Swimming with Bridgeport Girls

by Anthony Tambakis

  Outside, the Sarge was hosing down the lot in front of the store despite the fact that it was starting to rain. He looked at my bare feet. “You and the fat boy need to pull it together,” he said.

  I looked at his hose. Up at the sky. He kept spraying.

  “I don’t count on Him,” he barked. “I count on me. Think about that.”

  “I will,” I said, trotting up the stairs and kicking myself for not confronting him about the deer situation, which the Sarge had also counted on himself to take care of, the results of which had been bothering me in a way things usually didn’t.

  I had spotted a beautiful doe in the back parking lot a few months earlier, when spring just refused to come and the roads were so bad that I couldn’t make it up to the casino. After spending an entire day watching a Rocky and Rambo marathon, I went outside to get some fresh air and smoke the last of my weed. It must have been two or three in the morning. Out in the lot, sniffing around in the snow, was a doe, who must have crossed the parkway to get there. We looked at each other for a while, and then I figured, Hell, this thing has gotta be starving, so I went upstairs, filled a bowl with some Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and left it outside. Waking up to find the bowl empty, and feeling a bit of pride that something I’d attempted had actually produced the desired result for a change, I started leaving a bowl of cereal out every night. For a few weeks, the only decent part of my day was seeing that empty bowl in the lot as I walked to my truck. And then it stopped. One morning there was a full bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch out there, and it remained untouched for days, got soggy with rain, and that was when Maurice told me that Angel, the overnight manager, had seen the Sarge dragging a dead deer across the back lot, a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was a committed hunter, the Sarge, and had held court about his woodsy exploits numerous times. I occasionally indulged him, since I’d found you could crack a beer in his store, listen to one of his rugged stories, polish it off before he was finished, and get yourself a little two-for-one action when it came time to pay up.

  Anyway, I don’t even know why I’m still thinking about this. I didn’t witness the shooting. There are no haunted tales of a rifle crack waking me from a dead sleep. I never even said a word to the Sarge about it. Part of me wanted to call him out for what he’d done. Give him a good lashing over it. I rarely got the opportunity to take a position on any kind of moral high ground, and it might have been nice to check out the view from up there. But another part of me knew that it was my fault. That feeding the deer cereal was just another case of me thinking something was a good idea, acting on it immediately, and failing to consider any kind of consequences until it was too late.

  I tossed the FedEx on the bed and knelt on the floor, fishing in the pocket of my jeans for the weed Chip had slipped me after the Mohegan Sun boys sent me packing. I extracted the joint (three-quarter joint, really, since I had taken a few drags on the drive home) and pulled my phone out. I had more voice mails and texts than I had ever seen before. If I had hit the Powerball or assassinated a sitting president, I couldn’t have expected greater volume. Like a FedEx from a law office, this couldn’t have been good, and as with the FedEx from the law office, I ignored it and climbed on the bed, sparking the joint and turning on ESPN. The bronchitis made smoking a little difficult, but I powered through it, and within a couple of minutes a buzz started to kick in, right about the time shitty and distant cell-phone footage of me at Belmont Park appeared on the screen. The anchor was saying this over it:

  “In what can only be described as news of the weird, New York State Police are searching for an unidentified man who stormed onto the track at Belmont Park Tuesday afternoon and attacked Colombian jockey Jorge de la Maria following the day’s sixth race. De la Maria, who had ridden three-year-old Brother Rick to a place finish, was pulled from his saddle by the mystery assailant and struck his head on the turf after falling from the horse. The veteran jockey is listed in stable condition at this time, and the circumstances surrounding the attack are unknown. Police have received several tips regarding the potential identity of the perpetrator via social media, but no definitive announcement has been made.”

