the rest of the guys quit and Alice became Alice, they were wild. That’s the way I wanted to do it, and do it live. I still like playing in front of an audience.”

  Angie said, so does Alice. “He came up here last year with Rob Zombie.”