  Well, fuck. That wasn’t good. The only positive thing I could glean from the situation was that the footage was crap, though the fact that my cast was visible made an eventual positive ID very likely. I was halfway decent friends with the anchor delivering the story, and I could tell by the look on his face that he knew it was me and was glad he didn’t have to report it yet. Then the room phone started ringing. Maurice must have checked the Twitter feed and found people starting to ask questions. I ignored that, too, and sat back on the bed, staring at the sea captain on the wall. I was beginning to look at him with new appreciation. Kinship, even. We were brothers, he and I. Men carrying on nobly in the face of adversity. Sojourners tossed about on the unyielding waves of life, both seeking firm land after rough passage, a return to hearth and home. I sighed. Looked at the FedEx at the end of the bed. Relative to what I had just seen on television, there was nothing in that envelope that could possibly stoke my inferno of misfortune any higher, so I ripped it open. And this, my friends, is where that turn of events I was talking about comes in. That momentum swing that can change everything if you just seize it and make the behavioral adjustments you need to make.

  In the FedEx were two separate envelopes along with a cover letter from Ira Schnauph, Esq. I wasn’t two sentences in when I finally remembered where I’d heard that name before. It was the last conversation I’d had with L prior to the alleged dognapping. It was back in February, I think, or March. Sometime before the Sarge had decided he had nothing better to do but murder my deer for eating cereal. I’d been driving back from a rare winning day at the casino when I’d seen L’s name pop up on my cell. I couldn’t believe my eyes and nearly drove off the parkway in my haste to answer. “Hey there, pretty baby.”

  “Ray, a man named Ira Schnauph called for you.”

  “How are you?” I gushed. “I miss you.”

  “Never you mind how I am. Just expect a call from Mr. Schnauph.”

  “Is he a debt collector?” I said. “I’m working on getting all that stuff straightened out.”

  “He’s not a debt collector.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s an attorney.”

  “You already divorced me once,” I said cheerfully, since making light of the situation made it less real, and the Knicks game on the radio had just gone final and they had covered the spread on a meaningless shot at the buzzer.

  “He’s an estate attorney. Apparently you’re inheriting some money from your father. Which is remarkable.”

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “Raymond, in lieu of telling it to a therapist, which you badly need, you can explain it to your friends at the casino. Or tell it to your hairdresser girlfriend. Or go swimming with Bridgeport girls and share it with them. You will not, however, be telling it to me.”

  Click.

  I never spoke to Ira Schnauph, and outside of using its impending arrival as an excuse to hold off Bing Buli, I never thought about the inheritance at all. I figured the old man had left me fuck-you money. A check for a dollar or something like that. I had no desire to be reminded of my father for any reason, and the fact that his attorney had called my old house and told L about it felt like the bastard was sticking it to me from beyond the grave. I considered it a terrible break and a crushing blow to my reconciliation campaign. Considering L thought both of my parents had died in a car accident when I was one and I’d been raised by my grandparents, news of my father’s actual death certainly did not further the cause of me getting her back; it merely cemented her growing impression that she didn’t really know who I was and never had. She wouldn’t let me explain that my mother had been dead for six years before we met, and my father and I had cut ourselves off from each other, so he was dead to me, too. I had invented an alternative past for myself out of spite, the mutual friends who intr
oduced us in New Jersey had told L the invented story prior to our meeting, and there never seemed to be a reason to dredge it all up. I had moved on, we were insanely happy—who gave a shit about the past? What was everyone’s fixation on things that had already happened?

  I sat on the bed and looked at the two envelopes. One had my official address on it (“c/o Parkway Motor Lodge” looked ridiculous in print and was strange to see), and the other just had “RAY” written on the outside in my father’s unmistakable handwriting, which I recalled from the specials board in the kitchen of his restaurant, and from the only letter he ever wrote me at prep school, advising that I stay out of a situation I’ll be telling you about later that factors into all of this.

  There was no part of me interested in opening the “RAY” envelope (I have no idea why he used quotations like it was an alias, since he’d named me after his father), but I held out a little hope for the other one, once it was actually in my hands, as I had under a hundred bucks in cash and anything that was in there would help, even if it was fuck-you money. I took a last pull on the joint, snubbed it out, and opened the envelope. Inside was a check for $612,500. I stared at it. Stared at it a little longer. Looked for loopholes.

  From? Schnauph and Associates, Attorneys at Law.

  Pay to the order of? Raymond J. Parisi.

  In the amount of? $612,500.

  Signed? Ira H. Schnauph.

  I didn’t know why it was happening, what the hell the old bastard had been thinking, or how he’d chosen a number like that, but the check was official despite it making zero sense. It had been almost exactly half my lifetime since we’d even spoken, and if there was an explanation, it was surely to be found in the “RAY” envelope, but I decided to stop thinking about how this mysterious gift tied into my past and instead focused on how it could shape my future. I looked at the check, glanced over at the bedside table, where my paperback copy of Gatsby sat untouched, and smiled. The Kinder House Plan could finally be put in motion.

  The Plan had come to me a few months earlier, right around the time I had let myself into my old house on Archer via the garage and found all of the Our Life scrapbooks L had made rotting in a pool of antifreeze at the bottom of a plastic garbage pail. See, every year we were together, she would keep every last memento from our lives—torn movie tickets, photos, notes, concert stubs—and arrange them in handmade scrapbooks. If Boyd Bollinger’s Lexus sitting in my old driveway wasn’t enough to worry me, finding the scrapbooks ruined and discarded was, and from that moment on I understood that it was going to take something major to get her back, some gesture well beyond anything that had ever worked in the past. She was not the same person once her mother died. There was her obsession with the school shooting up in Sandy Hook. The religious books that had started popping up around the house before I got tossed. The exasperated tone she had adopted with me on the phone during her stay in Myrtle Beach and never relinquished. Now she had short hair and did yoga. There had been a major shift, and it was obvious that I needed to pull off something significant. Something jaw-dropping. Buying the Kinder house was it.

  See, we used to drive up to Athens just about every Saturday in the fall when we lived in Atlanta. We’d roll up for UGA games, drive the red-clay Clark County roads where L had grown up, and visit with Ed and Kay Kinder, an older, childless couple who lived in a farmhouse just outside of Athens and bred golden retrievers out in a barn behind the main house. L had grown up in an apartment with her mother and been unable to have a dog. She had visited the Kinders’ barn nearly every weekend as a child. We’d bought Bruce as a puppy from them, and the Kinder property always represented a kind of Shangri-la to a Southern girl who’d grown up poor, living in run-down apartment complexes on the wrong side of the university tracks and riding her bicycle for miles to gaze upon kudzu-draped railroad trestles and old sunlit barns in wide-open spaces. We always joked that we’d buy the place from them someday when we got a windfall. Take over the massive property, the breeding, everything. It would be the perfect life.

  While never cracking the book I had gotten from Barnes & Noble, I had watched The Great Gatsby at Dawn’s and come up with the plan, or rather just stolen the general idea from Leonardo DiCaprio, who bought a house directly across the bay from Carey Mulligan and waited for her to come to one of his splashy parties as part of his grand design to win her back. I fell asleep soon after their first rainy afternoon together, due to having stayed at the casino until six that morning, but I had seen enough and decided that I needed to do something Gatsbyesque to sway L, though my idea would be longer on sentiment and shorter on patience. The second I got the idea to buy the Kinder place, I knew it was the most brilliant plan ever conceived. It was nostalgic. It was epic. It could not possibly fail.

  I had been pestering Marty Tepper, my old Realtor friend in Atlanta, about it despite the fact that I was badly in debt and living in a motel. That had changed, though. A miracle had taken place, and now I was mere days away from another one taking place. I picked up the phone and called Marty.

  “Jesus. What now, Ray?”

  “Marty. I need you to call the Kinders.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? That property is worth two million dollars. You don’t get a discount because you bought your dog from them or because they like you and L. They aren’t going to give you the place because they never had kids and you used to visit them. It doesn’t work that way. Hold on. What? It’s Ray Parisi. Oh, what do you know about it? Sorry, Ray. Look, I’ve got to show some McMansions. I don’t have time for this right now.”

  “I’m serious this time, Marty.”

  “Ray, not for nothing, but you said you were serious last time.”

  “When was that?” I said.

  “When you called me at three in the morning from a fucking casino and asked if they’d take twenty thousand down and finance the rest.”

  “This is going to be a cash deal,” I said.

  “That’s great. Put it in a knapsack and have a pig fly it down here. I’ll take it up to Athens. Ed Kinder will be thrilled.”

  “Marty, it’s— What’s today?”

  “July first.”

  “Call the Kinders. I will have every penny within a week.”

  “You’re going to have two million dollars within a week? That’s amazing. I heard money was falling from the sky in Connecticut, but CNN has been wrong a lot lately, so I disregarded the story.”

  “You ever hear of a little thing called an inheritance, my friend?”

  “An inheritance? From who?” he said.

  “Never mind that. Just set it up.”

  “Who could you possibly have an inheritance from? You’re a fucking orphan. No offense.”

  “Marty, are you listening? Set it up.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  “You better not be dicking around, Ray. I’m not in the mood for one of your— It’s none of your business, is what we’re talking about. Go work on your quilt or something. Fine. You do that. Tell him I said hello. Tell him it gets old quick. Sorry. It’s that time of the year, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “You’ll call Ed Kinder, then?”

  “If you’re serious about this inheritance, I’ll call Ed Kinder. But I wouldn’t mind a little more information. Not to mention the six grand you owe me.”

  “It’ll all be taken care of. Just make the call. Someday I’ll tell you the whole story, brother. You and Sher come out to the house—”

  “At this rate I’ll be coming out solo.”

  “Fine, you come out to the house when this is wrapped up, and I’ll tell you the greatest story you’ve ever heard.”

  “You’re an optimistic son of a bitch, Ray. I’ll give you that much. Call me after the Fourth. I’ll be in Sanibel all weekend, looking for a place to bury the body.”

  “Awe
some. Hey. Marty?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know who this country is named after?”

  “Amerigo Vespucci. Why?”

  “No reason.”

  I hung up with Marty Tepper and pulled out my wallet. I had one credit card that wasn’t entirely maxed. It was useless for a cash advance, but it had a few hundred in credit on it. And while a few hundred wouldn’t get you far, it’d most definitely get you to Vegas.

  TODAY, I CONSIDER MYSELF

  December 6

  R didn’t have any real friends. I was always encouraging him to take people more seriously. To actually befriend someone instead of just yukking it up all the time. On some level, I knew he was Don Quixote and needed a Sancho Panza. But he didn’t see it that way. He had the guys from the show. The crew members. The neighbors. Everyone loved to see R. He could read any situation and give a person what they wanted. That was his genius. We never left a party without pretty much every single person telling me how much they loved my husband. But real life isn’t just about giving people what they want, is it? It’s about giving people what they need. And to know what a person needs, you have to be paying the kind of attention it wasn’t in him to pay. To take the kind of care it wasn’t in him to take. R was like one of those old songs about having a dollar in your pocket and a girl on your arm and everything being hunky-dory. And maybe life was really that way to him. Or maybe he was so committed to keeping things positive, to walking on the sunny side of the street, because he was afraid of his own history. Afraid of the other, shadowy side of the road. I’ve thought so much about this, and I can feel as I write that I don’t have it in me to think about it anymore. It’s like studying an equation you no longer desire the answer to.

  I ARRIVED AT MCCARRAN INTERNATIONAL Airport a little before three in the afternoon, toting the Kinder House Plan, a duffel bag, and a new head of hair. I got recognized a lot from being on TV, and with the Belmont Park video circulating, I figured it’d behoove me to change my appearance; so I stopped at CVS on the way out to JFK and bought some Just For Men hair dye, figuring a switch from my usual blond to their H-45 Dark Brown would do the trick anonymity-wise, provided I parlayed it with a Red Sox cap and long sleeves to cover my cast.